Zack’s Perspective

I walked through the desolate streets; walking towards the forest to the east of the village, like a lone pilgrim walking towards his own hell. Beads of despair dripped down my face without cease as with every step I took.

This… this hurts.’My head dropped low, my gaze landing at my feet. I want something to drink. I want somewhere to sit. I…

I couldn’t help but harbour unnecessary thoughts as my feet kept walking forwards, like my body was not my own.

A sudden thought struck me as my left arm grabbed the middle of my chest. A pulsing sensation seeped through his fingers and it got harder to breathe. My vision was shaking as all sorts of colours mixed before my eyes.

Why am I still thinking of all these useless things? Do any of those matter? Is there any meaning in that?

A bleak breeze blew up a cloud of dust, causing me to break up in coughs. I wiped my eye to look at the path ahead. However, no matter how I tried, my vision never cleared and I couldn’t make out left from right.

Stop! Stop it! Don’t move… Please stop… I don’t want to see that again. Atleast not in reality….

Yet, I knew the direction I had to walk in like an instinct from within. My feet kept walking regardless of how much I wanted to stop.

After an unknown amount of time, I had crossed the border of the village. A dull green forest surrounded me. The ample grass beneath shivered with the chilly wind as occasional thunder roared overhead.

I will get to that forest in the east and… there will be nothing. Right? They all are lying! This shouldn’t be… No, this won’t be. Something like that can’t happen. He kept on thinking to himself, hoping this would come to reality.

However, every time I did, a face whose features were shrouded in a fog… features which I couldn’t make out would fill my vision, breaking me out of this make-believe.

At start, every time the face flashed before my eyes, I would feel my guts churning and my throat drying while a pain like a knife being twisted through filled my chest. However, after a while, although I felt my heart beating through my chest, I only felt a lonesome void within.

Angry? Resentful? Guilty? Sad? Why don’t I feel any of that? Isn’t it normal to feel any of those? Or am I just undeserving of feeling any of those? Even all this useless talk of tiredness, wanting water, sore feet… What is it worth? Why do I feel nothing?

I knew what happened from the start… No; I had a feeling it was all real. That day when I first dreamt this nightmare… that it was real. Yet I kept running from it. Even reactions from Uncle and Aunt, I should’ve realised it then. Maybe I did, and long before that, but I didn’t want to believe it. Hehehe… from the start… it was a lie, yet I chose to believe in it wholeheartedly.

But why…? Why did it have to be real… And why is this emptiness within me making me feel stuffed? Why didn’t I also—

But before I could complete his thought, I felt my right foot stepping on nothing, followed by my body twisting to the side. A scent I couldn’t quite make out assaulted my nose, making me want to throw up.

Grains of sand cushioned my fall, yet made it harder for me to get a grip and pull myself up. But somehow, my hand managed to grab onto some dirt and twigs, using which by body climbed up.

I turned back to look at what I fell within and my eye widened. The scene from my dreams flashed before my eyes as I mechanically turned my head away from the hole I fell into.

I looked at my left hand to see coarse grey grains covering my hand and my clothes. Through my face, I felt a fresh wave of warm tears flowing down my cheeks as my lips curled up into a broken smile that couldn't help but form on my face.

My right hand pulled at my hair as if to pull them from the roots. Yet, I stared at my other hand as my laughter echoed back through the forest.

My vision was a mess of colours forming a scene I had gotten intimately familiar with over the past few days. The scene before my eye kept on changing back and forth before overlapping with what lay in front of me like an illusion.

I walked forward, and with every step, the feeling assaulting my nose rose by octaves. The trees — remaining husk of those which remained — were all charred to a crisp, their ashes covering the ground or blown away with the breeze.

The further I walked, the more vivid the scene became; the screams from that day filled my head as I relived my nightmare.

I saw the people, both young and old, both men and women, screaming as they ran through a blazing inferno. People clad from head to toe in blood-stained armour chased after them.

The lucky ones managed to run for a while longer whereas the ones caught were toyed with like there was no tomorrow; some had their clothes ripped off, humiliated in every way possible others had their limbs chopped off, screaming as their blood formed a pool beneath them, some begged for their life, going as far as to lick the dirty boots of their captors, some were buried alive as their hair lit on fire, not spared with the suffering even after their deaths, while the rest breathed their last while turning to cinders from the ambers flying in the air.

The scenes repeated in my head as I took one step after another.

My steps halted as I stopped in front of a cliff.

A man whose face I didn’t remember was grabbing a kid by the neck. The woman whose face I couldn’t remember stood before him, saying something to him.

The man threw out a glass bottle as a smirk covered his face.

The woman went forward and picked up the bottle with a fearless smile. She drank the contents without hesitation before her body convulsed. She fell to the ground as a stream of blood poured out of her nose.

She looked at the kid being held with gentle eyes as her lips moved to say something. I couldn’t remember the voice but the words engraved themselves deep within my heart — ‘Live on…’

Blood seeped out of the corners of her lips as she gave a weak smile.

Next, she stared at the man before screaming something.

The man shrugged.

The woman’s shoulders drooped down lifelessly as she saw the man slashing at the kid’s head as he fell down the cliff.

The woman struggled before reaching the edge of the cliff. Her arm reached out towards her child as the child as well tried to reach out to the mother despite the ever-growing distance between the two.

However, in the next moment, a sword stabbed through the woman’s chest as her eyes lost their vigour and a lifeless arm dangled across the edge.

The illusion — remains of my broken memory — obscuring my vision came to an end as a cliff carved with pools of dried up blood and blade marks came into my vision.

Something glistened in one of the pools close to the edge.

Lowering myself, I felt the ground, the frozen blood, and something solid within. My nails dug through, pulling out a pendant decorated with burn marks, dirt and black flakes of dried up blood.

The motion of my fingers as they curled around and opened the pendant felt like second nature. Within there were two images, one charred from the centre while the other, mine, scorched below the neck.

The hollowness within me exploded in on itself, growing more intense by the moment. I felt like flames engulfed me, burning all that’s left of me from within as I stared at the pendant, not a sound leaking from my lips.

“WHY?! WHYYY?! JUST WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY…!” A scream escaped my mouth.

I screamed till my throat gave out, my scream turning to tearless sobs. Yet, the stuffy emptiness within my chest kept growing. I felt like I was about to explode.

My nails dug through the ground, fresh blood seeping out through my broken nails. Yet, the pain from my fingers was not even like a drop in front of an ocean. I banged my head against a tree, clawed at myself and even punched the ground till my knuckles broke down and skin tore apart.

Yet, the feeling of nothingness kept on growing relentlessly.

‘This… This is… This is all… real…’

When I gave up trying to fight the emptiness, it engulfed me. And… it didn’t hurt anymore….