Issue 2: Summer or Purifying Flame
Act 1. Burning Forever
Edward blinks.
He sees a low blood moon over razed industrial brick and a ground smothered in soot and rotted, scorched innocents- and thieves. His memory is filled with Claudette's begging wails and uncontrollable screams. From above, on the dominating mountaintop far away, twinkling lights wink.
Every single part of him is devastated by agony, all the way down to his worthless, meaningless, waste of a space of a soul.
What he comprehends as iron holds his limp frame, the pressure adds to the pain of his bone deep contusions, and he floats like a ghost forward.
He is ice cold. His heartbeat is slowing. He has no will to live or care where he is going and he fades out of consciousness with relief.
But even in the nothing, he feels the unending pain. His guilt. His shame. To die is a gift, to be freed of a life enduring this weight. In the darkness, an echo, a feeling of this burden haunts him.
When Edward once again becomes conscious, it is to the dim light of a moth bitten purple laced lamp on a chipped, ornately carved bedside table beside him.
A flash of an image of Claudette's lifeless body fills his sight. A memory as real as anything. Her once curious and astute blue eyes, now dull and vacant, stare at nothing, her dried tears streaked through dirt covered bruises.
His heart shatters, and each weak beat is a reminder of his failure to protect her.
The memory scatters as his vision vignettes around a fantastical version of Claudette with blood red eyes wearing a lilac dress standing over him. She has the same golden curls and a beauty mark, but hers is above her pout instead. Her features are too perfect, they seem unnatural. She doesn't seem real.
He knows she's not his Claudette because Claudette is dead.
Her demon eyes are filled with resolve when they meet his. Without a word, she takes his wrist and bites into it.
As her razor sharp white teeth sink in, the pain is immediate and bursting. It starts at the site of the bite, a searing, burning that pulses in place.
It knocks the wind from him, his broken shattered ribs puncture a lung. Tears fill his vision and he is feverish and sweating but he is too tired to do anything but limply accept it.
She lifts his other wrist and bites down again and as that fire starts, the other begins to spread. These flames ignite every nerve ending they touch and turn his blood to sluggish crackling hot oil.
He screams, a raw song that shreds his throat, it burns and he swallows blood. A fitting precursor to the suffering he will soon forever endure.
Now he finds the strength to move, to thrash, in a hope to escape this evisceration. He no longer notices his protesting ribs, his broken leg, or the crack in his skull, those sensations now dull.
Rosalie, the vampire, so enamored and infatuated, has not taken a single breath since she found him crumpled and broken on a dock of the slums with his arm reached out toward that dead girl she was then instantly jealous of.
Beaten, left for dead, and still so beautiful, she sees in him someone who can understand the damage that was done to her.
She dabs his buttered sugared apple blood from her lips with a stained silk handkerchief, ignoring every innate instinct to savor it. She clasps his, for now, bruised and broken hand and imagines the safety she will feel when it is he who is strong and holds her. It helps her persevere through the agony of resisting such succulence.
His bloodshot eyes whirl about the tattered, finely decorated room as he tempts her, "Kill me, please! Please!"
She swallows the venom, the dry blistering heat unrelieved by the action, and gazes down at him with anxious attraction.
He continues his screaming pleading as his muscles contract in miserable uncontrollable bursts.
The viscous slithering fire reaches his shoulders, and begins to crawl across his chest. The fire thickens more and more as it moves, making his weak heart work harder with each and every dreadful beat. Each pulse sends a new intensity of pain radiating outward infinitesimally.
Time stretches, each second an eternity so he may take in every new level of insanity as the flames slowly take over.
The fire coils closer to his heart, and he is certain he stands at death's door, his body and mind unable to endure any more. He is fracturing, his consciousness splintering infinitely to grasp the entirety of the escalating desolation.
It reaches his desperate heart and as it constricts, his chest is boiling acid liquifying and its flames coagulate and clog but the flow continues. It finds new paths to annihilate and ruin.
He isn't sure if he is still moving or screaming, but he is done begging for his life. He knows he is in hell for his sins.
The blistering caustic fluid of fire consumes him, and he can think of nothing else as it continues its slow march.
His thoughts are fragmented and scattered, and he clings to the only thing he has left: the knowledge that he deserves this.
Then he loses all sense of self, his soul burnt down to nothing in the pits of hell. He is no longer Edward, only a meditation of torment.
This is mere hours into what he will soon come to understand is his five day long vampiric transformation. He hasn't, and won't for a while yet, reached the zenith of this suffering.
A/N:
Why, hello Rosalie.