exile i

This is just a small part, I'll probably post more tomorrow.


I suppose it all started around my fifteenth birthday.
         See, it began as a dream. Well, dreams. No, not dreams. Nightmares. Disgusting, frightening, perverted nightmares. Every day I woke up screaming. Crying. Trembling, uncontrollably. The thing I saw... oh, the things I saw. Children, children. Their skin was ghostly white, and their eyes were filled with black. Their smiles were disturbing and thoughtful, stretching over gritted teeth. Their nails were long, dirty, and sharp. Their breath came in quick, labored gusts. Their fingers curled into their palms and violent, hungry noises rose from their throats. Their limbs were caked with dried blood, their clothes were tattered and torn and black. Sweat glued greasy hair to their pale, dirty foreheads.
         There were four of them then, two male, two female. One of the females stood before the rest of them.
         I hid behind a thick tree, grabbing at the bark. The only noises I heard were their snarls and the rapid beating of my own heart inside my ears. Their eyes scanned the surrounding vegetation, searching for something, something living that they smelled, I assumed. The beat of the heart I knew they could hear, but my feet were glued to the dirt beneath my toes, my nails would not extricate themselves from that tree even under my command. Their nostrils flared. The female at the head of the group turned to the left. To the right. She finally dropped into a crouched position, hands grabbing the dirt in front of her toes, showing no mercy to the critters that squirmed beneath her grasp. Her eyebrows knitted together in a frustrated way before she began moving around on her knees like a rabid animal. The other children stared naturally ahead, their lips moving quickly, speaking words unheard.
         She stopped moving then. She stood up on her toes, posture perfect, aside from her neck, which hung limply against the skin beneath her collar bone. She turned on her toes, slowly. She stopped turning when her eyes found the tree behind which I stood. I whimpered a little, the grasp I had on the tree loosening, my fingers trembling. A cold sweat broke out over my body, and I did something reckless then, idiotic. My body took control over my mind, leaving me even more helpless, even more scared than I had previously felt. I was running. I was running faster than I ever had remembered.  The ground flew from beneath the soles of my bare feet. I was aware of the violent cries that accompanied the sound of the feet pounding the ground behind me. They rang inside my head, picking carefully at whatever sanity was left in my mind. I knew they would be able to keep up with my pace, despite the speed that cause the greenery to divide around my in dizzying blurs. With every breath came a piercing pain. And I flew. But I was not naive. I knew that they were simply toying with me, enjoying the thrill of the hunt, laughing at the pathetic attempt that I, the prey, made at escaping the grasp that they had on my sanity, my heart, my soul itself. 
         I felt eyes on me. They engraved holes into my skull, bored into my very being, tickled the flesh on the back of my neck. Despite this, I would not slow. My tongue pressed dryly against the roof of my mouth. I was struggling to avoid the trees that slowly turned into shades of grays and purples and blues with the pursuit of the night. I then realized something. I was going to die. The realization came with the salty flavor of blood onto my tongue. I was afraid. Terrified. My body gave my mind the power it struggled to withhold, the power that I wish my body still possessed when I then stopped running and instead began sobbing uncontrollably, falling to my knees, giving up. I waited for it, my inevitable death. I felt bony fingers grasp my shoulders and gasped involuntarily. Fear chilled the layer of sweat that encased my body. I shivered. I felt a tingling at the base of my spine. My fingers reached up and wiped away a warm tear from my otherwise cold cheek. I looked down at my fingers then. T he tears there were tinged with blood. This, for some reason I can not understand, did not phase me. Nothing did, at that point, really. Not the clouds that began to conceal the moon, the stars, emphasize the coming darkness. Not the silence that now pounded against my eardrums.