Nightmare Fantasy

Chapter 1: Where Angels fear to tread; Fools rush in.

Nightmare Fantasy

Book 1 Path of the Shadows

By ShieyeOne
Chapter 1: Where Angels fear to tread; Fools rush in.

            The battle clashed loudly as the woman overlooked the scene. It was a stab crushing her chest to see one's cherished comrades and kin losing drastically with no hope anywhere at all. She looked up, defeat in her heart, her lover somewhere dead with the many around. War was no pretty thing, and how could evil win? How could the Divine One allow such horrors? Where was He to protect the ones below? Even if she reached the clouds, nothing would be there. Even if she dug deep in the ground’s core, all she would find were fires of lava. Her head hurt in despair. She was to lead these few people. The rest were focused on greed. Their army overpowered hers like a mountain to a sand hill. The Great One Himself alone could take this fight; she slumped to the ground in defeat. It was her time, after all. The time to meet the Great One, and this insignificant one gave it her all. A part of herself still mingling with the hopes of her fallen comrades, trust didn’t waver in the least.        

            She continued thinking of how her life had progressed. Smiling with a grin, she thought to herself, “The story is not yet written in its entirety. It certainly would do no good to give up already, silly girl…”

            With that, her wounded self drifted off to an eternal sleep. The pounding of her heart faded into nothing as she entered the gate of dreams, as ethereal or real as it wished to be. Her soul in the place it ought to be.

                                             

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The man stopped to catch his breath. He wiped the sweat from his brow and tore off his outer shirt in haste, wrapping it around his hips even as he ran. After a distance, the weariness of his body called him to stop once again. He looked around him, finding nothing but rubble and remnants of an old village already being erased slowly and gently by time itself, it seemed. Where structures used to loom only bits of rock and wall remained becoming an ancient shadow of the past. Within a brief moment of time, he jumped back on his feet, and again, though weary, he fled swiftly away, for his pursuer was quite an impressive individual keeping up to his prey.

            The man following behind was cool and collected. Despite the fact that he, too, was pushing all limits in such a place, he showed more restraint, void of all emotion. The completion of his mission came before all things, even the suffering of the body through such extreme wear and exposure.

            “Out of all Nevar’s pawns, Tribrinka had to send Marix!” the weary hunted one mumbled as he glanced over his shoulder to find the other steadily behind. He shook his head, knowing he had no choice but to run into the desert in broad daylight. There was no other option. To linger back would mean the man behind him would send for reinforcements, which was much worse.

            The skull desert, an ancient place, had good reason for its name. Bodies, long gone and dried, covered the vast desert. Long wars over the region had cause a natural grave yard of sort. The desert itself seemed to take humor in burying and revealing its bodies on a whim. Sand storms brushed through the area, frequently moving the sands and the bodies with them as well. A spot with fresh yellow sand could be a heap of hundreds of bones all a few days after. The space of land so coveted and long fought had now become undesirable even to survive upon.