With the knife to his neck, the old man clutched the leather bag close to his chest. It was the sort of futile protective motion that desperate animals perform in the face of certain death. With a shaky voice, he tried to reason with the masked, filthy-clothed man. He mentioned his four parakeets that nobody would be left to feed and his love for abstract poetry. He said his name out loud a couple times, hoping it'd be harder to kill a man with a name.
But the masked man heard none of this. Instead, his eyes focused on the old man's bejeweled fingers and finely groomed beard. He mentally counted the coins he'd be sure to find in that leather bag. Beyond all that though, he pictured a couple weeks worth of food. The masked man's belly had been insistently growling for the past four days. His eyes darted around nervously and his nose had become hypersensitive. His waking hours were plagued by visions of different foods. As a meat pie tantalizingly danced in the masked man's starved mind, he slit the old man's throat with a single, clean motion.
The masked man would indeed find food security stashed in different parts of the fresh corpse. He carefully extracted three gold teeth from the elderly mouth and fished several old banknotes from the old man's pockets. However, there was nothing in the leather bag. Nothing, that is, but a blue-green rock the size of a walnut. Most people would've grabbed it, kept it, gifted it to their sweethearts or maybe looked at it every night before going to bed. Hell, most would've figured a pretty rock like that could fetch a decent price in the market square. Our masked man, though, had a full parade of chicken wings marching through his hungry, hungry brain. Finding himself perfectly satisfied with his findings and unable to contain his hunger any longer, he threw the stone into the grass by the road and climbed into the horse-drawn carriage the old man had been driving.
That was the precise moment when in a different plane of existence, a bone-chilling alarm was sounded.
YOU ARE READING
CAIRN
FantasyThea would forever regret finding the first stone. She would forever regret not chucking it into the sea when she had the chance. But most of all, she'd forever regret finding the second stone. --- A young woman finds herself deep into the affairs...
