DEATH IS ETERNAL #440 by GIC
THE EMBERS BENEATH MY SKIN and A GRAND MISUNDERSTANDING
Contents
THE EMBERS BENEATH MY SKIN (genre: body horror)
A GRAND MISUNDERSTANDING (genre: burlesque comedy)
THE EMBERS BENEATH MY SKIN
Genre: body horror
Inspiration: 1865 – American Civil War: Columbia, South Carolina, is burned as Confederate forces flee from advancing Union forces.
Word count: 469
The sky over Columbia burned, choked in a hellish glow. The Union soldiers had marched at dusk, their boots grinding ash into the earth, their torches licking at rooftops and windowpanes. By midnight, the city screamed.
Jonah staggered through the ruins, his uniform in tatters, his hands raw from dragging himself over fallen beams. The Confederacy was dead; the war was lost. But none of that mattered now, not with the heat inside him.
It had started when the firestorm swallowed the church on Hampton Street. A blast of searing wind had thrown him back, his skin peppered with embers. He had slapped them away, but something had burrowed in—just beneath the flesh of his forearm: a spark, a silver of living flame.
At first, he felt only a dull warmth. Then, the pain. Deep. Pulsing. Like something gnawing at his marrow.
As he stumbled through the wreckage, he could see the glow beneath his skin. Orange veins creeping up his arm, writhing like worms beneath the surface. His fingers twitched involuntarily. He could feel the heat spreading, devouring the muscle.
He reached a shattered mirror in a storefront. His reflection stared back, wild-eyed, face streaked with soot. His lips cracked as he gasped for breath. Then, he saw his arm.
The skin had begun slogging away, curling like paper in a candle flame. Beneath it, no blood, no bone—only coal-black fissures pulsing with molten light.
Jonah fell to his knees, retching, but nothing came up except smoke.
A shadow moved behind him.
“Jonah?” The voice rasped through the smoke. A soldier, his face barely recognizable beneath a layer of grime. “Christ, you’re alive.”
Jonah turned, his mouth opening to speak, but the words withered on his tongue. His fingers spasmed. The flesh split.
Flames licked out from his palm.
The soldier’s eyes widened, his mouth forming a silent scream as Jonah reached for him. Not by choice—the fire within him was pulling. Hungry.
The moment his fingers brushed the man’s uniform, the flames leapt. They crawled over fabric, over flesh, sinking in, rooting deep. The soldier convulsed, his veins lighting up like cracks in a smouldering log. His scream came then, raw and jagged, but only for a moment before his throat blackened, his breath curling into smoke.
Jonah recoiled, but it was too late. The fire had fed, had grown. His chest cracked open, ribs splitting apart like the doors of a furnace. His heartbeat was an anvil strike, each pulse sending heat waves through his limbs.
He stumbled into the street, past figures writhing in the inferno, their bodies blooming into living embers. Union soldiers shouted orders in the distance, but the city had already been claimed.
The fire was inside them now. Inside him.
And it would never stop burning.
The end
A GRAND MISUNDERSTANDING
Genre: burlesque comedy
Inspiration: 1905 – Russian Revolution of 1905: Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia is assassinated in the Moscow Kremlin by Socialist Revolutionary Ivan Kalyayev.
Word count: 992
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to ... by GIC to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.