hole in the earth

“Alois, why are we running?” Lise pants out at her best friend. She attempts to slow their pace, her legs still burning from the previous day’s work. But Alois’s legs are unrelenting, as is his grip on her hand, and he doesn’t deign her with a response.

“Alois,” she says again, her lips turning down into a frown. “This is silly.”

“Lise,” Alois manages out. “Do you still have your ax?”

Lise grasps at her back, her fingers closing around the cool wooden handle of it. “Of course I do.”

“And your knife?” The desperation in his voice is strange, disorienting. “What about your knife? Do you have it on you right now?”

Confused, Lise turns her head to peer behind them.

Alois’s mother isn’t too far, but she’s a good distance away, watching them leave her estate to escape back into the forest. She hadn’t been happy to see them leave, but still, she’d allowed it.

She knows the impact Alois’s mother has on him, the fear her anger instills in him, but Kwithra, rather strangely, doesn’t look angry at all. In fact, she’s smiling. Smiling at them as they make their way down the hill, closer and closer to the forest. Lise’s gaze darts back to Alois and his alert eyes and blindingly fast legs. “Yes,” she says, turning back to him. “I have it. I have everything. But Alois—”

“Don’t look back at her,” Alois grits out.

“What are you talking about?” Lise asks softly. She gives him an unsure smile, giving his clammy hand a squeeze. “I just did. Your mom isn’t after us, Alois. You’re safe. We’re fine.”

“Lise,” he begs. His voice cracks. “I know what I feel. And I know my mother.” His icy blue eyes are sharp, pupils blown wide; his throat bobs. “We’re anything but safe.”

“What you feel?” Lise repeats. She squeezes her eyes shut, trying to sense an unease in the air. Unsuccessful, she looks back over at Alois, feeling frustrated now. “Alois—”

“Keep running, Lise, no matter what. Don’t stop.” His hand grows impossibly tighter around her own. “Don’t stop for anything.”

Lise just stares at him, half-afraid he may be losing his mind.

But this is Alois, she realizes. He isn’t stupid. He isn’t one to be fooled or misconstrued. And he certainly isn’t one to be speaking absolutely nonsense, or panicking and running for his life—for both of their lives—for no reason.

Slowly, Lise turns her head around one last time to look at the manor from which they’d come.

Kwithra is still a near-distant figure on the hill of the Starlight estate. Even from this distance, Lise sees her long black dress with golden trim blow violently in the breeze, just like her golden hair. Slowly, she holds out her palm to them, an extended hand, like a kindness, with a sly twist of her lips. It makes Lise dizzy, the width and curve of that beautiful smile.

Then she jerks her wrist, her talon-like nails pointing towards the sky like claws, and the world seems to tilt on its axis.

Lise feels it before she sees it—the unfelt, the unknown. The pure, unadulterated power reverberating about them, that Kwithra seems to hold up with a single wide, slender hand, like she’s holding the weight of the world in her palm, as she hoists her arm into the air. The world around her hand seems to crackle with something Lise can’t quite make out, something like clear lightning, like invisible punishment, like death. Her black eyes seem to bore right into Lise, and Lise gets the message clear as day: she doesn’t plan on letting them leave alive.

Lise whips her head back around.

“Holy shit,” she blurts out.

“Brace yourself, Lise,” Alois pants out, as they enter the forest and begin to rip through the trees like the wind.

“For what?” Lise asks urgently. Her legs stop moving—whether in terror or pure exhaustion, she doesn’t know. There’s a deep-seated panic in her gut that might feel like insanity if she pays it any mind.

When Alois meets her eyes, his gaze is sharp.

“For the power of a god,” he says, before the forest grounds around them give out with an all-encompassing, rumbling crack under their feet.

Lise just barely holds back a strangled scream at the feeling of falling, of dying. At the sight of the ground she had just been touching being split in two and opening up, threatening to swallow her whole. But Alois is fast; he aims his palm at her, and what Lise expects to feel like a magical pull feels more like a frustrated jolt, like an invisibly angry hand fisting in her shirt and pulling her up and forward, yanking her through the air until she crashes back onto solid ground again. “Idiot!” he barks in her ear as soon as she blinks through the pain and the terror, but the familiar, albeit panicked, anger in his voice grounds her. “I told you to keep running!”

So they do. They run and they run, even as the ground shakes and rumbles and cracks below them, even as Lise sees things she never thought she would see. Trees bending, curling unnaturally like Kwithra’s long fingers, and swinging out at them in huge, fast swoops. Grasses and leafy plants curling around their ankles and pulling, attempting to halt them in their tracks. Fiercely, Alois yanks her through all of it; Lise just follows him and does her best to copy his motions.

It isn’t until fire starts spewing from the hollows of trees that Lise sees Alois finally starting to slow. As if the forest itself senses his mistake, the huge tree to the far right of them begins to fall. Lise sees its giant shadow too late, and it’s instead the loud thud and the gut-wrenching scream of her best friend that makes her whip her head around.

He’s stuck, she realizes in terror, staring down at him. His leg is stuck under the giant tree. Lise’s eyes immediately dart to his crushed leg and pales when she sees the blood.

Alois’s face is scrunched up in pain, but he’s looking at Lise with something like determination. He hasn’t given up, Lise thinks, her heart clenching.

She takes a firm, large step towards him before Alois throws up a hand, and she’s sent flying backwards several feet, in the direction they’d been running.

Lise stumbles back to her feet, only barely keeping her balance. When she looks up again, Alois’s face is fierce.

Eyes narrowing, Lise sets off towards him again.

Another violent throw of Alois’s arm, and Lise is flung back again through the air. Her back slams against the trunk of a tree with a force that knocks the breath out of her, and all she can feel is pain.

Slowly, she brings herself to her feet, and now all her body can do, driven by her own rage, is propel itself forward, towards the boy with shaking shoulders and the leg trapped underneath that massive fallen tree.

Trembling with rage or fury or maybe both, Alois is already raising an arm again. To send her back again, sprawling through the air like a helpless, weightless ragdoll. To make the decision himself to die. To end his own life by preventing her from saving him. To save her instead.

Lise hates him for it.

A scream of frustration threatens to erupt from her throat, and she brings her knee down hard onto his arm, pinning it in place. “Don’t!” she snarls right at him, grabbing his face, forcing him to see her, to make him understand. Digging her fingers into the flesh of his cheeks, not caring if her fingernails break skin.

Alois just stares at her with emotions flitting on and off his bloody face, like one’s final memories flashing before their eyes. Pleading, upset, desperate. Furious. “You,” he hisses, “need to get out of here, now.”

“I’m not leaving you here, Alois!”

“Lise, this isn’t a game! We are dealing with a—”

“God or not—” She braces her arms under the massive trunk of the tree, feeling every bit of its punitive weight, “God or not,” she repeats, her voice raising as her arms shake, and the tree raises with her, “I’m not letting anyone take your life in this place.”

“Lise,” Alois sobs out. He’s openly crying now, right in front of her for the very first time, his hunched shoulders heaving with the force of his sobs. Lise can’t even bring herself to look at his mangled leg. “I don’t want you to die.”

“Stop talking… like you’re already dead,” Lise grunts out, pushing harder. Sweat pools in rivers down her forehead, her chest, her back; her knees and feet scream in agony. “You know how much I hate your pessimistic streak.”

“It’s too late for me,” Alois croaks out.

Lise closes her eyes tight. She can feel her lower lip trembling violently. “Bullshit.”

His voice raises, shaking in anger and fear. “Lise, please—”

“Bullshit!” Lise screams. Her arms shake like willows in the wind under the crushing weight of the tree, the bark furrowed and rough against her hands. The weather has turned almost violently windy, like an imperceptible tornado is whipping around them, the monstrosity already sending devastating gusts of winds powerful enough to take down a house around them. A large rock is sent flying and it slams right into her gut, nearly making her keel over, but she doesn’t. She just groans, knees bent, and pulls, pulls, pulls.

“Lise!” Alois screams.

With a roar that comes from the very core of her being, Lise sends the tree flying high and straight into the air, giving Alois and herself mere seconds to escape before it comes crashing back down. Alois’s mangled leg, now free, is limp and useless, a bone in his thigh jutting out in a horribly wrong direction, but he’s still quick to tackle her to the floor and roll themselves away, saving them both from both the tree and the second burst of fire that springs out from behind them, lapping at the area where they had been mere moments prior. They both stare, transfixed, as the massive tree before them bursts into flames.

With a grunt, Lise hoists Alois up onto her back, hands tight under his thighs. Alois doesn’t resist; in turn, he wraps his arms around her neck, nearly choking her with the strength of his hold.

“Run,” he chokes out, a hoarse command into Lise’s ear, and Lise obeys.

Alois is her eyes; she is his body. he tells her what’s coming from behind, how to avoid it, how to make up for her average speed. Lise feels like she’s been running for days, like all her legs were built for were to rip through this forest of blood and bone, of fire and smog, of pain and death.

They run until it all stops. The fire, the broken earth, the human attacks from the grass and trees, and it doesn’t take them long to collapse. They sit there in the grass, tear-streaked faces smeared with dirt and blood-soaked in their tattered clothes, and embrace each other with a fierceness neither one had ever shown the other. They stay that way for a long while. They hold each other until Lise feels that she can not separate from him, from this, ever, even if she wanted to. She, her and Alois—they are one single consciousness, one entity. What they were before they knew one another, what they could have once been defined to be, no longer mattered. What they were yesterday no longer mattered. Whatever binds them to themselves so far as words could go—it no longer mattered. Because now they were one in the same, the force that survived an indescribable strength, a godlike strength, an insurmountable terror, out in the wild with nothing but their own bodies and spirits. With their own bloody hands and legs, with their bruised flesh and broken bones.