I look out from the roof of my home over the city of Vealt. It's completely covered in glowing filth, and I can't recognize a single spot of it. I'm warm, far too warm even for the middle of britquar. I usually hadn’t minded the heat; I liked how it felt on me whenever I pulled bread out of the brick oven. Maybe I feel different now because my body is dead or at least that is how that tattered old scholar made it sound.

  The world had changed sometime last winter, but I had barely paid it any mind. I was so certain my sweetheart, Danni Dulci, had been seeing someone else that I couldn’t see the world around me. In the end I never found out the truth. I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore.

  All that filth covering my city is spilling from me. It had been for the past few days. As I wallowed in misery, shunning all the people close to me, it appeared on me one day. I thought it would consume me and in the negative spiral it sent me into, I almost welcomed it until a strange older man came to me and asked me if I wanted to live.

  He was disfigured, but by then so was I. Told me I could contract with a demon, and it would freeze my death. Told me a lot more than that, but I couldn’t understand half of what he was going on about. All I remember is that he wanted to know what would change when the walker was still conscious. Didn’t much matter to me what his reason was, I just decided I wanted to live after all once I was given the option. After all, it isn’t fair, is it? That I should have to suffer and die for my own pain.

  The filth stopped changing me, but it never stopped dripping from me. And just look at what’s become of it. The whole city’s buried in it, but that’s just fine. It’s just revealed its true colors is all.

  I could feel its filth and I’m sure it could feel me. It might just respond to me.

  I raise my hand and a large jelly-like glob of filth shaped like a pan raises from the ground. I start flipping a filth cake in it. This is nice. Just like back home at Loonmallow.

  I'm just starting to feel peaceful, but a roar of laughter breaks me out of it. Why is he laughing so damn loud? I thought it might be at the pan, but when I let it go, he just keeps laughing.

  A stream of filth shoots up from beneath me and a young man rides with his feet on top of them. His clothes are sleek but slightly disheveled. With how clean they are I bet it was intentional. He has hair that is shaved so closely he's almost bald and a shit eating grin that told me all I needed to know about him. He looks just like a pickup artist you might find in a tavern. Just the type that might have tempted my Danni away from me.

  I grit my teeth. We'll see just how he likes being played with. I reach out my hand and the filth below me ripples. A weapon that looks like the tridents I’ve heard of in stories rises up, but I think of it more like a large fork.

  The blue light of his jet stream wraps around his shin, and he falls fast towards me stretched out to kick me. I hit his shin with my fork, and he flips back up into the air. He is still laughing and another stream caught him. He really seems to be going out of his way to stay in the air. If that was the case, I would just need to knock his sorry ass down. He rights himself into a low stream that looks like it would send him right towards me, but I imagine myself standing right before him. I knew my demon would carry me to where I wanted to be.

  The shift didn’t happen. I look towards my demon in surprise. It's surrounded by rectangles of bright green filth that had the image of a smile carved into them. Past it, on another rooftop, I see a woman with wispy black hair and pale skin. She's dressed sorta like those maidens from older times were said to dress. She has her hand held out, so I guess she was responsible, but I have no idea how. I guess I’d have to think outside the box.

  The filth bubbles below me, and I let my own stream of filth raise me up. The smarmy bastard is already headed back towards me, but I'm ready for him. I deflect the playboy away with my fork once more, and I hear soft chuckling coming from behind me. A strange masked man is creeping towards me through the air.

  He walks slowly on shifting lines that appear in rhythm with his soft laughter. Wouldn't he fall if he stopped? He has a mask formed out of light blue filth. The eyes are two teardrops in reversed directions. One is slightly darker than the other and they each have dots in their middle. And the smile…it is so wide it splits the face. It's like he was looking at everything I am and seeing nothing else but a reason to laugh.

  “How…how can you look at this filthy world and smile like that!”

  It's disgusting. I take my fork and get ready to chuck it right at that blasted mask, but he just slowly holds his arm ready at his side and a mop made of the same light blue filth forms in it.

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  “I lay you to sleep…with wisdom! But I should warn you, wisdom can be a bit restless at night.”

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  When he fell over, I stopped chuckling and let the mask vanish from my face. At the time I still hadn’t fully remembered where the inspiration for it had come from. Before the filth beneath me vanished, I lightly skipped downwards and fell only a few feet from the ground. I had already had some close calls with this new ability, but I’ll admit I found it a bit thrilling. Thomas approached with his easy going grin fading into a scowl and Karen approached soon after.

  We had slowly been growing closer over the past months, but there was still a slight awkwardness between us that hadn’t been present before. We hadn’t immediately resumed our relationship after everything that happened at the capital, but after a few weeks of more friendly rendezvous we had begun dating again. From someone looking on from the outside, we might look less like an ideal couple than we had before, but I was happy with the way things were. To me, the slight discomfort that could be seen in our uncertainty was proof we were looking at one another.

  “You look gorgeous in that outfit, but I can’t really say I like what it says.”

  She attempted to purse her lips in irritation, but it only ended up looking goofy. She had recently taken to trying to force facial expressions that fit her mood, but whenever she did it would end up being me who was smiling.

  “I don’t like it much at all either. And for that matter it’s heavy and difficult to move in. I feel sorry for all those maidens.”

  It was more or less just for publicity. It had been suggested to us that people would accept us more easily if we had a symbol that represented cleansing. I didn’t really like it, and Rayngo had gone on a rant about how it was no different than what the country did when they first started using scrubbers instead of maidens, but we had also seen the practical outcome, so we held our protest. People had taken well to it, rallying behind Karen and a few others as a symbol and it had even given us the support of the dreamless that the scholar was trying to subvert as an organization.

  “I don’t think it mattered much for them when they just had to go to sleep in it.”

  “Well yes, I guess that’s fair enough, but I want to fly about like you and Thomas and every time I try, I feel like I’m gonna get wrapped up, blinded, and tripped over.”

  “What’s to stop us from flying about in our free time? I say we go pick ourselves out a couple of new outfits this weekend and go for a bit of filth skating.”

  “Filth skating? Brilliant!”

  In truth we’d probably be busy through the weekend cleaning up the mess the possessed mutant had left behind. Though I’m not sure if it was right to call him a mutant. The filth hadn’t covered him completely and he still seemed whole and healthy beneath it.

  “We still can’t cleanse them without killing them.”

  It at least made sense with the queen and other cases we’ve seen, since they were disfigured far past what a human could endure, but this lad looks perfectly fine beneath. What’s more he had a contract with a demon despite not being fatally injured. There was clearly some strange relationship between a demon, a human, and filth. We only understood through trial that filth could ward a demon, we hadn’t discovered the why yet. Jossette was studying the phenomenon with those in Tembralvain, and she would be arriving shortly to examine the residual filth, but the answers that could be gleamed from it were limited.

  “Poor bloke, really just a victim of that scholar in the end. The fuck is the sick bastard even trying to gain out of this.”

  Filth may now spread in reality, to a degree that made the outbreak in the ether ways seem mild, but there had been no sign of the disease. There had been equal devastation with people dying and turning into walkers, and reportedly jellies becoming aggressive when the contamination reached certain heights, but the disease never appeared. In theory fighting it had been the scholar’s entire purpose, but he hadn’t slowed down despite it seemingly vanishing from the face of the earth.

  “Well, he’s a scholar…so I imagine he’s just studying.”

  That had to be it. He may have begun with a purpose, but it’s just as likely his near death and possession drove him mad. He would find a purpose in this changed world to make his actions necessary regardless of whether or not they really were.

  “Studying Huh? Well, whatever.”

  Thomas formed a light blue mop in his hands.

  “we’ll leave ground zero to Jossette for now, so I’ll go begin at the fringes.”

  Thomas left and me and Karen would soon follow suit but first we took a moment to watch the filth covered city under the starlight. It hadn’t blended into red as much as it had in the capital, maybe because the mutant’s transformation had been incomplete, and a myriad of glowing colors lit up the dark night. Despite knowing how dangerous it was, I couldn’t deny that the way it illuminated Karen’s pale snow-like face as she gazed out on it was beautiful.

  “It really is extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  I had been thinking much of the same, but with context it would be seen as a shocking statement. In the past I would have thought so. I would have been disgusted by her attitude before a horror I believed should be treated with all sanctity, and I would have left it at that without searching for her reason. So, when I asked what I asked next, I didn’t do so with any condemnation in my voice. I asked it, as I always should have, to supplant my assumptions with her reasons.

  “How is it you can always say such things so easily when you know what is really behind it all?

  She turned to me and the light of the filth shone through her wispy hair as her emerald eyes met mine. Her smile was as bright as ever, but there was an almost haunted weight to her eyes. In them I finally saw the last piece that had eluded me. It was not the front, but the effort. The meaning of wearing a smile before filth.

  “Because Douglass, no matter what might stain our minds, we still have to carry on

  https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/115759/lost-starlight-genesis