Second Life: A Second Chance

They Follow Only Apollo (VI)

A wall of meshed dead body parts erupts violently from the ground beneath me, pushing my entire body far away as the mound from where the wall of parts came from blends into its rising rigidness. Shifting my head upwards from facing the ground, I focus my attention on the wall's height. The wall, now present before me, stands at about ten meters high, with its sided faces standing so tall and wide, that even the very edges of my shadow are swallowed by its overarching silhouette. Diverting my attention to its green-brown and putrid smelling appearance, I notice that all the decayed green colored fleshy heads on the wall all seem to face me, with some of the picked-apart dead children even wearing the exact articles of clothing the children surrounding me are currently wearing. Aside the young lifeless faces dotting the wall's surface, I come to realize that for every nook, cranny, and space in between the young heads on the wall, a dismembered arm, hand, or leg fills the gap in between the heads.

Quickly paying attention to what is occurring before me, I sit still on the floor, waiting for the children to do something eerie. But, instead of having the children do something odd, an eyeball merely drops from the dead wall's roofed top, with its entire fleshy wet  piece of eye landing directly in between my feet, turning around on itself to face me with its brown iris, before exploding into a large blot of murky brown-white blood. Nothing short of terrified, I jump back and squeal loudly before the children.

"What is this?!" I shriek at the huddled children. 

"What are you?!" I ask.

"We are the kind you betrayed and abandoned, do YOU not REMEMBER?"

"What? What do I not remember?!" I hesitantly ask.

"This... WHAT YOU DID TO US! You.... KILLED US ALL!" screams the young female who raised the wall of the dead, as she points towards her missing set of eyes.

In a piercing and bitter tone, she continues on.

"You have turned against the kind and against your fellow human, you MONSTER! YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR TRANSGRESSIONS!" she directly screeches at me, just as the color of sky morphs into a deep white, with black drops of liquid falling directly from the white sky, turning red upon immediate impact with the ground, appearing almost blood-like to the glance.

"I DIDN'T DO THIS TO YOU! I PROMISE! PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE!" I loudly plead to the young female, right around the same time a deep piercing siren is released from the tall wall of the dead, canceling all plea attempts almost instantly.

A high pitched sharp sound is further emitted from the wall for several seconds on end following the siren before dying down just as quickly, with the sharp ringing of the wall so tough to withstand, I cover both ears just to spare myself the agony. Quickly, upon the disappearance of both spontaneous sounds, I think to myself very considerately.

What could the possibly want from me? Do they want to end me or do they want me alive just so they could torture me? What does the young female want from me? An apology? What have I done to deserve all this blaming in the first place? What could I have possibly done to anger the dead children? I wish, I wish I was not here. I wish I could run. I wish I could run away from this scene of wretchedness and never look back. I wish I was safe. I wish I was sound.

"Please let me go!" I implore to the female. Begging desperately for her mercy once again, I begin to feel the tone in my voice grow deeper by the second, sounding quite wasted away after only a minute has passed. I feel an overpowering sensation of dread and tiredness taking over my entire body. This odd feeling only brings chills down my spine as I scream to the top of my lungs. However, my yelling is cut short as I come to the realization that I am aging. Looking over to the back soles of my hands, I further confirm my worst fears. My skin on both hands appear loose in tightness and are covered with freckled dots all about. I quickly move my right hand over my left hand and prepare to tug on the skin. The skin, with my two index-thumb finger tug pulling on it, is moved upwards, reaching a small height consisting of pure mountain of skin, before flattening itself out in a circular yet layered manner, resembling a sort of flattened staircase within the skin of my back hand. Upon the culmination of the tug act, I begin to notice all around me that the wind is picking up in intensity from its long absence, where I feel it rush violently through my clothes, alongside the disintegrating beneath me. As this all occurs before my very eyes, the children stand once more before me, surrounding me as they chant loudly the word "Demon!" again and again.