Chapter Forty Six
10,025BC
Sun in the middle of the sky
It was not an easy life to try and live alone in that current climate. The cold chill of the wind brushed up against her cheeks as she trudged through the heavy snow. She hadn't eaten in five days, subsisting mostly off sucking water from snow, which didn't help her temperature maintenance. She'd had a pouch filled with dried berries and smoked meat that she had carried for a few months that would occasionally refill when she came to the opportunity. However, now, it was long since empty, not even the sweet smell of such delights were left ingrained into the leather.
She reached a small stream that was frozen over, grasping her staff firmly she struck it down hard fracturing a frail looking area. With her work worn hands she broke away some of the ice and sat down with a small twig trying to catch something.
She tried to remember the days when she was a child, before the evil had come upon them, and the most she could recall was based on the warmth. The woman would swear to the fact it had gotten colder, much colder after the evil had come.
The numbers of tribes had dwindled as well. Before the evil, before the creature, there had been many little tribes living along the shores of the river and around the large lake that sat at the bottom of the huge mountain range that separated them from the ocean, a body of water she had only ever heard about, but had never actually seen. The range too much, she hoped, for even the evil to cross. But she knew that it was still here, still ravaging the plains. There were nights when the screams of the creature's victims were welcomed by her hearing, and by day or several days later she would stumble upon their remains. Charred and blackened, some without flesh upon their gnawed bones, their tiny tents bare of furs and leaf, the sticks that held them blackened, broken, horribly shattered remains of bowls and weapons that would never stand their own against the monster.
Her eyes had never laid themselves upon the creature.
Never viewed it.
Only descriptions from her father.
From the father.
Her mother and her sister had never laid eyes upon it.
She had only ever seen its destruction.
The gods saw to it that her hunger would be satisfied that day, a fish mindlessly chomped down upon the wriggly twig, perhaps driven by its own insatiable need. She plucked it up successfully and without a need or disgust against she devoured it raw, its body still flapping as she chewed off chunks of its cold flesh.
Had the young woman existed in a future time she would have been inwardly horrified at how she had wolfed down the entire fish, instead, she spent her time picking the scales out of her teeth and when that unpleasant task was done she washed her hands in the cool water.
She stood.
She turned.
She was struck.
She fell.
She crashed through the hard ice and down into the chill of the stream which was much deeper than she had imagined.
Its crispness stung her harshly and she felt as if thousands of wasps were stinging her with tiny spears simultaneously. Somehow she managed to struggle free of the icy pull and gripping the slippery shards she yanked herself out to face what she had only ever known from description.
The creature had not aged.
It was still a boy.
But what told her it was the creature was that lack of eyes.
It laughed at her.
It waited for her to clamber up out of the freeze.
It waited for her to pick up the half of the mystical staff that had given her hope on so many of those empty, lonely nights.
She gripped the leather tightly and looked up at him, she stared into those empty, bloodied sockets and the ran at him, screaming out a string of words that formed a powerful spell, swinging her staff the feathers and small animal skulls rattled fiercely and she struck the creature.
The feeble stick broke into fragments beyond count.
The little skulls snapped from their leather strings and flew off into various dead grasses and flora.
The feathers floated free to land on the cold earth where they would be trodden under foot.
The young sage staggered back in shock, looking down at the remains of the staff she still held. It had done nothing, the powerful spell she had uttered, no effect!
Something hit her; she lost her balance and fell down into the chilly snow.
She groaned as she rubbed her head. Something was on her chest. Something was looking at her. That something was her sister.
Correction, that something was her sister's face.
Those once solid brown eyes had been removed and the sticky sockets bore testament to the brutality that was her last sight.
Her mouth was open just ever so slightly, as the mouths of the dead were often found.
The skin was shrivelled ever so slightly, it had not been preserved, her sister had been without breath for perhaps five days. There was definitely some signs of rot around the more delicate skin and the smell was certainly evidence of that.
Creature approached, reached down, and grasped the hair of the severed head of her sister. He lifted it up and swung it down to strike her, again and again and again. Her screams were so awful she would deny she ever made them.
This was how it would end for her?
Part of her mind cried to her.
Alone, cold, wet, orphaned, without blood line or linage, without hope of keeping alive that heritage and ancestry that was now laid on her shoulders?
NO!
It wouldn't end with her.
She reached down and felt through the snow a sharp rock, not knowing how deeply it was impregnated in the earth she took a chance and pulled anyway. She brought it up and swung as hard as possible, slamming it into the thigh of the creature. There was a horrible shattering sound and the creature went down hard.
Clambering up onto its form, it struggled momentarily, but the creature should have chosen a more suitable host as a child's body was not as strong. She lifted the rock high above her head and bought it down on those empty sockets. Again, and again and again, mimicking the speed and pace of the creature as he had struck out at her with her deceased sister. The sage didn't stop until its head was a bloody mess of pulp, a mixture of brain and skull and hair and blood and skin and whatever else made its way to dwell within that part of the body.
"I have no knowledge of if this method will bring upon us your fate, but I will not cease until you no longer wander this world!"
Screaming she thrust a jagged part of the rock through the flesh of its neck, she began to rotate the chunk of earth in her hands until it was starting to make a rather nasty tear in the flesh. It wasn't long before the vertebrae was visible, at that she smashed her trusty rock into the bones and continued until they were nothing but a bloody white collection of fragments. The spinal cord was damaged, but not disconnected, she reached down and pulled it upwards, the head moving at a sickeningly unnatural angle until, having it tort, she used her teeth to chew through.
And then, as simply as that, the head of that creature was severed from its body.
Its body ceased to move, and it was then she realised how vicious the scratches and bruises that it had inflicted upon her as she struggled to kill it, it struggled for freedom.
Its black blood covered to her form and she turned and vomited into the stream, before dunking her head down into the water… not in the same place of course… to rinse the foulness from her own mouth and senses.
Resting, she laid down in the snow for a few moments but ended up drifting into a cool sleep.
Nightfall
She was soaked through when she woke, and the chill was such that she feared she may greet morning in the land of the rotten. The sage decided to move onwards, hoping she might run into a party of her own who might offer her the comfort of a warm fire. And perhaps even the hospitality of a husband once they see that she has dispatched the evil creature that had touched the lives of many.
Under a large tree she buried the head of her sister, hoping the small ceremony she performed would be welcomed and approved of. Ordinarily she would take her sister to a point where the wind would blow eastwards and upon a funeral pyre she would be burnt while the eldest would stand and chant the prayers and spells that would assure her safe passage onwards, but she refused to carry the body of that monstrosity with her younger sister.
Strangely, the night seemed slightly warmer, which was odd for a number of reasons, but she gave it no mind and continued to traverse the land towards the origin of all of this.
Father of creature had told her of the strange tent they had found while searching for his son. He explained how he approached it, and found blood laying everywhere on a small ledge leading down towards it. On the edges of the door was a bloodied hand print about the same size as his son's. There could be no other explanation. He entered, and the sensation he had when he was inside him would never be removed. He would spend the rest of his life trying to find the warmth. He saw the same things his son saw; of course he could not know that. To him, the head on the floor, staring out at him with strange eyes, had never belonged to a being given life or even a deity, it was an idol, and chances are, perhaps this place was a temple, and this creature that took his boy was angry at the desecration. He refused to believe his son would ever knowingly commit an act of grave sacrilege against a temple of a god, but perhaps it was an accident, or perhaps someone else had been the perpetrator of such a heinous crime. Of course, it didn't really matter who was the cause.
The father had been unable to venture any further into the vessel and so had not seen the remains that thousands of years later would be discovered by a curious Autobot.
So, perhaps if she returned this thing's body to the temple and somehow burry the thing, it would leave her be. It would never walk the earth again. And she could find a tribe somewhere to join and a man to claim her as his own and things would continue normally for a woman of that time.
The slither of the moon was bearing down on its final quarter across the sky when she came upon another.
He was a man of her age, of powerful physique and stanch expression. He halted her progression and demanded to know what business a woman had dragging a headless body through the forest, his tribe's forest, at this time. Then he saw the eyeless face.
"This be the creature!!"
He growled at her.
"How has it come to pass that a mere woman has come into possession of this ill gotten monster's form?"
He demanded firmly.
"Sir, I am no mere woman, I am a sage, a carrier of a blood line destroyed by this thing, and without me, that blood line will cease. It killed my tribe many, many winters ago, so many I cannot count them without being called a distorter of the truth! My grandfather and grandmother sacrificed themselves to give warning to my tribe, but such a warning was not heralded by any, and so when this creature approached my father attempted warning! My father had taken his father's place as tribe witch doctor! But alas, he was not counted as a man of substance of opinion, and the chief ignored him to his peril and the peril of our tribe! My father stole my mother and my sister and myself away to the depths of the forest and it was that that creature lay death upon the heads of my kin! It was during our escape that we made paths with a man who was the father of the child who the creature took as his form! He showed us the place that he had found, a place he claimed the creature must have come from! It was believed by my wise father and the pitiable father of this boy monster that the gods of some dark art must of dealt within that temple and this child somehow angered them, or was believed to have angered them by those deities! My belief, then sir, is to return this body to the temple and burry it".
"You tell an interesting tale indeed, woman, and I give you my word that I find you to be truthful and without misdeed in your telling, of course, I am but a lowly warrior without the mind of a sage or scholar and feel my opinion of you could be based on such a lower mind. Therefore, I will return you to my tribe, where my chief and his wise and learned sages will reside upon you and your story".
"I pray to you, dear sir, that upon this night you do take me to your chief and his wise and learned sages who will reside upon my story, and that I tell them such a horrid tale and upon their minds and hearts they accept it as truth! For I am but a mere woman with but two mere hands, and two mere hands could not possibly hope to burry an entire temple of angry gods! Perhaps this being would relive again within this tiny frail boy and the hastier that we burry such an evil temple, the hastier we will find this monster gone from our sights and the sights of our descendants forever!"
Sunrise
She told her story to the chiefs and sages, and they listened and they believed. One of the Chief's son had been a friend to another tribe, where he had courted that chieftain's daughter with intention of marriage. It was a cold night that the creature had happened upon their small tribe and had done what it did to all tribes it happened upon – it destroyed them.
The chieftain's son and the daughter he hoped to woo took into the night and came back to his home where he told his father of the things he had seen, in particular confirming the truth of the child without eyes that was responsible for such carnage.
It was then decided that many hands would indeed lighten the task the mere woman had set herself, and by 8am, though they did not know it as that time, they would set out, entire tribe, to burry the temple so many kilometres away.
And it took them all of three weeks to complete the task, setting upon the temple's mound a huge monument crafted from rock that would serve as warning to those who would dare near it.
The female sage placed the remains of the boy within the vessel at the nose of the severed idol's head and then backed out, chanting words of apology and a beg for forgiveness.
After the last of the dirt was pushed over the craft, and it was covered from human eyes, the female sage was welcomed into the tribe as a worthy individual for what she had managed, and she was given wed to the man she had met in the forest that night, he of course was very happy with this arrangement and took her with unnatural speed fuelled by lust to his tent where they began the effort of child producing.
And she did produce children.
But she did not tell them of her travels.
She did not tell them of their true blood line.
Nor of her sister, nor of her parents, nor of her tribe.
And the children of all in that tribe were never given story of that creature, for fear one may be stung by the curiosity that stung all children and they might seek this place and wake that creature.
And that female sage would live her life happily and without want and would die peacefully in her warm furs dreaming of a man she never spoke of to her husband.
Her husband would produce three more children with a younger woman and then that husband would be killed in an accident while hunting, having fallen from a rock face after going the wrong direction, age had wearied his mind and limbs and gave him no mercy after he lost his footing over that ledge.
Their children would live lives that were expected of them, with nothing extraordinarily happening to them and they would go to the land of the rotten without thought of a monster that had plagued their mother so.
And not one of those involved would ever give thought to the fact that many many winters later it might rise again.
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Author's NB: I swear to Primus this has a purpose.
As for the way they speak, it sounds almost, Shakespearian, sort of, but I figured, they'd have their own language and translating it into English might actually have it end up sounding like that. Plus, I think it sounds kinda cool.
Also, I wanted to keep you all on your toes (all, what, six of you? Hehe) and keep you guessing with the concept of an ancient evil.
And you know, I often wonder about my ancient ancestors, what they did before the time of bottled water and indoor heating and laptops. I mean, its kinda creepy really, human evolution and progression across the planet. I was reading something the other day that said everyone with blue eyes came from some guy from a place that is now Turkey, 10,000 years ago who lived on a river bed and that blue eye gene was a great big mutation. Okay…. Um… that's enough of that rambling.
Thanks for all the r/vs by the way peeps, I appreciate it.