Trigesimus Tertius Gradus

A black winter ensnares the landscape with its deceptively calm and deadly ubiquity. The clouds never scream, never flash, only stir. They are gray, infested with soot spewed into the atmosphere from fires that consume flesh dozens, or scores, or hundreds of miles away. Fires somewhere, everywhere, never before the eyes or the ears. Thick flakes of soot drift without urgency toward the desolate ground. What can be seen of the beaten earth is black with the soot. Even the ground that catches the eye is mixed with soot and presented to it as a festering stew. If one were to dig a hole they might dig forever and never escape walls of sooty dirt. Black sludge which was once called water fills depresses of earth to the brim. Now the waters are unrecognizable, full of debris, and covered with a blanket of soot that swells with the sludge.

Gray legs wade through the ponds. Bare feet batter the barren soil. Every leg is scratched. Every foot punctured. Every wound infected, spilling yellow puss down to the surface of the sludge, down to the soles of the feet. The skins of many legs hang in tatters. Those legs which have walked for more years than most are in utter disrepair. Flaps of skin have been caught on the soulless points of stones, bark, and bones to be peeled from the flesh in sheets. The bodies care not to prevent the teeth of the earth from unraveling their gray skin. Strings and mats of skin hang, decaying, across the landscape. Worse are the legs which have given up the flesh beneath the skin. Rotting muscles give way to bones blackened by the sludge and the soot. The bodies that bear the burden of attachment to these legs stumble over the earth and through the sludge as a marionette beheld by trembling hands. Yet still did they fare better than those bodies which had lost their legs long ago. These monstrosities crawled through the decaying earth, their gray chests and stomachs and faces smeared with soot and the stew of waste. They crawled until the landscape had scraped away the gray skin of their fronts. Then the land could eat their organs as they yet crawled, entrails betraying their aimless paths through the black winter.

The bodies have black eyes, eyes blacker than the soot. Long ago had the pupils of those skulls overwhelmed the irises and the sclera such that they may devour as much light in the eternal dark as possible. Often, those black eyes hide behind veils of greasy hair the color of soot.

The bodies wander. One may find itself alone among the desolation surrounded by miles of empty, dying earth and choking air, its own soot-smeared gray skin the brightest shade in the endless black winter. Or one may find itself one among thousands, no more room between it and the next than is afforded between one’s own knuckles, ebbing with the others in an ocean of rotting upright bodies. Ever are they wandering. Rarely has a body not met foot to every plot of the stinking soil of the landscape, waded against every wave of sludge in the pernicious ponds. Never do they fall, save when the stumps of their shins or of their femurs can no longer support the bodies without sinking into the mud. Never do they reach a destination, because there is no destination to reach. There is only soot, anywhere, everywhere, suffocating the sensory organs until it finally devours them. Then the bodies soak and dissolve into the black earth, ground down by the feet of others. Never do the bodies change pace. They scour the land at the same, slow pace, always. 

And the bodies eat. Acute nails bite into the forearms and faces of every body. Needle-thin hands pull away chunks or strips of skin and flesh from every body. A wanderer left alone will soon tear at its belly and devour the organs found within. Yet none wants to be consumed by another. The bodies scuffle for survival. The bodies move quickly, decisively, to defend their lives in the squalor of the landscape. The bodies prefer to wallow in the sludge than to be killed and eaten by another. So they fight. Clawing and biting at each other, shredding skin, shattering skulls, eating all along. They fight in silence until their stomachs are full. Then their ravenous engorgement ends and they continue to wander.

Then from the ground emerged a man. His eyes were white around the edges, and brown, and his pupils were small, but he moved with caution through the landscape, unscathed by its barbed extremities. He had brown, not black, hair. His body was whole, not scattered across the landscape. His skin was brown, not gray. It was not blackened by the falling soot or the soot which caked the earth. His feet were clean, not festering with disease. He moved with intention, choosing where and when to be. He could see the fire beyond the wandering bodies, the fire from which the soot spread out over the land.

Then the man met the bodies. Rather, the bodies met the man. Immediately a great horde of them rushed to him, spraying dirt and sludge out from everywhere they stepped. For the first time, the bodies began to speak. The first body fell upon the man, and the man’s red blood gushed from his throat as it was split by black fingernails. The bodies screamed with witless rage, cursing the man whose body was whole. They all fell upon him to rip at his skin, tear at his flesh, to cake his hair with grime and to beat him to his knees, to his side, to drag him to the sludge and drown him, to drag as well the bodies which had latched their teeth into him. All these things, they did. The red blood of the man spilled over, leaving a red streak in the black earth as he was dragged to a pit to be drowned. His human flesh was gnawed away as he was dragged. The mass of bodies around him grew larger and larger, each gray hand desperate to desecrate the man’s flesh. His joints bent awry, his bones beaten to the point of breaking. Every hand which was laid upon him, every jaw closed against him, every foot bashed against him, was a blessing to the remainder of the body, for the gray skin began to stitch itself together, the lost flesh began to regrow stronger than it had been before. Some bodies became less gray, and some which had crawled legless for millennia stood upright again.

After the gray mass had circulated completely, and what remained of the man was no longer distinguishable from the rest of the landscape, they turned to see him standing where he was first seen. And he turned, and left.

There was a great wail. Then the gray bodies said no more, for they could not. They hung their heads, hiding their taut faces behind those broken veils of hair, and wandered and decayed and burned, never and always. 

Save for one, then another, and another. For these gazed upon that place where he had been, a slight hill in the dented, twisted landscape. And while the flesh of the others again degenerated, the bodies of the onlookers continued to heal. The flesh strengthened. The skin browned. The infections dispersed. The black eyes shrunk into whites, into irises, and the hair was cleansed.

These few fled lest they be treated the same as the first man; eaten in parts by bodies and land. But one of these few remained among the damned, and those who beat her were healed until she died. Her corpse was devoured and strewn about the black earth, returning to it. The damned returned to their wandering, rapidly returning to their deteriorated state. Lo, for two among the soot stood still to stare at her red blood as it sunk into the black earth, and lamented what they had done to the man. And their wounds mended, and the soot fell away from their browning skin.