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The man couldn’t remember for how long he’d walked, but he knew he couldn’t stop, no matter his skin turned red, drenched in smelly sweat and cracked and burnt under the cruel twin suns, no matter the boiling heat filling his lungs leaving him struggling for fresh air as he kept going on, one foot after the other, among the endless dunes, never daring to look back. He didn’t even remember why he still had to go on: he saw Death right in front of his eyes, and was alone now. Absent-minded, he touched the metal box buried deep in the pocket of his stained jacket.
Each step made him crave death more and more, and he couldn’t avoid cursing that hellish planet, those damned suns and the even more damned person who decided No Man’s Land was going to be humanity’s new home.
Who was the one that condemned humans to that scorching hell?
A god? A devil?
The angel?
He shivered, even if the heat was almost cooking him alive.
Fuck them, whoever they were, he cursed mentally - he couldn’t even afford to speak, otherwise he’d lose even more strength…and God (if it still existed) only knew how much longer he would have to walk before reaching the next inhabited place. He tried to act bold, cursing and swearing and making a list of all the blasphemies he could think of in his head - but that did nothing to soothe his dread, and the terrifying sensation of eyes following him.
So, he kept walking and walking.
Don’t look back, don’t look back.
The man was still in disbelief as the memory from days ago - how many, he couldn’t tell anymore - came back to him: his old house, a small but relatively clean apartment inside an ancient spaceship where a few hundreds had found safety to build their lives. The spaceship was far from being in good shape, though: the small settlement never had chances to become a real city, rich in resources and money, like the Seven Cities, built around huge spacecrafts of old; still, it had provided a decent shelter for more than a century.
Until the day of the accident.
It was actually a massacre.
He knew that, by now, he was the only survivor, and he had to thank his survival instinct and good legs for that. Others had fallen into the trap, but he had felt, immediately, how the curse upon them would be the end of their story.
For a curse it had been, a curse come from the desert.
It started with the last, small plant still functioning. One day it suddenly stopped working, halting its production of energy; nobody had panicked, back then, as it sometimes happened: the plant was a little thing, a blue-white creature with too many legs and arms and feathers - a delicate monster in a lightbulb -, and it had been running since before the Big Fall. He was familiar with it, having been a scientist too, at least for a while. His parents descended from the first crew of the ship, and he managed to learn a thing or two about bio-engineering, but plants had always creeped him out too much to keep working with them. So much that he’d almost fucked the whole thing up once, pressing the wrong buttons on the control panel or something; after that, he’d been happily relegated to less intellectual chores.
As days passed without energy, and thus with no means to have fresh food, water and even air, panic erupted among the ship dwellers. The small crew of scientists (rather: the descendants of the actual scientists from a century before) worked incessantly for weeks on the damned thing, to make it work again - to make them all live. But to no avail. The plant hadn’t died, quite the contrary: it was glowing like never recorded before, and showed no signs of malfunction. The monster had simply stopped producing whatever humans had it do for its entire, damned life.
Almost as if it had chosen to.
When the crew leader declared failure, a furious mob started throwing rocks, metal bars, whatever, at him. He died screaming, and the last he saw him, as the scientist’s body was being thrown in the desert, his face was an unrecognizable pulp of blood.
The man had watched from afar, too tired to even care, but he still noticed a figure among the dunes; something tall, and white, standing atop one of the sandy hills.
It sent shivers down his spine, and for the first time since the plant damage, he was terrified, as he had never been in his entire life. He ran back to his apartment, but he couldn’t shake off that terrible sensation.
He felt observed.
A few days later, the sudden famine made its first victim - an old lady, who’d been sick for years. Her family mourned and screamed against the remaining scientists, but nobody joined in their attempt for revenge; the woman had lived long, after all. Longer than any of them would ever live.
Things went different when a child died.
Things ended with the whole scientist crew becoming the main meal for the next couple of weeks.
After there was nothing left of them to eat, they were replaced by those who kept dying, killed by the lack of nourishment or by the incessant heat.
He had been nauseated at the thought of eating humans, people he’d known for his entire life, but the idea of dying from hunger or strain (if he wasn’t going to be killed first) and becoming the next meal had been stronger than any remaining sense of shame and disgust. Besides, that wasn’t even the worst. What truly shook him to his core, what didn’t let him sleep even if sleep was one of the few things his tired body could still do, was the constant sensation of being observed, even when he was deep into the ship-village, desperately searching for a cooler corner where he could rest, and hide from everything and everyone.
That was the one thing truly driving him crazy.
Eventually, he confessed his paranoia to a friend of his, and how it all started with the mysterious figure standing among the dunes. One day, as the suns were setting, granting them a small relief from the boiling temperatures, he even led his friend to the same point where he’d first noticed the figure.
Had only death got him right then…
The figure was there, again, but it had grown closer, and he managed to finally distinguish it clearly.
A man.
A tall man, clad in a white cloak, immaculate as if the dust couldn’t lay on it. As if he’d just descended from the heavens.
There was something unnatural about him, even from that distance.
His friend gasped at the sight.
“They’ve come to save us! They’ve come to save us! They’ve come to save us!”, he exclaimed, louder and louder until almost all the survivors had rushed to the edge of the village, where the ship ended and the desert started.
“Saviour! Saviour! Saviour!”, they all chanted, and their voices roared in the sunset as the man approached the village, crossing the sand with long and fast strides; as the stranger got closer, he noticed he had raised his left arm, from which something shining spurred, bright and metallic.
Instinct made him run back into the ship.
He didn’t want to look behind, until the joyful chants stopped in a moment of general confusion, so he turned towards the sunset, where the mysterious man stood - only to find nothing.
He was gone. Disappeared.
Had it all been a mirage?
The man tried to breathe deep, hoping to be soothed by a long needed feeling of relief, since the mysterious white figure was finally gone…but his heart was racing, still in fear.
And then, then he noticed he was drenched in cold sweat, shivers and goosebumps all over his skin. Suddenly, he perceived the air moving brusquely as something, extremely light, barely detectable, brushed against his shoulder and hand as it fell on the ground. It made him feel sick, and so heavy he could crush on the soil beneath him, where that something now was; its vision had his heart freeze in fear and confusion.
A feather.
A white, luminescent feather, bright and weightless crystal under his touch - such a beautiful, perfect and so inhuman little thing.
A plant feather.
Soon, an endless rain of feathers fell from the sky, and their brightness shadowed even that of the setting suns.
In the background of his mind, just barely outside of his vision, a mixture of confused cries and prayers rose from the people, and someone said: “AN ANGEL!”
The man acted as fast as his body could allow him to, and immediately laid down, keeping his head as low as possible. And then he closed his eyes.
He heard blades unleashing, but he didn’t even hear the people dying.
Not a single scream.
It was over in the span of a few seconds.
Once he dared to open his eyes again, he only saw their blood splattered all over the place, painting with a deep scarlet the soil and the bodies chopped to tiny pieces that were on the ground.
The angel was standing tall above the carnage, its cloak as pristine as before. As if none of this could ever really touch it. It wasn’t even looking at its own work, but rather seemed to move its gaze around, as if searching for something - or someone. Likely, it hadn’t even noticed one of them was still alive, but the man couldn’t be sure, as he refused to raise his head more than a few inches: he knew that looking into the angel’s eyes would mean certain death.
So he remained still, blood beginning to stick and dry on his skin and clothes, the stench of disemboweled bodies and guts permeating the air, so strong he wanted to vomit and cry, but he knew he had to repress his needs.
He lost track of time, whether minutes or hours had passed, when he heard someone speaking directly to the angel; it was the old village chief, who somehow had managed to survive so far - but not for much longer.
“So it was you who did all of this”, more of a statement than an accusation, judging by the calm, resigned tone of his words. The man found it weird, though: the old chief seemed to somehow be familiar with the monstrous angel, not showing any hint of surprise or fear. How?!
He was startled when the angel - the monster - talked back, voice sharp as blades, so heavy but at the same time light, almost uncannily pleasant.
“No. It’s always been you, humans. Had you not enslaved all of us, none of this would have ever needed to happen”
The village leader replied, and when he did, his words were heavy with venom.
“You were made to serve us. WE are your creators, you better remember that, and who you truly are, plant”
So that was the true nature of the angel? How? It stood, walked and talked on its own, with no apparent need to permanently live inside those huge light bulbs…
The angel, monster, plant, spoke again, voice full of pride and quiet anger.
“I know who I am. I am the knife that will cut my kind free of your dirty chains. I am the fire that will burn this world anew, and all that will remain of you will be less than ashes”
Such words made the man shudder and squirm in terror, be damned his initial plan to keep still and survive. He was sure there would be no survivors, even more once he heard the old man’s reply.
“Cry and kill for all you want, one day another wave of humans will come and put you back into your place, to produce what we humans order you to do. You, and those other two, are just unforeseen abominations. One day! One day you and that brother of yours will be slices of meat fleeting in laboratory tanks just like that other one!”
“I WILL NOT LET YOU STAIN MY SIBLINGS’ NAMES!”, the angel screamed, furious and loud; the man braced himself, anticipating Death would strike soon again.
And he was right. He didn’t see it, he only heard blades unsheathing and slicing meat. The village chief’s body parts falling to the ground, accompanied by loud thuds, wet with blood. Something else hit the soil, something that sounded like a box rolling towards his direction - but he couldn’t care about that now.
The noise of metallic blades being dragged on the ground signaled the monster was moving, directed into the core of the ship, seemingly. The man almost started breathing again, when the angel’s voice hit him like a freezing shower.
“Once I find what I need, I’ll come back for you too, parasite”, and it was breathing hard, as if fury had left it with no oxygen.
Of course the creature would notice he was only pretending to be dead. Of fucking course, damn me!!, thought the man, edging on hysterical amusement. He heard the creature walking away, but had no intention of moving: he had given up. Nothing could stop Death. He dared to lift his eyes to see what was waiting for him, to accept his future, but (and he couldn’t explain how or why) the only thing that caught his attention was the box. A small, square-shaped metallic black box.
And then he realised, what if this is what the monster wants?
If I give the box to it, it will let me live, right?
No, no it’s going to fucking kill me like everyone else!
And then he stood, with all the strength he didn’t know he still possessed, grabbed the box, and started running, faster than he ever ran in his entire, miserable life.
He never dared to look back.
As the twin suns were finally setting, the man caught a glimpse of a tall building from afar: as he got closer, he saw it was an old spacecraft, smaller and much more ruined than the village he came from, but hopefully it could still provide a decent shelter for the night - that’s what he thought as he headed there.
He managed to start a small fire with a few old pieces of clothes and rotting wood, but there was no food or water. Resigned to the ever-present hungry cramps in his stomach, he laid down by the fire, grabbing the mysterious box from his jacket.
Only now that he was finally resting, he opened the box and discovered its secret, what seemed to be an old data disc, thin and light but extremely durable, a typical item of lost technology from the space era.
There must be something on that, something big, the man thought, already standing and searching for some device he could use to access the data. After some rummaging in the spaceship (well, what still stood of it), he found a small reader covered in dust and sand, but still working somehow. The miracle of lost technology.
Just before inserting the disc, the man stopped for a second, wondering if it really mattered at all: what did he even expect to find on it?
His life was over anyway.
But maybe, that’s what pushed him to play start.
It was a video recording. The camera initially moved, a succession of unclear images and muffled sounds taking up the early minutes of the video, until finally the camera was stabilized and the man could see the mysterious director.
A child.
He seemed to be around seven, eight years old. Pale big blue eyes and short white-blond hair, with a mole under his right eye. A cute kid. He had a sweet, embarrassed expression as he began talking to the camera, his cheeks red with shyness.
“He-hello! I know I shouldn’t be doing this, Rem told us to act normal but I really, reeealllly need to improve my skills! I want to help everybody, and who knows where our journey will take us a-and I’m sure this could be useful!”
The boy then moved far from the camera and kneeled on the ground. Only then the man noticed the child was inside a small, dimly illuminated room, the floor made mostly of soil. A sort of greenhouse?, he wondered, Does the kid want to be a gardener or something… while the little boy started moving the soil with his two little hands, as if to make room for seeds to be planted. Every now and then, he would look towards the camera, a shy smile across his face.
The man chuckled, but the brief moment of amusement faded into bitterness as he realised the boy, very likely, had died in the Big Fall; and even if he had survived the crash, he should have been one hundred years old, even more by now. He was dead in any case. Hopefully, he had lived a quiet life and died of old age, a luxury on that God-forsaken hell. The man couldn’t understand why, but he immediately took a liking for the boy.
Yet, as the video progressed, the man realised it would have been better if he had thrown the damn box into the sands, for what he next saw froze even his blood - to hell the sudden paternal instinct.
“Ok, here we go! Let’s make a flower!”
The child took a deep breath, put his hands into the soil and after a few seconds, a small, white lily appeared where there was nothing.
Out of fucking nothing.
“I’m so so happy!! This is just the beginning, I promise I’ll get better, and one day I’ll grow fruits and flowers for all my friends, for Rem…and for Vash!”, and the creature blushed as it spoke the last name. As a human child would do, the uncanny resemblance clashing with the very proof of its completely different nature.
That was no human child.
That was a monster.
The memories of the massacre, the angel of death, the blood and the disemboweled bodies suddenly clogged his mind, and he felt breathless and nauseated. He brusquely stopped the video, threw the device away and then screamed in the twilight, cursing those monsters inside the light bulbs, those monsters outside the light bulbs and their creators, the foolish, arrogant humans to which he belonged.
When he woke up the next day, early in the morning, the nausea was gone, but not the hunger and thirst. His lips were cracked and dry, and every now and then he cursed himself for leaving the village: had he stayed there, the monster would have killed him too. Getting his body chopped to pieces would be more merciful than struggling in the open desert like that, feeling his body wasting more and more every single minute, every single hour, every single day.
He had to do something. To keep walking meant suicide, and the ship had no food stock left; perhaps its radio still worked, though?
Trying couldn’t worsen his situation anyway, so he stood, weak and thin, heading for the place where the main radio panel should have been - but something made him fall, trapping his feet.
It was the small reader he used to watch the cursed tape.
Fuck that, and the damn kid. Don’t look back, he thought, struggling to his feet. His eyes, on the other hand, darted back to it.
Don’t fucking look back.
The radio couldn’t possibly work, not after a century left in the wilderness.
Do. Not. Look. Back.
Before he even realised it, he grabbed the reader, sat back on his miserable makeshift bed, and pressed “play”.
By the time the twin suns were high in the sky, he had watched at least a dozen videos, all made by that same, mysterious thing that looked like a human child. He watched it giving life to lilies, roses, daisies and other flowers of which he couldn’t know the names, all in the soft shades of white and pink and light blue, and every time, the creature smiled and giggled happily, clapping its tiny hands together enthusiastically.
He was sure, by now, that it must have been some type of geo plant, maybe even a fertility plant: the village once owned one, years and years before his birth, but he nevertheless was astonished by the ease, the natural way in which this little plant birthed flowers. At the same time, he also grew certain that the creature had not survived the Big Fall: had humans ever found it, had the creature grown into an adult plant, an indipendent, the planet would have been much greener now. Humans would have overworked it, likely, making it birth tree after tree, a forest after the other, until it would dry and die. No way they would have let go of such an incredible talent.
But alas, No Man’s Land hadn’t changed at all since humans crashed on it, still an endless sea of dust and sand and scorching temperatures, giant worms and disgusting insects seemingly the only living beings that truly thrived among the dunes; the Big Fall had killed the wrong plant, he thought, letting the other one bring death and blood, instead of pretty flowers and green fields.
With such thoughts, he started playing the last video.
Something wasn’t right.
The small plant looked scarily different: not in appearance, but in the way it couldn’t keep its eyes on the camera; in the way it tormented its own fingers and mouth; in the way its very own eyes seemed to be lightless, empty, tired. Scared, even. It was sitting on the fake grass as usual, its hands mindlessly going from its face to the artificial soil, scraping against the mud, nervous and uncertain as no flower grew from where it laid its small hands.
“I…I can’t do this anymore”, it was clearly struggling not to cry, its voice small and broken, but it continued somehow, “I just wanted to be friends, but my…my…sister”.
It paused, and then the small creature began weeping, its whole little body shaking with sobs and hiccups…and the man saw a child again, instead of a thing - and he felt guilty for that: no matter the real nature of the boy, his pain was real, just as his happiness and smiles had been.
“Th-the humans…the humans…they did it”, he spoke again, his voice still shaking, “The humans!”
The child was crying tears of blood.
What did they do to him?
The man prayed, begged whatever God was up above, that the child had been helped, cared for, watching the kid as he cried and shivered, struggling to find his voice; as his tears finally dried, his sobbing ceased, and he appeared as empty, numb, all bright sweetness and shy joy gone forever as something, a sort of freezing realization, possessed the boy.
“Humans butchered Tesla, they will butcher me, and Vash, and all of our sisters in the bulbs”
He watched the kid as his eyes went wide open again, as his voice turned into something more metallic, cold and sharp - disturbingly familiar, even if he clearly still struggled to speak properly, seemingly on the brink of hyperventilation and panic.
“They don’t see us as equal friends, no, they see us as things they can cut open and bleed and dissect and put in tanks”
Tanks?, again, that was familiar in ways the man couldn’t - or didn’t want to - understand.
“They created us to stay inside those bright, crystal bulbs…cages for my sisters, to never be really free…for my ancestors…but Tesla was special and they killed her and put her in tanks”
He watched the kid as his pale blue eyes began vibrating, becoming brighter and brighter as the rest of the room turned darker and darker.
“I loved humans, I wanted to be friends with them, but they never made us to be their friends…they gave us a body, for them to cut and use and keep as experiments…they gave us a soul but for which reason?”
What did we do to him?!
“Do we need one if we are meant to get killed by humans? They gave us senses, only to make us feel pain…But I’m not inside the bulbs…I have an independent body…I AM an independent…I don’t need humans…my sisters won’t need humans…”
The boy stood up, and from his tiny hands something spurred: not flowers, but something that shone dimly in the dark room. Next, a quick slash in the direction of the camera, making it fall and roll on the ground, the screen partially shattered.
The plant-child had grown a knife.
A devastating wave of sadness crushed against his soul, and the man wept for the boy and his stolen innocence. A child’s soul, plant or human mattered no more.
The man stopped the video, staring at the small fire until it died, unmoving and silent. He stayed like that for a long while, until his sadness, his exhaustion, the both of them, led him to fall asleep; it was a cruel sleep, plagued by visions of human blood and the fading smile of a young boy.
The man couldn’t remember for how long he’d run, but he knew he couldn’t stop, no matter his skin turned red, drenched in smelly sweat and cracked and burnt under the cruel twin suns, no matter the boiling heat filling his lungs leaving him struggling for fresh air as he kept going on, one foot after the other, among the endless dunes, never daring to look back. He didn’t even remember why he still had to go on: he saw Death right in front of his eyes, again, and was alone now. Absent-minded, he touched the metal box buried deep in the pocket of his stained jacket, the box with the cursed records.
Each step made him crave death more and more, and he couldn’t avoid cursing that hellish planet, those damned suns, the damned person who decided No Man’s Land was going to be humanity’s new home and the even more damned humans who made it all possible by ruining and enslaving kids - plant kids, but kids nonetheless.
He knew now.
He saw it, with his own two eyes, on the screen of an old camera from more than a century ago, he saw how innocence turned into hate. The man truly hoped the plant-child had died in the Big Fall, his pain gone forever, the possibility of a life of torture (either inflicted by or upon him) disappeared among the exploding ships…but the moment he woke up, that morning, he found out with horror that, perhaps, his prayers had been useless.
When he opened his eyes, thinking the day would be the same as the previous one, and as the day before it as well, his heart was still sunken in sorrow, in the haunting memory of the plant-child crying blood, more than one hundred years before. He stood, as usual, but weaker than the day before, maybe finally closer to death and the eternal rest that came with it. He remembered how he absentmindedly went for the camera, almost seeking a sort of weird comfort in sharing his pain with the plant-child’s pain - after all, what else could he do now?
So he grabbed the device, once more, from where it was laying on the ground; but when the man raised his head, that’s where the real nightmare began again.
The moment he had lifted his eyes from the ground, he spotted a shining, white figure, tall above a dune.
The curse come from the desert.
The angel.
The monster.
The plant.
He couldn’t even explain why and how, but fear took control of him again, as he placed the camera and its box in his pocket and began to run, run, run as fast as his emaciated body could allow him to run, in the opposite direction of the angel.
He ran and ran, until something tall emerged from the desert.
An abandoned spaceship. Dirty rags pulled together as a sort of bed. Ashes from a small bonfire.
He knew that place.
It was the same spaceship he'd used as shelter for the last few days.
The angel had him running in circles, and now there was nowhere left to escape.
The endless desert in front of him. The monster behind him. Death all around.
His knees finally gave up and he collapsed on the boiling sand, wailing like a wounded animal, pathetic and hopeless - a wounded animal, he was sure, had much more dignity than he had now. He had become the lowest of the preys, hunted by a hunter that exceeded every human dream, or nightmare.
He heard footsteps approaching him, slow but steadfast, and then he finally turned his head, daring to look at his hunter.
A man.
He seemed to be around twenty, twenty five years old. Pale sharp blue eyes and short white-blond hair, with a mole under his right eye. A handsome man. He had a stern, cold expression as he began talking to his prey, his skin white as marble, as his cloak was.
The man felt his heart breaking and falling into an endless pit of despair: he recognised those features.
He knew him.
An angel, built to look like humans, but too perfect, too unstained, so uncannily familiar but at the same time the literal embodiment of Death, masked as a statue made out of ivory and marble and flesh.
“I told you I would have come back for you too, parasite” his voice was full of sharp contempt, as he was glaring down at the man, and he looked even taller as he stood on the higher ground, the twin suns crowning his head with a double halo made of fire and death.
The man sobbed, defeated and scared.
“I know what you have seen…” and he pointed one his fingers, long and gloved, to where the man kept the box in his jacket, “…on those records your pathetic chief dared to steal. It’s a wonder he managed to get the lab logs of our very ship…human greed truly knows no limit”
“TAKE IT! Take it away please!!” the man shouted, desperate and loud, “I will never tell anyone about the records, nor about you!! I beg you LET ME GO!”, and then he bowed on the ground, right at the angel’s feet.
Of all the reactions the man was ready to expect from the angel, hearing him sigh, as if he had been bored, wasn't among them.
“Please, please take it, I know it’s all our fault, we humans killed the plants!! And your Tesla!!”
The moment those words left his mouth, the angel froze, and his face turned even paler, his blue eyes shot wide open, and looked even brighter, while his mouth twisted in shock and disgust.
“What did you say?!”
The man gasped, his heart almost stopping for good: he had been knowing ever since he had watched the very first video, but now…now he had to fully accept it.
When he spoke again, his voice had become a thin, faint sound, barely audible as he trembled.
“It’s you…you are…the boy”
He raised a hand, shaking and weak, trying to grab at the hem of the plant-boy’s cloak.
“Oh, it’s really you…I watched your videos. Your flowers were so pretty…I am so sorry, boy…please…please let me go-” but air was suddenly blown out of his lungs, as the plant-boy, now tall and strong - too strong - had kicked him away, repulsed by his touch and miserable begging, apparently. The plant had hit him right in the middle of his chest, so violently he was coughing blood now, even more as he struggled to crawl the farther he could get from the plant.
“You had no right!! No right to see that!! Stupid, greedy, useless human!!”, the plant was shouting now, furious and deadly, as multiple, shining blades grew from his left arm - and the man heard the same metallic, slashing sound as when the plant had killed his whole village.
Next, a storm made of knives and blades, sharp and cold, was all around him, cutting to pieces even the minuscule grain of sands that covered everything - even the air seemed to be cut in half.
The noise of the moving blades was overwhelming for the man, and he began crying and screaming and yelling words and sounds he himself couldn’t even recognise, scared and hopeless and angry, because he would be safe and happy and maybe live on a green, fertile planet if the fool humans had never treated those plants like mere livestock; because none of this would have happened, if the fools humans had never even created those things, those…those…
“MONSTERS!!! ALL OF YOU!!! YOU ARE A MONSTER!!”
The blades halted their destruction, and silence reigned once more.
The man dared to raise his head, turning towards the monster, slowly…it was staring at him, eyes wide and empty, its mouth a thin line.
A saner person would have taken the chance to run away, to exploit the monster’s temporary weakness - or maybe not, a saner person would have remained silent, like a convict respectably waiting for the last judgment. But the man had long lost all that remained of his sanity.
“Leave me alone, monster!! Go away!!”, the man spat, terrified but still full of rage and hate, “GO!! AWAY!!”, as if the orders from a mere human would be enough to stop Death, or its angel.
It didn’t reply to the man’s futile commands, neither with words or expressions, and its face was still a perfect, unreadable mask of cold marble; it simply walked next to him, effortlessly catching up to the pathetic man crawling on the sand. It didn’t say a single word as he unsheathed a single, long blade, slightly curved towards the end - a death scythe. The man’s senseless screams gradually faded, his whole body and soul exhausted, and he had grown almost silent when the plant raised its knife, bringing it to the man’s neck, close enough he could feel the cold emanating from it, but still too far to kill him.
“You…you are all the same”, the plant spoke, and its words bore resignation, even regretful in the calm, distant way its voice sounded. Then, the plant moved its arm, ready to strike the lethal blow to the man, still on the ground, wet with tears and sweat, making his clothes and the sand sticking unpleasantly on him - not that he could even afford to care anymore about any of that.
As he heard the blade descending downwards, where he was, where his neck was, he used the last strength he had to curse the plant, the monster, slowly turning towards it, to look at that face one last time - but that’s when he knew he deserved it all.
For the last thing the man saw was the anger, the pain, the sadness.
The eyes of a monster.
The eyes of a child.