The Emeralds

XVIII

The rebel leader's body was racked with fever, dreams and strange visions for days. Rainer struggled to separate reality from fiction, which was superimposed on his eyes by his tired mind. The burning pain in his body and the metallic stench of blood drove his senses crazy. Wolf could not know when he was talking to existing people and when he was talking to people who never existed. For everything seemed to him to be a long, intermittent dream or nightmare. The last four years of his life on many days were as real to him as images of demons dancing around his rush, waiting to pounce on his body and tear it apart with their sharp teeth.

Sometimes Rainer walked among the fields, admiring the majesty of the storied mountains and the rolling sea. Admiring the crops that so eagerly climbed upward toward the bright rays of the sun. In the next moment, the man was fleeing from the dark, gray and frightening mountain slopes crashing down on him. He was running from mythical giants throwing huge, sharpened spears in his direction, which almost hit his wolf-like body every blush. More than once it seemed to him that the shadow of the wicked Magnar, about two meters tall, was sneaking into his part of the cave, wielding two, long and razor-sharp swords in his hands. Sometimes, in turn, he saw Colin. His foxy, not tall stature, who served some kind of herbal infusion with a truly awful taste and smell into his mouth.

Rainer had been shouting some orders for days, the content of which he himself did not know. Whatever words came out of his mouth, the man was unable to remember what he said for more than barely a few moments. After that he would fall asleep, wake up, scream and fall asleep again. This worst state grated Rainer for a little less than a week. After that, his condition gradually began to stabilize. The man had less and less fits of rage and delirium with each passing day as a result of the high fever, which was dropping.

His disorientation and difficulty in understanding where he was, despite his improved health, continued for days afterwards. During this time, the man slept for days and nights without dreaming anymore. The scraps of memory that remained in his head showed him images of various people coming to his part of the cave. He knew he had been fed by someone. He couldn't remember what or who put the spoon in his mouth. However, he could tell by the consistency of his vomit, which was on the stone floor, that he must have eaten only various kinds of decoctions and soups during that period. Rainer didn't say much at the time. He continued not to grasp with his thoughts what was going on around him, which was not helped at all by the burning pain in the side of his body.

After more days, Rainer began to collect his thoughts. First, it started with the fact that he didn't sleep the whole days and nights, but most of them. He also knew that he was talking. Well, it is difficult to actually call a conversation throwing out single words accompanied by pain. Nevertheless, the man did his best to respond when clearly someone expected any words from him. What he did not remember were the people who were the senders of those requests. The faces of all the people who came to visit him merged into one blurry whole. The tones of these people's voices were also indistinguishable to him. All the wolf could hear was the noise of his own throbbing blood in his ears and the screeching, reminiscent of the incessant sound of crickets chirping.

Rainer did not dare to open his eyes or move his head most of the time. Every spoken word caused him pain, so he really didn't say much. Once he was more conscious, he realized that he was nowhere else but in the rebel hideout then after a while, he heard a voice all day long. A voice that spoke to him as if in an ancient, strange and unintelligible language. The culprit was that this voice was telling Rainer about strange stories that featured strange characters.

He heard a story about a pair of a man and a woman in love and a snake that made the woman eat a forbidden fruit by which these people were banished from some magical land. He heard an unbelievable story about how soldiers crawled out of a huge horse figure and opened the gates of a certain city and destroyed it. There was also a story about some warrior in green armor who took his own severed head in his hand and left some kingdom.