Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Blood Pact



My hands were smeared with the vile fluid. It was sticky, dark, and it reeked. I could hardly imagine I could lose so much of it and still feel fine.

“You’re learning, I see,” a voice called from behind. Lenny had learned of blood magic a day earlier than me, but he already seemed like he was a master at it. Although, judging by my performance today, it didn’t seem so difficult. Draw a plain circle with your blood, sign in your name and voila – I can shoot the stuff everywhere. And I had just made a hole in the wall. Cutting your finger to get your blood flowing was the hardest part.

“Pretty sick, man,” I smiled at him. He did not reciprocate. “It really makes you feel powerful. Seems counter-intuitive for the Pluto folk to give us access to this. They said they wanted us to despair.”

“Oh, this is exactly why they did that, my friend,” he said as he turned his gaze away from me.

“What do you mean? I feel like I can send them back to that stupid rock with this!”

“Precisely. You have been given the tool to fight, a tool that can win you this war. Something that makes you think you can change this world. But,” he said as he adjusted his glasses, “so have we all. We can now perform contracts that have allowed our bodies to perform inhuman feats, and we now believe we can do this. They gave us hope.” 

Lenny took a deep breath and walked toward the window. The pitch blackness was illuminated only by the orange gleam of the streetlights. The stars and moon were gone, engulfed in the tarry nightmare that was our everyday sky now. He exhaled, breathing out a heavy breath, his shoulders dropping. Lenny took off his glasses and continued.

“They gave us hope. Because only if we believe we can succeed, can we truly fail and succumb to despair. It’s a simple truth of life.”

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