The Saughrehhk

    The Saughrehhk have given us orders to search for survivors, wounded or not. We have great faith in their decisions. They help us fight this oppression.


    On the one-thousand and ninety-fifth day of our expedition, we came across a fenced town. This “fence” was more like a barricade. To keep people out. We approached the gate and were met by unfriendly eyes. Our group was small, but you could see this town was starving. Through the fence, malnourished children sat on the laps of malnourished mothers, or playing in the muck on the ground. The crops were all dead, and heaps of dead were lying around. After a bit of negotiation, our leader convinced these people to let us stay in exchange for some provisions.

    That night we slept in the safety of the barricaded walls of that town. We did not catch one bit of sleep. Sleep had run out that night, leaving us with screams of sick and dying, sobbing of parentless children, and sighs of regretful elders. Here we tried to sleep on mats half soaked with mildew, and walls half crumbled away. This town contained only people with half a heart. Not hearts of anger, but of sorrow. I felt my eyes close, but as soon as they had, I had awoken and sun was pouring through the wall like a cup of blood through a sieve.

    Even in broad daylight this town looks ghostly. There was a rotten-green tinge to everything. Even to the white and dying cheeks of the people who called this home. As we were leaving, a small girl thanked us for staying. She had one pretty green eye, and a mess of blood and what seemed to be a bit of optic nerve in the place of the other. She asked me if I would say good bye to “daddy”. Without half a thought, I said yes, willing to do anything to lighten the hearts of these people.

    My eyes cried as the small, dirty, child walked over to a pile of rotting bodies and took a hand from the pile. On the middle finger was an intricate silver ring with runic letters written along the outside. I looked down at the hand she was holding and whispered “good-bye” and immediately walked away with the rest of the group. The girl must have been three.

    I was almost glad to be back into the danger of the bog. No half-people lingering around here, only rotting trees, dead vines, and mire here. As our path led on, I heard talk of reaching the first checkpoint. Soon, we would unite the Saughrehhk with the militia they asked for. Soon this war could be over. Or begun.

    We have made it to the first of two checkpoints. Here we found the following supplies: fifty pairs of boots, twenty machetes, two axes, and food, some of which had gone rotten. Food seems to go bad much faster than usual in this bog. And on top of the supplies were a few letters marked with interesting calligraphy. One was pressed into my hands, so hard that it crumpled. It seemed heavier than a letter should be. I took it out and read it.

    “You are being commanded to lead this force. I believe this force has already dwindled from the decisions of the former leaders. You are to kill them. You were chosen at random to do this service. Here are the names of your new allies…”

    Seeing just a signature at the bottom, I stopped treading the letter short. I saw the other two men who had the same letter as I peering toward me. I searched the envelope and found a hypodermic syringe the size of my little finger.

    That night, I found a leader and plunged the small needle into a bulging vein on his bald forehead. The effect was almost instantaneous. His whole body tensed and then relaxed. His fingers bled for a moment and stopped. He had torn off his fingernails by clutching the ground so hard. I turned away and returned to my spot at the edge of camp. Sleep fled me another night.

    When the dull sun had risen, I pulled on a pair of the boots that the Saughrehhk had left us. We left behind twenty-seven pairs because we no longer had fifty men in our troop. And three of us no longer had feet. Twenty days ago we had realized sleep came less, and illness came more often as we made our way deeper into this swamp. Many of us suffered, and most of us died.



    It is the one-thousand two-hundred and sixteenth day of our search and we came across some fire remains. This surely means that we are closer to the edge of the swamp. Our numbers have fallen to twenty. Twenty healthy, and one sick. I do not believe he will last much longer. We had to amputate most of both legs and his left arm. He foams at the mouth and cannot eat. He is surely going to die.

    Alas we have made it. Sweat drips from our foreheads as we trudge toward the abandoned mines. The Saughrehhk are waiting just below the surface. All of our group hurried to the entrance and crawled through the small entrance. We were greeted with the smell of one-thousand rotting bodies. All seventeen rushed to the surface, even I.

    Such hopelessness had touched our hearts. All was lost. All is lost. I tore a strip off of my shirt and soaked it in a bucket of water. I placed it over my mouth and nose and began to crawl into the space that led to the mine. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught two bodies with cards still clamped tightly in their hands. A hand was over a pile of coins. The whole of Saughrehhk seemed to have been frozen in time. I searched around and found some stained paper. It seemed to have some writing on it, but I could not make it out.

    A bottle of wine had been left on a table, unopened. I pulled the cork out and dumped the contents on the floor. And that is when I realized what the smell was. The contents of one-thousand stomachs were all about the floor.

    I took a tinderbox from my pocket and lit the papers that I had found, after soaking them in the wine. The room looked much vaster than at first. And for the first time in hours, I felt movement.

    I felt weak hands clutch my throat in attempt to kill me, but I easily threw them off. A bald man fell to the floor. His beard was matted with blood and his skin was pale white. Almost transparent. In the struggle I had dropped my light, and as it whisked out, I saw green eyes surrounded by sickly yellow cornea peering up from his face. With a jerky motion, he whipped his arm out and pressed a cold object into my hand, picked up a rock and slammed it into the side of his face, collapsing his skull.

    I hurried to the surface, in order to unveil the item that the mysterious man had pressed so purposefully into my palm.

    To my dismay it was a bit of old paper, thrice folded. It read:

    “…Has started…Sickness…daughter…give…important…in order for…Rest w…l, my…Fr…nds…Watch …t for…Vict…Is…ht…has been…years”

    And from the stained paper, a small, silver ring fell into the palm of my hand, surprisingly cleaner than the paper. It had a look of familiarity to it, so I placed it in my pocket. And as I was doing so I noticed one word on the back of the paper. The ink had bled through to the other side. Victory. The Saughrehhk had not failed us.

    By now night has fallen and I return to camp, only to find smoldering remains and a day’s worth of supplies. I have been abandoned. And so I leave this letter to you, and I charge you with the responsibility of this ring. Bring it to the man’s only family, the girl with one eye. Tell her that her father lives. Let the whole town know that they are saved. Our oppressors have been defeated.

Faithfully,

              Percivielle