Chattering Monkeys

Mechanical Bunny · Site Admin Joined: 19 Apr 2007 Posts: 223

Dark. So dark...

Light! So much light...

A sphere bobbing forward, an orb of light coming nearer and nearer. Smiling now...

He rose up from his stupor and his slumber as the flashlight stopped before his vision.

So bright, so pretty...

He reached for it, but caught a dark shape instead. There was a shriek that rocked the whole world. A person! A person in his prison.

How dare she be here...

The flashlight fell and spun. It shone enough for him to make out her face, her clothes, such foreign clothes, and her long hair whose color was indiscernible.

Pounding, so loud, the screaming, so loud... Stop. Stop it!

"Stop...scream--" He panted, his voice grating from lack of use. Hardly a whisper escaped his lips. "--ing."

Yet she didn't stop. And she was in his prison. To enter here was to die, anyway... He had died a long time ago in here. It wasn't fair...

His fingers had a supernatural strength never attained in his youth, his life. They reached around her throat and stopped the ear-splitting shriek, and gave him pause. He should stop. But the pounding, the pounding that was now under his touch. It wasn't fair.

He squeezed harder. There was a snap, a pop, and struggle. He held on, watching her writhe, watching her wide eyes, and thought he saw blue. It was so long, an eternity, before the twitching stopped. For awhile it was best to stay that way, holding up dead weight with outstretched hands.

He hardly remembered standing, hardly remembered seeing the bobbing light. But the intruder was dead, and that was all that mattered. A whisper in his ear congratulated him, mocked him. It was the prison warden, sent to ridicule his strength and his power, the person who envied him, put him in here...

It wasn't fair.

The dead weight dropped. There was a thud.

And there was the flashlight. His strong fingers curled around it. It almost broke under the grip and he had to remind himself to be gentle. He wasn't used to moving around; he missed the cold comfort of his tomb sleep. Yet, it was time to leave. It was finally time to accept his fate, and to get away from the warden.

The whispering followed him and he thought that he saw, with the aide of the flashlight, a shape standing beside him, whispering. It walked with him as he went stumbling forward on strong but uncertain legs. So strong, really... Too strong. How could something dead be so powerful? This was all wrong.

Bright, so bright! Very bright, blindingly bright.

He stood for a moment in the sunlight and heard sounds he had never heard in the tomb. Twittering of birds, wind, silence of the glade. A glade now? When he died it was a plain, a large plain that the battle had been on. The reminder of the battle made him look down. The sinful blood was long gone from his gaping wound. So was anything that said he was still human but for his bones and skin and hair that had somehow managed to stay looking like he had never died. But the blood, the blood was taken by time. It was his sin; he had always thought of it that way in the tomb. Dying was a sin. But the blood price had been paid to time.

More sure of himself, he dropped the flashlight at the entrance of the dilapidated tomb. He didn't remember the entrance, but it was different. Some of the roof had crumbled down and one of the pair of statues near the front had fallen and shattered. Some of other pieces were missing from the building, taken down by vines and erosion. It no longer looked like a proper tomb for a... A what? Who was he?

Everything was different, ruined. His hair was longer than before—how can the dead grow at all?—and the burial braids were now at his shoulders. The color had faded, however... It was now grey. But it shone, somehow... So it was silver. He held it in his fingertips and stared for awhile. He didn't miss the color, the color he had forgotten. What color had his hair been? His gaze went to his fingers, those strong fingers, and stared again. The color was gone. Very gone. Another price he had paid, he supposed.

Tired of the tomb he walked away. The burial shroud over his form was irritating; he brushed it away. It floated on the breeze and settled over the flashlight. The leather armor he wore in battle was still on, but they had taken his chain- and plate-mail. That made sense. Not that it had helped; the enemy had come at night, while he slept. There was no sadness or anger over that; that had faded away long ago. Now it was a fact and a faint memory, that's all... But his sins, the sins he couldn't wash away with blood, because the sin was blood, wouldn't die away. And now he was this faded being in old leather walking through a glade that didn't belong there.

The irony didn't make him smile; it was just another fact. In life he knew he would have smiled, though. That was almost... sad.

"Dandan?"

The voice was a shock to his system. He jerked around and stared with flat, faded grey eyes. There was a man, in foreign clothes, standing with shock on his face, holding a large bag of some sort. It was beige, with woven straps that looked stronger than he was used to. The man was frozen with shock, and he knew this was his chance. He reached out to the man across the clearing and hissed out words. "Dead..." It was hardly through his lips before the man dropped his bag and ran. Just, ran, ran out of sight behind the trees with an ear-splitting shriek.

His arm lowered. He stalked over to the bag and bent over it. Carefully handling the object, he opened it. Inside were some black, strange objects. They bored him.

He got up and followed after the man. It was the only thing he could do. He hoped it would lead him to something meaningful. After an eternity of carefully moving through the forest he reached another clearing. Large objects on what he recognized as wheels were there in the distance, moving as if alive. Many more men were around and the man he recognized from the clearing was there, raving at a group of amused people. Then they saw him and with alarm alerted each other.

His lungs puffed out, "It's not fair..." Chaos broke loose. Everyone ran away from him. He followed after, reaching out for people if they got close, but he wasn't fast enough to grab them yet. He wanted...something. He needed them to tell him what it was.

"It's not fair..." he moaned again. As he approached a seemingly-living yellow box, the person inside saw him and screamed. He climbed inside and grabbed at the man. "Tell me," he breathed. The man was too frightened to reply, he supposed, because the noises were unintelligible. His strong, strong fingers wrapped around the man's throat and cut off the yelling and screaming. There was another snap, but he didn't stop there. He squeezed harder and there was another louder crack. The man lay still on the seat that smelled strange. Everything was strange. The yellow boxes, the seat, the way he looked, and the odd noises coming out of the man that he recognized to be language.

It was lonely leaning over the still-warm corpse. Out of the yellow box... Running after the screams... So much noise, so much motion, so much light, so much to see and feel...

Orpheus · Joined: 20 Apr 2007 Posts: 250

Daylight began to fade as the stormclouds billowed. The landscape became utterly black. The darkness was intense. It was suffocating. The birds stopped chirping. The animals hid in their abodes. There was no sound except the sound of wind. It screamed and crashed, much like a wave breaking on rocks. Thunder cracked and rain began to pour from the sky.

All at once the sounds stopped. The crack of thunder stopped. The screaming of the wind stopped. The pounding of the rain on the earth stopped.

Trees were bent, as if the wind was still tearing at them, but there was no wind. Leaves were motionless in midair. The rain stopped falling, it just held, stuck in the sky, a bolt of lightning stretched out from the sky, but did not retreat. Everything stopped.

There were fresh corpses on the ground below. They created a path with the way they lined up, a trail left by the killer. They had all been strangled to death, but that was not surprising. Nothing surprised Him anymore. After existing for endless millenia, nothing could surprise him. He just did his job. Emotionless, cold, unfeeling. That is what he was. That was his nature. Mercy for no one. Never any pity. Death comes to all... eventually.

Something was troubling, though. There is someone... something... out there. Something that has been there a very long time. Something that bothered Him. He could not rest until the creature was no more. It was misery. He could never sleep. For hundreds of years he endured this suffering. A soul that should have departed was still walking the earth, and it could not be found. It was hidden away, some deep place that Death could not reach.

He followed the trail of bodies. He had no form. Not yet, anyway. But his presence was there. Any living creature could sense him without senses.

At the beginning of the trail of the dead was a stone structure. A curious building He had not seen before. There was a soul inside. He could feel it. It wasn't the soul of the Dead One. It was a much younger soul inside. He tried to approach the structure, but he couldn't come b ut so close. His essence reached out for it, but it seemed as if there was an invisible wall standing there, warding him, and only him, off.

A dark cloud formed slowly in the air. It was His essence beginning to take a visible form. It was dark and thick. It expanded, grew, like an infection overtaking the human body. Suddenly, there was a scream, deep and powerful. At first it sounded far away, but it quickly came closer, louder, and in a flash a scythe, shining and beautiful, swung out from the cloud. It scraped against the invisible wall. Visible sparks flew away from the point of impact.

All at once everything disappeared... the scream, the scythe, the cloud. The rain began to fall again.

((It's not good, but I don't care anymore.))