Having long since abandoned his dignity and pride as a priest, Hemlock carried himself like a man possessed deeper into the forest. Figuring the depth of the trees being his only possible solace from the beasts that bent them, Hemlock withheld himself from stopping or looking back for even a moment. The rapid snapping of trees as the beasts got closer to his heels made it abundantly clear in his mind how he would end up if they caught up to him.

Luckily, Hemlock was far more agile for one in his position than was normal. Clergy men were often thought of as stout, portly fellows whose peak of exertion was the door-to-door visits they made in villages once a month. But that wasn’t the case for Hemlock. Plus, he had given himself an edge through the modification of his cassock. Cutting it below the knees in a brief stroke of wisdom had just barely given him the ability to run from the pursuers.

Surely no one from the clergy could blame him for disfiguring his robes. As in such a situation, having an ankle-length garment was only so helpful for running from beasts, so he had long cut it to a more appropriate length.

Hemlock blinked sweat out of his eyes as they shot to his left. There! A place he could escape his pursuers! The beasts who had found his camp at the crack of dawn and had hounded him since.

It was the sloped mouth of a small cave, obfuscated by a thick layer of berry bushes. Hemlock could see past the bushes by just a little bit, allowing him to find the shallow inlet that had just enough space for him to crawl into. He was going to gamble that the aroma of the berries would camouflage him sufficiently from the beasts.

Hemlock counted down in his mind as he ran closer to the cave, all while hearing the warping sound of wood behind him. He was also beginning to feel a warm moisture behind him. The breath of the ravenous beasts, inching closer.

Hughf!

Hemlock jumped to the side, though not before the massive scaled frame of a beast flew past where he had been moments before, gouging a chunk through his leg.

“Agh!”

Hemlock gritted his teeth. His body rolled through the bushes, falling into the cave and slamming into the coarse stone wall at its end. He held his bloodied leg as he looked out of the cave’s mouth, not daring to release his breath. From his position at the bottom of the shallow cave, he could still see the light of the morning, although blocked a bit by the mesh of the berry bush.

A dark shadow suddenly passed over the foliage, darkening the spot where Hemlock laid in pain. Then another, and another. Their long serpent-like forms swam in the air above where the priest had disappeared, searching with their senses for the remnants of their prey. The resonations of wood being crushed and bent accompanied their search.

Keeping his eyes upward in silence, Hemlock tried his best not to move or make a sound. The class of beast known as serpenti, and especially the particular caste that comprised the group hunting Hemlock, were unlike their unevolved ground-based brethren in that their hearing was adept. Relying on this sense even more so than sight, serpenti of all classes were practically blind hunters that struck viciously at anything they could detect.

But their lacking in the use of other senses didn’t make them any less dangerous. Hemlock shook his head as he checked his leg. No, for more than ninety percent of people, facing any caste of serpenti beast would result in certain death. That Hemlock had gotten this far alive was only due to his prior knowledge of this type of beast and some minor experience with beasts in general.

After a while, the shadows overhead finally passed. Hemlock let out a sigh of relief, the beasts had finally given up on him, or had moved on to other prey. The lack of much noise from their departure was due to the fact that they never once touched the ground. The movement of serpenti was usually enabled by their forms gripping and bending around suspended objects. In a forest this meant that they traveled while hovering off the ground by bending themselves around trees.

However, to Hemlock it seemed that his gamble had paid off this time. The smell of the berries had really served to camouflage his scent, allowing him to hide from the poor noses of the serpent beasts while being right underneath them.

Though even with the beasts hunting him gone, he still faced other problems.

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The dark-haired priest looked down past his knee at the veins in his leg that were beginning to turn black. Serpenti were a class of beast that had evolved from snakes after all, and that came hand in hand with many of the traits of a snake. Such as rather expectedly, being venomous.

Hemlock clutched his calf in pain. His leg was now starting to burn from the inside. His expression turned serious.

“All of my medicine was in my bag…shit.”

And being greeted with the eyes of several man-sized snakes looking at him as the first thing he saw that morning, didn’t exactly remind him to grab his bag before he started to run in the other direction.

Hemlock cursed again.

Well, that was that, the young priest supposed. Without any way to make an antidote, or even a suppressing agent, the odds of his survival weren’t looking very probable.

As for cutting off the source of infection? Well, Hemlock doubted if he was even resolute enough to do such a thing. But even if he was, he had no means of cauterizing the wound if he did so, which would just result in an even faster death.

Hemlock sat back and sighed, trying to ignore the pain coming from the spreading venom. He looked around the cave some, wishing to take in the interior of what he supposed would be his final resting place.

“What a complete shitshow. And I don’t even have my supplies, which means I’ve got nothing to do except wait.”

Hemlock shook his head. Actually, wait, didn’t he have something after all? The priest patted the inside of his cassock, before pulling out a thin thread-like stick. He set the stick down beside him and a couple of rocks before clacking them together, setting its tip alight with a spark.

Seeing the tip of the cigarette burning, he held it aloft and took a drag.

Pwah.

Even if it was only a cheap Wheatmark, the companionship of the cigarette was still better than dying alone and cold.

“Hoh. Well I suppose with this kind of cave, I won’t leave the type of skeleton that’s only discovered after a few hundred years. At least that way Old Ors will know to close on my name before he dies, haha.”

Hemlock let out a smokey laugh as he thought of the old priest who no doubt, even at this very moment, was going on and fretting about the future of their small church. His death would hopefully be passed on to the old priest quick enough for the church to make a close on his name, thereby cementing his history in the annals.

As Hemlock watched the smoke from his cigarette drift outward through the cave mouth, he also thought about the others from his church. By now the war shouldn’t have reached them, but he also wasn’t completely sure if that assumption would be accurate. He hadn’t been back in many months, and who knew what was going on lately? With the way the tensions have been rising for the past couple of years, even the situation in the rural areas of Mont Ryoux was unpredictable with the drafts and tithes extracted for war.

“Though I wish I could have spoken to Delphane one last time.”

Hemlock thought to himself as his cigarette started to reach the end of its length. He began to close his eyes.

“...Smart kid.”

…

Rustle. Creeaaak.

After a while, Hemlock’s eyes shot open. Immediately, he was assaulted by an omnipresent sense of pain throughout his body. He wasn’t sure how long he had slept for, but the venom had spread considerably, rendering him immobile. Out of the corner of his vision he could see up to his chest had spiderwebs of black veins running across it.

Crack. Woosh.

Overhead, an echo of tearing wood and fiber called back his attention. Hemlock looked above, through his blurry vision he could barely make out the figure of a person casting aside the berry bush that had covered the cave entrance.

Wait, was that a person? The sunlight burned Hemlock’s eyes that were dilated from the venom. It was hard to make out just what was entering the cave where he was, but he hoped they were a rescuer.

“H-hello? Fellow? Are you h-here to help, or harm?”

Without the means to even cover his eyes from the assaulting sunlight, Hemlock could only do his best to sound sophisticated with his eyes closed. If they were friendly, he didn’t want to immediately put himself in a lower position. And if they were hostile…well, he wouldn’t be able to do anything anyway.

But the figure’s reply was not as he expected. As the sound of their steps grew closer, they paused to speak.

Their voice was dissonant and inhumane, yet not aggressive or malevolent. It nearly made Hemlock believe it was a child who had learned to speak from beasts.

“Fellow…Oooh? No! Muan is only Muan!”