Uriah walked and walked, but he never could escape this entangled web of immense trees and icicles. No matter was the direction he had chosen, it always brought him back to the same starting point. The entrance to the village.
He tried to exit this place for days. Unfortunately, all his efforts were in vain.
He fell on his arms and knees, observing the far entrance of the village, where there were pillars of gray and white smoke ascending to the dark cloudy sky. His weakened breath took the same fading color each time he exhaled.
He wasn’t completely healed, the remnants of plague and the coldness that invaded his skin and devoured his flesh didn’t just hinder the process of the regeneration of his wounds, it also played with the accuracy of his sense of smell rendering it numbed and vincible.
Slowly his full body sank onto the icy glass. He turned to rest on his back, directing his face to the distant sky, his sight was blocked by the massive branches of trees around him making him feel locked in a small cage. So he closed his eyes to conceal the golden glow that was emitting from them. This position made him resemble a dead body being buried under the snow. However, his mind was far from being dead.
He was trying to remember the escalating events that caused him to become unconscious and rendered him to this pitiful state of hopelessness. He wanted to know when it all started to go downhill. How he ended up here in this closed barrier.
In his mind, he pictured a dark shadow, grinning like a Cheshire cat with three glowing pairs of eyes. His compact white teeth were giggling each time a soft but cynical laugh come through them. Then all the eyes blinked a few times before the whole image transformed into a pair of odd-colored eyes. One was a light shade of blue and the other was a pale tone of gray bathed in utter darkness. This followed by a distant voice like resonance asking him:
¨Do you want to live?¨
Everything floated into darkness again, before a pale yellow light emerged in a blink of an eye like a falling star. A dark face, he couldn’t clearly make his details aside from pale yellow eyes and a lock of white hair in eyebrows and eyelashes. A sensation of choking, then an intense chest pain before he lost his consciousness.
He shook his head a few times, attempting to throw this horrible piece of memory. Yet this image would never leave him, forever remaining at the bottom of his unconscious mind. And always floating to the surface whenever his insecurities and fears got the better of him.
His sixth sense told him that this is not a safe place for injured individuals like himself to stay in. He already had smelled it. Earlier, when he has woken up. The fragrance of a cold war was hovering above this village.
From the villagers who trigger his appetite and stimulate his hunger to the abnormal albino and the Aractanthrope. And more importantly, whomever who is ruling the village inside the main house. To sum it up, the moment he regained his conscience felt uneasy. But he didn’t believe his guts till the day he has the chance to go outside that tiny room.
Moreover, it was when he visited the cemetery behind the main house, as he was walking between the graves. The aurora of the rotten souls that emerge from the pores of the frozen soil stimulated his fight-or-flight reflex. And there he started to get a hold of the big picture of what really was going on inside this barrier.
Thus came the conclusion to not waste another day here. But how he was going to get out of this place.
Uriah rose to his feet, prepared. It was the sound of footsteps crunching the virgin snow that alarmed him. Approaching steadily. He pondered about the reason that brings one of the villagers near the edge of this village, weren’t they afraid for their lives? Even the woodcutters, -after close observation- never dared to stray away into this distance.
He sought to conceal his presence by jumping into one of the high branches. He waited for the unexpected person to approach.
He watched with a hankering, bumping heart as his eyes narrowed and flared under the fuzzy moonlight. Then he leaped behind his prey. Overlooking all his prior settlements and plans to seek knowledge about the reason that brings this person here near the bars of this barrier. It was hunger and cold that controlled his actions, whereas complying with the hypnosis of his other instincts urged him to prey on an unguarded target.
He quickly withdrew, when his attack got blocked by unforeseen tricky motion that let his prey flee the certain death while sacrificing its forearm.
Uriah didn’t retreat. Throwing the severed arm away, he leaped for another attack. Perhaps this was his last chance to get a nutritional meal without getting into the village and facing that Aractanthrope. Yet his impatience was rewarded by an unforeseen stab into his abdomen. Red blood oozed from the new wound. He pressed it, attempting to decrease the bleeding, and when he left his eyes, that person was running towards him. A sharp blade cut the air to reach him. It was a miracle that he avoided it. The attacks never ceased. One after one. Uriah lost his balance, and before he fell, he jumped away as far as he could.
Resting on one knee, one of his hands pressing the abdomen wound, he stole a glance at this merciless warrior. It was a young woman that wore a black and white dress. A maid from the manor, the same maid that brought the message to the Doctor in the tavern.
Uriah was flustered, why he didn’t recognize her by the smell? Could it be that the cold numbed his olfactory sense to the extent of not smelling a familiar person a few cubits away from him? He trembled at the fear of losing his olfactory sense as the image of the Aractanthrope fleshed between his eyes. If his ability to regenerate is surpassed by the plague, he will lose more than his olfactory sense.
Uriah decided to retreat. He took a hasty glance at the forearm near his position. Then he glanced at the trails in the snow to see an upcoming shadow accelerating in his direction. He tried to defend himself from the flying kick by crossing his arms over his face. Next, he threw the severed arm towards her. It seemed that his instinct was right. She became less hostile when she got her arm back.
He took the recess while she was retrieving something from the severed arm, then he retreated.
Once he detected that he wasn’t pursued. He stopped and put his left hand on his nose to warm it. The wound was still open and a trail of blood drawn the path he walked. If that maid wanted his head, she surely didn’t find difficulty in chasing him. Thank goodness that she had something more important than Uriah’s head.
When he got his nose warmer, he sighed in relief, his olfactory sense wasn’t altered as he feared, but that won’t last long if he didn’t get a decent meal to enhance his body regeneration.
The image of the lady with a big-shaped face appeared in his mind. He bit his lips to surpass the pain in his abdomen. There was no other choice, a prey was essential to his survival. A Chimera prey was the ideal prey to increase his regeneration process and to delay the effect of the plague.
The blood from his wound finally began to stop flowing, but the stabbing injury was far from being healed. The cold, the hunger, his weakening body, perhaps, contacting the Kerit was a miscalculation, though he never regretted it. The effect of the plague became a hundred times more powerful. Whenever the doctor was near him, it abnormal, and it felt like melting his bones. What was he, a healer or an aggravator?
“Don’t let me see you again and don’t make any mess while you are still in this village.”
The Kerit warning was clear, but right now, he had no other option. He must get himself some meat.
He cast away the burden of his caution, then he walked steadily toward this cursed village, wanting to get things done as rapidly as he could. He was dead either way.
