The Decay of Auria

Chapter 1 - The pain of our past

The patient suffered from the blue pox in its late stages. Blisters filled with violet liquid covered his entire body, forming a sort of twisted pattern that would have had to come from the mind of a deranged painter. One by one, Auria cut each blister open and carefully cleaned it, draining all the pus away, and sterilizing the wound with alcohol. The surgical suite was filled with the smell of rotting eggs, yet she paid no attention to it. It was not important.

She worked on his body for a half an hour without a pause – each and every blister needed to be cleaned, every drop of violet pus needed to be removed. The man on the table kept waking up for a short periods of time, coughing out bloody mucus from his inside. Auria doubted that he would survive the procedure – the disease was left untreated for far too long.

„His heart is not beating." said the assisting medical student with a hint of panic in his voice and at once, he started to massage his chest, trying to make heart beat again. After a minute, he moved to breathe into the patient's mouth but was stopped by Auria slapping him with the back of her hand.

„Your mouth touch his and you will infect yourself." She said in a tired, but still very pleasant voice. „Try to make his heart beat again, do not let your bare skin touch him."

She grabbed a flask of strong alcohol from a nearby cabinet and poured it over the victim's closed mouth. Then she wet the clean piece of cloth with the alcohol, scrubbed her own mouth clean, then the patient's, and with a silent curse, started to breathe into the patient's mouth. After three breaths, she flushed her mouth with alcohol, rubbed the man's mouth clean again, and repeated the process.

They did it for ten minutes, swapping their places when one of them had no energy left for rhythmic chest compressions, but the man on the table refused to breathe. With a loud sigh, she threw the empty alcohol bottle into the corner of the room, where it shattered into a million pieces. She cleaned her hands in the sink, both with water and disinfecting alcohol, and then filled up her pipe with a mixture of herbs. She opened the windows to ventilate the room a little bit – the patient was dead, and the breeze could not bother him anymore – and turned to the clueless student.

„He needs to be burned. Call the cremation team, and clean yourself thoroughly. Burn your clothes, along with the corpse. Send another victim." She let out a large cloud of blueish smoke. Sweet scent pierced through the reek of death. „And another student. Good job." she added.

***

They were trapped in the dark. Walls made of wet wood were covered by white, fluffy fungi. They were dotted with holes and through them, hot air was coming inside...

Squeaking and rattling of rusty wheels mixed with moaning of twisted, malformed figures laying all around. Bodies marked with tumorous growths, horn growths and weeping wounds were pressed together in the mixture of filth, heat and stink. There was nowhere to move. There was nowhere to run...

The carriage has stopped. A wooden wall disappeared and bodies pressed against it fell down from the carriage onto the hot, sandy ground. Monsters covered in golden scales started to sort through the bodies and drag them away, being as gentle with them as with a pile of horse shit in the middle of the road. The moaning of suffering figures was getting more intense...

Her fall to the ground was painful, but not more than what followed. A golden-scaled hand grabbed her, scraping the skin on her upper arm while his other hand hit her across the face. Her once white hair, now darkened with filth, started to change color again – this time to blood red. The world was fading in front of her eyes...

Dragged through the sand... Sharp stones, cutting her skin open... Dry twigs leaving their thorns in her body... A face in the golden, scaly helmet... A smile with yellow teeth, the reek of rotting gums... Spit dripping from her face, her wounds stinging from the golden man's bodily fluids... Golden hand hitting her face, again and again...