She had almost made it. She almost reached the safe-point, the one place that she was certain she would be protected. What did she do to deserve any of this? Why did they want her? And why did it have to happen here; so close to the home that she had known so well for so long? There were only a few yards separating her from the rest of her community. Her family, her home, the only place that she truly felt secure. She could see it from where she lay: the green grass, the wild flowers, the thick underbrush, all closely guarded by the tall, fully-leafed trees that dominated the entirety of the Free Zone.
She had come so close, within sight of the border of her community's territory. She had escaped her pursuers with only a few minor wounds. Some scrapes and bruises, mainly the work of the thorn bushes and low-hanging branches that she had been forced to run through. The only real problem had come from the sharp stabbing pain that had rushed through her leg toward the last 10 minutes of her mad dash through the woods. One of her attackers had shot at her several times over the course of the chase. She had heard stories for most of her life about the advanced and terrifying weapons that the Defilers used to hunt down their prey. She had always assumed that they were just stories, however; tales that were used to keep the young and inexperienced from venturing outside of the Free Zone. Yet in the end it was not those monsters or their weapons that had ultimately done her in. It was her fear and desperation that brought about her untimely demise. Beyond that, she might blame this unfortunate end on her own over-confidence that she would be safe once she could see her home.
She had come within a stones throw of the one place on Earth that could protect her. And as soon as the Free Zone had come into view, she had thrown the last of her precaution aside. Feeling safe at last, her anxiety lifted and she began to make her way across the last stretch of Forbidden territory: the Burning Scar. The scar was a relatively small strip of land in way of width, but it stretched on endlessly into the distance, no doubt reaching from one end of the Earth to the other. It was the Burning Scar that marked the edge of the truly inhabitable land and the beginning of what was quickly becoming more and more the land of the Defilers. The strip itself was almost entirely devoid of life, and the evidence of why could be seen all along its low-lying span. The burning area lay at the bottom of a shallow sloping hill covered in a wide assortment of trees and short foliage on the Forbidden side, and the mostly-flat forest that hid the Safe Zone. Even before the Scar came into view from either side, the roars and screams of its only living inhabitants could be heard as they hunted along the stretch of infertile land. The beasts were unholy things that could not survive outside of the vile taint of the Scar. The oldest members of her community had told stories that had been passed down to them over many generations, stories that explained that the beasts and the Scar were connected to each other, each only being able to exist because of the other. Whenever the forests had tried to reclaim the land as its own, it would be forced back by these monsters, renewing and, at times, even extending the Burning Scar's grasp on the entire area. The beasts themselves were vicious hunters, but were made an even greater threat by the fact that they were now closely aligned with the Defilers, often serving as their mounts, beasts of burden, and tools of corruption throughout any area that the Scar touched.
In the moments before her death she had the misfortune of taking in the morbid scenery that surrounded her, confirming the stories she had so often only half listened to in her youth. The ground beneath her had long ago been singed into the hardpacked black-grey stone that was the Scar. All along it, strange markings were visible, bizarre shapes and glyphs that, according to the stories, were what bound the monsters to the Scar. They enabled the creatures to thrive in the thin, acrid wasteland, but at the same time cursed them, keeping them from surviving outside the pale lines that covered the smooth, flame-hardened ground. All along the burned land, remnants of the creatures' past meals could be seen. The bones of squirels and other small rodents. The carcass of a vulture that had surely come down to make a meal of one of the other unfortunate residents of this damnable stretch of land, having now become a meal for its own brethren instead. A raccoon's slaughtered body was visible just east of the place where she lay. It was still identifiable and sickeningly fresh, but it had obviously been dead since the day before or the earliest hours of evening, as it had successfully spilled its guts all over one of the rectangular runes that was singed into the exact center of the Scar. What had come out of this poor lesser creature was already dry and rotting.
Yet the truly disturbing sight was what she beheld only a few yards away from her, on the opposite side of the wastes. There, staring up at the soon-to-be morning sky with eyes that had already been claimed by flies and wasps, lay one of her own brethren. She recognized him from that night's search for food. He was in the second group that had continued further south than her own group had, yet he had managed to get ahead of her when the orange Defiler's shot grazed her leg. He had made it even closer to safety than she had, yet ultimately, not close enough to ensure survival. His body was twisted and broken, yet it was a much less horrific scene than what had become of the raccoon or the vulture.
Or, it would have been a less horrific scene, had the creature that had done this to him not still been present. But there it was, towering over him with its massive, silver teeth jutting out at jagged angles. from what she could see, her comrade had done all he could to fight the inevitable. His weapons, once the glory of his line, a deadly and beautiful testimony to the strength of his family, now lay broken and shattered next to his head. Yet the monster that had broken him had not come away unscarred from their battle. Its skin bore scratches and cuts that she assumed would be immortalized as scars upon its shiny, armored body. Its skull, once a flat, rectangular mass of the same seemingly impenetrable stone-like bone that covered most of its body, now bent inward at a bizarre, unnatural angle. Its entire body was shaking and shuttering, smoke involuntarily escaping from its horrible, disfigured face. A Defiler was already present, grunting angrily, obviously helpless to do anything to ease the creature's pain. There was no doubt that the beast was regretting who it had chosen to feed upon this time, judging by the damage that had been done to its hideous head and part of its body.
But by far the most devastating blow that her companion had dealt to the abomination was ridding it of one of its glowing, blue eyes. The stories claimed that those eyes were how the beasts hunted their prey, using it to blind lesser animals, like the squirrel and the raccoon, and cast fear, doubt, confusion, and hopelessness into the minds and souls of higher beings, such as herself. By breaking the demon's eye, he had done a great deed for the rest of the community. There would be one less monster roaming the Scar and hunting down foraging parties now.
But as that thought came to her, so did the horrifying realization that this creature was simply one of million. There would be more, the Defilers would see to it that this insult would not go unpunished. They would not allow her people to hold onto a victory, no matter how small or at what cost it may have come, for long. Nor, she knew, would they allow for her brave kin's body to be accepted back into the Earth, would not allow him to pass on with dignity. Soon they would come, riding one of the terrifying yellow creatures, similar in many ways to this injured one but far more massive, and would feed his body to it, forever keeping him from him from becoming part of the Free Zone. Part of the forest. Part of the world.
In the end, though she had been able to escape the pair of Defilers that had chased her away from her foraging, only come face-to-face with a massive, Scar-dwelling horror of her own. Unfortunately, lacking any of the weapons that the males of the community were granted by their ancestors, she had not stood a chance against the beast that had come for her. To be fair, she obviously had been a tougher meal than it had anticipated. When it was charging toward her it was howling and screeching, proclaiming its soon-to-be victory and marking its meal for death. Now, however, it just sat there, silent aside from the deep rumbling that was emitting from its twisted underbelly. Its jaws, a single row of once perfectly vertical silver teeth, now bent inward at a disturbingly threatening angle. Yet its eyes were still intact and shining in a deep yellow glow. Those eyes were the last thing she remembered seeing before it was right in front of her. And now it looked like they would be the last thing she would ever see before life left her.
There she had stood, frozen in her tracks by the mesmerizing stare of the demon that was hurtling towards her, all the while while screaming its horrible battle cry. She had no idea how it had happened; one moment she had been running as fast as she possibly could on her injured leg, the next she had come to a dead halt and found those eyes gazing at her, in all their infernal glory. What took place in a matter of seconds stretched on for years in her mind as it happened. The eyes had drawn her into a world where time and space had no meaning and held no sway over what transpired within it. She stared into the lights for what must have been decades, basking in their shear, terrible beauty. Life has always relied upon the sun; plants nourish themselves with it, reptiles require it to stay active, many animals need it simply maintain their bearings, and the flying insects of the world seem to worship it as a god. Yet these monsters hold sway over the power of the sun itself, contained within their very eyes. What living being can honestly expect to compete with something that uses the very thing that almost all life requires to exist as a tool of hunting. Who could look into those eyes and not feel utterly insignificant, be left completely helpless by its gaze. Who could expect to conquer a creature so much more advanced than anything that has ever walked this Earth? Yet the Defilers had been able to tame them, to befriend them, and even to use them as their own tools. Truly, this terrifying alliance had surpassed the greatest hunters in the world. It became clear to her in that moment that there was nothing that could be done to topple this unstoppable force. Truly, these were the superior beings. And so, with that final thought in mind, she gave up all hope of escape. And a fraction of a second later, the beast was upon her.
What it had ultimately come down to was a matter of inexperience. Though she had gone off to forage on this side of the Scar many times before, this had been different. Normally she would have gone out during the day time, when the sun shone its brightest and the leaves of the trees just barely held back the burning rays. The predators that would normally be her main concern, the natural ones like coyotes or wolves, usually kept away from the area during the day. Today was an exception to that, however. They had gone out in the earliest hours of the morning, while it was still dark out and the world was still quiet and asleep. Her group had split up as soon as they had crossed the burnt earth that marked the edge of the Free Zone. With the safety of the woods that had been her home for the past few years behind her, she set out into the more wild, untouched forest that had been the source of food for most of her community. The resources were being depleted too quickly in the Free Zone, splitting the community into two major factions; Foragers and Dwellers. The Dwellers consisted mainly of the very old, very young, the new mothers, and the damaged. They never left the Free Zone, finding the crossing to be too potentially dangerous. They ate what was there, anything that was edible in those woods was reserved for them, so that they had easy and immediate access to their nutrients. The Foragers, being the strong, mature members of the community, made daily trips out of their home, across the burnt land, and into the forest on the far side in order to eat whatever was available in those woods.
Danger had always been a part of foraging in this area of the world, but now that the Defilers had begun to venture this far in it would soon be time for the Community to move on to a new Free Zone. Some of the other Foragers must have made it across the Scar, there was no way that the monsters had taken them all down. With any luck, word would soon be reaching the leaders that this region had fallen and that it was time to take up the old migration once more. The old and injured would be left behind, the Community would be moving at a pace far beyond what they were capable of maintaining and they would only slow down those weak-hearted enough to try to help them along. It was in everyone's best interest to cut the Dwellers loose. Life would go on, it always had before. This was far from the first time they had been uprooted and it surely would not be the last time. How long would they be able to outrun the inevitable? Decades? Years? Months? It didn't matter. Eventually the world would work itself out, and if that meant that the Defilers would ultimately overtake them entirely, then so be it. Life would go on. Maybe not for this particular Community, but there were others. They had crossed paths with two or three the last time they had migrated. They would each survive as long as they could independent of one another. No matter what, life would go on...
Just not her life. She died with no knowledge of the pain that she should have been feeling. It was over quickly, mercifully. In the end, when the images of the brief flicker that had been her existence upon this world flashed through her mind, it came down to what most would have considered a good life. She had lived a simple existence; eating, running, sleeping, hiding, enjoying the worldly pleasures that life had provided her with. Compared to all the happy memories she watched go by in her last seconds on Earth, what did the horrible events of the past half hour really amount to? They were a single drop of water in an entire lake, a single needle on a massive pine tree. And really how much more did her life mean to the rest of the world than those moments meant to her? In the same way, she reflected, her life was came down to little more than that same comparison. It was comforting to know that regardless of what had happened to her, her family would be able to move on, to get away from the danger that she had had to face head on. Comforting to know that she was, ultimately, little more than one of those drops of water or needles from a pine herself. That she was just a part of the whole Community. Just another Forager doing her job. Just another sign that it was time to move on.
Just another deer in the headlights...
