"Hmu Hmo!!!"
Hmu Hmo wrenched awake—lungs seizing, throat raw. His chest bucked like a speared fish, his pulse jackhammering in his eardrums. Slowly, the world resolved into wrongness: ice spreading through his veins, dead air where his right leg should hum with life.
He looked down.
Meat and tendon dangled below his knee, two frayed cords binding ravaged flesh. Blood sluggishly oozed through the grime encrusting his wounds. Bile scorched his throat—he clamped his jaw until his molars creaked.
"Hmu Hmo!!!!"
The piercing cry tore through the fog that filled his ears. His sister's voice, shrill and raw, shattered the oppressive silence.
Memory flared—sister, foxhole, fall—cutting through the haze of animalistic panic. It struck him like a jolt of lightning: the trap, the plunge, the snapping of roots. His vision spun, fragments flashing before his eyes in a chaotic mix—the slick wall of the pit, the clay smeared across his palms, Father's gaping stomach, Mother's swaying womb, and sister's weeping scream somewhere nearby.
He must find her. To stop her screams. To stop his head from exploding.
His fingers scrabbled at roots, nails gouging into the fibrous strands as he tried to drag himself upward. Snap. Dead branches splintered under his grip, crumbling into useless fragments. Thud! He collapsed back into the blood-caked earth, his wrecked leg twisted at an unnatural angle. His jaw trembling in pain. He bit down tight, then, elbow over the shattered elbow, he hauled himself forward and out of the gaped ditch. Each movement crushed fragments of bone in his leg, sending jolts of searing pain up his spine. Picking up a dead branch to support his dead leg, he began the return to his sister.
His muscles screamed in protest, his ravaged frame sagging like an overburdened sack. The splintered branch he used for support groaned under his weight, its jagged edges biting into his palms as he stumbled forward.
The sunset cast a bloody smear across the sky, painting the scrubland in hues of crimson and gold. The canopy shadows stretched longer now, skeletal branches clawing at the ground. Roots coiled around his mangled foot like a predator refusing to relinquish its prey. But he did not notice. His whole body was a blanket of pain. Whether his flesh was torn or his skin pierced, he no longer knew where the pain began or ended.
Thud! He fell again—the roots wrapped tightly around his dangling foot and pulled him down. He tore at the snarled roots in desperation, yanking, but his ruined limb wouldn't come loose, wouldn't break off. His teeth ground together, and his nails sank into the tattered flesh of his leg. The pain electrified his entire body, but still, he pulled.
Reeeek–Plop! Reeeek–Plop! Tendrils snapped, fibers frayed and peeled away as the roots finally gave. Freedom came, a tattered foot left behind. A howl began to rise in his throat, but died, swallowed by the gnawing pit in his chest. The sound boiled low and guttural. Phantom pain raced up the absent limb. He refused to fall. He refused to stop. He must continue; the voice gnawing his mind commanded him so.
As the sun set, twilight's chill brushed against the sweat trickling down Hmu Hmo's neck. His movements were reduced to a deformed crawl, his three functioning limbs carrying him forward, breath by agonizing breath. Through pain-blurred vision, he caught the wavering outline of the village on the horizon—a jagged mirage mocking him from the edge of his awareness.
By the time dawn broke, his body was a hollow shell, his strength all but spent. He crumpled at the village's rotting edge, collapsing onto the brittle bamboo shoots that sagged like fractured ribs. Roofs loomed above, their frames caved and smothered by moss, fungus threading through every crack. The quiet buzzed in his ears—a fragile relief tinged with dread.
No crusaders' trumpets, no living motion. Only rot. Rot in the wood, rot in the air, rot in the depth of his tongue. He marched onward, body scraping against the ground. His sister's name lodged in his throat—Sgai Hmo—but no sound emerged.
Decay had claimed everything. Thatched walls slumped into dark mulch, their edges fraying where life had once pulsed. The village, once a vibrant entity, now lay hollow, consumed by degeneration. The rot air grows heavier with each crawl toward the elder's tent.
The tent's bamboo frame had been the first target when the demons came. Now, it stood skeletal, wind keening through gaping holes where the roof had peeled away. Silence crushed him, heavy and stale, sharpening each breath to a knife's edge. His hand found the entrance curtain, tattered and faded from indigo to dull rust and gray. He froze.
A gong lay overturned nearby, dark red. The ash-strewn ground bore footprints, preserved like fossils. And there, nestled between broken incense burners…
"Sgai?" The whisper left him broken.
Instead of life, Hmu Hmo found nightmare-wrought flesh. A dozen children lay twisted into obscene geometries, limbs coiled around arched spines like wax slugs left too close to the flame. Their swollen bodies bore hieroglyphs of agony—eyes glazed to milky stone, jaws unhinged in soundless shrieks. Rotten blood gleamed like charcoal, seeping from defiled crotches. Plink. Plink. Plink. Plink. Droplets pooled on the mournful earth beneath them.
They formed a perfect ring—these distorted lambs—around a raised dais where a girl hung suspended. Ropes wrenched her prepubescent form into a tortured arc—heels grazing the matted hair above her ears—spine bent like a hunter's bow. Coarse ropes bit into her torso—squeezed tight—crushing her budding breasts into purple contusions. Where nipples should have been, ragged craters wept trails down her ribcage—two weeping serpents slithering toward her armpits.
Her skin screamed red and purple. Careless and cruel handprints stained her flesh. Whip marks flowered across her shoulders. Rust-brown streams crept from her delta to her knees, dripping into the stagnant pool beneath her swaying hair. The air choked him, the raw stench of his fear made tangible. Sgai's voice vanished from the back of his mind.
Eeeeeeeeee—the tinnitus returned.
Hmu Hmo collapsed, his head slamming into the earth below her knees. His scream erupted—primal, tearing loose from his core. It was not a cry but a howl. The raw, guttural roar of an animal ensnared in steel jaws. The wrenching anguish of a root, torn from the soil, pleading and undone.
It thundered through the air, shaking the rotted thatch and rattling the brittle bones of the village. The sound reverberated, unrelenting, clawing at the oppressive silence. It didn't stop. It couldn't stop. His lone voice carried the unbearable weight of a world shattered beyond recognition.