Scorched

34

Cleo ran like hell, dodging, deflecting, side-stepping — the whole lot. They were right on her tail, not even giving her a moment of time to just simply catch her breathe. Even with the adrenaline pumping inside her, her legs and arms rushing at a brisk pace — she knew that she was flailing. Slowly slowly losing.

She mostly bought herself time by straying along the walls and behind the massive pillars to hide in the shadows in hopes of staying hidden; but that was for only a single second before they were upon her.

She breathes hard, so hard that it sounded ragged and hoarse and broken. Her chest feels constricted and tight as if each dying breathe was her last. She kept praying that it wasn't. She didn't want to die like this.

Her legs and arms have begun to feel numb, it felt like her legs were made of rubber and her arms were made of wet concrete — easily breakable and malleable in which she could fall into a puddle of piss.

And her sweat. She didn't even want to start; she is almost certain that every step she took resulted in a puddle of water on the floor. That's how profusely she is sweating. It made her eyes burn, like waking up from a pitch dark room to a bright and exuberant room, like Kaleb's. She still can't get over the fact that his room was inferior to hers.

She pauses at another pilgrim, seeing the sea of demons running after her. She ran a bit faster buying herself time before she had to start again, until she collapsed.

She has a grisly pain in her side, reminding her that she has never trained since the last time she said to do so. Procrastination is another kind of demon indeed. She regrets not even taking a jog around the Court fields and gardens, because life purposely wanted to test her now.

She breathes slowly, slowing her heart rate— by going in through the nose and out through her mouth but doing that did nothing against the sharp pain in her chest; she is afraid she might get a heart attack.

She hears them coming closer and was about to get up again to hide deeper against the wall till she felt a presence behind her. She jerks upright, not turning around. She could already feel the heat embedding from it's mouth onto the back of her neck, causing her hair to stand erect and little goosebumps to form onto her skin despite the miserable heat. She could hear it's snarling as well, knowing those transparent glass-like teeth were inches from her neck.

She gulps down a rock and turns around slowly, facing the nasty demon sitting on the wall like a spider on all fours scraping its massive claws on the walls just inches away from her.

They had no eyes. Nothing at all. Except for those strange holes called nostrils. That means they relied heavily on their other senses to find their prey. They could scent her wherever she went but not physically see her.

She could feel more heat and energy at her back and took it as her cue to run again. Speeding her legs and arms to cut through the breeze faster to gain more space between them. But for how long could she keep this up before she couldn't no more?

She groans and halts suddenly facing the ever growing tail of demons before lifting both her arms and raising a huge curtain of flames. She looks up at the ceiling willing it to touch there, but her power is not that strong now; she was becoming too weak. She would eventually be too weak to summon a simple flame to keep the demons at bay.

The flaming curtain could at least cover her from view— standing a few feet away from the ceiling right below to her feet, stretching from one pilgrimage to another. It could have been the size of six tall tree-height double doors next to one another this time opaque.

She could not glimpse anything behind it, and the curtain of flaming oranges and reds might not even hold. If she had time, she would have taken time to appreciate how good she created this fire sheet.