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Through the fields.
Through the fields.
The wind blows, no natural wind, the echoing of carrion crows.
Circling above, no end to the cycle.
No end to the fields.
Marisa whined as she continued to trudge through the field. The initial frustration of the grass ocean brushing up to her knees had long since passed, so long that she was sure they would be better measured in days than just mere hours. The sun however, had not moved since it settled halfway over the horizon, casting the land in long shadows and a melancholy burnt orange.
Nestled down just behind the peaks, like a half-lidded eye.
She couldn’t find the armour she had stripped off to make walking easier, nor the circle of swords her companions had created as a waypoint, nor the pool of water she had supped on to sate her thirst. She couldn’t find anything beyond the grass and wheat.
Without the water, she dried up. Her lips cracked, her shoulders slouched with each step, bringing her closer and closer to the languid, fearful fall to exhaustion. Each breath hurt to take in and beneath the sun, she felt like she was being strangled.
A noose, woven of inevitability.
Fuck.
Surely, she had been walking in a straight line all this time, but the mountains in the distance still hadn’t gotten any closer. The earth beneath her was still dry, and her boots were now caked in dirt. Without her armour, she could every blade of grass brush and scratch against her calves, only furthering her irritation. Had she the energy to even move her face, Marisa would have glowered down at the dry, prickly flora. As it was however, all she had the energy to do was to press on, slowly, in the hope that she would eventually reach the edge of this accursed field.
Why did the commander send us here? Why? There’s nothing here. There’s no tactical advantage to having this location, no towns or villages around for leagues.
She looked up, squinting into the half-light and the circling flock.
Nothing here at all, but the crows, and the grass.
She looked behind her, and she could just make out the wall of wheat that the rest of her cohort had disappeared into. It shouldn’t have been as close as it was, but she failed to notice it in her current, dredged state. At first it had been half of the entire group, within the first few hours of them being lost and trying to find their bearings. Then, one by one, they had succumbed to some a fungal-insectoid madness, screaming and crawling through the tall grass to ensure their passage to the wheat. After the first had fought hard enough to twist their own knee out of its socket, the group had relented and let those who fell to it go on their own.
She didn’t even look as the last ones were seduced by its curious hunger, leaving them to whatever verdict the field decided for them.
Marisa was the only one left now, she was determined not to fall to their fate, she would find her way out of the fields. Even as her feet bled into her boots and her eyes began to glaze over, she wouldn’t give in.
But the grass suddenly looked soft, and she was so tired, so exhausted. A short rest couldn’t hurt. The world wasn’t going anywhere.
Marisa couldn’t even feel her last breaths as she lay down, closing her eyes and slipping into dreamless sleep.
Minutes?
Hours?
Days?
At least it was a starless dark now, at least the sun had moved with the pendulum.
Marisa couldn’t tell how long she had been asleep for. She woke with a dull headache and pain behind her eyes, her limbs aching thanks to the graceless position she had slept in. It felt like she had been cut off halfway through her rest, but the inviting comfort of the grass had somehow disappeared and all she wanted to do was stand up to get away from its scratching embrace. A sharp jolt of pain hit her as she tried to rise, from the inside of her left leg. It took her a moment to fully understand what she was seeing as she lifted the limb from the grass, in the inky black of night.
Once she did however, she screamed.
Wrapped around her leg, halfway up the calf, was the biggest centipede she had ever seen, dwarfing even the largest native to her homeland. It was black and twisted, bearing flecks of green and manic human eyes upon each segment. Every single orb was locked onto her, staring, watching. The creature – for it was beyond even being called a mere insect – had bored and burrowed itself into her flesh, the upper half of its coil slipping into a gaping wound it had dug out in her skin.
She could even see it bulging out from beneath her body, squirming and finding its way to its next meal.
It was flanked by ants and locusts and all other manner of exoskeletal swarm, having come to sup parasitically on the leftovers. They crawled about in an apparent unison, nevertheless chaotic on their direction, but unified in their feasting motive. Below the knee was a living tapestry of individual critters, feeding on her misfortune, growing fat on her pain.
Marisa screamed again, slashing daggers against her parched, cracked throat. Immediately she reached to try to remove anything she could, slapping and swatting at her skin. The lesser of the swarm were dissuaded and much was removed, though not without returning in fervor with vitriolic buzzing and the ensemble clicking of their bodies. She tried instead to remove the central culprit, grasping with her fingertips onto the eye-laden centipede’s body and pulling. New sparks of pain shot through her leg as she realized its claws were tightly hooked into her skin.
She pulled harder, and her fear gave her strength enough to dislodge the creature from her body, taking ribbons of her skin with it. As she tried to pull it from inside the flesh-burrow in her calf however, it snapped at the segment, and the upper half slithered deeper into her skin, beyond reach.
She howled now, feeling it worm its way around her muscle, tearing sinew and vessels and scaping against the bone.
But the swarm was returning, collective consciousness crawling up her toes and heel, and she had to run from it.
Marisa lifted herself up and ran blindly, not even cognizant enough to think if she had stayed true to her prior path or if she was going to get further lost in the field. Each step brought a new wave of twisting, sharp pain as the creature within her leg clawed tightly for grip, but she kept running. She looked up at the night sky, hoping to find some direction in the celestial bodies, hoping to find some way.
There were however, no stars, nor the moon. Nothing to guide her, just a sea of infinite black.
Then it moved. Only for a brief moment, and she might not have even yet noticed it in her state, but a fragment of the sky’s painting seemed to shift out of place, breaking the mold that the rest of the void conformed to. Then again, and again, and then in a continuous, circling cycle that was as though the black was cannibalizing itself, drawing its own medium into a devouring cosmic typhoon.
A feather fell in her path, cold and lifeless, and Marisa realized with mounting dread that it was all wrong. The sun hadn’t truly moved, night hadn’t come, time was just as still as it had been for the past many days since she had gotten lost in the fields.
The sky itself, the vortex flock of crows grand enough to consume the world above, descended upon her, and she ran.
The cawing silenced everything else. The pain in her leg, the pounding of her feet, her heavy and uneven breathing, the fear binding her chest. Even her own heartbeat was eclipsed by the cacophony.
There was no cover to hide under in the expanse, no rocks or grass tall enough to save her, only the wall of wheat her cohort had disappeared into. So too she made for it, howling with every step as the flock clawed and pecked and gouged at her body, yielding chunks of hair and skin, some of them managing to find hold with their talons, and dig their dead beaks into her flesh.
She dove unevenly into the brown stalks, scraping her shoulder down as she landed. Her hands reached up to claw away at her head and torso, and she only discovered then that the crows had relented now that she was in the wheat. She shivered and shook herself, bleeding so much that she couldn’t tell which wounds were which. Everything hurt, and she was terrified.
The crows still circled above, blotting out the sky. The half-centipede in her calf still moved, hollowing out her leg from the inside out as it grew fat. Her voice was gone, the screaming she had partaken in robbed her of her sound. Marisa could barely breathe as it was, barely think.
She started to walk again, as if that was the only thing that still made sense. She stood and with her right leg, took a step forward into nothingness, as the ground opened up beneath her and snatched it away. The soil grew teeth from the stones beneath it, and in a swift motion bit off her right leg below the thigh, sending her tumbling to the ground as it closed up just as quickly.
She screamed a silent cry, terror gripping her heart. It felt like her skin was filled with hundreds of tiny, buzzing flies. It felt like every bone and fiber in her body wanted to separate and run away, all in different directions.
Yet she was paralyzed, and all she could do was let the fear consume her.
The earth rolled and twisted, giving way to peeking eyes with the same tone and guard as those upon the centipede. They stretched unnaturally, the stalks of wheat swaying back and forth as they blinked, altogether too living, staring up at their prey.
Marisa’s throat closed as she heard a sound approach her. A cracking, rickety sound. The wheat parted, and she saw it.
A figure too tall to be human, too thin. A vague tattered softness to the silhouette, wrapped and trailing like a great cloak, marred by the splintered shapes of their limbs. A crooked, unwieldy scythe dragged blade-down in the dirt behind each haphazard step. Stitched-together burlap bound his form, wrapped around with rope and chains and the bones of crows. At the lower hem there appeared to be a skirted belt made from something she couldn’t quite make out at first, only realizing as the figure drew closer that they were a collection of dismembered arms and legs.
Some of them were a lot smaller than the others.
Beneath the burlap were eyes, eyes too many and too strangely placed. While those of the earth stared with solemnness and purpose, the eyes beneath the scarecrow’s skin were manic and unfocused. Wild. Vicious. Hungry.
As it came close to Marisa it bowed down, crawling on an uneven number of limbs that sprouted without any sense of coherency. It was slow, almost like a spider, as it neared. It presented its head to her, crowned by a high collar of straw. It was a mockery of a human, stitched part by part into one another with dried skin and filthy cloth.
It opened its mouth, no bones or joints to stop it from opening into obtuse angles, and stared at Marisa. She could not see the thing that was looking so intently at her, she could not see anything but the expanding, pervasive darkness in its gullet, surely staring out at her.
Nor did she see whatever force pulled her in as the monster swallowed her whole.
Through the fields.
Through the fields.
The crows are singing, scratching the air.
The crows herald the harbinger.
And then there was silence.