4/24/2025, 10:48 PM
It really was like going to sleep. One moment standing, the next with mud in his mouth. Bloodied mud. Perhaps he’d bitten his own tongue. He didn’t get the chance to ask. One moment he was staring at dozens of leather bound legs, the next one of his fellows landed beside him with eyes glazed in death. Ah, he hadn’t bitten his tongue. A shaking, freckled hand pressed to his midriff, and his body jolted in confused pain. His mind didn’t register it like the rest of him did. It was far away, synapses firing slower. The world was a watercolor portrait, colors smearing together like an amateur’s paintbrush had been taken clumsily to his surroundings. He had little else to do but look past his dead and dying compatriots, and watch the brushstrokes of the world as it danced dizzily around him. He didn’t want to look away from it, but his eyelids itched to close. And he had little energy left to fight his own self.
Somewhere in a muddy clearing in a forest he’d never known the name of, Aymeric breathed his last.
Life had a way of continuing though. The river of time couldn’t be impeded for long, overflowing every dam, speeding through every obstacle. Matter couldn’t be destroyed, just remade. Maybe if life had more time, it would have put him somewhere kind. It would have scooped him from the river and rested him gentle in a happy sort of life. Aymeric had a bad habit, though. He often slipped through the cracks. From orphanages to prisons to militaries. He slipped past the fingers that would have brought him gentleness, and was scuffed by the next.
He came out roaring. Injustices burned into his eyes, chains to his throat. Earth erupted from his shoulders, around his legs, mud and blood tangled into his thick, pale coat. Old blood poured from his mouth in rusty clots that he coughed against the ground. And for that moment, he could only heave, cough, and wheeze out curses in a voice that felt it hadn’t changed when everything else had.
Somewhere in a muddy clearing in a forest he’d never known the name of, Aymeric breathed his last.
Life had a way of continuing though. The river of time couldn’t be impeded for long, overflowing every dam, speeding through every obstacle. Matter couldn’t be destroyed, just remade. Maybe if life had more time, it would have put him somewhere kind. It would have scooped him from the river and rested him gentle in a happy sort of life. Aymeric had a bad habit, though. He often slipped through the cracks. From orphanages to prisons to militaries. He slipped past the fingers that would have brought him gentleness, and was scuffed by the next.
He came out roaring. Injustices burned into his eyes, chains to his throat. Earth erupted from his shoulders, around his legs, mud and blood tangled into his thick, pale coat. Old blood poured from his mouth in rusty clots that he coughed against the ground. And for that moment, he could only heave, cough, and wheeze out curses in a voice that felt it hadn’t changed when everything else had.