Phidias

work in progress
kam's bookkeeping partner who is a little too calm about everything



On the north end of the lake, there was a village.

Signs of age were draped across the few remaining huts. Timber soft and crumbling from decay; what little was left of the thatched roofs, molding. Although since having been tossed to the ground, sticks had once been banded together by tiny hands to make boards. They were then propped against the entrances, intended to be doors. The gaps between the branches further guaranteed that they hardly had provided any privacy, and much less, protection.

The pillagers had swept through just hours before, that very morning. Perhaps the incident's timing was a testament of how pathetic the settlement was. The intruders arrived in broad daylight, and still, the villagers didn't stand a chance. Their lives, futures, dreams--gone, snuffed out like candles. Any mercy the raiders might have possessed was forgotten, locked away for a different time, a different place. Anyone with a soft heart wouldn't make it to the next day.

Retaliation was met with the slash of a blade, claws, teeth. Those incapable of putting up a fight were dealt with in the same way that a child deals with a toy that they had grown bored of playing with; gripping it in two places, and twisting in opposite directions until they hear a snap.

A certain kind of peacefulness enveloped the village. It wasn't exactly spooky, or even eerie, although some might have felt differently. The empty huts, once treasured and filled with hope that dangled by threads, were finally free to be exactly what they always were--rotting logs erected in a farce of a home, begging to finally collapse and decompose. Outside of them, villagers were stuck to the ground by pools of reddish-brownish-blackish liquid. The purest of it coagulated into stringy globs, strung across blades of grass, while some had mingled with the morning dew and diluted enough to seep into the soil. Any remaining life had seeped out of them, the final rise and fall of a chest happening both much sooner and much later than it should have.

They would be completely cold by twilight, and frozen in a week's time, when the unusually mild temperatures were to be chased away by the frigid climate. Unless a wandering beast happened upon the settlement, they would remain preserved for years, maybe decades. Some were curled in upon themselves, others neatly prostrate, but mostly, the corpses rested in crumpled heaps, limbs bent at unnatural angles. Their glazed eyes would forever be staring at everything and nothing.

The massacre was a blessing.