Deceptive Harmony

Deceptive Harmony

Author Notes: This is by far my favorite piece of writing that I've accomplished. It was for a writing competition that involved some sort of warfare or war strategy that may be uncommon. I believe I placed third place. I'd like to write a novel with this theme some time in the near future.

A small warning, this does contain some vulgar language and shouldn't be viewed by younger children. 

I needed to move, to get out of there, but if I was too sudden with my actions then I would very well be ending my life. Four sentries were closing in and I didn’t have the self-confidence to take on one demon, let alone four at a time. A simple miscalculation in my step and the racket that I cause would bring these beasts bearing down on my location. I’d never outrun them and the chances of killing them was near impossible. I had to find some way to get them to bypass my location and allow me to have a chance to sneak away, but how? Their sense of smell was keen, their watchful eyes could easily pick up any small movements, their sense of hearing was so precise that I was afraid to think the thoughts that I was currently thinking for fear that they might be heard, and their physical abilities were unworldly. They were getting close and they were moving quickly. Then there was nothing, just silence and that feeling that you get when you know somebody is sneaking up on you, but none of your five senses have picked it up. I just felt it; the end. The screech of metal scraping and cutting through the car door that had been against my back filled my ear, but only for a short period of time. Purely out of instinct, my body threw itself forward and I started to run. My right hand grasped at my right earlobe, but found no target.

“The mother fucker cut my ear off!”

There was no time for pain. In fact, I should have been dead by now, but it didn’t matter; I’d be dead within seconds if I didn’t turn and fight now. That feeling again: a feeling similar to electricity moving through my body like lightning about to hit nearby. My body instinctively ducked and I heard the swish of air warping above my head as bloody steel passed over, nearly taking my head along with it. It was my only chance; I needed to act right away and maybe I could still take one of the bastards with me. By the time I was about to finished the swipe of my sword, the demon had turned around and taken the blade directly in its throat. A twist and a rip and I had beheaded the foul beast.

“No time to get cocky, there are still three more and by all the goddamn noise you made there are probably more where they came from.”

As if my own thoughts narrated my life the three beasts were upon me within moments. There really wasn’t any running that time. I had to stay and fight. Dying wasn’t an option and the only way to stay alive was to end the lives of the demons in front of me. They stood side by side, snarling, trying to wear me down with fear before they even moved in. The one in the middle motioned to the other two to stay back.

“Great, I have a better chance this way.”

The creature made an expression that I could only make out as a grin as it prepared for battle. Slowly, it crept towards me, ever so confident that I had no chance. Probably I didn’t. I had only killed one for the first time moments ago and that in itself was an incredible task. The beast charged me and for a moment two pieces of metal clanged together in a sound that most soldiers would hear if they were lucky enough to engage and block the first swing before their immediate death. The earth moved away from below as the blow threw me to the ground. I swung my sword on the way down as an act of desperation, but wasn’t rewarded with the solid blow that I had hoped for. Instead, my sword seemed to bounce off of the hard, scaly substance that made up the demon’s hide. My back hit the ground first, with my head following close behind. With my vision blurred I struggled to my feet, awaiting my inevitable death, or so I thought. 


They did nothing. I couldn't believe it. There was an open gash over the left eye of the one that had attacked me, but it showed no pain as the wound slowly closed up in seconds. I stood there, ready to protect myself in any way that I could, just waiting. The monster threw a grin in my direction, turned around, and left with his two companions. I stood there in silence for around thirty seconds or so. After the demons had walked about twenty feet they took off on a run, letting me live. Never did they show mercy, even if it meant killing a woman or a child, but for some odd reason they had let me go. I figured it was some sort of trap or trick that they were playing on me, but it didn't matter. I needed to get the message to the resistance as fast as possible, whether it meant fighting my way through a trap or not. Standing there wasn't going to get me any further; that much was for sure.

It was probably only a mile left to the last encampment and I knew the territory well. I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see. Is ignorance truly bliss? I was ignorant once, and, come to think of it, life had been so good, but bliss it was not. For something to be bliss it needs to be heavenly and happy. Nothing could be blissful if it created so much destruction and that’s exactly what our ignorance caused. In front of me laid the remains of men, women, children, and even a few of the demons. It looked like the entire camp had been destroyed. For all that I knew it was the last human civilization left outside the camp that I just had come from. I thought that I had made it in time and that the demons that I had just encountered were a scout team, but they must have been a small group patrolling for any survivors. From the look of the total carnage in front of me, they had done their job.

“Wait, is somebody there?”

I had probably given myself away, but that sound was so human. I heard a whimper or perhaps a whisper. Approximately twenty feet to my right I saw a small section of land lifted up. Suddenly my vision blurred and for the first time I remembered about the blood running down the side of my face. After falling to my knees, a silhouette with seemingly human eyes appeared and carried me away.

“Come quickly, down into the earth before they come back and find us.”

I was being carried down a crudely made tunnel with just enough light at the end of it to make our way through. They found their way around a root that used to be attached to a tree and just around the next corner was a compartment big enough to fit fifty or so people. Women, children, and men cluttered the far corner in fear, in which I assumed was caused by the massacre up above. For a moment there was silence as the empty faces looked towards our direction. My blurred vision turned black and I drifted off into a deep sleep, one that part of me wished I wouldn't wake up from.

The sun was shining and I was walking my dog in the nearby park outside my apartment. Children were playing basketball in a nearby court, yelling at each other for a foul that someone committed. All around me the sounds of cars and other unforgotten noises bounced and echoed off of the towering buildings. I was back in a time where the only thing I had to worry about was not getting to work on time or my favorite TV series being cancelled. A time where I wish I wouldn’t have taken things for granted like I had. I hear my name being called from the left and I see my wife of four years smiling and waving. I try to run to her, but the chain gives an unnatural resistance. I turn to look at my dog, yet find nothing but rotten flesh and bones hanging from a collar.

“No.. no.. no…”

 My body starts to shake, but I have time. I can still save her, I know I can. I drop the leash and I run as fast as I can towards my wife, but no matter how hard I try to run I’m barely making any ground.

 “So… so close… please God let me make it.”

She calls my name one more time and reaches. Just as our finger tips are about to touch the ground opens up and claws start tearing at her skin. Clawing, pulling, and killing her. Everywhere around me there’s death. The children that were once yelling about a foul in their game were now having their limbs being torn apart by creatures. The demon that had just murdered my wife now stands in front of me. I want nothing more than to make him suffer. I claw at his face with my own hands just to find that he wasn’t a demon at all, but instead a man. He was… he was me…

It felt like my heart had just left my chest. I sat up in a dead sweat from the nightmare. The women next to me put her hand behind my head and carefully helped me back to the ground.

“Not too fast, you’ve lost a lot of blood. Have some water, it’s our last, but we won’t be needing it… Your wound has been cleaned and bandaged.”

I turned to the man that had led me down the tunnel as he seemed to be the one in command.

“Sir, I have a message from the north, but apparently I'm too late. Our camp was attacked by scouts and we noticed a small group moving in this direction to your encampment.”

“Yes, your message was too late, but even if we had been prepared it wouldn’t have mattered. We only numbered around one hundred or so people, but now we are down to a mere thirty four. We got as many people as we could underground, but there just wasn’t enough time. Ahem… what are the results from the battle front up north?”

The man was choking back his emotions. I knew the feeling that he had because it was the same feeling that we all had every second of our remaining lives. No matter how hard we tried, how hard we fought, and how hard we wanted to come out of this victorious, it didn’t matter. For every demon we killed, three more would replace it. Hell, if we hadn’t stood a chance when we had guns and missiles, we surely didn’t have a chance fighting with crude melee weapons. If we were lucky enough we would find one of the demons’ swords lying around, but these were few and far in between, showing the small amount of success that we actually had killing them.

“I don’t know. We had just repelled a small group of about thirty demons. They didn’t attack in full force, but we still had major causalities. I was sent out before there was a head count, but I would say we had around twice as many people left as you have here. ”

“You’ve had a long journey. I would offer you some food, but all was lost in the battle up above. We could use another hand here. Would you be willing to stay?”

I really had no reason to go back. Most of my friends had died months ago and I had no family to speak of. I tried not to get attached to people because chances were they weren’t going to be alive for very long.

“Yeah, I’ll stay. I have nothing to return to anyway.”

A sudden crash echoed through the tunnel that I had been carried through. I had nothing to return to and by the sound I had just heard there might not be anything left here soon as well. Random whimpers of concern and fear filled the corridor. I stood up with the sword by my side. We had a chance in such a small area. They would have to funnel through the only tunnel and we could fight them one at a time. A claw exposed itself from the opening of the tunnel, followed the by the red, scaled skin of an arm, and a hideous face, a face that I had once seen. It was the demon I sliced open earlier, the scar covering its left eye. I should have known better, they weren’t just letting me go. They had tricked me into leading them to the rest of the survivors.

“Well come on you son of a bitch, what are you waiting for? You want me to slice you open again?”

I screamed at it like I would to a wild animal, but unlike a wild animal there was no point in trying to intimidate it. They had never shown fear before and there was no reason for them to show it now. It stepped closer; one step, two steps, and surveyed the room. Just as I was ready to move in it surrendered its sword.

“The population is under control. You are the only remaining humans left on Earth. It’s over.”

The room was filled with confusion from each direction that seemingly collected and grew as the seconds ticked by. We never knew they could speak in the first place, but on top of that it had talked about the slaughtering as some sort of population control. I demanded to know what in the world was going on and I wasn’t quite ready to set my sword down. In fact, I was almost certain it was some kind of trick where it was just toying with our emotions before it ended our lives.

“What the fuck do you mean? You talk as if you were doing us a fucking favor, but you’ve done nothing but destroy and kill us.”

“I understand your confusion and your anger, but we were only doing our job. If the human population continued to advance at its rate then the world would have been destroyed.”

Yells came from the far corner of the room where people were still clinging to, in a desperate attempt to gain as many inches between them and the beast as possible.

“How can you say that? You’ve destroyed everything!”

“Don’t trust the beast, its evil!”

“Kill it! This is just a trick!”

I knew not to trust it, but I almost heard sincerity within its words. I needed to hear it out before any actions were taken. The beast took a seat on a nearby rock and continued.

“We only destroyed the parts of the world that we needed to. We needed the get the human population down to a specific number and we have accomplished this goal. What we have destroyed can be restored, but if we would have let you continue to ravish and take advantage of the world it would have died. Your technology was making the land unlivable. What humans forget is they are a very small portion of the bigger picture of the world. You may think I’m evil, but don’t think of us as bad. I know this sounds very hard to understand, but the universe isn’t as black and white as good and evil. We are merely the opposite of light. Without us light wouldn’t exist and without light we wouldn’t exist. It’s all about a continuing balance between things in nature and in the universe itself. Humans were shifting this balance and making it lopsided. We needed take care of it in the only way that we knew how.”

I continued my intimidating voice, but not in fear, but in anger and realization of what the beast was telling us.

“You could have... I don’t know... tried telling us, you know!”

“We’ve tried that. We tried it approximately three hundred to four hundred times already. Some civilizations were by far superior than yours was and some were much more primitive, but the end result was always the same. We were tired of trying to prevent the inevitable from happening so we moved right on to solving the problem. Eliminating the human population to the point where the world could recover and give the humans a fair chance at trying again. This marks the thousandth time we’ve had to do this. Like I said before, it was nothing against you as a species. It was all about maintaining a balance.”

For some reason I believed it. Before this happened the world was in very rough shape. We had ruined a large section of the oceans with pollution and oil spills, our air was severely polluted, and large sections of the forest had been cut down.

“Well, what now?” I said softly.

“That’s up to you guys. Try to prevent the inevitable from happening once again by teaching everyone about us, but along with this you must teach people about the technology and the power that it can create. On the other hand you can attempt to keep the population down and stick to a strict life style where you live in harmony with the world. This would prevent you from teaching people about technology and therefore give no reason to speak about us and the events here. I warn you though. No matter what you do the inevitable will always happen.”

“But... but... we can always try...” a child’s voice from the corner of the room chipped in with.

The beast gave the same grin that it had given me earlier when it had let me live as it started towards the tunnel.

“I wish you humans the best.”

We stood there in silence for the longest time after it had left. Eventually people started murmuring about things and discussing what had just been told to us. There were still those who thought it was some sort of trick to lure us out into a trap. I knew there was only one way to find out. Sword in hand I made my way through the tunnel that I had been carried through before, climbing and pushing the rubble out of the way leading to the opening of the tunnel. I witnessed something that I hadn’t seen for years besides in my dreams. The clouds of soot had cleared and the sun was shining. All of the human bodies remained, but any sign or trace of the demon creatures couldn’t be found. They had left as promised and now it was our turn to make sure they would never have to return.