Beyond the Forest of Spikes

When I was born, winter never stopped. Snow used to fall in clusters, crops would die soon after. Me and my family, we struggled; every day was a battle and things would never get easier, no matter how much luck we had in a year when not all of our crops would die before anything could be harvested.

My dad died when I was only twelve or so years old. People were sick all the time, especially those who left the villages to go hunting or fishing; my father was no exception. The priest said my father had a nasty jawbone infection, a disease he got from all the times he had to spare the better food for his children.

The village would rarely stay in one place. When our children started to become sick, we would move. The priest was the one responsible for our next settlement location, where we would head to and settle for the next five years if we were lucky, or less than that if things got rough again.

The winter one day stopped, and then came autumn. Orange leaves fell from the few trees we came across; they looked nice under the yellow skies. Things were looking better, but the priest soon got sick and a new priest was elected, an old, scrawny man, but very determined too. On his very first year, the new priest preached about our promised land, somewhere beyond the sooty clouds that plagued us, where the skies were blue and water would flow in rivers that glimmer and glow at night, how the manuscripts and murals depicted men foolish enough to reach our land, only to end sick and frail, for that was not their place.

This vision renewed hope for many, perhaps the last priest passing was divine work at play, how a new guiding light would now hover above us and guide us to where we belong; so, we prepared to move once again, and our pilgrimage began.

For days we walked beneath crumbling towers of old, our hurting feet passed half-buried skeletons that littered the road to our new home. The skies soon grew dark again, and they would every night. Many got sick from the journey, our numbers dwindled as we slept in the poorest of shelters, made in a rush to survive the night.

The closer we got to our destination, the harder things became. The birds no longer soared above, the sparse wildlife was quieter than ever, and nothing but rats and roaches populated the withering gray fields we passed. The earth was coarse and fractured, marking us with rashes and blisters; the skies cast clouds of soot and grime upon us, and the rivers carried a foul stench of death.

However, hope rose in the horizon as towering black tips pierced the skies and the strange trees cluttered our vision. The forest stood before us, as we gasped one after another, pressing march forward for our suffering should know no end. When I first set foot in between the trees, i felt a looming threat as i analyzed every log, every leafless branch, one more twisted than the other; all of them tightly packed, as impenetrable thorns blocked our path. With precise pathing and cunning maneuvering, we breached the black forest and kept our journey going, for our destiny lay beyond.

For the first time in my life, I saw impossibly high pillars of stone. Pristine, shiny metal poles neatly arranged around a perfectly smooth stony floor. This surely couldn't be anything else. All that suffering, the rashes, the blisters, the skin that peeled from my arms, the muscles I had strained and the bones that could not handle the interminable walking and flailing had finally paid off.

We settled, this time, for the last time. And within a year, only a handful of us remained.

Our children were the first to perish, then soon after, the priest. Our crops failed to grow no matter what weather we were in, and the water from the only river that passed there had a positively bitter taste to it. Beneath the stony floor we found only more stones. Our mules became sickly pale and no animal, not even the fish, dared to enter our promised land.

My body felt weaker with each passing day, and as I lay down one last time, I could not help but wonder —
whether we were really worthy of such a place.