Step step step. Heart pounding. Stress rising.
There it is. The impossibly maddening pricks of itchiness spreading everywhere. He had to get out of there, now! Delsin Igneous Cale was born, concepted, and raised under a rift in the spatial construct of reality. Ever since he was first alive, and before hand while he was developing in the womb; unknown radiational energy was seeping through, infecting his Mother’s stem cells. These mutations from extra-dimensional anomalies gave him certain capabilities that most people could only dream of having. But with every rise, there is a fall. Some say that it has to be an equal fall to the rise, but that’s not always the case.
Delsin made an abrupt turn into the closest store – a Jack In The Box – and burst straight into the bathroom, locking the door behind him. Head, neck, shoulders, arms, torso, waist, legs, thighs, feet. Everywhere itched with the relentlessness of annoyance. Scratch scratch scratch.
It always starts off as a few, but scratch one and three more appear. It spreads like a disease from the scalp and spirals down the bottom of his feet. He breathed heavily as he focused on the air around him. Everything started to grow cold and the tiled floor beneath his feet frosted over as if the air was highly concentrated with liquid nitrogen. The frost slowly crept over to and up the walls, the sink turned from grey metal to porcelain white, while the mirror’s reflective surface cracked under the intensity.
Delsin sighed in relief as the itches faded under the coolness of the air around him. His concentration fell and came back up again. However, instead of frigid temperatures, the small room was overwhelmed with gentle heat, growing stronger by the second until finally all the frost had dissipated back into the nothingness it had seemed to come from. He stared at his cracked reflection in the mirror. Neon blue eyes, covered by average brown colored eye contacts looked back at him. His hair was also dyed into a brilliant navy blue color, which was starting to near his eyes and the sides were tucked behind his ears.
“I really need to get a haircut.” Delsin thought to himself as he leaned all-too-abruptly on the sink as it broke off the wall and shattered upon impact with the ground. It appeared that the sink wasn’t as thawed out as the mirror.
“S**t! S**T!” Delsin exclaimed in a panic. The noise was loud, and was most definitely heard by the anyone and everyone outside. The cops had definitely passed the place by now, he was sure of it! Delsin wasn’t in any real trouble as they were really just security guards to the mall a couple blocks away. He was shocked they chased him this far!
Honestly, who would have guessed that trespassing on the roof of the mall was such a big deal to them! Although could you really blame him for wanting to go up there all the time? It was a Parkour wonderland, with all the pipes, generators, roof gaps and plenty of other fun obstacles to pass over, under, around etc.
Delsin took his chances and made a break for it, rushing out of the food establishment like a bat out of hell and took off down the street and into the fairly abandoned warehouse a quarter-mile away, where him and his friends hung out in their free time. Obviously no one knew about his abilities besides his parents and his best friend, Vince.
As Delsin dropped in through the skylight into their little area, he was greeted by 4 of normal friends. Henry, Nathan, Griffin, and Jace, all of them vastly different from one another. The only thing they had in common was the ever so lively character of Delsin.
“What da’ fuggs up!?!” he exclaimed to his 4 companions who were sitting in a small ring around a table playing Cards Against Humanity.
Jace looked up from his hand and chucked a chunk of severed concrete at his head with incredible speed, while Delsin quickly grabbed it with ease with only an inch from his face.
“Jesus Christ dude! How the hell do you always do that?” Jace spat with a little bit of annoyance and awe in his voice. With a smirk Delsin simply retorted with:
“I’m a badass and you’re not.”
Everyone laughed as if it was the funniest thing they ever heard.
Delsin spent the next few hours before having to head home. This part made him fill with dread, but not because his home life was bad, but because he felt guilt when around his parents, as it was his fault that they secluded themselves so much from everyone else. It was his fault. Everything was his fault.
He arrived home and greeted his parents sheepishly, grabbed some food and went down the hall to his bedroom. It was a one story house, unless you were to count the basement and or attic.
Delsin didn’t eat unless he wanted to, as his body could supply and create any and all things that it needed. It was a part of his special abilities that made him utterly unique to anyone else on Earth. Although oddly enough, even though he didn’t really need to eat, his teeth were sharper than normal people’s teeth were. They weren’t crazy sharp like shark teeth or anything like that, but just more carnivorous than herbivorous. Even the seemingly flat teeth, e.g the front 4 teeth between his canines, had hundreds of tiny grooves that you couldn’t see that made it easier to tear through flesh.
It was -30 degrees Fahrenheit as it was winter, yet he had his window open and he was in nothing but his underwear laying in his bed. If you couldn’t figure out by now, his specialty was energy. He could control it to an absolute whim, and could use it to adapt himself to many situations which in such cases like this, which were semi-automatic allowed him to not feel how cold it really was.
This would soon be one of the more useful variations of his tricks.
Life went on the same until the end of winter break. His parents didn’t really do Christmas as Delsin wouldn’t let them get him anything, however he would always get them each one thing.
Although he wouldn’t admit it, Delsin loved both his parents dearly.
Wake up – Breakfast (optional) – Shower (Mandatory) – Get Dressed – Go to school. That was his daily routine throughout the weeks. To anyone who didn’t know him or just passed by would assume that he was dead inside, but they couldn’t be more wrong. People judged him because of his passion for the looks of gothic. He didn’t have any piercings, nor was he pale; however he dressed in as much black as he could without looking like a poorly dressed ninja.
His favorite outfit was solid black jeans, black shirt with white sleeves and a bloody spiked metal plated horse skull decal on it. Over the shirt he wore a thin black billabong zip-up hoodie with the logo in gothic letters sprawled across the chest, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows to let the shirt sleeves be shown, while he kept it unzipped to reveal the shirt underneath.
On his spare time he liked to write horror stories which he shared with his friends whom loved to read them. Delsin was always getting complimented on his works, from Vince especially.
Delsin had just finished his latest story about a boy who shortly after gaining supernatural powers, snapped and went on a murder spree in his town but was caught soon after.
When presenting this new piece to his friends, they gawked at the title in excitement.
“Subtlety: A voice long forgotten.” Nathan read aloud. Vince, Henry. Nathan, Griffin and Delsin were all chilling in the warehouse as usual after school. After a couple of weeks when everyone had finished the story they were reluctant to give Delsin the feedback that he so desperately craved from his friends. As the normal, they all sat around a table playing some sort of game, and one by one they gave him their full hearted honest opinion.
After a couple of moments of silence, Henry slowly admitted, “Sorry man, but… honestly it wasn’t the best thing you’ve ever written…” This cause a chain reaction of comments from the rest.
“Yeah D Sorry, I hate to say it but I agree with H,” confessed Griffin.
“The story line was frail and full of plot holes, the character development was almost non-existent and the ending was too abrupt,” Nathan all but said with ease.
Jace, Vince, and the others just nodded in agreement. Delsin sat in his chair with embarrassment, and despair.
For the next few weeks he had been plagued with nightmares and writer’s block. His dreams were filled with taunting laughter and distasteful smirks from his so-called “friends”.
As the days went on, he could feel himself become less and less lucid in the waking world. Day after day he found it harder and harder to pull himself out of bed and each day he felt more and more dead. In fact, people thought that he might actually be nothing more than a walking corpse due to his shrinking of body mass. You could see his skeletal outline. His parents tried to ask him what was wrong but like everyone else he ignored them and locked himself inside his room, then locking himself in his own mind.
“Power… Stronger… Strength… Kill… Blood… Consume… I’m hungry… I’m… hungry?… hunger… new… need meat…”
These were the words passing through his mind while he contemplated how to make a new story to crush all of his past works and make the last mistake be microscopic in comparison.
And that’s when he had a spark of brilliance! He would give everyone, starting with his friends, the ultimate way to experience his books! Never again would they diss the stories of this 17-year-old author!
Right then and there, his skin seemed to inflate like a small balloon, and within a minute he was back to his un-anorexic self. His body started producing proteins and muscle and adrenaline all throughout himself! He ran into the bathroom and looked into the mirror and marveled at his body changing.
Once again he felt his entire body flared up in itchiness and as he tried to calm them down, it was futile. They kept growing worse and worse, but for once he didn’t care. He embraced it, enjoyed it and relished within all of it. The itches seemed sink into him, moving onto his insides whilst leaving a changed exterior! His skin was now as black the darkness in a room with no light.
Although for some reason, it didn’t feel quite right to him. It was as if this was just a cover, and the real skin was directly underneath. He slightly focused on his skin, pulling it inside himself which revealed his original skin tone. He played with this strange phenomenon, bringing this new skin out and into himself.
He smiled psychotically into the mirror and it grew even wider as he noticed something else when his skin was out; his teeth and grown thinner and slightly sharper. Once again not shark tooth sharp, but this time pretty damn close. He removed his colored eye contacts and wasn’t surprised to see his eyes were now neon yellow! Pulling his skin inside, his eyes remained yellow.
“They will fear my stories,” Delsin spat out.
Going downstairs, his parents asked him where he was going as it was night.
Delsin stood there.
Turning on his heels he walked up to his mother and father who were sitting together under a blanket on the couch.
This was the part where a voice would talk to him in his head. But Delsin wasn’t insane, so a second voice in his head wouldn’t fit, oh no! However his thoughts started on their own.
“Fear. Death. Hunger. Scare. Kill. Eat. Scare. Kill. Eat.”
Those last three words seem to have become a mantra for himself.
“Mom, dad did you ever find my stories scary?” he questioned through a monotone voice.
“They were definitely interesting and unique,” his mother responded while his father just nodded in agreement. Delsin’s skin started turning black.
“But were they scary?” he asked again.
He could feel their hearts starting to race and could taste the adrenaline starting to carry through their veins. In unison they stuttered out the single word; Yes.
Delsin felt their hearts flutter abnormally, even for them being scared.
“You’re lying.”
There was a sleep over at Nathan’s house that night. A block away from there and Delsin still had not wiped the his mother and father’s blood from his face except from his chin because he didn’t like the feeling of blood dripping off. He froze the tips of his fingernails and used them as tooth picks to get bits of meat out of the nooks.
When he approached the front door, he pulled his inner skin out and placed his hands on the door. He released all his buried anger and anxiety into heated energy and burst the door into flames. He made sure to contain the fire within the door frame and kicked the door down.
Instantly he became overwhelmed with the amount of fear he felt inside. All of his so-called “friends”. The fire spread all around the house and every step he took led to a small path of frost appearing in front of him, despite the intense heat all around. Delsin smiled at them as they backed up from him, horrified of his black skin and mutated eye color.
“If you don’t like my stories, I’ll write a new one…… AND NOW YOU’RE IN IT!”
Neighbors saw the Hellfire rise and take over the house, and called the fire department along with the police once they heard the screaming from inside. Within the house, Delsin’s skin itched with an intense pleasure and thirst for blood. It no longer bothered him… in fact— He craved it.
Police cars and firemen rolled up onto the scene. Within moments the fire vanished on it’s own, and as firemen and police rushed into the nigh-ashed building they paused. They were struck sickly with awe and disgust. No one was there, and Delsin was nowhere to be found.
Inside the living room the walls were lined with ice and spotted with scorch marks. In the center of the room was an ice sculpture decorated in entrails and surrounded in blood. Above it on the ceiling, there were words bulging out in solid ice, infused with blood. One cop read it aloud:
“Chapter 1: Friends before Death’s door.”