Evelyn's Star

Prologue

When an animal is slaughtered, it is cut down into many tiny pieces assuring it to cook well. These pieces are transferred in a vessel so that it can be portioned and cooked later. If this meat is touched with bear hands as soon as it is butchered, the warmth carried in it becomes familiarly noticeable. You realize that this mere flesh belonged to a creature that walked on its feet not so long ago. This knowledge is not the type that is shared in usual conversations. If you have spent enough time in a kitchen, you simply get accustomed to this way of life.

But out of all the times in the world, O’derv thought, why am I thinking about this now? He has just regained consciousness and his emotions are now a mixture of panic and confusion. He can feel the warmth of the lifeless bodies that lay over him. Out of fear he tries to crawl trying to get away from the pile of corpses that lay still. There is a loud moan of pain that echoes through the mountains of the desert. O’derv carries a broken bone in his left leg.

Why me? Why am I the only one? Why am I not dead? He exerts all of his strength on his arms and his right leg and manages to get away from the soldiers that lay on the sand. His throat and his nose are dry and he is facing difficulty breathing. With all the energy that resides within, he stands on his right foot, with the weight of his armour draining him even more. First thing he learns from this battlefield is that there are no enemy soldiers that have fallen to their demise.

We have truly lost. He understands the severity of his kingdoms defeat. There is no going back now. This battlefield is a horrific scene with gaping holes in the thorax of every single soldier visible. There is a peculiar smell that cannot be unnoticed. The air is thick with the stench of iron from the blood of the fallen brethren. From the corner of his eyes, he notices the enemy far away approaching with his out worldly weapon. O,derv falls to the ground in an instance. He did not see me, he assures himself.

I cannot stay here any longer, he feared that he will be captured as prisoner of war. He remembers that he had seen an opening to a cave before the battle began. He looks around and surely enough, there it was, towards his left as the enemy approaches from the right. He has no strength left in him but he knows that he needs to survive. Why am I alive? Why am I not dead?, he thinks over and over every time there is a sharp pain in his leg.

He regains his memory of what happened. He stood on the seventh line behind vanguard, not knowing what the situation was up ahead. There was a loud roar from the vanguard and all of a sudden he found himself charging into battle. Somewhere in this process, he tripped on a rock and tried his best to defend his head from the stampede. Shortly after, he was unconscious.

O'derv never grew up to become a soldier nor did he have the body or the strength of one. He grew up in a small village far away from the capital city where the king resided. He stood at the height of five feet and he was overweight. He was gifted with the hands of his mother who was skilled with the excellence of cooking. He always wished to open a hashery in the capital city. He was sixteen years old when the ancient wizard Dante convinced king Adair Ivar, the third of his name to build up an army for the war to come. Every male above the age of fifteen was enlisted to carry a sword and a shield and were made to wear an armour just to increase the number of soldiers in the army to have strategic leverage.

I am going to kill that wretched wizard myself if I get out of this alive. O’derv had crawled deep within the cave and was inside one of the three tunnels that he encountered along the way. In much simpler times he would have been terrified of the darkness and of the thought of not knowing what lies ahead of him. But these weren’t simpler times. He embraced the dark as the enemy couldn’t lay eyes on him anymore. He lies on the ground with his back to the rock wall of the cave. The horrific scenes of the battlefield and the thought of wanting to die saddened him and he started to cry. There is hope. I am going to live.

This feeling of sadness and hope is short lived. With the tears rolling down his cheeks, he realizes that his fear of the darkness is not dead entirely. He feels as though he is not alone anymore. He senses something move through the darkness from the way he came in and it is creeping towards him. Slowly. This entity is now in front of him and he is now petrified.

This is all in my head. There is nothing in front of me. I did not hear any footsteps. This is all in my head. There is nothing-, there is a sound of the metal of his armour and now there is cold shivers running through his body as he realizes he is in tremendous pain and something had gone through his chest. He cannot see anything, but he knows there resides a hole in his armour and the walls of the cave have been designed crimson.

Is this it? He gasps for air but is physically unable to breath. Is this how it all ends? In this short duration of time, he understands the situation he is in and accepts his fate. The hovering creature now motions deeper in the tunnel and O’derv feels it moving through the darkness. No more pain. He smiles and faces the creature that is now at a distance and with all the strength left in his body he mutters “Thank you”, for he was not being taken prisoner. He stared into the infinite dark for a while and then shut his eyes.

*****************************

This story will follow the pattern of a jigsaw, wherein the reader is compelled to think about the chapters and piece things together. For example, the events occurred in this chapter are actually somewhere in the middle of the entire story. I have a vague idea as to where the story is headed and how it is going to end. Nonetheless, there will be a new chapter uploaded every month, even though I know no one is reading this lol.