Fate and Choices

Three - Raven, The Fate

★★★

"Oy, Oscar, have you taken those two down?" a high-pitched female voice suddenly rang out, "I need you in the headquarter,"

I looked up, expecting to find a young girl standing around. However, there was no one around than Gabe, the mysterious attacker, and the centipede corpse.

Who? Is she hiding somewhere? I thought.

"Two monsters down," answered Oscar as he touched his earring, "I need back up,"

The earring is his communication device? I thought and narrowed my eyes on them, is she off site, then? No, it's too early to say-

"Do you think I have nothing to do? Why do you think I'm calling you back?!" the voice rang out again.

"But this is-" asked Oscar.

"You must be crazy to expect me to come and help you all the way to Palm Spring Village right away!" said the voice again, "it took me a week just to find all of-"

Oscar let go of his earring and glared at me.

"I'll let you two lovebirds for now," he said and pulled the ends of his lips into a tight smile, "what a miracle to have some extra time to enjoy life, isn't it? Ta-ta for now!"

Then the floating starfish brought him higher and higher, and he soon disappeared from view. Then I saw a piece of paper fluttered down. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a paper with rough texture with a blur of green in it. It was the type of paper used normally for painting in watercolour.

"What's that?" he asked.

"I don't know..." I said and turned to him.

Suddenly,  I could see Gabe's face scrunched to agony once again.

"Gabe?" I called out.

However, his face muscles quickly relaxed the moment I called out to him.

"Yeah?" he answered.

Was I... imagining it? I thought.

The wound in Gabe's arm has closed, sewn neatly back with his skin cells and blended into the rest of his slightly tanned arm. He healed it, obviously. However, for a second, at the sight of his arm, an inferno started inside my head as flashes of images of his fresh wound bleeding appeared in front of my eyes. 

"Let's get out of here," he suddenly said and picked up his backpack, slinging the straps onto his arms, "who knows what other creatures might be hiding here..."

"Right," I said and put my hands behind me.

~~~

The two of us kept on walking along the single road inside the rainforest. However, along the way, I couldn't help but looked over my shoulders over and over again. And each time, I came across nothing behind me. Not the giant spider, not the mysterious man, not even a leaf. There were only trees, swaying in the wind, but otherwise still as death.

"Rave, where would we be after we passed this forest?" Gabe suddenly asked, waking me up from my thoughts.

"O-ohh... sorry, you were saying?" I asked.

"I was just wondering which town will we be in after this forest..." Gabe answered, "everything okay? You don't look well..."

"No, I'm fine," I answered.

Was what I said. Yet my head was burning inside and I felt an invisible weight weighing my mind. Inside, the man's voice seemed to ring over and over again.