Hunted by Shadows

In the deep recesses of a forest where a terrible slaughter had taken place less than a week ago, were scorched footprints sunk into the earth. But the once blackened edges were gone replaced by a burst of greenery, which seemed to push each other out of the way in order to get closer to the footprints. Delicate fronds shoved through the earth underneath each footprint and grew a hand high in under a night.

Old Ones gathered around them at first in puzzlement and later in dawning realisation and panic. They had known that the strange being that had created them was being chased by that sorcerer. And they knew they had to find her before he did. Such a monster as he would not know or care what he had destroyed before it was too late.
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I woke up the next morning with more lethargy than usual. I couldn’t concentrate, my limbs felt heavy and when I tugged them upright something crackled. I looked down and stifled a scream.

Vines covered me having grown somewhere from below the ground to cover me at night. How was it possible that there vines in this barren desert? Not even cacti grew here…
I crawled to my knees scratching the plants from me and as the sun’s first tenuous rays lit my back my body heated and the plants shot up in flames to lie blackened and shrivelled on the sand. This was the first time I did not feel terrible for burning a living thing and I quickly scrambled up and started to run.

But I stopped dead still, without warning and looked over my shoulder. I had seen a glimpse of green when I had stood up and now I saw the full effect. Where I had lain was a bed of greenery, beautiful against the harsh backdrop of the desert. Strange flowers, a few cacti had grown knee ankle height during the night, as if from nowhere.

Is this what I am? A bringer of hurt and at the same time a bringer of intense beauty such as what now lay before me? I knelt down before a budding cactus, stout and proud in its tiny nestle of earth, it’s pretty white flowers thirsting for life.

A smile broke across my face and I sank my head to smell the flowers when my eye caught a black dot on the horizon, slowly growing larger and larger.

I looked back down and back up, gears shifting in my mind. Finally I stood up straight, and took a deep breath.

He would terrorise me no longer. He was the monster and not I. I had no reason to run.