Romans & histoires The Skin Is Blank To The Bones

There was no longer enough blood flowing through them to keep them healthy. His eyes were closed, and the skin around them had sunk so deeply that he looked as though he had not slept in weeks. His hair had thinned dramatically, with patches already fallen away. Dark, irregular blotches mottled his skin.

The sound of my own skin hardening was a series of dry, rhythmic clicks that echoed in my teeth. It started at my elbows and raced down toward my wrists, a spreading numbness that turned the warmth of my blood into the heavy, airless cold of a winter pond. I looked at my forearm and saw the transformation in the flickering violet light. My skin was no longer brown and scarred. It was becoming a translucent, crystalline shell, showing the white salt-crystals weaving through my veins like parasitic vines.

His skin was bronze, mapped with the faint, white lines of old scars that no longer throbbed with the Bone-Code. "The seasons are moving faster, aren't they?" Aradaa leaned back, the wooden chair creaking under him. He looked out at the Vision Pool—a natural basin of water near the edge of the porch. It didn't glow with blue light anymore. It was just water, yet it reflected things far beyond the Highlands.

His skin clung too tightly to his bones, stretched thin, pale in a way that didn’t look normal, it looked like something fading. His cheeks had sunk in. His lips had lost their color. His head? His hair was gone, completely gone. And the veins… they stood out against his skin, thin and scarily blue, tracing across his head like something fragile, something that certainly shouldn't be out there so fast. His hands rested on the blanket, but they didn’t look like the hands I knew. They looked too light, too still, the fingers long and stiff, certainly didn’t belong to someone who used to hold mine so tightly when I was little.

Instead it felt like he was looking at a world he might soon lose. "What happens to me?" The question was quiet. Almost reluctant. For the first time since arriving, the Guardian hesitated. His silence spoke louder than any answer. Finally he said, "Your body changes first." Cassian slowly rolled back his sleeve. The black veins had spread farther since sunrise. They twisted beneath his skin in thin branching lines, climbing toward his shoulder like roots searching for sunlight. They no longer looked like wounds. They looked natural. That frightened him more than pain ever could.

Murphy gasped at the sight of what was inside the coffin and backed off. Exactly the skeletal remains of a human as she read on the manuscript, covered over by some cloth below the waist,whole of the flesh had sloughed off over time, the orbits were empty of any eyes that used to be there. But there was something unordinary about the skeleton, it didn’t have any muscles or skin on her face to have any expressions made upon it, but still, it clearly looked like a frightened away remains!

Warm. The one on the platform was skin and bones, darkened like a wolf left out through a brutal winter. Her cheeks were hollow. Her eye sockets sunken deep. That full, firm body was gone. All that remained was a fragile frame. "Th-This isn't her..."

The thing was beautifully monstrous. Its body had human proportions, but the tone of its skin was too pale, almost translucent under the light. Its back was marked by black protrusions like exposed bones, forming a row of sharp spines, like a crooked predator’s crown. Its arms were folded over its bare chest, long dark fingers and claws that didn’t seem meant only to cut but to suck.

Or lack of. Skin and muscle had been melted off him to where only the raw, skeletal bone remained. Only, the lack of tissue abruptly stopped at his wrist. The flesh had already been cauterized, and his wolf had maybe healed him. Leaving anything past that point in complete tact. Or so it looked. What kind of pain must he be in? To have his bones exposed like that, or the skin ripped from his fingers. The thought made me shake and I suddenly felt very cold and very aware of my surroundings.

Her skin looked nothing like she had, unlike the last time she had met with her daughter, she looked even more pale and food-deprived than she had when she was locked up. Her bones could be seen through her skin, with a glance one couldn't tell if her skin was transparent as her bone lines outlined over her skin. Her face is so pale making her eyes sucket almost seem like they are about to fall out. Her skinny fingers, which were more like a skeleton sample left in a biology class for study, grazed the dead cells of her skin as it fell off.