Horns ✖

The Darkness Within

Everything was cold. Everything was still.

All was empty. And all was quiet.

Am I dead? I asked myself, searching through the endless darkness for a sign of truth, I cannot...feel anything. I cannot see anything either.

Nay...I am mistaken. I can still breathe.

I could still feel.

I could smell and taste.

I can do it all...

To seal all other questions I felt a faint pulse of life at the basin of my underbelly. But something else too. The poor damaged scar had reopened entirely, the skin now peeled away from the impact, and the pink tissue once again touching raw speckled air. Yet no discomfort stirred from the wound. I found this odd: how something so agonizing, so horrid, and beyond disgusting failed to bring me pain. Either my body had been shocked to the max, or I was simply immune to it.

The same pulse echoed everywhere else: from the tip of my limp tail to the veins that shifted in my shoulder, to the twitching muscles moving upon my pointed snout. I was anything but dead, and now that was certain. All that remained was what I had yet to discover, what I couldn't see, for a new mysterious scent was already lifting, clogging my nasal passage from it's pure rotten stench.

Just open your eyes, I willed painfully, just open them. No more sleeping. No more rest. Death is watching, and waiting for you to succumb. Do not let him win! Not when you're so close to it all...

And I obeyed.

Unlike all those days before, I wasn't greeted by the warm smiles of a club-tail's face, or the sharp rays of the morning sun above. I was gifted to the cold, dark emptiness of an open wound within the forest, a treeless circle as deep as a mountain as high. Long had the event happened, and yet the night skies above, spectators of the past battle, stayed behind, awaiting it's new victor.

And alas, it had found one.

With a soft, muffled groan I urged myself to stand, shifting every crank and muscle with the gentlest motion, just to ensure that nothing else had been broken. My tail still swished to and fro, each claw still held up on its own. My scales still shimmered in the splintered moonlight, all from frill to my backside. And although the bone of my ribcage had yet to be healed, and my rashed underside was now patched with pebbles and dust - courtesy of the fall - that was all that I found unfamiliar.

Not until I felt for my neck, which was burning like a blooming flame.

A massive gash had been drawn on my throat, raiding from the top of my neck to it's basin near my heart. Much to my surprise, the blood that oozed from the wound itself didn't reminisce what I had seen in the corpses. Rather than a pulsing spray sprinkling the ground, the wound simply leaked out, dripping to the ground like sweat droplets upon the chin of a mammal. It wasn't life-threatening.

In fact, I felt nothing at all.

Then, where'd all this blood come from?

And this wound?

I first looked upward, noticing the same liquid coming from one of my horns. Unlike the other two this one was painted red, engulfed with a rather different primal stench. I turned my head to the right, gazing only at the limp bodies of the fallen club-tails, then turned left. And there! Exposed in the incoming moonlight, laid the mighty beast that conquered these woodlands. The creature within the shadows. The monster of the night.

A raptor.

An impaled raptor.

Her imperfect torso was concave and matted with the essence, which now pooled around her as it had done to Wrecker. Her feathers were the last thing that remained in motion as the wind stroked her, a calm sorrowful melody seeping into the land and into her ears. I noticed her immensely large claws too, sharper than a thorn, longer than a fang. It was no wonder she had slain so many herbivores: she had been gifted with such powerful weapons and strength, far greater than any carnivore ever had. But now these weapons curled inward toward her wound, caressing the damage as blood leaked out of her body. Alas, the little carnivore was a wheezing dying mess upon the earth, her crimson nostrils twitching as she frantically struggled for each and every breath of life.