Hope you enjoy this! The writing felt kind of weird to me, but that could be because it's now one in the morning as I'm writing this. Really need to budget time better. Have yourself a lovely day, and see you Wednesday for more of something!
The Warlock VI by Mackinley Clevinger, July 25, 2016
The sounds that plagued my steps drove me onward along that old dirt road, my bare feet dully impacting the packed earth beneath me muted by the chorus of twisted limbs beating against the ground and the onslaught of breaking branches on either side of me. I focused on breathing, on keeping my eyes on what lay ahead of me, on not slowing down or tripping as I ran.
I tried to keep my mind empty of anything else, ignoring the part of me that thought the sound of flesh beating against the ground had gotten louder; not thinking about how many of the deformed and corrupted creatures ran behind me; did everything I could to clear the slow-burning in my legs from my mind lest it urge me to slow down.
They weren’t meant to chase people down for longer than a few minutes; they couldn’t become exhausted like I could, but their malformed bodies didn’t allow for the same kind of distance running a normal person was capable of. If they didn’t claw out your heart or rip out your throat with their teeth while they had the chance, and you were outside of lunging distance, then there wasn’t much they could do.
The question that I tried to ignore, though, was how long could I keep running for? They wouldn’t get tired; couldn’t, actually. The energy I’d drawn from the first one I’d killed replaced any need for eating or resting in them, and the process that corrupted them devolved their minds into obedient slaves with a penchant for human flesh.
They would run forever if ordered to, whereas I was experiencing the joys of being mortal, which seemed to put me on the wrong side of Carmen’s instructions. I still didn’t know what Carmen had been doing, couldn’t fathom why he’d lain a trap inside of them. Their existence wasn’t as hard to understand, though: Terror. It was one thing to find a loved one dead, another to discover them made into a mindless monster which, if it didn’t kill them, would send them running to the hills in fear.
I was running, but not in fear. They were scary, sure, but all you had to do was look beneath the mask and see how impractical they were, how easily you could destroy one of them, and suddenly the idea of killing one wasn’t that far gone. You couldn’t move that much bone and muscle without missing why it’d been there in the first place and leaving a target for any would-be adversary.
Their claws were scary, but the bone had to come from somewhere. They were frail, weak; a danger in numbers but nothing to worry about alone. They were what I’d once needed, and even then I’d come to see them as a nuisance; the front line to shatter ranks or a distraction to more serious ploys. Expendable and not to be trusted when it mattered most.
Beautiful and deadly in the right situations, of course, but not the end of my experimentations. There’d been better uses for bodies and survivors than making the things following me now; creatures that didn’t need to stalk in the dead of night or wait for the lone wanderers to make their prey. There was only so far I could go in perfecting the twisted creatures following me; a new canvas had been needed to further my art.
My knee sank beneath me, the tired muscles failing for a split second before following my commands and pushing me forward again and sending my balance wavering for a moment. I righted myself and pushed onward, the string of memories from the past drifting away; whether they’d be found again or not was a mystery to me, as much as what my ‘new canvas’ had become.
Not that it was likely to matter much. Sure, I hadn’t fallen and was back to running at a steady pace, but I was getting tired. The next time I slipped up like that, I might not be so lucky, and based on how close the pounding sounds seemed to be, I wouldn’t be getting a second chance.
I kept my eyes forward, paying more attention to any warnings from my body that it was about to give out again. The fire in my thighs had grown, my feet rubbed raw from the packed earth but ignored in light of the greater danger lying behind me. I needed to find… something. Were there even people still alive around here? Was this all for nothing, a meaningless search for friendly life in a dead land wiped clean by Carmen over the past centuries?
No. Carmen had found someone to sacrifice to bring me back; there must be people around here, somewhere. At the very worst, if I couldn’t find help, I needed to find a better place to stop running than the road, somewhere I couldn’t lose my scythe in a tree if I tried to swing it.
Around me the trees began to thin out, the path widening and becoming more maintained than the roughly packed dirt I’d been running on. I could see a solid wall of trees ahead of me, briefly filling me with worry before I saw that the road split in two, a worn signpost set in the middle of the road.
The choices raced through my mind; left or right? I couldn’t see any writing, but there were two boards on it, the top one cut into a point leading to the left and the bottom leading to the right. The sound of a body crashing through trees arose behind me before settling into another set of pounding hands and feet against the widened road, far closer than the rest, and distinctly on my… right.
As the signpost loomed, I tried to read it but only got a few rotted letters before dashing off to my left, hoping that the time spent turning wouldn’t give them a chance to catch up to me.
I heard their bodies dragging along the dirt as they tried to turn quickly and rolled, the nearest far too close for comfort as I set my legs pounding against the ground again and reignited the fire burning therein. I switched the scythe into my opposite hand with what little time the turn had afforded me, wiping my open hand against the old, chafing clothing to remove the sweat. The numbness had receded to just the mark in the center of my palm, an odd patch of unfeeling as I ground my skin against the coarse material before replacing the scythe in its grasp.
For a brief moment, the chorus of limbs beating against the dirt was gone, an odd moment of respite from the subtle but constant affirmation of oncoming death before it rose up in a frenzy, the road wide enough now to accommodate all of the deformed men and leave none of them crashing through the bordering forest.
The urge to turn and look was strong, to see in full what had been chasing me for so long, but the need to stay focused and avoid that moment of slowing down to look over my shoulder was greater. I was coming up on something at long last, distant shapes taking a form that wasn’t that of a tree or the unending road, and no amount of curiosity of what lay behind would stop me from finding out what lay ahead.
Buildings slowly came into focus, their wooden walls rising to challenge the trees for height as I approached what had to be a town. Windows came into view, reflecting the orange glow of the now-setting sun falling to my right. Hope bubbled in my chest; the town seemed small, but stout walls and other people were better than fighting in the open, especially now that it was getting dark.
Something cracked beneath my foot, digging into the tender flesh and nearly sending me into a sprawl as I jerked away from the pain. Catching my balance and not letting myself turn around and look, I kept running and looked down at the ground instead of up at the buildings. The sound had been familiar to me, something I recognized but couldn’t place.
The setting sun sent deep shadows across the earth, nearly masking the small collections of white sticks that lay ahead of me, seemingly half-buried in the dirt. Behind me the same sound of cracking arose briefly, the repeated sound and a closer sight of what I’d stepped on flaring in my head as I realized what it had been.
A rib being broken. The town was dead, dammit.