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Cade
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Drums. I hear the drumbeats from this dark place. I'm huddled on the ground, my arms around my head. I don't think I can move anymore. I've run too much. All I can taste is my heart in my throat, pulsing so fast that my breath can't keep up with it. I'm dizzy, and sweating, and I think there's vomit on me. My muscles feel like they've been pounded with clubs. My days usually go pretty well in the Dheaghnn'on Tribe, so this is all very new to me. What happened? I'm too stunned to remember. I remember voices, but only as if they're being shouted from far down a cave. No, those aren't memories. They're from the present. The voices are getting closer, fading from muffled garble into something coherent, something louder, until I hear them, finally, clear as day. That's when the door opens into my enclosure. Weird, dull orange light floods in.
Getting my senses back. Figuring out where I am. It's like a hut, but smaller. A dirt floor. Ramshackle, built within minutes, really. Only there to keep me in a cage and in the dark. There's a leather collar around my neck, thick and rough, that's attached to a chain. Someone takes the end of the chain. The orange light glints off of it and becomes sharp and warm, as if the whole length of the chain is on fire. I just watch it, entranced. I should be concerned that two people, likely my captors, are standing over me. I'm not.
One of them, a tall, broad-shouldered man with short hair, reaches down and hauls me up to my knees by the back of the collar. My vision goes hazy, the dizziness consumes me, and I retch a little more of the contents of my stomach onto my shirt. I can't move. I'm too weak. How long did I run from them? The world lurches sideways in a way that just isn't right, and then the dark comes over my vision once again.
There's the feeling of my boots dragging over the ground. One long drag, then a pause, and then a drag, then a pause. Very regular. Someone's pulling me. I feel air over the bottom of my right foot. Did I run the sole off of that boot?
"Should we clean him up?" Who is-- I recognize that voice. Dhe-gleashe. He's my friend. Always has been. Keeps me from staying in the bars past my welcome. Held me up once when I was too sick to stand. Helped me clean up my kid when the poor squirt tried to wear his dirty diaper as a hat. Where is he taking me? I'd ask, but I can't even lift up my head, and my voice is scraped right out of my throat by now. I'm so confused.
"Eh, if the regents want 'im clean, they'll order us to." A more restrained voice. Gouss'tave. Never really got on with him well, but we tolerated each other.
"...Aye." There's no conversation after that. They're just dragging a dog to his death, after all.
I'm still trying to pry at the situation mentally. The regents from the north come down every now and again, to remind us that they're better than us. We don't tend to argue and just leave well enough alone, when it comes to the regents. But this time they made us dig up the bonfire mound. We've used that thing for years and years, as far as my father's father can remember back, even as far as great-great-great-granny-gel can remember that anyone's remembered. It's attained sort of a holy status, you see. I don't remember anyone raising a protest, though. No one does, when it comes to the regents. There's something about them that just frightens the blood clean out of you.
Then... well. Then the killing started.
I'm being dragged up now, even though there's no possible way I can stand. My vision runs clear for a bit. Everyone is standing here. Everyone that's left of the tribe. I catch a glimpse of Dhe-gleashe's face before I'm pulled high into the air by a one-handed grip around the wrists. To be fair to him, he does look very sorry.
I'm lifted even further up. I hear the rough gravelly exhalation of one of the northern people's horses. Those regents ride huge beasts, I imagine because otherwise no other horse could carry them. They're so damn tall. They're like giants. It explains why I'm so high up, though. A horse-mounted regent's got me by the wrists.
It's a little hard to take in, you'll understand. I can't quite connect what I'm seeing with, well... myself. So many people have died. And then I ran so much. Who died while I was running? Did they kill Thedd--
I can't think about that right now. Theddore wasn't a sick kid, anyway. Just a little stupid. They only killed the sick, then churned the flesh into the dirt of what was left of the bonfire mound. The sick elderly, at first, then the sick children. A few of us even tried to stop them. Fought regents, of all things to fight. How brave we were.
I can smell the blood. We're standing on what's left of the bonfire mound, aren't we? Now it's a burial mound. I can hear the pounding of many hammers at once. Is someone building something? Now of all times? I don't have the energy to turn my head. I can only see out of the corners of my eyes. Another horse-mounted regent on one side of me, and on the other, the regent holding me. They speak, but I don't understand it. They have some other language they use. It's like listening to the sweetest set of pipes. So many ells and esses. The regent holding me is male. He's as pale as milk, his hair is night-black and long, beads and trinkets strung all through it. His eyes are blue. He's so beautiful that I forget myself for a moment, and all the carnage around me.
Then I look forward again, and see the men standing around the ruins of the mound. The men, and some women, but hardly all of my tribe. Where are all the others? Where are the children? I smell so much blood, and my heart's forcing itself back up into my throat. I keep trying to think of my son, my wife, and then I keep trying to stop. We have a baby. I don't see my wife. I don't see--
My thoughts freeze. The regent is looking at me. Both of them are. Their regard chills me straight through to the bone. Then, after a little more of that speaking-music that seems to be the regent language, the chain attached to my collar is pulled upwards until the collar draws up tight around my neck. My heart finds it in it to beat again, frantic pulses of alarm. Then the regent drops me and spurs his giant of a horse forward. I see my people scatter before him, and then I'm swinging around. My arms droop down to my sides. I can't move.
I'm just hanging here, from the scaffold they've built over the mound. My head is hanging down. I can see into the mound now. The mud churned into a red pudding from the pieces and bits of my people that have been mixed up into it. I see an eyeball, here or there. I'm spared from seeing any bits of my family, except for a shock of long red hair strewn through the mess. My wife kept her hair long and unbraided. Friends' faces spiral under me. Rivals. Children too innocent for me to ever make quarrel with them. It all blurs, after awhile. Swirls and warps. But that could be the lack of air.
...No.
It isn't that I'm choking, though I am, in fact, choking. The ground is moving, as if something's crawling inside it. The bits of my people are getting dragged down, one by one. More blood wells up in the depressions left behind. Dark blood. After a few moments, the blood begins to turn black.
I start to feel sick.
They ran us through their paces, the ones of us who tried to fight. Lined us up after we lost to them, then spurred us on with metal-tipped lashes. Yelled to us in a heavily-accented lilt of our own tongue that if we all ran our fastest and hardest, they would only take the loser as tribute.
And I, after running my best for days, I ended up being the loser. To tell the truth, one of my comrades tripped me. By then, though, there was very little left of me to care. I was only glad that all of us could stop running, that somehow this all might just end.
Now I'm watching the very ground below me eat the remains of my people, and wondering if it ever will end at all. That's when I feel the thing in my mind.
The hungry thing. The hungry voice, that's just a growl. Smelling me out, sniffing at my pain, my fatigue, my exhaustion. Like a cold nose pushing the inside of my skull. Then a lurch, and I'm pulled downwards.
No. The scaffold isn't slipping. I just felt dizzy. But I feel it again, then, and again, along with the nagging impression of a gnawing, of hunger sated.
I'm being eaten. I can't see it, I'm not bleeding, but I'm sure of it. Possibly because of the pain. Little wedge-shaped teethmarks, making their little impressions right along the seam of my mind. The pain is excruciating, and I open my mouth, and I scream with my broken voice. It comes out as a rattle.
I hear one of the regents assure my people in our own language that the killing will stop once I die. There'll be nothing to fear, once I die. Then the hunger will be over.
Once I die...
I can feel that thing in the ground watching me, sniffing at me again. It can't seem to get any closer, because the gnawing's stopped. I feel thinner now. Less of myself. But I'm still here, hanging. Slowly choking. Slowly dying.
Once I die...
The beast is impatient. It's snorting and pawing like a horse. I'm not dying quick enough for it, am I? I see the red-toned mud beneath me give one solid blurp, and then the scaffold shakes. One of the regents makes a startled exclamation, and I hear its horse spook backward a few paces. That's all becoming a blur.
I'm closer to the monster now. It's working at the supports. Gnawing at the base of the scaffolding hanging me over its nest like a treat.
Actually... more like bait.
Wood splinters with a tearing sound. I lurch as the scaffold does, and then I fall straight down into the mud. They've churned the whole mound up into something that I should sink slowly down into. As my body begins its descent, I brush a small hand that's buried in the murk. In the frenzied recesses of my mind, I imagine that it tries to grip me.
How many of us have been fed to this thing?
My eyes can still see my people, or what's left of them, watch me as I sink. I'm not dead yet, after all. But then, I sink under, and I suppose I might as well be.
I can feel the beast gnawing again at me down here. Not physically, no. It's worrying at my mind again, taking bits and chunks as it pleases. I sink, and sink, and sink. How can this mound be so deep? It seems to be pulsing, like a heartbeat. It's so warm, down here. I can't breathe. I'm surrounded on all sides by blood, and flesh. There is no earth here anymore.
Then, it sinks its teeth deep into my mind like a spade, for one final, satisfying, killing blow. I scream, my lungs giving up their final air into this fleshy soup. It's not agony I feel, nor despair, nor hurt or hatred. Those are all gone, probably eaten by the beast itself. No, that scream is all defiance. My one final bit of desperation. I stab it into the beast like a knife, because that's all there is, down here. Me and the beast.
Something happens, then.
Everything rushes up. Myself, the mud, and the leftover bits of people. Everything except the beast. The blood is all around me, floating, flying, and then the ground comes up and pummels me in a blow that should crunch my bones.
But it doesn't.
I hear the thundering of hooves approach. I dash to the side with strength I didn't know I had. I feel a pining, a longing in the back of my mind. The beast beneath the ground. It misses me. It misses its food.
The horse runs by as I hear the most melodious cursing that has ever graced my ears. Missed. Bastard regent didn't expect me to dodge. I lurch to my feet, then dodge somebody who grabs for me. One of my own kind. Is he really, now? Are they my own kind, who let me die in a hole? I skitter away, using strength I didn't know I had, that I wished I had earlier when I was running.
There's a howling that fills the whole world. None of them can move. It's a terrifying sound, it is. The voice of the beast. The beast who wants me. The beast whose strength I'm stealing, I suppose, as I run faster and faster.
The regents can't catch me, try as they might. Their great big stupid horses are terror-bound, foaming at the mouth. The foam is tinged pink. I don't care, really. I'm on my feet to run out of here. I expect it to be pouring rain, I hear so much thunder.
That must be the beast, beating at the ground. Oh dear, is it trapped? Did the poor thing taste freedom, only to have it snatched away? Am I the key to its cell door? Is it angry I am escaping?
Yes, yes, yes. I can feel it growling into my very brain, the brain it tried to eat. It wants me back, is even trying to lure me back, but no thanks. I'm taking off for the hills. Out of the very corner of my vision, I see the regents escape in the other direction. They've pissed off what they were trying to entreat to, it seems. They're giving up on feeding me to it.
I go, then. I clutch at what's left of my mind and sanity and I keep on running. Who knows when my legs will tire?
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