Evil...
Frank's pencil scratched into the corpse-dry pages of his journal, his gentle hands guiding the wood across its desired path. Writing- transferring his wildest and darkest thoughts to page had always filled him with a strange sense of peace, the kind of which had eluded him for so long before the fall of Brainiac. In the stormy seas of his mind, Frank had become a fisherman- his pencil as his rod- and could now pluck strains of wild thoughts from the fray, should he prove to be patient enough... and given a healthy absence of sharks.
Evil clings to this place like mould to old bread. Its reach is far and I am certain it runs deep. Corruption. Crime. The sins of man have been made unto flesh yet again, but not by my father's hand. No, the poisons they brew today are made by their own, concocted with the poor and ignorant in mind. War has always brought out the predator in man, but on the World named 'Ash', it has brought out demons.
As the hum of the bar rose and fell behind him, the Monster felt time wash over him again. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Months approached years. And there he sat, with a bottle of greying, untouched wine to his right- purchased a courtesy, rather than a call for pleasure- and a dwindling supply of HB pencils to his left. They were of the cheap variety, with their flimsy impure leads breaking under even the smallest amounts of pressure; he had long since grown tired of the sound of snapping graphite and the nuisance of having to search the table for his sharpener to fight of the unyielding forces of bluntness. It was a war he could not win.
As far as I am aware, he wrote Ash seems to have become the resting place of unwinnable wars. War, unending, opens scars anew. We all bleed as the border skirmishes grow in number with every passing day. We all grieve for the families who fade from memory, victims to a cold and bitter night. We all lay awake at night, praying to the forsaken gods for deliverance. They refuse to listen. Are they, too, silenced by the chill of the grave? Or do they simply no longer care for the children they have orphaned? Ash is a place all too homely for men like me. Ash is a shelter for the living dead.
And with a final snap, the war was lost. His final pencil was no more, another elephant to add to the graveyard of yellow wood and peanut shells that had been laid to rest at his feet. Fate had willed him to rise again and return once again to the slum he had called home. Frankenstein was a lifeless man of work, forgetting to welcome tomorrow as it crept in at the end of each day. Day had become night. Night had become day. The sack of flesh and thread had grown into a machine since he had arrived in Ragnarok, reliving the same line of code month by month. We would write until he ran out of pens, or, on occasion, ran out of paper. From there, he would return 'home', gather some more utensils, then set out in search of another place to write. Life had become unto death, and death had evolved into exitance, and existence had descended into labour. He would write until the Lord decided to collect his debts, and then, even in Hell, he would find some way to write some more.
His stool behind him, Frank simply nodded an absent-minded nod towards and began to wade through the Happy Hour crowds, his ageing drink still sleeping at his spot on the bench. Maybe he'd come back for it tomorrow, and simply stare at it again until another ideal leaked onto the page. Or maybe he'd work from 'home' instead, scratching off the days on his old, brown calendar and wait for the city to be overrun. One day- when his lamp had run out of oil, and his last pencil had found its way into the trash- it would be, and perhaps then he would find a cause to return to the battlefield. Until then, he had a reputation as a mad, old bagman to keep up, the strange old recluse creeping from bar to backwater under the cover of night.
Night. The greater half of the day for a man with a face such as his. The blackness had become his blanket a long time ago. The stars had become his brothers and sisters, glowing eyes free of judgement and full of child-like wonder. As an infant- or the closest a creature such as he could get to being one- he had spent every moment he could with his eyes tipped to the heavens, waiting to see which ball of gas would tip over first, pouring its radiant glory across the skies. For a fleeting moment, far from the song of the bar or the cries of distant shells, Frankenstein let himself stop. Just for a moment. Just for one selfish little moment, he let himself simply be. His books could wait. The war could wait. For now, he wasn't Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E., nor Frank, Private Poet, or event Stein, Space Crusader. He could simply be another creature, living as part of the harmonious mess that was the universe. For a moment, he would let himself believe that lie.
A flash brought him to his sense. A burning flicker of black and red dancing from the lips of another alleyway. A fire? A fallen star? A comet? A shell? Ash had never been a world of simple answers or short stories; it was a land of epics and legends, were the most bizarre creatures seemed to congregate and cower. Whatever had just been born from that flame was organic... and far more alive than he was.
"Madam..." Frank cried out across the square, redoubling his pace to catch up with the Lady in Red "You are disoriented. Pray, you should rest. Level your thoughts... there are monsters out tonight..."
