Р Ф М Р Є І І

Collapsed. No. No. This would not be his end. This would NOT be how it ended. Heat searing, burning, skin on fire, blood boiling in his veins. He is a creature of acid and vitriol and fire and flames, ash and smoke. He heaves, blood and bile and charcoal spewing forth from singed jaws in thick rivulets. Splattering across the ground, blood and ink and slaver, the charred warrior drags himself forward through the sand and seafoam with heaving shoulders and panting breaths, great wild swings of thick limbs and heavy footsteps heralding his coming.

The world swims in his head, the smoke strangling, suffocating, eyes stinging and finally his body can no longer obey the screaming commands of his mind and he crumbles to the earth--blackness. Is it water in his lungs, or blood? He cannot know.



Nobody expected it. The fire that swept through the thicket. The grasses were dry and crisp, there had been no rain this season yet. The ground, parched and arid. The trees, crisp. What had sparked these flames? No matter. It swallowed the land,undiscriminating of the lives it gobbled up, great plumes of smoke billowing into the air--the sky grew dark, the sun lost behind the fury of the flames. But he could not find them. He could not find them and his frantic searches yielded only crops of corpses, the dead piling one ontop of another in charred and smoky remnants. His shoulders ached, ached and stung with the fur singed away and the flesh pinkened and blistering as he heaved bodies from the collapsing rubble of home in futile efforts to carry them to safety, despite their hearts having long since stopped. But they weren't among them-- his siblings, his great loves. Where? Where were they? Where had they gone?! Had he lost them in the flames?! Were their bodies too far gone, interred into the earth as soot that gathered in angry flaming spirals in the air? He hacked and wheezed, smoke filling his lungs, blackening his throat. His eyes could no longer focus, the flames licking searing burns that split the skin as the boils burst and the blood near cooked on his bare flesh. He didn't even have the strength now to scream, he could only try to pull back. To save what he could, of his home--himself.  But what if they were there? What if he couldn't hear them screaming over the roars of the flames? What if they watched him  leave, the hope fading from their eyes as the fire overtook them?
No. He'd search. Just a little more. Just a bit more. Just one more body-- just one more...




Crisp. He is crispy, his singed body lying in the sand as his chest heaves. The burns will heal into ugly scars that leave the flesh bare, no fur will grow there again. His legs will forever be barren and only dark flesh that bears the burden of what he can only call his cowardice. The blisters along his shoulders have burst,pus and blood oozing  into what remains of his fur--he is soot-covered and blackened, his entire form near-charred, and yet his lungs refuse to give in and he breathes--in, out, in, out.  Panting, eyes squeezed shut, jaws parted and hung open as his burned tongue lolls freely from between his teeth and his breath continues to heave from his chest, rising and falling rapidly as his body greedily tries to swallow and gulp the fresh, clean if not somewhat salty, stinging sea air. Driftwood claims his body, sticking harsh into his right flank--but the blood has been washed away, the seafoam pink around the now-older wound.

But he is alive.

Alive.


There is only darkness. He is numb, numb to the world and numb to the waters lapping at his wounded flesh, and deaf to the voice that calls to him with concern. He can only breathe, and continue to fight against death that has tried so valiantly to take him--but it wouldn't. Not today, anyway.
Jaws clamp about his scruff and the sharpness-- an extra pain, prick, not a burn-- breaks through the barrier of blackness and brings with it a ray of light, and with it, acrid eyes snap open and a snarl tears from the fallen warrior's throat as he struggles in an effort to fight whatever it was that tried to claim him now--I'm not dead yet!--- and yet it is not vultures or birds that peck at an assumed corpse, and ever so slowly do his eyes fall upon--and focus upon-- crabs. What?  He gazes behind him, to the sea--expansive and wide. Had the waves carried him here? Had he floated across a strait and into some distant land?

The snarl fades, dying in his throat as the scowl falls from his face. He quivers with the effort--standing on burned paws, on tired limbs, but he will not go down, not now, not today, not like this. Teeth clatter, clicking together as the sting from the saltwater in his wounds brings swelling aches and pains to him, but it reminds him only to keep breathing.
"Kde som?" his voice is hoarse, raspy and likely forever damaged, the smoke and cinder in his lungs and in his throat leaving it's mark upon him. The crabs, of course, do not see fit to answer.




"Great clouds rolled over the hills bringing darkness from above"