Unsleeping Patron - Crimson Fire on Wet Shale

Liquid slate churned between banks of grey shale; the water looked unlike anything natural. In the bruised twilight settling over the forest, it ran thick and heavy, like liquid slate churning between banks of jagged grey shale.Silas stayed ten paces back, his hands jammed deep into his coat pockets. The spray coming off the rapids was ice-cold, carrying a metallic tang that coated the back of his throat. Around him, the discipline Gideon had spent five hours building collapsed in less than five seconds.Thirst beat out fear every time.Men dropped to their bellies, shoving their faces directly into the freezing current. A woman with a torn wool coat fell onto her knees, cupping the water in her palms and swallowing so fast she choked, coughing wetly onto the stones. Gideon was shouting, his boots crunching on the shale as he tried to grab coat collars and pull people back, but nobody listened. They drank like cattle.Silas watched them, his jaw tight. His own tongue felt like a dry strip of leather against his palate, but his eyes were on a man three yards to his left a thick-set dockworker in a grease-stained flannel shirt.The man’s right jacket pocket bulged awkwardly. Tucked inside, barely hidden by a dirty cuff, were three slender, violet-glowing stems.He hadn’t thrown his Purpur-Blossoms away back in the clearing. He had hidden them.”Don’t drink it all at once, you fool,” a woman gasped near the dockworker, wiping her chin with a wet sleeve.The dockworker didn’t answer. He plunged his face back into the river, taking a long, noisy gulp.Silas opened his mouth to warn him, but the sound never left his throat.A muffled, wet pop came from the dockworker’s jacket pocket.It sounded like a wet cork being forced from a bottle. The man froze, his face still dripping over the dark water. Then, a seam along his flannel coat split open, revealing a burst of sickening, neon-violet light.It wasn’t a normal fire. There was no smoke, no yellow heart to the flame. The purple light flared straight out from his ribs, turning his shirt to black grease in half a second.The dockworker let out a sound that didn’t belong to a human being a high, wet screech that ended in a rattle as the violet embers erupted from his mouth and nostrils. His skin didn’t burn; it boiled, bubbling into dark, fluid-filled sacs that ruptured instantly, spilling violet fire down his chest.”Fire! Get it off “The woman next to him scrambled backward, but the dockworker thrashed wildly, his arms flailing as the heat melted his fingers into fused, blackened stumps. He lunged sideways, his burning shoulder slamming directly into her chest.The moment the purple embers touched her wet wool coat, her whole torso ignited with a soft whoosh.Panic went through the riverbank like a butcher’s knife.”In the water! Get in the water!” someone screamed.Three people threw themselves directly into the rushing rapids. Silas watched in mute horror as the violet flames touched the river. The freezing water didn’t extinguish the fire. The moment the current hit the violet embers, the river spat out a cloud of scalding, purple-tinted steam. The fire spread across the surface of the water like boiling oil, chasing the swimmers downstream.One man went under, trying to drown the flames, and came up three seconds later as a thrashing, green-stained skeleton. The current caught his ribs and snapped them against a boulder before sweeping the remains into the dark.A figure scrambled out of the steam, running blind toward the shale bank.It was the dockworker. His face was gone, replaced by a charred, bubbling mass of melted fat and exposed jawbone. He was staggering directly toward Silas, his burning arms outstretched, seeking anything to grab.Silas’s heel caught a slick slate tile as he backed up. He hit the shale hard, the sharp rocks tearing through his trousers and biting into his elbow. Pain shot up his spine.The dockworker stumbled over a rock and fell forward, his weight carrying him straight down toward Silas. The heat radiating off the man’s chest smelled like scorched marrow and copper, so intense it singed the hairs on Silas’s forearm.Silas didn’t think. He drew his right leg back and kicked with everything he had, planting the heavy heel of his boot square into the dockworker’s burning collarbone.The impact felt unnaturally soft, like kicking a sack of rotten fruit.The dockworker’s neck snapped sideways with a dry crunch, his momentum halted. He tumbled backward off Silas, crashing onto a heap of sharp shale. The moment his body hit the stones, the violet fire flared one last time, consuming the last of his flesh, and then died out completely.Where the man had been, there was only a pile of fine, glowing purple dust settling between the grey pebbles.Silas scrambled backward on his hands and knees, gasping, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He spit a mouthful of cold ash onto the rocks.The riverbank had gone dead silent.The screams were gone. The only sound left was the relentless, heavy roar of the black water dragging itself over stone.Silas pushed himself up onto his knees, his hands shaking so violently he had to shove them into his thighs to steady them.Gideon was standing fifteen feet away near a jagged limestone outcrop, his charcoal coat torn at the shoulder, his face the color of damp salt. He had his heavy iron-buckled belt wrapped around his hand like a knuckle-duster, his breathing heavy and ragged.Behind Gideon, pressed flat against the rock, was Hester Brierly. Her spectacles were missing, one lens shattered on the shale near her feet. She was clutching her knees, her shoulders hitching silently as she stared at the grey smudges on the riverbank.Silas counted them.One. Two. Three.Including himself, Gideon, and Hester, there were only eleven people left standing on the shale.Over twenty people had been reduced to smudges of soot on the rocks or washed down the river as floating bone fragments.”Nobody move,” Gideon said. His voice was hoarse, stripped of its military bark, reduced to a rough rasp. “Nobody touches the water. Nobody touches the ash. If you have anything in your pockets… pull it out with two fingers and drop it.”A young man with a bleeding scalp fumbled with his jacket, pulling out a crumpled Purpur-Blossom stem he had tucked into his lining. He dropped it like a venomous viper and backed away until his shoulders hit a tree trunk.Silas wiped his mouth with the back of his torn sleeve. His throat was raw, but the sight of the river water made his stomach turn. He crawled closer to the edge of the stone bank, keeping his center of gravity low, and peered down into the black current.The water was clear, almost artificially so, despite the gloom.Ten inches beneath the surface, wedged in the dark silt between two submerged slate boulders, something moved against the fast-moving stream.It wasn’t a fish. It had no scales, no fins, and no eyes.It was a writhing, twisted knot of pitch-black threads, thin as human hair, floating in a dense, swirling ball the size of a man’s fist. It didn’t drift with the water. It swayed rhythmically, pulsing with a faint, oily shimmer, its dark tendrils opening and closing like the cilia of a deep-sea parasite, feeding on the cold.