The Eternal Chase

“Who are you? Where will you go? What is your fate?”

The footsteps rushed in quicker with each passing second. Even though he ran and ran until he felt the very ground under his feet vanish, he just could not brush away the presence that was latched onto him. A fiery gaze burnt through the back of his head and etched into his brain, a constant reminder of his status of a prey, eternally on the run. His eyes dared not to divert from the path ahead, not that he had any destination in mind, he just, ran… for survival. Even though he had not caught a glimpse of what loomed behind, he knew that it was no mere mortal being hunting him. It were as if it were omnipresent, the aura of ‘his’ spread throughout the surroundings, a scentless dank stench set all around, hanging so heavily such as to distort the very plane of space and time about him, the musk of an apex predator, the odor of death and void for mere morsels like him. He could swear that at times along the chase, this formless entity would gain a structure, something eerily akin to himself, mocking him and his futile attempts to cling on to his inconsequential life.

Deep within he knew that he could never outrun the ‘thing’ which was intently chasing him, he knew that if he was merely after his life, he would have been hunted down and his identity consumed before the chase even began. This was ‘his’ world, no matter where he ran he didn’t seem to ever move forward, an endless loop of constants, the same withered, pale trees zoomed past him, skeletons of wood, the corrupted, damp soil underneath had not even a single occasional pebble or a sprout to break its monotony, his feet sinking deeper with every step, the environment closing in on him. It was as if that he was being toyed with, a morsel of apparent hope being dangled before him only to rob him of it for eternity.

"What is the purpose of your existence?"

He was in the chasm of this being's world for such a long time that he has no separate reality of his own.

Is there life beyond this? Is this life?

If so, he was borne from the womb of the creature, his creator, his doom, an eerily cold form of... love. Was he being chased only to be mauled and torn apart by the deep dark fangs of the beast, or was it an innocent chase, a mother playfully running after her child to cuddle him in her warm arms, to put him to a sweet sleep. If he knew how to, he would laugh at the irony of it all:

My mother, death.

“Is this chase an illusion?”, he wondered, “Is there any purpose to the running?”. “Should I stop, earn the final rest that I have earned off of this chase?”, his head started to sway, his lungs deflated, his body devoid of any ounce of energy. His pace started to slow, consciousness fading into the environment, he felt his fingers become one with the environment, the sensation creeping up to the rest of the body, he felt the darkness nibble at him slowly and with much interest, he felt his identity fizz away bit by bit, claimed by the hunter himself. 

“I am the prey. I run through the eternity. The chase is my fate.”

Blood rushed back into his veins, regaining control of what was left of his body. His steps started to hasten again, his consciousness rekindled, his identity restored. 

“There is no rest.”