Dusk Over Arcath

Chapter 14

Aster felt his lip quiver as the sensation to curl into a ball warped the strength in his arms. "Please, where is the light?" He hated the smallness in his voice, but it was all he could manage. 

"Aw, he is afraid," the soft voice murmured. 

Whether it was the same voice as he had heard a moment before he could not be sure. The tone sounded like wind passing through leaves, fluttering and changing with the forest around it. 

"Why is the Watchman afraid?" 

"I - I can't see." Soft dirt and roots answered his fingers' touch as he groped for roots that would bring him to the top of the hill. "Who's there?" 

"What is always in the dark." 

Aster clung to his handholds and hung his head. The image of the Watchman climbing the hill before disappearing behind the elm seared into his eyes. It was the only image he could find the black. 

"What's that? Please, I can't see. I can't..." 

"Loneliness. Emptiness." 

He shivered against a gentle breeze. Eyes clenched, he realized that the voice could no longer be distinguished from the wind or his own mind. There was no mouth to see the voice come from, no eyes to see the meaning burst from. Each word may have come from his own mind as likely as the soft tones of an unseen figure. 

"But it doesn't end like this. There's more..." It felt strange to say so. Why he said it he could not know. Being robbed of his eyes had felt like any hope was robbed from him. His ax, lost from his frantic hands, was no use when the foe was his own fear. It was not right. It was not fair. 

"Why not?" The air seemed to answer. 

"No one dies to..." He gulped at the empty night. "No one does to nothing." 

"But we are not nothing," the dark answered. "We are everything. Every fear hides in our cloaks. Or does it? You will never know." 

His voice cracked as he searched for words. His hand rustled against a branch of a nearby tree. By the wind's hand or another's the leaves gave way to a gentle ray of moonlight that cascaded through the foliage. Its white light traced the rotting leaves of the forest floor like a searching torchlight before it alighted on an ashen face. 

Any relief from seeing the beam died with the white of the corpse that stared back with glass eyes from the ground. Three long gashes, black with since-dried blood carved grooves across the man's countenance, twisting his lips and cheek until they were petrified in what looked like a hideous sneer. Wild eyes frozen in the hand of death still glared upward as the moon blinked across their now-empty depths. 

Aster shook, stumbling back at the sight. His foot caught and his hands thrashed in search of a grip. Pain lanced through his arms as his elbows connected with ground. Cold flesh touched his head, stopping it from hitting the ground. 

Rolling over, dizzy with horror, he made out another face in the rolling moonlight. It too was cold with death, though familiar. 

The scouting party, he retched. Throat tightening, he reeled from the ground. No matter where he walked or touched he could feel the cold of dead flesh and stiffness of motionless bodies. White hands seemed to grab his feet as he tried to run away. Heads tripped him, arms propped by rocks and roots on which they had fallen seemed to reach up to stop him. 

At last he stumbled and fell again. Roots and rocks struck his falling body as he tumbled down the hill. A shriek escaped his lips as cold fingers grazed the bare skin of his falling legs.