Insulator

1.7 The Cliff Path

The path ahead of me split off in two directions.

Left or right.

I didn't know where I was, nor where I was going. It was just the occasional meaningless decision I had to make.

Today we were going left.

There were tall cliffs on both sides, and as I continued the path it would only become narrower. As I looked ahead, I could tell what this path was. It was a bottleneck.

I looked around the tops of the cliffs for any faces or signs of life. A path like this was the perfect place to ambush people, so it felt unlikely for this type of path to not be watched in some way.

As I drew closer, I could see in the distance that the path opened up eventually. It was still a fair way away, but I was approaching the thinnest part of the path.

An arrow shot me, knocking me backwards a few meters like a ragdoll. It seemed to be like a warning shot, to see how I would react. I stood up and continued walking, though.

They probably could tell that they would need more than that to stop me, so the next arrow that hit me was a bit different. After getting up again from being knocked over, I looked at the tip and saw that it was poisoned. To poison someone this way would require piercing their skin, so I was unaffected by it, naturally.

They fired a few more, which appeared to be a different type of poisons. They didn't knock me back much, and I was able to keep my balance, but a strange gas came out of some of them. I held my breath as much as I could and continued walking.

I was very much aware of what was happening, though. The next shot was a fire arrow. I was someone that had seen too many explosions to not recognise the impact the terrain around me had, so I knew it was coming.

I pulled out a fire bottle which blew up along with the gas around me. It made the explosion much larger than they would have expected, as well as removing their vision from the cloud of dust and smoke that covered the small pathway. I quickly ran through to the other side, standing out in the open when the dust settled.

I could see the archers up on the cliffs. They eventually noticed me, so we had a dialogue.

"What is it that you want?" one of them yelled to me.

"I'm just a wanderer, travelling from one town to the next."

"This path is a dead-end" they replied. "There is only an archer town down this way. It would be best for both of us if you were to simply leave."

"Very well" I said, and started walking back. I had no reason to visit an archer town. I wasn't one to care about the war going on between our two kinds, so it didn't matter to me whether the archers there lived or died.

Though, if provoked I would naturally fight back to defend myself.

"Oh wait..." I said to myself, realising I forgot something. "I probably don't need to do that anymore..." I turned around and started walking back down the narrow path, but they started shooting me again, knocking me backwards. They didn't stop this time, and just used regular arrows. They were stubborn and persistent, probably frustrated that they weren't able to kill me so easily.

A person's intentions can be difficult to know. Just like how they didn't realise that my intention for returning was to prevent unnecessary destruction. But since I didn't make it back in time, I just lay on the ground, taking their arrows one after another, waiting for the usual silence that would follow the large bang.

In the time the dust was up I had placed bottles on each side of the cliff face, before waiting out in the open. I made sure that they were stronger than usual, as it was my way of dealing with the archers that thought they were safe way up in the sky, there.

It almost felt ironic that their stubbornness was what caused their lives to end. If they hadn't pinned me down, then no one would have died, and no destruction would have occurred. But because they kept shooting me like they did...

The two explosions went off, followed by the rumbling of the cliffs as they tumbled over from behind. I couldn't see the archers, or even the side of the cliffs that took the brunt of the damage, but it seemed to do its job.

The thin little path they used to protect their city and ambush strangers, was now a fair bit wider, and now a path of rubble with little separation between the ground and sky.

But what's done was done. I didn't care enough to dwell on it, so I simply went back to the path I was walking. I eventually came to the fork I was met with earlier, and continued down the right path instead.

I guess, my meaningless decision did matter, just not to me...