Information

Cauterize has a minion!

Singe the Rift Blob Kitty

Cauterize
Legacy Name: Cauterize

The

Riftborn Ontra
Owner:

Cipher

Age: 4 years, 11 months, 5 days

Born: May 27th, 2019

Adopted: 4 years, 11 months, 5 days ago

Adopted: May 27th, 2019

Nominate Pet for Spotlight

Statistics

Level: 1
Strength: 10
Defense: 10
Speed: 10
Health: 10
HP: 10/10
Intelligence: 0
Books Read: 0
Food Eaten: 0
Job: Unemployed

cauterize (verb). to burn the skin or flesh of (a wound) with a heated instrument or caustic substance, typically to stop bleeding or prevent the wound from becoming infected.

01.

He names himself when he is molded and shackled into the shape of a man.

Cauterize, he says, and he watches green-eyed and alien as his summoner paints out the spells to fetter him. Cauterize, for the burn of the atmosphere stripping clean the flyaway fragments of him; cauterize, for electric crackle of his fingertips, still, and heat sharp at his palms.

02.

Why am I here, he asks, sitting in the center of a pentacle, tracing out runes beneath his fingers. He has not needed to touch before; he has not needed to see or smell or taste. He has never felt the weight of a body, the noisy, messy beat of a heart, the requirements of oxygen and energy more than starlight.

To do as I bid, his master replies. Gently, as if to a child.

He considers it.

Only that?

His master smiles, indulgent, amused. No.

03.

He likes watching people, he finds.

In the moments between work — mundane errands and old magic, illusions set alight within the dark-paneled walls — he slides in a static crawl through the streets, watching: Their tangled, difficult paths, their flashy, brief, indecorous, petty lives—

He has watched the birth and death of stars before, terrible and inevitable. He has watched his kind consume swathes of space, leaving a crackling void, a cold gap of nothing. A relentless hunt without impact on the microcosm of man.

04.

What do you think of them? Thiel asks.

They are eating breakfast. He picks apart pancakes with fingers humming with static, his palms small furrowed voids, his eyes shining greenly up from bare feet. Chews in a way that humans do not: Wet, electric, many-mouthed.

He thinks about them: A girl in the park, wailing about a scraped knee; a mother, comforting, blotting blood with her skirt. A couple, leaning giggly into each other on a bench. A businessman, barking orders into a phone, tie fluttering. A gaggle of teenagers in a back alley, pressing discreet white packets between their palms and their lips. A drunkard on the street, eyes blank, slurring to deaf ears.

05.

He has watched them die, now: Not the clean burn of stars, but messy, splintered. Blood and bone and carbon chains. Gasping air through failing lungs.

They are fragile, he decides. How do they survive?

Often, they do not. His master’s watchful eyes, his master’s ageless smile. When they do, it is because they are protected.

06.

Is that my purpose?

It has been eons; it has been seconds. Heartbeats for stars, for planets, for the vast sprawl of the universe shifting overhead. Lifetimes for men, born and dead and forgotten, their cities laid to dust, their laughter and tears and joy and desperate, needy prayers reduced to ghosts and phantom things.

His master remains. Rearranging old, cracked things on the shelves, lighting incense for old gods.

To protect them?

Is that what you would like to do?

07.

Cauterize: To burn away infection; to save the whole. To purify through pain; to cleanse by fire.

Yes.