The Creatures of Ellieu Forest, Part 5
April 14th 2011 00:02
"Men," he yelled at the group. "We are here today not to fight, not to arrest. We are here as our orders dictated to take down this forest, and that is what we are to do. I know that you are scared, but fear blocks out progress and learning. You have nothing to fear, as we have no enemy." From the side, he heard a snicker from the illustrious right hand man. "Think of this: if we do not make it out, then we will be free from the tyranny of the Emperor King, and will be able to live the lives that want to." The snickering stopped, and had he not been closer to the tree line, Dabba would have attacked him. "So, let us press forward and find what sort of menace live in the trees." He didn't believe a phrase of the battle cry, and neither did any of the men from what he could tell.
One step into the forest took the daylight away, and enshrouded him in darkness. Men ran away screaming from this forest. He could feel it in his heart, but it wasn't as scary as what he thought. It was an unseen force, judging him, accounting him for all the evil he had done in his life. In the back, he heard a few of his men scream madly. Truly, it wasn't as bad as that. He tried to direct his thought away from all the poor souls that he had killed. He pulled away from all the times he hit his father. He pulled into last night, and the warmth of the bed. The warmth of the bed that wasn't his, the woman he held in his arms that belonged to many other men. He stopped. Even the thought of her made him cringe. How dare he fall in love you could only pay for? Was she truly different from the rest of the women in the tavern?
He pressed forward into the darkness. The trees were close together, close enough that you could easily jump from one limb to the other. Close enough that if you were to veer left or right, you would loose your way. They were ancient beings, taking care of their wood. Then, his thoughts went back to before, the first time he met her. He thought of how beautiful she was, how beautiful and unassuming her grin was. He remembered her laugh, and at that laugh, the darkness that surrounded him seemed to disperse a little. Then, it encroached again, and he pressed on.
He couldn't feel his men behind him, and doubted that they were even there. He must have been 100 yards into the forest, but it seemed like 500 miles away from anything. There was no sound, not even the vegetation crunched beneath his feet. In the distance, he thought he heard some of his men yelling and screaming, but something wouldn't let him turn around. It was onward and forward, no turning back now.
Then, a new tactic... forget. Something happened that he needed to remember. Something that happened last night. Something... He knew it was there. He could feel it struggling to break free from behind a wall of forgetfulness. He thought hard, his training taking into effect, and then it happened. He remembered, but it wasn't correct. He remembered Lucy, only she wasn't Lucy. She was a faceless, nameless woman he spoke to about something, something about getting someone out. And, there was Dabba, also faceless, walking out of her room. Bits and pieces of memory were forced from his mind, and he couldn't control it. He stopped for a moment, and nothing was behind him, at least nothing he could hear. Going against what his training demanded, he turned around to see no one.
None of them were there, and he was all alone, in Ellieu Forest. Taking a quick breath, he turned around again, and proceeded forward. Whatever tried to get him out might have succeeded, had it not been for his persistence.
"Why are you here," an unseen voice echoed in the silence. "You are one of them."
He tried to speak, to tell the voice why he was there, but nothing came out.
"Your Emperor King had sent many in here before you, all of them driven man. But not you. What makes you so special?"
He felt sharp pins digging around his mind, trying to access something that wasn't there, and they continued to dig in deeper and deeper, with the silence around him. Had he a voice, he would have cried out in pain. Had he been able to move, he would have doubled over like that of a baby newly born onto the ground. But all he could do was stand and stare straight forward, listening to a voice that might have only been in his head.
"I don't understand you, man, why you should want to destroy my forest," the voice continued. The fluctuations could have been one or many, man or woman, young or old. Then, the stinging stopped, and he was able to move again. Grabbing his head, and screaming out in pain, he fell to the ground. This was the end.
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