The young boy awoke to a horrific sight. The grass was stained with red from the blood of dead and mutilated bodies. Flowing from wounds and severed body parts, the unsightly fluid turned the dirt to mud and the mud to crimson.
Where was he? He could not remember. Perhaps someone else had survived the awful attack and could tell him. He arose and searched the area for survivors. Nothing. All were dead. It suddenly dawned on the boy, he had no idea who he was.
What was his name? Did he have one? Did any of these people have a name? It made him confused and rather frightened. He searched frantically for information. Who were these people? Why were they dead? He at least could recognize that they had been killed, and had not always been that way. He was able to identify the different genders, ages, races… so why was he unable to identify himself? He cried out in frustration, suddenly realizing he didn’t know what to say. How did these people communicate? He couldn’t remember! The young boy collapsed to his knees, sobbing and trembling.
When he opened his eyes again, his eyes caught sight of a strange item before him. It had a body made of wood (which he knew trees were made of), and thin strands of metal (which he knew the surrounding blades were fashioned out of) stretched across it. He picked it up and began to toy with it, running his fingers up and down the strings at different rhythms. The sound it made was rather soothing. The boy sat in the clearing for some time, attempting to improve the sound of the strange device. Eventually, he stood up and began to walk through the woods, carrying the odd contraption with him. Something slid off the long neck of the stringed object. The child picked it up. It was a piece of cloth on a string with some writing on it. Without thinking, the boy put the string around his neck and continued on his quest for others like him.
The skies overhead changed from light to dark. The air changed from warm to cold. The clouds disappeared, reappeared, rained, stormed and disappeared again. The cycles repeated themselves over and over, again and again and again. The boy grew larger, learning the ways of survival in the dangerous wilderness quickly. He ate small animals and berries, slept only when he could no longer keep his eyes open, continually wandered, never finding another like him.
One cold, misty morning, the child was sitting, strumming the now extremely rusty strands of metal on his wooden instrument, when he heard an odd rustling in the distance. He tried to ignore it at first, but the noise grew louder and louder until, out of the fog, emerged an old, robed man with a long, white beard.
The boy was in shock, for he had not seen another like him since the day he awoke in the clearing. The man began to speak, but the child had no idea what he was saying. After all, he had never heard those words before. There was a pause. Suddenly, a look of realization crept over the old man’s face. He held out his hand and said something in a welcoming tone. The boy understood that the man was asking him to follow. He arose, carrying his instrument under his arm. The old man eyed the item but said nothing.
They walked for some time, eventually arriving at a large shelter made of trees with smoke rising out of the top. The man pulled back a flat piece of wood that was covering the entrance and disappeared inside. The boy followed suit, and stepped into the warmth of the large structure.
The man turned and smiled, asking a question with gestures that implied he wanted to know what the boy was called. The boy looked down at the piece of cloth hanging from his neck. The man walked over and read what was written on the cloth. The next thing out of the man’s mouth was the first thing that registered with the boy.
“Derrick.” The man said. That was it, Derrick. The boy’s name was now Derrick.
Over time, the man taught Derrick many things. He learned how to write, read, speak, cook, groom himself, and most importantly, tune the now re-strung instrument he had learned was called a “lute.”
The old man, Vorados, was an apothecary, making potions and elixirs to serve the people of the nearby town, Old Brick. Derrick, now well nourished and extremely proficient at both poetry and playing his lute, was sent into Old Brick by Vorados to earn money for the nearing food harvest.
In no time at all, Derrick’s poetic prose and enchanting melodies emptied the townspeople’s pockets and won the hearts of many a young lady. Derrick learned the ways of love, lust and entertainment quickly. Though the boy had started off shy, he soon became one of the most social people in the town.
One thing made Derrick uncomfortable around many of the villagers, however, and that was the strange birthmarks across his abdomen, legs and neck. Save for a few lasses that had seen him nude and didn’t inquire about them, Derrick’s birthmarks had made him very self conscious. He kept his hair long in order to conceal the marks on his neck, and the rest was covered by his clothes. He had read of the Altriks, the nearly extinct warrior people of Altro, who were described as having similar birthmarks to his, but also glowing eyes. Derrick hoped it was a bizarre coincidence, as his eyes did not glow and the Altriks were a very rare race. But it gnawed at the back of his mind like a sewer rat. What if he was one of the monsters from the Learning Texts?
One day, some shady individuals ventured into town. These figures were dressed in ragged, brown leather and were not well groomed. The way they stared at Derrick’s money made him uncomfortable. However, they did not do anything to him, so he did nothing to them.
That night, on the other hand, was more eventful.
On the way home, Derrick could feel a cold, slimy feeling in his gut. He couldn’t stop thinking about the men staring at his money. Something just wasn’t right. He did his best to shrug it off, but the feeling remained.
Late that night Derrick awoke from his less than restful sleep by a noise from down below. He jumped to his feet and his hair stood on end as an eerily familiar smell entered his nostrils. It was the smell of death.
He rushed downstairs. The sight before him was horrific and unforgettable. Vorados lay face down in a pool of shining crimson. Around him were the three unkempt figures he had seen eyeing his earnings. Derrick suddenly filled with burning rage, and the room became quickly illuminated. The men turned as though they had seen something out of the corner of their eye. When they saw Derrick, panic washed over their faces, and they immediately grabbed their weapons.
The three men rushed at Derrick.
Instinct took over. He lunged forward, ducking under the middle one’s legs. He rose behind him, grabbing his arms and pulling them back, thus removing the man from control. Out of panic, the two men unintentionally swung at their companion in the dark. The thief took an axe to the chest and a mace to the side of his head. His final screams terrified the remaining two even further; Derrick could sense it. Unable to make out Derrick’s full body movements, they began to swing wildly in every direction. Derrick grabbed their fallen comrade’s short sword and rose up, making eye contact with the axe wielder. For one moment, he saw true mortal terror in the thief’s eyes, before pinning him to the ground by shoving the sword through his throat. Without missing a beat, he grabbed the second corpse’s axe and promptly cut off the last man’s lower leg. The man fell to the floor in sheer agony. His scream both filled Derrick with euphoria and chilled him to the bone. The man swung at Derrick in wild terror, which was met with a swift severing of the hand. Derrick stood over the bloody, whimpering intruder for a moment, before ending his cries of pain and fear by slamming the axe’s blade into the frightened creature’s face.
The young man turned to look at his surrogate father’s corpse. In the pool of blood, he caught his own reflection. White light was pouring out of his eyes, illuminating the blood in his hair and on his face. Derrick collapsed to his knees. He was an Altrik after all.
He looked at himself, then at the corpses on the floor, and began to weep.
When morning came, the burning rage had subsided, but the dark thoughts and feelings had not. In a trance, he took Vorados’ walking staff and began to sharpen both ends into deadly tips. He knew from reading in the Learning Texts that the Altriks’ weapon of choice was a sharpened staff. Now he had his own.
Derrick grabbed his lute, his staff and all the money he could carry, and set off into the wilderness once more. He stopped and looked back at the cottage outside the town where his life had been, then turned away. He walked into the unknown, never again turning to look at his old home. He knew not where he was going, nor what he would do when he got there, but he did know that his time in the village of Old Brick had most certainly reached its end.
No comments:
Post a Comment