Musings Of A Chaotic Mind

Monster Of Man

Severed limbs lay in disarray. Contorted beyond recognition of what they represented.

"Coward", the voice seethed.

The monster of man had made him a part of the end. But was escaping from it all mean that he was saved?

"You coward!" The screams were deafening.

Blood rained like drops of tar, thick and dense; a pool of crimson beneath the undergrowth. His own hands shone in the stark white, for the light had caught him red-handed.

His pupil constricted, the eye as vast as a chasm- a different world in itself. As if a universe opened in his iris. The drop reflected in that mirror of a void bounded by the mystique of this new world that was a part of him. Then ever so slowly, the dark and heavy drop of sin collided with that black hole of his-

-and the big bang burst anew.

※ ※ ※ ※ ※※ ※ ※ ※ ※

Consciousness streamed in like a streak of daylight. At once, as if he were a competitor to the wind itself, he soared upright pushing himself off the ground and sitting cross-legged, with an aghast expression, dripping down his face in beads of sweat.

Hyperventilating breaths fogged as soon as they escaped the man's throat, while he clutched the grasses so forcibly in fact, they gave from their roots , snapping in the silent, damp morning thick with dew. Only the stream nearby him kept alive the world being dynamic as he, and broke through the stillness as if breaking through a static image of reality. So clear in fact, you could see right through it like glass.

He rubbed his face. But at once winced. A fear had crept within him. He was afraid to open his eyes.

Was the world going to fight back? Or was the end on its way.

He dared. Peaking from the corner of his vision, he looked. His vision was not dyed red. He sighed.

He got up, steadied his glasses on top of his nose and dusted off his torn and stained jacket.

The cuts and wounds from the previous day still stinged. Would he be able to find any medicinal plants in this region?

His breaths stopped all of a sudden.

Rustle. Footsteps.

He stood silent.

And then-

The leopard leapt.

Not onto him, but on the bodies hidden beneath the shrubs.

He rushed and retreated into the shadows, as if transforming into the darkness itself. But he couldn't go all the way before he came stumbling down. His voice hitched, and his choking voice gave into miserable sobs, that ever so silently blended into the weeping forest.

The stream still flowed quietly, with no stench in it left to give away what had occurred the previous night. Yet the claw marks in the mud indicated the trace of something that did not belong in this world.

The tent was in tatters, but could he really be blamed.

The fire had consumed them all, and the end was coming either way. It had just got to them earlier that the rest. Damnation was mobile. And so was it, an incarnation of the very fire that blinded men, before the unspeakable bore fruit.

The leopard looked up, smelling him, before it too was blinded.

And it got up. A part of the end.