If a darkness must pass, let us not be found waiting by the door without a lamp.
Gen’s eyes shot open. It was the dead of night, an hour that could certainly spell death for many a watchless sentry. For a village this small, everyone in Derri was called to a sentry roster. There was no watchtower, nary an outpost; for the flaming beacons lay at rest in those that rest.
Feeling his skin crawl, a dreadful sensation as yon skeletal outgrowths of a weathered oak scratching a passing wagon’s canopy, his eyes darted to the table sitting snugly beneath the window sill. He observed the shadows dancing across the marred surface with caution, breath hitched in his throat, torn between petrified choking and relief.
The shadows were ordinary and everyday, cast by the fluttering awning of the dried goods shop across the dirt road and prancing crickets, interrupted occasionally by a passing cloud breaking the moon’s glow. But something was amiss. The silence in the air was stifling, the passing breeze seemed all too rushed, not sparing a moment to dawdle among the things that were made to catch the wind.
Something, some instinct, made his eyes linger on the crisp edges of the shadows. As if the intensity of his gaze would set things in motion. The change began barely noticeably, edges turning fluid and fuzzy, before growing alarmingly like a bleeding ink spot on parchment.
There was no time to waste. Flinging the blanket haphazardly to the floor and almost tripping over the heap of fabric, Gen stumbled out of his room and down the narrow hallways of his house, calling out in alarm.
“Ma, Pa, Leia! Get up! We have to go! Hurry!” He shouted, slapping his sandals together to get their attention and heighten the urgency.
He couldn’t wait for them to climb out of their beds. In large strides, Gen returned to his room and went straight to the wooden box by the nook. He tossed the lid aside and couldn’t care less that it slid noisily across the floor and right into his crafting table, breaking one of its legs and causing his work to crash into the floor in a heap of splinters and sawdust.
Gen grabbed the travel bag that he’d long packed for this day and hurriedly slung it across his chest. Pulling away an old garnet drape cloth, he uncovered a sturdy oaken staff. The familiar weather-beaten textures in his palm reminded him of the roads he'd travelled in years past. All of which had led him to this very moment. He allowed himself a few sacred moments to take it all in, digging the end of his staff into the red earth beneath his feet, sending a small cloud of dust sailing across his toes and falling on them like the cover of a safe blanket. Like an anointing from home, it was all he could take with him.
As he raced around his room a last time, scanning for anything else he’d need to bring along, he stopped by the window and peered out at the sky above the mud roofs that stretched into the not-very-far distance. As a boy, that had been his great big world - civilization began with the neighbours and ended at the village gate. He had believed. Even the lake just beyond had been a frontier only for the brave and bold (fishermen), an ambition his young mind placed on the pedestal. Now at twenty-four, Gen certainly deserved to build his own pedestal, one that would utterly disgrace the former and rid it of any grounds for existence.
The moon, oh the great light of the night he and Leia had once naively declared as belonging to them, was slowly being obscured, and not by a cloud or fog. No, it wasn’t a phenomenon of the celestial realm, it was the village that was being covered. He grimaced at the silence from the hallway and adjacent rooms, grip tightening on the strap of his bag, twisting it unforgivingly.
What he feared and alone prepared for was at hand, and stealthily so in the middle of the night when everyone was in unguarded slumber. Nobody believed him when he warned them of its coming. They took him for the scout that turned non compos mentis upon his return, so dazzled by the great outside that it took his bearings. Even his family believed so.
“Gen, I’m begging you, please stop this madness. You’re ruining our lives! Do you know what you’re doing to Ma, Pa and I? We can’t go anywhere without being scorned for your deeds!” Leia cried, disappointed at her brother’s blatant disregard for his family. Gen, on the other hand, was disappointed in her unbelief. He’d thought of his sister as his closest confidant, never in the world would he have expected her to turn against him too. She knew him better than what others say, his family knew him better, or at least he thought they did.
Pa was detached. He didn’t comment. He didn’t react. He simply ignored Gen’s presence completely. It was as if his son had never been back.
“Please keep your son under control, Halgar. Enough is enough. You shouldn’t have let him leave Derri, should’a just been a good craftsman like his father. He’s been brainwashing my children and going about the marketplace like a lunatic, spreading this nonsense about some darkness. He’s a threat to our peace!” Gen hid in the adjacent alley, back pressed against the dried mud wall as their neighbour yelled at Ma. He took a peek around the corner and saw Ma respond to his harshness with servile acquiescence and apology, characteristic of her meek nature. This man wasn’t the first to confront Ma; Gen had witnessed the critical stares and disparaging comments of those in the marketplace directed at the unassuming lady as she went about her errands. It broke his heart that she had to bear the brunt of such opposition, but he couldn’t stay silent, he couldn’t ignore the reality that was out there. In fact, there was no such thing as ‘out there’; Derri and the other lands are intertwined as bone to marrow. It didn’t matter how far North nor South nor East anything occurred, the earth beneath their feet is one and the same, and evil certainly does not care for geographical boundaries.
Everyone had so taken for granted the light that they never thought they’d have to fight for it. Everyone would rather live in this false sense of peace and stuff their ears from all warnings. Much like the deceptive respite of melted candle wax in one’s ears when the neighbours’ dogs were getting too restless at nightfall. Some ancient, baseless oral advice passed down the generations. Gen had hoped by his time the people would wisen up to the permanent damage resulting from temporary relief. By some sick and twisted lie, the people believed that paying heed to any controversy inaugurates a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the darkness was coming whether they harkened, whether they believed. It was coming without sympathy.
“Gen, is this about the darkness again?” His mother’s tired voice reached him just as he crossed the threshold of his room. The tiredness was born not singly from interrupted slumber, but from her son’s countless deluded ravings that brought the household everything but peace. There was a tinge of pity in the trembling of her aged voice, a painful acceptance that her son was too far from salvation.
“Ma, can’t you see for yourself? It’s happening now. You can argue with me later but we need to leave while there’s still light, we need to leave now!” Gen rasped, pointing to the visibly growing darkness outside their abode.
“Please,” voice above a whisper, he only hoped whatever little faith they still had in him would move them. When his father and sister came to join their mother in solemn rebellion, looking sorrowfully at their son and brother dressed like a vagabond, he knew that no human - son nor saviour, could move their hearts of stone.
Without even a moment to lift a prayer to the heavens, there was shouting from the neighbours, which quickly turned to shrieks of anguish. Splintering of wood. Sharp tear of canvas. A discordance of devastation and raw horror.
“Hurry! To the village gate!” Gen shouted with everything he could, dashing out of the doorway, a cloud of red in his wake. He couldn’t save everyone, but he’d try all he could to save his family. Waving his arms frantically, he led the way as Ma, Pa and Leia scrambled to keep up.
The darkness was closing in like a tidal wave from every side but where they were headed. They needed to be faster, but it was getting difficult as villagers ran amok, pushing over laundry poles and woven baskets of fruit. Everybody was trying to hide and dodge, yet no one thought to make for the village gate. Leaving Derri seemed too preposterous a notion.
As Gen charged through the commotion, every time he looked back his family seemed to be falling further behind. Colliding with frenzied villagers and stumbling over strewn village ware, they were swimming against the tide and they were losing.
“Quick! We’re almost there!” He turned back to help Ma but a villager pushed her to the ground before he could grab her hand.
“Gen!” Leia screamed from his far left, desperately reaching out for him before the darkness devoured her into non-existence before his eyes. He couldn’t forget what he saw in her eyes in the moments just before she was taken. Amidst the wild waves of terror in the blue of her eyes, there was a heart-rending poignance and deafening ‘I’m sorry’. It was one thing to be swallowed by an entity beyond one’s control, another by self-inflicted regret.
“Leia!” Gen cried out, agonized by the loss of his young sister. He turned and saw Pa standing still, resignedly so, and looking right at him as tendrils of inky midnight crept up from behind, swirling around him like deadly vines. There was rue written on his face - a sorrowful acknowledgement of his son in his final moments. Their last conversation was a silent one, heart reaching for heart, as the darkness swiftly enveloped Pa.
“Gen!” Ma screamed for him. He whipped around to see her crawling helplessly towards him. And that was the last he saw of her - a scene etched into the very depths of his mind, a scar.
He was emptied all of a sudden - mind and emotion drained. Staring wide-eyed at the encroaching shroud of death, loss, and destruction, Gen was frozen to the spot which would soon be his burial ground.
An unexplainable force snapped him out of it long enough for him to reach into his tunic and retrieve the tiny glass bottle from within.
The sole surviving firefly lit up as he shook it with a rugged determination. Raising the bottle in front of him and above his head like a winning trophy, he made his last sprint towards the gate, calling out at the top of his lungs: “If anyone can see the light, follow it!”
As Gen burst through and beyond the gates of home, he tripped over a stone and toppled forward, the bottle rolling out of his grasp when he hit the ground. He turned on his hind and witnessed the final strike of darkness swallowing the terracotta walls protecting the village.
The darkness seemed to know no end. What was before his eyes was a wall, no not wall, for there were no edges, no way to look over or beyond. It was a sea...yet even the nautical planes had to bow before the sky at horizon. It was blackness, emptiness, nothingness. There were no words capable of describing the other-worldly occurrence, nor could plain sight comprehend the extent of the amorphous malevolence.
Dawn lost for yet another village, heralding the dawn of another age. At present a victory for the savageous dark domain. God only knows how much of the lands remain in the delicate balance of light and shadow.
Face claim for protagonist, Gen: Patrick Schwarzenegger
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