4E 188
Bodies lay scattered, sprawled and entwined in a dead heap. A pallid mass, disheveled and depredated. Limbs both attached and severed jutted this way and that, the bloody remnants of war seemed to clump together to form a sepulchral creature, sluggish and foul.
Once the people of a bustling town-stead: the common and distinguished folk alike now came together as a grotesque tumor, ensnared in an eternal bond.
Eyes stared endlessly at nothing, frozen in their final tortured moment of life. Others were shut almost peacefully; some disgruntled, like the face of a child suffering a nightmare. The rest were somewhere in between, petrified in that uncanny semi-closed cringe, eyes rolled back.
From the wood encompassing the massacre, moonlight betrayed the presence of wolves, their meandering eyes piercing the darkness. Movement did not stir the sylvan glade's grave silence, as they skulked, heads low.
From the massacre, one pair of eyes gazed deep into the firmament. Not unlike those of the dead, they were hollow, and appeared muted in death. Yet they blinked.
The pack slowly closed in, cautiously sniffing at the pile, uncertain of their feast. Silence was broken by guttural growls and jaws-snapping, then the pulpy snap and smack of bones breaking and flesh tearing. The feast had begun.
Laek Falla laid motionless, legs folded beneath him, all contorted and glassy eyed like a discarded doll. He had been neglectfully cast atop the mound where he froze as if lifeless. Just another piece of kindle, the assailants intended to incremate the corporeal debris, but unknown affairs had beget their hastened exodus.
Would they have thought him undead if the carnage was ignited and he had risen from the inferno, flailing in madness, writhing aflame? Would they have struck him down as something unholy?
Dilating, his eyes bore further into the abyss, beyond what the mind could fathom. He endeavored to see reality itself pale in the face of infinite. To comprehend. But the shackles of youth still held him…
Dead weight had him pitched prostrate. He was beyond the sensation of pain, unfazed by the livid blemishes and weeping lacerations marring his body.
He turned his head and met one glazed eye of what used to be the blacksmith. His face appeared to have been bludgeoned into what it was now. Pulverized, teeth splintered and jutting, jaw dislocated and force-molded, one eye socket ravaged along with half of that respective side of his face, which was left in gory ruins. A crudely placed gash split the ruined countenance into an inhuman grin, sickly parodying the joy of the living. That one eye staring coldness into Laek's heart.
With one free trembling arm, he shifted the burdening bodies and pivoted, as if rising from the dead. The wolves flinched away.
Cold wind brushed through the trees, whistling a bleak howl.
The alpha-figure slowly padded forward, approaching the forlorn boy. Its eyes fixed with his.
The wolf gathered his insight and expelled, boring into Laek's soul. As it probed deeper, it read through the boy's psyche, sweeping over black terra-firma beneath flowing skies awash with violent hues of crimson. A landscape that seemed to once be of the unnerving atmosphere that precedes a storm. Now a desolate aftermath, scoured clean by a devastating tempest. Charting fresh ruins, the intruder walked empty corridors, echoes of the fallen at his back.
The wolf found sealed doors, lined with putrefaction, weeping black corruption. He threw those doors open.
The wolf fled then.