“Cook!” I called, my voice fading before an echo could emerge in the openness of this dead jungle as though kidnapped by the cold menace lurking in the trees. “Cook where are you?” I shouted again, my ribs stinging and sore. The area was silent still.
I toppled to the ground again. Hopeless and broken, tired and simply without strength to continue again without my friend Cook who must have suffered a great torturous death at the vicious jaws of the wolves when just in front of me, a branch snapped and I looked up to the fierce face of a wolf beast.
Its dark eyes watched me for what felt like an eternity again of suspended fear and then, the beast simply dropped down onto its side with a yelp winding its breath. I frowned and managed up onto my feet again, holding my ribs as the beast lay there panting heavily on its side.
I carefully stepped around, passing it as distant as the fallen debris would allow me, watching its face cautiously – not trusting this sudden collapse. As I motioned past it, I noticed its dark brown eyes moving with me, and at first I felt cold, tricked and trapped then I realized that this beasts eyes carried a weight, a sadness and I cautiously paused.
“I cant help you.” I said softly, as though this monstrous killer would understand me, before I motioned again. The beast softly moaned, a high pitched saddened whimper and I stopped again, its eyes watching me, almost calling me towards it. “What do you want from me?” I asked with anger, a sadness and plight this beast would not comprehend. And as though by sheer miracle, the beast lifted its head, rolling its body onto its back to reveal its left side where a stick was stabbed into its side. The beast rolled its head to face me, its eyes pleading with mine in sad brown angst.
“Forget it.” I said with a coldness, “You will die before you eat me.”
I scurried off, my ribs paining and bruised, my fears of being alone again in this place surfacing with coldness and my mind trying not to see Cook’s violent and gruesome death playing in my imagination and then i tripped to the ground over dry, rotting roots and I rolled to my back, crying out in both pain and sadness as tears filled my eyes.
“Cook!” I shouted from beneath my sadness and painful loss. If felt like my head would not stop from spinning and spinning, my anger turning to vile gal within my stomach as my anger and rage began to boil inside of me. I hated this place, this ground, the death, the corpses, the confusion, the pity, the solitude, the misery, the silence, the fear, the anger, the coldness.
I got to my feet again, clenching silent the pain at my side and I head towards the fallen beast, kneeling down and grabbing the stick with both my hands. In those seconds before I plucked the branch from its body, I turned to stare into its eyes again.
“I am not part of this place!” I said, ripping out the stick.
∞∞
Inside this narrow ledge that cracked down diagonally into the ash filled earth, I forced my body deeper, further from the wolf who clawed away at the ground sheltering me. The further I squeezed down away, the deeper the ash grew and I realized this ledge held carcasses and decaying remains of some vile beasts hunt and I filled with more fear now as the wolf above me began to break away at the ground.
With my arms and clothes covered in rotting flesh and dead corpses, the growling still chilling my very core even though we're not in eye contact. This wolf like beast knows I am here - he can smell my fresh fearful flesh and as I grew stuck in this ledge with no way out but up, I realized it was now just waiting game to see who could outwit and outlast the other.
Can I stay in here long enough all cramped and crunched up, until the wolf finally gives up the battle, or will I give in?
Is Rekara alive? Did he survive the crunching tree falling?
Does he know that I haven't left him, that I will be back to find him?
The wolf paused and silence hung long enough for me to carefully maneuver in this cramped space towards the top when again the wolf began scratching to find me.
I ushered backwards again, realizing that I had kind of gotten used to it now, the fear of this place, of loosing this battle for my soul to darkness. Yes, the fear remains inside of me always, controlling me but somewhat calmer as I listened to the beast clawing away at the ground that broke and dusted down onto me as my shelter began to evade its strength. I realized my chest was not pounding as much and my breathing was now still. The stench in this ledge was heart breaking. Then silence befell the site again.
Spending this time alone, trapped and not knowing where to go next or what was going too happen in this god forsaken world brought back memories from my life, my "other" world that once felt like the worst life I could lead, until I came to this place.
I remember those times, being stranded alone and knowing that those people were coming to get me. Not knowing when or how. I was always on the run from this gang who targeted me for no reason other than me being the weak, weirdo. The easy target. They were determined to ruin me and had tried on numerous occasions - setting traps for me. Those petrol bombs and torching my car. I bare still the scars of the knife fight. But each time I had escaped them, fighting to live, to tell the story. All those times I felt my spirit breaking to the solitude of my reality, I reminded myself that it was only making me stronger in a way, but I lost my faith to that.
I lost my faith in general. In people, and in life and in my purpose.
And then when I finally made the choice to alert myself, I found myself opening that fucking door! The door to the passageway! I feel tortured for my choice.
But then, at the point of my exhaustion where I was ready to just fall to those shadow warriors chasing me through that mist, I found Rekara. He's different from the rest. He sees only the new me, not that what drove the family to cast me away like a demon myself. I have total faith in him, in Rekara even if he is not the one. It was with him I found that I was not ready to fall.
Just then a stomp brought me from my day dream of thoughts and the roof cracked in, falling away more and more as the beasts clawed paw dug for me, standing right above me now, growling with fierce rage and determination.
I tried to control my breathing to a silence but I could not control it. The fear was no longer numbed and my chest was now pounding again.
“Rekara!” I called out in fright and last desperation when I heard a roar tear through the air. I looked up through the cracked ground above my head as a dark figure tore into the wolf above me. I shuddered backwards in alarm, fearful now of this new threat. Eager to escape this trapped little space of rotten carcasses, I hurried for the opening when the ground above me broke in and I was grabbed by my collar, ripped violently out through the ground.
∞∞∞
With all the strength I had, I forced Cook out his hole and tossed him to the ground beside me, worried now that my wolf friend would be murdered in his attack to defend my friend Cook. The two wolves tore and clawed, rolled and buckled at each other, screaming and roaring loudly in this silent forgotten place.
“Rek!” said Cook grabbing me, “You’re alive! How did you find me?”
“I didn’t.” I said looking again to the war of wolves, “He did.”
Cook and myself watched the two wolves battle each other viciously with no remorse when suddenly from behind the giant cat fight of claws and screams, several shadow warriors appeared in the brush, almost cloaked in their blackness if not for their flaming red eyes.
“Oh shit!”
“Oh my god!”
We leapt down the mound of broken black ashen earth and dart off, towards more burnt brush, leaving the wolves to battle a bloody match as the shadow warriors charged after us, their high pitched screams undoubtedly calling their reinforcements.
The further we ran, the closer the menacingly cold shadow demons grew towards us and the fierce annoyance of having to run like this began to chew at me as I ran and finally I just stopped and turned to face them head on.
Cook skid back beside me, “Dude, what the fuck you are doing!”
“I can’t run anymore.” I said softly, weakened and angry.
“You cant fight them dude!” he shouted as the screaming red eyes neared and neared upon us, “We have to run! For the love of God we must run!”
“No.” I said, standing my ground in this black place as the forces of darkness neared with flaming eyes. “Jesus Christ Rek, don’t do this!” he screamed, his voice on the verge of tears, I could tell he felt torn between running and fighting beside me.
The seven dark warriors with blood red eyes burning like the purest fires of hell, were within seven feet from us, their black swords raised with their screaming whispers of death.
“Rekara!” screamed Cook, urging me with a plea I could almost not resist as several feet became five and I closed my eyes.
∞∞∞∞
Rampant and sent as though by miracle, the giant beast dropped down between us and the shadow demon warriors, causing them to slither to a violent stop in confusion and surprise, a surprise as great as both mine and Cook too.
The beast released a loud, menacing roar that almost trembled inside of my body as I stood watching with Cook beside me, awed by this wolf’s sudden progression to protect and not hunt us.
Standing in awe of this, we watched as the warriors watched the wolf with red eyes as it lowered for attack, then without pause, slashed out at them, its claws ripping two of them aside, tossed away into the brush screaming. The remaining five shadow warriors drew sword at the beast, their high pitched screams almost deafening and maddening.
“Its saving us.” I said in alarmed, numbed confusion in a disbelief I could not understand. Cook turned to me shaking his head, “What did you do?”
I turned to face him, as the screams echoed as the wolf ravaged at the sinister black warriors, “I pulled a stick from it.”
“That’s gross.”
Just then, in the air like an explosion that tore the sound and shook the black earth at our feet, a red ball of liquid flame erupted out above us. The liquid began to fall down around the area, like magma, burning into the ground, scorching the trees in blistering heat. As Cook and I dove apart to avoid the drops of flames, the wolf scurried for cover. Cook barely missed one of the blobs of magma like juice, scathingly and as I tried to scan for the origin of the explosion, I saw a battalion of shadow warriors approaching when another blast erupted in the air above us, the magma flurrying down all around us like tennis ball rain drops.
Cook scurried past me and I followed, after the wolf as the balls of flaming death ate away at the ground around us, falling inches from us as we tried mercilessly to evade being hit by them.
In the clear now of the fall out, we heard two more blasts sent from the battalion and heard the already destroyed trees singeing behind us, after us almost as we sped through more and more endless brush of black ashen jungle, following the wolf like beast that crushed through most of the debris in our path towards more endless blackness in this forest of ash when suddenly the wolf disappeared in front of us.
Grabbing Cook’s arm, I eased us to a stop, the sound of the battalion rushing behind us in the distance now louder.
“Where is it?” I asked breathlessly. Cook shook his head baffled, “I have no idea.”
Then again, a blast exploded in the air behind us, and a score of magma like liquid came raining down near us, instantly torching through anything in its path. Cook rocketed forward, tugging me after him as the lava balls singed after us as the warriors rampaged after us, screaming and then as though stumbling through yet another rabbit hole, we were out of the black jungle.
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