"You know what I really hated about my old home?" I asked my companion as we picked our way across the battlefield, through the puddles of mucky water and the piles of armor and flesh that were the bodies.
"What?" he asked me obediently. He tripped on the leg of a dead orc and I shivered, helping him to his feet.
"Nothing," I answered dourly.
It's true. Once upon a time, you know, I lived on a world called Earth. If you want to get specific, I hail from the land of Ohio, but honestly, nobody cares here. I, this very day, am in a not so much better place; another world, a really strange world, a world where there is no Ohio.
"Well. It sounds very nice," my battle-scarred companion told me, wiping a smear of blood from a cut on his forehead. "I should like to see it."
"You know you won't," I told him sadly. I leaned over and picked up a shiny piece of metal from the ground- wouldn't you know, a nice new dagger! "And I probably won't either."
A man came stumbling toward us, bloodsoaked and moaning. My friend grabbed me by the shoulders and steered me out of the way, and we both shuddered as the guy continued his blind stumble. Sometimes, both of us had learned, there are situations that you just can't better.
"Ah, well," he said quite pleasantly, taking the dagger from me without asking and examining it with interest, as we paused for a moment in our battlefield stroll. "It's probably the same with me. I wouldn't be altogether surprised if it was. So that makes two of us."
"Wow," I felt suddenly guilty for whining. Mr. Peregrin Took- that's my companion's name, by the way- has a way of presenting everything in a more or less optimistic light- you know "hey, by the way, we're probably all going to die! Pretty different, huh?". I, though, have never gotten that down. Maybe you have to be a real live natural hobbit to be that way.
I'm not a real live natural hobbit. I just happened to have been re-born one.
"So where are we going, anyway?" I asked him, removing the dagger from his hand and placing it fondly hanging from my belt. I'm getting good at spotting shiny things on dead people; it's actually quite creepy. "I mean, apart from all over this ugly old battlefield?"
"I don't know," he explained.
We wandered for a while longer, across the battlefield. The sun came briefly out, shining yellow through a crack in the thick smoky brownness that was the sky. From a bird's eye view I can only picture how we must have looked, two little figures cutting our way through piles of the dead and dying, through crumpled metal and mud, in a place that looked like the end of the world.
I had a feeling that this was the end- I don't know, something about the quiet and the dimness and that one ray of pleasant, weak sunlight gave a feeling of winding down to the whole place. We'd escaped death an unnatural amount of times over the past few months, but now it seemed, almost, as though we were going to go quietly after all.
It's funny, how far I was from Ohio or anything even remotely Ohio-esque. Ohio was only months away from me, but it felt seriously like decades. There were some things that I'd even forgotten; like the names of some of the people I went to school with. It's weird that in a manner of months I'd forgotten something that I'd kept in my mind for years and years,
You know- that's a journey of epic proportions for you.
And I guess you could say that I'd been on a journey of epic proportions. You know, literally, figuratively, emotionally and physically and mentally. Epic proportions everything.
It's kind of a long story.
A.N) Oh boy! The start of a brand new long story!
I should warn you that this is going to be kind of a Mary-Sue…you know, 21st century meets M.E, tenth walker, romance with cannon character…but if you're like me and you adore that sort of dumb thing anyway, absolutely keep reading.
And reviewing would be nice too...not that I'm subtly HINTING anything. XD