Seven Miles
Seven Miles
He opened his eyes and through the slit of his helmet he saw only a wet darkness. Soaking damp black that suffocated him, he gasped again and again and began to sweat as he lifted his body under the weight of his metal shell and lay against the stone. The skittering cry of a rat whispered from the shadow. The knight outstretched his arm and the metal felt cold as he stomped through pitch black hallways and empty chambers that smelled of death. A light barely discernible shimmered almost completely in the knight’s mind. It gained form as the knight was drawn to it, brighter, realer. It pulsed and breathed against the suffocating black around it. A centimeter’s thick beam of moonlight coming through a hole in the stone. It pierced the black and illuminated an empty barrel in the corridor. The knight stumbled towards that beam, shoved the shell on his head up to the hole and could see only the moon. His face wet with sweat and tears and dirt, he clawed at the stone, widened the hole. Dust and rocks clouded through the slit into his helmet and he let out a cough that echoed and broke the silence in that place so completely that it felt as if every stone might collapse. The hole was large now. The hole was larger an hour later. The knight’s fingers bled from their metal casings. The knight crawled and squirmed his way through that hole and fell four feet into freezing mud. The moonlight was blinding and his breath whisped out of his helmet in front of his face. The knight sat on his knees in the mud. In front of him lay a silent clearing, a field walled by ancient trees hundreds of feet away. Little pinpricks, needles, stuck up from the grass and peppered the horizon like the silhouette of a porcupine’s back. Every line was an arrow standing straight toward the sky, held up by the gut of its own dead man. That moonlit graveyard pulsed with an iron scent, the fragrance of death. The knight whispered to himself the lord’s prayer and laid his head down toward the ground.
