Poor Man's Crusade

"They destroyed everything. Ashes are spread around us like a sinister blanket, folding us in while we lie, wakened by every snapping stick, every breath of morning’s choir, every dew-drop which thuds against the floor with deafening roar. The sky is black. All we can see is smoke hang thick in the air, and the stench of burning wood and flesh meets us with vile ferocity. We haven’t seen a sunrise for three days, we all have given up belief that He exists any more. Maybe we didn’t pay Him enough attention, and He left, seeking braver shores and a more assiduous people. Good luck to you, for without the power to cross reality - to rip through The Cloth and appear in a place that none of us can dare to dream of - you will be searching for longer than any of us can know, because I do not believe such a place exists in this world. We walk past wonders of Creation and turn unblinded eyes to them, not stopping to consider the complexity and plights behind their existence.1

"We do not dream any more. We do not have the courage the grab at false idols of figurative symbolism, awash with colour and sophistication. Whoever writes them has forgotten we exist, and does not grant us the gift of escape anymore. Our eyes stay trained on them. They destroyed everything. Bastard sons of forgotten elders, the last dying race of an ancient tribe, come to scorch their memory on our village. Black-lined in their attack, they came upon us two nights ago, swathed in gluttonous shrouds of disguise, they descended like a plague of Egypt’s finest upon our slight township. Hacking, burning, smashing. Axe, sword and hammer. They dismantled our society in one prompt swing of a sharpened blade, cutting through the whip of panic and alarm. I awoke, not beside my fair wife, but beside a tangled mesh of tinder’d masonry and chaotic flame. Screams of anguish, subjugated and controlled, rang throughout. My head span frantically and I dropped, blackness hiding behind my eyes had lurch’d me to the floor. 2

"I awoke, dressed in leaves and tattered garments, with two people about me. They had dragged me from the burning wreckage that was home, and I now lay among nature, serenaded by silence. I opened my mouth to speak, but a heavy hand clapped itself about it, staunching the sounds I made before they had chance to form and meet the world in incandescent slurs of paradigmal speech. Looking about, I saw a face of my friend. A heavy, bearded man with oxen-like shoulders and a bull’s temper. He had one massive finger held up against his matted beard as he looked at me with dulled blacksmith’s eyes. The other person with us was a young girl, escaping in sleep. She had one hand firmly pressed to her side, her wan dress blemished in scars of deep crimson red. In her sleep she moved softly, her breath catching momentarily, before the slow, ceaseless rhythm up-started again.3

"As I looked out from where we lay, at the base a prodigious oak, ominous and stalwart, I could see the mottled whelps illuminated against the dying fires of the siege, on which they threw each carcass with mindless thought. Man, woman and child, all were burned within the same fire. No humanity was left in these fiends of dark harvests. 4

"I waited for what seemed like an excess of aeons, something to eclipse the Earth’s primordial existence and overshadow its acknowledgment in our little home. And yet we worry of such little things. I saw them, heard them yelp and screech in a strange tongue whenever they found one more body to break, one more innocent maid to befoul. Sick. 5

"The two of us still remain, rooted to the same spot with perverse curiosity and undeniable helplessness. The young girl’s steady breath didn’t keep us sane any more, we had nothing to fix our concentration on, and we slowly felt time slip away with thick sermon, trailing away with smoky lines into the net of trees which surrounded us. My shaken tears mined deep tracts down my mudded cheeks, creating of tapestry of shallowness and intense creativity. I had not slept for the last two days, and my eyes hung weary, waiting to drop. Morpheus was mocking me, he stood tall and wide, laughing at me through the un-stoned entranceway to where I was welcoming him to no reward.6

"Now one. He died during the night, the cold had enfolded it’s pneumonias arms about him, and embraced him tightly. He died in a strange manner, staring at the same spot with open eyes, axe and blade interlocked in a symbolic message of capitulation. Acquiescent in performance. I could stand it no longer, cold quiet had sneered at me from behind wooded bars for too long. Taking the Smith’s blade from his frozen hands, I gripped it with firm mentality. I will rise, stand strong. I will push myself up from this prison of noiseless insanity, rise and shake the leafy dew from my mane. I will lead the pack, pride and sleuth into the vacuum of ruinous subservience. Drown my enemies in a wretch’s blood, make their knees bend and shake at my approach, watch them manacle themselves together in compliance. I am more than they. I am more then they."7

- The Last Survivor.8

Overcome in cumbersome slashes and slits, he fell, and was buried beneath the Oak from which he rose, dogged and single-minded in his intention. Enclosed in night-time, we were first onto the battleplain, and he was last to leave.9

End.10