PILGRIM
A searing pain grips my side, its hold squeezing at a rib I can’t see. At first, I feel a steady drum beating in my head until I open my eyes to a horror that spells the mistake that’s my throbbing heart.
What just happened? It all happened so fast that I can’t remember much of it. A minute ago, I was in the carriage. Now there’s a high-pitched ring in my head. My vision is blurry. The stench in the air reeks of blood and smoke. I look down at the source of my pain, and covered in my red, a piece of wood sprouts out of my lower abdomen, with my left foot shifted from its socket; a sight that stirs a vomit of food and blood from my mouth.
I can hear the crumbling snap of timber and flesh around me. The carriage is in shambles, with one wheel impaled in a nearby tree and the other still linked to a piece of the carriage that survived, making its final languid spin as the dense wind whips at it. The horses lie around lifeless, some of them so badly burned that they’re unrecognisable. Closer to me are the remains of my soldiers, some with limbs severed from their bodies, others reduced to roasted bones, sitting on the charred grassland that surrounds me.
Earlier, Keneta, my assistant, had thought he heard something in the distance, approaching us at a speed I had dismissed as exaggerated. But like a blur, I had seen and learned of it too late. Then this happened.
I turn to face the nearly inaudible, soft yet drifting stir of footfall approaching me from behind. My vision, while obscured by the stinging red of blood trickling from the painful gash on my head, beholds him approaching me with a tenderness that screams of glorious splendour, tinted with overwhelming power that renders all other forms of mortal royalty to inferior mediocrity and disappointment.
©2022
