TO JP

March. March Something.

It all happened so fast.

  It started the day after my failure, the after-night in particular. Not quite before dawn broke but getting there, when the guards were shifting, and the neighbors were lowering their clothes from laundry lines with yawns. The birds settled on top of these threads, perched along and staring down at me and beyond them, the sun against morning dewed grass.

  The guards left my vicinity to travel along the walls and remove the smoking torches. There was only one perched by the bridge near me, and the man sent for it spent most of his time looking and talking to the villagers; flirting, joking, scaring the children off. Stupid things.

  It was morning and I’d long since been caught. They tied me by the bars by my own makeshift rope. The most expensive rope ever made, ‘bout a thousand dollars worth. Fuck me, right?

  Of course, I fought and loosened the thing, but never quite enough to get rid of the bondage. Just enough to be semi-comfortable, so my flesh wouldn't bulge and purple against the tight grip.

  In this state, in this cage, I was made to watch my humiliation. To watch the people run around in their daily comings, how they laughed at me and threw rotten fruits at me. How they looked at each other, how they stopped for hours on end to talk with baskets of food on top of their heads. I was made to watch the city, sat there slumped and tied, looking at the homely buildings - lofts with thatched roofs, lofts grown into the rolling hills, perched on top of the giant trees. Some thick bricked, other paper-thin walled.

  I watched everything. Suffered everything. Children poking at me with sticks, the guards who were too slow to scare them away and who laughed with them as I screamed and barked.

  They slapped me, hit me with the blunt of swords, made me sit still and watch the scenery.

  How misaligned the grey bricks on the floor composing the shrinking roads were and how wide the field was outside the ten-man tall high wall was. Or how the wind carried the faint smell of ocean and blew my hair sideways, that I had to constantly shake my head to get the straight black hair back in place behind my ear. It was so long, so straight. How’d it grow so fast in a few days since Aussie-land?

  It was an ordinary day all things aside. Save for my nervousness of them stoning me to death. Otherwise, normal.

  Not one strange thing at all. Not even after the scream last night.

  So's evening came, and the busybodies of horses and women with baskets over their heads petered away into or further out the city. I was sat along the corner of my metal bars. A child played with the tail end of my little rope, he stuck his little hands through the bars to steal one of my shoes that was half-slipped off. I snapped my mouth at him, I would have hurt him too. What more did I have to lose, right? I didn't have the energy though, not today.

  So's the kid went away to cry off to his older brother, both stuck out their tongues across the plaza and ran along into an alley. Not into a house. They were barefoot and even with all the loud tappings of three dozen wanderers, I could hear the plop of their calloused feet. The sun was about to set. Hunger came and went, thirst stayed. Picklefingers over there, was sat opposite the road, half-dozed off into the beginning of the evening shift with a little gourd of fluid by his feet. Sweat came down his red face and stained his leather helm so every so often he'd take out a little rag and clean his forehead.

  Evening came.

  "Asshole," I liked saying it out loud, Picklefingers didn't know what it meant. He smiled anyway. So I'd say, "Smug assholes."

  His hair looked greasy underneath his helm, wet and darkened like seaweed fresh out the ocean floor.

  In a few hours, I was sure I'd be killed. Chains rattled by the the side of the cage, guards threw rocks in buckets by the side of the fountain. The torches flickered, dark was set.

  Picklefingers was still half-asleep. More guards approached.

  Clouds congested the sky, stars were few and they'd peer through cracks for brief moments. Then disappear. I loosened the grip of my constraints, I felt my hands touch, and my arms move, and I knew with one clean jerk I'd be able to break through. But not now - not yet. Now was the time to wait, to look up and watch the moon.

  What I should have done was work on that key with the rope again. Before more guards came - before the whole fucking city rained down to shower me with rocks. In hindsight, now I know that what I should have really done was wake up Picklefingers. To warn him.

  What I ended up doing was waiting. Just a few hours, just for a bit for the guards to open my doors and for me to put up one half-assed fight to the death.

  It started before the main event, with only what seemed like a dozen people around me. The pre-game of public execution, I learned, was filled with alcohol. I smelled it in the air - apple and cinnamon and the scent of nail-polish or gasoline, the stuff was strong whatever it was that they drank out of the dark wide cups. It looked like they were shooting straight out of hats. The torches relit. By God, it’d all happened so soon. Morning and day and children playing and noise and horses and all of a sudden dark. I hadn’t remembered a single moment of it all, not one and it was gone.

  Guards approached my door. They wanted me chained before everything started.

  I heard the trees from the west stutter. Not unusual. Night winds often came, I would know, I was shirtless, and every small degree of cold was made that much more awful against my flesh. I knew the wind. I knew cold. I thought nothing was wrong.

  So's the guard came and the wind with 'em and the blow threatened the fire. It flickered, the gushing from the west. The scent of ash passed by all of us.

  "Ish ya'ar timu." The guard said. He stuck a key into the gate, I heard it click. My hands were loosened, ready. The door lock snapped. I ripped my hands out of the rope and ran forward.

  Well, shit, right? I figured that if they wanted me dead, they'd have to fight me for it.

  I pushed my body against the door, levied all my weight against my knees and buckled them to hold the damn thing shut as the guards kept trying to shake it open.

  Someone struck me in the side through the bars, really dazed my head. I fell.

  I expected that of course. It was just another variable in this failed experiment that was my escape.

  What I didn't expect was the scream.

  It happened right as two guards stared me down, one with a prodding spear. The other with the hilt of his sword sticking through the gates.

  The guards kept going.

  "Ya'ar timu. Ya'ar timu."

  "Fulth gwai. Fulth gwai!" They kept shouting.

  "Fuck off." I kept shouting. Kept kicking my feet out, pushing the tip of the spear away from me.

  "Fuck off I said."

  In the middle of all this heat, we felt the cold scream. A scream that shut us up real fucking fast.

  Shrill, eastbound, a shout that carried itself seemingly by sheer anger alone all across the skyline.

  "What was that?" I asked. No answer. They whispered to each other. Pickle fingers even woke up, some paces away from the three of us.

  Another horrible sound. This one, a bit further.

  It was by then that I saw a few lights in the village come up, the soft glow by the window sills. A few faces popped out. They nodded their heads and slammed their glass panes closed.

  The others, the people who had come out to celebrate my death looked up to the sky.

  There was screaming further in the city. The shouts were not in even intervals. They were by all measures, sporadic. And there were only two so far so it must have been easy for most of them to shrug it off; most of the people outside were drunk, the rest were sleeping so for all them it must have just appeared like a night terror.

  I guess that was accurate in a way, it was a night terror.

  It took ten minutes, a few more waves of wind to comb over my hair and the torches and the people for another shout to be heard.

  I tugged the gate, it was shut. The guards weren't trying to pull me out, the key was far away. The closest person now was Picklefingers, who held his sword.

  My shoulders hung low, my knees bent. My neck propped up a bit, and turned and angled upwards to see everything above.

  The silence disgusted me. The calm made me uneasy.

  There were walls. There were houses. There were fields. There were people drinking, some singing and some cautious. Lights were propped everywhere; every corner and every stand, around the walls and in the hands of guards. The exits were closed, my vantage to the fields was gone. Guards questioned themselves. They looked fuckin’ pissed.

  There wasn’t a scream for a while.

  So's I thought things were alright and I was starting to expect and prep for the second attempt at getting me out of the rat cage. Wind came, it made me buckle.

  It carried the scent of ash. And blood. A lot of blood.

  But there wasn't another shout. Not another shrill voice in the sky.

  Guards multiplied as they came out of their homes, more heads popped up the sides of the wall. Pickle fingers had a friend now, a young man with thin cheeks. He was sweating. Both of them were. A few neighbors came out with cloaks around their shoulders, some with their children, some alone with the lantern light illuminating the half-lazy eyes on ‘em.

  They whispered.

  I didn't know what they said, but I could read in their faces the piqued feeling of something wrong.

  It was thirty minutes of this drowning sensation of a body cast out to sea, slowly falling and circled by sharks. Thirty minutes, that felt like thirty hours. Thirty minutes before the fast coming war cry and the flock of horrors - a carnival of the grotesquely that came from the forest. I was in my cage watching it all. And it happened so fast from the first shout to violence that even after just seeing the events unfold, the memories are muddled by the blur of movements from the city and the ravagers.

  It was a whole cavalry, I didn't know of what at the time, only that they came with shouts and flapping. The guttural scream, the one you muster from your innards and propel out of yourself like vomit. The kind of scream that launches spit and bile with each shriek. This noise accompanied the flapping. Wings. Long, maybe a grown man's length across, a span that covered the sky. The white of the moon was covered by their shit-colored skin. I looked through the gaps of my cage. Screaming, screaming to the two bumbling idiots who turned their bodies to face me and with juggling hands lingered in a state of nervous back-and-forth should-we-or-should-we-not strides.

  I screamed at them, "Hey, let me out! Come on."

  I made the gesture with my hands, the come here-and-hurry-the-fuck-up gesture.

  Both saw me, I know because I faced them and I was sure we all had the same contorted face. It was like looking into two mirrors.

  "The keys! Give me the keys. I don't want to die here." I kept gesturing.

  One of them caught on. He approached my cage. Though he didn't help, he only went near me to grab a torch.

  “Aw fuck man!” I said. So’s they both held out their swords, and their torches and all I could hear was their quick breaths and the shaking sound of their steel-tipped boots tapping away.

  So's they went in circles around my cage until they were in opposite ends, one facing the gate and the other facing the main street. People all around us ran. A stampede.

  The guards by the walls kept still, except for one lone man who climbed a bell tower at the very corner of one the village and shook it. It didn't help. It was like an alarm for the monsters - and I do mean that word - monsters - to attack.

  They circled us. Vultures. High above us, their thin bodies cut into the cloud ridden sky. Torches around the walls lit up, the men came out of their houses. Some held their children. Some pushed them inside, with swords already in their hands and half their armor on. I saw the shopkeeper. He ran to his store, he closed the door, and I saw him through the window with a pike in his hand and his eyes creeping up from the display window and the large mountain of berries behind him.

  "Someone get me out!" I rattled the cage. It didn't even tip it over. Talk about impotent. Here I was, slamming my palms and fists while these idiots fumbled around.

  Not that they…lasted long. I don't know if they were the first, it was hard to tell in the chaos. I know the creatures swooped down, I could hear the wind break as they glided straight down. And I saw the first guard, the one next to Picklefingers, sword in hand, plucked from the ground. His sword was still in the air for a moment. It spun into a full circle before falling with sonorous rattle onto the concrete floor. It shook and vibrated and settled. I heard screaming. I heard steel clash. I heard...a plop.

  I looked behind myself, to where an unmanned stall was. I saw a hand fall down, dismembered. I saw blood dripping from the sky. I saw the man, eaten alive. His body raised and lowered into the wide maw of the thing. Even now, I can't describe it's features. Past purple skin, past the veins and hypertrophied arms, past all that. The details are lost to me. I didn't want to watch too long, I couldn't. I just heard the body drop behind me, onto one of the stands. The wood collapsed. The explosion of splinters reached even me.

  I slammed my cell, I tried punching it. I think I fractured my fist then. But adrenaline hit me just right because I couldn't feel much but the drop in my stomach and the coldness in my loins. I kicked, I punched.

  "Let me out. Let me out, please!" I screamed. People ran past me. Mothers, children. And it was like a kind of life-or-death lottery because they were plucked from the ground and eaten and dropped with no sense. No reason. The markings of claws decorated the city, it was easy with their talons; talons so deep they tore the wood and clay off of houses with one grip.

  Planks fell around me. Limbs and giblets rolled past me like the bloody rocks before. And here I was, I won't lie, screaming.

  "Help me. Help me, please."

  They circled us. Vultures. High above us, their thin bodies cut into the few stars and moonlight left . Torches around the walls lit up, the men came out of their houses. Some held their children. Some pushed them inside, with swords already in their hands and half their armor on. I saw the shopkeeper. He ran to his store, he closed the door, and I saw him through the window with a pike in his hand and his eyes creeping up from the display-window.

  "Someone get me out!" I rattled the cage. It didn't even tip it over. Talk about impotent. Here I was, slamming my palms and fists while these idiots fumbled around.

  The idiots didn't last too long. I don't know if they were the first, it was hard to tell in the chaos. I know the creatures swooped down, I could hear the wind break as they glided straight down. And I saw the first guard, the one next to Pickle fingers, sword in hand, plucked from the ground. His sword was still in the air for a moment. It spun into a full circle before falling with sonorous rattle onto the concrete floor. It shook and vibrated and settled. I heard screaming. I heard steel clash. I heard...a plop.

  I looked behind myself, to where an unmanned stall was. I saw a hand fall down, dismembered. Blood dripped from the sky. The man’s body made loud pops as his muscles rips and bulged from mauled flesh. His body raised and lowered into the wide maw of the thing. The monster ate him. Even now, I can't describe it's features. Past purple skin, past the veins and hard-looking arms, past all that. Shit, I can’t even remember how long this all way. Fuck man. I didn't want to watch too long, I couldn't. I just heard the body drop behind me, onto one of the stands. The wood collapsed. The explosion of splinters reached even me.

  I slammed my cell, I tried punching it. I think I fractured my fist then. But adrenaline hit me just right because I couldn't feel much but the drop in my stomach and the coldness in my loins. I kicked, I punched.

  "Let me out. Let me out, please!" I screamed. People ran past me. Mothers, children. And it was like a kind of life-or-death lottery because they were plucked from the ground and eaten and dropped with no sense. No reason. The markings of claws decorated the city, it was easy with their talons; talons so deep they tore the wood and clay off of houses with one grip.

  Planks fell around me. Limbs and giblets rolled past me like the bloody rocks before. And here I was, I ain’t gonna lie, screaming.

  "Help me. Help me, please."

  Chaos. That's what it looked like. The kind that's almost funny. People stumbling over their own arms or legs or the very wreckage of their houses or families, slipped and fell like they were walking on banana peels or some shit. But it wasn't funny, not when they were swooped up, not when the fat was ripped from their bellies.

  It wasn't fair, it never will be. I didn't know what to do, to be honest. I'm not...a fight. It's not fair. I'm not USED to these things. I couldn't do anything - I mean. Could you blame me?

  I just kind of sat on my knees. I had my hands to the bars, I didn't cry. I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry. I stayed calm.

  I just waited. Picklefingers saw me eventually. Bless him. He tried to open the cell. That's the word, tried. I guess at that moment he thought who cares about shoplifting? Assault? 'Cause he stuck the key and looked at me and offered a sword. The lock creaked and got stuck, but I couldn't hear it in the cacophony of war; the shouts and the gliding and the fires and the explosions of wood and walls was too much. He just looked at his keys and fumbled, and I don't think it helped that I was there with him, fumbling.

  "I have it, let me do it!" I told him, and he should have. He'd still be alive if he did.

  Because one moment we were both wrestling to find the right key and the other

  The other

  The other

  His body slumped over. Twisted a complete three hundred and sixty, his neck was turned, and the back of his helmet faced me. T-that's not how a body should be.

  The body looking forward, the face looking back. That's not how it should be at all.

  Blood came out of his snapped neck. It was warm against my face.

  My legs went weak. I had to push myself against the metal bars to stand. It took a few breaths, or rather, it took a few moments for me to breath.

  My ears rang. My teeth rattled. All I had in my mind, all I could think of to get the image out of me as if by concentrating, if I could erase everything but my want for those keys, then I could pull through. I got on my knees and stuck my hand through the gate, and my hand reached for the keys next to the corpse. My fingers touched them. I shook the whole time, just lifting the keys made them rattle as if they were in an earthquake.

  I had them near, right next to the lock.

  The cage flipped over.

  My body slammed against the bars. Forcing my eyes open was a struggle and what was there made me wish I’d kept the closed - the concrete floor. The cage was tipped over, completely. A bucket of shit fell past my face and spilled onto the body of Picklefinger. (God bless him for trying)

  Above it snapped at me. I didn't want to look at it - couldn't. But it's spittle fell down to my face and down the back of my head.

  Fuck the keys. That's what I thought. Go for the sword. Kill the monster.

  Pickle Fingers was still here, underneath the bars now, squeezed underneath my weight and the cage. So I reached my hand for his waist. Fuck the keys The cage was safer by now. So's I found his sword. It was covered in blood and the tighter I held my grip, the more it seemed to eject from my hands. The leather was wet, the steel was wet, and I was just there, with this slipping sword aimed at this monstrosity barking through the bars. And it was starting to break in. Shit, right? It used both its talons and got a grip on two bars and pushed. Pushed. Pushed. The metal whined, and I just had to fight, now or never because once it was in, I was a goner.

  The bars opened. It stuck its foot out, the talon pointed at my head.

  I moved my head to the side. It struck the concrete and broke it, the gravel hit my cheeks. I clipped the bastard that instant. A sword through its hind. It felt that because it screamed. It's green tongue slobbered as it gaped its mouth. It's jagged teeth Jesus like a vortex of sharp-steel. It sent its talon, down, trying to pluck at my head and I was there, rolling left and right, avoiding getting my neck eviscerated.

  I stabbed it again, I must have lopped off a leg or something because my mouth was full of its shit tasting blood. The sword slipped out of my hands. The monster gave out a cry. It widened it's wingspan and flew up.

  I opened my mouth to a plaster of blood. I rubbed my eyes. Shouted.

  But I couldn’t stay. Not in this cage with a hole in it. So’s I climbed the bars, and I was thankful I'd been to the gym a week earlier. That's weird to say, huh

  I slipped out, squeezed my chest-bare body through the bars. I rolled out the edge and landed on my knee. The pain shot up to my waist. My eyes saw doubles, I couldn't run straight. But...but... I wasn't broken yet, just rattled. So's I did all I could, I hung low. I steadied myself against walls. People passed me in frenzy. Someone almost attacked me; the craze in their eyes so bloodshot and wide that he couldn’t even tell me apart from the monsters. He stopped his blade an inch short of my throat. Then he blinked and breathed and walked past me into smoke. Never knew him. Never saw him again, either.