Alone (WIP)

Here is a little preview of something that I have been working on for one of my characters from To Each Their Own:

    Isolation. That was all Radjal knew those days. It had been about four months since he had suddenly returned home from the volightian warfront, or at least a different part of him did. He was not the same bright-eyed boy who had left. What returned to his town was an unknown variable, a being torn apart by reality.

    That’s how he saw it, and that’s how it was.

    The veteran doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him, all they could do was fit him with a new arm then sit back and observe him like an experiment. ‘Why am I thinking this?’ Radjal thought while looking down at his new arm, some of its metallic structure showing through the false skin he had ripped off in one of his recent episodes, ‘they are trying to help me.’ Or at least that’s what he told himself. His mind refused to accept the arm. Refused to accept that he had lost his real one to a volightian. It even refused to accept the fact that he had even went to Volightoria. It was like his mind was trying to rid itself of those memories in order to protect itself. He was mentally scarred, and the doctors did not know how to approach that. Originally they kept Radjal sealed off in a private room in their infirmary, but his mind was sensitive to any loud noise, and caused him to the pain and suffering he had endured. They tried to give him suppressive herbal mixtures, but the memories and sensations would always come back. They couldn’t heal something, and that scared them.

    And what do they do with things that scare them? They cast them aside to rot on their own, for if they can’t see him, then he doesn’t exist...

    Radjal widened his eyes, suddenly afraid of his own thoughts, and he drowned them out by calling out into the darkness around him, “No, they only did that for my own good. They—“

    He stopped himself short at a sound that rumbled outside his lonely cabin. He held his breath and listened carefully and the sound presented itself again, a low rumble that shook the sky. He gasped as a sinking sensation filled his chest. He knew that sound, it was the sound of an incoming storm, and it was one that brought lightning with it. Lightning... the very thing that caused his persistent suffering. He got up from his sitting position and he started to pace the room he was in, the muscles of his face twitching in his uncontrollable nervousness.

     His fake arm lay stiffly limp at his side as he subconsciously tore at its false skin while he muttered to himself, “Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm. Welka will be here soon...”

    But his caretaker should have been there already. She should have seen the incoming storm before it began and should have been there to comfort him. He listened carefully for any sound other than the pitter-patter of the rain falling onto the roof overhead, but nothing sounded like Welka entering the small cabin.

    “Welka, where are you?” he whispered desperately as the rain pounded harder above him like the hooves of a herd of horses. He could feel his panic raising as his mind began to anticipate the lightning to come. The fingers of his real hand moving quicker to expose the metal of his false arm.

His heart started beating just as quickly. His vision started to narrow in fear and desperation as he realized that she wasn’t coming this time...

CRACK! rum rum rum...

    Radjal froze in place like a rabbit caught in the sights of a predator as the walls around him lit up for a brief moment. It felt as if time itself froze around him, his mind on the summit of his sanity, about to tip over and fall down a long and slippery slope. He held his breath for what was to come.

CRASH!

    Again lightning whipped across the sky. His mind flashed back to what had happened to him on the volightian battlefield. He ed the pain that came with losing his arm to a bolt of focused lightning. He ed the fear he felt when he locked eyes with his attacker, a face that would forever be engraved on his mind.

BOOM!