Fire pit

We were running. We stopped.  The fire pit lighting the woods ahead of us. It wasn’t pretty or even hopeful. It seemed like god was crackling in the embers, cracking, burning. The god of the forest waited.
The entity had sent their beasts after us, they had risen from the mud, the putrid pestilence of decay. They raised as the forest ate our steps.
We knew it was the darkness in the side of the fire, as it the god of the woods crept impossibly in that place. It was the impossible, it was the immediacy of the light, the sharpness of the edges of the shadow.
We looked at each other’s eyes, searching at for an answer, a path to follow.
It was an easy decision, not a decision at all. Be eaten by the places and the memories that hunted us. We walked forward.  One foot just ahead of the other, sinking lightly in the organic mud, warm because of the decomposition of flesh and feces. Mushroom were anchors to our heels.
A full stop at the edge of the small grove ruled by the light of the fire. We stood in the realm of the shadows, not that was division made only by the fear of our minds. We knew that it was the body of the god. They breathed in our lungs by the sweet (…), they licked out blood in out mouths. They were the air and the soil.
We stood there weighting our presences in the grove. We didn’t had such thing.
The fire cracked, an invitation and a timing waiting. We set a foot onto the lighted mud and grass and stone. The fire burned from the embers that beat with a pulse, it was out. Our hearts, the contraction of our veins, we were at sync.
The fire pit was taller than us, small moths towards the light of (…)
The wild fire burned, its ashes flew in circles, carrying the heat. This was a heart. That was to burn to burn it all, shunning the dense fog away as the humidity of corpses left. It wanted consumption of the remains, a fair trade for the lived.
We knew.
We had to carry her here. That limp body, hard meat for the maggots, the strong smell of our sin, the blood of the deceased.
We didn’t feel the presence of the god in the grove, we felt it everywhere, even in her. We only realized only now that it had been with us every step, that it had been everything.
We stained our wounded hands dragging her here. She needed fire.
And the fire burned.