The Last Heretic

THE MONSTER

It was dark.

Explosions rumbled in the distance. His body shivered uncontrollably, dragging him back to the land of the living - ripping him out of his wretched slumber. The torrential downpour washed over his face like a deafening waterfall. His head ached with a dull ring as he opened his eyes and blinked through the storm. The sky flashed with arcs of lightning, washing its blinding light over the dark and sticky rain as it fell from the heavens. The piercing streaks of nature's fury branched into veins of blueish, white tendrils across the underside of the nightmarishly black and foreboding clouds like ravenous claws trying to tear the sky apart.

He was still alive.

He put his leathery hands to his face and felt along his drenched scales as the rain poured over him. The artillery had decimated the battlefield. Muddy craters spotted the land into a twisted, nightmarish weave of unnatural design. The trenches had failed and caved over his countrymen whole. The mud had swallowed half of his body, but here he was...alive. He sat up, whimpering through his exhausted bones. Everything below his gut was swallowed by the trench. The earth had nearly consumed him. He rolled onto his stomach and dug his meaty hands into the thick mud feeling the tough and fibrous root of a nearby weed and pulling himself out of the cold and sticky embrace with a shaky groan. His uniform was soaked through and through by the rain; everything below his waist was covered in the sticky muck.

The sky pulsed as lightning silently fluttered through the distant clouds, illuminating the remnants of the battlefield with staccato flashes of blinding light. Corpses lay scattered among the craters of what used to be trenches and trees. There were hundreds of them - an entire ocean of bodies. Fallen logs, their leaves and bark burned clean off, lay submerged in the sticky dirt and abysmal pools of blood. Thunder pounded through the hellish wasteland as he gazed at the untold number of lifeless bodies of Solladin and Vorsun alike - some buried almost completely in the prison of the muck's cold and callous grasp. Most missing limbs. The matted, soaked fur of the dog people of the north was stained red from open wounds nearly bled dry, spotting the deceased soldiers' bodies. The putrid stench of death saturated his nostrils with a stink he could feel on his scales. He glanced to his right and saw his rifle sticking out of a puddle. Another flash of lightning cast its tall and twisted shadow along the mud. His trusty instrument of death. His weapon of war. He pulled on the soaked wooden stock and pried the weapon from the dirt. Mud filled the barrel of the bolt-action rifle. The weapon was bent in the middle. It was useless. He dropped it and took a shaky step, sinking his exhausted leg into the mud almost up to his knee. Thunder blasted through the air.

He heard something over the rain. Something animalistic. Something eating. Biting and tearing through flesh. It sounded only a few yards away. He wouldn't have heard it over the storm were it any further. The soldier turned to his left and saw it through the darkness of the storm - he saw the monster. It was wearing his uniform. Its face was buried into the chest of a fellow soldier whose life had long since been claimed by the battle. It ravaged deep into the body, its head engulfed in blood and flesh. It chewed at his deceased ally like an animal rips and tears at the corpse of its prey. It stopped.

It froze in place mid-bite. He held his breath as it snapped its head in his direction. The blood of its meal poured out of its fanged mouth as it growled. It was not the growl of a man - nor the growl of an animal. It was the growl of a monster.

He tried to run, but his muscles wouldn't move upon hearing that sound. It hit him deeper than some petty instinct to flee. He had fought in these trenches for months watching his allies ripped apart by lead and shrapnel - watched enemy soldiers' fur burn them alive in fires amidst their bloodcurdling screams for help they knew they couldn't get. He had killed countless soldiers without mercy...and here he was absolutely frozen in fear. Just him and the monster. Staring each other down. His mind wasn't racing; wondering what to do next. He had no plan of action for this encounter. His mind was completely blank.