Roark Part 1

Roark stood, arms limp, eyes in disbelief at the sight before him. Flames, flickering in the twilight. It had been five minutes since he had crested the hill on his way home from the hunt. He still could not process what he was seeing. The village of his birth was engulfed in fire.

His mind finally caught up with his senses, and he immediately broke into a full sprint, headed straight for the house he had grown up in. Again he stood, mind reeling, before the bonfire that was his home. Any attempt at entering the structure would be the height of futility. A thought crossed his mind, and he was off again at a dead sprint towards the center of town. As he made progress towards the square a horrific sensation began to rise within him. Every single structure he had passed on the way was also in flames. Homes, businesses, barns, sheds, stables, all ablaze. By the time he arrived breathless at the center of town, he could do nothing but face the truth. The town hall, the one place that the people of his village might have evacuated to in a state of emergency, hosted the largest fire of all. A pillar of flame reached up into the sky, billowing smoke and putting off a acrid stench. This was not the smell of burning wood. It was the smell of burning corpses. Roark fell to his knees, lacking oxygen after his minutes long sprint through a smoke filled environment. As his consciousness faded and he slumped to the ground, his mind coalesced on one solitary question. “Why?”

Roark awoke with a fierce headache. For a moment he could not remember where he was or why he had been sleeping in the dirt, then his memory returned like a ballista bolt to the chest. All of the emotions of the previous night slammed home, and he dry heaved into the dirt for several minutes before he managed to regain his composure. Roark struggled to get to his feet, eyes still streaming tears. The burnt out husk of the town hall lay in a collapsed pile before him. He walked up to the edge of the structure, still glowing with embers and radiating a faint amount of heat. What his eyes beheld could not be a mistake. Beneath the various fallen ceiling beams and collapsed walls there were the dead. Even without stepping through what used to be the front door, he could see dozens of charred limbs and other body parts protruding from the rubble.

Mind numb, he slowly walked back towards his home. Between the town square and the edge of his family’s property he encountered not a single living soul. Even the normal sounds of nature were absent. No chirping birds, no sounds at all besides the occasional pop of a fire that had not yet burnt itself out. His house, much like the rest of the town, was now little more than a pile of ashes.

He trudged back up the hill beyond his home, and found the three rabbits he had successfully hunted the day before, still laying on the ground where he had dropped them. His mind was still reeling from what he had witnessed the day before, but he still knew that he had to eat to survive, even if his appetite was nowhere to be found. He cooked the rabbits over a small piece of his barn which was still on fire. The smell of burning meat turned his stomach, but he forced himself to take a bite. After he managed to swallow and keep the food down, he suddenly became ravenously hungry. Before he knew it he had cooked and eaten two entire rabbits. He cooked the final rabbit and stored the meat in his satchel. With food in his stomach, clarity finally began to return to his mind.

He grabbed a nearby stick and set to the task of searching what remained of the only home he had ever known. He found very little worth salvaging, and no corpses. His family was likely amongst the numerous bodies buried beneath the town hall. He managed to rescue three knives from the kitchen that had not been too badly damaged by the blaze, as well as the short sword that his father had once hung on the mantle. He found the sword buried beneath the collapsed bricks of his chimney, mostly unharmed. Before he left he said a traditional prayer. Not for his family, but for the house itself. The idol which had supposedly held his household’s diety had burned away completely in the fire, and he thanked it for the years of shelter and comfort that it had provided. He didn’t really believe in such things, but it’s what his mother would have wanted, so he did it anyway.

After exiting what remained of his former home, Roark took a deep breath. Then he screamed, long and hard at the top of his lungs, releasing all of the anguish and sorrow that he felt into the cool morning air. He then took another deep breath and steeled his resolve. Never before in his life had he felt like this. The sensation sweeping through him was entirely foreign. It couldn’t be called sorrow, nor anger, nor despair. It wasn’t hatred, nor regret. What he felt was a pure distillation of all those things, combined with an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards the family that he would never see again. What he felt was purpose.

Roark closed his eyes and calmed his mind, drawing his consciousness inward until it coalesced into a single point at the center of his being. Then he opened his eyes. He immediately noticed several things that he had been too distraught to see before. There were signs of struggle. A broken fence, untouched by fire but shattered as though by a great force, and deep ruts in the road that ran past his family’s property. There were also tracks, many tracks that he had not seen the night before. Dozens of men’s boot tracks, horse hooves, and something else. Something that sent a shiver up Roark’s spine. They were like the prints of pig feet, but splayed out more, and with a third toe between the normal two. They were also approximately four times the size. He followed the strange tracks all the way back to the center of town, where they abruptly ended in the village square. This would have been very disheartening, were it not for the presence of a cloaked figure standing before the remnants of the town hall.

Roark drew his father’s short sword from it’s sheath and called out.

“Who are you?”

The figure jumped, startled, and turn towards Roark, drawing back his hood. It was an elderly man with silver hair that glinted in the sunlight. He had very sharp features, the most prominent of which were his ears, which were long and tapered off into points. At the sight of Roark his eyes filled with tears and he dropped to his knees.

“The prophecy was true.” said the old man, “There is a survivor after all.”

To be continued...