Crimson Claws & Fangs ch.13

    After finishing off the entire tray of meats Samantha instinctively buries the entire tray along with the left over bones from the chicken in the ground beneath the bushes. Remaining in her vixen form she runs from the park in search of a more secluded area to go to sleep. Eventually she found a nice brush covered hill away direct sight of houses and the interstate, and curled up in thicket to rest.

 

    Across waves of purple like water dancing before her eyes Samantha finds herself still in vixen form standing in a strange landscape. The sun beats down on a place with rolling rills and sparse trees. The grassy hills have stone pillars, metal frames, and glass like structures sticking out of them like the decayed remains of buildings. An observation Samantha quickly makes thinking, “it’s like the skeletons of buildings embedded in the ground.”

 

   Samantha gets an odd urge to dig, and dig she does. She finds faded cans, bricks, and odd pieces of metal pipes, beams, and the occasional corroded gadget.

 

   A familiar man’s voice from behind her says, “Ten thousand years or so of neglect and this is what you get.”

 

  Samantha turns and sees something she hadn’t seen since the incident at Pine Ridge. Or rather from a dream she had at the time, a small black fox with opposable thumbs standing on its hind legs wearing a tuxedo suit. “Rhuen,” she remembers being its name, “great another dream.”

 

    Rhuen says, “This is a possible future which humanity faces, a world where humans abruptly vanished. And thousands of years left alone the cities decayed and nature took back what is rightfully its own.”

 

   Samantha remembers once watching something about something like that happening if everyone just vanished. She asks, “So, what happened to everyone?”

 

   “This but a dream,” he says, “of one of an infinite number of potential futures; however it’s a very plausible one. One that involves forces near to where you are now & I feel I should tell you that you may very well become involved as things stand now.”

 

    Before she can ask anything else Samantha finds her self awoken suddenly by a cop standing over her. Startles she sits up abruptly, both glad to see she is back in human form, and for the expanding and re-shrinking cloths Grey Wolf had given her. The cop asks her is she is okay, “fine she says, just…uhm, fell asleep after a party last night.” The cop offers her a ride, but she refuses saying she is near her home and will be okay. The male officer shrugs his shoulders with a slight fog over his mind making him dismiss the situation and go on his way.

 

   Samantha is a bit surprised that he gave up so easily and walks up the hill towards the neighborhood roads thinking about what she is supposed to do next. Nearby hidden in the brush two small foxes sit side by side, a grey almost wolf colored one and a stark black one, Versa and Rhuen in their small animal forms.

 

   Versa turns to Rhuen, “What was that about?”

 

 

 

   Rhuen smirks saying, “Nothing like an apocalyptic probability to give one a feeling of purpose. It should do her good right now as something to take her mind off her situation so to speak.”

 

   Versa shrugs, “So much like your mother with the cryptic methods.”

 

   Versa and Rhuen vanish like a pair of spirits leaving only the wind to disturb the brush.

 

****

 

   Across an impossible distance, in a dimension so far removed from time and space as its known that to any human observer only blackness would be seen a woman’s voice speaks to a mostly unseen audience of living shadows with robe like bodies beneath her, the very darkness moving as though it were the garments of the one speaking. The voice echoing like thunder an impossible distance above the audience of male and female shadowy frames as they look into a black circle of water that shows a male figure lying down on a bed in pitch black darkness.

 

“Time is an illusion,” speaks the unseen thunderous voice, “Something conceived by lower beings that mark their time like precious gems, for it will someday end for them. To them time should not be wasted, while time moves no faster for immortals, they lack this regard for it. For them a few days, months, years, may pass while they rest in dark tombs with no concern. While powers that may be seen as gods mark the days for a world those like this man are the ones that act as the knots that tie the events of time’s thread. Fate can not be written by gods alone, but by mortals who are thrown into such events.”

 

   A great motion occurs above the figures rippling the darkness, knowing but not seeing a great arm pass distantly above them, they perceive in the waters snap shots of the man’s life.

 

   “This man named Peter Jones, his father’s father a member of a religious order trying to stay back the madness of the supernatural world from flooding over humanity. He grew to become a member of the same sect in a sense but remained near the town of his birth as a Sheriff.

 

    His life, one destined for mediocrity with purpose. All that changed when another man came there. If not for that man two Rai by the names of Rhuen and Versa would have conceived, and bore their young with out anyone being the wiser, save for a few mysterious predations of livestock which would have faded away as an urban legend. No instead the life of this poor soul was thrown asunder by the over zealous hunter who caused the wrath of those two gods to come down upon the man’s family. The man, after the incident joined a rogue sect of his cult determined to do greater things, only to become a prisoner.”

 

    The figures below unable to understand the importance as to why one such as their goddess would care so much about this watched knowing that far above them she was smiling; by the feel of power in the air indicating her amusement or excitement. They knew that somehow this man was destined for something important, and were merely there to act as witnesses.

 

    The waters grew dark and the figures knew their part was done, as quickly as each had arrived there in that impossible place they vanished. One of them returning to a dark throne room had upon her head a headdress for an oriental priestess, save for being made out of shadow, her robed body of flowing darkness standing before her throne. She was the Shadow Lady, ruler of the Dark Domain. Even she knew only one other who had been standing around the Well of Midnight, her brother Rho-Sho-Shin.

 

  As she pondered the meaning as to why her goddess would summon her and the other ancient priests and priestesses of their long forgotten by her’s and most other’s worlds faith in that darkness beyond them the un-seeable form still watched. With eyes now opened that shone through the darkness like two oval blue suns, barely illuminating a shadow in the shape of a woman’s face with ridges to indicate nose, cheeks, but no actual features, as though her eyes were merely openings shining a light out from inside a shell.

 

   She watched across time as Mike became a Toori-ma and joined Count Fontaine, and as Samantha came to the city. But she had wondered what of the man whose string of fate tied him to these supernatural forces, the lucky yet unlucky man who encountered yet survived said encounters with forces so far beyond him. She brought her servants to watch, “if only to influence the course of events and impose upon them the humbleness of humanity” she thought out loud to the unknowable realm.

 

     With a wave of what could be perceived as an arm enveloped in a giant sleeve of watery shadow with a hand more like glowing darkness in a the shape of a geometric claw, she caused the waters to grow to her scale and show her once again the man sleeping in the darkness, the poor soul that is Peter Jones, and the events that occurred for him over the week when he was brought in by the H.E.P. . “A story is unfolding here,” she says with great amusement, “events impossibly tied together. I can hardly wait to turn the page to see what happens next.”