NOVEL NEXT Interlude 7: Regret of a Fool
Interlude 7
Regret of a Fool
While this was happening, Rida found that he had fallen halfway down the mountain.
He was not as hurt as he thought he would, thanks to the barrier that covered him.
He looked above and saw the angry sky. Then at the mountain, which had started to melt.
His scalp went numb and Rida wasted no time on running down the mountain. At first, the ground was solid enough to run on, but soon the ground became like mud. He ran and ran, using all the Speed Charms and Defense Charms that he had been keeping for emergency purposes until he became almost a blur.
Rida felt his feet burning in pain and his eyes became blood shot from the pain. Desperate and fearful, snot and tears leaked out from his nostrils and eyes. His lower half wet from piss.
He stumbled on occasions and felt like all his muscles were on fire. Soon, his shoes had collected too much wax and he had to let them go. And then his socks, and near the bottom he had to blow off his right foot as it had started to turn into wax.
He could imagine the wax, hot and wet and cloyingly fatty entering his mouth, his lungs, his ears, his eyes. Covering him, changing him, molding him into something inhuman. Until all that was left was a wax statue with a head of dribbling tallow.
Even then, he kept on running. Even as his lung burned and the stump of his right leg became feverish and the dull pain stabbing through his head.
When he saw color on the ground, his heart jumped for joy and he forgot all about the pain.
He ran and ran until finally he could not run anymore. The bone exposed on the stump of his leg was dirty from the earth and grew jagged from the rocks he had to run over. Only after he regained his consciousness did he finally feel the pain.
Rida was found later by a wandering merchant as he grew delirious from the fever as his leg became infected and had to be amputated.
Such was the price of seeing the forbidden. Of seeing the birth of something beyond the ken of men.
And in the years after this, during the cold nights when he woke up from the dull pain coming from his lost foot, he would sob silently and lamented his folly.