Viscous

His eyes were not his eyes.

They belonged to the malaise outside, the zephyr through hollows. Gray and ashen, fear that left his throat dry. He covered his face from the mirror, the mottled tile blue and cold beneath the fluorescent lights of the bathroom. Copper, red of tooth and claw, clung to this throat and flaked beneath fingertips.

There was a bilious light behind the shower curtain: a virulent, pulsing orb. He tore a ragged breath away from it, the flesh of his forearm marbled and gelid against his temple. He clawed toward the cabinet and pulled it open.

It had taken only a glance. Two-pinpoints, blinding, ever-present, bore into him, even as his sight flooded with color and filled in the adumbrations of a home. Heat, sanguine, maple, frankincense. He spun toward the door and wrenched it open.

The colors bled from reality, the gold and brown of the floors and burgundy of the walls reaching to him in wisping vertices. He exhaled, the colors disrupted and broken, a mass of writhing iridescence that coalesced into something dull and earthen.

Weight bore down on him. Scent carried the delineations of decay and life, ever-consuming fractals as after images of surrounding the pinpoints.

The needling light was ever-present.

He placed his palms outward, exhaling, a vertigo reeling him five meters within a blink. He gazed from between the rooms, the light piercing into his hands, his vasculature as incandescent webs of ever-dwindling pattern.

The weight lifted upon an ebb and flow of ink and emptiness. Solidarity. Course. Smothering. It rasped as it shifted about his form, the angles biting and red of purchase. He opened his eyes to the canvas, the edges drowning in the sheen of cinnabar.

The angles broke beneath the tension, the endless curves weightless as the world turned. Cool viscosity brimmed between his jaws, gave slight resistance as he tore another hole, hot and sweet to the throat, head throbbing at the distant scent of nidor.

Molten gold flecked with obsidian rimmed the wound in reality. Beyond it, curtains of rust fluttered and howled as he descended into ichor. The heat within the void was his now. It was bearable.

A brief reprieve cloyed his mouth, his skin prickling, rising, rising further as heliotrope glowed within the gloom, overtook it.

It clung to him, almost too chilly to touch, but it carried him down gingerly, his body unfurling as fluid stretched down the rivulets of his belly. His shoulders and back flared and striated, the elongation warming the facets of flesh that rose against a chilled caress.
Stone met bare feet, digits clicking and scraping, the cerulean haze quivering against the vibrations. The tongue stayed hot and sweet.

The furnace within, the embrous orb, pulsed as his scales coruscated, the steam of the ichor as ruby ash. It filled the satin void, the glittering cerise tides undulating.

There was a square of clarity before him, a mirror. Its eyes were now his.

Wordcount: 496