Flashback Choosing Sides

[Darvus]

Timestamp: Spring, 17, 502



People say, "The greatest thing in life is to love," but Darvus would beg to differ. The greatest feeling is to live and get paid…

A starving youth in Ravok's treacherous maze in nature has not ended well for many before him. Tales of these woods and what they hide are known by all. It is only the brave, foolish, or mad that willingly traverse this place.

With every staggered step, Telal makes a sound of breaking twigs and shuffling leaves. His soft groans of pain from his broken and bloodied hand kept him company as he traveled with no food or water.

As he walked miles into the dusk and then the dawn, his pace grew ever slower. His determination kept him awake, but as the forest started to blur into itself Telal slumped into a small cave without knowledge of this action.

He awoke again covered in a blanket and a wet cloth over his head. How long was he out? Hours? Days? Weeks? Who knows for sure? But all signs pointed to an old man that was sitting at a desk chopping something maliciously humming a tune in dim fire light. The air wasn't right and old death clung to the dirt walls; like a bakery long closed down, but the smell still lingered.

Telal searched under the blanket quietly for the knife he buried into his family to no bearing fruits. Slowly, Telal started escaping the fur blankets and made his way on his feet. The shadows on the dirt walls flickered with the light as he made small shimmies across.

Telal then did something stupid. He noticed a loose stone in the dirt that he should have avoided while creeping across a slab of bedrock on the ground. As the stone fell in silent slow motion, Telal grabbed for it in air to no avail. The echo the stone made seemed louder than a firecracker as Telal cringed in disappointment of himself.

"Darvus?" Came the old man's voice and the chopping came to an abrupt halt. The man stood from his chair.

His peppered hair drooped to his shoulders with various bits of nature and earth tangled within. His body was slender and frail, but it didn't seem to be age related. His clothing was ragged and grimy and of a funeral feel. The man’s slow turn brought to life his monstrosities. The dark eyes and pallid complexion wasn’t the only things wrong with the man. It was his face. He had pincers at his jaw line like an ant and antenna protruding from his forehead.

He was an Nuit. Not just any Nuit, one of those messed with by Uldr. Its form’s blackened teeth came to form a grin as his face began to contort in ways it was no longer use to. The gargled voice was hard to place as male or female. For all Telal knew, its gender dropped off somewhere while it shuffled around or had been taken off by a stray branch. It gargled again, “Darvus! Darvus, my son!”

[to be continued…]