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.

“Father who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven

Please lead thee not into temptation

But deliver thee from evil lord”

The knight lay against the stone wall facing that field and the night was so calm. Stars and the neon of the heavens blanketed the sky. Death silenced it and the knight felt like an alien on some strange moon without human sound or emotion. This keep was the farthest the knight had ever traveled in his entire life. Seven miles from the fief he had lived and the fields of barley he had grown his muscles reaping and seven miles from the priest who had knocked him to the dirt with the hilt of his sword sending him to this place. There wasn’t any man alive under the moonlight and that empty air rejected the knight. Empty.

A crackling ember woke the knight and softened the caked mud and blood on his armor. Smoke whisped up into the stars and he turned to his side and a tiny withered man squat and stoked the flame. Arrow shafts splintered into kindling fed the whimpering fire and the old man looked at the knight.

The stranger moved his mouth and whispered across the flame.

“There’s a man in the woods.”

The knight cocked his head and took off his helmet, threw it into the mud where it stuck and sent droplets sizzling into the fire. He turned back and there was nobody there. He fell out of consciousness again

The knight blinked open his eyes and braced his arm against the stone to stand himself up. It was still dark and still silent. He looked back at that field of death and there was nothing there but wheat. Every body and shaft gone. Some blood still stained the crop. The knight stumbled forward out of the mud and ran his hand through the wheat as walked through the moonlit clearing. He saw not a single corpse. He lifted his head and his eyes widened at the sky. There was not a single star. Not a single color or light shone through the black. The knight began to shake and the air started to freeze him and his breath. The trees he faced held behind them a black even darker than that silent clearing behind him. He began to step into the woods.

“Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,

deliver thee from this evil lord.”

The trees were like some great arrows that had been shot into the earth and their shafts reached far out of sight into the starless night, and the knight kept his eye forward and shivered as felt his way through the oak. The great sword strapped to his back began to weigh him down. He hadn’t heard a single sound since that fire and he could almost hear the trees whispering to themselves as his breath clouded in front of them. He kept marching forward and his throat began to dry from a lack of water. The knight clutched the cross hanging from his neck and whispered the lord’s prayer to himself again as continued with his eyes shut. He knew not how long he had been walking but after some time he felt something soft hit his face. He recoiled back and opened his eyes and a foot was dangling in front of him. Flecks of blood dotted the leg and as the knight looked up he saw the foot was attached to a body hovering in the air connected to nothing. The knight gasped and drew the blade weighing down his back.

He yelled something unintelligible and tapped the body with his sword. It spun softly. An arrow protruded from its gut. That alienation from the field and that graveyard boomed louder into the knight’s head and he felt a perversion to everything he knew. The trees shot up still into the dark and the foggy shade that enveloped that wood was suddenly visited by a faint blue glow. The floating body became backlit by what the knight could only understand as a blue fire. A glow wrapped around the body from the darkness high above the trees like a giant ray of sunlight and the body began to float further upwards.

The knight whispered to himself and dropped his sword.

“Beelzebub.”

He backed up further and watched in horror as the glowing body rose up into the light and vanished. The light flickered and folded in on itself and it was pitch black once again. The knight began to convulse and blink as he ran through the wood. Above him he began to hear a loud humming like he had never heard before, the cloud of black fog that smothered the woods parting above him as something followed him in the sky. He ran until his armor clipped into itself and he hit an oak, tumbling down into a pile of leaf and bark. The humming centered above him and his pupils dilated to blacken his entire eye as his mind attempted to process what it saw looming above the maze of trees where he lay. His vision was stripped from him as a godly blue light beamed into his eyes and pulsed all around him, lighting up the mess of branches and dirt where he stumbled in an attempt to get up. His armor began to feel lighter and he began to quicken until it turned into a weightlessness that began to carry him above the ground. The knight grunted and struggled and screamed and no saliva came out of his throat because of his dehydration and he thought this must be God reclaiming him from the life he was supposed to lose in yesterday’s massacre. He squeezed his eyes shut and his consciousness left him.

He blinked open his eyes and stared back at a man. It was him. He had never seen his reflection, never known what he looked like. The metal above him, the ceiling, it must have been, was so clean it seemed as if someone had washed it in the river a thousand times. It shone back with an image of him that mirrored every expression he made. He looked into his own eyes for the first time.

He turned his head and shook his body and realized he was held down by some soft band. Another surface to his left held a door made of metal like the knight had never seen and the door had no handle or groove of any kind. The knight groaned and shook and sweat as he tried to break the restraints keeping him strapped to the platform where he lay but nothing gave. He squinted his eyes and that flat door hissed like a cat and slid open like an act of magic. Nothing lay behind it but a metal corridor much like the one in the keep the knight had been the night before. The air behind that door began to grow hazy and the knight struggled to turn his head and see. He couldn’t make out anything moving; anything there. His eye darted to the side of the door. He heard something. A soft footstep, like a dog's.

A leathery green finger crept out from behind the door.