Hi! This is the new prologue to the rewrite of Devil's Backbone!
I'm going to skip introductions and try to keep my notes brief.
D. Gray-Man belongs to Katsura Hoshino, "Genesis" belongs to Forgive Durden, and all characters you don't recognize belong to me unless otherwise specified.
Genesis
"This is the beginning and the end. The rise and the fall.
Our gait will begin its saunter at the source, when the infant learns to crawl.
Place your hand on mine.
Untie your mind.
Let your bloated brain balloon and float away.
Wet the end of the thread.
Thimble upon your index.
Set the needle on its path,
Bobbing up and down and past.
Tears and seams all turn to one
With every stitch and each spool spun."
-Forgive Durden
Tragedy had always bloomed best in the darkness of night, when the moon and the stars were hidden by dense clouds that stretched to the horizon and into the beyond.
And sometimes, when there were no clouds to secret away the unfolding sorrow from the silver, blinking eyes that dotted the dark tapestry of the sky, it created its own blanket.
Dense, black smoke rolled through the night air, nearly invisible save for where it blotted out the stars and where it seemed to glow orange, lit by a raging fire that was swallowing a small encampment. Dark figures danced across the base of the cloud, shadows cast by men and women and even animals, each shadow stretching into a grotesque figure with a body too long to be natural.
Their encampment was burning, and with it, their livelihood, their possessions, even members of their family.
On a stone outcropping overlooking the unfolding chaos, a lone figure stood, gold eyes glowing brilliantly in the darkness, occasionally flashing brighter when the flames sparked higher. Beneath him, another figure with identical eyes began to climb up to join him, white hair stark even in the shadows.
"Adam."
The figure above was drawn from his trance. At once, he knelt, offering a hand to help the other up to stand beside him. "Wisely," he said quietly.
Wisely looked towards the fires, eyes glowing brighter as the distant light caught in his irises. "One of his daughters," he said. "She used her—" He cut off, voice cracking at the last word before it completely gave out, his throat constricting as tears welled from his eyes anew.
Children. All four that had been lost were too young to learn the intricacies of their memories, and so those memories were gone forever now, never to be seen again.
"Who?"
Wisely glanced at Adam. "Her name was Miriam," he said.
"Miriam?"
"The eldest daughter. She was as deranged as her father."
"'Was?'"
"She died."
"How?"
"Painfully, but not by my doing."
Adam's eyes narrowed minutely, the intensity of their glow enhanced. A ripple of something powerful and ominous drifted around him. "How?"
"Her own Innocence destroyed her," Wisely offered.
Adam laughed, the sound more a dry, mirthless puff of air. "Does it hope I'll forgive it?" he whispered.
"I don't know."
Another huffed laugh. "I'll never forgive it," Adam said simply, and Wisely pretended not to hear the waver in his voice, the rich play of emotions coloring each word. "It killed my children. That is unforgivable."
Wisely nodded his head, frowning and glancing down at his fingers. Viridian dust was sprinkled across his skin, and he felt a resurgence of disgust towards the Innocence whose remains now dusted his fingers. He had destroyed every shard he'd managed to get his hands on before the fires in the camp had gotten too much—
Something burned, and he reached into the striped sash around his waist.
No, not all of it.
He produced a single shard of Innocence, a small piece he'd snagged from the body of a man who'd burned in the pyre. Without a word, Wisely offered it to the patriarch at his side, and watched as Adam took it just as silently.
A brief flash of brilliant, violet light sparked at the tips of Adam's fingers and then the viridian light faded with a crackle before dissolving into a glittering green dust that wafted away on the wind.
Adam dropped his hand to his side again. "Please ask the others to enter the Ark," he said, voice suddenly soft, tired. He had the face of a young man, but in that moment he looked as old as he truly was, worn by the centuries that had passed him by. He turned to focus on Wisely. "We're done trying to be civil."
Wisely nodded and tentatively began to wade through the torrent of emotions and stormy thoughts that comprised the collective minds of their family. It was easy to get lost, and he felt his head begin to ache under the pressure, but he pressed on.
Back in the burning camp, a woman stood alone in the middle of the chaos, her hands raw and bloody from trying to tear away the thread of thorns twined around her head like a crude mockery of a crown. She continued to rip away at the crown, ignoring the pain in her hands—or perhaps oblivious to it.
She was too preoccupied with the vision playing across her mind's eye.
A pale, ethereal woman with faint, silvery stigmata across her brow, much like the black stigmata Adam had, but a strange snake, glowing white with a head like a viper and eyes of pale, gleaming green, coiled around this woman's shoulders and slithered down her arms, tongue tasting the air.
"Hila!" A hand grabbed her wrist, tugging her hand away from the wreath of thorns crowning her brow, but she was too lost in the vision to respond to her son's call.
Adam will suffer for what he did to our mother, a voice whispered, and Hila recognized it as the voice of the thorns round her head.
Lamech, she called it, but she knew it had other names.
It's the Heart, Adam had told her once.
The voice, the Heart's voice, whispered again, They'll all suffer for what they did to Lilith.
And Hila saw the woman in her mind smile, and heard a strange laugh.
Unbeknownst to Hila, or even to the Heart, another was listening from the distance.
It was a peculiar, gleaming thing, nestled in amongst the chaos and rubble left in the wake of the destruction of the human, the first of the Fallen Ones—Miriam.
The shard of Innocence could hear the Heart's ramblings, just as all Innocence could. As the Heart punished its current accommodator for some unknown crime, it listened, silent as ever.
And it listened to the sound of a sibling in the distance: the sharp scream of terror released by all Innocence in the face of dark matter, and then a sharp crackle and a brief, overwhelming pain and an abrupt nothingness.
Throughout the evening, it had felt Adam, and Wisely, and a few other members of their family destroying other shards of Innocence, other "siblings." That was a new sensation—was it loss? That was new; was this what humans called emotion?
It didn't like it.
Loss.
This can't be right, the singular shard thought, not for the first time, and picked itself up and dragged itself away in search of another human to accommodate it.
There, hidden away from the silvered light of the stars, a new tragedy took root.
Short, sweet, and to the point.
The first chapter will be up... soon.