6. Chapter 6:
Chapter 6:
As I made my way closer to where my eyes had been drawn, I soon came to realise that it was a clearing of sorts. It was so almost perfectly circular, that for a moment, it almost looked artificial, but the small defects made me realise that must have been natural, likely cleared by some sort of large animal for mating rituals. As I walked closer, I found that the clearing was surrounded by bushes, all of the same species and type. They were also all in fruit. Each bush had hundreds of little purple berries gracing almost every stem and ever woody branch. The berries looked almost a homologous purple from a distance, but when I plucked one of them off and examined them closer, I saw that they were in fact mottled with a few different shades of purple, I crushed one in my hand. A deep-crimson juice flowed out, and the berry emitted a stink so close to the odour of rotting meat that I for a moment looked around me for any sign of a rotting carcass. I dared not taste the berried, both due to the smell and my recent experiences with the water. I doubted that it would end well.
This forest seemed to me now a sort of perversion of the natural order - the water was poisonous, the berries were not sweet but smelt like death itself, I found myself being thankful that Sew did not have to rot once he had died. I would not have liked to have thought of him rotting. It did not seem right. The clearing itself was a wholly different conundrum.
Inside of the clearing, I noticed a large metal sphere embedded in the soil, I walked over to it and tried to pull it out initially, but it did not seem to want to budge. Instead, I resigned myself to examine it as closely as I was able to. I knocked on its surface a few times, and heard deep clanking sounds echoed out from inside of the sphere. This told me that the sphere was hollow. That was a start. It seemed quite valuable, the sphere but it was not made out of any kind of precious metal, No gold or silver or Klerdin to be found anywhere on the metal. overall, it was quite plain, but I found myself drawn to its allure. It had a plain and simple beauty about it i could not quite dismiss as purely subjective. This thought began to unnerve me. The sphere itself was about two cubits in diameter, and I noted down all of the other details in my notebook, sketching it as I went. I soon found a small inscription of sorts at the base of the sphere. It seemed to depict a dog or wolf of some kind, and I was puzzled as to why it was there, with the rest of the sphere being black and even undented, it seemed strange to me that a rather crude illustration of this dog like creature be left here, without illustration and without context. I had heard about the peoples who used to live in the valley the forest was found in before we arrived, and I assumed it must have been some sort of artefact left behind by them. I even began to get the idea that they may still be alive, somewhere deep in the woods.
The soil near the sphere was also strangely red. It was because of a particularly strong deposit of clay, as I found when I mixed some water into it, but I could not stop my mind drifting and linking it subconsciously to blood. when I was in the clearing, my mind seemed strangely out of my control. It seemed at once familiar and alien to my psyche, and I grew slowly more and more distressed as the day continued, and I was strangely kept within or near the clearing. I wanted to leave but seemed to be drawn or tied to the clearing, so I never ended up doing so. it felt physically how I had felt trying to rid myself of my gambling addiction. I wanted to stop, but it seemed as if I was always drawn back into it, out of my control. I did not quite understand it the, and I did not quite understand it now. What I did know for certain, is that it could be overcome if I developed enough self belief and trust in my own mind. I had done it once, and I would do it again. I knew I could.
Once it began to get dark, I knew that I had to leave, the cry for escape came as if from a force deep inside of me, my organs telling me to leave. I felt intensely uneasy, and I did not want to remain in the clearing when the sun dipped beneath the horizon, and I was left without one of my senses and far away from any warmth or refuge. I would alone with the woods, this clearing, and it would be able to do anything it desired. This made me uneasy.
I once tried walking as far away from the clearing a I could, only to find myself rushing back to the clearing because I had absent-mindedly forgotten my pack near the sphere. Another time, I set off in one direction, determined never to see the clearing or the sphere ever again, but soon found myself circling back to the clearing and yearnign for the sweet respite sleep would give me from this seemingly endless trudging. I could lay down right here, I told myself... I could give over my fear to the sphere and let me be free for once, for a true and fleeting moment have no burdens, no regrets, only the beauty of existence and the physicalty of the forest keeping me from dissapearing into the soil beneath me... I could... I should...
"No!" I told myself, pushing my eyelids open as far as they could open, the maw of my eyes trying its best to eat up any light form the surroundings. I ran as far as I could from the clearing. making sure this time to take my pack, trying to think of other things with all of my remaining energy as hard as I could. I just kept going. I pushed through the plants by my feet, getting stung by nettles who knows how many times, getting whipped in the face by astray vines. Eventually, when I was sure that I had gotten as afar from the clearing as I would be able to with my limited energy reserves, I tied myself to a tree by my torso, and fell asleep standing up.
As rays of warming sunlight hit my face, I felt a very distinct sensation. It is hard to describe, but It made my entire body feel very light, and my thoughts seemed to be drifting aimlessly through a void of abscence. I seemed seperate from my usual self, and I did not know why. I was suddenly jolted back to reality when I noticed that one of my feet had swollen up to a terrifying size. I untied myself with some difficulty, and collapsed down onto the ground. The clearing was just out of sight, and I was thankful that I had gotten away. I had had visions of terrigying things while I was sleeping, and I was thankful that they were only visions. I would have preferred nightmares, because you can wake up from nightmares, but the visions had seemed to entrap me in them, and my waking world seemed but a dream while i was drowing in their amorphous mixture of colour and pain.
I looked down t my left foot, it was the size of a gourd, and I was unable to feel anything when I pressed down on it. I examiend it carefully, before finding the thorn of the Ghalr vine embedded in a place near my heel. I tried ot pull it out, but it would not budge. I remembered being told once that you had to be careful with thorns, because they could leave an infection once pulled out, and so carefully covered the area with some Loam Sap that I had brought with me in my medical kit. Loam sap was supposed to help reduce infection, and so I knew that it was the first thing I wanted entering any wound if I had to fiddle with it. I pulled out the thorn with all my strength, unfortunately, it was barbed, and so brought a decent chunk of my flesh with it. I threw it to one side, and looked over the wound. it was quickly filling with a mixture of puss and other bodily fluids, but, lukily, not blood.
I waited for the wound to drain, and my leg to reduce down to its original size. It looked as if it was deflating, like the paper baloons i had seen at festival times in the town, or the bladder balls the childrne playe with in the village. I could now feel the pain, however, and it was a low throbbing pain that I could not quite ignore, nor use to divert my mind, so the pain sat in the sort of liminality where I was eternally aware of it, but never quite aqare enought o deal with it, or even pity myself for it.
I wrapped it in a bandage made up of healing leaves, stuffed it with a salve and tried to fit it into my boots. it would not fit yet. I t was still overly swollen. For a few minutes, I was silent. I could not quite believe that I would not be able to walk yet. It seemed as if I was being punished for something I did not know I had done incorrectly. I let out a singular incredulous laugh, and then went on to try to find a solution. I could not afford the delay.
I wrapped my foot in a few layers of fern leaves, and used them as a way to protect my foot from any more thorns.
I set off walking. I soon realised that this was a terrible idea, and eventually had to stop, because the pain had gone from the undercurrent it usually was to a fiery and burning experience that stopped my from walking. I distinctyl remember putting my foot down at one point, and falling forwards with such veracity that I almost broke my leg, because the injured foot in question buckled under the weight it was no longer able to carry.
I opened up my plasters to find that the foot was infected. Streams of yellow pus emeneated from the place the thorn had entered, and there was a real danger of it killing me.
I would not die. People were relying on me. I was relying on me.
Nothing else in my medical kit could have possibly helped, but I choked down some intensely bitter Draan leaves to ease the pain, and went about thinking about what I could do. As I child, I had seen Sew use maggots to clean the flesh of the hides he was sent. he told me that they only ever ate the dead flesh, and never the living. He used a special type of maggots that did not eat the skin, but he had told me that any maggot would work. This gave me an idea. I might be able to save the foot by letting maggots feast on it. However, I hated maggots. Lukily, this was more of a disgust than a fear, as with snails, and so I was able to put it aside in order to give me a chance at life.
I dragged everything I had to a log to rest, and looked inside of it, hoping for maggots. Luckily, I found some and these were eating some sort of large fungus. It was the shape of a fountain, and smelled sickyl sweet. Luckily, when I touched it, it did not retreat or retract, but instead turned a deep violet colour. I decduced that this was to warn the fungus that it was poisonous, like many of the beetles I had played with as a child.
I scooped out some of the maggots and plopped them onto my foot. They squirmed and slid into the wound, and for a moment, thought that they were eating my living flesh, but found that they only ever touched the yellowed, infected flesh. I sat there for hours, as the sun's light dried up, just watching the maggots eating away, the strength returning to my foot, and the time I had dripping slowly away from my grip. i felt helpless, and I hated it.
The maggots themselves were disgusting to me, and so I had to force myself to look at them every so often. they were rotund, fat little creatures which reminded me of the pigs many of my neighbours had farmed what seemed like centuries ago, though I knew that it had only ben a few years. Back when I was about ten, a plague had swept through the continent, killing off most of the livestock and leaving the rest crippled. Watching the maggots now, I remembered the hundreds of dead pigs that had been lined up in the field near the village to be counted, and then their bodies burnt - some unfortunate soul having discovered that eating the diseased animals caused violent convulsions that caused the affected to vomit up their organs. The healthy animals who had lived with those who had died were culled to stop the spread of infection. I remember Kleh crying bcause her favourite cow had been taken to be killed.
Once I thought back to my foot, it had been thoroughly cleared by the maggots, and I almost found myself thanking them, seeing them in a different light. I picked them off, now gorged on my flesh, and popped them back on their mushroom to feast till they grew into some sort of fly.
I wanted to walk at night to make up for the lost time, but I knew better than to risk my life over-exerting myself, so I bandaged the wound up, and forced myself into sleep.