Number Nine by Toadfoal on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

When life number nine slipped away from the Silver-Shadow it was dark outside and a thin veil of clouds covered the cool night sky, hiding from view all the stars of the spirits and those who had come before. He had known days in advance that it would happen, but waited in silent determination for his tribe to return home before succumbing to his injuries.

Death, in his perception, felt a lot like falling. But it wasn't really death in the normal sense, and so there was no destination but his own body. A small portion of himself slipped away into the darkness and he watched it go, tears floating up into space as he fell, or hovered perhaps, in limbo. It didn't hurt, in fact it was a release from all the physical pain he had suffered as his fatal wound was healed for his return, but the loss was strange none the less.

Cenek knew when he woke up he would soon come to hear of more who had died and would not return. He had outlived already most of his generation and the one that came directly after it. This, and he was only now coming into his sixth year. It was more than half the lifespan he could expect to live, at this point longer than most would reach. It saddened him to think of this accomplishment, how robbed others had been of years to come and stories of the past. If he and others who had lived during the Second Great War did not tell their stories, would the newer generations in their short lifespans forget in the wake of their own troubles? Perhaps there would not be any new generations. Already many were leaving the tribes, seeking out new lives in solitude. They were more likely to die without the protection of numbers or a cause, so the moment they left he considered them little more than corpses belonging to the wilds. Cenek could only honor the dead, not the deserters.

"I would die fighting for my home," he spoke calmly to the stars as they passed, blurring into oblivion as his mind began to heal and his body to become once more inhabitable. "But I won't have to. We're going to live, some of us are."