Battle Arena 1: Exiting Short Story: A Cloud Of Darkness

We’re comin’ innaclouda darkness,

floatin’ on blood and bones.

The light’ll never reach us,

plowin’ through the hills of Sons.

They sang soft and low as they walked in three lines through the fields. The rhythm had come from days in the fields and the notes had come from the suffering in a world that wasn’t made for two species. The words came from rhetoric.

They were all gathering around a woman standing rigidly still in the center of a circle of flattened crops. Her head thrown back to stare at the red sky, she moved her lips in sync with her brothers’ and sisters’.

We’re comin’ for ya slow but surely.

You’ve earned what’s gonna come.

The wheat’ll burn around us.

We’ll come through untouched.

Three men walked towards her, large blades they used during the harvest in their right hand. They wore dark green robes with one sleeve hanging below their left hand and no sleeve on their right arm. Brass buttons were sewn everywhere on the robes, seeming to have no logical purpose. Their gait was slow and large. Every third step, they cut a gouge into the ground, in time with the song.

The rest of the people, dressed in coarse clothes gathered around the circle, crushing the remaining wheat. They had no fear of the men who whipped them by day. By the time they realized something was awry, it would be too late.

The woman shuddered in the center of the circle even though the evening was hot and wet.

We’re callin’ on our Papa

‘cause he knows wrongs been done.

He knows the transgressors,

their names written in stone.

As one the three men slashed through their sleeves and into their forearms, crying up to the heavens.

The woman fell to her knees convulsing as the rest of the men and women drew whatever they had been able to find, knives, forks, sewing needles, or, in a few cases, sharp sticks and stabbed themselves.

He’s smilin’ at our off’rin’,

a toothy grina blood.

He’s takin’ up our weapons

an' fightin’ for us all.

The fields went silent as the woman at the center pierced the bleeding sky with a wavering scream, shaking her head back and forth, tearing at her sheer white shift which was the only thing she had on. Her dusky gray skin seemed to gather black spots as if she had acquired some sort of rash. They spread quickly, soon covering her body in mottled black.

Their rhythm steady despite the fact that all singing had stopped, the three men continued to advance. Their arms dripped blood which seemed to sizzle into the ruins of the crop. A thin smoke was rising from among the crowd as blood slid from everyone onto the thirsty earth.

The three were close enough to her now that their next swing would cut into flesh, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her screams had morphed into the wordless melody of the song. Her muscles were taught as she shrieked into the sky, eyes rolling up into her head, spit collecting at the corner of her mouth.

Their blades rose simultaneously, in time with her scream-song, one man’s blade nicking another man’s cheek before they fell.

There was silence. The men left their blades, one in her right thigh, one deep in the left side of her chest, and one in the right side of her neck, just above her collar bone. As the men turned smoothly outwards, their gray skin spattered with her black blood, she gurgled softly, slumping.

A woman in the crowd started humming, and her humming was soon picked up by thousands of other voices. They were all singing a different verse but not at the same time. It was a cacophony of words and notes that still somehow created music.

The haze over the field was thick now. The men were absorbed back into the crowd. No one moved.

The haze was converging upon the woman, soon no details of her corpse could be made out. Sometimes it seemed a shadow twitched. Her silhouette wasn’t recognizable. It stretched only to shrink down again. Limbs jerked as if she was coming back to life.

The jumble of words and notes that was a song reached a fevered pitch. Shouts, not those of these people but of those who held them in cages, could be heard in the distance.

A low voice, loud enough to be heard over everyone’s singing, started up, its song nothing but mumbles at first. The woman stood in the smoke, but she was no longer a woman. It towered over any height any of the brothers or sisters could achieve. Muscles bulged. Four tentacles had replaced each arm and the legs were bent strangely, like the back legs of a horse.

The crowd fell silent. The voices of their owners were fast approaching. The creature’s mumbling slowly morphed into words.

You want me for your vengeance.

You’ve offered me your blood.

You think it’s all that you’ve got left,

but your lives aren’t your own.