Sunday 11 February 2018

Bag O’ - Part 1


    Bag O’ Sat waiting; this was so boring all of this waiting, he’d been waiting for so long he could not even remember.  Through chilling winters with swirling snow, winds that chilled him to the bone, causing his teeth to rattle.
    The summers, well they were another thing; days so hot that the air in the small clearing within the forest was stifling to the point that he felt like he was pushing through an invisible swamp.
    This had been his existence since he had died fighting the Dark Elf, so long in fact that he had watched whole generations of trolls come and go over time. Trolls being short little things that had been his only company over all these years, and even then they were not the best of company.
    They tended to keep to themselves, gentle Little Rock’s that they where; they really had a reputation that they did not deserve.  Sure they don’t seem overly helpful or friendly, occasionally one of the daft buggers gets it in their mind that Bag O’s bones would be a good addition to their stews. He’d lost a few ribs that way.
    Bag O’ liked them though as they were a bit of sport, periodically every generation or so the Story of Bag O’ as told by the trolls would be forgotten and one would wander into his glen.  There’d be surprise, a conversation and more often than not a fight.
    These encounters were a relief from the monotony of his existence. An existence that he did not choose, a curse cast upon him by a hag of a witch years before he died at the hands of that annoying Elf.
    He remembers laying incapacitate, slowly bleeding out looking at the dark creature standing in the shadows of the forest, speaking to him in the common tongue. ‘I see your cursed human; cursed to be undead. That is you now.’ Then it stood still and watched.
    Watched for hours, watched as the shadows of the trees lengthened, as the sky faded from bright clear and blue, to the grey of dusk and then the dark and sparkle of night. Then it spoke again.
    ‘I can’t have a vengeful undead following me, looking at you now after all of these hours, I know you will not be a zombie, ghoul or ghost you will be a skeleton. Because of that, I curse you to stay in this glenn forever’
    Then the dark elf was gone. Bag O’ lay there incapacitated for days, even weeks.  Wolves came and feasted on him, foxes ate the leftovers, crows picked out his eyes. He was both alive and awake for all of this, feeling nothing more than a sense of tugging or prodding on his body.
    Obviously it wasn’t painful as he was dead, he could feel nothing. Did it horrify him, or scare him? Oddly no. After the Dark Elf’s binding curse Bag O had decided that he needed to embrace being undead.  There was no use in mulling over being dead, and feeling sorry for himself.
     He had realised he liked it more and more as the years went by, especially as he advanced through the process. At first he was dead, yet his eyes still opened and blinking he was unable to move, a lot of the blood had drained from his body, or congealed within.  His heart was not pumping so there was no oxygen moving around. He felt like he was full of sand like one of the small throwing bags he had made for his niece when he was at home.
    A small bag, filled with sand and sewn shut to make a 1 pound throwing bag. He’d made six of them, and he and his niece had spent hours playing proximity. He spent days thinking and examining this feeling calling himself sandy at that time as he searched for a new name.
    The next stage just after the animals had done a good job of cleaning him up.  All of the flesh, skin, hair and internals had been eaten by the multitude of carrion critters of the forest.  This was the smelly stage.
    Not that he could smell himself, he could tell by what went on around him. All of the tentative animals, the deer, chipmunks and Rabbits avoided him and his glen. The meat eaters’ foxes, wolves and carrion birds pestered him like flies to shit for weeks.
    This was not one of his favourite stages, although it was very enlightening.  A large wolf grab his shin one day and started to run. It ran straight out of the glen and down a small animal track. Bag O’ was amazed, he was free of the glen.
    Grabbing for a tree Bag O’ managed to hold on a sapling that cause the Wolf’s head to be snapped back ripping its body around 180 degrees flinging it into the air landing bodily onto the ground. Yelping the wolf jumped up and ran deep into the forest.
    Bag O’ stood up, dusted himself down, looked about and thought, well I’m out of that glen, I may as well continue.  Realising the wolf had pulled him in the same direction the Elf had gone, he figured he may as well go find that bugger who had cursed him so.
    Then as he walked bones started falling off of him, onto the ground. As he watched the bones then started wiggling back to the glen. First it was some Rib Bones, not to structural so he took another step, His left arm from the elbow down fell off and started making its way back to the glen.
    Another step, his right arm. One more step and his head fell to the ground, dragging backwards through the scrub he could see his body flailing about, and thought oh no, if I lose that I’m nothing but a skull.  Thinking hard, as hard as he could he managed to get his body to turn towards the glen.
    As his head started to pick-up speed he told his body to run, run as fast as it could out of sheer terror that he would simply become a skull and nothing more.  Then he burst back into the glen, with his body flailing behind him and breaking into pieces across the ground of he open glen.
    Bag O’ now new both curses were true, one he was an undead skeleton and secondly he was truly cursed to stay in the glen and only the glen. Finally he also learnt how to put himself back together.  Something that would come in handy over the years that followed.