Bereft: Demise

53 | Of an Escalated Depravity

The insects below knew not whom they taunted.

He leaned upon the railing and squeezed the metal beneath his trembling fingers. His rage was unquenchable and it tore at the meager scraps of the Sin's once generous supply of patience. He looked at his hands and again saw Pride's neck just inches from his fingertips.

Darius had evaded him. He and his host thumbed their noses at Balthier while Cuxiel laughed behind his ward. They thought themselves safe from Envy. They thought him a mad dog tied down and harmless. They thought they were going to survive this.

No more. No more.

The humans had allotted the sulfurous creature a natural eddy of space not given to anyone else in the squalid little club. A woman dared part from the crowd and enter that eddy, giving Balthier her sultriest smile as her hips rolled to the music and her fingers crooked in invitation. In the darkness permeating the lapses between light shows, the Sin's sodden attire must have appeared shabby-chic.

An outlier and an anomaly, Balthier thought as he looked upon the woman and plastered a pleasant smile to his lips. Cosmetic glitter was slathered over the high plains of her cheekbones, the hollow of her throat, and the swell of her breasts. The sequin dress she wore barely covered the necessary areas and her pupils were dilated by either lust or whatever drug was circulating through the crowd. She sauntered forth without regard to the demarcation separating Balthier from the others. 

She was a lovely, repulsive thing. Her face epitomized beauty, but Envy knew her heart and soul oozed sin. Her insides were rotted by desire, by greed, and hunger. She wore pride on the supple curve of those glossed lips and vanity in the short scars left by a face lift. The woman had molded herself into the perfect lure, not unlike a true Sin. She did it to find the mirror of her faults, and to render that image inert. To seek, to destroy, and to consume. 

The woman was either too dim to sense true danger or thought herself more of a threat than he was. Envy would delight in proving her wrong. 

Balthier pulled essence into himself and exhaled his gift. At first, he tasted nothing but the stale, cacophonous malaise of the human condition—but beyond the bland horde he found a weedy sage dancing with two underdressed women whispering spells of attraction under his breath. He could sense Balthier's degenerative power but didn't know what to make of it. 

There was a witch, too, though Balthier couldn't quite catch what her affinity was, and unlike the mage she sensed Balthier's power and knew to run. She tried to get out of the club, but the Sin didn't let her go. His power reared like a venomous snake and looped its coiled about the witch, snaring her in place. She buckled like a castle of sand.

"Tell me, my lovely," Balthier crooned to his companion as his fingers skated over the bronze skin of her shoulder. "Have you ever seen a man die?"

Recognition dawned slowly in her drug-addled expression. The woman swayed with the music and paused, looking up into Balthier's face as energy set his eyes ablaze. Tendrils of pure, black poison rose from his clenched hands in desiccated waves.

She stumbled, confused. "N-no?!"

"Then stay and watch the show."

Balthier lifted one hand and trailed it across the back of a young man edging too near his boundary of personal space.

Initially the young man didn't react. The club was quite crowded and he had consumed several beers, judging by the smell of his breath and his spotted shirt. He passed Balthier's touch off as a simple accident. He kept dancing and trying to get the attention of the young woman pointedly ignoring his advances.