Prompt 486 Dark Path - naughty_bangles - Dark Path - Original

[naughty-bangles.livejournal.com]

Title: Dark Path
Author: naughty_bangles
Disclaimer: All mine!
Prompt #486 Dark Path
Note: I'm back from an epic succession of bad luck. First, Internet went out at my place for a week and a half. Which sucked big time since it happened on a Thurdsay and made me miss two week-ends. Then, for some reasons, LJ had decided I needed to revalidated my email address to post anything, except I never received any of the revalidation emails I was supposed to get. And out the third week. This week I noticed that LJ doesn't bother me on the computer at work, only on mine at home. So I don't know. Anyway, I know I've missed way too many weeks as it is, and my participattion count is broken, but I'm still posting the texts I've written while I was waiting for things to get better. You never know.


I remember the day I realized I was going too far. I don’t remember the date precisely, since at the time, the petty ways human use to measure the passing of time and life didn’t mean anything to me anymore. But I remember the moment. The feeling.


It was nothing special, at first. I was sitting on the edge of a fountain, under the vivid sun of Italy. I had been living a glamorous and rich life in Rome for a couple of month, enjoying the good food and the nightlife. I pretty much only had to snap my fingers to get anything I wanted. Everything was the way it had been for years.


Why I noticed the street animals that day, I don’t know. I hadn’t been in contact with nature since the day I decided to use the power of the cross. Animals were little more than decoration for me. I think what brought my eyes on the cat at first was the spot of black he shaped on the sun-painted plaza. I had been expecting to find a lazy ball of fur laying there to warm himself up, caring little about what happened around.


But his body language told another story. Ears flat against his head, tail twitching madly, crouched as if waiting to attack, or, more accurately, waiting to see if he would need to defend himself, it was a cat facing a potential territory rival, a potential threat. And he was looking at me.


I wouldn’t have thought much of it if it had been an isolated event, but I was still looking sharply at the cat when an old lady crossed the plaza, scaring the feline away. She stopped not far from me, a paper bag in hands, and began throwing pieces of bread on the ground. A huge flock of birds, mostly pigeons, flew down on us to grab the meal. None of them showed me any sign of attention, but they stayed away from me, even when crumbs fell next to my feet. No matter how much food was near me, the pigeons drew a perfect circle around me, unconsciously careful not to get within my reach.


I wasn’t connected to nature anymore, true, but I wasn’t as far gone as to not notice the signs. When animals begin to act like you’re an evil thing, it usually mean you are.


I didn’t sleep that night. I got the books and testimonies about the cross I had gathered and scanned during my quest for it, and I read, and read, and read, until my eyes were hurting me. I read and re-read the parts I had ignored during my search, the one talking about the power, the dark path it lead to, and the ghosts it produced. And I thought, long and deep, about those previous years, and I saw now what I had ignores then : the signs were there, the signs showing I was already far on that path, so far nature would feel the darkness surrounding me.


The question was : was I too far already?