A single lost soul in this world of empty husks - chapter 1

Under the violet sky, two bodies trudged through the water-logged sprawl of concrete rubble and threatening undergrowth. Sorely pronounced bones emerged from beneath slowly ebbing, violet waves. The moonlight illuminated their mournful faces, reflecting on the water with a chemical glow; amaranthine wisps curled around them, dancing across the planes and surfaces of the projecting debris. Water splashed around their ankles. There was a boy and a girl. Each was ragged and stained, their clothes showing a legacy of frantic escape and bestial encounters. Blood spiralled raggedly across burnt out holes in the cloth. The haze bloomed across the stains, alighting them in an eerie purple.

The boy was tall. Around his neck swung a rope bearing a knuckle of rough black stone. It was etched in some intended patterns, knocking against his gaunt clavicle, the coarse rude material rubbing against the skeletal formations. Inky pools formed between each emerging bone. He was hungry. The girl was luminescent. Her hair was caught by the mystifying wisps rising from the torpid water. Swirls of sunbursts across her skin defied the darkness around them, overcasting the permeating amethyst glow with a witchlike emerald green light. Oh, the view in which they cast: the grim skeleton leading the blazing princess through some blighted swamp, the bones of lost civilization looming around them. The princesses' light paints the reaper in unwelcome vibrancy, drowning his frame in a fog of shadow.

But what is seen is not what is; the unlikely, bony hand stretched back, the faint familiarity in her eyes, the quivering of his soul at her touch. The boy led the girl, his thoughts stretched protectively about her, ready to interfere at the slightest provocation. She stumbled. His towering shoulders jerked, his ragged wear snapping across him from the speed of his movement. The crystalline eruption of water hung in the air as he caught her. Two fiery red eyes, peering from the darkened pools of his brow, were locked in frame with the glowing green orbs of the girl; swirling patterns crept up from the once white shawl she wore, tattoos dripping down from here eyes like tears. The moment ceased. He let her go, and they continued. The light wavered with each blink her of eyes. The two trudged through the water-logged sprawl of concrete rubble and threatening undergrowth, still. Where were they going?