When Sylvester thinks he's in a safe distance, he slows down and leans against a fir tree. Or ratherrams himself against it to halt.
Steady breathing.
The first inhale sucks in air too quickly.
Steady.
He hears the air from his nostrils hiss out at snail's pace then forces the next eager breath to slow down. As he turns his head sideways, one of the fir's branches catches his eye.
Fwwwick. Sylvester chews on the fir needles he plucked out. The flavor's not too bad though it might need an extra kick with the tanginess. He itches at his right eye socket and frowns at the slivers of dried blood he scratched up under his nails.
Of course, the eyes had to be an enemy's priority if he knew about them being a weakness. I'd been too rash to think of protecting my weak spots.
Sylvester then attempts to summon a mercury sphere from his hand, but it only grows to the size of a barely fattening persimmon before his muscles gave up.
Damn. Even if I fully recover, my mercury power won't be the same. At least I still have the other power.
A firebolt the size of a butter knife appears between his fingers in less than a second, and he hurls it at a boulder. With a sizzle, it splits in two giant half-melted pieces.
He then begins picking out the tree with his bare hands. Its needles would go in one pile; the tree's smaller branches and bark would go to another for tinder. The trunk and the larger branches would turn into the foundation for his lean-to shelter, a task more suitable for later.
The demigod yawns and burrows a shallow hole paces away from the stripped-out tree, a naked ghost among the other dark-cloaked ones.
Perhaps the light from tomorrow would make matters a bit better, including the landscape. He lays down there and closes his eye. Behind that stinging darkness closing off the world, a familiar presence emerges, close but out of reach. Of course, it could as well be a play of his imagination. It's all right though.
For a week, Sylvester stays at the same place doing the same general routine: wake up, stretch, forage, work on the lean-to, eat fir needles and cones, watch the hideous bumps on his body gradually shrink into nothingness, forage more, eat again, sleep. Building the shelter especially takes plenty of patience. When cutting the logs to thinner vertical pieces, Sylvester has to control the heat in the firebolts. Too little wouldn't maintain the tool's structure for long, making it vanish, but too much would cause the log to explode in flames. Countless, potentially useful pieces burn to ash because the balance between "just right" and "too hot" tips ever so slightly.
When the shelter is complete, he spends more time searching for food, including wild birds and squirrels. Every part that contains some meat makes for a more savory variation from the increasingly monotonous vegetation he crams in his mouth.
Then, a disruption from the pattern happens.
A low-pitched, deafening hum from above reaches Sylvester's ears while he is skinning the gray fur away from a dead squirrel. He startles like an animal half-aware of its surroundings and puts aside the carcass as he sprints out the shelter. As he gazes up to see what's going on, a bright light from a flying apparatus strikes his good eye, and the gigantic thing levitates closer. Should he run ... or fight?
A bow begins to form on his palm.
A nearly realistic human voice from somewhere calls out a sentence, but it sounds garbled to him.
Befuddled, Sylvester looks around for where the voice is for a moment before realizing the connection between it and the machine.
That spoken language sounds familiar. Maybe if I was in a previous lifetime, I would fully understand...
Three figures descend down from the apparatus, each wearing the same colors. On closer inspection, they aren't quite people but rather resemble them in shape. Instead of flesh, they consist of titanium and silicon. Instead of faces, there are glass circles in the middle of the head, turning toward him when they "see".
The figures raise their arms up with empty hands, and one of them beckons him to come to the rope ladder that just dropped down. Sylvester leers at them for a moment. Could they be trusted?
As his hesitant legs make their way toward the ladder, Sylvester keeps eyeing the humanoid figures, their mechanical arms still above their heads. Although nothing remarkable happened from the time he climbs up to him sitting inside the flying machine with spinning blades on top, tension still tingles around in the air. Although he could escape with physical force, there's the possibility that he wouldn't ever. He overestimated himself before. Maybe this would lead me to somewhere new. To redeem something I never did. Maybe.
In spite of himself, Sylvester smiles, looking like his proper age.
Comments (0)
See all