The Butcher

He had had a name once. A name he was proud of. It wasn’t a name with any wealth or status attached to it, but it was his name, and his father’s before him, and his grandfathers, and innumerable generations of his family before them.

He couldn’t remember it any more.

He had had a job. Productive. Though he didn’t remember it anymore, he had been a worker in the Carnificium district. He spent his days hauling the fresh goods, dismantling them for parts, grading and separating them and hoisting them on hooks for the great machine to recycle. It made them into green.

In many ways, he was still a butcher.

The explosion had destroyed his world, left everybody he knew dead, or worse. It was only through luck or divine oversight that he had survived, shut in one of the great cryo cabinets as he had been. He emerged to a world shattered, pointless. He roamed the broken ruins of the world for weeks, months even - an unnumbered time of scrabbling to survive, finding the fresh goods that hadn’t succumbed to rot or been burned to glowing glass, drinking the tainted water that dripped from cooler pipes into rusted cans. Over the months, his skin began to grow thin and colourless, his hair grew lank then dropped out. He scavenged suits, rebreathers, purgators, anything to halt the inevitable, but like time itself, he could not stop the ravages of existing in the Sec’.

That’s when he found the cult. They knew all about the Glow, and recognised it for what it was - a blessing. It transformed them all, made them better than they were, raised them up into enlightened beings. While others fought and killed for precious resources, all they needed was the glow. They bottled it, brightened it, distilled it into its perfect form, and they took it into themselves. They fed it directly into their systems until it flowed like blood in their veins. He found his calling in the Glow. He was a holy warrior of the green, a centurion of enlightenment and an enforcer of apotheosis. He slew, and fed, and upheld the teachings of the Glow, and wherever he went, a trail of mutagenic green and arterial red followed.