Northward

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Northward

There is a scar on this land. It stretches forth, its gnarled claws with their crevasse veins inking the land in shadowy streaks. Like a spine the main mountain range juts in jagged teeth to meet with the clouds in a battle of beauty and chaos. Moldy crags creep up and down, the trees like cackling monarchs twirling around, choking all still life in the dry, warm wasteland. Dust devils swarm and dissipate. Monstrous caves yawn the light away and tremors of silence shout into the ears of the life that isn’t there.

But there is life; a man, naked but for khaki pants and shoes, hides, shivering, in a vertical crevasse in the side of the canyon. The wind whispers a song in his ears and he straightens, tightening his grip on the hilt of his black-handled bowie knife. His eyes dart to the side of the crevasse, the opening back into the canyon, and he swallows. He is not shivering for the cold; there is none. He is shivering because he is being hunted.

His black hair is short and parted, or was once, and his muscled body is caked with dried blood. His face is lean and dry. Behind the darkness of his sunken eye sockets and the grit and the dust, his eyes are filled with madness, an eternal spawn of fright in his soul.

Teeth glint from the darkness behind him and something launches itself off of the rock above.

A drop of blood-tinted sweat dives from the hilt of his bowie knife as he flails it just in time. The thing is stripped of flesh on the chin below its snout, but with a red blur of on of its limbs the man is flung back into the windswept canyon. He gets to his feet, mouth dripping a new stream of blood down his chest. The creature can not see him because it does not have eyes, and walks slowly forward, panting. Its shadow lands on the man’s feet as he tries to release himself from the paralyzation of fear. It is dripping blood too, and fangs gnash on jawbone instead of teeth. A moan comes from its throat, a piercing wail of soulless defiance that swirls hollowly through the canyon, a crescendo of terror and composition of future death.

The man cries out and is off, running madly and blindly with the wind at his back. He thrashes his knife back and forth, trying to kill the phantoms of his mind and the monsters of his imagination that evade his every blow. He screams and doubles his speed, madness cracking his heart and body with devastating effect.
Nauseating spirals creep like decayed worms across his vision and the black comes on eerie soundless feet to lay him sprawled unconscious in this empty wasteland where there is only death.

The darkness is off as abruptly as it came, creeping away and only leaving a blurry vision of the orange landscape. The man’s eyelids quiver although the rest of him is motionless. His skin is more gnarled than before, clotted blood flaking off with the sunburnt skin that was revealed to the rays of the heat in his sleep.

He sits up suddenly, eyes glossy and wide, and his mind is no longer clouded with the madness of fright, but with a lust for water and shade. He creeps wearily to the side of the canyon, groaning with the effort, and sits in the darkness for a long while. Vultures circle above, dots against the globe of fire that is the sky. His knife lays next to him, thrust into the ground while he relaxes.
He turns his head downward, looking at the object. The compass on its hilt gleams up at him like a devious eye looking back with clever horribleness. It is a painful reminder of the hope that had drained away long ago. He can not clench his hand onto the handle without doubling with pain and desperation to breath, yet the eye still shines up at him, smiling at his defeat.

The pin in the eye points northward, up the canyon, the way he had been running before he fell.

Northward. That means something to him. That is somewhere he was supposed to go before...before what?

Madness had erased his memory and instilled fear and pain. His mind sulfurously drifts in half-thoughts. Important, it was. It must have been, or he would not feel the urge to follow the devious eye’s pointing obelisk.

He presses against the rock wall to get up. The landscape northward slopes down into a valley of boulders. The knife is in the hand that is not wounded, but is slack and hanging by two fingers. He starts toward the valley, his shoulder scraping against the hard red wall. He falls again and again, grunting with lost desperation.

Questions giggle and dance away from the hand of understanding that fails to grasp them. He loses caring for these and tries to concentrate on the nimbleness of his legs, but finds only weight and encumbrance. The valley is nearer now. He forgets why he is trying to get there. He only knows that he must.

His mind is gone. There is grayness, but a void where there should be thought. He only has his instinct now. He is no longer a man, but an animal. A creature like the hunters far behind him.

His sense of color, of personification, is gone. The boulders are no longer there, but somewhere not to be seen yet. Water is what he needs, but he does not know where or how to find it. Imagination is soaring away in a cage. The black is swallowing it up. He does not recognize the cage or the thing in it, but the black should be there and
always has been, somehow, but he does not ponder anything because he can no longer.

The knife falls out of his hand.

He continues on, unaware of everything except what his senses tell him, and searches northward, ever northward.

...


This is a story I wrote a few years ago - kind of a change, more sensory description and a hidden meaning than anything. So what do you think?

 

That, is great. Nothing else can realy describe it

 

Another story, which is one of my best, is posted on SP, just not linked to yet. It's at
http://www.sorcerers.net/Worlds/Stories/xaelifer1.txt

I hope you'll really enjoy it. It was fun to watch and write.

 

A very nice read but...

Did you mean the sun?

Again, I must say, great writing.

 

No - I meant the sky. Simply looking outward from inside the globe, you know? Wasteland fire sky.