The gray log of a long dead tree emerged in their path, blocking the way. Vincent slowly turned left and right with Stacy atop him, searching for a way around. There was none; the surrounding thicket was clogged with tightly-packed thick stalks of young pines and birches, a wall of gray and brown in some places, a continuity of white with black spots in others. The impasse seemed to make his headache worsen at keeping the flame alive at his knife’s tip.
Vincent lifted his right foot, trying not to fall, and tested the log’s strength. To his surprise, it was relatively firm, bending but not snapping or crumbling. With a great effort to keep his balance, he moved sideways and stepped his right leg over it, having to sit on it before he could even think of getting the other over. The log felt cold, wet, and hard. He hugged Stacy’s legs tighter to himself, trying to keep himself upright with her atop his shoulder and slowly and strenuously lifted his left leg to the other side. Once there, he had to fight past soreness and fatigue to make himself stand all the way up. The first and second attempts failed, but while straining his legs, grunting, and gritting his teeth, the third succeeded, and he was able to push on once more.
Eventually, the rain stopped and he came with her to a more open area in the trees that was freer of bushes and undergrowth yet still possessed the fat trunks of many towering pines, spruces, and firs in the space between. It was easier to traverse until about halfway in when he spotted even in his knife’s dim light from this distance, the mass of one of these giants that had fallen-over further ahead. He walked toward it, hoping to keep his bearings on the way that would lead them out while going more to the right in order to go around it.
When Vincent took another step, lightning flashed from above and the black shape of a large beast with wings was revealed on the ground. He immediately cut the flow of magic to his knife and ran. An ear shattering thunderclap followed. He hid behind the other side of a stout pine, letting Stacy down to her feet and hugged her to himself so he could put his back to it. He tensed suddenly and scrunched his eyes closed, clutching Stacy tighter when he heard a great cacophony of splintering and breaking limbs behind them. After that, he heard a hard thudding on the ground.
Chapter XII
Twin bursts of green light from behind illuminated the forest past the edge of where he stood. They were not as large as when it had unleashed its attack earlier, and he guessed that they must have come from its nostrils. The position of the light source moved as its head moved. It was searching. Searching for them.
Vincent and Stacy had only narrowly escaped death at the wyvern’s hands before with the help of Rick, and he wasn’t here to save them now if things went wrong. Their death was guaranteed if they were found. Vincent felt himself tensing and trembling where he stood, trying to control his breathing to maintain absolute silence.
Other than water dripping off the trees, it was unusually quiet without the rain. His attention was diverted when he felt Stacy begin to stir. He clenched his teeth. Only her head moved the slightest bit. It didn’t seem like she was conscious yet, and he didn’t know if she was going to be just now.
A quiet moan came from her closed lips.
His heart caught in his throat, and he clamped his hand over her mouth. Vincent’s blood surged hard, and he could feel his fast pulse throbbing in his head. He waited.
The wyvern gave a snort and a slightly larger flash of green light shined on the surrounding forest. He heard its massive footsteps clawing at the ground. The next small burst of flame from its nostrils seemed even closer than before.
It was going to find them, his panicked mind repeated over and over again. It had but to walk past the tree’s edge. And he could tell from the light and its steps that it was coming toward them. It was going to find them, he thought again, unless he did something, and it didn’t seem like there was anything he could do. Waiting and hoping the beast would do otherwise would not save them.
Vincent heard the wyvern’s feet crushing pine cones while scraping and clawing at the ground for traction. It was not a stealthy animal, not when out of its home in the sky, but it didn’t need to be. Green light bathed the trees, the grass, and the debris along the forest floor, brighter, closer. The enormous fallen-over stand of spruce lay not far ahead in his vision. He wished with all his might that he could just hide under it with Stacy.
The wyvern came closer.
Mortal panic gripped him, and he decided that he was going to try something, anything, to distract or hide from it. The light from its nostrils seemed to be coming from further left. He started edging slowly right with Stacy, knowing that one false snap or crack of anything he stepped on would be death. He hadn’t gotten far, only an inch or two, when his foot brushed up against something. It was a small rock with misshapen bumps and protrusions all around its surface. He eyed the fallen over spruce again. An insane plan immediately sprouted in his mind.
He bent over slowly while holding his breath and lowering Stacy with him to pick it up. He felt his face turn red from suffocation, and his lungs were in more want of air than he had ever known. The feeling didn’t go away even as he stood up. Trepidation beyond belief began to swallow him when he worried for an instant which the wyvern would notice more: the rock, or the place it was thrown from. It was this or nothing.
The gleam of green light was not far behind them. The instant it subsided even slightly, Vincent threw the rock off to his right as hard as he could without aiming. It knocked loudly on a pine trunk in the distance and then thudded on the ground, rolling and skidding afterward. The wyvern gave a snort and the green light shifted with its head toward it, but it otherwise did not move. Vincent gripped Stacy tighter and a tense moment passed while he waited.
The wyvern roared.
Its clawed feet scratched and scraped loudly, and an uncontrollable shudder went through his body. He at last heard the thundering of it running off toward the right, and then he waited only for as long as his nerves would allow. When he could take it no more, Vincent dashed toward the fallen spruce as fast as he could, carrying Stacy with him. He put a hand over her eyes to protect them and then turned his head sideways while he scrunched his own closed and dove with her underneath it.
Sharp green needles poked, pierced, and raked his face and hands. He hit the ground hard and began to slide unexpectedly downward in the wet grass and mud into a lengthwise depression in the ground he hadn’t known was there. Stubs of dead growth on the interior of the tree’s massive limbs battered and cut them. When they finally stopped, he heard the wyvern’s roar puncture his fog of pain and dizziness from the landing.
The top of the fallen over tree was suddenly scoured in flame. Bright green light bathed them from above, illuminating the thick, long limbs around them, making them look like oddly spaced spokes on a wheel. Blackened needles fell off and rained down on them, feeling hot when they landed on his skin. In the next moment, the massive trunk was violently pressed and shaken, bending downward as its limbs snapped, threatening to crush down on them.
The flickering green light revealed the black form of the wyvern with its wings spread, perching atop it. The second Vincent felt relief from noticing that it wasn’t looking down at them was gone instantly when the tree pressed down even further, limbs snapping and breaking until broken ends made shallow stabs in him, and the fat bases left of others were all that supported the tree’s weight. He wanted badly to scurry out of the way in case it came down further, but he dared not move.
The wyvern waited atop the fallen spruce and folded its wings to make itself comfortable. Its gruesome, scaly black head curled back with its neck, and every now and then, it perked this way and that, following unseen movements like an eagle. Vincent thought that the wicked reptilian monstrosity had no right to imitate a noble bird of prey, and wished it wasn’t so comfortable there.
The spot where they lay smelt of dirt, bark, smoke, and was alive with subterranean creatures that had taken up residence after the tree’s misfortune. They had been distu
rbed by their intrusion and by the wyvern’s landing. Crawlers with rippled, gray-domed backs crept with their tiny little rows of legs harmlessly across Stacy’s face and forehead while a not so harmless Brown Spider walked across the top of her muddy, soaked blue dress. A small centipede, red even in this light, crawled down his pant leg and then took a detour inside of it once it reached the bottom. Hundreds of little feet tingled against his flesh, but he still dared not move. Infuriatingly, the wyvern still saw no urgent reason to leave, and Vincent felt something crawling in his wet hair but couldn’t tell what.
Finally, it spread its black wings once more and took a leap. The tree’s trunk bended at the downward pressure, and more limbs were making cracking and breaking sounds as it took to the sky. Vincent waited a few more moments for it to fly far enough away and then snapped his hand to the part of his upper pant leg where the centipede was underneath, gripping it from above and viciously squeezing hard to crush the life out of it. When he heard and felt the crunching, he immediately swiped away whatever was in his hair, flicked the spider off of Stacy’s dress, and brushed off the crawlers from her face. Not wanting to stay down there an instant longer, he grabbed her upper arms and began dragging her through the mud and sharp splintered limbs and needles, getting his ears scratched badly while he crawled and squirmed along.
When he at last emerged with her on the other side, getting far enough away from the fire, he set her down and collapsed next to her on his back, exhausted. He stared upward at the pine boughs and dark clouds above, catching his breath and feeling grateful for the relative safety. Even by his own wishful estimate, they still had a long way to go and he needed a moment to rest. Though cold, hard, and ordinarily unpleasant, the wet forest floor felt like one of the softest beds he had ever lain in, and he felt his alertness and wakefulness begin to waver. His body ached and his muscles were reluctant to move. I just need some rest, he thought. Against his own will, he relaxed further and pure weariness forced him to pass out.
He did not sleep long. He dreamt fitful dreams about the danger of sleeping here. In them, he saw his own body laying in the wilderness and the wyvern coming back to claim both of them. He kept trying to get up and yet was unable. Clyde, the man they sought, would show up sipping from a tea cup and smile while watching the wyvern get closer. Vincent would twist and turn on the ground to no effect.
His nightmare was cut short, and he sat bolt upright in a sweat when he heard loud breaking sounds coming from the brush far behind the fallen over spruce. He could feel his heart pounding loudly in his chest and the blood pulsating through his neck and temples. It couldn’t be his other friends; it was too loud. Too many were pushing through the forest toward them from the direction it came from.
Vincent got up instantly and grabbed a hold of Stacy, frantically pulling her along the ground without bothering to sling her over his shoulder. Those following them were not nearly subtle enough to be the cultists, he thought. The snapping of twigs, breaking of branches, and rustling of leaves were far too careless for it to be anything other than the zombies they thought to have outrun. He looked behind him only once and saw little other than blackness. Once he reached the other side into a less open expanse, he ducked behind a tree and hoisted Stacy onto his left shoulder once again.
He hugged her legs tightly to himself with his arm, keeping her body draped over him, and felt around blindly with his right hand for any obstructions that might block their way. Fright was the only thing keeping him lucid and pushing him to keep going. Eventually the sounds spread out further and veered off in other directions, ultimately dimming into silence. Despite the quiet and his tremendous fatigue, Vincent had no intention of stopping again.
Only once he was reasonably sure that the thick grove of tall trees and dense undergrowth would conceal it did he take his knife out again to find his way. He was mentally numbed to his body’s pain by constantly reminding himself that it was better than death and that he had only but to escape these woods to return to Gadrale, and then it would be gone. The task of plodding through the muck all the way back in his current state, as well as with Stacy on top of him, seemed monumental, and over time his rising weariness forced his personal affirmations to become more and more cruel. Especially when he kept telling himself that he had the power to bring to bear a cessation of his own suffering just by putting one foot in front of the other until he got all the way back and that he was to blame for every moment of pain he felt because he hadn’t done that yet. He became his own brutal taskmaster, even more ruthless and effective at driving himself forward than the lash of any real one.
It was better than death.
Other than his own footsteps and rustling, the night became quiet. Vincent often had trouble keeping himself balanced while he carried Stacy, and it seemed to get worse the further he went. His ability to function seemed to be wearing down, and the flame at his knife point began to flicker. Despite this, he kept a steady pace to ensure that they weren’t found and that the night stayed quiet.
Hours later, dawn began to creep through the darkness, blanketing the area with a dim gray ambience. The scent of damp pine needles, leaves, and moss filled his lungs. Birds began to chirp, and the crisp morning air was filled with their song. A gentle breeze whisked through bushes. Between exhausted, foggy breaths, Vincent’s mind only barely registered the additional light enough to make himself cut the flow of magic to his knife and put it away. Able to hug Stacy’s legs with his right arm, he lessened the tension on his left and it felt stiff afterward.
Not long after this, he reached the edge of the forest, and they emerged into a sea of tall dead yellow grass, sparsely punctuated by clusters of wild brush. The direction he needed to go was somewhere to the right along these woods-that was where the road had ended. He turned slowly with Stacy atop him and started off, feeling like he had to look back upon a distant memory to realize that this was the way to go, even though it had only been earlier that night.
He was able to walk on for only a short time before deadly terror abruptly pierced every fiber of his being. He heard the familiar, loud roar bellow in his ears a decidedly uncomfortably close distance behind him. The instant it did, his panic took over and he ran and launched both himself and Stacy back into the nearby woods. No sooner had he, than an enormous black-winged form swept by through the air in his right peripheral vision.
He crashed hard on the ground with an unconscious Stacy. He glanced back behind them and noticed the wyvern making a circle in the air to come back toward them. It had been waiting for them to leave the forest and now knew exactly where they were. He could not hope to outrun it, with or without his injured friend. In a vain attempt to provide Stacy with shelter and concealment, Vincent hurriedly pulled her over and stuffed her limp form into some bushes behind a tree. Then he stood and drew his sword, the metal scraping sound filling the air. He held no illusions that this was going to be anything other than a fight to the death.
There would be no hiding.
Past the edge of the tree’s trunk, Vincent saw the wyvern’s black slit yellow eyes atop its black scaly head peering right down at his place in the forest as it made its gliding descent. It no doubt knew where Stacy was as well. Given the choice, Vincent decided that he would much rather die first than die second after watching the beast rip her apart in its jaws.
Summoning inner strength he didn’t know he had, Vincent strode purposefully toward the outside of the forest. Aggressive feelings as well as fear churned together as one within him as he put himself between the wyvern and Stacy’s place of concealment. It was going to have to kill him first. His eyes glistened from the altruism, his chest heaved in anger, and his muscles tensed while he gripped the sword so tightly that it felt like the metal wiring on the hilt was cutting into his hand. In his quiet, fearful rage, his mind became alert and he prepared himself for the final battle of his life.
A slow and surreal moment passed after he had stepped beyond the last tree, out into the open
, and the black wyvern flapped its wings and came to a landing before him, a deep, rumbling, guttural snarl escaping its long, pointy teeth. The two stared at one another for only the tiniest of moments that seemed like an eternity while Vincent lifted his blood stained, battle-worn blade in both hands.
The instant it began to open its mouth with green flame caressing its teeth, instinct took over, making Vincent jump and roll to the side in order to avoid its blast. Because of his training and coordination, the maneuver was not detrimental; he used his momentum to come back to his feet and square off with the beast once more. The wyvern immediately turned its head toward him. This time it chose to attack by snapping at him with its jaws, hoping to bite him in two. Vincent denied it by making a lightning quick side step and hacking at the side of its mouth. The sword scarcely cut into its scaly hide at all, and it snapped at him again. His blade unintentionally slid between its teeth and deeply cut the soft underside of its mouth when he jumped backward and countered with an upward swing. The force of the jump made him fall backward.
At the exact same time that the wyvern jerked its head back in pain, Vincent scrambled off his back and onto his feet with incredible speed to ready himself for its next strike, and was only barely in time. Aggravated by its prey’s painfully sharp defiance, the wyvern flapped its wings angrily and opened its jaws to let out another horrific blast of green fire. Vincent bolted around it to the right in a circle to avoid the streaking blaze that it chased him with, running closer as he did to increase the distance it needed to turn its head for aim.
Storm of Prophecy: Book 1, Dark Awakening Page 21