The Battle of Death Mountain: Alpha

[Gildarts]

Bloodied corpses mixed with the smite-worn rock that had been turned to rubble around their razed effort. Piles of of the freshly heated and uprooted terrain blanketed their battlefield. The dragon, lay siege elsewhere, meanwhile, Zack’s words had ceased after his shout of warning.

Silence lay, while the silence of the dead remained.

It was a tomb.

The only movement that stirred was the faint hissing of ever-burning heat from below. A dragon’s might had caused such enormous destruction, so much so, that its shimmer of power seemed to still be captured in the vibrance of the thrilling air.

While the dragon flew on, the graveyard remained. And nothing would take back the mistake they had made. The aftermath, had it been seen by a man’s eyes, would make even the strongest man wish he had never opened them. Such was the pain and terror, infused in a single place, that one could see still-warm blood caked on the many rocks, still tumbling, from the tremors of the earth.

The silence in the air hung on, there was no sound of any corpses coming back to life, and yet, softly, a stirring had begun below the mound of boulders, below the broken stone.

A single, maroon finger emerged around one of the stones. A finger became two, and then was four, with a thumb. Just whose body it belonged to, was a mystery, after all, certain parts of the Omniverse is known for reanimating flesh. However, this hand seemed to have a mind attached to it, and finally, the thumb and fingers grasped the targeted rock with enough force to cast it aside. A wrist could be seen now, but no hint of pigment from the blood-covered skin, as another stone was tossed aside, and the arm hung limply for a moment, until another, and another, had been cast off.

It was as though the hand were a beak, pecking away at softened shell, slowly gaining strength while using it, slowly, gaining the right to be free again. Blood oozed down the knuckles of the man who’s hand it belonged, while the dried blood caked in the aged layers of his skin. The hand, raised high to the sky in a fist, belonged to Gildarts. For he, had been buried alive.

One by one, peck by peck, Gildarts threw stone after stone off of his flesh, with his reach, extending nearly beyond his own shoulder, he fought the tangled weight of what felt like mountains above him, and wished, with all of his heart, that he had an ounce of strength left, that had once allowed him to break the boulders. Instead, the strongest was now the weakest, and he had to climb to achieve his perdition.

From within the shallow pools of rock, each sharpened chunk tore into his flesh, mangling the meat down to the bone. Gildarts felt the pain influence his hand’s grip, and had he a voice, would have yelped in pain. Rock after rock, bone after bone, the meat shredded with his every movement, and such a pain, was one that any man would have wished to receive death instead. Death is very easy. There is only one end to a beginning, but the Fairytail Wizard was a prime believer that if you were strong enough, you got to choose your own ending. Gildarts, surely, could allow himself to fall here, buried in his own tomb, delivered to the reaper, the god of the multiverse by the dragon’s beam of death, but there was nothing, and no man that could convince him, that dying in a mound of rock, while he had the only fight in him that mattered, to live.

He had to persuade his grueling body that the hell it now faced, that now seared his flesh with every heated rock, scalding his skin layers deep and sealing his lips shut, was finite. That living was worth it. Gildarts felt his hand hesitate on one of the hot rocks, but only for a moment, until the next one was tossed away. Luckily, the blast had made them all, more or less, hand-sized to that of a bowling ball. The dragon had struck down the pins on this mountain, for now, its home and cave, lay a wasteland like the rest of the verse.

Gildarts, though his eyes had not yet reached the light, could feel the friction causing the gashes on his body to rip, there was one particular one, that was practically eviscerating his stomach. He felt his eyes roll back in pain. Daggers, daggers everywhere, all around him, peeling back the skin from the bone. But a hundred times worse.

The Prime, as one might imagine, had little air to breathe below the surface. It was worse than a furnace, and Gildarts was deeply crushed inward, his bones, still intact, as his dextrous fingers lifted the next blazing rock. His fingertips had surely worn off during the battle, or perhaps, they were now simply numb. The carpals below his blacked skin were moving, but only, to grasp at the next stone. It was a hopeless existence. Atlas would have shrugged, and Sisyphus would have preferred never to have been born. That however, is what you got, for messing with Gods.

Alas, finally, a greater part of the Prime’s mangled shoulder felt the coolness of the air above him. His amber eyes could yet to see the daylight above him, but the sensation of ‘slightly colder than the current conditions that his body was enduring in this inferno’ gave the man hope to live on, even if it was just so that his lungs could remember, before he died, what air actually tasted like.

Over the next couple of unending minutes, Gildarts used every able part of his body to climb through the parted hole in the pile. A loud, enormous gasp, could be heard from Gildarts as his scalded lips burst open, for his lungs had taken too much time without air, and the world was looking too soggy around him. He was not even out of the pits of hell, when the weight of his body caved in on him. His shoulders bore down with the tremendous force of gravity, the smoke toiling above him and in the sky, spiraled dauntingly over the prime, warning him that his hell would not be over as swiftly as his ascension from the last shreds of death had been.

He keeled over, collapsing over the stone while the other half of his body still lay submerged in the part his torso had slithered out from. Blood was everywhere, falling onto the rocks that he had just made his bed. But he could not find the strength to move, only to breathe, as the air, though it was full of fumes and noxious gases, was still air, and from the stone-encased tomb he had come, suffocation would have been upon him had he waited to battle the rocks above him even a second later than his hand had moved to action.

Air rolled in and out, stumbling on the edges of his ribs. The sky was above him, and vaguely, he could see it. More importantly however, were now the daggers in his back. This was no place to rest, for a man who’s flesh had been gnawed off and mangled. The gore, perhaps, would have smelled, had most of his wounds not been cauterized by the very rocks that had buried him.

Blood that had dried black had stained the majority of Gildarts’ skin. His flesh, felt as though it had been cooked to “medium-rare” and the Prime had yet to stand, though he was being prompted to, from the jagged thorns in his back.

It was comfortable, it’s funny how a man could say that about pain, but Gildarts, at last, could hear the sound of his own breathing, the blood in his veins was pumping regularly, and though his entire body had been beaten, and laid nearly lame, the Prime, suddenly, lost the sensation of the pain all together. Numbed was everything around him, except the ringing in his ears, and a faint voice who’s pitch was feminine and that of a woman, “You have done well, Gildarts. However, you have chosen to use me, alas, too late. And now, you have your results. Your power however, is one that even I underestimated. You’re lucky to be alive...”

Alive? His eyes rolled around in his head some more before they came back to the light around him, with a little bit more focus, and a little bit less blur. He heaved his legs from the jaws of rock that had been his opening and escape from the trenches of the mountain. Blood sputtered from his lips now, as he had forced his torso upward. The man coughed and hacked, feeling no more immortal than a secondary, and the agony grunted out of his system, while splashes of blood came up and burned at his throat.

Ack! Ugh... The prime’s eyelids had been covered in black soot, or black blood, and the majority of his face looked like a mask, while the eyes, however, remained his own. The whites were distinguished upon the contrast of the black base, however weary, they glowed with a silent vigor, as though paying silent homage to the dead that he could taste in the sweet air around him. The fact that his body breathed, while he knew that there were fallen, who’s lips would not be willed to move again, disgusted the mage, who dared to breathe again.

Broken bones riddled his body, while there remained a severe gash on the side of the warrior’s left temple. More blood had seemed to pour out, during any effort he had expended. It must have hit a vein, or artery, and now, before his eyes could even lay on the destruction around him, his left one was sealed shut by his own blood.

A sorrowful gasp followed his single eye’s movement, as he had not even the strength to rise to his feet, but only the strength to keep his stomach from overturning, as his hands extended outward, to grasp another rock, to crawl forward, only to meet what was too smooth in his hand to have any semblance of stone. Filling the Prime’s ant-level view, was a skull, the size of his own, charred with layers of slimy disgust still upon it. Had the prime felt the texture in his fingers, it might have caused him to shiver with revolt.

In his desire to survive, climbing at the pace of one rock to the next, Gildarts had grasped upon the foreboding skull of a slain man, a symbol of hallowed death that wretched in his mouth more distastefully than that of an aimless fate. The deceased the mage held, as just another stone to throw over his shoulder, was surely one that the dragon had treated as a feast, while leaving the desecrated bones unburried, and the skin of the man, had surely been melted off as he had taken his last breath.