excerpts from Exuviae
The Exile
Scarlet rivulets ran down the exile’s back as he staggered, weary and scarred, behind the procession of gossamer-clad figures. His flagellated flesh was laid bare to the torment of salt-laden winds as he surveyed the pallid figures of Hierarchs driving the carriage along. Behind him stood the imposing walls of the Hegemony’s highest citadel, overlooking the Desiccant Basin with scorn.
Each granule of salt carried upon the harsh, scouring wind stung against the exile’s gaping wounds, a potent reminder of his crimes—petty thievery, a singular sin for which the exile had been excised from the Hegemony, his scars the flesh-bound proof of misdeed and dissidence. He could still feel the cold, raking caress of surgical implements upon his skin, exposing a scarlet network of raw musculature beneath. He recalled how those pallid, white fingers scraped away the cartilage in his knuckles and joints, stripping the ligaments and jabbing unbidden utensils between the bones. His skin had been forcibly abscissed, yet in time, salt and torment would make for natural substitutes. The exile’s thoughts hemorrhaged into one another, each forced step forward infected by agony. His soles left acrid pools of blood behind in his footsteps.
Continue Reading The Exile
The Orphan
The young girl stood upon the shore, her feet sinking into murky sand, and her hands covered by dangling strands of seaweed and kelp. Her name was Orbona, and she worked tirelessly in the fading afternoon light, pulling clumps of algae out from a mound laying plump upon the coast. Orbona’s hair was ratted and brown, with sticks and leaves caught in the knotted net of her scalp.
Her cloak was drenched thoroughly, a sodden garment of loosely threaded vines.
The girl’s skin, deeply tanned and glowing amber in the fading sunlight, was coated by thick layers of swamp muck and sand. Her ankles were covered by marks where leeches had gnawed, and her toes were calloused by years of trudging through sharp bristles and vermin-ridden flora. Orbona, however, was not particularly fussed about the state of her appearance.
The girl was untangling a mass of seaweed and ocean-rot that had run aground upon the shore. Jagged rocks littered the side of the coast, poking their sharp edges out from the protean surface of the sea. The mound of kelp, about the size of a whale or a sailboat, had been trapped between the stones, and now that low tide had allowed the waves to recede, Orbona could tell that the mass was struggling, strangled by its own bulk. It belched up laborious exhalations smelling of brine and blood, and made wretched, choking sounds with its gurgling mass. Orbona pulled away strand after strand of seaweed, loosening up the thing. It was nearly free, and Orbona could tell that her efforts had helped the mass to gain some comfort, but her time was up. The ocean had begun to creep back in, the tides pulling water back over the rocky shores, and foam coating the seaweed-laden mound with oceanic discharge and effluvia. The sun was fading in the sky. She would have to return home for the night.
Cooper Walden Sturm 