Silhouette: Broken

The silhouette of the canopy above his head lay on the snow before him like a picture from a long-forgotten book. The clearing spanned only one hundred square feet; a graveyard for fallen trees; watched from the surrounding shadows by a dozen pair of eyes--pinpricks of light glinting malevolently only inches above the ground. Sound did not seem able to penetrate the hundreds of yards of trees hemming him in. Birds remained on their perches and waited; none dared brave the sky so soon after the fury of the night. The clouds over his head skirted the clearing, racing around the edges to move further east. The wind moved with sporadically alternating violent gusts and friendly breezes. With a furious gust like a thunderclap the wind thrust itself at the ground as if to burrow to the very center of the earth. The last night's snow once again took to the air, swirling and colliding against itself in an effort to reach the sun and melt to fly above the earth again in the clouds. The gust died. Dejected, the flakes fell back to the ground with an almost audible sigh. A semi-tame breeze followed on the heels of the gust, making its way through the trees and across the clearing, sending a top layer of snow skidding along the ground to meet him. The flakes threw themselves against his face, dying in the heat from his flushed skin. He wiped them off with the sleeve of his thin coat and looked around.
He felt he had known this place in a dream. Some dim memory of death and sorrow called to him from the depths of his feverish mind. This place was not to be disturbed. The watch of the ancient Fallen of the old Order had held for an age and a half. Every instinct in his being screamed against entering the open ground.
He pushed his way through the bushes and stepped into the shade of death.
The clearing offered no shelter whatsoever. A single stump stood twenty feet from the north edge as if it were a solitary guard of this sacred place. The echo of a voice that had not been heard in a thousand years whispered to him in the silence. Shadows of the arms of hundreds of the dead pulled at his legs, pleading with him to turn back. Clenching his toungue in his teeth to dam the terror threatening to spill from his heaving lungs, he made his way slowly towards the stump. His fists closed in on themselves as he willed himself to take another step, and then another.
After an eternity he reached the stump and stood staring at it, his panting breath floating in a fog across his vision. The charred roots stood out starkly against the blinding white of the snow, snaking up from the ground and twisting around the base like vines. The age of the tree barely showed through the scar of the flames in the rings spiralling through the stump's core. As he watched, the rings began to take on the faintest glimmer of a dead light. Not a single flake lay on the stump's surface. The snow that floated on the wind travelled in split paths at the base of the stump that rejoined each other on the other side. He reached down with a trembling hand and rested his palm on the marred remnant of lives needlessly lost and pulled back quickly. The tree's corpse still burned with the fury of the flames that had taken its life. His hand began to blister and bleed. He watched through his fingers in horrified fascination as the outlines of a writhing face passed across the surface of the stump. It was gone immidiately, leaving only a faint trail of smoke that curled its way into the air with a delicate grace. With all of his strength he willed his legs to remain in control and turned back to face the way he had come.
The grip of the dead over his body was gone. Somewhere before him he heard the low murmer of thier sorrow.
The sound of a single footstep in the suffocating silence tore him from the last few fragments of the sanity he'd desperately clung to. Before he was conscious of what was happening, his left arm flew up in front of his body. The knuckles of his right hand were whiter than the snow as the fist that held his .45 came to rest on the outstretched forearm. His body merged with the weapon, his torso rotated towards the other intruder of the sacred ground's silence and he took a half-step towards him as his finger brought the trigger towards his palm.
A fine red mist hung suspended in the air behind the other for a brief moment before peppering the ground before the base of the forest's edge. The rabbit slung over his shoulder, weighed down with its own blood and that of its killer, slid to the ground at his feet. The other's hand wandered from his pocket to his blood-stained shirt, then fell back to his side; the watch he had held carved a round hole in the snow. The boy's twelve years faded from his eyes before his body reached the ground.
The weapon dropped from his hand and came to rest on the steaming stump. His legs relinquished the weight of his senseless body to the frozen ground and he fell to his knees. He stared at the child's body until the last light of the sun had disappeared from the sky.

He had not moved by the time they reached him. His eyes did not stray from the face of the child. They entered the clearing cautiously, approaching his turned back with weapons drawn. Fanning out silently, they followed the edges of the forest, ready to move into the safety of the trees should he turn. He did not turn. His eyes were glazed and empty. They would have thought him frozen and dead where he knelt but for the small tufts of breath that streamed from his nose.
Somewhere just beyond his realm of awareness, a father cried out in pain and horror. A man raced into his blurred vision and dropped to his knees beside his dead son. The frozen body was lifted to the man's chest and held as if to never be let loose again. His eyes followed the child's as the boy's father sobbed and screamed into his son's face. His own eyes held no more tears. The snow beneath his frozen, bleeding hands was all but dissolved in the hot salt of the agony that had poured from his eyes at the boy's death.
His eyes did not meet the father's when he turned from his son in blind fury. He did not turn when the shouts of the men in the circle were joined by the shouts of men long gone from there. He did not look away when the old stump was enveloped in the flames that had taken so many lives all those years ago. He did not raise his head or flinch when the man's hatchett sliced an arc through the air, catching the dancing flames in the edges of the blade. A smile touched his lips as her face formed before his. He closed his eyes and watched his dreams seep between them, around the father's blade, and into the ground near the flaming stump. For a moment, for a brief, glorious moment, he swam among the smoke of the Ancient sacrifice. Then the rings of the stump closed around him and he raised his voice with those of the Old in despair for the lost.