The air turns in a soft whirlwind around the flame. The sticks kick over and the embers roast and cool gently into the the branches above. I keep much to myself. I let the three hunters opposite me pass the story between themselves to shake the silence. I had walked through the thickets for days now. For how long or where I was now I was unsure. There were times I lumbered in the dusk before blinking my eyes and reappearing in the dawn. I was losing hours at a time to the rot. Meaningless to track the time, all I can say is somewhere in the void, there was a glow. I walked toward it, my sword as a cane, to a fire in the clearing. The campfire was long in my watch before I looked away, to notice three men that sat still in my presence. They were shocking to behold, I must admit, as stone-like as they were. I begged their pardon that I may join them, if not for warmth of fire then warmth of companionship. They didn't seem odd to the request and obliged heartily. They apologized to me for not having the manners to offer food or drink as an offering. They claimed to be hunters and unsuccessful ones at that. Their belongings lay matted in the dirt beneath them. In the dark they seemed raised on thrones. I speckled questions between their tales, never listening to their replies, but to fill the absence of noise in the forest. The more I inquired into their hunt the more they dotted their eyes to one another. The reflection of the fire moving with their glares. So I stopped. I let them carry on with their tall tales of parties and women and war. And I pretended to listen and laugh along.
I awoke when the sun stretched her fingers through the trees, and felt the hot breath of dawn. The hunters were gone, their belongings absent but for the footprints they left in the soil. My sword was several feet from me, perhaps feeling the weight before realizing it was too heavy to steal and I was too worthless to kill. I loosed myself from the dirt, carried my companion, and continued toward the sun. At the time the day had passed me overhead and heated my back, I claimed for rest against the bark. I smelled the burning pitch before I saw the soft silk of smoke lingering over the forest floor. I brought myself on even ground with the horizon, my sword as a crutch. The walk wasn't long before finding the source in a decline in the ground.
The forest floor took a sharp dive several meters down before relaxing into even ground again. In the middle of this new land, the vines conquering their way up the crater of the scarred earth, was a shell of clay. Round, no larger than a hovel, and smoke stack beaming with putrid air. A hut in the middle of nothing, with one circular window staring up at me. When my focus glared into the dark insides of the forest home through the window, I gleamed a shade of black, changing colors from within. Someone had shifted their weight. Not a moment later, a robed figure slid to the outside and around the back of their home. My curiosity fueled my feet to tread around the rim of the small cliff, my eyes focused on the round home in the center of the precipice. The cliff-face sloped slowly downwards, the edges on each side creating a raised horseshoe shape with the ends sunk into level ground. As I neared flat ground I could see the other side of the home where the robed figure was... and noticed I was alone.
While I stared at the nothingness, I noticed a second window. Yet again the shades changed but this time in opposite contrast. The shade turned dark before a bolt lodged itself near my collar, just beside my windpipe. I dropped into the vines that littered the forest floor, down among the tar smoke. Were there two people leading me to a trap? Or only one? If there was only one person, how did they get back inside their hovel if I had eyes on the only door? No, there must be two. My eyes watered from the sting in the air and the sting in my chest. Through the decomposing fog I saw the door open again and the same hooded figure as before step through. They brandished a dagger like a badge and stepped cautiously through the weeds. How did they appear back inside the hovel? What did I follow? An apparition? I worried these meaningless thoughts as death grew near. Each breath flexed my throat and cut against the edges of the bolt. I managed to gasp a swear at the figure before they knelt. They answered back in kind.
"Son of Lilith," she said, "hunting me will lead to nothing but corpses. You want to sport my head like a trophy, and I'll use yours to feed the flies."
Half-aggravated by her deduction at who I was supposed to be, my reply was both explanation and insult to her demeanor. "I'm a king."
She quickly let down the knife and let up my head, pulling the bolt from my neck roughly. The shock nearly hastened my life. "What did you say?"
I gasped for anything I could breathe that wasn't tar smoke. But she waited while I could explain. Not in finest detail, but enough to not stutter her belief. I tied together all my tales by saying "And so we met. You greeted a king with an act of treason. Needless to say, a spot of wine and a fur to lay would not be an unjust start to an apology."
There was no fur, only a bed of sewn straw. And there was no wine, but the ale did its job well enough for her to close my wound with hot pitch and tell me of her woes.
"I'm a witch, so they say, and nothing more can be said to change a peoples' minds. I'm unwed, poor, and speak not for a belief in God."
I shook with pain from the scalding. "What is this liquid pestilence?"
"It can serve as many things. Mostly I use it to fix any damages that befall my home in the storms. And apparently it can work for any man."
"You weren't sure?'
"The smell keeps others away, let's them not discover me while they believe they've loomed into a mass grave, unmasked by landslides." She dipped her blade into a boiling pot of tar, sliding the excess back into the brew with the edge of her knife. I could not brace myself for the heat, as much as each time I think I could.
Between chattering teeth I spoke. "What were the charges? Why here?" My interest waned from the moment she first spoke, but I had to keep my mind occupied as she pressed the side of her blade against the wound to flatten the tar and declined my tolerance for pain.
"I moved away from Southern lands. Illness took my family. The towns here had heard word of the sickness and granted no access past their gates. I made this hut out here for shelter. Rudimentary at first, its walls became thicker and the outside smoother. I stole and continue to do so from the town that left me to die. As new sicknesses spread, they remember that I was the last to survive the old ones. To them it counts for nothing that I'm the only one to not live cramped amongst their filth and livestock. They only see the witch from the wood." And what to do with the Son of Lilith? "He's become a self-titled judge as the builders of law die from plague or The Son's own assassinations. Now that the law belongs to him, to be built in his image. He's brought back the old ways; with magic beliefs and bounties on undesirables."
"Being far from civilities shouldn't make you immune to illness. Death will catch up to you."
She walked away from the bed and took with her all her devil's tools. "I doubt that. I've stayed in one spot for so long waiting for so long I've grown to believe that Death doesn't exist."
* * *
I could've slept a season, had it not been for the pitch smoke setting fire to my lungs. The cries of violence was a simple thing to slumber through, but the stink and taste of the fog filling the small hut was too vile for my liking. I awoke to the window from which I was shot from staring darkness back to me. I twisted my body 'round once I heard a repeated shout, realizing it wasn't from a dream. The way I rolled my shoulder did something to my forgotten wound that shocked my entire body. I stayed close to the cold ground once I recuperated there, until I realized the fog coming from the kiln was heavy and sinking fast to where I was.
I scrambled to the door but found it fastened shut. The round window above the bed was too small to climb through, as was the other, and offered no support to my shrinking lungs. I could only see hints of the turmoil outside, but cared not for the resolution. I had to leave. I covered the smogging kiln with random bits of furniture, eventually knocking it and the vile liquid over. Whatever good it did at this point mattered not. The hut was now a shade of black an arm's-length around me. I ran at the door, trying to bust it down, and saw what jammed my exit was the body of a man on the other side, wildly stabbed, chest left open. I tried to muscle my way an opening, but the smoke had drowned me for too long, left me weak. This felt an unfitting end, if this was a way to die.
Between the yells, I heard a trickle from the other end of the hut. The spilled kiln was leaking its contents under a clothing chest and down some drop. I shoved my way across this wretched home and tossed the chest to the side, finding it empty and weightless. A hole was dug underneath, large enough for a person to crawl through. The kiln spilt its contents down the hole and left itself in the way of my escape. I found an exit, and the Lord was testing my will. I pushed myself down the slope where the fog was thickest. The gunk that was brewing was left in a pool on the bottom of the hole before curving upward again to the outside. I slid my body into the bile of this dirt stomach, scalding my skin with the tar. I raised up, out of a false ground, covered with vines and bits of wood, on the outside of the hut, the opposite side with the door. Now I knew how she disappeared to arrive back inside her home. I exited her escape hatch and shook with wild breaths.
The cold air steamed from my body. Patches of tar spotted my skin and matted my scalp. My eyes watered away the blindness as I drew another breath and stared at the moon peeping from above the wooded canopy of branches. My eyes drew downward, led by a straight line that cradled gently. It was a rope. And leading at the end was the witch, kicking for leverage. Two spectators watched. I stood waist-height in the hole, my tongue leading my mind. "Hey!" I shouted for attention. My lungs as black as they were, the word came out more as a guttural yell. They turned around and watched as I picked myself from the hole, the tar still covering my flesh and the steam trailing. I marched towards them.
Their eyes grew wide and the width of their legs further apart as they prepared to fight or flee this monster. One made some primal sound of surprise. The other readied the crossbow already in his hand and the knife in his belt, unsure of how to handle such a situation. I lumbered forward, grunting with dead breaths and shrunken lungs, realizing I'd forgotten my sword inside. My hands can do plenty. The hunters stagger in their steps, not sure what to make of me. The moonlight serves as the only light to the garden floor. Through the slivers of light they see the towering golem march before them. The one with but a sword steps to the side of his friend, who through his courage, raises a bolt to me, fires, and misses. The same man, an animal afraid, cries out in a broken yell and raises his dagger above his head. My hands go out to where I think he'll strike-- down towards my heart-- before I feel the blade's edge cut and stick to my throat. The tar had hardened thick against my skin. Though I feel the cut, the knife refuses to slide away back into the hunter's hand. He pulls away shocked by the way his knife has absorbed to my skin. I jut the blade off my neck myself. I barely bleed but they know not what they really see. "Swing for its head!" the bowman calls as he steps back to load another bolt.
It was the turn of the other hunter, his eyes glinting with fear and apprehension. He yelled nonsense to boost his courage, his knees stuttering to launch his body forward. Nothing in his mind worked in tandem. By the time he ran up to me it was then that he realized he hadn't cocked his sword to strike. He stopped a few steps away before drawing his sword back behind his shoulder like a delinquent about to bat a window. I reach out and plant my left hand on his face, gripping his skull at arm's length like you would a child. The knife I'd held onto was returned, further than his throat, 'til I felt the point click against the vertebrae. I felt tears warm my palm before I dropped him, just as the other hunter raised his crossbow before me.
He knew this was his last chance to slow me, as did I. He released his held breath and the night listened just to him. I held my own, as did the trees, as did the hung witch whose shoes stopped tapping against the trunk. The fire spread through the witch's hovel, the heat and smoke building, trapped. The clay structure could deal with the tensity no more. The roof caved with a powerful sound, startling both the hunter and myself. While he's distracted, mine own eyes never leave his. I jump closer to him before he realizes his mistake, my hands already wrestling the crossbow from his arms. His grip tightens as the bolt is released. He yelps and shoves me away before stumbling away to the woods. I see the bolt sticking through his side before he ducks behind a trunk for rest. I use this time to quickly drag the blade from the other hinter's neck to saw away the rope that hangs my benefactor.
They tell you tales of witches floating about the ground. Their toenails graze the floor and their feet tap against the stairs on their way to the children's bedroom. This witch didn't float. Her body thudded to the dirt, bouncing against the roots roughly. I could still hear the panicked breaths of the hunter not far from us. As I picked the witch up over my shoulder, I could hear his breathing becoming sharper, ending in groans. Familiar, I thought, He's attempting to loose the bolt from his side. I've heard it from the wounded before. If he were wise, he'd leave it where it lay. That bolt is the only thing to keep him from death.
Flame struck through the witch's den, crumbling her home and history. Smoke funneled through the trap door thicker than clay. I huddled with the witch's body against the cliff-side, behind the fire. A wisp of the putrid smoke swept across us. Strong in scent, the tar-smoke must have pulled the witch from Hell, for she sputtered a breath before rolling away from me to her side, falling away to dream. The flames and smoke were thick enough for me to conceal myself. I knew that if the huntsman was back on his bloodpath, he'd have to get fairly close to volley his shot. My blade was still licked by flame inside the chaos, nowhere to be seen. My hands were my only weapon. So we're even.
* * *
The flame cooled away with the morning sun. The smoke stopped stinging the senses long ago. And the witch twisted her limbs throughout the night in her rest, letting me know she lived. At some point while the stars were overhead, the hunter quieted his pleas. Perhaps he rested. Perhaps he died. If not, I was to make it so. I got bored in my complacency, picking my second skin of tar clean from my flesh. I sifted the soot and ash, finding my sword once the Hellpit had cooled. I waited for no fair fight. I planned to take the huntsman's head for companionship until I find the nearest pile of shit to allow him final rest.
When I treaded to the trunk that should've hid my newfound friend, I found nothing but a dried spot of blood. No bolt lay on the vines. He was wise enough not to unsheathe it, was he? No blood to track as well. But the bushes were stomped in the direction of the hills. However, I cared not to track vermin over hills and fields. I am no huntsman. With one look over my shoulder I saw the witch, pretending to sleep, but her heaving shoulders gave her away. And so with only my sword to follow, I walked again toward the sun. Borne from the ash, smoke, and earth I tread. Looking for a God to stop me.
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