On Black Wings

by Storm, Sylvia

  I leave the strange man behind.

  What did he mean by three days?

  I don’t know, and I don’t care. I need to save myself.

  The ground starts to shake, with every footstep, the earthquake of the approaching fireball grows stronger. It feels like standing in front of a train and not being able to run fast enough to get away from it. The heat is unbearable, the headstones around me are bubbling and popping as I run by them, the heat on each one making them smoke like griddles on the fire.

  I see a grasshopper on one of them explode like a squeezed grape.

  I’m worried I will fall, and I can’t hear anything but the earth being torn in half behind me. I keep running, my hands hitting tombstones and I hear my flesh sizzle as I try to right myself when I stumble. I keep thinking the next moment is my last, that the heat and the sound and the thunder are just too close and this is it.

  This is the end.

  I keep running, I keep falling, and I pull myself along the nightmare vision of hell into which I am trying to escape.

  A burning coffin lands in front of me and explodes, the flaming body falling apart around me. I scream and run past it, and burning coffins strike the ground all around me.

  Jesus Christ.

  More coffins land, exploding, blocking my path, and I’m dodging them as the fly past me, land in front of me, and some even roll past me, disintegrating as they burn and fly apart. A burning skull bounces past my feet, tumbling and bouncing like a football.

  God, please.

  I can’t keep my balance anymore, and everything grows dark.

  From somewhere a black horse darts in front of me, and I reach out, grabbing onto its mane. I’m dragging along the ground and I hold tight, cursing myself for maybe hurting the animal, but trying to keep myself from falling under its pounding hooves.

  I pull myself over its back and cry, the noise still too loud to hear anything in the world. I manage to get my leg over the horse’s back, and I dare a look back past my fluttering black wing. How close is it?

  It’s like someone took a flaming poker and shoved it through a cemetery hillside. Burning coffins are falling through the air, opening up, decomposing bodies falling down as they burn away. The earth is splayed up on two sides like a building-sized bulldozer cut a gorge in the earth. Each side smokes with the heat of the burning power of the sun, smoke trailing off into the sky.

  At the end, right where I stood moments ago, the earth lies blackened and burning, the grass ablaze, fire consuming the rows of headstones around it. The tree I sat against is burning like a match, the unworldly heat consuming it in an instant.

  The dark man still stands there, almost as if I knew he would be. Torturers usually don’t die by accident. It’s like none of the flames affect him at all, he stands there as calm and still as when I left him. I can’t see much because of the fire, just his shape as the tree above him burns like nothing I’ve ever seen. He’s immune to the fire.

  The trough of destruction ends right in front of the dark man, and another man sits on a horse, the hooves of the beast red hot and burning with fire. This new man wears metal armor, holds a sword glowing as hot as the sun, and his eyes burn with the same hellish light.

  I am not dealing with anyone real anymore. These must be gods or demons. This is too hellish, too real to be something in a nightmare. The destruction is too great, the power too incredible, the devastation too widespread for this to be imaginary.

  I am here, somewhere, lost in some hell I did nothing to deserve. Or maybe I do, and I haven’t understood why yet.

  I just know I am dead.

  I look into the burning man’s eyes, and I feel the hatred of a hundred-thousand wars all locked in a single moment. I scream in agony as the pain of billions wracks my soul. It feels like my head explodes in that single moment of hatred and ire.

  It’s as if every nerve, every sense exploded in me in a blinding flash of pain. I can’t even remember if I scream.

  I feel my eyes burning, and all I see is light. Is there blood on my head? All I see is light. My skull rings as I feel it splitting apart. All I see is light. I taste blood.

  Looking at the man is going to kill me.

  All I see is light.

  CHAPTER XIII:

  Am I Going to Die?

  I have three days.

  I have three days.

  I can’t see, I’m in so much pain.

  I will myself to stay awake, holding onto the black horse’s mane as tight as I can, the hairs twisted in my fist. Holding on to this horse hair is all I got in this world, it’s the last thing keeping me somewhere grounded in something real.

  Despite so much pain that I want to die, I hold on. Every fiber of my being wants to scream, to give up, to let go. I feel my heart racing a mile a minute, this can’t be good. It hurts so bad I just want to give up.

  It’s so bright, like having your eye-sockets burned by a hot light-bulb, I still can’t see. The horrors echo through my head in a fever dream, death and bodies blown to pieces, men choking on their own blood, and bodies sinking to a watery grave in cold darkness.

  I endure a million lifetimes of death in a second, and in my next heartbeat, a million more.

  I keep holding onto the horse, I can’t let go. That feeling of grabbing the mane is the only thing that isn’t tormented right now, the only thing I can grasp that isn’t lost in a sea of blinding pain. I must be screaming, because my throat hurts so bad right now.

  I know one thing, I am not waking up in some nightmare again. I am holding on. I am staying here, wherever here is right now.

  I hold on.

  I’m in too much pain to think, really, about all that I saw and all that I was told. None of it still makes any much sense. I hurt too much to think, and just trying to piece all this together in my mind fails to take hold as the pain tears my thoughts to a million shreds and rips them away from my consciousness.

  I keep holding on.

  I can’t take this much longer. Either I let the pain take me away to a peaceful death, or I fight it. Why, God, why? Life is misery and suffering and loss, life hurts every waking day we struggle through it, putting up with all of its hatred and malice.

  Life hates us. Life hates any reason to smile or be happy, life just takes a dagger and sticks it into my heart and twists the knife as if almost its malicious nature is some sort of perverse form of enjoyment to its wicked soul.

  Live is just a reflection of the word evil.

  I force my eye open, despite the pain, despite the misery, despite my body wanting to die and let go. My eye feels like it is scraping open against barbed wire, the pain making me cry but I don’t care. Pain doesn’t care, nor do I.

  I’m riding through a forest, a fog shrouded forest, the palette of greens muted like green-gray moss, with fallen trees, sagging branches, and a whole swath of nature that appears to be in mourning and loss.

  I force my other eye open despite the pain.

  I’m winning this battle, even though I have already lost.

  The forest is laden with moisture, wet and dying, morose and moist, and wet with the rotting smell of death and rebirth. Tiny green plants grow on the rotting flesh of the old.

  Maybe it’s just my time, and I need to let go. To fall dead in some peaceful glade in the forest despite the pain that I am so tired of enduring, to lie there on some rotting log to rot myself, my black wings spread wide and flat like some sickly crow lost to the world by dying in some secluded spot in some forest far away.

  The trees whip by in a blur, my teary eyes unable to focus, my weakened body lying on the horse’s back.

  Should I give up? Should I let go? Brad, my children. As the man in black said, they hold me back. They aren’t even mine, according to his logic. Not yet.

  Did I ever love them? Or did I just marry Brad to get out from under my parents and away from my family, and to grow up way too early? Did I ever love my children? Are they even a part of me anymore?


  Black wings. Magic. Death wherever I go. A man in black, and another as hot as the sun. Horses, medieval soldiers. Time itself tearing apart yet I’m conscious of it all. Things I don’t understand. A bizarre abortion of my future family from who I am now, yet I am unable to forget them.

  Yet I am chosen, and for what I don’t know.

  I have three days, a ticking clock I have no idea what it heralds.

  Men and their wars, weapons and death. At times I feel like I was born in the wrong world, one where hatred was worshiped like a god, celebrated with bloody glee, and the myth of life after death perpetuated to feed its sickening maw of wickedness and despair.

  With every new generation, the black seeds of hatred are planted again by those who happily sow discord. Our bitter harvest of lives and dreams shattered, the legacy of hatred being the sole heirloom passed down between generations. Hate, it’s our most important legacy. No wonder we protect it so fiercely.

  I grit my teeth, and push my broken body to sit upon the horse. I’m crying, tears in my eyes, and my body too miserable to even sit straight. I’m riding dead, my wings nearly dragging, my sobs lost in the echo of hooves, my frame slumped and broken.

  But I’m not dead yet.

  CHAPTER XIV:

  I Refuse to Die

  I’m not slipping away to some other world, to be lost in some tortuous lie, some meaning I don’t understand, or some heartbreak I am too tired and too dead to even feel.

  I’m not giving up, I’m staying here until I find out what’s happening.

  I lower my head, letting it bounce as the black horse continues path away from the dead graveyard somewhere far behind us.

  What if it’s not important that I know? What if I can never know or even hope to understand what’s happening to me? All these images, all these terrors, what if they are just figments of some larger nightmare I am passing through that I could never hope to understand or even make sense of?

  It’s like the patient dying from cancer upon the hospital bed asking God why, but all they see are machines keeping him alive. For the dying man, there is no answer why.

  Maybe I can expect the same.

  There is no reason for this. Unlike everything I read or the movies I watched, the whole reason is to first understand why, and then defeat it. With knowledge, power, and with power, there’s hope.

  Tell that to the man on the hospital bed.

  There is no reason why, there are no heroes who will swoop in and save the day, there is no doctor who can help, and there is no amount of love that will magically bring him back to life.

  Maybe the quest to understand why is a lie.

  Maybe this is where I am, in the real world dying or near death somewhere and these are my last thoughts, a final dying dream or electro-pulses firing in my brain before I pass away into nothingness. It feels like it’s taking an eternity to die, however.

  The horse slows. I look up.

  He wears ragged clothes, layered with holes torn in them like a homeless man’s, barely hanging to his gaunt form.

  He stands upon a pile of boulders and dead trees, the mist surrounds him like a halo of soft green light.

  The man has no flesh, he is all bone. His wheat-colored skull grins its mask of death, his vertebrae holding his head upon his skeletal frame.

  The black horse stops, and I’m left to look in the rotting man’s hollow eyes.

  “Who are you?”

  No answer, he doesn’t have a throat. He steps down off the logs, walking as good as a man with flesh and bones, but the odd noises he makes unsettle me. His joints pop with the noises of bone on bone, the cartilage long worn away, every move he makes popping and clicking a dry rub that makes my skin crawl.

  The skeleton man in the haggard clothes walks up to me, standing beside my horse, offering his bony hand to me as if to say, “Come.”

  I hesitate a moment. The skeleton waits.

  I take his hand, and I lower myself off the horse. The bones of his hand dig into mine, it hurts just holding it, and I nearly collapse into his frame as I slide off. I’m too hurt to fight, too broken to resist, and too weak to say anything more.

  Is this the one who will deliver me unto death?

  He’s close enough I can look straight into the sockets of his eyes. There’s no glow there, no magic light, just a grinning, bony, skeletal man dressed in worn-away clothes. He’s taller than me, the rags clinging to his frame, bits of battered armor here and there, and he wears belts and a scabbard for a sword.

  He leads me towards the pile of moss-covered rocks and logs, and we walk around the side. It is peaceful here, quiet and calm, the moist air hanging around us making me sweat. The bones of his fingers wrap around mine and pull me along.

  "Wait," I say, struggling to keep up. I feel weak and my wings are dragging behind me, and they're just slowing me down. Besides, I don't want them dragging in the dirt and the leaves. I pull against his bony hand, and weakly struggle to right my wings. I get them in place, the black feathers feeling good against me, slightly weighty but reassuring.

  I look around. There are giant trees around us, long strings of moss hanging from wet sagging branches, and the soft hiss of rain somewhere off in the distance.

  His bony hand pulls against me, the calcified fingers digging into my flesh. He pulls me towards the mound, and I see a cave entrance around the left side.

  "Where we going?" I know I am not going to get an answer, but I ask anyways. He turns his bony head towards me, and then back towards the cave. Why he's taking me into this cave I do not know.

  We step into the cave going down, mostly stepping on mossy rocks and other squishy things including rotting wood. It gets dark pretty quick, but I see faint yellow light on the large stone rocks ahead. The floor the cave is wet, and he keeps pulling me down.

  Yellow light washes across the rocks, and torches light the interior of the cave. I can barely make out the shapes at this distance, but I can see years worth of junk piled up in here. I see dressers, racks of armor and clothing, spinning wheels, piles of rusting metal, chains, chests, old trunks, and every other piece of debris I can imagine sitting in an antique store somewhere. There are caves off of caves off of caves filled with junk down here.

  He leads me over to a chair, and with a bony pop he puts a hand on my shoulder and pushes me into it. I sit and sigh, tilting my head back and groaning. The skeleton man walks away and opens a chest of drawers across from me.

  "Who are you?" I rub my eyes, trying to scrub the pain away, but failing at that. "What are you? What is all of this? Where are we? What is going on?"

  There are no answers from the dead. He turns, his hollow eyes still staring at me, and he holds a long needle with black silken thread.

  "What is that for?" I sigh, letting my guard down. I've seen so much, I've been through so much, that I just don't care anymore.

  His bony hand grabs my chin, the pressure of his finger bones digging into my flesh hurting immensely. As if I wasn't in enough pain today. His other hand draws close to my lip, pushing the needle against my skin.

  I struggle and kick, fighting him, beating on him, and trying to get his hand away from me. He holds me tighter, trying to pierce my skin with the needle, and trying to sew my mouth shut.

  He continues to hold me, the bones of his hand digging into my cheeks, the needle pinching hard as it tries to break skin.

  I sound out muffled cries as my mouth is held tight, the hollow eyes staring down at me mercilessly, his other bony hand trying to work its devious and painful task.

  I kick the chair out from underneath me, retreat back while wrestling free, and hold a finger in his face. "No! No, don't! Get that thing away for me!"

  I’m several piece of junk furniture away from him, screaming and retreating, my wings unfurled and angry. I don’t care that I’m knocking half of this garbage over, I just want him to stop.

  I feel my anger rising, but the skeletal man isn’t chasing me.

  He sta
nds there with the needle and thread, I can't read any emotion, and he hesitates as it seems confused. I feel my lip, and look at my finger. No blood, but it still hurts. "No! You're not doing that to me! Put that thing away!"

  Is there even any negotiating?

  I raise my black wings slightly to make my point, more junk falling over, and I am not going to hesitate if I have to harden these and slice him in half. The skeleton man hesitates again, holding the needle as if he were going to continue. I point at him again. "No!"

  I stare into dead eyes for longer than I ever wished, trying to make sense of him and why. “No! Explain yourself! Who are you?”

  As if he could speak back to me.

  Still, if a skeleton can walk, it can talk, right?

  He turns, and puts the needle away in a small wooden drawer. The skeletal man turns to me and stares, his hollow eyes staring right through me. I’ll probably never find out why he did that to me.

  "What you want? Why did you take me here? Why did you try to sew my mouth shut?"

  I just stare at him. I just stare at him like he's nothing, like I'm not afraid of him, and I am his equal. I blink. Not his equal, his superior. He is dead, and I am alive. I lower my finger, and just glare. I look back towards the entrance of the cave, and then at him.

  "I am leaving."

  He raises his bony hand, waves it around the room, and points at all of the junk. He then points his bony finger at me. Then, he just stands there, waiting.

  I sigh. "What? You want me to look around? For what? Seriously?"

  I look both ways, and peer into the near darkness at the piles of junk. I look back at him and point. "No funny stuff."

  He lowers his bony hands and just stands there.

  Right, you just stay where you are, buster.

  I turn, and start rummaging through the junk. It looks like some sort of Ren Faire cast-off pile, with rotting leather scabbards, random bits of chain mail, leather shoulder pads, belts, and pieces of plate armor all scattered about open trunks and hanging on broken racks. I end up tossing more of the junk to the side and digging through it more than anything else.