Fractured Posion
The noxious mustard gas crept through the trenches like a insidious yellow mist, choking and burning any man unfortunate enough to breathe its hellish vapors. Private William Prescott's eyes stung with searing agony as the blinding haze seeped into the underground dugout.
"GAS! Every man, masks on now!" the young soldier screamed in desperation.
But the gas assaulted with indiscriminate haste. Within moments Prescott's wool uniform began smoldering from the corrosive toxins making agonizing contact. Blisters erupted across exposed flesh as he fumbled in vain for his respirator, each rattling gasp feeling like shards of hot metal lacerating his lungs.
Visibility faded to an amber haze. Prescott's senses became overwhelmed by the fumes' putrid stench, like the air being siphoned straight from the fiery pits of Hades itself. Fallen comrades writhed in agony around him, faceless silhouettes gurgling in muffled screams of grisly suffering.
Despite the training and anti-gas protocols drilled into every Allied troop, nothing could have prepared the 19-year-old recruit for this malevolent assault. Retching convulsions gripped his body as fatally tainted air scalded his respiratory tract. A molasses darkness blurred his vision to tunneling blackness.
When William finally regained consciousness days later in a casualty hospital, what little faculty remained felt as though he'd awakened into Dante's deepest ring of the Inferno. The blessed darkness of blessed sedation had worn off, revealing a scenery of unimaginable human anguish.
Scores of wounded soldiers from the Front packed the rudimentary medical tents in Saint-Omer, their mutilated bodies and moans intermingling into an excruciating symphony of carnage. Row after row of cots harbored the blind, burned, and eviscerated - men frozen in horrific rictus, their flesh literally stripped away in mutilated sheets.
William's shredded uniform was saturated in corrosive yellow sludge like a rag dolled in acidic ooze. His body had become a contorted wreckage of seared tissue and suppurating lesions weeping toxic chemicals. Flaps of charred skin sloughed away to expose bulbous pus-filled boils and raw muscles liquefying beneath. His face remained swaddled in putrid bandages, offering fleeting mercy from glimpsing his own chilling disfigurement.
The piercing pangs lancing through William's ruined frame eclipsed even the most excruciating torment he could previously fathom. Existence now revolved around a cyclical ritual of blood-curdling dressing changes, guttural fits of violent seizures, and hallucinated terrors glimpsed between lapses of morphine oblivion.
With every gasping respiration, the young man could feel the insidious gas toxins course deeper into his deteriorating tissues, slowly poisoning every cell like virulent black rot spreading outward from the impact site. Whole layers of cooked flesh peeled away day by day, leaving gelatinous craters of seared muscle behind.
The relentless agony would crescendo until even morphine offered no portal of escape. William's mind struggled to process the annihilating desecration being waged against his body from within - as if Satan's minions were consuming his soul piece by searing piece directly through the veil of reality.
Within weeks, the afflicted soldier became little more than a mangled husk of radiated corporeal matter - his bones and organs dissolving with each dose of cellular toxicity. Or so the small piece of Prescott's psyche still cloying to existence believed.
For what remained had indeed detached completely from the mortal ravages of mustard gas casualties on the human plane. Instead, a metaphysical fractal of William's disintegrating spirit essence now existed in abject freefall down a churning vortex of entropic chaos.
An inky ashen darkness enveloped the distilled sliver of consciousness still fighting to maintain cohesion. Yet each jarring impact against karmic turbulence caused another fissure to rupture across this fragile soul - acid-green lightning lancing outward like spiderwebbing fractures in atomic detonations.
Every shudder of willpower clinging to corporeal senses ruptured another searing fault line through William's attenuated psyche. The distilled facets comprising his very essence became unbound...individual fractals shattering off like warped shards of a broken mirror reflecting the gnarled visage of mortality's futile struggle against the anti-life snares of war.
Each successive impact and splinter away from unified being caused unfathomable psychic shearing and existential torment. Realities overlapped and contradicted. Memories evaporated like sparks from a dying flame. Even the very root impulses bound to what constitutes individual identity and consciousness endlessly subdivided into self-devouring cyclones.
Starbursts of pure anguish spidered across the quintessence of every jagged shard reflecting William Prescott's once inviolable spirit. Like searing neurotoxins leeching through the very fabric of existence itself, these lancing viridian trauma tendrils showed no signs of dissipating.
Trapped in an endless state of entropic severance, this lost soul now exists only as a grotesquerie of charred, rupturing fragments swirling perpetually at the fringes of all being. What scant vestiges of cohesion remain are held together only by the radiant agonies of anguish shattering outward in spiderweb fissures of sickly emerald haze.
This nameless phantasm of cyclical torment may manifest as glimpses of toxic smog burning holes in reflections or vapor trails of putrescence weeping from innocuous surfaces. Always revealing its very essence as the shattering remnants of a shattered psyche, willpower, and soul rendered asunder by the destructive machineries of war's most virulent and depraved weapons of oblivion.
