Our Little Gods 1: RABATEA, the first World of the Daughters.

Chapter 24.

The Fast-runner had ripped his rib cage open and taken his liver and a good part of his guts. The boy was lying on his back; the crown of broken rib bones sticking out of his chest were heaving with each panicked breath he was taking. Unseen to him most of one of his lungs was missing too and one could clearly see his heart beating madly in a pool of his own blood.

The flightless giant bird had seized him off the back of his horse as he was riding hard to escape the Nagwars charging them and it had kept running for a while until it reached this grove. He remembered managing to grab his dagger, the one with the leather bound handle, and slashing at the birds' eye. He merely grazed the hard beak and the bird retaliated by shaking him with all the strength of its muscular neck. He thought It truly was beautiful how the bright blue color on the beak turned into orange and red just before the feathers started. He lost consciousness at one point only to regain it when the beast was breaking his ribs to get to his entrails. The fast runners had abruptly left with the pack of Nagwars. There was one part of his mind that was analyzing this whole situation with cool, almost casual detachment. He was computing the unnatural alliance of Nagwars and Fast-runners and the even more surprising presence of Macroceros who had always been mutually exclusive with the first. His clear mind was deciphering patterns in the animals' attacks; they had come in a pincer formation, the Nagwars had pushed them right against the small grove where the Fast-runners had been waiting, they in turn had held their attack until the riders had mostly passed in order to cut their group in two. The firsts afraid of slowing down but confused by being cut off from the rear and the back, butt headed by the attack panicking at the sight of the vanguard scooting away.

There was a throbbing. The way pain and absolute panic came and flooded over him. Like great waves rising impossibly far above him, and holding there, just at the ebb of consciousness, seconds before insanity at the fatality of it all; they crashed down upon him destroying what little was left.

As he told himself that he was lost, dying; alone; far from his brothers, from his mother; that his life had amounted to nothing in the end. That with him Limore was lost and Ziom too, the world, his world was lost to the enemy.

He was choking. There was blood everywhere, the thick warm gooey liquid was starting to dry and crust on his face and neck but it still somehow flowed freely on the side of his chest and how ridiculous was it to feel tickled by a blood trickle when your whole chest was opened like someone had wanted to dig a grave in it?

His breathing was calmer now despite the still mad beating of his heart. It sounded hollow though like there wasn't much left to pump anyway. The clarity was all but gone. He felt light headed and drowsy. Which was good in a sense because it meant not feeling. Actually he wasn't sure he could feel anything his waist down. Now that he was thinking about it he wasn't sure he could move his arms or hands at all. He was just too tired to try. Too tired to breathe. His eyes were closing but it mattered little since there had been a wide dark spot obscuring them for a while now. His heart stopped beating, then it hesitated beating once, twice, three time and it gave up.

A voice, somehow. A female voice, sweet and rich, it triggered deep-rooted feelings in him. Gee! He would have sworn that he was unable to feel anything already. The voice, it was saying something Something like: "son." Yes that was it: "my son." Only his mother had called him that. "Mother?" The reply came. "Yes, my son, I am you mother and I love you." Somehow this felt at the same time immensely right and profoundly off. The only thing he managed to send back was "which one are you?" What came next was a deep sense of confusion and frustration and suddenly the mind touch of his brothers was there.

Like a fist in his face, so strong it was, so powerful the life force coming from it was raking him awake, bringing him back to reality, to pain and mutilation, it shook his heart into beating whatever was left of his blood. Bringing him back to the fight and the war and the enemy. He knew it had been her. She had blocked them away tried to steal him from them and to steal his death from him too. And it happened. Like it was the most natural thing. He felt them feel him. He saw in their mind the horror registering, the steel fangs of despair biting deep in their souls; and, as one of them was forming the idea "we have to be there," they were, simple as that. Holding each other's hand and the rest was light, and fire; but mostly light.