I ran.
And ran.
And ran.
I didn't know for how long.
But that sinking feeling.
That fear.
You don't know what's behind you until you look.
I heard the Knight go down. He fought for barely a few seconds. Now he was dead.
Would he remember us when he awoke? Would he even remember himself? I didn't know. All I knew was that if I slowed down I'd end up like him. So we ran. We ran towards the forest ahead of us, and as we gained distance, the roaring and screeching behind us slowly faded away to a gradual silence. We'd outrun them.
But at what cost?
Didn't matter.
Keep moving.
"...listen for the tolling of bells..."
"...I will see you again when the night is darkest and the black sun breaks over the mountain..."
"...do not let them go astray, and trust not the wandering man..."
The words stuck with me. Those were the last real words he would've ever spoken.
But those words had given us an objective: reach the Mountain, at any cost. As long as we didn't die along the way, we found some crown, and we didn't trust this Hermit fellow, whoever he was. We do all of that, and when the black sun broke over the mountain he'd meet us again and everything would be right with the world? We'd enter this Mountain and find Paradise or some shit like that? It was far-fetched, a plan so convoluted and filled with holes that I knew my past self wouldn't have trusted it at all, if my past self remembered why.
Then again, this was the only thing we could do now.
The land before us had opened us as we'd left that Valley. The Forest loomed ahead of us and the sandy ground eventually gave way to stones and moss. A nice, refreshing change, if at all a happier ending than what we'd left behind. The four of us, this sad, depressed party, stopped in a bare field, populated only by us, what mirages and hallucinations inhabited our brains, and some stone pillars lined with moss, spattered by cracks and weathered by the twisted nature that existed in this land. A river flowed before us, but the sounds it made...weren't relaxing at all. In the silence of the Forest its trickling was...weird, disconcerting. A sign of peace in a land of madness.
This whole place was weird. There wasn't supposed to be any light and yet there was, in the form of this weird-ass green glow that inhabited the fog that rolled and undulated between the pillars. At times it looked like there was some huge serpent slithering through the very air, weaving through the stones, as if silently judging and observing us. I saw silhouettes through the fog too, something I never thought I'd see in my life; weird, humanoid figures that were and then weren't.
Huh.
Well, the four of us were a sorry lot. The new face (that I'd pegged earlier as a Prissy Bastard) was lying face down on the rocks, his back rising and falling with his ragged breaths. The Assassin was off to the side, perhaps observing and cataloging this new place, and the Lady was seated upon the rocks, her back against one of the fallen pillars. My concerns were more for her than anything else. She...her plight resonated within my soul. This wasn't something a lady of her like should go through at all. My thoughts went back to my wife and daughter. Oh, how I yearned for their company. I didn't want to imagine what it would be like if they were here, trapped in this same sordid hell like I was.
As I drew closer to her, I heard soft sounds, and realised they were coming from her.
She was crying.
Curled up, with her axe clasped between her hands and knees, her forehead resting on its flat, she was a sorry sight alright. I sat next to her and took off my mask.
"Well, this is some fucked up shit we're in, huh."
I couldn't deny it. This was the worst kind of hell imaginable by the minds of men. Hey, but we were here and we were still alive, by the Knight's sacrifice and by our own quick thinking. That was something, right? And here we were, ahead of any possible danger, with an actual moment to rest and recuperate.
At that thought, I smiled a little. Not once had we had a real moment to rest, not since the Valley. Things had just been going at breakneck speeds until this point. Now, finally, we could collect our thoughts, plan for the journey ahead and survive this bullshit to find our way home at the end of it all.
Hey, someone has to be optimistic here, right?
I turned towards her a little and, like she'd done for me previously, laid a hand gently on her shoulder. Softly, I spoke.
"Y'know, it's not all that bad. We're still alive, and that's good. We can rest and collect our thoughts. Make plans for the road ahead of us."
Then I raised my voice a little so the rest of our little quartet could hear me.
"So, now that we have this opportunity to rest and recover, why not we take this time to, y'know, actually introduce each other? We all have names, right?"
SkyeOfStars