guilty as charged

It was a hard journey across the Field of Memories; the deceitful terrain had slowed me down to a snail’s pace.

As Evening inexorably stifled the dwindling light, the Fog of Truth shrouded me in an ever-thickening swirling wall of grey.

Lost and disoriented, my feet sunken in the sludgy soil underfoot, I struggled on.

But soon, exhaustion took its toll; I stumbled and fell down on my hands.

That is when they came.

The Fog suddenly became alive, seething with unseen hands dragging me down, trying to swallow me whole.

Threatening to break me, consume me.

I refused to surrender my individuality.

I fought and fought and fought...never stopping, never breathing; grubby fingers pulled me close, their sickly metallic stench flooded my lungs.

Caught in panic’s unrelenting embrace, I let out a scream to drown a thousand screams; hacking, biting, slicing, I tore my way through the sea of grey.

But the Fog had bled the strength from my limbs; painfully slowly, I was dragged to the ground.

The taste of the bitter soil forced its way into my mouth as my head was pushed hard down into the dirt.

Kicking and screaming, a blood-curdling roar born of blind anguish and desperation tore out of me.

Then, just as suddenly, it all stopped.

I found myself face down in the dirt wrestling with thin air.

There was nothing there.

The Fog had dissipated into an ethereal mist.

Pain ripped through my arm as the acrid smell of burning flesh flared into the air.

My eyes widened when I wrenched up my arm.

Still smoldering, the word “guilty” had been branded into it.

For a brief moment, the distant sound of children’s laughter fluttered around me.

I listened closely.

Only, it wasn’t a child’s laugh.

It was something grossly inhuman mimicking a child’s laugh.

Too exhausted to stand, I let sweet blackness overwhelm me.

Unwelcome consciousness slowly seeped into my head as my senses grudgingly began to work again.

I was slumped against a wall in a dark corridor. With some effort, I stood up.

There was a door at the end of the corridor.

Hacked roughly into the wood were the words:

“No one is innocent”.

I went inside.

There in the centre of the room lay a corpse; the word “innocent” was branded into its arm.

Scrawny mindless demons, forms that were a gross parody of human bodies, devoured the corpse ever so slowly, relishing every bite.

The faint sound of their raspy inhuman breath hung in the air.

Their eyeless faces turned to me. Shreds of putrescent flesh hung from their hideous teeth.

One of them smiled sickeningly slowly.

A rivulet of blood dripped off its jaws.

I declined its invitation and turned away in disgust.

They returned to their feast.

The soft wet sound of flesh being chewed followed me for some time.

It was a several hours’ journey to the nearest road. I had a lot of time to think on that walk.

Fear followed me like some mindless phantom, always staying just out of sight.

The demon’s smile lingered in my thoughts; that depraved smile that said “you’ll come around...... you and I are the same.”

I had been judged….and I had been allowed to leave.

I felt the brand on my arm.

“Guilty”?

In this world, no one is “guilty” or “innocent”.

Those moral high roads exist only in tales and stories.

No, in this world, one does exactly what one must; nothing more, nothing less.

Innocence and guilt don’t even figure into the equation.

I grunted in contempt.

The guilty condemning the guilty... how ironic.

“No one is innocent.”