Yet I Still Live

Staring straight ahead, unresponsive to the world around her, she could barely recognize her own thoughts. An unfamiliar face appeared before her, diligently staring her in the eyes, but she still failed to make a meaningful response.

“What’s her name?” an old man’s voice questioned. “I’ve asked but for some reason she’s stopped talking,” a woman’s voice replied. “It’s like she’s shutting us all out.”

“She had a pretty bad injury,” the man stated, slowly creeping his way into view, “the fact that she even survived is a blessing from God.”

The woman’s eyes lowered, sadness overcoming her expression. “What the hell happened to that village?” she remarked, “If you think her being here is the work of God, then what we saw over that mountain was the work of a cursed spirit.”

Nodding his head as he ran his worn hand through his long stringy beard, he followed, “The Sovereign will speak on what we witnessed there, I’m sure…” He then took a deep breath as he turned away from the two of them. “In the meantime, I think we should get an Ayur to treat her. Otherwise, her wounds may reopen. I’ll reach out to Azu. He’s usually good with quelling the onset of mental disease as well. At this rate, if left untreated, I fear she may never speak again.”

The old man and the woman left the room with a deafening stillness. The wooden door aching with age as it screeched shut. Left alone in the small dark hut she now found herself in, she simply lowered her head as she began whispering to herself.

“Akari… My name is Akari Asakara. My name is Akari Asakara…”

“Akari!”

She gasped, her eyes torn open as blood dripped from her palms. The world around her was now a mere muffle, her mind split from the reality before her.

“Kuro,” Akari wept, “why am I not able to able to wake up?”

Kuro’s face was despondent, coated in dirt and blood. His entire body aching in pain. Fear constricting his chest. Yet he couldn’t feel a thing.

He cupped Akari’s hands into his, firmly holding them steady trying to stop the trembling. As he looked Akari in the eyes, it was as if Akari was looking back, not at him, but through him. Like staring into a glass jar. “We have to go,” Kuro pleaded, but Akari wouldn’t move, too reluctant to let the truth sink in.

A streak of blood stretched off into the distance where a mangled body lay. To think that mere moments ago, he had stood tall on his own two feet, a smile etched across his face as he stared death in the eye... only to now be reduced to nothing. What remained of him bore no resemblance to life, a hollow echo of the person he once was.

Though he had traded his life to save them, the sacrifice may have bought them nothing more than a fleeting moment.

Akari’s eyes swept across her surroundings, landing on one of the attackers sprawled lifeless on the floor, now but a headless husk. But the other was closing in, with eyes bloodied with murderous rampage.

There was no one left to save them, no one to take a bullet for their sake. Just two lost souls trapped in a foreign world. Neither with the means to fight back.

Akari knew that their next breaths could be their last. Their lives ending in an instant. Kuro then pulled her in tight, clutching her within his arms.

“We were already dead weren’t we?” his voice wavered.

A shadow casted over them, with Kuro feeling the hatred filled aura peering from behind him. An emerald glow began to envelop them, its ethereal light weaving into intricate markings as the energy surged. Rising with a deceptively graceful intensity. Glistening off the bloodied ground and taunting their deaths.

Akari clenched her eyes shut, unwilling to watch her own demise. A single tear running down the side of her cheek, an unusual thought flickered in the back of her mind.

“I’ve seen this before...”

Opening her eyes, she glared out into the empty room surrounding her. Her head spinning with thoughts of confusion. The feeling of insanity eclipsing her ability to think straight.

She had become lost within her own body, haunted by the fear that she would never find her way back.