Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 170

This week's photo is from Leszek Paradowski, a polish photographer I have actually had an image from before on Week 162.  He calls it The Beech with Human Face. 

Gone a bit dark this week, apocalyptical. Although a whole other sort of apocalypse. 

The General Guidelines can be found here.

How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.

There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.

Atonement

I crawled across the bed of decaying leaves, the stench of their transformation in my nostrils. As life turned to feed, I didn’t want to risk upsetting them in case I should become their feed too. They grew from what rotted in the ground; some believed those around the graveyards were the strongest.

I wanted to ingratiate myself to the leader. It had to be the leader; it was the tallest in this ancient beech forest, one of the few we hadn’t killed off. Although now they had taken over there would be a comeback.

I reach my hand out and felt something soft and gentle. I dared to glance up at the moss covered root. Was it a foot? Or a hand? I didn’t know, but as soon as I came in contact with it, I was laid rigid by the energy that poured from it and consumed my body, leaving me paralysed.

‘You come to beg for your life?’

The deep rasping voice seemed to emanate from deep within my brain. Each word felt like a migraine as though they were being pulled from me, but weren’t mine.

‘Please,’ I whispered, unsure whether I had said it out loud or only thought it. It was all I could do from my prone position.

‘Why? You took our lives in their millions. Why should I spare yours?’

The energy rose to an excruciating pitch. Every inch of my body twanged with nerve rendering sensitivity like I was on the tip of a dentist’s drill. Then rage swept through me; a blinding fog of red spreading through my mind, and I could feel tears running down my face. I was feeling what they felt.

It might have taken them millennia to find a way to take over, but they had, en masse. We’d thought we’d known so much, but we’d known nothing about how they lived; their symbiosis with other plant life and other species; their ability to poison the air and the earth; the refined methods of using transferral between all these things to bring a stop to human life and their way of living.

Then they had started to “communicate” with those remaining. It was painful but at least it gave us a chance to understand and maybe atone.

That was why I was here. It was my turn to offer myself to them, to appease them, to be of service. I had no idea what that might mean. No one who had offered themselves so far had returned. I could only hope I’d be the first.