The Petty Crusade

ch 1 Réquiem

"None, no puo' essere" the slightest quietest of whimpers fraily escapes past the lips of the 7 year old boy in the midst of the fiery hellscape. His bottom lip quivers uncontrollably along with his chin. With his frown appears two dimples and the tears trickle down curling into his mouth as he tastes the moist salt along with the acrid air of the ruined facility. The boy had messy black curls, cold grey eyes and a lost look on his face as he held his mangled arm hanging by mere threads of sinew. Falling to his knees down in the center of the smokey rubble of the ruined orphanage he once resided in. A highpitched exhale of agony whistles from his searing throat as he rubbed his already irritated eyes worsening the sting. A hiss is heard through the crackling of the weaning fires of the collapsed building, a certain circle of neatness oddly around him in the shape of a perfect circle. Fiercly fighting back sobs; his little body twitches in shock as he leaned his head over looking sideways along toward a mangled half a head still covered with patches of dark blond hair matted with blood and soot.

That was all that was left of his childhood crush whom he had known as long as little Damons memory could serve. "Jocee?" he questioned it in a hopeful squeak as if it would respond. There was no deliverance at the end for this humble Catholic orphanage. It was later reported as just another mindless terrorist attack that had been peppering western Europe in these troubled times. The bombs that ripped apart every one he held dear where actually quite a beautiful warming light as Damon remembered it. They lit up the sky and the grounds like one of the rare fireworks father Trancy use to import for the children at the ending of lent every year.

The boy hiccups innocently scowling as a single stream of white tears slid down the grime on his rosey ashen cheeks speaking in his thick Italian accent the first words of English mother superior spoke to him the moment he walked into the grounds of the orphanage. "Ju musn't cry childran, say your prayers before ye sleep. amen..." He hyperventalated uncontrollably afterword staring at the fractured marble floor in front of him as he began punching the ground in a wrath he never had experienced before. "Amen, amen" he repeated through clenched teeth drooling in his wroth moment. Eventually his shrill shrieks could be heard over the crackling mounds. "AHMEN! AHMEN AHMEN!" and eventually it was just a prolonged "AH!" As he looked toward the cloudy sky and the sun began to set his mind a blank inferno of pain and exhaustion.

Oddly dressed in elegant clothing and shiny buckled shoes when he had arrived at the impressionable age of 3 at St. Judiths home for the blessed. Little Damon was early on a rigourous neat freak that always had an eye for fancy clothing even at his young age. He never really smiled and others would find that odd because he seemed so precocious in everything else.

He looked at the charred husk of the little girls head and gulped extending his trembling manicured hand and reached slowly outward to draw out a jade snake hairclip from her blond head reliving their last memory before he laid his head off to sleep. "Qui! look Oni, I pick out jast for youu!" Oni, that's what the kids called him to get on his nerves. A devil, an ogre. That's what it meant. The sisters began calling him that for his serpent birthmark along his leg and the questionable set of skills that brought him to this wayward home for misfit children. He was no lab experiment like some of the kids at the facility or a victim of altered mutation from an act of god. Little Damon was just a kid born altered with a high level of e.s.p. or extrasensory perception. He possesed a higher set of brain functions than regular people and was able to manifest an aura like material powerful enough to be visible to the naked eye. "DONT'E CALL ME THAT, ORO SPURCO!" dirty gold, his name for Jocee because she always had a hint of dirt on her that she would always wind up rubbing onto him. Probably just to bug him, which would always suceed in setting him off along with her unbearable happiness and smothering. Jocelyn would always get him to try and coax a smile. Smack he tossed the pin into the girls face deeming it too feminine even for his exquisite taste in clothing. Yet she still smiled picking up the trinket she saved up for God knows how long for and retreated back to the girls side of the abby.

"Dispiace oro. Dispiace" he whispers barely audible and limpens deciding to lay down amidst the rubble breathing calmly in his patch of tidiness right in the center of the disaster. Clutching the jeweled object close in his good hand feeling the jab of the metal dig into his palm until he slowly trickles out more than the occasional tear.

Young Damon became oni that day. As vatican officials recovered him and investigated about the orphanage the little boy became a monster. Vowing to destroy all that was wrong and all wrong poeple that hurt his now dead friends.