"What? Who came?" Asher's voice is tinged with confusion and fear. "May? Who is 'they?' May!"
He calls to her, but she is beyond hearing. Her eyes are filled with flame and smoke, and the bright red lines that slash down her father's back as a beast tears at him with its claws. Her mother's screams fill her mind, block her ears--her whole body begins to shake. Tall devils in billowing robes stalk through her mind. Black armor and harsh metal. Like an evil mockery of the river's white morning mist, smoke now roils among the trees. May scrambles along the ground, feeling cold mud between her fingers and hot flames at her back. The screams of her people mix with the screeches of the beasts. Deep bellows of merciless men seem to come from the shadows themselves. She watches a priest of Nintu work the waves and fight the flames, but a robed demon stalks toward him. Cloth hangs from his mouth; his eyes are narrowed and hard. The water boils into mist around him, and he strikes the priest down.
"May!" Asher puts his hands on her shoulders and jerks her. She blinks and looks at him with an expression so full of fear that it stirs fear within him as well. "What?" he says. "What is it?" A heartbeat passes, heavy as the stillness of a pendulum on the edge of its swing, and then May grabs Asher's hand and runs. He's pulled along after her, calling out to her, telling her they left the food behind, but she doesn't answer. She wants only to escape.
YOU ARE READING
The Unending Epic Written to Appease a Friend, Tell a Tale, an...
FantasiaEach day, the story grows. The tale begins when two lives are suddenly and irrevocably twined together, and a boy from a lonely farm and a girl without a people find themselves each other's only friend. Little by little the fabric of their lives wea...
