Spark of Life stared out into the nothing, remembering the time she’d wandered the woods forever, lonely, cold, and aloof. She hadn’t known anyone at the time, and the closing sadness and insecurity made her feel weak, and feeble. The world spun around her, and she turned and looked. Every step she took, the ground... died. Each hoofprint in the grass behind her left a stale, brown clump that crumbled like ash. The trees behind her seemed always close, despite how far she wandered. And the more she wandered, the darker and more looming they seemed to be. As if the trees themselves were chasing her, and their branches were their ragged, clawed-hands reaching to drag her back, back to that horrible black Obelisk.
She was life. She understood life on a level only those born to nature could. But what stood behind her weren’t trees. They weren’t living. Everything hidden behind them was dead, gripped with some illness that dripped from their eyes, mouths and ears. A nightmare-fueled hellscape of death. Death was the opposite of life. Death was the opposite of her.
And so as every hoofbeat sounded loud in her ears, she hoped she would move farther and farther away, and yet she went nowhere. Every time she looked back, there they were, seemingly closer, seemingly taller trees, arched in a sort of fisheye lense to claim her. And then she heard it...
It started out quiet. Barely audible over her thundering feet, and then it gradually grew louder.
The screaming. The hellbound screaming of the damned. She twisted her head back to listen, flicking an ear at the trees in horror. Slowly, they emerged. A line of kin, blank-faced, expressionless, colorless mix of kimeti, acha, totoma, and zikwa. They seemed to step close to the edge of the trees, and yet not beyond into the field where she ran. And they saw her. They saw her and howled.
Slowly, one by one, they opened their mouths, and wailed, their skin, muscle, and sinew slowly falling away from the bone. Some moaned loudly, some cried, others seemed to have yelled something to her, perhaps cries for help, though she couldn’t understand. They collapsed, a few at first, then slowly almost the entire army of them hit their knees and called after her, vomiting blood and worse into the grass. Spark stopped where she was, skidding to a halt and turned back in guilt. She’d left them there? This was her fault? They continued to moan out to her to come back, to help them, all while the field began to turn red.
No... no it was blood. They’d begun to soak the grass with their illness as it bled out of them, permeating and poisoning the soil. It soaked into the ground, and rolled ever closer to her feet where she stood. If it touched her... she’d die. They would spread their sickness unto her. Her fur stood on end, and she turned away again in horror to run full-speed as far away from the woods as she could go, but every step she took away only seemed to drag her back to the trees. She turned around one last time, and saw she was at the tree line, the kin surrounding her converging on her with snarls and gnashing teeth before she could comprehend how she’d even found herself there. She cried out in terror before fading into blackness...
And as soon as the sunrays shined on her eyes with the morning light, she awoke with a gasp and a cold sweat, panting into the pale morning dew, shaking and uneasy. She looked up to the sun thankfully, and rose where she’d fallen asleep by the tree to continue her travels beyond the arrows of light. She didn’t want to. But something still seemed to pull her...