Posted

Dec 3rd 2009

Mood

Blank

I was toodling around on the computer for a 150-word freewrite thing for language arts, and wrote too much.


The night would’ve been black as pitch if the burning Academy hadn’t lit up the night sky. I had no idea how many survived, how many were taken. She had gone all-out on this attack, for sure. I looked around at my peers. We were all battered and bruised, some more severely than others, but we were alive.
I looked around. Isaac was sitting on a rock with Mizo, staring at the ground. I thought I saw Marcy somewhere within a cluster of people and animals huddled together on a log. I hadn’t realized quite how much I didn’t know these people, even though we had shared the same classes and living space all these years.
Luna whispered from her perch on my shoulder, “We can’t just stay here forever.”
She was right. Something had to be done. The chips were down, and somebody had to rise to the occasion. I stood up.
“We have to go after them,” I said suddenly. They all stared at me with cut, smeared, scowling faces.
“Everyone is gone except us, that makes us the only hope left. We need to go rescue the others, and we need to do it soon.” I paused. “Who knows what could happen to the survivors while we sit here and pity ourselves?”
Isaac looked up at me. He had a near-murderous look on his face, which was bleeding from the temple. Mizo the lizard gave me a distinctly angry glare, but said nothing.
He spat, “I never liked you, or the way you do things. You’re hardly a leader, and now you have the gall to lecture us like one? I would expel you myself if the school weren’t a bonfire. How do you presume to defeat her?”
My spirits sank a little, at that. Luna hissed, “Nobody said they were the leader here!” She straightened up and looked eat everyone in the crowd levelly.
“We… have no plan. But action must be taken or the school will be the least of our problems.”
A few people in the crowd were still giving me hard looks, but just enough were nodding that I spoke up again.
“Nobody ever said you have to like each other to work together, but we have to do something. And if we can try to like each other more along the way, that would help, too.”
I looked out at the horizon. The land looked shadowing and forbidding in the moonless night. The air carried a chill wind that smelled of blood. I knew in my heart that dawn was a long way off. But it was coming, and that was all I needed right now.