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~The Anthology II~

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A White Wolf

A White Wolf

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Light.
Blinding light.
He closed his eyes again, the brightness taking him by surprise. After blacking out what seemed like months ago, he had no idea where he was, or even how he had gotten from the small village he used to call home to this place. All he could remember was the noise...
"Who am I?" The man wondered dumbly, a pounding ache driving into his head. The faint noise of running water brought him to his senses.
A sluggishly humid breeze made a pretense of blowing, reminding him of just how hot it was. A thirst sprung up, with an edge so keen it felt to be that of a knife. His dry, cracked lips opened and he coughed hoarsely, and began hastily gulping down the cool stream water. The water tasted faintly odd, but he attributed it to the forest. The water felt invigorating, and even with the odd flavor tasted like the sweetest nectar he had ever drunk.
A sudden cramp doubled him over, and he retched loudly and repeatedly, emptying his swollen stomach of the quantity of water he had drank. The vomit disappeared around the bend of the stream, and he slowly drank this time, savoring the crisp sweet water. After drinking a little, he stopped, and let his dehydrated, malnourished body re-adjust to the sensation of water in his belly.
A bird sang cheerfully, and he noticed that the forest here was quite beautiful. The humid, hot air was really the only thing wrong, as the vivid verdant growth of the forest bathed the seemingly the entire land in various shades of wondrous green. He glanced back at the river, noting it's burbling music. He sat again, and stooped to drink more.
Until he noticed the water looked a bit different.
A thin stripe of color was being carried down the water's center, a murky color that looked brown in the green light. As it got more brilliant, it turned colors.
It was red.
Soon, an object the size of a large tree limb came floating down the river. As it neared, the viridian light revealed what it was.

19-Jun-2008 04:15:30 - Last edited on 08-Dec-2008 22:55:07 by A White Wolf

A White Wolf

A White Wolf

Posts: 8,377 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
It was the body of a man.
More bodies came floating down the river, and the man's calm demeanor turned to panic. He tore up the side of a slight hillock, and smelled what the breeze had been keeping away.
A few miles away, a town was burning, and screams of the injured floated up on the humid breeze.
The man sprinted down the side of the hillock, tearing down the steepening slope, leaving behind a strip of cloth on some briars. The acrid stench of burning wood, tar, and flesh grew stronger the closer he came to the village. His red hair whipped back and forth as the thick air rushed by his running body, his bright green velvet robes snagging on brambles and twigs. He panted harshly after only a few minutes of running, his weakened body, although strengthened from the water, still much too feeble from his lack of food. Thinking of food made him remind himself to find something to eat later.
After a bit more, he slowed, coasting from a panicked sprint to an easier jog, although his lack of strength and of breath still made the going tough...not to mention the lack of any discernable pathway through the verdant greenery. He suddenly broke into the clearing, and his eyes gazed upon a massacre.
Women, children, and men all lay strewn about where they had fallen, gore laid about them as if it was morbid confetti from some satanical party. A few struggled for their lives, but most were dead and cold, lifeless eyes staring, but seeing nothing.
His breath caught. He had forgotten about death, but this enormous amount shocked him to awareness, and he remembered what death was. He saw several figures clab in robes of the darkest shadow striding among the victims, calmly and maliciously severing the heads of any survivors of the eradication and holding them up in seeming satisfaction.
He felt more than saw a deep crimson miasma cloud his vision, and he felt the angry grip of rage take its hold upon him.

19-Jun-2008 04:15:37 - Last edited on 08-Dec-2008 22:44:41 by A White Wolf

A White Wolf

A White Wolf

Posts: 8,377 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
"You...you...FIENDS! What have you done?!" he yelled, screaming his rage at the figures. They turned quickly, the closest to startled he had ever seen them before.
But...he had never seen them before...had he? The rage was taken over by an incredible pain in his temples, and a fiercely high-pitched keening in his ears that made his mind and world spin. He clutched his temples, knuckles going white in the grip of his pain. Images flashed through his mind, too many to coherently make sense of.
"No! Don't take..." A figure clad in midnight itself striding over, raising it's black blade...."Help me!" Something repeated itself throughout the images.
A sword; its blade made of the purest crystal, purple arcs of energy scintillating across its pure surface.
A loud noise abruptly shattered his dream-like state. It was the black figure yelling, a hoarse yell in a language seemingly forged from evil itself. The crimson miasma filmed his eyes and he saw nothing but a scarlet blur.
Two figures seemingly formed swords from shadow, and with movements as swift as a striking cobra lunged at him. Dodging to the left, he instinctively pushed his outstreched palm into the open but empty hood of one of the figures.
A green blast shook his arm, and bright crackles of energy swirled around his forearm. He felt total and complete cold, and the pendant around his neck grew frost around it. The figure abruptly stopped moving, shadowy sword shifting in his red-filmed vision as if it was alive itself. The figure's robes quit swaying in the wind, and began to grow hard. The many other beings just watched, as if curious about the fate of their brethren. A loud series of snaps and cracks filled the air, and the robes of the statuesque figure began to fall apart, cracking at the wrinkles in the black cloth until nothing but a pile of dust blacker than the soot from a forge lay on the ground, which then blew away on the thick air.

19-Jun-2008 04:15:38 - Last edited on 08-Dec-2008 22:55:57 by A White Wolf

A White Wolf

A White Wolf

Posts: 8,377 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
The figures hissed, and melted away into the shadows of the village. The pendant around his neck pop and snapped loudly, and the thick layer of ice that had formed around it broke and fell away, melted by the heat. The red film melted away with them.
The man sat down, and let the darkness of exhaustion took him into it's deep embrace.
***
Light. The blinding yet vivid green light forced him awake again. No-name sat up slightly, and again noticed he was in the middle of a lush forest.
No village.
Sitting up, he then wearily climbed to his feet.
Just in time to avoid a streaming mass of pure darkness that landed exactly where he had been laying. A purple explosion, a rush of wind, and No-name found himself lifted off his feet into the air. Thankfully, a tree blocked his flight, and he collided hard with the moss-covered bark.
Anger as sharp as a razor blade suddenly possessed him, and he felt a burning cold surround him once more. Just before darkness once again consumed his vision, he saw a green shockwave jet out from around him, and he also saw the shredding midnight of the creatures of darkness.
Then nothing.
***
Once again, blinding light awoke No-name from his weary slumber. This repeated cycle of waking then blacking out was really starting to get annoying and frustrating. All he wanted to do was figure out what was going on.
No-name quietly yet emphatically swore under his breath, sitting on a large partially moss-covered chunk of rock. "Who the hell are they? What do they want from me?!" he continued, just randomly talking to the rock, or anything else that would listen.
"Well, I won't figure anything out sitting here." he told himself, while standing up from his mossy stool. He decided that exploring his surroundings might aid him in figuring out who he was, or what was going on.

19-Jun-2008 04:15:39 - Last edited on 19-Jun-2008 04:18:13 by A White Wolf

A White Wolf

A White Wolf

Posts: 8,377 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Adjusting his tattered and frayed green robes, No-name began striding into the luxurious greenery, brushing away stray tree branches and other offending bits of nature.
He walked, 'cross hill and vale, clearing and stream, but never appeared to leave the forest. It continued on forever, apparently. After many an hour of walking through the plantlife, and after seeing every variety of forest life imaginable, he had still not stumbled onto another single vestige of humanity; not even a slightly worn forest pathway. 'Actually, now that I think about it, I didn't notice a path leading to that village either.' he thought curiously to himself, trying to picture the village without the violent attack.
After another eternity of walking, No-name smelled a new aroma, a different smell from the damp earth, moist humidity and other various smells of the forest. A musky smell. A...familiar smell. He pushed through a bramble thicket, and into a very familiar place.
Dead bodies lay strewn about the ashes of a burned village, the blackened remnants of a chimney standing bare testament to the violence he had seen happen here.
"What the...? I KNOW I didn't walk in a circle!" No-name cried to no one in particular, rapidly getting angry. He was positive he had walked in a straight line, and even guided himself off of the sun. He looked at it, and noticed something he had missed before. It was in the EXACT same spot it had been while he was fighting the shadow creatures...and night had not yet fallen. Unless...maybe when he had been blacked out?
"What is going on?" he muttered under his breath. He set out in the other direction, away from the village again, hoping fervently that he would find someone. After more seemingly innumerable hours of walking, and more scratching and prodding from twigs, again, a smell confronted his nostrils. A musky, familiar scent.

19-Jun-2008 04:15:39 - Last edited on 08-Dec-2008 22:58:37 by A White Wolf

A White Wolf

A White Wolf

Posts: 8,377 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Breaking through another bramble of thorns, a clearing surrounded a massacre. Bodies of women and children lay strewn everywhere, gore laid about them with seeming careless abandon. A blackened chimney's bricks tumbled into a pile, the staid sentinel to a holocaust.
'I must be going insane,' No-name thought. This was starting to tick him off. Why did he always end up in the same spot, even when he started from a different position? It made no sense.
Maybe a different approach. He set out, and tromped through the burbling stream, water darkening the hems of his now thoroughly tattered robes. He pushed through and onwards, and discovered he appeared to be traveling a different route. The trees looked different...somewhat...darker. The bark grew warped and twisted, and some of the trees were dead, a thing he had never seen in his various earlier trips throughout the greenery.
He finally jumped over a small cliff, and found himself in a clearing, a large clearing of dry, cracked mud. Also new, as he had only seen lush, moist tropical growth everywhere.
A wasteland stretched out before him, darkened by black thunderclouds above him. A huge expanse of nothing but dry desert stretched before him. He turned, to return to his lush paradise, but it was gone.

19-Jun-2008 04:15:40 - Last edited on 08-Dec-2008 23:00:50 by A White Wolf

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