On his knees in a pool of blood, a boy looked up at the sky blotched in crimson
Pangs of guilt and sorrow ravaged his mind
Regret, horror, and self-hatred would flow through each passing thought, in an endless manner, unable to tell front from back, his feelings in a muddled loop
In a daze, the boy stricken with a nauseous feeling, finally said his piece,
uttering words of madness and cruelty, as if testifying to the world of his promise
"I... It was all my fault, all of it, it was mine."
"The ruin around me, the smell, the freshness that's around me given by pools of crimson, it was all me!"
"So... PLEASE, BRING HIM BACK!"
The silence was heavy… No reply, only the air, carrying the silence of the dead and the waft of the ruinous mesh of bodies.
This, however was a nightmare not so far off, when the time came, the carapace of the world... and the boy's would shatter, and the nightmare would begin.
...
"Huh? Where,"
"OI YOU PUNK! YOU DIRTY RAT, GET OFF MY PORCH!"
Looking up, with eyes as glassy, clear, and grey as cobblestone, he looked up, in a daze, seeing the fat but mature man seemingly bark from the window at the top.
Looking up again, then down, he saw skin as clear and white as snow, dirt, all over his ragged clothes. Seemingly the old Fat Dog was right, the boy may have actually looked like a rat.
Unknowing of what he was doing here, the boy grasped out, with his snow white arm, seemingly longer than a regular human's, grasping for the porch railing. Leaning on it, he got up to see the place where he awoke.
Glancing out of the porch, he saw a small brown gate, that emanated a woody scent. He stood there, staring at it, for almost a minute, as if enamoured by the details of brown and the shape of the ordinary object.
"DID I NOT SAY GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE YOU DAMNED RAT? GET BACK TO YOUR SEWER WHERE YOU CRAWLED OUT FROM!"
Taking a small glance up again, annoyed at the interruption of his amusing look at the gate, the boy shrugged off the noise and left the porch.
He walked outwards, towards the wooden gate that had left him amazed. What exactly was it that kept him so interested?
Seeing that the man would not stop with his annoyances, the boy left, walking past the gate.
As he stepped out, a sudden pause arrived at his destination. Unable to move, unable to let this scene go away, something else left him enamoured, other than the woody scent or the brown gate.
It was… the scent of strawberries, of the stank mud that was slopped up when a horse was galloping by carrying a carriage on its back.
It was the scent of a thousand people, their situations, their lives, that rushed into the boy—the scene of a town, as if projecting from a distance, where he had not entered but was outside of it all.
As if looking at an oil painting, he saw a glorious, but dirty town: buildings that reached the tree tops, men smoking pipes, horses galloping down streets with unsavoury men on them, with children messing about near a shop selling substances hardened on a small white stick.
Finally, it wore off. He finally had the chance… the ability to wonder, now to ask himself, 'Where am I? Wait, no, more importantly who am I? Why was I sleeping on that porch?…'
As he kept asking and kept wondering, his mind started to remember one thing, a singular name devoid of any memory… 'Kenoma'.
Following that, pangs of pain attacked the boy's mind.
His eyes blushed as if to keep the red from seeping out. The hair on his arms stood on end, and he fell down again, plunging back into deep sleep, that… almost had felt like
death?