Story temporarily on Hiatus and the story name has
officially been changed from Meridianto 'Every Demon Bleeds Black'. The first
few chapters are beign retooled/edited (approx 1-3 are being edited for easier
readability and some of the other chapters are going to be edited to be easier
to read). Chapter 17 is on its way, so everyone please hang tight. I've had
lots of schoolwork to do and my original story is eating at my with
ideas/inspiration, plus I just haven't had the time to regularly work on my
writing, as I have to get ready to go to Europe next week for a school trip.
- Wish me luck, and if I don't update by the end of april,
something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Of Wolf and
Man
Pride-Fall
‘I hunt, therefore, I am.’
-- Of Wolf and Man, Metallica
‘I was a creature before I could stand.’
-- Before I Forget, Slipknot
In day, he sleeps.
He wakes. He trains. He eats. His body moves of its own accord through
daily rituals long-lost of meaning or purpose. He cannot see; cannot wake. The
world is a wild, obscured vagary; a place in which time passes by with languid
ease and the dull lights and sounds of everything around him whirl and whorl
like an ephemeral, chaotic spiral to which there is no definition.
He is blind, but refuses to see it as such.
In night, the beast rises.
The prey’s feet crunch and crack the undergrowth beneath him. The sound
echoes horrifically -- all too loud, all too sudden. Everywhere, the darkness
abandons him; treats him not as a comrade should while lying at his feet like
mangy dogs, on his back like a wheel of stone, and around his neck like a noose
of wire.
He is silent, and quiet, and afraid. The fear fuels the fire and the
shadow of doubt grows, flares, and blazes with the pieces of his flesh the
shadows steal and use to paint the leaves bloody, bloody red.
This man is not the hunter, not the warrior who is blind. He is the
prey-beast cornered and trapped and hunted by the larger, more efficient beast.
Sweat dribbles down from his forehead. There is a blade at his neck that
replaces his self-made noose, and a claw at his spine that has taken the weight
of insecurity away from him, and the beast who wears the skin of man smiles as
he says with a voice that crackles like a thousand burning, flickering
infernos: “If you had kept downwind, if you had been more unique, I wouldn’t
have won.”
The thought is disquieting, yet, it is an honorable death that the beast
gives the man -- clean; precise; morbidly efficient as the blade enters his
neck from behind and slices his Adam’s apple cleanly in two.
When he falls, sputtering to the ground, he watches the truer hunter
clean his katana on a leaf and walk off into the gloom. As he dies, he thinks
the thing that killed him more damned in life than he himself will ever be in
death.
In dreams, he wakes
When the hunter sleeps, he smiles a smile that no one can see. They
think he is free; yet, in his mind, he is a prisoner -- is trapped inside a
vast, limitless maze without end, or walls, or distinction. In his dreams, he
is steepled in blood, and death, and battle. From the
cradle, he is a sacrifice to the war machine, and to the grave, his life shall
be a battle -- a battle for peace, for hope, for life, for sanity.
He wades through the morass swamp of reds and vermilions that cling to
his skin and stain him, his shirt, his shoes, his soul, and there is a beast
around him, threading through the waters.
The beast is known as memory.
Faces of comrades long dead or lover’s long last float to the surface as
he walks, and they haunt him -- screaming his name or asking him why he was not
fast enough, why he was not good enough to save them.
He runs to get away from the red, from the pain, from the memories. When
he cannot run any longer, when reds have flecked his face and the pain of the
past crushes his shoulders, his spine, his heart, he falls, hard and fast, and
the sound of his screams echo in the red-tinged landscape like a cry for
freedom or absolution.
At the epicenter of this maze, there is a beast. It hears him clearly.
When it walks, the waters churn and scream a staccato blast of sound at its
feet and the air glimmers and dances like crystalline phantoms locked in
ethereal dance.
The beast is hunting him, and grinds out his name through a screen of
sabers and a blast of hot, senescent breath that rises like miasma to the sky
and spreads throughout his mind; devouring thought, melting humanity, consuming
his soul. Its claws drip putrescence, and it’s tails flicker back and forth
like candy-apple dipped banners in the wind as it sinks its jagged, blackened
claws into his soft, weak mind.
He does not know why escaping the beast is important, but when it nears,
old wounds rip open and his blood splashes down onto a catwalk of crimson he
can feel, and follow, but cannot see. It terrifies him, but as its jaw
closes around his throat and he wakes up screaming, he realizes something.
The beast has no name.
:Yes, this is utterly
leeeched crapped. I
blame you, Chev.: