The Nextworld Invasion and the Death of Magic - 18. Chapter 18 - Taking a Life

As the sun began to rise, the forest around Dorjin did not seem to be getting any less dense. For the entire following day, she wove through the tree trunks, guided by her compass to the south and west, away from the city her fellow Humans were attacking. She came upon no paths or trails and not a single clearing. The forest was bright from the sun above the treetops, but no direct light made it down to her through the thick canopy before the sun began to set that evening.

Dorjin could not guess how far she had gone, but she felt like she made very slow progress through the dense wood. As night began to fall, she found a knot of trees that looked like it would provide her with a little shelter, and she tucked herself in for the night. She slept restlessly, waking and dozing in the darkness, and she arose with the dawn. The second day felt identical to the previous, except Dorjin could no longer hear the attack happening behind her.

That second evening, Dorjin began to worry that she was lost in the forest and might not make her way out of it. Night fell, and sleep proved just as elusive again. A third, fourth, and fifth day came and went, and each carried with it heavier feelings of loneliness, isolation, and fear. Dorjin thought she would never escape the seemingly infinite forest.

The sixth sunrise brought with it nothing new. The trees appeared exactly the same everywhere she looked, and yet Dorjin persisted. She continued to follow the direction her compass had been leading, and while it was still early, she realized the forest in front of her was finally thinning.

There was a brightness ahead, and it shined through the trees, lighting up the area into which she now walked. The illumination made Dorjin feel hope, but she proceeded cautiously. Then she realized what she had come upon; a barren, sandy beach stretched out before her.

She stepped onto it and took a deep breath of the salty sea air. The sun was rising behind her, and she could see the last glimpse of the moon as it slowly made its way down the far horizon beyond the ocean. The moon in Nextworld did not glow white, and Dorjin stared at the pearlescent orb as it slowly dropped beneath the far edge of the Earth. Her eyes filled with tears as the sun brightened the forest, the beach, and Dorjin as well.

“All these poor people,” she whispered. “They don’t deserve what we’ve done to them. So many innocent people…”

Dorjin focused on her immediate situation. She had her spell book but no cloned flesh. “I need an animal,” she said to herself, looking around the beach for any sign of life. “If I just had some entrails, or a liver, some brains, a spleen, I could cast a charm and reach out to that ship again. Maybe I could meet up with them.”

There were no immediate signs of anything alive for Dorjin to kill, but in the shallows, she spotted a large crab that was unlike any of the crustations of Nextworld. She suspected it would do. Dorjin negotiated how to safely catch the mildly dangerous animal, and she snatched it from behind, yanking it out of the water. It reared back with its claws, and Dorjin slammed the thing down on a stone, smashing open its shell and rending it lifeless. She also scraped her fingers against the rock and ripped open her knuckles.

“Ouch! Dammit,” she growled, observing her bloody skin. Then her gaze shifted back to the twitching crab, and Dorjin’s shoulders sagged. “Oh, that’s sad. I didn’t…”

Tears welled in her eyes again, not specifically for the crab or her bleeding fingers, or even for the devastation that her people were causing to Earth; Dorjin cried for herself. Her knees dropped to the sand, and she began to sob. She sobbed for how wrong she had been about everything. She sobbed for the deaths she had caused, including the pilot of her ell shuttle. She sobbed over her initial ignorance and the subsequent revelation of her wicked actions. As she stared through her tears at the dead invertebrate in front of her, she sobbed over taking its life. Dorjin was so used to using cloned flesh that she did not consider how much the simple act of killing an animal would affect her.

The sun had risen high enough over the forest that it started to glimmer on the rolling sea, and Dorjin’s tears sparkled in the light.