Side-Story – Vim – Miss Beak – Prologue – A Flamingo’s Kingdom

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This area was too hot. Too hot and arid for its location.

Even I had begun to sweat, which was a very weird feeling. My thick clothes felt a little slimy.

But it wasn’t my fault. I had just been traveling through a wetland. A place of cold and rain.

Some dried plants crunched under my feet, drawing my attention to the flora around me.

“Yes. Arid,” I said as I noticed all the half-withered shrubs. Shrubs of plants that were not native to such dry and warm climates at all. There were bushes without thorns. Withered and dry fruits on the ground near some of the larger bushes, barely even recognizable thanks to how tiny and dehydrated they were.

This heat was not normal. It was no heat wave. Not some kind of weird storm.

This heat was unnatural.

I was on the right track.

As I traveled deeper into the heat stricken land, I began to notice even more oddities. Dried out grass that crunched underfoot, stuff that hadn’t died over time without water but instead had been dried out quickly. I walked through riverbeds and streambeds that I sunk into a little thanks to my weight, since not far underground was still some of the moisture. The water was gone, the beds of the rivers cracked and dried, but the heat was still new enough that it hadn’t completely dried out everything just yet.

And it wasn’t just the plant-life or rivers that had succumbed to this sudden heat wave either.

Every so often I passed by animals. Ones lying dead on the ground, collapsed from dehydration or shock. Their tongues sticking out were dried up and cracking, and their eyes puffing but shrunken and hard as if calcified. Further proof of the heat’s affect on this region was how none of the corpses, even ones starting to decay, had been bothered or disturbed.

There were no crows or vultures. No scavengers or corpse eaters. Nothing had tried to eat the dead creatures, not even for the water.

The oddest part was the lack of insects too. Even the older corpses didn’t seem to have any flies or maggots upon them. Not a one.

“It’s likely hotter than it feels,” I said, and felt the heat scorch and dry up my mouth and throat. Suddenly I felt like I needed a drink.

Yes. Very likely. Odds are it was so hot right now that a human couldn’t even breathe. It explained why some of the animal’s, their corpses at least, had puffed out tongues and eyes. They had died not just from the heat but the inability to properly breathe or sweat out their internal heat.

How hot was it I wonder? I was half tempted to gather up a nice mouthful of spit, just to see if it’d sizzle on the ground after spitting it out.

Yet for as hot as it was I still continued. I kept heading deeper and deeper into the heat, searching for the source.

I was heading towards a giant mountain range. One with massive peaks. Peaks that should have had white caps, and lush greens of thick forests. Instead they were as brown and desolate as the deserts one found farther south from here.

Such sights felt weird, since I knew if I traveled just a hundred or so miles back the way I came I’d return to those wet marshlands and forests. A place of dense greenery and wet rains.

Glancing up to the sky, I frowned at the lack of clouds. Not even a hint of any. It almost made the sky look fake, somehow. There was even a strange blur to it, as if it was fuzzy. As if I was looking at the sky through a windowpane or something.

Mother had once mentioned that extreme heat could create illusions and hallucinations. She hadn’t known if I’d be susceptible to them, but maybe I’d finally be able to prove if I was or not here.

Rolling I shoulder; I felt a strange feeling and heard some crunching sounds. A little confused I paused a moment, to look at my shoulder. Had I just broken or torn muscles again?

But no. It had simply been the thick clothes I was wearing. They had cracked and hardened somehow, and my movement had simply disturbed and broke them.

Reaching over, I grabbed a handful of the thick shoulder, and felt the cotton and other material break and shatter. As if frozen.

The sight and feeling was startling, since my clothes weren’t frozen at all. And instead were the opposite.

I stared at clumps of cloth in my hand, and noted how brittle it all looked.

While walking through those wet marshlands, I had indeed gotten a little soaked. Could this extreme heat had somehow dried out my clothes so quickly, so thoroughly, that it had basically ruined my clothes?

“Fascinating,” I whispered as I brushed my hand clean of the stuff, and decided to just keep walking. If my clothes all fell apart while I walked there was nothing I could do about it.

I’d not leave here until I found the source of this heat. The source of this disturbance.

It was obviously unnatural. Beyond normal. And there were only two things that could create such anomalies in this world.

Gods and their servants.

I knew not which was doing this. But it didn’t matter. One usually led to the other. I’d deal with them both here and now.

This heat could not be allowed to continue, or spread. If this continued to spread as it was doing then the whole world was in danger. Nothing was able to survive this heat. Or at least, wouldn’t be able to for long. Even those able to endure the heat itself, they’d still succumb to it eventually. Since they’d then not be able to grow food, or find fresh water to drink.

As if to further prove such a point, I approached a large hole. One that had obviously been some kind of lake.

Stepping up to the edge of the dried up lake, I studied the chaos before me.

There were fish, and other things scattered all throughout the hole. There were clumps of stuff in some sections, which right now looked like brown and black refuse. Odds are the lake had been deep enough for some kind of plant-life, and those things were clumps of such stuff all dried out.

Some of the fish remains were large. Big as, if not bigger, than I. Their scales glimmered in the sun somehow, even though dried out. They weren’t the only dead things here though. There were other creatures, though most were unrecognizable already. Having been dried out for far too long. Some were lying around the edge of the lake, or only just within it. Larger corpses, that had likely been herd animals searching for a drink.

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What was strange was that there didn’t seem to be any land animal corpses near the center of the lake. They seemed to end only a few dozen feet into it.

“Had the heat dried the lake out that quickly…?” I wondered. Usually it took time for lakes to evaporate. A long time. Even under immense heat. In theory that would mean the land animals would have had to walk to the center of the lake, as to get a drink.

Maybe the land animal corpses near the edge, but still within the lake itself, had not done so because the water had diminished. Maybe they had dived into the lake hoping to escape the heat. Not just to drink…

I debated walking over to one of the fish corpses, to see if it was bloated. To see if it had been cooked.

“Cooked alive,” I mumbled the thought, and believed it. Some of the blotches of weird gunk looking stuff did kind of look like exploded flesh and organs.

Was it really that hot…?

I glanced down at my hands and tried to tell. My body had long since adapted to this heat, so it was easy. I felt the heat. I felt the slight sweat upon my whole body, but nothing more. I wasn’t even struggling to breathe.

Yet I knew better than to think it wasn’t hot. My clothes had began to degrade some more. My pants were now shorts, with pieces falling off with each step. The stuff was drying out so badly they were hardening and becoming brittle.

Stepping away from the lake, or rather what had been a lake, I continued onward towards the mountains.

I could feel it now. I could hear it. Like the faint sound of electricity, there was a small buzzing sound. One that sounded a little different than anything else, yet similar all the same.

Somewhere in those peaks was a heart. A monarch.

I’d find it. Then I’d take it.

I’ll end this heat wave. One way or another.

I had to.

And I did. At least, I did the first part.

On one of the mountain peaks, near a small plateau, I found a single bird. A massive creature beyond reason, with a pair of long legs and a huge beak. One with strikingly pink feathers.

The huge pink bird shifted as it slowly stood from its perch. I recognized the creature from mother’s lectures. A flamingo. She had liked them.

“Well, well. Another attempt. Yet one so tiny,” the bird greeted me, with a tone of pure amusement. It was a deeper voice, likely a male, and came from a huge beak. One of different colors, not just black and white.

“My name is Vim. By the right given to me by my parents, I,” I began to speak, to tell it who I was and why I was here, but before I could finish I was hit with a huge blast of hot air.

The whole world went white. My eardrums popped, and what little I could hear over the loud ringing from their rupture was the mighty wind as it blew past me. I felt myself trying to stay up righted. To stay on my feet, even as the powerful winds buffeted against me. What little bit of my clothes that had lasted the journey here were now definitely gone. But the hard wind wasn’t just strong. It was also hot. Extremely hot.

I could feel even my skin blister and pop, boiling to such extremes that I could feel chunks of the skin flying off me. I grimaced in pain, and felt my own lips melt off. I felt the heat hit my teeth, and then shortly after I felt those teeth explode and shatter. The white world went black as my eyes exploded, and I fell myself fall to a knee. Upon landing on the ground, I felt my knee sink a little. At first I thought I was being melted completely. Into a puddle, but as I lowered farther and placed a hand onto the ground I felt what was really happening. The very ground beneath me, the hard stone of the mountain, had turned into goop. The wave of hot air I was being blasted with was so intense and hot the very world around me was melting.

A part of me wondered if I even felt pain anymore as more and more of me melted. I felt stuff slide down my back. I felt certain parts of me, like my fingers, go weirdly numb. As if I had no fingers anymore to feel. Yet I strangely didn’t feel much pain at all. If anything I felt kind of sleepy.

Yet the hot air continued. It buffeted me without end, and even seemed to grow stronger. Hotter.

And that was the monarch’s mistake.

I eventually stopped feeling stuff melt off me.

I felt flesh harden. I was able to clench a fist again, and felt my fingers. My teeth returned, and I was able to make a smirk thanks to the lips that joined them.

Even the world returned into view as my eyes reformed.

Blinking through the harsh wind, I frowned at the sight.

Not far in front of me, crouched low was the bird. The flamingo.

The monarch had lowered its mighty beak and opened it. It looked as if it was roaring at me, and in a way that was exactly what it was doing.

It was roaring this wind. This heat. And had been doing so for some time.

Able to take a breath for the first time since being hit by the mighty hot wind, I held the breath inside. I felt the heat scorch the inside of me, and spread all around as if I had just set my heart on fire. I felt my blood rush through me, as if it was set alit by the flaming heart.

Then I stood up.

It was hard, and not just because I was still being hit by the harsh wind. The ground was now wet. Slippery. There was a good few inches of pure gunk, stuff that glowed. It was molten slag.

Right as I stood up fully, the wind stopped.

A mighty beak snapped shut, and for a few moments I heard nothing but my ringing ears. The wind was gone. The heat had come to such an abrupt stop that I felt a weird rush of cold air, and then a loud pop exploded inside me. I coughed, spewing blood, and wondered what had happened.

My mind whirled as I was sent back to my knee again. The gunk I fell into splashed all over and I felt how hot the stuff was now. It was so hot it was now making sizzling sounds.

Grimacing at the feeling of great pain in my chest, I glared at the monarch that was staring at me in pure shock.

Had going from such intense heat, to more normal heat, exploded my heart…? Sure felt like it. Or had the sudden rush of cold air created some kind of weird vacuum?

I felt my heart already repairing itself, but I needed it to hurry. The monarch looked stunned right now, but wouldn’t be for long.

“You…!” the monarch leaned back, and stepped backward. It stepped down so hard the whole mountain shook, and as it did I felt my knee and feet shift in the ground.

I wasn’t in goop anymore. I was now in hardened rock. Had the air cooled so rapidly that it had hardened the slag that quickly?

Coughing again, I grinned up at the creature. I liked the look of pure fear on its face. Although not human in form at all, with a mighty beak, it was still so obvious. The way it stood. The way its wings were half-unfurled as if about to fly away. The way its beak was slightly ajar, and its huge eyes staring in wonder at me.

Such sights made me feel good. They gave me a strange sense of pride and wonder.

To make literal gods look like that was proof of my parent’s success. Of their power. Of their greatness.

I lived for this. For that fear. To do to them what they did to the rest of all creation.

This was why I lived. To not just kill them, but to even the scales.

To right their wrongs.

Standing back up, I broke free of the hardened slag. I paid it no heed as I returned to my feet, and shifted a little. To make sure the rest of me was all back to normal.

I felt fine. In fact I now felt great. I had a rush of adrenalin pumping through me. I had just survived, and endured, what likely no one else could have. Maybe not even other gods or monarchs.

And this monarch knew it.

It took a deep breath and stood up straighter. Its feathers lowered, hugging its body, and its eyes hardened. It was still scared, but had set it aside.

“What are you?” it asked with a very deep voice. Far deeper than it had been earlier.

Stepping forward, I grinned up at the thing as it flinched and stepped back again. Away from me.

They never knew what to think of me. I looked like a human. A being of no importance. And they could not sense any power. No heart. No divinity.

And that was what truly terrified them. Not that I was able to survive their powers, or ignore and subvert their divine authorities… but that I did so while being the very thing they deemed beneath them.

“You!” it shouted as it raised its wings, about to attack.

“Yeah. I terrify myself too,” I said, and engaged another monarch. To slay it as I’d done so many others, and always will.