Tell your story

https://allpoetry.com/poem/17842398-Maggots-by-Curedmeatmel

this is personal nd i js turned 14, be nice plez

The jungles were at their thickest here. He remembered the density from the week before when he first made his way through the area. Teril Agashono was the greatest elven warrior in his village and it was his duty to thin the numbers of the beasts that infringed upon his people.

He had alone set off, and he alone would return.  His life had been spent training and growing in the shadow of his father, a renowned palace guard to the emperor of Taicozoa. Teril was skilled with the curved long sword and the spear, and he could press an arrow to a bullseye several yards beyond other elves. 

Hunting afar was not unusual for the people of his village, there were large beasts that roamed the outer jungles that were stable food. Many of them feasted on the berries or fruits high in the trees, but still more dangerous beasts prowled upon the thick floors. Fire-cats, Man-Eating Apes, and worse yet, the slender wingless drakes. The drakes swam the oceans from the North Boiling Sea and laid their eggs in the marshlands of Taicozoa. His people often encountered them during the mating season when the drakes traveled inland for food.

Teril often made the journey to the shores. During the wet seasons, he would prowl through the forest into the marshlands in hopes of slaying as many of the beasts as he could. The season had not been unkind to him. He was thankful for the dry days on the way there and now enjoyed them so on his journey back home, his several kills he accounted to the calm of the oceans and wetlands, and he carried the proof of his greatest kills in a satchel upon his scabbard. Three black drake hearts bled through the thick wool sack. 

On a range of years prior he had been caught in a torrential downpour, a flood sought to take him before he escaped higher into a fist of stone that burst through a clearing in the jungles. He watched as the world below him was overrun by the risen marshlands, he had been trapped for five days while waiting for the tides to pull back towards the seas. 

Trekking through the dry jungles with the sun beginning to fade, he was still seeking a place to safely lay his head for the night. He made camp at the base of an incline, prepared in case of a sudden storm. His crude tent had been pitched, and a fire lit for warmth. It felt as though he had slept for hours when he finally awoke.

A distant rumble and an explosion of thunder. His eyes adjusted to the shadows and his smoldering fire pit, its embers sent tumbling out of the safety of the stones from the ferocity of the winds. He felt the tent around him nearly uprooted from the ground. Standing and quickly readying himself to depart, he collected his longsword, his traveling pack, and the satchel containing the hearts of the fallen drakes, and he moved.

His elven feet beat against the shaking ground as he ascended a pathway. Like a sharp pain, a thought stabbed him: "What thunder would make the ground shake?" But no matter; he needed to get to safety. The wet seasons on this northeast coast were deadly and he knew within an hour of rain that the ground below him could be ripped away by currents towards the ocean, even though the sea lay miles from him.

"But where was the rain?" It did not matter, he knew it would soon pour over him, the trees shook violently in the ripping winds. 

His eyes adjusted to the shadows, and before him, the ground and the thickness of it were blotchy grays. His dark-sight was often troubled in this near twilight, though the sky was clear and lit as it tended to be. He broke from a clearing of trees and quickly sighted a small stone cliff face, an easy climb.

A graveled stone face sat under his feet as he left the trees behind. In this clearing, the light of the night sky and its moons and stars illuminated the streams of energy in the air. He was overtaken by a brief few moments of near blindness, as the dark-sight of his people was left in the shadows of the woodlands behind him. His eyes adjusted as his arms reached out to the cliff face and he pulled himself up. He clenched his eyes shut; they burned as they adjusted to the color and light that poured from the clear night sky, dust and debris kissed his face in the climb, forcing his eyes shut further still. 

Even half blind, these movements were simple, a few minutes of climbing passed before he pulled himself upon a flattened stone slab, flinging gravel and debris back down behind him the light pieces crackled gently across the stone below. 

Stopping briefly to catch his breath, and he felt another rumble in the air. He looked to the east expecting to see dark clouds and lightning, then to the north, then urgently all around him. "No sign of a storm" he thought.

The world shook around him and he knew that something was wrong. He felt the hairs on his arm stand straight up, pimples raced across his flesh at a sudden crack of thunder. The wind ripped; it would have tossed a weaker elf from where he stood, but Teril held strong. His heart raced, he felt his gaze lock to the west and felt a thousand eyes briefly staring back at him. He heard a thousand voices, calling his name but was it his name he heard? There were so many chanting voices, words echoing in his mind, languages he did not understand, yet some he did, but the words became nothing after they were spoken, even the ones he knew. 

Something in him felt like running, he wanted to sprint across this mountain and beyond the valleys that lay after, past it all and down into the jungles of his homeland, and further past them to the swamps before the ocean, and beyond that ocean and the one beyond it. Something urged him on, but that same feeling made his mouth dry, it twisted the muscles in his chest, and he broke into a cold sweat. 

Sick and disoriented he shifted as the rock beneath his feet rumbled. The weight in his chest burned as hot as his forehead, and part of him wanted to throw himself from these cliffs to make it stop. He felt pulled in every direction out of fear, out of unknowing. He gasped for breath and felt the fruits and nuts he had forged for the days before come retching up.

Tossing himself to the cliffside and letting the contents of his stomach pour down to where he once stood before, he saw the ground growing farther away, the stone shook under him, bits of rock twisted and broke free, and the sound of tumbling stones grew more distant as his senses felt to fade.

With his fading vision, he gazed below the shifting stone and saw animals frightened and fleeing. The whole world rumbled, and winds ripped leaves from the trees it kicked dust and debris from the mountains around him, and he was forced to cover his sweaty face from the sting of the sand. 

Then came the deafening sound of lightning crackling across the stormless sky. There was no light, no rain, no real thunder, he looked to the sky in horror.

It was as if the night sky itself had been cut open with a jagged blade. The dancing vapor streams of color and magic broke apart and melted into the sky, pulled violently from their path in the sky. Something pulled at him too; some force was strangling him, it seemed to strangle everything.

The stone under his feet began to split apart, little canyons fractured like veins across the surface. Further away, he saw the lands he hunted just the week before falling into the sky. "Am I sinking? Or is the world rising?" His mind raced to keep his footing, then he felt a great weight in the air around him, and finally, he felt pain.

A sickening hiss as the blood within his arms began to boil, and his body felt as though it was wreathed in fire. The sweat evaporated the moment it poured from him. He screamed as loud as he thought he ever could, his throat felt to rip and he swore he tasted blood burning to steam in his mouth. There was no sound besides the deafening quakes around him, the air now rippling so fast it felt it would peel the skin from his bones.

Falling to his knees he felt as if he was going blind. His eyes tried to adjust to the darkness of the night sky, to all the stars that remained in sight, to the two moons that hung so far from one another, both half-crescent and dancing apart, twins in a mirror.

Then he saw it from the jagged split in the sky. He saw beyond the colored streams that danced in the night, an ominous moon without pale light sat still above him, fire lept across its face. 

This world ate the sky below the clouds, it was growing so close, even in his suffering, he knew if he had wings he could touch it. He wanted to touch it, to prove that it was not real. He wanted to wake from this dream to relieve the burning of his skin. He wanted to be with his family, to be a guard of the emperor like his father. He was strong, and this could not be the end of him.

Throwing himself upon the ground in agony, he stripped his clothes to let air kiss his boiling skin, but as the night sky, torn asunder, gazed at his pale flesh, it only kissed him with more fire. He felt as if he was everywhere. He felt as if his mind was being pushed into the ground. He felt like it was being lifted into the air. He felt like it was being pulled to the west for a moment again, and a force not his own began to drag him to the edge of the rising stone.

Stopping mid-way at the edge, he began to convulse and lash around him, his skin scraping against the burning stone below him. 

"Was it the stone that burnt? Was it him?" 

Fighting for what seemed like hours, over mere seconds, he felt the last of him splitting away from himself. He forced himself to his knees and fought blindly past blistering eyes for his sword. A taste of steel to end this torment. He shuffled over burning clothes and finally felt the scabbard, his palms pale with sweat clumsily feeling for the hilt. He felt sick again, his eyes swelling, and blood running down his cheeks. 

Pulling the blade from its final place of rest, the fine steel serrated his satchel that held his trophies. The black heart spilled out onto the stone, one caught by the winds tumbled over the side, and as the blade was further produced, it kissed the tender black heart, splitting it like soft fruit, like the ripple in the sky.

Through swollen eyes, he watched as the shadows overtook him. His visions and thoughts faded to darkness, and his last sight was his arm peeling to charred flesh. The pain had finally stopped, and he dreamed he was falling, falling into the sky, falling towards this invading world that burned his body. He dreamt he passed the twin moons, Elocia and Noenya, he saw the last of all the stars he knew, and his soul drifted into the realms beyond what is known, just as The Titans once did ages before what is known. 

Yet he awoke. He was deep in the ground, covered in stone and rubble. His muscles ached and burned as he began to free himself from the pile, and he found himself in a cave of sorts. He could scarcely make out a blocked tunnel behind him packed with loose rubble. Slight beams of moonlight reached through the cracks offering the only light around him. He had never felt darkness like this before; it was unusual his eyes would not adjust. 

As he began to dig towards the moonlight, his muscles burned and ached, but quickly he felt fresh strength, a power he never had before. He felt ferocious and roared so unlike himself as he spun a large boulder into his would-be grave, revealing the gray light of the moon’s stabbing through dark clouds. 

Emerging from the chilly cave into the warm night air, e felt the wind ripping around him still, and the ground below his feet shuddered and quaked lightly without rhythm, neither as aggressive as they once were. 

The world around him felt so different, though he knew he had not gone far. He could still scarcely make out the stone face he had climbed to try and escape what he thought was a flood, although much of it had now been crushed and collapsed into the pits below where he had awoken.

The half-moons parted fully from behind the dark clouds that poured a white light across the sky, and in that moment the sight of his arms made his face burn and his stomach twist. 

Black scales collapsed upon his arms like a beetle. His fingernails had turned to pointed black daggers; they were sharp and sturdy. He recalled now, even just moments before when he dug from the tunnels, how the sturdy sharpness had made his digging feel unusual. 

His heart thumped in his chest—no, not his chest, some creature’s. He felt his bare body all over; scales raced down, overlapping nearly all parts of him. Some bits of his underarms and belly were soft yet sturdy, like thick boiled leather stretched over his bones, no, not his bones.

He retched again when he felt his tail slap against the stone ground beneath him. 

"His tail?" he thought. "Elves do not have tails.."

The sun was rising when he finally found his sword. Between his fits of sickness, he had tried to lay down through what remained of the night and calm himself. Sleep never took him; his heartbeat was too loud to find peace enough to rest.

The blade was his, but it was different. Once a long curved steel sword, edged on a single side, it still held its shape, but the blade was stained bloody black on the latter half towards the point. The razored edge was now jagged and corroded where the Black Drake's heart stained it. The steel was still strong, and the blade would still cut clean, although with a bite rather than a kiss.

In the clean reflection of the blade, he saw himself with his new wide round, and yellow eyes. The face and head of a black dragon. He was some wingless fiend, a monstrosity. 

"He could never return to his home, and he could never guard his emperor. What would his father think?"

Gazing up at the split sky he saw beyond the mystifying chromatics of the streams of magic that danced in the night air. Staring above the clouds and yet below the stars, all that remained of the great world that hung there mere hours ago, was a hole. A black pit, and if you looked through it, you could see the Storms of Chaos, shifting at the edge of our realm and all we'd ever known. 

That night in the wilderness alone, he dreamed, he was climbing a mountain in the center of the universe, the tallest mountain in all of this plane. At the peak, he stared across a cloudless sky and gazed at the world before him like a map on a table. 

There were tornadoes of fire ripping the land asunder, whole lakes draining into the sea, and strange figures that shifted across the world, towering over the lands below. His eyes were fixated on a black-robed figure who steadily crept across the board. It shambled over the land leaving a shroud of sickness and plagues of insects where it roamed, he stared so long that he felt his eyes turning to sand, and just before he woke, he felt the figure meet his gaze.