Fleance's Stand: A Macbeth Original Scene

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...There was a cold air surrounding the great expanse of grass and bark that was Birnam Wood.

One that pierced through the hardest, heartiest armor man could make like a foul serpent's stinger or dagger's end, striking at their very core. Only those with a will strong and sturdy enough to bear the frigid humidity could free themselves from the forest's grasp unscathed, or better yet, intact.

Some men came across the wayward woodland as part of their simple route of transportation. Others, chanced upon it by the course of fate.

A special few, however, took off to Birnam with greater purpose, passion, percolating in their hearts and minds. Whether to banish the demons that dwelled inside their own being, stow away in the makeshift stockade the forest provided, or even find some tranquility in the trees' embrace.

More would say Fleance embodied all these things this night.

The entrance into Birnam was a miring challenge in of itself. Trees formed a makeshift barricade of entrenched branches and the canopy's bristle, their surface spikey and scornful all across. With every step taken through the prior thicket of grass and shrubbery, it's as if the Earth was desperately trying to pull you back into safety, sanity.

Try as they may, all great Diana's forests could not heed away this boy, today.

Stepping foot into assuredly charted, yet still cryptic and conniving territory, Fleance's character was a combination of both subtle mourning and dead seriousness. His leather tunic still strewn with patches of blood from a confrontation just days before, boots battered and beaten by the forces of nature a thousand times over, and face scarred by overflowing saltwater. The boy's bones ached with hidden anger and frustration, veins pumping the sorest substance of all through his body in stride. Worse yet, brain a tumultuous battlefield of raging emotions and enterprising recollections of the past as he tried to keep them all from bursting out at the seams!

...No matter what, against it all, he'd stay calm. Body stiffened and stalwart to wade off the enigmatic instruments of the world.

Manhood, treachery, heroism, narcissism. And then some down yonder the great characteristics of man. He'd keep on trudging.

Banquo's corpse willed it.

Further into the woods as young Fleance continued to trek through the marsh, it was as if he could hear his father calling his name in the dead of the night. Whistling for him, wailing for him, as if still fighting for his life in the thick of the ravine. (Other men would scoff at such cries of cowardice. Banquo and his son weren't nearly as fickle.)

The noises in his head were much unlike that he'd heard on the way to Birnam, to begin with. The rustle of logs and litters of forest animals running amok across the grassland, crows and owls squawking long into the night...and all that ruckus of mass human-stomping coming from near Scone, hm? Oh, he didn't have time to wonder what that was all about.

No, these were different. They rang through his skull. Ricocheting off the many parts of his fractured, reeling mind. He needed to hear his father's voice, engage him in an embrace of sorts, even if only for a moment in time. If Birnam could provide that, all the vagabond chatter about its supernatural, mystical traits could be damned.

He just wanted to see Father's face, one more time.

The paternal echoes loudened with every step he took. Fleance flew along the thicket with mindless haste, feasting his eyes upon the incoming image of Banquo's resting place. Sinful, yet sacred.

There was no time to waste. Not to throw away all that was meaningful in life, to savor and sully the moment-no! He could feel his father's mouth pressing against his cheek.