Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Silvery moonlight spilled shadows from swaying treetops and the moon's lurid hue blanched the scene. The moonlit pale delighted the Fellow and illumined writhing shades dancing, fancifully cross his grin. His eyelids were shut, though, as if slumbering. The ravens quieten in the copse; blinking, red gazes their only movements. The campfire cindered with dying embers and Eli stirred restless in his sleep. Amias watched him concernedly from cross the firelight and the Fellow remained upright and silent, still as the strange statue left of the trio.
It was eyelevel with Amias sitting and the boy's grey eyes fell mesmerized by the depiction of the statue's torment. Its onyx skin was carved drooping from its face. Its teeth bared, eyes wide in horror or maybe rage. Chains and fetters were its punishments.
The night gale swept the clearing and sent shivers down Amias' nape; the breeze whispered.
That wily man couldn't possibly be asleep. Amias knew the Fellow to be feigning, but the boy's posture swayed. He blinked rapidly to fight slumber. Amias walk towards Eli and laid a palm on his friend's feverish brow. Eli's chest fluttered beneath his tunic and a warm rivulet traced down his cheek.
"Eli, wake up." Amias shook his peer, again and again. "It's not real. We have to run. Run Eli!"
Amias tried waking Elijah, slowly raising his voice. He'd wanted to rescue him from whatever nightmarish landscape he endured; Eli did not return.
****************************
White chrysanthemums strewn cross a vale beneath the glittering, night sky. Then wistful fireflies slacked and lazed betwixt the drooped branches of willow trees. Verdant greens turned a winter scene with silvery, blue blades of grass. Their icy sheen shimmered in the dawn light and crunched beneath her sole. Eli's dreams knew no bounds-episodic and superfluous. He could not discern their purpose; where one ended and the other began but distinctly he recalled.
Despair.
Eli felt himself falling, eternally sinking into a dark pit of churning teeth and gnashing voices; it was not the bottom that he feared. He welcomed the end. The womb was a place, after all. It was the infinity of the descent; that'd he'd never land-which despaired him.
Darker, darker still no monster. She was the monster.
His scream died on her lips.
*****************************
For as long as any child could remember, the Roanoke Colony consisted a hamlet of a couple dozen colonist--pious men and women in breeches, stockings and waistcoats. From birds-eye view, it must've looked a wilting blight on the landscape. Dotty adventurers with zealous hopes arranged in crooked shanties, slouched like the gnarled limbed codgers who inhabited them. Eli realized. It was propriety which postured them. Some unshakeable faith meant to scorch the earth with its furor. Yet, the sacred text provided little instruction for settling new lands. How to grow English vegetation on foreign soil.
