Isyra: The Last Outpost

Your beautiful features had rotted away long before I realized that I had lost you.

The trail was hard and brutal, no one had maintained it for quite a number of years. The gravel, laid down two decades prior had slipped and rolled downhill. It made the hike pretty grueling. Before long I was sweating through my cheap cotton shirt and yuppie shorts. When I tried to whine and complain you just smiled at me, waved down from an impossible distance ahead and barked some words of encouragement.

I loved that about you. You knew I was always the natural pessimist and chronic whiner. But you put up with me, even as you laid there gargling on your own blood.

Civilization was far removed. You were always the adventurer. Your sense of direction was uncanny, even after I forgot to pack a map in compass in my infinite wisdom. You simply shrugged off my intellectual negligence and said you could find a route if you needed one. It was a state park, after all. Most of the trails were pretty well groomed.

You were like some wild cat. You had reflexes that'd put even my Halo trained trigger finger to shame. So why was it you I found yourself suddenly floating, tumbling into me like some bloody boulder?

You joked about how you'd find a thinner man. You never meant it seriously. Sometimes my mother would ask why I put up with it. I'd always just shrug it off. I knew you were never serious. You knew it. That's all that mattered. We could always see past the faux cruel facade to the truth, even when we thought we meant things in the heat of a shouting match.

So why was it you didn't see the root snaking under the steeply inclined trail, or the loose patch of gravel?