The Radiation Fragment

Stem shook violently, his fingers curled into fists around the rags of his siblings. He stood up from the rubble and twisting wroughtwork and it hurt all over to do so. The mouse was brave but still only a mouse and his muscles were worn thin. Rain poured in through in the ruined cathedral and sizzled on the stone floor. The water stung his flayed hide. It was a dirty rain, heavy with ashes and acids. A cemetary rain of muck into open graves. Around him the scattered pews, each massive and oaken, lay tumbled up on each other in splinters as forgotten as toy soldiers. They were ancient, solidly hewn and well crafted. But the intensity of the blast had bent them as easily as soft green grass. As the rain pelted the upturned ends, the figures carved there seemed to cry in raised, glowing devotion.

The mouse stood up from the rubble and his knees immediately gave way, collapsing as though jelly. He crawled away from the center of the vast chamber and propped himself against a spiralling column.

"Show yourself!" He cried, feeble and spent. His throat was raw and he coughed out black blood, "Show yourself, you coward! I have - I have bested your Champion and I demand an audience!" But his words echoed into the rain and were lost.

He bled all over: from his pores, his eyes, within his gut. He doubled over in pain and the blistering skin on his back split and sloughed away. He sobbed against the hard wet floor. A section of the roof fell in, collapsing under its own soggy weight. It would not be long before the whole holy fortress dissolved away into sundered bricks and ashes. The heavy rains. The thunder rolling and racing through the canyons.

He looked through the wet bars of his eyelashes and saw across the rapidly filling crater that a gargoyle had shattered upon the floor. It lay in pieces, and the spout of its tongue protruded towards him. It looked ridiculous. It was somthing his brother would have laughed at, and so he laughed for him. He rolled onto his back and shuddered with laughter. The water battered his face and pocked the open, doughy flesh of his chest.

He smiled still and his teeth were soft things that he had to turn and spit out onto the floor. But he could not help laughing.

"Little brother, when Mama made you eat your turnips, you would have that expression. Do you remember?" He brought his hands to his face and rubbed the rags there. His nose had clotted shut but he buried his muzzle into the tatters for their lingering scent. He felt his eyes yield and rupture painlessly against his knuckles. He was blind. His tounge felt thick in his mouth.

"And the time Polly ate those grubs," He mumbled and wheezed into laughter, "You dared her, and I bet you a fat berry she wouldn't. But she did, didn't she? Little Pollen. And your face looked like that." He hugged himself into a ball and felt ribs snapping as tinder. Overhead the storm screamed through the exposed timbers and the sky was almost solid with dark water. High above the nave, the vast dome groaned as though a ship at sea. It flaked off its crumbling frescos into tumbling plaster clods. He seemed to feel the floor sliding out from beneath him.

"Mama will be worried about us, my faithful squire," He gurgled through the thin blood flooding his mouth. Strange and sour, metallic water, "We should return home with the princess. Our queen... She will reward us handsomely - for we are heroes, and it will be supper soon..." He was quiet after that and laid very still.

Over the altar flickered the Vicar's Mark, the eye immutable and unblinking.