Nomad

|ONE:: the Wilderness Mourns

Death. 

The stench clings to this wretched corner of the world. 

So overwhelming an onlooker might have believed the very forest was bleeding out beneath their feet. Some morbid wound ripped clean through Mother Nature, the earth cracked open, revealing viscera at the core. 

A medley of rot and pine that sticks to the lungs, demands to be known. 

A cursory glance across the treeline, however, reveals no clear source of this. 

There are no bodies littering the forest-floor as plentiful as the leaves, stretching as far as the eye can see. 

Nor a monster lurking in the shadows, maw still dripping crimson as it searches for its next victim. Only waiting for the next opportunity to strike. 

But Mother Nature holds her breath. 

There is no merry birdsong welcoming in the morning's first light. No small creatures bristling through the undergrowth in a hunt for breakfast, before the summer heat becomes unbearable. 

Even the wind doesn't dare dance this morning. 

Today, Mother Nature is a single force, a hundred thousand bodies moving as one. 

Each and every set of eyes pointed in the same direction.

Toward where, by all appearances, a bomb has torn a portion of the forest to shreds. 

For that is the only way to really put words to the indiscriminate destruction that has taken place there. 

Where, in a part of the forest where the sun isn't quite able to penetrate the thick tree canopy, a man lay crumpled in the dirt. 

Aside from sporadic, gasping breaths that wretch his chest up and down, there are no clear signs of life. 

Mud cakes his body so entirely it is difficult to guess where the filth ends and his skin begins. It has etched itself into the crevices of his skin quite entirely. 

Etched even into his soul. 

Crimson saps into the earth around him, staining it a dark shade of brown. Litres of it, the earth seems to drink it in with a great, unquenchable thirst. 

This figure is something of a sore thumb in a part of the world that has been claimed quite completely by the wild.

The creature is malnourished to the point of emaciated, his body a canvas for the splashes of blacks and blues. Bruises cover him the way wildflowers dot the meadow. 

A passing corpse would have thought to offer him pity. 

A passing Samaritan would have offered him the mercy of a swift death.

But there are no passerby's to speak of. 

The man is alone, with only the forests as audience to this wretched scene. 

Only the trees left to mourn it. 

And mourn it does. 

Trees, many as ancient as the rivers themselves, have been uprooted. Discarded carelessly to the side, gnarled roots reaching out. 

Paths that had been carved into the face of this earth by more generations than could be easily counted on a set of hands, had been rendered to unrecognisable rubble. 

The forest would heal - it always did. But it would take decades. 

And it very rarely had much of a chance.