Reflected Scars

Wow, this is Long over due I know!!

Life has been taking chunks out of me lately. Lost my job, lost some family members, and moved and dad was diagnosed with leukemia… its been a real pain in a lot of ways I can’t really begin to describe.

I wanna name and thank all those who have been reviewing my fic and keep asking for updated, but that would probably take more time then reading this chapter.

It’s a little short. Just 5 pages. The original chapter I wrote was lost when I reformatted my computer. That original gave me shivers just writing it! this isn’t so creepy, but I really did try my best!

Just ask my new beta reader Melanie!! Everyone should really give her a BIG round of applause! Poor girl didn’t know what she was getting into when she offered to beta for me! Lol. I’m horribly picky and lord knows how many times she’s been over it this one chapter.

Once again I thank all my readers and reviewers for sticking with me and giving me a good yelling at when I need it. ;P your all wonderful and I’ll do my best to get the next chapter out as soon as I can.


WARNING! DREAM SEQUENCE! INCLUDES VIOLENCE, GORE AND GRAPHIC TOURTURE OF ANIMALS!

Warning Dream sequence.

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Ch 15
Dream 2 part 2

Ants

Pain.

….

Burning,

Smoldering,

Immobilizing.

Pain.

The fox couldn’t move, his body refused to obey him because of the stabbing pain over every inch of his body. Where was he?

The lifeless corpse hardly resembled the once lively fox it had been hours before. Its pelt had been scraped off by the skilled hands and sharp knives of the man with the hidden face. His gums and lips had been removed in an effort to acquire as much as possible of the valuable fur, exposing his teeth in a gruesome grin for all to see.

It was cold where he lay. Or he believed it was cold, it might have been in flames, he really couldn’t tell for sure. Such confusion over something so very, very simple. Everything just tingled with an itching pain. A faint October breeze washed over him, burning his exposed muscles with the feather light touch. The only relief is the small patches where the blood had clotted in a thin coating of dried fluids and fat, over his muscles. The fox commanded his eyes to open but they refused. His eyeballs and eyelids had been gouged out while he was being skinned alive.

His nose twitched as he sniffed the air to see where he was. The air was warm and fresh as it entered his lungs. The faint crispness of the night winds enlightened him to the fact that dusk was still hours away. Far more dominant was the copper smell of his blood as it seeped out of his exposed muscle tissue and soaked the earth around him.

Weakly he sniffed again and caught the scent of leaves, grass, fruits and other things he couldn’t identify. He was lying on a pile of rotting vegetation.

‘I’m outside again’ was only thought that went threw him. His heart skipped a beat at the idea of finally being free, despite the fact he was now, blind, deaf, and immobile.

Then something tickled his nose, and he caught a faint scent of familiarity. Something that he had known little of before he was captured--and something that he learned more of while in captivity.

It was an ant.

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He used to watch them for hours, crawling up and down the bars of his cage. Up one side and down the other he watched them, because at the time there was nothing else he could do.

Interesting little things carrying stuff here and there for reasons he couldn’t understand. Once or twice he would tap one out of boredom with his paw and watch it drop its load and take a stance for a fight, antennas up and feeling the air for whatever interrupted his voyage. After a while, though, it would pick up its parcel and continue on its way, out through the bars and out of sight. The fox would sit and wait for the little folk to come back again later and take something else with them. They never took a great amount of anything that would be missed. Whether it was food from the strange rounded stone that the human would put it in or some straw from his small bed, he had let them do as they please. It had been his only source of entertainment in that forsaken pit.

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The insignificant creature tickled his nose again as it crawled over it. Then he felt a pinch. Tiny at first, very weak, as if experimenting. Then it was gone. He felt the little feet crawl off his nose and away somewhere.

Everything became still again and for a while he just lay there motionless, trying as best he could to regain some strength in his limbs. ‘I just need to rest a bit... just a little bit then I’ll be able to move again,’ he thought to himself. He was injured and tired, he knew this, but it wasn’t anything time and a good meal couldn’t heal. The fox would think about food later, once he was rested enough to get up and walk way.

The fox’s whole body was becoming numb to the pain. Moments of lightheadedness from the massive blood loss was causing a feeling of floating… being lifted up and weightless. Then the breeze would wash over him, and the pain would return tenfold as his carcass baked in the afternoon sun. Making his mussels that much more stiff and harder to move as the coating of bodily fluids bake into a hardened crust over him.

He tried again to shift his body into a different position. Move a leg, move a paw, move a muscle or his now furless tail. Move anything, but nothing even flinched. The only parts of him that obeyed his mind were his lungs, bringing slow shallow breaths in and out again.

Finally he gave up and stopped trying. No matter how much his mind wanted the fox body to get up and walk away, it was no use. His body no longer listened to its mind. His body had been broken.

Then a scent. It tickled his nose and crawled up his face and pinched his cheek painfully. Then it pinched him again, and again.

Pinching, and pulling. Becoming more and more painful as pincers began to tear and rip at the flesh of his body. His little folks were back and taking full advantage of the free meal. Cutting small chunks of meat off, they began to haul him off one tiny piece at a time. Like when they used to drift around his cage and carry off bits of his bed and food, only this time he couldn’t bat at them with his paw. He was at their mercy and they were showing none.

He screamed in his mind, begging his body to move and throw them off. Pincers tore and cut the flesh, making the blood run fresh again from half clotted sections of flesh. Jaws grasped and pulled the veins from his exposed muscle and tissue with no regard to the pain it caused.

Hundreds and thousands descended on his motionless corpse, tearing the raw flesh from his bones. Pincers like thousands of razors were slicing him into peaces, snipping his veins like scissors. With each slice there was a gush of blood that washed away the offending ant, but within seconds there would be a dozen more to take its place, stinging him on instinct to keep him still as they slowly killed him. But he was still. It was only his blood that continued to move, keeping him alive. Motionless but not yet lifeless.

He mentally begged them to stop but he couldn’t make a sound. Cutting, slicing, ripping; he began to pray for death. Pray that something would happen to end this horrendous torture. While being skinned he had at least passed out from the pain, but it seemed that this time he was destined to experience it all, down to his last breath. The fox prayed that breath would be soon.

He could feel them crawling all over him, descending into his ear passages, scratching and scraping their way along. Sometimes getting stuck in the combination of earwax and blood, and then struggling to get out. Itching like a thousand fleas in a place you could never reach. Climbing over his eardrum with now thunderous feet before proceeding to chew it up and haul it away.

Those that ventured into his eye sockets soon found themselves drowning in the small pool of blood and the runny vitreous fluid of his eyes (the skinner having popped the fox’s eye like a grape with his skinning knife earlier) that had collected there since he had been tossed outside. But unfortunately it didn’t take long for the cleaver little creatures to find a way to rip pieces of the softer inner eye socket out without sacrificing their lives. They managed this by using the bodies of already drowned ants as stepping stones.

The ants crawled past his teeth and into his mouth, stomping over the raw flesh that used to be his lips, before taking up residence on his tongue and proceeding to cut off his taste buds one by one

Then his breathing suddenly became harder, as some of them moved into his nose and began pulling at the soft untouched flesh. Tearing out the tiny hairs of his nostrils to cut the skin more easily. Bit by bit the tiny hairs were excruciatingly torn from the small bit of sensitive skin he had left, the tiny drops of blood began to run together. And together they dripped down the back of his nose, down the back of his throat and into his lungs.

Suffocating him with his own blood.

Slowly the blood began to fill his lungs, coating them in the thick red substance.

It hurt, oh god it hurt. He couldn’t cough, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t BREATHE. The torturous pain the swarms of ants caused as they disassembled his body paled in comparison to the horror of drowning in his own blood. His instincts screamed at him!

Oh god, oh god, he had no air. None, not a breath, not a gasp, not a whisper. He was going to drown in a mouthful of blood. Enough he could have licked away, had he been able to move his tongue. There was so little but it was enough to coat his lungs and stop his life. The small amount sticking like syrup down his throat.

Everything spun.. everything moved, and everything wasn’t right. He had to get out, he had to get away. Jump up and run, Run, RUN! Get away, get far, far away from the danger.

He screamed! Screamed with all the strength his mind could muster. Mentally throwing himself again his broken body. Now his carcass, now his immobile prison. Like a cage slowly being lowered into cold water. He had no way out, and nothing he could do.

The lightness in his head made his stomach turn. Everything was spinning out of control, down, down into the darkness. His flesh burned from the stinging and piercing of the ant’s pincers, his lungs burned from the colligating blood that made it difficult to breath.

Falling, falling out of control. Everything became clear, everything became sharp, everything hurt a thousand times more then he could imagine.

Burning,

tearing,

ripping,

piercing,

drowning.


And then, it was done.


*~*~*~*~*~*~*~


The scream that echoed threw the library that night would have made the hair on the back of the most hardcore ninja’s neck stand on end. It echoed down the long corridors of books and scrolls. Reverberated off walls and threw open windows, into open streets and down empty alleyways.

But it made no ones hair stand, nor did it send chills down anyone’s spines. Because the hidden village was dark and there was no one around to hear it…

end chapter 15