Eyes of the Forest -wyvern tf-

Eyes of the Forest


I'd seen him before.

At first I was afraid of what I'd seen. I was seven. I could not see his face, for the sun had set and shadows surrounded me as I walked along the edge of the forest. I only saw his eyes: glowing red, staring at me through the darkness. But by the time I had acted upon my childish curiosity and walked over to where the eyes were, he was gone, disappeared into the shadows of nightfall.

It made me nervous. I wanted to know what it was I had seen in the forest. So my mind made up possibilities. I had dreams. They were intense dreams, violent dreams. I would awaken pumping with adrenalin, wanting more but never remembering what I had seen or done. And of course, there were the nightmares. In those, the eyes would haunt me, follow me, watching, always watching.

After a few weeks, sometimes months, the dreams would stop coming. Then, I would see his eyes again and the entire cycle would start over.

Eventually, I came to my senses and told my parents about what I saw. They told me that I had an overactive imagination. But I was a smart kid and I knew what I saw was real. Just – I didn't know what it was.

So I started ignoring it and eventually it went away.

It was probably three years before I saw him again. By this time, I was fifteen. Or, maybe I was sixteen. That doesn't really matter.

We were driving home on a rainy night. The windshield wipers were working as hard as they could to dispel the water from the window, but it was all in vain. My father was driving quite cautiously, which was a big surprise considering he usually sped, even in the most appalling of conditions. We were stopped at an intersection when the semi truck hit us.

Or, at least, that is what I was told. I don't remember any impact. I just remember a vivid flash of light, too bright to be reality, and a voice screaming as I struggled to cling onto consciousness. Then, I remember seeing his face. He was standing over me, looking at me with pity and comfort, and as I closed my eyes and slipped away into the realm of unconsciousness, I somehow inexplicably knew that I would be safe.

That was the first time I'd gotten a good look at his face. My guardian angel. That's the joke I made – because he was far from being an angel.

The odd thing was, nobody else ever saw him.

We'd never spoken. He was just there, just watching. And somewhere deep within my mind I knew that I was safe when he was around.

Years passed since that moment. For a long time I never saw him, but I always looked for him, intent on seeing his face again. It got to the point of being an obsession. Then, one day, I gave up and forgot about the entire thing.

I was twenty. There was too much else on my mind: partying, girls, school and chilling with my friends. Life went on and any time I remembered my childhood and the weird things that had happened, I attributed them to my "overactive imagination", just like any sensible young adult. Childhood was where you imagined interesting things that could not exist in this reality. As an adult you had to have your head on straight, focus on getting a good job and die at an old age after living a fulfilling life. So, that was what I believed.

By the time I was twenty-two, everything about him was forgotten. And boy, did that come back and bite me.

One of my favourite activities was riding mountain bikes. No, I wasn't a spandex-wearing bell-dinging road-raging kind of guy. We rode bike jumps that we'd hand built. We rode down hills, drove up, and rode down again. We went on long trips just to ride bikes at all the best places across the country. Some of my friends even entered contests and became sponsored, riding professionally and making money off of the sport.

But it was this wonderful hobby that had gotten me into my dilemma. See – I loved the sport, but unlike all my friends, my goal was just to get out and have a good time, whereas they constantly insisted on me trying flips and spins and basically turning my bike into a gymnastic contraption. That, or they were hellbent on doing the biggest jumps known to man kind. By all means, I was confident in what I could do. But at the same time, I was happy with the level I was at.

So, picture a cliff. Put this cliff about two hours drive from any civilization. This cliff is about thirty feet tall. On top of it there is a small, one foot wide wooden bridge structure that extends over the cliff about six feet. Then, it is a sheer drop to the steep dirt landing far below. You probably fall about forty feet total by the time your tires contact the ground. It is a massive adrenaline rush, but at the same time, it is completely insane.

Now, picture me: completely addicted to this adrenaline; completely and totally afraid of what I was about to do; standing upon this cliff, holding my bicycle, ready to ride this thing yet completely not prepared for what was about to happen.

I did it once. The feeling was incredible! Indescribable! I lived for that feeling; the three seconds of airtime where everything goes completely silent, except for the sound of the wind in my ears, muffled by the motocross-style helmet; that feeling of just free falling, losing control for a brief glimpse of time, just letting go of all rules and laws and just living; pure life! And then impact, the bicycle suspension squishing and me rolling away smoothly.

It was that feeling of looking back and saying to myself "holy faak! I just did that! Never again."

My friend told me that the video camera wasn't filming.

And then, before I could twitch, I was back atop the cliff, albeit, this time a bit more confident. I'd done it before and everything worked out. I could do it again.

That was the last thing I remember thinking.

I let go of the brakes. That was the last thing I remember doing.

According to my friend, the video was amazing. He kept repeating, "that was the best fall I've ever freakin' seen in my life! I can't believe you walked away with only a minor concussion!"

Yeah, if only that was the only thing that I walked away with.

See, in the realm between awake and unconsciousness I saw his face again. He was upset. He nudged me with his snout, comforting me as I lay paralyzed in the dark void of my mind. Then there was a flash of light as he disappeared into the emptiness.

I woke up and everything was sort of normal, considering the situation. My friend was initially concerned with what had happened to me and upon realizing that I was for the most part uninjured, he pulled out the video camera and showed me the fall. He was right. It did look like I'd broken my neck.

I looked away as he rewound the video to watch it for the tenth time. I couldn't stand seeing it again. I couldn't stand thinking that I had fallen on something so stupid and wrecked the rest of our day.

And I couldn't stand the pain that was coursing through my body. I would never have admitted it, but the pain was not localized to my head as it had been a few minutes earlier. It was everywhere. My entire body was burning with white hot flame. Perhaps I had injured myself worse than I'd thought.

I drank some water and we started the slow walk down the trail, as my bicycle had gotten mangled by the wipe out.

I guess my friend must have noticed me cringing with each step because he mentioned going to the hospital. I nodded, then kept my eyes on the ground. Being a guy, I had gotten good at being 'strong' in painful situations, but even my visage was failing.

Finally, I couldn't stand it any more. I stopped walking.

My friend turned around when he didn't hear me following him and came over. He asked me if I was okay. But I couldn't answer.

I was too busy staring at my hands.

My friend followed my gaze and recoiled.

He said, "dude, that's some hardcore busing! Are you sure nothing's broken?"

I nodded. I said I probably wouldn't be holding my bike if anything was broken.

He just repeated what he'd said earlier about the hospital, a concerned look crossing his face and then we kept walking.

The pain was coming in waves now and every so often I would have to stop walking, to lean over my bike handlebars and cough or just focus on zoning out.

Every time we stopped walking, my friend stared at my hands. I tried to not look at their discoloration, kind of grossed out that something that color could be a part of my body.

Eventually, we got to the bottom of the trail where my friend's truck was parked.

I gave him my bike and sat down, leaning against the door of his red ford pickup. He walked over and stared at me.

"Dude, you look horrible."

I nodded, "not feeling too well, yeah."

"I see that."

"Gimme a minute and I'll be good to go."

He nodded and sat down next to me, staring off into space.

The pain started flaring up again, so I leaned over, holding my head in my hands.

"Dude, you sure you're ok?"

I looked up at him and nodded again.

The look upon his face was priceless. In fact, I wish I had taken a photo of it. He stared at me, blinked, shook his head, then stared at me again.

"Dude, stop it. Seriously, that's not funny."
"Stop what?"
"It ... what you're doing. It's not funny."

He stood up and walked over to the other side of the pickup truck, mumbling something unintelligible and shaking his head.

I turned quickly and stared at my reflection in the chrome hub cap on his truck tire. My face looked slightly off. I don't know how to describe it, but it looked slightly deformed, and severely bruised. I didn't remember hitting my face.

I sighed and sat back to the ground, cringing as wave of pain overtook me, probably from moving so suddenly a few seconds earlier. I rolled onto my side, groaning. My hands felt like somebody had plunged them into boiling water.

I clamped my mouth shut to prevent myself from screaming.

As quickly as it had started, it was all over. I looked down at my hands and gasped, recoiling with fear. They looked weirdly twisted and distorted as if somebody had taken a hammer to them. The fingers were oddly bent, oddly painful, oddly inflexible ... Everything about my hands looked wrong, yet, they were still hands.

I tried bending my fingers to no avail, barred by pain and an odd stiffness. The discoloration had become more intense if anything, patches of my skin having turned a bruised green-yellow.

Another wave of pain overtook me and I closed my eyes as something in my jaw cracked audibly.

I was thrown forward into a hunching position and I fell onto my knees, trying to keep my weight off of my painful hands. The sensation traveled through my arms, to my torso and down to my feet, which began to feel swollen and tight in my shoes.

Then, suddenly, it was gone, replaced by a weird tingling numbness.

I opened my eyes.  

"Hey, dude, you ok over there?" My friend called from the other side of the truck.
"Y- yeah," I moaned back.
"I thought I heard whimpering."
"N- no, you didn't."
"Alright man, I'm just gonna get changed over here then I'm good to go."
"Ok."

I looked down at my arms and gulped, unable to comprehend what I was seeing. I was resting my weight on my knuckles. My fingers spiked out of the ground like some odd dark green plant, much longer than any fingers should be and twisted sideways. My hands had swollen too, my thumbs pressed tightly to the side of my hands. They were also dark green, except on them my skin looked very dry and had begun to crack in diamond-like patterns.

I tried lifting my arm, to get a better look at my hand, but my arm didn't bend like I wanted it to.

Then, the pain returned.

I closed my eyes again as the pain surged through my jaw. Each individual teeth burned for an instant as a wave of fiery sensation traveled through my mouth. My tongue tickled. My jaw forced itself outwards, the bones and joints crackling loudly. The back of my head felt like somebody was trying to stab knives through the skin.

Then the pain traveled through my shoulders and down my arms. Then, I felt myself disconnect. At that moment I felt cool relief – wind, which seemed to inexplicably fan the pain away from my arms and down to my lower back. I vaguely registered my pants ripping, which made me open my eyes and snap back to reality.

The sight made me scream – a loud, low-pitched feral roar, a sound that no human should be able to make.

I watched as the skin on my belly folded over itself and hardened, turning black, over and over again all the way down my front. My skin was rapidly turning a deep forest green, drying out and cracking in diamond-patterns.

I noticed something flailing against the ground behind me and turned to see a tail. A freakin' tail!

I tried to reach around to grab it, feel where it was connected to my body, but found myself restricted and unable to move my arms like that.

I watched as spikes shot out of my back, running the length of my spine and down to the snake-like thing that was attached to my body.

I heard someone running over. I heard a loud yell. I looked up, into the eyes of my friend. I was awfully low to the ground.  

"Help me ..." I croaked, my voice extremely distorted.

My friend took a step backwards, and fell to the ground, out cold.

I felt the pain travel again to what was once my hands and watched with a mixture of horror and curiosity as the impossibly long fingers were pulled to my side and immobilized there as a thin yellow-green membrane grew over them. I toppled to my chest, no longer having any front limbs to support me.

My legs were in pain too. My feet looked like some cruel artists had taken a hammer to them and was trying to reshape them at his whim. Dark spikes shot out of my toes as they thickened and merged together forming three claws on the end of digitgrade feet. My legs seemed oddly shortened and bent too.

I screeched and threw out my wing-arms, forcing myself to stand on all fours and twisting around with fear and horror.

Then, the pain was gone, just an echo of a moment in time stored forever in memory.

I stood still, breathing deeply. Each breath hissed out of my mouth, violently loud to my sensitive hearing. I cringed and closed my eyes. The light was too bright. There was something behind me. A living something, breathing like it was asleep.

I forced my arms forward, awkwardly balancing myself on my the knuckles of what used to be my hands and tried to take a step forward. I felt something tug on my head and squirmed, watching a shredded t-shirt fall to the dirt. I snorted and instinctively shook myself, feeling the rest of the destroyed clothing fall off of my body.

I turned towards the chrome hub cap of the truck, fearing what I was about to see. I looked into my eyes and yelped.

I did not see my face – I saw his face. I saw his glowing red eyes, and green-brown scaly face. I saw the horns that were on his head. I saw his long neck, with black reptilian scutes, and I saw the wings that were his front arms; his long, slender claw-tipped fingers with membrane stretched between them, attaching to his sides. I saw the ridge of spikes running down his back, and I saw his tail.

But, oddly, I saw a reflection of my soul in the impossibly bright red eyes whose black slitted pupils glimmered and stared back at me.

That was when I noticed him in my mind. He had stepped back, watching me for the transformation, watching like he always did, to make sure I was ok. But, this time, he watched from inside of me, making sure I was safe.

I tried to yell, but all that came out was a hissing roar.

I screamed in my mind, "what have you done to me!?"

I fell to the ground, covering my head with the knuckles of my wing arms and hissing in rage.

I yelled again, screamed, panted. I screamed internally until I could scream no more. I screamed a simple question. "Why?"

Then, when all was quiet, he answered in my mind in plain, unbroken English. "I saved your life."

I did not reply.

More confident now, he kept talking. "You were going to die. You had multiple fractures, a broken neck and internal bleeding. If you had have survived, you would have never been able to walk again. I have sacrificed myself for you, as I knew I one day would. Yet, I'm sorry it had this result."
"Why though? In saving me you've restricted my life to something less than human! I've become a monster!"

"No, not less. The same. You are still you and for that you should be thankful. We'll never know why we do the things we do," he sighed. "But this was what I was sent to this world to do. Save you. As I came to you one day, now I must leave. I am sorry."
"How can you leave and leave me like this to fend for myself? Will I ever be human again?"
"I am but an imprint of soul who's energy has dwindled to nothing. I do not exist any more. It takes too much to maintain this type of illusion. I will never be able to speak to you again."
"So I'm stuck like this forever."
"I have freed you. I have created a new future, a new outlook on life. You must do now what you were sent to this earth to do. I have freed you. You ... are ... free ..."

I sighed and opened my eyes, taking in the sights of the surrounding forest. I shook my head. Everything was swirling, like I was in a dream. Everything was wrong, yet so right. Something in me screamed.  "Yes, yes, this was all it is. A horrible dream. A horrible dream in which I lose all that I love, everything I've had in humanity!"

I shook my head, noticing the weight that the horns added.

My friend was stirring so I walked over to him, stopping a few inches away from him.

He awoke slowly, opened his eyes and mumbled something I couldn't understand.

Suddenly, he jumped back, scrambling up against the truck. I shuffled awkwardly towards him and he started yelling for help – screaming my human name.

I closed my eyes and bowed my head. I felt something contact my head; a minor pain. Like a mosquito bite, it barely registered in my mind.

I looked up into his eyes and saw pure fear as he stared back at me. I tried saying something, but the hissing croon that my mouth produced only worsened the situation. He started edging backwards slowly. I saw him pick up a rock. He yelled my name hoarsely. He threw the rock. It missed.

I nodded my head again and turned, clawing my way away from the truck. At a safe distance, I closed my eyes and collapsed to the forest floor, sighing deeply and retreating inwards.

It took six months for me to realize what I had become. The initial shock caused me to withdraw inside of myself. I don't really remember much from that time. I had caved into instinct and recessed into the darkest corners of my mind, allowing the body to run on autopilot.

They came looking for me – the human me that is. I remember that. I guess there were brief moments of consciousness before I slipped back into the instinctual pattern of sleep, awaken, eat, find a safe place, sleep. When they came for me, that was one of the times I remembered. They were calling my name. I didn't consciously realize it was my name at the time, but I felt ... something unexplainable. I was drawn to them, though all instinct shouted that I should be staying far away.

It was by sheer coincidence that I ran into my friend. I had dove onto a rabbit but missed and there he was, standing about a hundred feet away, by his parked truck. He was holding something; a candle of some sort. He placed it by a white cross on the ground and lit is, staring remorsefully at it.

It was in that moment that I awakened and I realized what I had created. I guess in the internal struggle, I came to terms with the fact that I'd never be human again and I realized that it was me who caused myself to collapse and lose everything out of fear of change. I may never be able to go back to my old life, but I knew then that I had to take hold of what I've been given.

Every year, on the anniversary of my change, we return to the same spot and I watch from the underbrush as he places a candle on the cross and lets it burn to nothing. Then, he looks straight at me and nods and I know that all he can see are my red eyes staring out of the forest, watching, always watching.