The Harvest Of Souls (beast wirt X reader short story)

7: A Lake Of Jade

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind." -Marcel Proust

After finishing it, my eyes took a final look at my work. I felt content that this was the right choice to make, yet something still unnerved me about the words that he wrote to me.  The first footstep that came to my ears made my nerves flinch back, as the second couldn't help but make me wonder if this was something good or bad to come. Looking behind me, my eyes searched deep into the woods that peered back to me, and what stood before the woods was what I had feared most during my time in this afterlife.

It's eyes shone through the shadows that hid itself from the warm autumn lights, as it's body was etched into the foreground of the haunting picture in front of me. Horns of that of a deer sprouted from it's otherwise thin and slender body, it looked like something that popped out of a old fairy tale book as it came closer to my line of sight. Yet taking no time to observe any more details of the creature, my brain had sent me on the simple task of moving forward, away from whatever it was that had bore its eyes into my soul, for I knew that that had to be the beast I saw at the start of this chaotic afterlife.

My heart raced as fast as my legs were taking me, as the set of legs behind my own seemed to keep up with my pace. I regret not taking my time to heal, as my adrenaline induced ears could only make out blurred sounds of what that creature was trying to say to me, whether they be taunts, or the same siren tune it sang to the widow's child. My legs began to sink into a painful numbing feeling, they felt like sticks that I was using to move myself further from something that now had seemed inevitable. I didn't dare look back, not now, not after how far I've come on my journey here. However, in the end, that seemed to be the only thing that I could do once my stupid actions had ran myself into a dead end, a jade pond preventing me from advancing through the thick knotty forest.

"Please!" I could make out of the fuzzy words from my ears. The figure came up to me, as the colors of autumn had finally revealed their face from the shadows. From their voice, and the soft colors that I saw in front of me, I could tell this was the man that helped me from the start, and all I could do was take a step back, closer and closer to the pond, away from them. "Please, come back here! Don't go into the water!" His voice urged to me, but my feet still didn't listen as they got to the edge of the dirt that rooted above the water. A part of me wanted to listen to him, and sympathize after all that he did for me, but the other whole of me couldn't seem to forgive him for what he did.

My instincts kicked in as my stomach dropped down into the icy veins of the lake, and from the moment my skin met with it's liquid, how soon I regretted going in. It was as if the lake had a mind of its own, draining every inch of my mind, and soul away from me more and more the longer I kept inside it's cold, wrathful brood. As my body began to ascend from the jump I took, the more painful and mind numbing did the water get to me, as it infested every inch of my being, from my throat to my nostrils, and irises, it burned like a lake of bitter salt, with the consistency of lumpy tar. My mouth gasped for air even before I reached the surface, I managed to cough up the remains of the water in my organs, along with the outer layers of my own throat.

The lake still drained at my soul even as I reached it's surface. I could make out the cautious and hesitant movements he made of stepping into the water, as the world started to get fuzzier and fuzzier once again. His arms started dragging my body as my arm stung with pain, just as it did the first time. Glancing at the wounded arm as it swayed away from the lake, it started to bleed into the heavy water, staining the jade lake a deep indigo. My blurred mind fixated over the simple thoughts of how much my arm hurt in the salt waters, as that was the last thing I thought of as everything faded to the dark violet of my eyelids.