It was the night of the next day. The night was young and we were on our way. It only took a matter of thirty minutes or so before we passed by the edge of the forest that sat in front of the Carcernin Mountains. The ground that was once greenly vegatative, quickly thinned out and gave way to an earthy texture. Where there were once trees now stood free and empty space. And because of that space, the constant, mysterious light from the forest began to fade away, leaving us completely when he crossed the threshold of the trees and the open air of the mountains.
Looking up, I saw that the sky was clear in some areas, but cloudy in others. The constellations that swirled around the nighttime sky, along with the moon, were partially obscured, only allowing a fraction of light to find its way down to the surface. It was at times like that that I wished for the day. That way the path in front of me would be more clear, making it so I wouldn’t have to make assumptions and try to guess my way towards where I was heading. However, in retrospect, perhaps it was better that I wasn’t able to see the full extent of the twisted mountains that were in front me—that would’ve certainly reawakened something in me.
With everything that I was seeing with my eyes, the one thing that I noticed the most was the silence. Only after the forest’s song was gone did I realize that I was listening to it. In its place was only a void feeling. Maybe it was to fill that void, or maybe it was because it was a genuine question, but either way, I immediately spoke up.
“Hunter, where do we go from here?” I asked, looking around the shadowy, unseeable landscape around me.
“Oh, we just head back, but on a slightly different path,” Hunter answered.
Still looking around us, I replied, absentmindedly serious, “Why would we do that?”
I felt a bit of pressure quickly impact the back of my head. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel the best either. As I looked behind me, I saw the yellow, grinning eyes of Hunter and I saw him pulling back the hand he just used to slap me.
“I’m kidding,” he laughed, “we gotta climb.”
“Oh,” I said, rubbing the back of my head.
I walked up to the face of the mountain’s cliff in front of me. The sheer wall of rock extended upwards past where my vision could see, fading into the black beyond. No amount of moonlight was able to illuminate it enough. I then grabbed onto whatever cracks and crevices that I could, and I began to climb upwards.
My arms flexed with each new portion of rock my hands clutched onto. My body was squarely pressed against the wall, and in order to maintain my dominance over gravity, I carefully balanced my core strength. Because of that, I felt my abs slowly heat up over the next ten minutes. And it was a long ten minutes. In fact, looking back, I would even argue that my climb took an upwards of an hour to finish, but honestly, there was no way of knowing. Either way, I powered through any ounce of pain that I felt. I knew how athletic I was and how many inhuman feats I had accomplished. I figured that something as simple as climbing a wall was nothing to me, and so, I continued to push myself upwards as fast as I could.
Finally making it to a large enough plateau, I slumped on the ground and laid flat on my back. My arms were pulsing in a way that made it seem like they were gasping for air. My legs wouldn’t stop shaking, and my abs felt as though they were made of unmoving, tight iron.
After taking a few more seconds to collect myself, I peered over the edge in order to watch Hunter’s ascent. As I gazed into the abyss below, I saw no movement, except for the stray pebble that I knocked over the edge.
That’s right, I thought to myself, I told him not to underestimate me. I’ve gone through hell and back—my strength is unrivaled.
“Whatcha lookin’ at?” I heard a voice suddenly say from behind, like a phantom apparating from the shadows.
“Who are you!?” I yelled as I quickly turned around to engage with whatever was on the cliff with me. Unfortunately, It was just Hunter.
“Damn,” Hunter said, holding his hands in the air, “not only are you slow, but you’re also forgetful.”
I took a couple long breaths to slow down my heart rate, and then asked, “How in the hell are you up here? Did I miss you climbing up another way?”
“No,” he chuckled, “although I think you got it backwards—I was the one watching you.”
“What…” My breathing returned to normal. “How did…”
“I used to play on these cliffs all the time,” he replied, leaning against the next portion of the mountain that we were going to climb.
“Ah, so you took the easy way up, huh? I bet you know all sorts of different ways up and just watched me take the hard way.”
“Yes.”
I then got to my feet and dusted myself off. “I bet that was fun watching me suffer. You really don’t intend on helping me, do you?”
“First off, yes, it was very entertaining watching you try so hard on the easiest part.”
“Easiest?”
“And second,” he ignored me, “don’t blame this on me, like you always do. You’re the one who was all puffed up and began climbing without me. This one is on you.”
I just shook my head. “So how close are we to your den?” I asked. “That was a long climb, so I’m assuming we’re almost there.”
Hunter erupted in laughter, almost to an exaggerated point.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, calming down, “but that wasn’t long at all—maybe ten minutes, max. We still got a few more walls to go.”
“Don’t lie to me like this,” I said in the most solemn, serious, and tormented way possible. That was probably the most sincere thing I had said in my entire life.
“When will you learn?” he playfully teased. “I haven’t lied to ya yet.” He then looked up towards the next painful part of the adventure. “Well, no time like the present.” He then jumped up on the wall and stuck to it like a spider. It seemed almost too natural. Looking down back at me, he said, “Follow me if you don’t want to get lost.”
“Fine,” I mumbled, grabbing a part of the mountain that was slightly below him.
We then continued to climb up the mountain for the next hour, dodging and weaving around certain spots that Hunter deemed “unclimbable”. We would continue in a straight path, and then Hunter would stop and leap to the side. The way he would effortlessly let go of his only safety net, completely confident that the mountain would catch him before the world tried to drag him down was something that gave me a renewed sense of inspiration. I tried to emulate it, but every time that I did, I would almost fall to my death. By some stroke of luck or from my immense and sudden will to live, I would desperately hold onto the rock face before my balance was completely lost. And every time that failure happened, Hunter, instead of laughing, would slightly reprimand me from above. Besides those instances, the rest of the climb was completely controlled by Hunter, and I simply had to follow—which was harder than it looked for me. The fact that he got to look down on me was something that ate away at me. However, halfway through the climb, it didn't seem to bother me as much.
About halfway up the cliff, I randomly asked him a question. I wasn’t sure what compelled me to do so. I simply blamed it on my growing, unusual comfort.
“You said you used to play on these cliffs, right?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he absentmindedly responded, rubbing his hand on the rugged wall, completely focused on it.
“How was that allowed? Surely your mother wouldn’t have let a kid climb around. Or is it something that the fanged do?”
He stopped. “I mean,” he started to say, “it’s no more dangerous than what you did. You were a kid when you started to be a Slayer, right?”
“Not by choice,” I answered.
“Oh, right.” He then moved up a few feet and I followed. “Sorry.”
We then shimmied a little to the left, avoiding an obvious patch of loose rubble. Thankfully, because I was watching him, I didn’t fall victim to it.
“My mom didn’t like it when I did all the dangerous stuff,” he continued, “but Father insisted that I had to learn.”
“Why?” I asked, casually readjusting my hand positions.
Hunter moved a bit to the right and then took a rather large leap upwards, barely catching the lip of a jutted-out rock. “He said that if I couldn’t do it, then I might as well be as good as dead,” he answered. “He’s a bastard.”
“Sounds like it.” I then climbed up a few more feet straight up. “But this world is harsh and you have to be strong to survive it.”
“My mom didn’t think so,” Hunter replied in the most calming, soft tone I had heard yet. “As much as I want to agree with you, my mom’s words can’t leave my mind.”
“What words?”
He looked straight down at me with the most sincere, nostalgic, and beautiful eyes I had ever seen. The lightning-like, tortuous color was replaced with a delicate, dandelion yellow.
“All life is precious,” he answered. “She always believed that and so do I.” He then continued to climb up.
“I don’t know about that.”
“I know you don’t.”
There was a bit of a nightly silence that crept up after that. It wasn’t tense, nor was it sad. In fact, I wasn’t sure if it had any emotion to it. The best way I would describe it would be hollow. It was an empty silence, devoid of meaning. No, that’s not quite right. The nothingness within the silence said more than anything could—it showed the distance still between us.
Then, suddenly, the air changed and there was a slightly warm breeze that ran down from the mountain. Even if it was only for a second, I felt its heat-filled embrace.
“Sebastian, we’re here!” Hunter called out.
We climbed up for a few more minutes before reaching a ledge that was wider and longer than any of the others we stopped on. It was mostly empty, although I could only see part of it, seeing as the moonlight from above only partially lit it up. The one thing that I couldn’t not see was the vacuous hole that was carved into the side of the mountain. It opened up like a toothy maw, waiting to devour any that dared to carelessly walk into it. However, Hunter easily walked right up to the mouth of the cave.
“You ready?” he asked me.
“Are you?” I countered.
“Fair enough.”
We then took our first step inside, together. The cave itself wasn’t anything special, but that’s exactly what terrified me. There was an ominous sense of familiarity that just wouldn't settle within me. The walls were made of a stone that was not unlike that of which we just climbed, the only difference being the dampness of them. While the ones on the outside were exposed to weather—whittling them down and making them more jagged—the ones within the caves were slick and slightly wet. It might’ve been that added moisture in the air and in the rocks that caused the temperature within the walls to drop down suddenly. Superficial difference aside, I was more afraid of the darkness that swallowed up any semblance of visibility.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Why am I shaking? I asked myself. It’s just the dark. It’s just your sight. You’ve functioned plenty of times without it.
We continued to walk forward, and Hunter started to take the lead again.
What’s the difference? What’s the difference? What’s the difference?
I soon found my answer. Almost without warning, figures began to emerge from out of the dark. The lithe, slender creatures looked at me with eyes of distrust and hesitation. When they landed on Hunter, however, their expressions looked the same, but the emotion surrounding those eyes—those yellow eyes—spelled curiosity instead of fear. They all had the same, monstrous eyes to them, even the little spawns of evil that hid behind some of the larger ones’ legs.
As we descended deeper into the tunneling veins of the mountain, something that caught me a bit off guard began to happen: it started to get brighter. There were metal-caged flames that were mounted against the wall. What puzzled me was how the flames inside moved with an almost rhythmic pattern. They were trapped within black-iron fencing, maybe about a foot or so in diameter, and there didn’t seem to be anything that itself was on fire. It was like the flames existed all on their own. To me, it seemed barbaric. I didn’t understand it.
As if those lights shone them into existence, I began to see more fanged. Some of them were slumped against the walls, some of them sat around or laid down on the crude-looking “furniture” that was sparsely scattered through the tunnels, and others stood around and plotted. There was not a single moment that I let my eyes off of them.
Eventually, I saw one of them dare to approach us. As they did, I instinctively reached back for my sword, although I did not pull it out. This fanged seemed to be more masculine, even through his famished frame, and had scraggly hair similar to Hunter’s. The only difference was Hunter’s seemed wild and free, while this figure’s hair seemed unkept and lost.
“Hunter,” the figure started to ask, “is that you?” His voice was higher than I expected, but just as rough. It was like glass raked across sand.
“Yeah,” Hunter replied. “What’s going on? It seems even worse than before.”
“It’s actually a lot better than it was,” the fanged answered. “You’ve been gone for a long time; things changed a lot.”
“How could it have been worse?”
The fanged man didn’t answer with his words, he simply looked to the side.
“Oh,” Hunter said, seemingly understanding.
They then continued to have a small back-and-forth conversation that I didn’t pay any attention to. As their words turned into mumbles, I looked down at my jacket pocket to see how beautiful my flower looked. To my surprise, it was uglier than I remembered. It was dark, like the shadows that clung to the cave walls, and it continued to stay unbloomed. Honestly, it seemed almost locked in place, refusing to bloom for me. Or maybe it was I who refused to let it bloom. It was hard for me to even tell anymore at that point. My attention then snapped back to the two fanged men.
“Why did you come back?” the fanged asked, still looking away, “Especially after so long.”
“Well…” Hunter started to reply, shaking his head a bit, “...we need to talk to Father.”
Before the fanged answered, his head tilted when Hunter spoke the words “we” and then his slithering eyes snapped right towards me. They narrowed even further as they looked upon me. There was a starved intensity behind them, but one that had no action left in them. It was a look that I knew all too well, but one that I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was hopeless hate.
While he stared at me, I got a better look at his appearance as a whole. He was pale…extremely pale. It was as if the sun had abandoned his skin a hundred years ago. It was much different than Hunter’s, who I already thought was as white as snow. In fact, Hunter’s skin seemed as tan as a burned saddle compared to this man. His teeth were slightly rotted and twisted, much like his gaze.
“What’s someone like him doing here?” the fanged asked.
“He’s my, uh…” Hunter hesitated, “...friend.”
Instantly, the fanged’s eyes opened wide and they were left agasp as they found their way back to Hunter, much like mine—although his eyes had much more surprise and disgust to them. The fanged then bounced his gaze back and forth between me and Hunter a few times before settling on Hunter, although he would occasionally glance back at me as he spoke.
“So, you want to talk to Father, huh?” the fanged asked. “Well, that might be a bit difficult.”
“Why?” Hunter followed up.
“We kind of got rid of him.”
Hunter took a step back. “Really?” He then chuckled a bit and shook his head, although his laugh was more uncomfortable than it normally was. “It’s about time you realized how crazy he was. He was a madman, driven by one thing—he was going to ruin you all.”
“Yeah…”
I then stepped up next to Hunter. “So did you kill him?” I simply asked.
With a devilishly sheepish look, the fanged man responded, “No…we couldn’t.”
“Then where is he?” Hunter asked, a bit more desperate.
“In his room,” the fanged answered, motioning his head forward, “locked away. He’s been there for years. I would say that he’s for sure dead, but we can hear him every night, screaming out the same nonsense that we understand. The only thing keeping him alive is his madness.”
Hunter and I looked at each other. There was a confused, conflicted look plastered all over his face. I could almost see it split in two; one side trying to bolt for the exit, and one side clawing its way deeper in. Eventually, he slapped his face and looked at me with a look of resolve. We nodded our heads in silent agreement and continued forward, leaving the other fanged man behind. For the rest of the journey, which only lasted a few more minutes, I continued to rub my valrose in some sort of vain hope.
And then we arrived. What seemed like a normal, if not slightly saturated, wooden door, was marked with heavy signs of conflict. There were cuts, claw marks, and bludgeoned cracks littered all throughout it. If that wasn’t enough to set it apart from anything else, there were black-iron chains that entangled it, connected to various hooked pikes that were deeply embedded into the walls. The door itself had a central lock affixed to it that all the chains ran through before going out, like a spiderweb, to the pikes.
I began to walk towards the door and unsheathe my sword. Just as it fully came out, I felt a hand somewhat forcibly pull on my jacket.
“Stop,” Hunter demanded. “That’s not going to solve anything.”
He then stepped in front of me with some vigor, flexing both of his hands. I saw the veins on them instantly swell up as he forced his fingernails to extend a few inches past what seemed natural. They were long, thin, and jaggedly razor-like at the ends.
He approached the giant lock and got down on one knee. He stuck one finger from each hand in the lock and moved them around. One of them jiggled around in the tumbler more, while the other seemed steady as it ever so gently pressed against the outer edge of the lock. What was strange was how his hands were tense, but his movements were graceful. Within a matter of seconds, a loud, metallic click rang and reverberated through the caves, as the lock detached itself from the chains and fell to the ground.
I saw Hunter stand up, still facing away from me, and take a deep breath in. I walked up to him and faced the door. Placing a hand on the ruined door, I pushed it open. As I did, any last threads of integrity that kept it standing were snapped, and the door, rather than swinging open, fell on its back with an echoing thud.
I took a step forward, but Hunter did not. I turned to look at him and saw that his entire body was frozen in place. His eyes were glazed over and wide, his teeth were clenched, and his muscles were tensed and locked.
“Come on,” I said to him.
“I…” Hunter tried to say.
“What?” I asked with a curious glance, “It’s just one guy.”
“All it takes is one person.” Hunter’s sight was somewhere else, both in space and time.
I took a step back towards him.
“I can’t,” Hunter continued to ramble, his consciousness seemingly coming in and out of reality. “I thought I could, but I can’t. I told you who I was. I can’t do it. I’m not like you.”
“Hunter,” I strongly stated, placing both of my hands on his shoulders and looking dead in his quivering eyes, “snap out of it.”
He blinked a few times before the layer of frost that found its way over his eyes melted away. He then looked back up at me.
“Come on,” I repeated, “I’m not going to get any answers from him if you aren’t there.”
Hunter nodded and followed me inside.
The room was dark. It was musty. It was old. And most of all, it reeked of an invisible stench. Not one that my nose could pick up on, but one that my very soul inhaled and twitched upon smelling it. What made it so unnerving for me was how familiar it was. It felt like every morning for me, but if I had lived another thousand more suns—it was the natural progression of myself.
Along the walls, barely peeking through the shadows made by the dim light from outside the room, were markings on the walls. The ones near the front of the room, where I was, were shaped and amateurishly constructed. However, there was intent and clear vision behind them. Some of the markings were images of humanoids with exaggerated fangs and others were tiny humanoids, devoid of any features. As I continued to look along the wall, gradually making my way towards the back, those shapes began to break down. Only a few of them were vaguely humanoid—most of them were scratch marks, crazily slashed on the wall. The further back I went, the less they made sense. They looked more like the scrawlings of a child.
When my eyes and body arrived at the very back, I saw something that instantly made my senses heighten. I quickly reached for my blade but stopped halfway through the motion. In front of me, surrounded by bloodstained, scraggled lines, bound by black-iron chains, was a man. Or at least what seemed to be left of one.
His hair was so long that I couldn’t find an end to it; it fell to the ground, where it gathered in one, large pile. His face was completely covered by that hair. His body was pressed against the back wall, sitting not so comfortably on the floor. His hands and feet were locked in place, leaving only his head to be “free”. Just as we approached him, like an undead, his head snapped up in our direction.
“You! Why? Who!?” he cried out. He then began to cackle.
Hunter grabbed onto my jacket. “F…Father?” he gently asked, his voice conflicted and torn.
The man stopped his nonsensical noises and immediately focused on Hunter. “Yes? That is me.”
“Is it?”
Father cocked his head to the side, causing the hair to slightly part to one side. This revealed a single, dulled, yellow eye.
“So, you came back, eh?” he said. His voice was sharp, jagged, and wispy like a hollow wind. “Why don’t you let me out already? I’m tired of being here.”
Hunter shook his head. “I can’t…this is where you belong.”
Father struggled a bit against the chains, causing them to clank against each other. The sound filled the chamber.
“How could you say that? My own flesh and blood?” He then let out a sound that was neither a sigh nor howl. “You sound just like them.”
He then shifted his head towards me, staring at me with his single eye. The moment our sight met, I saw his body try to instinctually lounge out towards me, only held back by his own bindings. Even still, I saw some of the wall behind him shake and crack.
“You…” he hissed. “You let one in. You let one in.” With his head still facing my direction, he moved his gaze over towards Hunter. “I warned you what will happen!” He struggled even harder. “They're going to take everything from me again. They don’t know restraint, only greed and hate. AND I HATE THEM!”
“What are you talking about?” Hunter asked.
“They’re all the same, even back then. There’s not a single good one. They want us dead. They want everyone else dead. And I won’t let them.”
“Are you talking about humans?”
“Who else!?” Even though his body seemed to be nothing but skin and bones, when he said that, I saw muscles flex and apparate onto his body from out of nowhere. “What other race has bloodlust like them!? Who do you think drove us out of our home? Who forced us to hide in fear, living in these DARK CAVES!” His body then rocked back and forth, pulling each and every chain taut.
“Father, they are not like that. You do not know that.”
Suddenly coming to a complete stop, Father replied with an unnerving calmness, “I know it all too well. You and your mother will meet the same fate that I did. Mark my words.”
“You do not know them like I do!”
“Oh really?” he pressed, his voice eerily solemn. His head then slithered in my direction. “What about this one? Even he still wears that hell-made flower—that blood-blooming rose. Even he wears what hunted us down all those centuries ago. Even he wears that same hate. Nothing has changed.”
I looked down and saw that the valrose was fully bloomed, stretching itself to an extent I had never seen before.
“Sebastian, is that true?” Hunter asked.
But I didn’t answer him. I was too focused on the dark mirror in front of me. Oh, how badly I wanted to break it. I felt the valrose reach out towards Father and beg me to strangle him. Its hauntingly beautiful petals sang to me a song of familiar transgressions. Like me, it seemed to find itself in a common crossroad. But unlike it, I had not yet made up my mind.
In a few seconds, I imaged dozens of scenes over and over again. I thought of every possible way I could cut that man down with a single swing of my blade. I thought about in vivid detail what it would feel like to crush his bones and shatter his body. I saw the crimson bloodsoaked floor in front me, forming from the dripping wounds of his decapitated head. That would stop the poison that he spouted—poison that I tasted every day.
But I couldn’t do it. Something fundamentally was different inside of me. There were parts of an old self that tried to get the rest of my body to move in a way that it had thousands of times in the past, but the rest of myself wouldn’t obey. I had somewhat noticed the slow changes within me, but I never paid them any mind nor did I understand them…not until that very moment. The moment I laid eyes on the madman in front me, everything became clear. And it hurt.
I turned around without a word and walked out of the room. I heard Hunter say something in my direction, but I didn’t hear what. What I did hear, however, was a final plea of a desperate man.
“Come back here!” Father called out. “I won’t let you touch my people! I will crush you with my own hands, like I did with so many others!”
I remained silent, and I just continued to make my way out of the cave. I walked past the starved people; past the children that played in a sorrowfully optimistic way; past the suffering men and women that were slumped against the walls; past all of those people who were abandoned by their leader, who favored his own hate more than the care of them. Eventually, I found myself back at the entrance, looking out over a brightly moonlit valley below. It was beautiful. It was serene. It was larger than I thought—it was like the world itself finally opened itself up to me. And most of all, it was freeing. There was a sense of weightless freedom that coursed through my body.
Running up behind me, I heard a familiar voice call out.
“Where are you going?” Hunter said. “We still haven’t asked about your parents. Isn’t that why we’re here? Don’t you want to know?”
Still looking out towards the peaceful night, I took a deep, relieving breath. “No,” I answered, “I have all the answers I need.”