In my mind, I am a creature made of nothing but scattered pieces of bone.
My long, sharp spine stretches for miles. My thin skin, which is stretched taut, like delicate skin stretched over wire, chafes against the nightmare casts about my neck. I want to stretch out my massive head, but the thin neck coils around my two massive heads, keeping them in my place.
I see constantly from two points – the place where the necks meet, and the place where they divide, but both places are blurred by the disaster that is my body.
Remove the crushed forebrain, and the snake-skinned head turns upwards. Remove the shells of the feet, and I have are using my tail to try and stand upright. However, the thick tail tends to pull my arms off, so I resort to standing on my two hindmost limbs. There is a strange, stinging feeling as I touch the ground. I can see the edges of the ground as my huge eye can now see out over my head. The ground swirls and spins, like my vision would when I stand on two legs.
I am the last of my kind, those things with the white birthmarks in the back of their necks. The people fear me, the things without my birthmark, because once you are without, you are without purpose.
Take your place, lead us, and we will push out the man.
That is not our way though. I travel with two of my siblings, who are acting as cows to me. We travel. We wander.
We move.
You would not notice us on the street. We are pale, long things with birthmarks that appear like necklaces through the back of our necks. We keep our heads to ourselves, and avoid contact with the strange things which walk on their hindmost legs and use their forelegs to carry things.
I see you as I see all things. We try to avoid you, but the only other place to go is the sea, and we do not like to be wet. The young ones that my siblings birthed died quickly in the cold, and the people killed them to keep them from hiding their true fears.
We do not like to attack the things that walk, but it is necessary. My vision has been tainted with the red that comes with the death of my kin. My dominant head rolls back, and I ascend the hill.
My siblings will die today.
We came from the burnt remains of the plains. For thousands of years, the thing that attacked us came from that place, and for countless centuries we would trudge through the dust and ash and fight the beast that always managed to escape into the field of fire and rubble.
We are here, because my siblings thought that there was a large enough herd. However, a small band of the things with two hindmost legs has come and they have guns.
I can feel the gun shoot, and I am in a swirl of darkness as the bullet impacts my skin. The world spins as I feel the second gun shoot, and the world goes dark, not by the bullet, but by the sudden vanishing of my consciousness. I feel a pain and tumble down the hill. My legs are partially dead, and the feeling sends a ripple through my entire body.
I am thrown roughly against my brethren. I cannot see anything, due to the fact that I have no eyes, but I can hear the whimper of my girlfriend, the snap of bone, the sizzle of flesh. My other head is moaning in pain. I try to stand up, but my right middle leg is useless against my weight. I try to see, but the white people to my right force me back into the path of another shot.
The bullet does as I feared, and my back breaks in two. I tumble to the dusty, ash short of my siblings, who are screaming in agony, as the other two stood there and let me take their soul.
My siblings lay in the dust, broken and burnt. I try to roll my body over, but my weight is too great. Instead, I get dragged. I reach out for my sisters, but I find only thick, hardened ash. The other two were burnt, too, before they perished.
I may have survived, but my left foreleg is twisted under me. I turn my head to see the tree line, where the shooter entered. There is another beast, crouched with a grin. I feel my body being ripped open and the blade slide into place. My two heads hiss as the creature begins to prod me with the blade. My lungs fill with smoke and then I see nothing but darkness.
I feel a tugging, and I hear the sound of my other self screaming in agony. I hope he does not get eaten by the beast.
The third day had a cold frost. The people of the land were in agony, and the creatures had long since taken to the sea, at the edge of the land, where the land parted from the sea.
There was a disturbance, quickly approaching, and the song of creatures echoing off the rocks.
Light flashed above the brow of the hill. It did not seem like lightning. The brown ground quaked slightly and the sounds of the voices coming from the sea grew quieter. I had heard of this sound before. When I thought about the way the sound had sounded from the past, I heard the word that the one with the strange forelegs at the top of the hill had heard.
