Disclaimer: "The Lord of the Rings" and all related items belong to J.R.R. Tolkien. This is merely an excursion into Middle Earth as it transitions from a land of hobbits and elves to the domain of man.
The Dark Forest – Part IX
I leave a trail of blood as I run. The skin of my hands is shredded from pushing aside sharp, barbed branches, and my face is covered in stinging scratches. I cannot stop. I cannot scream.
Each breath I take is laboured, stabbing into my side as though I were playing a game of swords. I can no longer feel my feet, pounding into the ground and underbrush; they have gone numb, they have fallen away, they have become invisible. I care not.
It pants and snarls behind me. I would be sick at its foul stench except that I cannot stop. I imagine its wild lashing tail ripping across my face; my hair itself whips across my face. I am nearly ready to tear it out. I cannot see. Branches, hair, fear.
Fear that has clogged my heart and will stop its beating in a veritable moment…
My clothes must be torn. Gods, my dress must be torn! I laugh! I laugh, I laugh. Oh, Mother, if you could see me now…my dress must be torn…
I cannot go much further. I must go much further.
There is no shelter, no place to hide.
Only this unceasing, relentless chase – this flight through the forest in search of something that may not even exist.
Oh, for a ray of sunshine! Block away those red eyes that fix themselves on my broken back…
I am slowing down.
I have run for hours, it seems, hours upon days and weeks upon months. There is no hope for Father if he has met my fate.
The forest gets darker with each passing moment. I think it is night. I have lost my sense of direction. I am disoriented. All I know, all I feel, is the steady rhythm of my heart as it seeks to burst out of my chest and the wild, frenzied screaming of the beast on my heels. I do not want to die…but I have already left this body. I see it, running through the forest, scrambling through bushes, struggling through thickets. What girl is this, who screams not as the wicked thorns tear into her flesh and cling to her scrappy garment? Whose eyes, in this darkness, reflect an empty, feral coldness in their blue depths…she is drenched with blood and with sweat and yet she runs as one who is no longer of the ground but of the wind…
Oh, gods, it has me!
One final scream, though how it issues forth from my mouth I do not know, and that heavy weight upon my spine – I shall die, pressed into the earth, die of suffocation while my body is ripped apart, my mouth full of dirt and dust and worms and rotting matter…a branch snaps back by my ear, missing it by a hair; I hear the whistle and the rush of air. So it is not my scream; something hot, something burning drips onto my shoulder; it goes through the cloth and through my skin…
Then the beast's weight presses more heavily against me, and I am buried beneath it.
I struggle, and then I give up. Gods, you know I have struggled enough! What hope is there! Death is smiling at me now, gay and bright and cheerful and fulfilling to this child who has run through a night-lit forest. Death beneath the stars. Even romantic.
As romantic as the slender, slightly luminescent hand that is reaching down to me.