Nocturne sky fills the hopeless, timeless hour. It appears abyssal, unnaturally black with hue which drains all life from festering color within.
A forest of sorts, smothered in thick layers of darkness like raven fog.
From the air, he could see a large, purely skeletal bird with spiders aligned within its bony wings. The webs cover up a multitude of many more different spiders, with each their own eggs dispersing with young hatchlings covering the earth while the bird motions forward before disappearing along thick bushets near shadowed trees.
Savannah scuttles around. He looks confused. The area picks up on this confusion.
Enter.
"This is death's door," A beast appearing before him in black shroud follows his footstep to and fro, while a snake coils idly in the distance.
"You are welcome to remain here, if you like."
Savannah notices, but he does not stir. The dream plays him on, like puppet, and he does not seem to mind when taken by this drunken dream trance.
"Puppet for play," The voice reminds him, as the beast vanishes before his very eyes.
There, he looks around, but is stirred by a light coming from the dim, ethereal sky.
It is false, for what descends down is an entity cloaked in the bleakest "coloure", ebbed with the embedding of a still afternoon, yet stagnant and sick.
That afternoon has turned to night, and this night is respondent in all its glory for it does not wink, nor tell a lie. As the light fades at once, and it lands before the creature known as Savannah Rose.
The beast's body is covered with worms both white and its invert, the only pale thing there amidst the other bright furred.
"You will die here," It admits, and as it does, it transforms into the beast again, and laughs from all now three sides of its mouth, two along chest and one along maw.
Savannah is frightened, as he takes a few steps back in shock along his face.
"You will die here... just like everything else. Just like the wind will blow, it is certain."
The beast looks up, as its dichotomy of worms continue to squirm amidst rotten flesh and bony frame.
"Like whole, it was partially your fault." It points, with writhing 'paw', "You did not die when you were conceived. You remained strong, like an infant that breathes this stifled air. You lived to tell your tale. And so, this is what you get for your strength."
It turns, and reveals a screen like smoke in front of them, covered in layers of blood dripping down from said smoke with mixtures of color like infected maggot mucus, green-yellow along its edges that gives the floating, upright rectangular screen its shape.
"This is what you wanted."
It shows war.
"Each of your comrades will die, one by one, after your having known them. Related to them. Your joyous moments, belittled to nothing. It was nothing, as you are now, and always will be a dust in the wind; sweeping away back into the endless nothingness which you call destiny. Life, fate."
"...I—"
"And even if you die, your world will come to an end. Your world." It somehow cracks a twisted smile around the edges of a skeletal frame, with little a membrane to go around past rotting, dirt red threads barely grasping its comical tightness in longing of desperate relief.
"My world will remain. Always." The beast cackles from all three sides, "And because my world will remain, yours will too."
It laughs, and laughs, as Savannah continues to back away but is caught by vines along the back.
"THIS IS DEATH'S DOOR." It says, "THIS IS THE DREAM OF RESTLESS SORROW. THIS IS YOUR LIFE. THIS IS LIFE. YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE THIS."
It continues to laugh, sickly so with rasp as if coughing up its self-exasperated "lungs" in the process.
"I-I never wanted this!" Savannah explains, with slight tears filling his eyes as the vines pull, and drag him into the ground.
"YOU LIE." It points again, with bony finger, "YOU LIE, FOR WHICH YOU SHALL BE PUNISHED FOR IT. THIS DWELLING HAS NOT BEEN MERRY, AND WHERE YOUR DEFENSES HAVE LINGERED, YOUR MIND WILL ROT JUST LIKE MINE TO THE INEVITABLE NATURE THAT IS TIME."
Savannah's eyes widen as he continues to struggle against the vines.
"EVEN IF THIS WAS NOT YOUR PREDICAMENT, EVERYTHING WILL STOP. EVERYTHING YOU KNOW AND LOVE WILL DIE. YOUR CARE IS UNJUSTIFIED BY TRUTH, BELITTLED BY ANGER, FORGED IN FEAR AND GROWS IN IT STILL."
Savannah disappears under the vines, and raises a weakened paw.
"GOODBYE, SAVANNAH ROSE." It cackles, "IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED."
Surrounded in vines and suffocating, when he died he knew nothing. Bloodied by the thorns all over, the cycle repeats itself wherein in his death he lived, and his part became renewed.
We became the wind, and the world wept for it.
YOU ARE READING
Blood's Sacrifice
FantasyThe world will know ruin. That much becomes clear to a young-adult Savannah Rose, who is forced to desperately try and survive in order to cope with the knowledge of such a grand undoing.
