Part Five

In which a man beholds.

I lay nestled in her lap, seeing first her sweet, loving, and red-stained smile. I wanted to reach up and stroke her bruised and cut cheeks, but my body refused to listen. Her smile seemed to lengthen, and she reached down to stroke mine. As I gazed into her platinum eyes, I swear I saw myself in the reflection.

Her mouth was still caked with blood, and she was badly battered. I couldn’t move anything except, as I discovered wryly, my head. I turned to look around. Of the demon rider and its steed, there was no sign.

I asked if it was gone. She slowly nodded, and without any further need to speak it she understood that I needed to see. She slowly and very gingerly pulled me over her shoulders and even more carefully raised me up.

The steed was nowhere to be seen, nor its master. Where last it stood there were hoof prints embedded into the ashen dirt, but no trails leading away. Just as suddenly as it had appeared, it had vanished. We were the only living things in the vicinity. Everyone else had either fled, or was dead.

Now a faint wind stirred, and it blew her into and around her hair. After all that, it had finally come undone and now flowed in the gentle gale. As I gazed at it, it might have been a victory flag. I wanted to kiss her, tell her I loved her, tell her everything that now she already knew by heart.

The wind tickled playfully at my ears. I enjoyed the sensation, I enjoyed all my sensations. I enjoyed somehow being alive. But most of all, she was. That was the only thing that mattered for me. The tickling pricked again at my earlobes, and as I momentary let my thoughts of her be distracted by this I heard it. The faintest whisper of bells, carried only by the wind itself.

Every hair on my body shot up and I stiffened as if dead all over again. Concern immediately clouded her face. Then fear. I tried to crane my head to look where the wind was coming from, and motioned for her to turn the rest of the way. She did, turning around so we faced the road our army had taken here.

There, in the not too far off distance, was a single tree. It was twisted and gnarled; evidently long dead of all its leaves. It was the only one in the area, and far different looking than any other tree that should have been in this area. It was a bit hard to make out, but I could just barely glimpse the sight of a pair of russet belts, hinged with small, golden shells. On each belt was a holster, and those holsters were filled with something with blackened grips.

The wind blew one last time, carrying that murmur of bells, until both the sound and the air died away.

I relaxed somewhat, but a lingering trepidation remained. Not dread, but just a nagging feeling. I asked her to turn me back around; I wanted to see everything else that had happened. I needed to. Without a word she turned, and my eyes were free to look upon all that had been wrought.

Bodies were everywhere, piled atop one another, missing limbs or entire sections. Everything was riddled with arrows, drying to a rusty brown. A sea of red, stained with the yellow and violet of bile, peppered with the sickly green and brown of feces and vomit. Organs of orange, pink, red, and even pale blue littered the ground, already rotting in the air to a pallid white. Defender lay with invader, invader had turned into defender, and everyone had died all the same. It was a moat of the most ultimate of losses surrounding a once shining city that had now rusted over.

Everything had been sacrificed, nothing was left. So much from so little, all that from nothing and nothing to show for it. So much irony and surprise. And now, the light from the sun played across the scene bouncing off all those surfaces and reaching my eyes in an entirely new way. Hues and shades that never before existed and yet had to always be there. They existed simply because they did. So much color. I cried.

It was beautiful.

Author's Note

I usually proofread my works, however as always I'm sure there are typos and syntax errors. I appreciate any and all notices of that, and will work to correct those. If I haven't do know that I did acknowledge your notice and try implementing it, but found that it detracted from the effect I wanted and so omitted it.