The Tale of Heorogar

"Oul food won't last the yuletide."

Heorogar's eyes scattered. "What…has happened to me…why am I here…what have I done?"

"Fate es the only answel ta' evely question."

II

It was a time when snow should have fallen. In its stead the cold was replaced by the sweltering heat of what seemed like a thousand suns, so painful to the people of Hyldethrith that the weight of it all forced them to their knees. The sky throbbed with an orange red at every second of the day, regardless of the position of the sun. Cryda lay on the stale earth, his arms stretched into the air, fingers wide and quivering. His face was taut with starvation and clung to his skull. His skin had bled dry of its sweat long ago. His eyes glared at the sun, and the sun glared back.

"Vengeance!" his lips mouthed without sound, before he collapsed, his eyes rolling back to his head, his heart ceasing to toil, allowing him to rest forever.

By his side, his rusted sword lay, and Heorogar's eyes were upon it. By this time his muscles had melted into his skin, and his mind was racing with hunger and frustration. "No," he said, to himself, "no, no I won't."

Disobeying his own command, his body crept forward, and his thin arm heaved the sword into the air, its metal reflecting the tyrannical hues and shades of the sky. He looked at Cryda's body and the thin veil of skin clinging to it that he could devour. Then his eyes wandered back to his own body, to his stomach.

"Would only be a…short-term help…anyway," he murmured, referring to the meat upon Cryda, the sword's point gradually angling itself toward his neck. "To end life before I cannot-or to relish what misery I have left?"

A scream in the sky averted his attention, and he looked to the hot, crimson clouds, his eyes picking out a pair of flapping wings just over the blurred horizon. Then at the end of the despondent street he stood upon, a glimmer of light caught his eye. Forgetting the winged thing, he shielded his eyes from the glimmer and dropped the sword. He strode toward the light, his body angrily protesting the movements he made. The glimmer faded as he approached, and he bent toward the stale dirt to find a mercurial cross the size of a fingernail. Pendant, he thought, it's a pendant, not a cross. He picked it up, felt its tiny weight in his hand, its thin chain drooping in the air. Heorogar slung it over his neck. His stature straightened. His coarse hair lengthened and thickened and darkened from the early gray brought on by the starvation, and the small white hairs that had sprung from the pores of his body fell away. His muscles widened and grew, his stomach was immediately full. His eyes soared with life, and he inhaled the acrid gas as if it were voluptuous oxygen.

"Alive!" he screamed, "I live!"

Heorogar rushed back and forth among the empty streets of Hyldethrith like a giddy child, searching for anyone he could help by this curious wonder he had procured. By this time the skies had melted from their blood color to a sickly, cloudless viridian, and the air tasted of foul ammonia. But as Heorogar sprinted from doorway to doorway and street to street he tasted it naught, instead feeling eccentrically lively. Many hours passed and he was still running as fast as his legs would carry him, covering most of the small city, finding only skin-draped skeletons in his quest for someone to save.