(Tis a draft. :) )
Breathless, she ran through the forest. The agile body of a seventeen year old girl darted between the trees, and in between bushes. But, still, the smell pursued her.
She running from the smell, the smell. She thought. If she ran fast enough and far enough the smell will vanish. If she could outrun the smell, she could think clearly. It would no longer filter in her nose, and cloud her eyeballs. It wouldn't seep through her scalp, mingling with her long, dark hair and her head wouldn't maddeningly stink the same.
And when her mind is clear, she would retrace her steps back to the village. The sun would've sanked behind the trees and dragged the day sky down with it. The mayas would chatter noisily in their nests in preparation for night. And instead of this stink, she would not smell anything. The scent of the familiar skips past usual inhabitants. She would walk past and overlook the scents: vegetable stew, roasting hunt, freshy chopped wood. She was running for these scents not to become memories. She will not have any recollection of stink.
But scents never leave. In the years to come, the smell of burning will rouse her from dreams of twilight, and vegetable stew, sibilings, friends. In her last breath, she'd smell the same.
The forest was a blur as she ran the familiar routes. Her legs bled from the cuts from the thorny bushes right outside the village. The seeds of weeds caught her clothes and pricked her through the fabric. And in her mouth mingled the metallic taste of blood and soil. Despite the sharp pain coursing through her body, she dared not stop, she dared not look back.
In between the trees, to the direction of her village, she could imagine bright red spires slowly eating away her life as she knew it. But if she never saw it, she told herself, then she could always tell herself it was a dream. The dark bulbuous smoke from the burning houses rose up and covered the sky; a premature night loomed behind her.
In a moment of delirium, she thought the shadow of smoke was the shadow of a giant demon god chasing her. Any moment now, his hands would wrap around her body and his talons will dig deep through her. She cried out loud and wrapped her arms around her body as she ran ever more desperately.
A branch beneath her feet cracked and she cried as her her knees crashed to the ground. She looked up; the giant demon god seemed to disappear when she realized she had come upon a clearing.
The raspy voice of an old woman was the last thing she heard before the forest wavered before her eyes and her head fell to the ground,
"Like what I told them, you alone will survive."
