Era of Greed [✔ COMPLETE] (Chrim Chronicles #1)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Wren of West

The color of the sky was on the verge of green and blue, packed with fluffy, black clouds. I blinked a few times and tried to lift my head. Too heavy. My eyelids, too, were too much weight to hold open, so I allowed them to fall. A hot, dense wind stroked my face and pressed upon my body. It felt like a blanket and made me sleepy. My mind started to drift off to the realm of dreams. Somewhere in the far distance echoed the whinny of a horse.

A horse?

My eyes sprung open.

A maze of black branches quivered above me. Some were thin, others thick, but the one thing they all had in common was the unnatural way they laced into one another. I leaped up. With a wide open mouth, I analyzed the area. Surrounding me were black trees with no leaves, their bent fingers entwined. Even their roots were tangled, I noticed as I scanned the moss-grown ground, looking like fat worms crawling over black dirt. Ahead of me stood more trees, stretching as far as the eye could see, grown so close together that they left only a few thin lines of air between them.

Where the hell am I?

An image of Dominik flashed before my eyes. I felt his hands on my shoulders as he pushed me down into the water. I remembered now. I clenched my jaw and placed my head in my hands. That fucking bastard, Dominik. I forced myself to take deep breaths and remain calm. Though I seemed to be a long way from home, at least I was alive. Dominik had brought me here, wherever this place was, which could only mean that he was close. And once I found him, I was going to start with ripping out his fingernails and end with burning his corpse. With that thought I began to walk, pushing twigs out of my way as I went. The more time passed, the more I noticed how dead this place looked. Everything formed one black shadow of gloom. Not only did it look dead, it also felt dead, in an empty and hollow way, as if I were the only person left on Earth. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but something was missing here. 

The trees began to grow scarce, standing further from one another with a longer breath of sky between them. My eye caught a movement on my right. I came to a halt and turned to look at it. A little brown bunny stood near a scrub with its back turned to me, its fuzzy tail shook a little as it dug at something I could not see. Somehow the bunny awoke a sense of bliss within me, its innocence seeming much more beautiful in this valley of doom. I dropped on my knees and slowly crawled towards the bunny. It seemed to hear me, it stopped digging and tensed, but did not run away so I kept moving and only stopped when I was right beside it. Just as I reached to stroke its long, floppy ears, it turned its head and looked at me with two shining, fiery red eyes. Its face was torn and showed bones underneath red, rotting flesh, and the teeth inside its hissing mouth were small and pointy, like tiny spikes. With a shriek I toppled on my back, then jumped up and ran the opposite direction. I kept running, tripping over roots as I went, until the trees moved aside and opened up to an emptiness.

Once out of the woods, I closed my eyes and leaned my hands on my knees to catch my breath. After a few seconds I straightened myself to skim the area, and instantly wished I hadn't.

In front of me stretched countless black peaks, tall and toothed, growing out of an infinite sea of boiling red lava which glowed red, yellow, and orange. In the distance I noticed streams of lava flowing narrow through some of the mountains, making it seem like ropes of fire were strung around the stone. As if being pulled, I moved closer to the edge and looked down at the popping bubbles. The heat made my skin throb, taking my mind back to the arena for a short moment. As I stepped back, I realized it wasn't an edge, but an entrance. A flight of steps was carved inside the mountain and shrunk to a narrow path. The stone path twisted upwards, over the sea of lava, and trailed all the way behind the peaks.