The Lordly Ones

-Such A Long Time

The crunch of leaves rushed through the woods like bats bursting from a cave-mouth. This moment was too good to waste. All the crumblings of the dirt beneath their feet, the twigs slicing through their hair, the rhythm of their moist, warm panting, blended into one sole presence. They staggered, stumbled, converging to one central point. The wait was dizzying. After all, it had been so long since such fresh entertainment had ventured so close to their den and together they clustered one by one around her, like bees squashed around a solitary flower, the last flower in the world, nourishing themselves with her very presence. At with one inhalation, they sucked her image in. There she was, with greedy white-grey sunken eyes and greasy hair that clumped in a black knotted tumble across her bony shoulders, she lounged on her throne of sticks. Her grimy, yellow-green, mould-growing feet rested on her platform of mud, tapping every so often to some lost beat.

Every movement of her body would make her bones click, her dry skin pull tightly, growing more and more scaled every day, sometimes whole patches would break off, a translucent thin shell. But she was young. It was something about her foreign wide eyes and button nose that reflected some yearning on their part, a hunger to be part of her being, her pure power. It regularly twisted out, brushing their faces, reminding them that this was no longer a prophecy. Their saviour had arrived. Even her blackening teeth and bleeding gums held some kind of spell on them, its own effortless beauty. So even as they watched her day by day hurtle further into her own special world, her delusions, they were just so overjoyed to jump down that chasm with her. The feeling burnt up through their one chest. She was part of them now. Or these parasites were part of her. They were the ones eaten up, consumed and engulfed in the palms of her hungry and ever twitching bloodied hands.

And they waited, tense and on edge. One light word from her scaly lips would set them free. One gesture with her oily fingertips and they would be relieved. To fly or fall, it was her choice. Her full lips crackled and stretched into a grin, wickedly transforming her child-like face as she let her existence linger among her love-lorn slaves, pulling the tension to breaking point. Not one dared move, dared defy her control. A few hid a grimace as their rigid, leaning posture threatened to break. The pain and pleasure of being so close to her collided, destroying any sense and reason left. Everything but her became white noise, a converging stain next to her very being. Finally, in an exaggerated sweep, she threw her arm in front of herself in greeting, smiling as sweetly as an angel with her filed rotten fangs. Her voice poured into their heads. It disrupted any thought process so that her own whispers would ring clear above the blur of their minds, a swirling wind whistling through empty air.

My children, it's been a while since we have had such a...

She wrestled for an appropriate word for the gift which had been bestowed upon her people.

PLEASURE - to have some of our...old friends back.

Now show them our hospitality.

Do not waste this opportunity.

Go, my dears.

Rip their brains out!

And make them know our pain!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As the mini bus rattled down the road, class 12AB groaned as more complaints flew from the back.

"Miss," a girl with a low, rich voice yelled, "Finn's kicking our seats!"

"-And Jesse's stolen my IPod!" another pitched in, her voice sounding tired and irritated.

Then, one shrieked, more to the boys occupying the backseats than to her teacher, "Leave my hair alone!"

The teacher, Mrs B, sighed, as if the extra oxygen would give her strength. But when the shouting didn't cease she began bellowing herself. She was weak and thin but the veins in her pale arms throbbed as she gripped the armrests, even her eyes flickered with flashes of anger, her pure displeasure from previous incidents flowed back to the surface. 

"That's it! Stop the bus!" she said to the teacher beside her in the front seat, raising her voice so that all the class could hear her, even those from the very back. "Get out! All of you."

There was more groaning. Then finally a thin girl with a sour expression yanked open the door, hopping onto the patch of grass that the teacher driving had hastily parked on. They were in the middle of nowhere. The girl glared at the woods around them. They were surrounded by a seemingly endless amount of land and gigantic trees that tore through the ground like skeletal, sharp fingers. Everything was silent. However, there was something about the way the wind rustled the leaves, the way the twigs branched out and loomed over the ground like a covered archway, not allowing the light of the sky brush the ground, that made the silence appear as an echo of a voice or another place. Other classmates soon followed at a rapid pace until the queue reached the occupants of the two back rows. They didn't move an inch.

"You guys go first!" one of the six remaining classmates hissed, shaking her short hair, its colour gleaming in the outdoor light spilling from the window. Her hair had a slight syrup colour, as if it had planned to be gold but had lost heart and lazily reduced itself. It fell in scruffy layers that she had a habit of tossing around whenever she was angry. There was an almost unwritten rule that came with her hairstyle, she would never allow it to cover any part of her face, therefore it was more susceptible to the flicking of the occupants of the seats beside her. They squeezed their eyes shut in a trained reflex. However, the free-falling syrup weapon strands had no hold over the boys' irritating pleasure at her frustration.

"No chance Darcey!" one of the boys responded, straining his voice in this denial as if his life depended on how obvious his disagreement with her was, "She'll kill us!"

The group sighed deeply, agreeing with the blond boy, Finn. He was generally ignorant of everything but even he could could see the danger in being the first exposed to Mrs B's fiery temper. Today was not the first time their disobedient group had destroyed a school trip. They were gaining quite the reputation. It was because of this obviously inevitable outcome that Mrs B had begun to react to even the slightest argument between them. She most certainly didn't want another conclusion like the last trip. The group's only excuse for the uncontrollable flood in the bathrooms of the hotel was that an incredibly intense game of 'chubby bunnies' had gone down. Apparently it turns out that even when you have stuffed your face with marshmallows and been forced by your body to spit them out into the toilet, some of the group would like to repeat the experience, five times. Darcey and Finn were much too competitive. And of course this was after the food fight which had taken place across the two sex-seperated floors by means of the balconies. It seems that an infestation had occured quickly afterwards. Who would have known rats liked popcorn and Haribos?

"Take it for the team?" Another of the girls tried to tempt them. She knew it was a long shot but her big brown eyes with her signature deer-in-the-headlights look definitely won her extra points.

"Come on now, don't throw him to that lion," a second boy softly inturrupted, lowering his book.

Now the second girl did have an innocent mask working for her but against Mr. I-just-jumped-out-of-a-romance-novel, her effect was small in comparison.

Although their heart-felt discussion was a good time-waster, the form tutor obviously didn't have the same point of view and dragged each of the six out as they cried for mercy...well five cried for mercy, but somehow Mr I-just-jumped-out-of-a-romance-novel thought he was too good for crying for mercy and instead went back to reading his book. It wasn't like it mattered where he read it anyway.

The troop was positioned against the side of the mini bus while the form tutor gave them 'a piece of her mind'. The assistant teacher chatted with the other students, as if a one sided war wasn't going on behind him.

After sometime, it appeared that she had run out of steam and, after hustling the students back inside the bus, the journey continued... Or at least, it was supposed to continue. The tiny problem was that the bus wouldn't start up again. The bus' only excuse seemed to be that it had run out of petrol.

Funny, it was just filled up a while ago.