Atsile of Zenonia: Being Born [Kolme]

The faintest smell of home can trigger a life worth of memories. Grinded ash, smoky flames, that hint of cinnamon that nudges the tongue. The cobwebs in her eye sockets, alighting when a soul enters and illuminates the body. Rising from the dust of a thousand years, rising from broken arms and rolling heads with torn ears, the puppet wakes up not in fear, but in confusion.

An empty furnace littered with a burnt stone of some sort, a peeled window sticker painting an open grassy field, and a ladder beckoning her to escape from here. The handles clang with each step, the hatch was loose with opportunity and the view from above was just another room. A dresser toppled next to her, likely the burden that was supposed to weigh the hatch.

Broken furniture atop broken furniture, glass shards with a colony of termites still ripping the wood apart despite how many years this place has been in shambles. The bugs scatter once they feel the ground shake, abandoning their predetermined line over a curious silhouette. Running, scuttering, uninteresting.

There were half-eaten papers on a half-eaten table with no legs. The letters were foreign, unintelligible to a newborn. No matter how close she pulled the paper to her face, she couldn't understand at that time that what she was looking at was a name. Only the image imprinted into the brain as she tosses the scrap of paper away.

The puppet walked over the crackling floor. There was a door with a broken metal handle, a way to progress. She places her hand on the door, gentle vibrations from a colony, a civilisation inside the door. Hollowed out wood to make room for life.

She pushed it, not even forcefully, and it collapsed from its dusted hinges. A resounding boom, cracks appearing on the surface of the door as more termites poured out in a panic onto the surface, onto the long rug of a hallway of some sort.

The paint on the wall was discoloured, the floor creaking heavily underneath her feet with each step. She can still hear the clicking and ticking of those bugs, an endless rhyme stretching and filling in the silence. Or was this just the silence? A baby cannot tell such construct until they are told from someone else. All it knows is its basic motor function and perhaps an insatiable curiosity.

Doors upon doors the puppet passed, windows upon windows that were just nothing but stickers barely hanging to a pipe-dream of the same open grass field. The floor barely held together beneath her weight, almost threatening to swallow her whole by collapsing on itself. The infant walked slower.

Soon, there came to be an open door at the end of the hallway. There was a person sleeping on the floor. A person, a person to explain the wonders and questions trapped inside her synthetic cranium. Wisdom, yes, wisdom. A dumb puppet would want wisdom.

So, she carefully treads through the unstable hallway, inching closer and closer to the sleeping person. Where am I? Who am I? What are you? Why are you sleeping? Why are these things falling off the walls? What are these small little things? These thoughts were what would be translated into incoherent hand gestures and wild fumblings.

The puppet enters the room. The person faces away from her, pale and bald with some sort of a concave shape on both sides of its head. Thin frail hands poked out from its sleeves, an odd line of small white bones tracing down from its rear. The puppet prods it slightly as if she were a toddler trying to get the attention of an adult.

Of course, a corpse will not respond, especially if it's just a pile of skeletal remains. The puppet wraps her hands around the skull, accidentally snapping it from its fragile neck and brings it closer to her face. A spider crawls out from the skull's eye socket, down to its canine teeth and onto her hand.

Eight beady eyes, eight spindly limbs and two sharp fangs pointing at her hand. It was more interesting than the small termites, more fun to look at than scuttering little things. She drops the skull, letting it roll over the rigid floor in place for her new toy.

It hops, and hops, and hops whenever her other hand approaches it. In between her fingers, up her forearm and onto her shoulder where the puppet accidentally swatted it off, the spider's crumpled remains barely sticking to the palm of her hand. What a shame, it didn't have a long shelf life.

The careless infant glanced around the room. The furniture still stood, the small bugs haven't yet touched this room it seems. Inside the dull surroundings, a nice red coat sticks out from an ajar dresser. It seemed to have stood through the testament of time, the fabric still holding together despite the owner being long dead. Dead, such a small word.

Oh well, the puppet was more enamoured by the dazzling red coat than what death means. She was born mere minutes ago, there was life to explore! Although, her first act among the living was stealing a dead man's property. Even if she learned what morals were the moment her soul blew into this body, she'd still take it.

What good would fashion do for a corpse anyway?

Without that thought in mind, she also took the black dress hanging beside it as well and the boots sitting inside the dresser. A note was clipped to the dress, right around the collar of it, covered in some sort of plastic. She didn't question it. She doesn't understand what it meant, and perhaps she thought it was a part of the outfit as well. The white is a nice contrast to the black.

The puppet slips into her dress, her feet perfectly fitting the boots and the coat snuggling in nicely on her body or rather, perfectly as if it were tailor-made for her. She wouldn't know, she doesn't even know why she's putting it on. Does it matter? A child would do things for no reason, they would do things because they can.

And if the same logic applied, then the world would be a child as well. They would shake the ground, tear down the foundation of civilisation and destroy because it wanted to. So it did.

The age-old furnish began toppling over one another as the ground itself rumbled like a baby being abruptly awoken from its dreams. The crib violently shook as it cried loudly—no, shouting, shrieking maybe. Books sprawled across the floor, the dresser she robbed fell over her and perhaps even the roof threatened to collapse as well. If something was to rip this flimsy place apart, it was this and it was now.

Each second, the room shakes harder than the last. It was more akin to a greedy child shaking a jar of candy than a seismic disaster, staring at the deliciously bright coloured sweets as they see it bump and crash into the glass and each other with those satisfying clinks.

Repeatedly, the puppet slammed into the wall and back into the broken piles of furniture. It was hard to distinguish where she was, her face had collided with too many objects for her disorientated eyes to keep up. In those several seconds, the old wooden floors and walls could take so much.

The glass jar shatters. The puppet finds herself falling, falling through the floor that had given in to the turmoil. Debris of whatever that was left was beside her inside this blinding scenery she finds herself in. Bright, everything was bright, the sun was above her. It shines, it shines every speck of her being. Can she touch it? Such a thing? Can she touch it?

Idle thoughts of a doll, reaching her hand over the unreachable, not a single worry of the chasm she was falling into.

For a while, she dreamt of a silly idea. For a while, she thought her hand would stretch over through the millions upon millions of kilometres to the sun. That is until she experienced submersion beneath a body of water.

A brilliant splash, one of many.

It was strange. Did the air get denser? How was she floating now all of a sudden? How did everything get darker again?

The puppet flailed around in the river within the canyon, hastily rising up to the surface. Her dark hair drenched, her red coat and dress soaked, the doll still looked up among the rumbling waters. The valley was still shaking, rocks falling into the river and the hanging home barely keeping together. Yet, there was one thing that wasn't there.

The sun had disappeared, hidden away behind a colossal shadow. A tall building, the puppet had thought at first, then she saw it move ever so slowly.

Eight limbs attached to a body, eight faces extending out to stretch the appendages to touch the earth and a pair of sharp fangs pointing at the soil. They all screamed in horror or what looks to be like it. It was an interesting big thing, but surely it was evil. It cast the bright thing away, surely it was.