FATELESS: A Boy’s Bonds

Hunted

The woman stood on unsteady legs, swaying as if she was inebriated. I glanced back at the knife lodged into the tree behind me, wondering just how it’d gotten there.

Had she thrown it?

There’s no way, I told myself. Not even Father could have managed that.

It would have required a sort of strength that frankly didn’t even seem possible, certainly not something you find in a quaint village like Flykra. My heart pounded, and I prayed silently for someone to help me. For my father or brother to come searching for me, having left the festival behind. If I could just find my way home, surely they would protect me. There were plenty of villagers who could restrain this woman.

Unfortunately, reaching the village would require running past her.

To make matters worse, my panicked flee through the woods had left me completely lost. I couldn’t see a trace of torchlight, nor could I hear the sounds of celebration that I’d foolishly left behind. The villagers were probably still dancing and singing, devoid of any worries as I ran for my life.

Would they even notice you’re gone…?

The little voice in the back of my head did little to help matters, so I did my best to shove it down. Now wasn’t the time to worry about things like that.

The madwoman took another step forward.

Meanwhile, I took another step back and called out.

“Why are you doing this?!”

The woman flinched at the sound of my voice, but otherwise ignored me. As she passed by the fallen tree and came closer, the moonlight illuminated her features. Through strands of disheveled hair, I saw a familiar face.

I didn’t know the names of many villagers, as the only people I had regular contact with were my family members. But I remembered seeing this woman earlier in the evening, while I’d been bitterly watching from the sidelines. She’d been dancing alongside a large man around Father’s age only moments before my conversation with Mother.

Though I hadn’t paid any particular attention to the couple, I recalled that they were smiling. Seemingly lovey-dovey in the romantic sort of way that made me envious. She looked like a housewife enjoying the festival alongside everyone else. So why was she chasing me with a knife?

Was she offended that I’d left the festivities behind? Someone from the planning committee, perhaps?

Maybe someone had finally gotten tired of seeming my face and decided to do something about it.

“Y-You’re husband!” I yelled, glancing around. Maybe he was with her. “What would he think of this?”

My attempts to appeal to her humanity fell on deaf ears. The woman continued to walk toward me, then stopped. She looked down at the fallen tree and reached out, grasping the knife’s handle. It slid out of the trunk in an impossibly smooth manner, doubly surprising because I would have thought the blade to be broken. Moonlight glinted off its surface, making it seem to glow.

There was something else caught in the light, though. Something dark and nebulous, gone as soon as I’d noticed it.

A trick of the light, I reasoned.

Out of options, I stumbled backward. My back slammed into something hard, and I found myself up against the trunk of another large tree.

A dead-end, in other words. Perhaps literally.

I continued to beg. “Please, stop! I’ll give you whatever you want!”

Again, the woman offered no response. She simply stood with her knife hung in the air above her, and I squinted into the darkness to catch a good look at her eyes. I immediately wished that I hadn’t, because a whimper escaped my lips as I saw them.

Her eyes were black.

Not some dark brown that’s merely mistaken for black, but genuinely as black as the night sky above our heads. She had no iris nor sclera, as if both pupils had overtaken every other part of their domains. Something rain from those dark globes, down her cheeks. I thought that they were tears or blood at first, before noticing that it happened to be the same shade of black. It looked like she was weeping tears of ink.

They weren’t the eyes of a human. There was nothing left for me to appeal to, nothing to respond to my desperate pleas. Somehow, I knew that running would be futile so long as she had that knife. If she could throw it with enough force to knock down distant trees, there was no hope for a boy who hadn’t ran since he was…

I couldn’t even remember when I’d last ran anywhere.

This woman wasn’t human anymore; I was being attacked by a monster. Like something out of a horror story. Gazing up at the knife in her hand, hanging like an executioner’s blade, my thoughts raced in a desperate attempt to come up with something resembling a plan. I’d read so many novels, and now found it all to be useless.

What good were novels in the face of real danger? I couldn’t focus, couldn’t form a consistent stream of thought. If I hid behind the tree, she’d just cut the tree down and it could fall on-top of me. If I tried to climb up the tree, same outcome. What was there to do besides wait for her to kill me?

Get close, said a voice in my head. Minimize the risk of being caught in the blade’s path.

That meant getting closer to her, a prospect that terrified me. Maybe someone like Abel could have done it but…me? The kid who barely left his room except to eat and relieve himself? I barely had the stamina to make it this far, but good sense had been overridden by fear and adrenaline.

You don’t stand a chance if you stand there, said the voice again. Do something.

Do something.

I swallowed down my fear, and did something remarkably stupid.

“—Raaah!”

Releasing a bellow that probably sounded more like a frightened infant than anything of note, I charged toward her. Even in her delirious state, the woman seemed taken aback. Her black eyes went wide, and she attempted to bring her knife to meet my body. For some reason, the woman’s limbs seemed to work against her like a rag-doll caught in its own strings. Before she could defend herself, our bodies collided.

My charge held nothing back, sending us both tumbling to the ground. We fell into a tangled mess of limbs, and I saw a glimmer from the side as the knife flew from her grasp. In disbelief at my fortune, wondering if I was bleeding gold, I scurried to my feet and ran away.

Chills wracked at my body as an inhuman shriek resounded from behind, multiplying endlessly as it passed through the woods. It was the first noise she’d made since approaching me, but the sounds coming from her mouth were anything but natural. It was the call of an enraged beast, a hunter.

I heard the brush behind me scatter, but didn’t spare a glance over my shoulder. I couldn’t.

Whether the woman was searching for her knife or already pursuing me, I didn’t know. My eyes were focused on the forest ahead, my feet hammering at the ground as I ran through the wilderness for my life. The wilderness that worked against me as if it’d sided with that monster.

Seemingly invisible roots were placed around like trip wires, waiting to grasp at my ankles and drag me down for the hunter to snatch. Precariously placed branches jutted out from every direction, hidden by thorny bushes that cut through my sleeves and left trails of glistening blood—not gold. The damp foliage beneath my feet was slippery, working alongside the snow and shadows to make safe footing a distant fantasy.

I’m not sure how long it was, but eventually pain spread throughout my entire body. I briefly wondered if I’d actually been stabbed during the fall. My side ached, each breath agony, and I was certain that my heart was going to burst out of my chest. For the first time in my life, I actually wished that I’d taken up Father on his offers to train.

When he’d said that exercise could save my life, I hadn’t taken it literally.

I’m only making my situation worse, I told myself. But I’d rather be lost in the woods than caught by that…thing.

As I ran, my eyes searched wildly for any sign of the trees breaking. Geimhread was known for having vast expanses of uninhabited land. I knew that the closest settlement to Flykra Village was at-least a fortnight away, and I didn’t have the supplies nor knowledge to survive a trek that far.

Which way am I even running?

Wheezing and shoving air into my lungs, I considered the paths before me. In my delirious state, only two presented themselves. The first was to confront the woman once-more and hopefully defeat her. If I had my brother’s skills with a sword, or any weapon for that matter, maybe I would have considered it. Maybe I wouldn’t have been in this mess to begin with.

Unfortunately, I had no practical skills whatsoever. Something that would be easy enough to blame Abel for, but I knew that it was no-one’s fault than my own. My second option was to continue running through the woods, praying that I would eventually reach civilization. My chances of the villagers finding me probably dwindled as I ran, depending on which direction I was running in.

Who knew what creatures were looking around every tree—wolves, bears, snow panthers. Even the thought of running into a rabbit terrified me. The absurd circumstances I’d found myself in boggled the mind. How had it all gone so wrong? Sure, I’d wandered away from my family, but it wasn’t like I could have known that a villager was going to lose her mind.

I told myself that it was just bad luck.

I’ve been blessed by the god of hard-times.

Maybe I should have made an offering back at the feast.

I was lost in the woods, and it would have been nice if the only things I had to worry about were animals and a madwoman—but nature itself was the greatest threat. A sudden blizzard would mean the end of me. Though winter was at its end, the snow didn’t fully stop until the Moon of Lightning. One last northern snowstorm wasn’t out of the question, and I’d heard the stories. People who were lost in the woods, exposed to the elements and left to die.

Their skin turned purple, their eyes into ice, and I heard that it feels like you’re being set ablaze. Until your nerves finally freeze and you fall into an eternal slumber, for the animals to devour your remains once they awake.

Cursing the chain of events and praying that I wouldn’t end up like that, my steps started faltering. A foot slipped out from beneath me, and my arms flew out for purchase. There was none, so I slammed into the ground with a groan. My chest heaved, my head pounded, and my blood felt like it was boiling.

I tried to lift myself up, but every part of my body ached and protested. Exhaustion ate away at me like a swarm of locusts. White mist drifted and curled off my battered body, from bleeding cuts and scrapes, starkly contrasting with the eerie shadows surrounding me. I clawed at the ground, spitting out a mouthful of snow and mud in the process. My entire body shook with effort, and I realized that I was crying.

How pathetic, said the voice. Tears won’t save you.

A part of me wanted to give up, to pray that this was just a bad dream. That I would close my eyes and wake up in my bedroom. That was when I noticed something: a thin sliver of light streaming through the trees. Disbelievingly, I squinted ahead from where I was sprawled on the forest’s floor.

There was a small crack in the tree-line, painting the surrounding wilderness with argent moonlight.

The energy in my body returned, the sight fanning the flames of my resolve. I struggled to my shaking feet and stumbled forward.

I finally made it, I thought. I’m going to live. It’s all going to be okay.

I emerged from the forest, and my eyes took in the sight before me.

A manic fit of laughter took hold.

“Haahaa…You have to be kidding me…”

At the edge of my vision, the ground disappeared. There was a cliff ahead.

I’d just run from one dead-end to another.

I strained my ears for any noises in the woods, and found only silence.

Maybe she lost me.

With a great sigh, I walked over to the cliff’s edge. Flykra Village was situated on top of a large plateau, which I’d apparently run all the way to the edge of. Below the ridge far too steep for an ordinary man to traverse, another forest stretched on for as far as my eyes could see. As if nature itself was mocking me.

I’d run in the opposite direction of the village.

I wanted to scream, to cry and curse the Nine for my misfortune, but fate’s endless onslaught gave no such relent. A series of familiar shrieks came echoing through the woods, making me tremble. The hunter was following me, shepherding its prey against the wall. Closing in for the kill.

Swallowing my contempt, I turned to face the tree-line. The madwoman was making a ruckus, charging through brush and branches with reckless abandon. I simply stood there at the cliff’s edge, counting the seconds until my reaper would descend upon me.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t have to wait long.

My pursuer stepped out from the woods’ shadows, looking far worse than I’d left her. The woman’s clothes were ragged, and her exposed flesh was littered with many painful looking wounds. The most grievous of which pertained to her right arm, which hung limply at her side. Blood pooled onto the ground beneath her feet from the exposed tendons and bone that connected shoulder to torso.

I couldn’t tell whether those injuries had been caused by some sort of animal or if she’d literally torn herself apart to catch me. Regardless, the woman showed no response to the potentially fatal wound. She simply stood across from my black eyes boring into me without a single shred of humanity within them. My gaze flicked down to her functional hand, noting that she held no weapon.

Did that mean she’d begun chasing me as soon as we’d gotten to our feet?

Face-to-face with a rabid beast, I wondered what could have possibly brought this woman to such a state.

“Why are you after me?” I asked, expecting no response. After all, wild animals can’t speak.

As if affirming my thoughts, the woman took a silent step forward.

With each slight movement, her right arm swayed back-and-forth like a pendulum. My stomach churned at the nauseating display.

I made no attempt to retreat. Where could I go, save for over the edge of a cliff that would assuredly mean my demise? My only path was directly past her. There was only one way out of this, insane as it may have seemed. So, with a heavy sigh, I bent my knees. I lowered my center of gravity and locked eyes with my opponent. She was unarmed this time. She didn’t have the intelligence to adapt to attacks.

If I can just repeat what happened last time…

Drawing upon what I’d seen my brother do during the tournament, I kicked off the ground and rushed at the woman for a second time. But as the enemy’s form grew closer and closer, panic took hold of my heart. My feet slipped out from beneath me.

What am I doing? I’m not a warrior.

I wasn’t my brother, and this wasn’t one of my stories. This madwoman was going to tear me apart with her fingernails, she was going to feast on my bones and make clothing out of my entrails. Perhaps a bit dramatic, but that was where my mind was at in the moment. She crossed the cliff-top in what seemed like one long stride, clearing the distance in a single heartbeat. A bloody hand reached toward me, and the world seemed to slow down.

My body froze, my thoughts frenzied, my heart threatening to tear through my sternum. All the while, that blood-soaked hand approached like Lady Death’s very own scythe. All of the emotions I’d felt that night threatened to surge forth, overwhelming me. Perhaps the thought had crossed my mind before, but when faced with what could have been Death herself—I realized that I wasn’t ready to die.

As if in response to my revelation, something flared at the periphery of my vision.

And then the world turned white.