Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 153
153
Sarah felt as if some horrible, sadistic demon had cut her open from throat to groin and scooped out all her insides, bones and all, leaving her completely hollow, numb to all sensations except pain.
She knew she was crying, but she couldn't feel it, would not even have been aware of it were it not for the way her tears were blurring the flames, distorting them into hideous, leering faces. She knew Bethany was right beside her, holding her tight, gently swaying back and forth, but she couldn't feel that, either. All she could feel was the heat of the flames washing over her face, and the burning pain inside her heart, turning her entire world to ash.
She couldn't move. She couldn't scream. She couldn't talk. All she could do was sit here, staring at the flames while tears silently rolled down her cheeks.
"Sarah!" Bethany suddenly grabbed her by the shoulder and gave her a firm shake. "We can't stay here! We have to move!"
Sarah turned her head, feeling the icy cold whisper of the wind on one cheek and the blazing heat of the inferno on the other. Bethany looked scared, but it was something Sarah couldn't immediately ascribe any urgency to. It was just another piece of information she couldn't handle right now. Her mind was already overloaded with flashes of memory, ringed in flame.
Mateo, taking his first steps across the kitchen while his parents watched on in stunned disbelief, and then rushing to his aid when he fell down and bumped his nose.
Mateo, racing home after bagging his first pheasant, so excited that he forgot to wipe his feet and ended up tracking mud all over her sitting room floor.
Mateo, sitting on the porch and polishing his crossbow. Mateo, helping his father in the fields and his mother in the garden. Mateo, proclaiming his 'eternal' love for a different vixen every month. Mateo, constantly frowning and clicking his tongue, leaning against a post with his arms crossed over his chest, a complete and total sourpuss. But what he could never figure out was that his sourpuss face was the one that always made her want to hug him the most, and also the one that made his father want to ruffle his hair the most, until he did that thing where he stomped off pretending to be all haughty and indignant, but was never able to fully hide the treacherous smile playing across the corner of his mouth.
Mateo. The Fox who always got on everyone's nerves. The Fox who always said exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. The Fox who was always, always trying to make himself better.
Mateo. Her son. Her baby boy.
The flames burned on and on, and Sarah probably would have just kept staring and staring, had Bethany not seized her face and forcefully turned her head in the other direction.
The Wolves were still fighting, but although she could see what was happening, she simply couldn't take any of it in. Like a cub trying to look through a book many years too advanced, all she could understand was an occasional picture, there and gone again in the turn of a page. Still images without rhyme or reason, completely disconnected from anything and everything around her.
Two Wolves grappling with each other in the firelight, growling through rows of clenched teeth. Another crawling across the ground like a snail, except instead of slime, it was leaving behind a bright red streak of blood. A Wolf down on all fours, vomit dribbling from his lips. A large brute stumbling away from the conflict, cradling a broken arm against his side and wincing with every step. A scrawny Wolf with a bleeding kneecap, lurching along in agony. A Wolf nearly covered in blood from head to toe, dyeing his matted fur an ugly shade of red. There were bald spots on his arms and underneath his chin, and he was looking straight up at the sky, either laughing or crying. Sarah couldn't tell.
All these images. All these creatures bathed in the harsh, stuttering glow of many fires, didn't actually mean anything to her. Their blood, their screams, none of it touched her, none of it broke through.
Until she noticed their eyes.
Whether they were stumbling away or writhing on the ground or grappling with an enemy in a struggle for life and death, they all had the same eyes. The same dull, empty, lifeless eyes. Eyes that did not see. Eyes that did not feel anything but sadness and pain.
Do my eyes look like that? she wondered, staring at the tears rolling down their faces, slowly freezing into pale, white orbs against their cheeks. Those dead, empty eyes...
"Get up, Sarah!" Bethany was screaming into her face. "Get up now! We have to go!"
The Wolves, the good ones who had been protecting them, were being overrun. The very same thing that made them want to protect the Foxes was the very same thing dulling their teeth now - a newfound compassion that their brethren lacked. All they had to go on was pain and suffering and indescribable loss, all of it fuelling their anger, transforming it into something that simply could not be stopped, not by knife or claw, and it was grief. All of it...
A lone Wolf who had wandered too far from his comrades screamed in agony as three others piled on top of him, biting down on his thrashing limbs and shaking their heads from side to side in a shower of blood. A friend tried to help him, but he, too, was quickly overwhelmed.
Bethany hauled Sarah to her feet through sheer brute force, but now that she was seeing this, actually seeing this through her own set of empty, grieving eyes, she couldn't look away.
The circle was closing in all around them, tightening like a noose. Friendly Wolves were staggering towards the bonfire that used to be the medical tent, barely able to walk any longer, let alone fight.
There was nowhere left to run. Nowhere left to hide.
The brutish Wolf with the broken arm collapsed just a few paces away, shivering like a leaf even though he was so close to the fire.
"Thoka!" Another Wolf dropped down to his knees beside him. He reached for the brute's arm, but pulled back at the last second. He fidgeted in place and pulled at his hair in frustration, not knowing what to do.
"Sorry, Dorin..." the big one said. "I guess all that training was for nothing, huh?"
"Don't be stupid, Thoka! We've bounced back from worse than this! Don't give up now!"
The blood-splattered Wolf came shuffling up to them, dragging his bleeding feet, and collapsed flat on his belly. The bare patches on his arms and face hadn't been burned, as Sarah had thought from a distance, but rather plucked clean, like a chicken.
"Ivio!? Ivio! Hey!" The Wolf named 'Dorin' scuttled towards him, the absolute picture of worry. "Hey, don't go flopping on us like this, okay? Hey! Ivio! Can you hear me? Hey!"
Ivio looked up with one bleary, blood-soaked eye. "I'm sorry, Dorin-Sai... I can't fight any more. It hurts. It... it hurts..."
"Don't worry, we can fix you right up, okay? Just don't -"
"No..." Ivio shook his head, scraping his chin across a carpet of pine needles, and then said something that didn't make any sense at first, not until Sarah stopped to think about what he was actually saying. "It hurts... it hurts to hurt, Dorin-Sai. It hurts to hurt... I can't do this anymore..."
It hurts to hurt.
They came in from all sides; the weak, the wounded, the half-dead. They came here, to the centre of it all, because there was nowhere left to go. Wolves with half their scalps hanging across their faces like wet strips of leather. Wolves with shards of bone sticking out of their elbows and shins. Wolves with missing ears, teeth, eyes and fingers. They came because they were defeated, and this was the last place they could retreat to.
The last place left to die.
And on their heels...
"By the gods..." Bethany whispered, looking at all the pain and destruction coming in from every angle. "By the gods..."
They could do nothing but stare at the incoming tide - the last remnants of the Wolven survivors still intent on avenging their loved ones. They had been whittled down, but they were still strong, if for no other reason than the fact that they no longer had anything left to live for, and therefore, no reason to hold anything back. Sarah could see it in their flatfooted shamble, their slumped shoulders, but most of all, their eyes. She was always drawn back to their eyes. Abandoned wells, opening on nothing but darkness. Hollow caves in cliff faces. Emaciated skulls by the side of the road, their eyesockets stripped clean of all flesh by weeks of decay. They were already dead on the inside, but they were walking. A small army, hundreds strong, lurching along on their final march.
Sarah understood. She understood because, in this moment, she was feeling the exact same thing. That there was no point to anything anymore. That it would be better to feel anything, anything other than this pain, this loneliness, even if it meant feeling nothing at all. Even if it meant fighting, and fighting, and fighting until everything else went away.
They were coming to die. But before that...
They were coming to kill.
Sarah grabbed hold of her head, feeling like it was about to crack open like an egg and spill her brains across the snow, feeling like she was about to tear herself apart from the inside, feeling like she was on the verge of losing herself forever. Too many feelings were clashing inside of her, each one trying to pull her in a different direction. Grief at the loss of her son, hopelessness at the devouring flames, paralysing despair at all the blood and pain of this never-ending night, all of it coalescing into an overwhelming source of anger at the ones who had taken Mat away from her, the Wolves with their dead eyes... eyes exactly the same as hers now... eyes wishing for nothing more than to see everything suffer and die...
Sarah stepped forward and Bethany's hand simply fell away from her shoulder, completely unnoticed. She walked past many wounded friends without sparing any of them a glance. Her eyes were locked on the incoming tide of Wolves, sliding from face to face, wondering which one of them was responsible. Which one of them was the last to put axe to tree...
She stooped down and picked up a large, frost covered rock.
Which one of them killed her boy?
"STOOOOP!!"
And, just like the voice commanded, everything did.
Foxes and Wolves, both friendly and savage, turned their heads toward the source of that voice.
A hulking figure obscured by tendrils of smoke was standing atop a bed of smouldering coals - the last dying remnants of the ring of fire. Even though he was just a grey silhouette, his anger blazed out across the battlefield. Sarah could feel it even through the thick miasma of hatred that had enveloped her so completely. It was evident in every aspect of his being, every miniscule movement. The way his hands were balled into fists. The way his shoulders were rising and falling with every heavy breath.
He began to walk through the smoke, crushing half-burnt logs underfoot and sending flurries of sparks into the air.
Sorrin stepped over the ashen border, and as his furious eyes swept across the battlefield, a new line of silhouettes appeared behind him, growing darker and darker until they emerged from the smoke; the fifty Foxes that had gone to hunt Banno. They stared in shocked disbelief at the horrors that had been wrought in the short amount of time they had been away, and among them, looking incredibly out of place with a bow strapped to his back...
Michael...?
The rock tumbled out of Sarah's numb fingers and she dropped down to her knees, grabbing at the neckline of her dress. The one feeling that shot through her mind was not one of relief or happiness, but dread. Because how...
How was she going to tell him that his only son was gone?
She was still pondering this impossible question when something else happened, something she could never have foreseen.
The reason it had taken their party so long to come back.
A third line of silhouettes was forming deep within the curtain of smoke, much wider than the fifty that had come before, infinitely wider, stretching at least a hundred strides in both directions, and as they stepped through into this dark and burning hell, Sarah's disbelief only grew.
They were housewives wielding kitchen knives. Grandparents wielding torches and pitchforks. Teenage boys with hatchets and gardening tools. Everyone that had been left behind. Sarah recognised Vicky from down the road, possibly one of the most petite vixens in the entire valley, clutching a butcher's cleaver to her breast, its shiny flat surface reflecting the murderous spark in her eyes like a mirror. She recognised old Lonin, his gnarled hands curled around a sharpened broom handle. He was clearly suffering a great deal of pain, but his face was dead set and determined. She even spotted the Elders themselves among the crowd: Ruth, Bileam, and Amos, standing shoulder to shoulder. There were hundreds more pouring in, stepping through the smoke, transitioning from one world to another, each of them refusing to stand idle a second longer.
They were the entire village of Grovenglen, and they were tired of waiting for their friends and loved ones to come home.
Hey guys, sorry for the late upload. Half the country is on fire, apparently, but I wouldn't know anything about that because I just spent the past 45 hours without any electricity or internet, so... yeah. Fun. :/
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