“Lay them here.” I said, gesturing to the ground at the
edge of the clearing. She complied, swinging the bag from her shoulder and
unbuckling the strap, rolling it out until it was a short rectangle of fabric,
the tools shining dully in their black sheaths.
The moonlight was pale, broken
once by the canopy we huddled at the edge of and again by the fog which was
slowly building up, wrapping around our shins. The humidity had dampened our clothes,
aided by the hard trek here. We would both have gladly removed our jackets, was
visibility not such a risk. Even having our faces exposed was dangerous.
I watched my companion as
she straightened the fabric, ensuring it had no creases. It was not needed, but
it comforted her. When she was done she looked up at me and I noticed she was
shaking.
“You don’t have to do this.” I
said. “I’ll forgive you if you don’t.”
She looked away and stood up,
brushing dirt from her pants. “I know.”
Neither of us said anything
for a while. Our job was to wait. After a few minutes she sat at the base of
one of the dark trees, leaning her head against the trunk. The fog swirled
around her neck, occasionally thick enough to conceal her body and leaver her
decapitated on the shifting mist.
The leaves were tousled by the
breeze far above, the rustling tumbling down to us and collapsing into the soft
fog, into silence. Time passed. Under the vast, endless stars, sitting in a
forgotten forest, time passed around us, only our small cocoon left
untouched. Only once before have I felt
so insignificant.
Something changed, out in
beyond the forest, and then within the clearing. A glance at my companion
confirmed that she had felt it too. She sat upright, no longer touching the tree,
feeling the change creep over her skin and down her spine, just as it did mine.
And then, after long, tense moments, it passed us by. We dared to breathe.
“Quickly.” I moved to the
tools and she did the same, each of us taking from opposite sides. We stood and
gripped each others’ left arm with our own.
“Last chance.”
In the middle of the
clearing, the fog began to drift in a spiral, rising a little in the centre.
She watched it for slightly longer than a second. Then she stopped shaking.
She nodded. “Ready.”
The blades slashed down swift
and deep, mine opening her unmarked arm and hers reopening my scars. Blood
flowed readily, eagerly, and I could see the fear in her eyes so I gripped her
arm tighter and we both watched as crimson dripped from our skin and
disappeared into the shifting fog that had risen to our waists now and
completely obscured the ground below.
The mass of grey flowed into
the clearing from every direction, feeding into the spiral, slowly getting
faster and faster. Half-formed wisps brushed past our legs, tips breaking the
surface for the merest moments, swimming irrevocably inward.
The spiral roiled, all calm
now abandoned, the centre rising like an inverted funnel reaching up for the
endless stars. Flashes like lightning with no thunder lit the towering mass,
flickering fleeting shadows through the trees, and our blood flowed on and out
and down. I could feel her shaking again and began to shake myself, fighting to
stay afloat in the always-fear that maybe
we were too late, maybe this time won’t work, maybe we’re not strong enough
until finally the fog around our waists faded to pink, then red, the greedy
spiral sucking up the stain. The blood poured from our increasingly pale arms,
speeding through the blushing fog and twining around the pillar, absurdly
reminding me of a barber. The weight of the blood sagged the fog slightly and I
could feel the clear getting warmer, heat radiating from the writhing centre.
The flashes were casting
shadows from within the fog now, showing snapshots of a shape gestating in the
column. The crimson stripes pressed down on the shadows, crushing and
distorting them, vainly attempting to contain the heat. Her hand slipped from
my arm, her eyes glassy and unfocused. Slowly, for I could no longer move fast,
I took her in my arms and kneeled down, only our heads remaining atop the sea.
A pressure was building in my
skull, the colour of a scream. Something in the fog struck us nearly, making me
drop her. I didn’t know what would happen if we went beneath the surface. I
didn’t want to find out. Wind roared through the vacuous space behind my eyes
and I blinked away tears lest they fall into the fog. There was too much of me
in it already, swirling red through the centre of the clearing.
Memories burst unbidden to the
forefront of my vision, memories of places I have never seen: buildings rotted
and decomposing; the stench of scorched flowers; a howling desert and behind it
all a great slumbering giant once sated but now rousing.
The heat in the clearing built
until I could feel sweat prickling my skin, despite the steady numbness that was
seeping over me. My vision blurred and darkened, lit spasmodically by the
increasing lightning and the single full moon. My head thrummed with the
increasing pressure, pulsing in time with the light, the tempo getting faster
and stronger and louder and somewhere in the fog two enormous hands closed in
to crush and conceal us from the explosion rending outwards from the colossal
column of blooded fog that tore and dissolved the grass and plants and trees in
a perfect circle all around, washing over us in a primordial roar of princely rage
and blasting the hands that gripped us almost to obliteration. The expulsion
seemed to go on for hours, but I know it must have only been a few seconds
because I didn’t lose consciousness until after it had abated, leaving only a
blackened clearing.
She awoke before I did. Her
hands were on my arm, bandaging what was left of the wound. There was matching
white cloth around her arm, concealing her first scar. She was shaking.
“We did it?” Her voice cracked
as she forced the words from dry lips.
I nodded. We would not have
survived if we had failed.
We didn’t speak until she had
finished. I picked up the tools, still shining dully on the charred earth, and
put them back in the bag.
“Ready?” I asked, motioning
through the forest, back the way we came.
She stopped shaking. She nodded.
“Ready.”
