Lucrys Story, Memories and Fear. Of Hunger, of Fire, of Man – Alucin

                                         The Boy with the Burning Arm

     Lucrys inhaled groggily. The air stung as it reached his left eye. He couldn’t move. Something shuffled in front of him. A spoon tapped his cheek before getting forced into his right eye. He screamed.

     “You’re awake, aren’t you now, Lucrys?” Skaarin asked. He pulled Lucrys’ eye from the socket, then cut its cord, dropping it to the floor with a bloody collection of Lucrys’ body parts.

     Lucrys screamed again. He felt a burning sensation in his socket, felt something form where his eye had been. “What the hell?” he asked. “What the hell are you doing to me?”

     Skaarin stuck a needle into Lucrys’ eye. “This,” he said, “will allow you to see in the darkness.” He pulled the needle away without injecting the serum. “Never mind that. Lucrys, how do I explain this?” He walked to his table and grabbed a crude, curved blade. He pressed it into Lucrys’ bicep slowly and waited for him to stop screaming. The rust melted away from Lucrys’ skin as the wound dripped silver, then healed. “You can’t die.”

     “What the hell are you talking about? What have you done to my body, Skaarin?”

     “The same thing I did to my own body, friend. You’ll be able to regenerate any physical wound. But the consequence to that,” he said, grabbing tongs and a knife. “Is that you’ll be left with feeling the pain and any mental or emotional harm that you’d remember.” He forced Lucrys’ mouth open and pulled his tongue out with the tongs. “I’m not sure that’s so new to you now, though.” He cut off Lucrys’ tongue and dropped it to the heap.

     “You’re fucking slaught.” Lucrys said when his tongue regenerated.

     “Slaught and sick,” Skaarin replied. “Right down to the core. I’ve given you a damn gift, Lucrys. A gift like this requires payment.”

     “So, what, you torture any fuck you get in here?”

     “I’m just testing the regenerative concoction in your blood. You wouldn’t wanna lose a limb for good, would you?” Skaarin cut off Lucrys’ fingers and watched them regenerate. As they did, he took off his hand, which began to reform in turn. “It’s fast.” Skaarin said. “Faster than mine.”

     “Mil was right, you’re fucking crazy.”

     “You want to hear a story?” Skaarin asked. “It’s a fun one. About a little girl I knew once.” Lucrys glared toward him in the darkness. “Don’t give me a face like that. I’m full of good stories. A long, long time ago, there was a little girl named Aurona.” Lucrys listened to Skaarin, understanding there was no escape. And nothing but Skaarin and pain.

     “She had the prettiest eyes,” Skaarin went on. “So pretty, in fact, people believed she wasn’t human. One day, a girl began crying, thinking Aurona’s eyes would woo her best friend. She was afraid of losing the boy she so lustfully loved. So the boy set Aurona’s eyes aflame.

     “But the boy didn’t know how to control his magnius. He wound up burning another child, too. The child’s arm burned and burned, but he contained the flames with his own magnius. Try as they might, none of the children could get the flames out. The child with the burning arm was enraged. He fled with the pretty-eyed girl and promised her she’d never be harmed again.

     “Oh, how wrong he was. He researched sciences and magnius arts, and learned that wounds could be healed. ‘But why would someone stop at just healing a wound?’ he wondered. So, the boy began to create new potions and elixirs through his studies of magnius arts. At first, he tested them on small animals, but the animals always died, no matter how successful he thought the mixture would be.

     “In time, he decided to use his friend’s body. He had read of ways to use magnius arts to pick apart the memory and replace it. I forget what they’re called, though. The boy created a new concoction, more focused on memory. After using the girl’s memories, the elixir worked on a small rodent. Ecstatic, he injected it into himself and the girl. He watched as her eyes healed to their original state. For the first time in years, she could see him. His arm healed, and the flames finally extinguished.

     “After a short while, the girl became ill. The two returned to their hometown to find her parents. She always begged for the boy to stay by her side while she was bedridden. One day, the other teens came to visit. And in the mix was a boy who almost seemed to despise them. He broke our protagonist’s arm when they were alone. He hurt Aurona in her bedroom. And later that night, when the boy found her dead, he knew exactly who was at fault.” Lucrys swore Skaarin was shaking.

     “The boy had become well-versed in a few magnius arts in his studies. He knew well how the human body functioned. He also knew that there are some people who can’t contain their magnius properly. Magnius is like a liquid, you see, similar to blood in the body. It runs throughout humans within its own system, just like blood. Magnius can boil, if you use the right arts.

     “He took the boy and girl he knew as a child and boiled the girl’s magnius veins. She tried hard to control it. But, instead, a strange thing happened. Her magnius began to crystallize. The poor girl basically killed herself. She died from a magnius crystal piercing her lungs. That was the first time the boy had killed anyone.

     “He hung the other boy and tormented him throughout the night, nothing near what you’ve been through, though. And afterward, he went back to the corpse of Aurona. She had left a kdulinj behind with her final words, the way people do off in older Roz'nectuine capitals. The message she left for the boy cursed him for trying to save her.

     “The girl had loved the years she’d spent away from the town with the boy. But they had to come to an end when she fell ill. The boy had searched her body for any marks left by the alleged killer, but they had all healed. In the end, the boy had killed the girl he loved. His concoction may have worked, but her body was never really compatible with it. He had killed her by trying to cure her blindness. And through succeeding, she came to hate him. She wanted to stay happy with him, Lucrys. She cursed the boy for taking that happiness away from the both of them!”

     Lucrys heard Skaarin shuffle about the room, circling around him for a long, silent moment. Skaarin whimpered and slammed against his table. His footsteps came back to Lucrys and he continued.

     “The boy ripped out the eyes he adored and put them into a vial. He enchanted it with magnius arts to keep the spheres fresh, and then placed the vial on his neck to remember to never make the mistake again. He burned his research and disposed of his creation, vowing to never recreate it.

     “Years later, as the man traveled the world in search of a mythical library, he found a strange place with forbidden knowledge. It wasn’t the library he sought, but he was curious all the same. The place stole his sight from him as read. A curse even his elixir wouldn’t heal. But he had researched magnius quite well. He replaced his own eyes with his beloved Aurona’s, doomed to forget his vows.” Skaarin breathed heavily and sniffled. He grasped Lucrys arm and let out a content sigh.

     “Well, what do you say, Lucrys? Aren’t my eyes pretty? I don’t think yours will ever have the same problem!” Skaarin shoved a sword into Lucrys’ eye and laughed. After he calmed down, he pulled out the blade, allowing the eye to heal. “That’s enough about me. What’s your story?” he asked, sitting back in a bloodstained chair. “I’m sure someone as fucked as you has a few words to share. Why don’t you tell me about that Mil person you keep mentioning?”