Three Years Later...

-THE NORTHERN SLOPES

                He gasped – gulped air – and screamed.  His body seized, shook, and tore against itself.  He could taste the screams leaving his cracked, dry throat, could hear his own cries echoing down into the black warrens of the void.  His head swam, his teeth were loose in his skull, his lips bled from open sores.  He was dying, he knew: this was what death must feel like.

                The seizure ended and he collapsed.  He cried as dizziness overtook him; he managed to turn his head and retched into the darkness, heaving dryly against arm, chest, and leg restraints.  He could feel something snaked along his left arm, a point of resistance between his wrist and elbow.  He gripped wildly with his right hand, nearly able to reach the disturbance.  Blue lights flickered in the distance as rage fought weakness to win out against the restraints, to rip the invader from his arm.  Whirring filled the air as the lights danced closer along a corridor of the warren.

                No no no no nononono nononononono, he mouthed.  No no no not like this anything but this shell never forgive me.

                The lights reached him: two demons – two of the syl, returned to torment him for his transgressions.  One laughed and pointed, a floating, ethereal visage mocking his broken and restrained body.  One glared and entered a humanoid machine, its blue eyes and mouth flaring to life.  With the machine, the syl could speak.  With the machine, the syl could physically harm him.

                Its terrible voice was like suspension wire plucked by a giant.  It reverberated from within the machine and shook the room as a stiletto blade emerged from its steel wrist.  It gripped his arm and pressed the blade to the same point as the intruding device, and growled its demon scream as pain exploded within his head.

                THE ELFKING COMES FOR ALL HIS LOST CHILDREN, AARON.

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                Her voice lilted, barely audible above the rustling of the pines, calling his name.  He pushed through the sparse undergrowth of the forest, searching for her, following the soft knell of her calling.  Dry needles stuck to the bare soles of his feet, long dead pinecones stabbed at every footstep.  But she was so close that he could feel it in his ancient, aching bones.

                She stood atop a cliff, in a clearing, overlooking forested slopes and the distant shores of the easterly sea; the sun silhouetted her slight frame, the inshore wind did billow her white gown behind her.  Looking over her shoulder at him, loose locks of her moss-hued hair drifting in the wind with her gown, she looked almost the same as when he’d buried her here – he’d laid her broken body to rest so many years ago, so many lifetimes ago.  And, yet, here she stood.

                “I’ve waited a long time to see you again, little brother,” she whispered.

                “Miriam,” he breathed.  “How – what’s going on?”

                “Did you know that they had conceived another, our mother and father?” She looked back out across the slope, down toward the sea.  “He would have led our people to do great things.  We could have recovered this burnt husk of a world and made it into a shining, glorious example.”

                “Their dream is more than half a century dead.”

                She wavered, and his vision doubled.  Miriam turned again to look upon her younger brother.  She was herself in part, and decomposed in part – a harrowing vision overlaid her person.  She was complete and yet incomplete.  She reached out toward him as thunderheads appeared in the distance, brewing with fury.

                “It was unwise to come here in these sad times, brother.”  Two eyes wept; two eyes poured forth with dead, blackened blood. “He knows you are here, and hunts you even now.”

                Darkness fell as the storm overtook the mountainside; lighting illuminated the slope and thunder exploded from the sky.  The pines whipped with the fury of the wind – dust and pine needles flew and attacked his eyes.  A monstrous noise emanated from the north, and a funnel of cloud reached toward the earth there, a tornado ripping through the forest.

                “You must run, brother!  You must flee!”

                He still did not understand.  Dazed by the sight of the twister, he looked again upon his sister.  She stood now as a shambling hulk of decaying flesh, her mass rapidly dwindling.  He reached out, and the earth near her exploded.  Clumps of clay and dirt erupted forward, another figure clawing its way to the surface.

                “Aaron!” it cried.  “Run!  Get away!”

                It was Jessica, plagued with rot – the bones of her arm visible as she reached out toward him.  Her lips had receded, revealing her teeth, and her hair had been ripped from her scalp in chunks.  He stepped toward her, trying to help pull her from her grave.  The flesh of her hand pulled away from the bones, revealing crusted, disused tendons and crumbling bones.  He screamed in terror as the wind rose and the tornado approached.  It burst forth from the trees as Miriam and Jessica vaporized into dust, blowing away in the violent wind.  He cried out as the tornado dissipated – to lose each once had been almost too much; to lose them twice would break his soul.  The wind stopped, and he could hear himself wailing in the darkness as the rain began to fall.

                “Look upon me, Aaron.”

                The voice rumbled beneath the torrential rain.  It echoed from a time long dead, a time when superstition might help to survive.  Aaron stood, shirt and pants soaked through, and turned to face his tormentor.

                The Elfking sat astride a mutilated hind, naked aside from its crimson linen cloak and the pine garland across its emaciated shoulders, its face helmed in the skull of a stag.  Blue flames shone from the skull’s eye sockets, bathing its rack and the hind’s neck and head in flickering light.  The hind’s skull was split open – a mass of flies gorged upon its brain and rivulets of dried blood streaked down its muzzle; its right eye was crushed shut and its mouth hung open dazedly, its tongue lolling forth.

                “I am not ready,” said Aaron, simply.

                “It does not matter what you are or are not.” The hind moaned, as if to emphasize its master’s point.  “You cannot escape my reach, no matter where you might hide.”

                “I am not ready,” he said again, stepping toward the mounted creature.  “I am not ready!”  The Elfking glared on silently.  “I AM NOT READY!”

                Aaron threw himself at the figure, knocking it from its destroyed beast.  The two fought in the dirt.  The Elfking thrashed its head wildly, raking Aaron’s face and chest with its antlers.  Aaron grabbed one and managed to tear it from its base.  Both screamed as they rolled upon the ground, clawing and striking – the hind bleated and threw itself at the ground in the chaos.  A fist-sized stone dislodged from the ground and Aaron ripped it from the Elfking’s bony talons.  He held the creature to the ground by its remaining antler and pummeled the skull’s snout with the stone.  Yells and screams and repeated blows broke away the muzzle, revealing the grimace of a human jaw beneath.

                “You’re – just – a – man!” The stone crashed against the Elfking’s face with each word.

                “I AM NO MAN.”  The Elfking threw Aaron from itself to the ground.  “I AM YOU.”  It grabbed him, and lifted him above its head – above its remaining antler.  “I -,” it snapped his back over its knee as though breaking down firewood, “AM -,” it raised his limp body above it again and threw it to the ground, meeting the sickening crunch of his fall with its voice triumphant: “YOU!”