"My head... it hurts, it won't stop it hurts, so much."
As I opened my eyes, my nostrils flared instantly. A horrendous smell filled the air—the scent of burning flesh and damp stone. As my vision adjusted, I noticed a flickering light. I tried to move, but I slammed into something cold and hard instead.
Bars.
I started to panic as I looked around the small, cramped space. I wasn't in my room. I wasn't at home. I was surrounded by gray stones and iron. My eyes were locked onto the fly as it landed. Beside me lay two people with shallow and ragged breathing. The arm of the younger-looking one was disfigured; maggots ate away at his flesh, fingers hanging off the bone as if someone had chewed on them one by one, piece by piece.
My teeth began chattering. Unable to stomach the sight, I glanced at their faces, my heart hammering against my ribs. My head throbbed with memories of red eyes and green flesh. I looked at the strangers again, hoping and praying.
Neither of them is my sister.
"NO! NO! NO!" Keirum shouted. As his mind spiraled, he saw the older of the two people on the ground begin to wake. His eyes instantly shot toward the man's face. Without thinking, his legs moved before his mind could catch up with them. As he got inches from the man's face, he started to scream, " Do you know where she is?, Where is my sister?! Help me! Where is my sister?!"he said, while a smile plastered his face and tears soaked into his chapped lips.
As the older man's eyes gained clarity, he pushed the small child to the ground. "What the fuck are you doing?!" he shouted.
"Please... help me, my sister... where is she?. is she okay, can you tell me. are you Gunna help me?." Keirum begged as he crawled back toward him. The older man looked into the boy's eyes; they were devoid of every emotion other than sheer madness. Shivering at the sight, the man charged forward.
Boom.
As his leg collided with Keirum's face, the boy fell back, blood trickling from his nose.
"Huff... huff..." the man panted, breathlessly. Seeing the crying boy, he finally noticed an anomaly. "Huh? This isn't my room." His eyes flickered around every inch of the cage as he surveyed his surroundings.
Suddenly, a blood-curdling scream erupted from the third person who had just stood up. "Help! It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!" As he shouted, everyone else went dead silent, watching the boy suffer in agony.
"It hurts... it hurts..." His eyes started to roll back as the pain of his flesh and muscle being chewed by maggots took over his mind. He began to seize.
Thud.
His body dropped to the floor, shaking viciously. Blood sprayed from his mouth as he bit through his own tongue. As he gargled for air, he began to choke on his own blood until his body finally grew still.
There lay a boy, no older than fourteen, who had suffocated in his own blood. The cage claimed its first life, one of many.
"Mommy, please save me... you can't leave me here alone..." Keirum pleaded. He instinctively scrambled toward the corner to get away from the lifeless body, terror etched into his face. His mind began to break, just like his world did when he saw his mother's eyes while she was being mauled. A piece of his sanity began to crumble.
An emotion began to erupt from his very being like a tsunami, crushing every other emotion he had felt. All he felt was hatred—a hatred that began to bind itself to his soul. The twelve-year-old boy could not comprehend what he was feeling. All of these emotions came out in liquid form: tears. They dropped from his eyelashes and fell on his pale face.
Thump.
Finally, a tear fell to the floor. He began to punch the ground over and over, his knuckles cracking against the stone. Hatred began to overwhelm him. His mother had been eaten alive. His sister had probably received the same treatment. Someone had just died right in front of his face. Through all of this, he was utterly useless.
Only one word rang in his mind—the last word he could remember his father saying to him: Disappointment.
With that thought, he began to punch even harder, splitting his knuckles and causing them to bleed. Only three souls remained in that room.
The older man finally began moving. He kicked the maggot-infested body to the opposite corner of the room, far from himself and the dark-haired boy who was crying and pounding the floor.
"What the fuck is going on?" he muttered to himself. "I was just in my bed, and now I am in this shit-hole. This is like one of those horror movies I used to watch as a kid... but this isn't a movie."
As he finished moving the body, his eyes locked on Keirum. The boy's crazed eyes flashed in his mind. He scoffed, trying to steady his nerves. "I'm not scared of no fucking crazy kid."
He finally glanced through the narrow bars, and what he saw made him shake with fear.
Outside the cage was a massive pit with walls stretching as far as the eye could see. Humans in chains were led by green, red-eyed creatures. One creature stood easily over two meters tall, wearing stone-like armor on its shoulders and carrying a spiked club. Its most dominant feature was its dark red eyes.
He watched the chained people's heads down paths leading into the hole. In the very center, he found the source of the burning meat smell: a gigantic black flame. It looked like something gifted from heaven —or rather, from hell itself.
However, that was not what the man was looking at. His eyes were fixed on the long poles protruding from the fire. Skewed upon them were humans, being roasted like animals were. His eyes lost focus as he realized there were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of humans and gree
n men alike.