The Peasant: Episode 1 "The Fall"
Original fiction written by Jonathan Caleb Williams --
He was running, lungs burning like he had swallowed a plate of hot coals. The rust-colored dust from each powerful thrust of his muscular thighs was creating a cloud that looked like a dogfight in the Saharan desert during a harsh windstorm. He could see the edge, silhouetted against the sinking sun, and he was approaching it --too quickly. The forty, armed men behind him, all able-bodied and dangerous, began to slow, and the sound of their trampling diminished to a dull trotting. He heard insane laughter from one of the warriors.
"HAHAHA!!!" a large man howled, still panting, skin glistening with dust-thickened sweat from the last mile of ground they had covered in pursuit. His eyes were piercing, and his face was ridden with scar-tissue. "SEE YOU IN HELL, OUTCAST!!!" screamed the mercenary.
Everything had gone wrong for Shakkar Din-Rashiik. The edge that he approached would save him from the pursuit of his enemies, if he could reach it in time, but what awaited him over that edge was likely a sentence to the underworld. Superimposed on the horizon before him, and approaching at an inhumanly fast rate, were the jagged lips of a deep, crevasse. It was every inch of seventy feet deep and at the bottom was the raging whitewater river that had viciously lacerated the landscape.
The sun was quickly dropping, transforming the appearance of the earth's crust as the last of the day's heat waves washed out and made way for the cool of the night. Shakkar knew, that even if he survived the fall into the waters, he would then have to battle for his life --in the dark. The ugly, jagged wound in the earths crust, swallowed all the suns light within. As the night drew in, the cool air at the bottom of the crevasse created a milk-like fog, making the waters and the dangerous rocks below invisible from above. Shakkar already knew this, however. He had chuckled to himself quietly a month earlier when he was scouting the area, prior to entering the Dry Lands.
"Well, let's hope that doesn't happen," he had whispered, looking down into the fog at dusk. He had chuckled at this, but it had now become his only reality. As the small army approached behind him, he was now left with no other options. He glanced back, once, just before he reached the likely location of his death. When he turned, the arteries in his thick neck bulged as they pulsed with oxygenated blood to his brain. For a brief moment, his eyes locked with those of a leather-skinned mercenary, as he raised his bow with a smile and tightened his bowstring --his poised arrow, clutched tight between his calloused fingers.
Against all human logic, driven only by his will to survive, his leg muscles pulled tight like the strings of a cello, ready to snap. He strained so hard that he saw the blood-red veins on the inner walls of his eyes, as he leaped with every ounce of his might, out into the crevasse, in an attempt to avoid being chewed up like wood shavings on the jagged saw-teeth of the perilous red-rock walls.
THUUDD
Shakkar, grimaced in pain, as he soared over the edge. Even though a natural cocktail of dopamine and adrenaline was coursing through his veins, he felt the searing pain of a sharp arrow pierce his core. He tried to cry out but the pain had left him breathless. He was airborne. As the fog approached, his anger flared, directed at the bowman. If Shakkar survived this, he would remember his face. He had noticed a unique marking beneath his left eye. Royal Blue? Shakkar thought. It looked like an emblem designed for a marksman, and a marksman he was. He was clearly an expert in his class, and the pain that paralyzed Shakkar's nervous system as he plunged beneath the cold desert waters, was proof of that craftsmanship...
To be continued...
This is the premier episode of a fictional series that I am beginning called, The Peasant. This was Episode 1: The Fall.
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