Thus did the invaders come, tearing through the wind with marrow lights. The Aurora passed like a tide, but cut it was, and oblivious it was to them as well.
Flame burst like a flaring sun, leaving ashes like burnt corpses. This happened outside of him, but also on the inside, for the tides were fickle and maddening. One moment the warmth of the hearth made him loving, one moment the emptiness made him weep and the only cure was warm blood in the near-fireless husk, whispering to him promises of love in the fading heat.
The strangers made many promises as well. To the kithkin, a gift almost ridiculously uninspired: if they were one wth their communities, why not be one with all life? Even as they turned paranoid many only became more accepting of the porcelain, a valid means to prevent action from their enemies, too busy dripping yellow into the swampy lands. To the elves, the promise was more subtle: they framed tearing them apart to be made into beasts as a form of ideal beauty the best they could. In the end, they shouldn't have bothered; not a single elf isn't a hypocrite.
To the wistful selkies, a sea of oil. To duergar, the burden of knowing. To the boggarts once craving then in hunger, nothing more than becoming useful slaves.
So many promises, and they kept most of them. The rivers run black with oil, always carefully maintained even as the Aurora took the deligence from the merrow. Great forests were felled for furnaces and operation theaters, air clear during the century-day and cold in the century-night now choked with gas and disease. What forests remained were themselves twisted, home to Those-Whom-The-Barghest-Fears and Who-Guts-Purity. Clachans, be them welcoming villages or fortresses, had every building coated with pulsing, oozing flesh, and you cannot tell were the bone building ends and the porcelain doll begins.
And yet, the cinder remained.
His bulk was too fragile for metal and sinew, but he didn't mind. He entertained the idea, becoming a cog in the strange clock tower. Perhaos it'd fill the void occasionally within his chest.
But every once in a while the fires returned, and they felt great, vibrant and above all himself. A cog does not "have himself", and so when the tide turned again he was livid.
Anger does not cloud the mind, it clears it. And in this clarity the cinder found an euphoric happiness, a cruel laughter that sliced the air like the lights of the strangers. Darkness flew from his hands, and their steel turned to rust. Oh, so sweet rust, like blood but caustic, threatning the edges of the elemental's frame.
Alas. A doomed life is best served in spite.
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