Unblinded Faithful

Chapter 4: Inanimate

Hands cold as ice quietly resting in his palms, body even stiller breathlessly laying.
A chill in the air, and flowers languishing in twisted bloom.
The smell of rot.
"This can't be right..."
He gets off the ground and staggers back, almost tripping.
"I don't understand..."
There's no mistaking it. What was laying in front of the boy was the lifeless corpse of the woman he had met before.
The sweet scent of the withered blossoms mixes with rotting flesh and creates a deathly, stomach-churning odour.
The entire area around the cold body of the woman looks like it had been bled of colour, and dead leaves that had lost their golden glisten are scattered about.
It's as if the whole area around them is in mourning.
"What... What do I do?"
The empty clearing answers the question with hopeless silence.
"What do I do, what do I do, what do I do..."
Only now does he notice the small puddle of blood forming just under her head, camouflaged by the almost dark grey grass.
The walls of fog surrounding start to inch inwards. He unconsciously takes a step backwards and his boot hits something hard with a clang.
It's the scythe she had been carrying the last time he saw her, dry blood covering the very tip of the black blade, and the shaft looks almost translucent, as if it's slowly fading into nothing.
The whole experience feels so unreal that Aide starts to wish this was all a bad dream, as the wall of fog breaks down from its top like a waterfall, and a thin mist embraces the clearing.
"I-I need an adult... Father... Yes, father would know what to do," he says, and hurriedly turns around to run.
He sprints without thinking, his legs carrying him with all the strength they can muster, barely not allowing him to fall.
"This can't be happening!" the boy shouts into nothing as he's panting for air. He runs in what he believes to be the direction of the city and prays that it's the right one.
Finally, after three minutes of sprinting, he reaches the gravel path, and tries to make it back home as soon as possible.
His legs are weak, he can barely breathe from exhaustion and his eyes are trembling. He makes it about halfway to the city, "Almost... there..." he thinks, before tripping on his legs and slamming into the ground.
His forehead gets scratched on the gravel and his hand hits the floor with the full weight of his body behind the impact, and he hears a crack followed by intense pain.
Helplessly huffing air with a now most probably broken wrist and bleeding from his head, Aide is unable to continue further. With no other option remaining, he screams in hopes that someone passing through would come.
"Help!!" his shout echoes through the forest. He tries again and again. "Please help me! Help!!!" but no one comes.
Of course no one would go through this way, it's an abandoned path that only him and his father go through on a regular basis. Who is there to hear him hollering in distress?
His vision starts to get blurry. The boy has overexerted himself and is now losing his vitality more and more by the second, and there's a terrible ringing in his ear that is making him come closer and closer to passing out.
But just as he is about to lose consciousness, he hears a voice come in through the ringing in his ears.
"-ide!" he can barely make out the voice of who is calling to him.
"Aide! Aide! Boy, what happened to you?!"
It's his father's voice. There's not a moment to spare, if he tells his father, he will surely know what to do. He has to.
"Forest... There's someone... There's a body in the forest..." the boy utters the words as his father picks him up and rests his head on his arm.
"In the forest, there's a clearing with a tree in the centre... They're bleeding, help them, father, please..." Aide says, and then finally closes his eyes as he passes out.
"...!"
The ex soldier quickly analyses his son's wound and tears a piece of fabric from his clothes. He masterfully wraps it around Aide's head and wipes the blood off his face with his sleeve.
He lays Aide in a stable position on the side of the path and then gets up on his feet and looks towards the direction the boy had come from.
He takes a deep breath inwards, and with a single exhale, "...Hastened Step," before dashing forward with a boom.
His running bolstered with a physical enhancement spell, he moves at superhuman speed into the depths of the forest, and keeps casting spells one after the other in quick succession, using the increased speed of his limbs to satisfy the required body movements to cast even more speed enhancement spells along the way.
He makes it to the centre of the forest in a few heartbeats before coming to a sudden halt, "...Thalia, give me sight," he casts a spell to search the area all around him, and immediately notices the clearing with a distinct lack of trees with only one in the middle.
He runs onwards towards his target, and after a second the sounds of the city go quiet. He's here.
The fog in this particular area was quite thick, it's almost impossible to make anything out. Just what was his son thinking coming to this place?
He grits his teeth and tries to make his way through. The crunching of dry grass can be heard as he steps forward, and a lonely tree with grey leaves standing tall meets his sights.
He is overtaken by a feeling of unease that almost feels familiar. It's like the feeling he had when he was just a fresh recruit sent to his first ever real battle. He shakes his head and focuses. There's no need to pay any mind to the familiar feeling, he thinks to himself, and continues his search.
After looking around for a few more moments, just then he finally finds something through the fog...