Young Writers Society

Bo heard the scream and acted fast, plowing forward on instinct, taking Raiden with him. When he finally found Aegeas among the flopping falling eels he paused his flurry of lightsaber-slashes to reach over and pried off the eel from Aegeas’s arm. Painful for both of them, sure, but necessary. Though another eels’s teeth ended up sinking into his back in the process of bending over.

Ugh. Ugh. Aegeas stared down at his newly-ripped up arm. Bo had been fast enough that it didn't look like Aegeas's arm was in any serious danger of falling off - he couldn't see any bone, and despite the chunks of flesh the eel had taken off of his shoulder, Aegeas could still move the limb. It just hurt. A lot. Enough to send spots dancing through Aegeas's eyes, replace the noise of the fight with the sound of his heartbeat, and make his steps that much more unsteady. Everything felt blurred. Never a good sign.

That didn't stop Aegeas from using his working arm to pull out a scimitar and slice up the eel on Bo's back.

The softly glowing eel blood that coated them all served as their guiding light.

Out of the ambush, and into the the hunting ground of a plant-like, eyeless leopard creature- fangs like a sabretooth, hundreds of vine arms and venus fly traps sprouting forth from all over its long, sinewy body.

Hours later its corpse laid heavy upon Bo’s chest- leaking sticky blood, as bright and as pink as fuschia blossoms, from several contingents’ worth of gunshot wounds, its neck steaming from Bo’s cauterizing light sword. The head flew into in the grass, rolling to a stop by Codix’s feet.

Boris jogged over to Bo. He grabbed the leopard's headless end, and lifted it, though his grip threatened to fail him. His arms and hands were burnt, from when the beast had crushed his rifle in its jaws and caused it to explode. But helping Bo out was more important. -Good God, was it heavy.
He hauled the carcass away, and as soon as it no longer hovered over Bo, he dropped it. The beast struck the earth with an almighty thump.

Boris stretched out a hand to help Bo to stand up, only to see no recognition from him. Oh. Sweet God. The venus leopard’s saber tooth had slashed his good eye.
Boris leaned in closer, and took Bo’s hand himself.

“Well done, brother,” said Boris, and began to help him up.

He staggered, and almost dropped him.

“Sorry,” he said.

Everything went red, and then black, and suddenly darkness enveloped him. His ears were ringing from falling back onto the ground under the beast's weight and having his head strike the ground. He could feel a coat of sticky, wet assumed-to-be-blood covering him all over. He'd barely had time to clean his wounds from the eels before they had to fight the giant sabretooth, and he knew it was all flowing together, drenching him in bloods of many colors.

Or at least, he'd known that until he could no longer see.

The well of adrenaline that had been keeping him going through the consecutive monster fights seemed to finally run dry, and as he felt the weight lifted off of him his body began to tremble.

He'd lost so much blood... how much blood had he lost? How much of it was his own and how much of it was from the eels? The sabretooth beast? How quickly would he develop an infection from them mixing together? How would he ever clean himself up? If only he could get the blood out of his eye.

He took Boris's hand, unsteady as he got to his feet.

He reached up to his face, fingers gingerly feeling for his eye and wiping, and rubbing, and wiping, but nothing was happening. Everything was dark, and there was no light, no shapes, not even colors behind his eyelid as he rubbed it. That was, if that was even his eyelid.

His face felt... torn. The initial shock began to wear off as he felt around his face, how the gash of an open wound - the tender, stinging, screaming skin - stretched across his face, over his eye, just past his nose, to the edge of his lip.

Somewhere in there was an eye slit in half, damaged beyond repair.

His took a sharp breath in, shallow, in his chest.

He was ... he was blind. He couldn't see. They were in the middle of a jungle with monsters, and they were all wounded and hurting, and he couldn't see.

He reached out to Boris, finding his hand again - no, his shoulder? His back? His shoulder. His fingers gripped Boris's jacket, or shirt, or something with a death grip.

"Is-" his voice hitched a moment before he forced it into submission. Now was not the time to break down. He couldn't see, but he was alive, and that was enough, right? They'd get back home, to their real bodies, to their real lives eventually, right? Right. Now was not the time to panic, and he wouldn't.

"Everyone's still alive?" he asked, wearing a confidence his heart was lacking. He stood up straight, shoulders back, but still holding onto Boris as an achor. Or at least, he thought it was Boris. That was who had spoken to him when he'd been helped up.

Boris stood straight and steady, to help Bo keep his bearings. He reached over with his left hand to give Bo a comforting pat.

"Yes. We're alive. All things considered, I'd say we've done quite well.

We're out of the woods now. I can see the village just a couple yards ahead. I'll make sure you get there alright. With any luck, they might even feed us." he said optimistically.

He had tried his best not to watch, but watching was all that he could do.

As soon as the last in a deadly string of creatures had been defeated, Codix and Nadira had avoided its head and run over to Bo's side. They were trying to see the damage - trying to comfort him, even though Kartiel could see what they were both failing to accept.

Bo was blind.

He was blind and injured, and it was all his fault.

Blaming Boris would have been easy. Boris was the one who had chosen the path, and the one who had decided to betray all of his friends. But it was Kartiel who was sitting protected up in his ship, watching as the forest tried to tear his fri...

...subjects apart.

He stared down through the glass, trying to bite back tears that only he could see right now. He wasn't supposed to cry. He had promised himself that after Rei. He couldn't let himself become the same crying, weak mess that he had become after both groups had died. This group wasn't dead yet. They still had a chance.

But Bo was their best fighter, and he was incapacitated.

...And Bo was the one he liked the most.

The one he might have been friends with a long time ago.

A sob finally escaped him.

"They're near the village," he whispered, his words barely audible to even himself as he bit back another sob. He frantically tried to wipe away his tears to regain some part of his act, but it was so hard. "They'll be alri-"

He peered more closely at the village through the glass.

His eyes widened in horror.

He had never been here before. Never to this world, never to this forest, and never to this village. But the village was thriving, and he had seen villages like that before in only two places in this galaxy: the places that had some kind of defense against wraith, and the places that worshiped them.

This world had no defenses.

"N-No," he whispered. "No, no, no. This-This wasn't supposed to happen. They were supposed to go home...They were supposed to survive."

He glanced down at his phone. Boris was the only contact he had, but he couldn't trust Boris. Boris might see this as an opportunity to score points, and he couldn't risk that. He couldn't risk any of this. Act too kind, and Sirun would notice that something was amiss. Act too evil, and he'd be stuck repeating the cycle all over again.

His grip on his phone tightened.

He had already let himself get too much into the role.

They were going to die, and it was going to be all his fault.

The sobbing returned, and all Kartiel could do was duck his head down and cry into the ship's controls.

Bo laughed weakly, a sort of flat, unenthusiastic laugh that was more of a reactionary sound than anything. He didn't want to commit to the optimistic potential of being fed - despite the very thought of food making him feel weak.

When was the last time he'd eaten? At the moment the thought of food made him feel nauseous. All he could smell was blood... all he could taste was blood, and he didn't know if that was his own.

"Or maybe they'll have as shower and a first-aid kit," he said, matching Boris's optimism and committing to it in his tone despite not feeling it.

"Uh - I know ya'll are alive and all, but no one else is uh - too badly wounded? You can all walk?"

He paused. He wasn't even sure how to begin to measure what qualified as too badly wounded. He was currently bleeding a steady stream out of his face. He needed to stop the bleeding.

Before even finishing his question, he let go of Boris and felt down own his arm, feeling for his sweatshirt sleeve. He found the seam at the shoulder and ripped, tearing it off with a strong few yanks. He then found the end and slowly worked to roll it inside out, feeling for the fuzzier inside texture as opposed to the blood-spattered outside. When the comparably cleaner outside was facing outward in what felt like a cloth donut, he held it up to his eye and pressed down. Hard.

He'd have to hold it like that until the bleeding stopped.

With one hand and a mostly-bare arm now free again, he held out his hand, pawing the air to search for Boris again. Or someone else who would take his hand.

"We can all walk," Maahes confirmed, feeling a nauseous feeling in his essence. Bo had been blinded by the attack. He wish they had a Goa'uld and a healing device - then they could have done something to help him.

But all they had was the remote village in front of them.

It looked better off than some of the worlds he had visited before, but it was nothing special - the first of those two observations should have made him realize something was off, but he was far too occupied with taking care of Bo.


When Bo reached a hand out, Nadira took it.

She was relatively young compared to Codix - she had been made just as conflict started to break out between worlds and between people, and knew only of the monstrosities he had told her about. She had seen recordings of tragedy before. It had happened when she had been researching something on the internet and gone too far - she had watched tragedy after tragedy, trying to get a grasp of what Codix must have gone through.

She hadn't.

And none of what she had seen could have prepared her for the sight of Bo's face, torn and bloody, and the realization that Bo wasn't going to be able to see until they could get him back into his actual body.

Codix said nothing.

He just lingered behind her, looking at Bo with worry in his eyes.

"Hang on, Bo, let me tie that on for you."

Boris found the least filthy part of his shirt (around the waist) and tore off a long strip. He took it, and set his hand gently on Bo's, asking permission to take hold of the cloth he pressed to his face.

Aegeas chuckled to himself as he saw Bo, drenched in several shades of blood and completely blind, wave his hand around. Not because it looked remotely funny, but because Aegeas didn't have a working arm to grab onto Bo's.

The eel had managed to do a number on one arm - Aegeas had almost blacked out when he'd tried to lift it after he'd escaped from the eels. The other arm just so happened to be the one he'd twisted a day or so ago; the "leopard" had completely dislocated it. Aegeas didn't remember when. He didn't remember when he lost his weapon either. Even for a battle, his memory of the last few hours was incredibly fuzzy. The spots in front of his eyes, the random stumbling, or the vague sense that he wasn't standing on level ground weren't helping.

"I could go for a bath," Aegeas said, nearly stumbling over a tree root. He caught himself just in time - it wouldn't be fun to pull himself off the ground if he had to move either of his arms. "Kinda gettin' sick of blood."

Bo was trying to distinguish who was who based on sound, but there was still a dull ringing in his ears. He felt a smaller, cooler hand hold his own and he knew it had to be one of the kids. Codix? No, probably Nadira. He could remember holding her hand before when she led him away from the wraiths. It lacked the warmth of a human, but was still comforting.

He squeezed the hand a little before feeling another hand rest on his. It felt rough and bloody. Boris? It was confirmed when Boris spoke to him.

He nodded with a dip of his head and leaned down slightly so Boris could reach around his head more, despite the fact that doing so made his head spin.

“Me too,” he responded to Aegeas. “Hopefully the people at the village can help.”

Boris wrapped the tourniquet around Bo's head.

A moment ago, he had been allowed to focus on physical sensations, like lifting the cat’s body, lifting Bo, the raw burning in his fingers as he touched them- but now, there could be no distracting himself from the damage he had caused.

Even with the eye already covered, he could yet see the way the crevice in Bo’s face stretched so far down, how the blood crusted in the hair on his face, how little of his skin was visible underneath.The sight of him reaching for the nearest hand, the way he clung to it so gladly, so desperately... it reminded Boris of a private he'd fought with as a young man, back in the field of Frœschwiller. What was his name? Hans? Heinz? It was so far from him now, he struggled to recall the name. But it took no effort to recall the sight of his face when the bullet burst through his cheek, in one, out the other, shards of teeth spread across the...

Boris shook his head.

No, that was different. That was entirely different. This time, the fault was his. And after all he had done, it was only now, in this moment that he felt a thing.

He blinked hard, he blinked it away. He was needed in the here and now. And so Boris concluded this rare episode of awareness, the same way that he always did, with the resolution to survive now, and regret later.

Boris steadied his hands, tied the knot, and gave Bo a pat on the shoulder.

“There,” he said, “I think that should hold.”

Bo nodded in thanks and stood up again, head still feeling like a spinning top. His face was beginning to throb as the tightly bound makeshift bandage pressed tightly into his skin. He knew it was necessary, but good grief did it sting. Had he not been blinded literally he would’ve been blinded by the pain that was starting to echo throughout his skull with a pulse.

The eel bites were mere scratches compared to how much this burned with pain.

His hand tightened slightly around Nadira’s, but he didn’t want to crush it. Because oh god, he would if he let himself.

It took him a second to grt his bearings, or at least pretend to.

“Okay, we should get moving now then. Sooner we get there the better. Tell me if I need to step over anything big, or lift anyone over something,” he said, wishing he could lead the way, charging ahead in confidence. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t see where to go.

"I...I remember when the worst part about waking up in a strange place was being confused about where we were," Raiden said, staring at his hands, which were absolutely shredded by some eels that had slipped past Bo's defenses, and those that had tried to munch on Bo in a space Raiden could reach.
Admittedly, the weird leopard creature scared the absolute bejesus out of him, but, he survived, and Bo was now blind.
That was a problem.
Maybe there's some weird herb around that could heal Bo to full hp -- I mean, it's a weird alien planet right? If the video games have taught me anything it's that - oh lit this flower looks cool it's probably a healing flower

Raiden quickly found out it wasn't; as he moved over to get a closer look at the flower, he got a face full of pollen, and in a few seconds, he was sure he was seeing stuff that wasn't there a few seconds ago.
"Lads...I...Don't touch this flowwwwwwwwoah that's a big dinosaur..."

The group had been about to follow up on Bo's suggestion when Raiden suddenly spoke from behind. Codix, Nadira and Maahes all turned to see what he was talking about - and found him lingering near a strange flower with his face covered in what had to be pollen.

"...Raiden?" Maahes asked. "What's wrong?"

Codix glanced around. "I don't see anything that looks like a dinosaur," he said.

There was a pause.

Nadira let out a sigh.

"...I think the pollen is making Raiden hallucinate," she guessed.