Boiling Life [Open]

“Remember, my love, the object we saw That beautiful morning in June: By a bend in the path a carcass reclined On a bed sown with pebbles and stones…”

    The scar ached.

“The sun on this rottenness focused its rays To cook the cadaver till done, And render to Nature a hundredfold gift Of all she'd united in one…”

    It was less a scar, she supposed, and more of a still mostly open wound. The mark in the shape of a closed-finger palm strike had branded her chest with the permanent wound from old Prospero. The edges of it still wept blood and pus while she itched to scratch at where the little bit of healing done had begun to irritate.

    Not only had she been maimed so horrifically but her clothing had been so damaged she was reduced to swapping out for a collection of cloth that looked more like she was garbed in a chiton from some ancient land and swathed in a sash of crimson.

    The first thing Marie had done after the battle was to flee. Her mind had been maddened and wholly unmade at that point and the adrenaline had allowed her to sail clear across the continent before fatigue and wounds caught together and dragged her down into the pits of another urban sprawl. It had taken her a full day to realize she was not in just ANY disgusting city but that of East City.

    A place of vagabonds and murderers; where gangs formed a superpower all their own and the police were so incompetent that the martial arts dojos had been forced to form their own makeshift vigilante force and take the fight to the criminals. It made her think of something actually-

“‘It's a bad place for a stranger,’ old Goulven had said; ‘you'd better take a guide;’ and I had replied, "I shall not lose myself.’” Marie spoke in a memory of another story she had read before, “I am the Stranger you see, and barren of mask, I can only hope to run into a perfectly kind Countess Jeanne to take pity upon my wounded soul.”

    This was as good a place as any to lay down in an alley and wait to heal without detection by the Ki Police. She had become dramatic in the moment but her head was still heated from the events with the Prospero. Her breath escaped in hot puffs of steam that made the air simmer and it took her a moment to realize the entire alley she had stumbled into seemed to shimmer from the heat leaving her body. Steam wafting as her anger boiled the sweat and blood gathered on the skin.

“Fifth…Precept.”

    Marie’s words were tired and she slipped up to fall amid a pile of trash and refuse. Hands reaching out to grab the steel opening of a tipped over industrial garbage bin filled with mostly cardboard, now burning in her presence, and other things she hoped would burn as well. A quick movement of her hands and the lids were removed to make for her a little hovel to curl her legs up and wrap her arms around and wait the long days it would take for the scar to stop burning with the most intense of hatred.

“Ugh…” Her groan was loud and echoing down the alley, the heat inside this metal tin only feeling all the more intense as refuse caught fire and stone began to melt from the presence of the damaged little thing curled inside the bin.