Finding Winter

Chapter 8

Death was so inexplicably near I could taste it: oil.

These were my last moments, and they would consist of lingering recollections of claws digging under my skin that would tear each layer part by part until there was nothing left but bones to crack. The thick grime of blackened lard would coat my tongue as I screamed my last breaths. Obscurity of the monsters would blind me into timelessness damnation.

There are better ways to die.

"Do not give up, Descartes. I can still train you. Give into the ringing!" A few curses followed as Mandell's voice raised higher and higher in anticipation at every wasted second.

Give in to the ringing or die; I couldn't decide which was worse. The screaming of the demons around me and the ringing blaring in my head careened and hacked through my brain. Death would have done well to still them both.

But to be frayed by the hooks of beasts or to be macheted by the ringing were both fates that lay in uncertainty. Yet, one path could always be revisited.

Fingers clawing at the hardened earth, I tore into the loose soil, shredding and uprooting golden patches of grass as one last hollar of pain ripped through my throat the moment I relented to the ringing. The pain terrorized like I thought it would. The final blow had been passed, and the point that tested against the wall that blocked it was pierced straight through like an arrow into my mind- an unbearable pain that should have yielded blood, but immediately a voice rang through loud and clear.

The excruciating pain in my head was gone, but it didn't give me enough time to recover. There were still the fingers that spun around my leg like thread on a spool, fighting to reel me back into their waves of teeth and hell.

The fear that freezes you, bring it out, Descartes. Imagine it freezing around your body. Freeze the shadows and the hands that bind you.

Nonsense. Mandell was mostly speaking nonsense, but I tried to imagine it in the way he said. The fear that hammered and welled within was pooled into a tight knot in the center of my chest, and I visualized, although I felt nothing, bringing it up to the surface so that I was coated in my own freezing fear.

I felt like an idiot for thinking so, but the moment I did a different scream from the ones around me shrieked sharply before it disappeared with the fierce hold on my leg.

Along with it, the victorious screams of the shadows dulled into an eerie thick silence that rested heavily on the entire clearing. Not even the wind made a sound. It was a silence too sudden.

Stand up, Descartes! You are a fool if you think you can fight from the ground. Stand!

Mandell. His voice spoke clearly in my head.

Breaths quick and sputtering, I hustled recklessly to my feet and hobbled frantically around to find that the blue orb had once again disappeared. The shadows hadn't, however. Their cauldron black forms had conquered the majority of the clearing, contorting their monstrous silhouettes so that they could reach closer and closer.

"Mandell?" I breathed out while limping about in the small opening of space I had left.

Without the physical presence of the blue orb floating besides me, I never felt more alone- vulnerable. I was trapped in the corner like some frightened animal ready for the slaughter. My heart thundered like fists at the speed of a hummingbird's wings, and my feet pointlessly shuffled around and shook like my nerves.

The way between me and my escape was so tauntingly near. There was nothing in the air around me- just complete emptiness, but it was the ground that was flat but littered in tar. If only I could find a way to fly above it.