Civil Vicious

Chapter 6: Stained

I woke up screaming. 

Every single Friend inside the cave stood over me, looking fearful. I impulsively snatched a pelt laying on the stone floor and threw it over my waist, shielding my nakedness from their prying eyes. Doing so startled the crowd and many of them jumped backward, as though they were afraid that I might strike out at them.

"I saw," I stammered. "I saw my life... I saw everything!" my voice grew to a fiery shout. My heart raced, pumping blood so violently through my veins that I could feel them pulsing beneath my skin. "I saw everything!" 

"Let me through," A voice said from behind the crowd. They parted to reveal my beautiful Friend. Her face no longer looked warm and loving. Her eyes were no longer soft and kind. Her expression was harsh, hardened like stone.

I began to stammer, desperate to tell her what I had seen in my dreams. But as my lips tried to form the correct words, I realized that I had no name to address her by. 

"I have to tell you what I saw," I finally croaked. "All of you," I said, now looking up at the rest of the crowd.

"Kokegna wishes to speak to you," was her only reply.

"No, he's not who he says he is! I need to..."

"Kokegna wishes to speak to you!" she shrieked. Her face shone red. Her eyes glared at me furiously. The beautiful, kind woman I knew yesterday seemed to have vanished, replaced by the harsh and unforgiving stranger standing before me.

Some of the men in the crowd stepped toward me, intending to drag me to Kokegna's den if necessary. But I stood up willingly. I draped my pelt around my waist and started toward the door.

"No!" she snapped. She clutched the pelt and ripped it from my waist, exposing me. "There's no need for that here."

Swallowing my anger and struggling to ignore my nakedness, I marched out of the cave and down to the far end of the cliff toward Kokegna's den. Its entrance was open, and I could see firelight flickering in the doorway. 

I stepped inside.

There he sat, ugly as the day I first saw him. In fact, he was uglier. Not only was I repulsed by his sickly gray skin, his rotten and jagged teeth, his scraggly strands of hair or his menacingly yellow eyes, but I hated who he was on the inside. When I looked at him, I no longer saw a leader. I saw liar, a fraud, a thief. 

He sat next to the small fire in the corner of his cave, glaring at me with an angry grimace stretched across his ugly face.

"Sit," he said, motioning to the ground next to him.

I shook my head, refusing his offer.

"Child, sit. Or I'll have the others force you to sit."

Reluctantly, I sat.

His evil eyes stared intensely into mine. I wanted to look away, but I refused to allow myself to give in to his menacing stare. The sour air within the cave nearly made my eyes water, but still, I refused to blink. I refused to show him the slightest semblance of wavering.

"I have been told that you have been troubled lately. That you haven't been sleeping through the night. That you've been dreaming. Is that so?"

Swallowing the heartbeat in my throat, I said, "I've seen things."

"What kinds of things?"

"Everything."

There was a pause between us. Our eyes remained locked in a tense stare that neither one of us willing to break. His expression was furious, cold, evil. I could only assume mine was the same.