The Discovery of Darkness

The large forest was soaked in blackness, its soft undergrowth heavy with the night. She padded forward, bare feet treading the curling ferns noiselessly. Her quarry, unaware of the presence of a predator, loped gracefully ahead, rustling the leaves in a rhythm that was music to the hunter’s ears. Her eyes, trained by the hunger of days, followed the deer’s movements with a clear, calm ferocity.
Stay. Stay.
At some distance, the deer slowed to a stop like a puppet. Death was calling out to it and, like all animals, it had heard It’s call. Eyes wide, ears pricked, it waited. She stopped breathing and stood still, almost eye to eye with the one she was about to kill. Time flowed in like a stream through the cracks in a door, until she could feel herself ankle-deep in a little pool of anticipation. Then a wave rose inside her and the door gave way. The water crashed in, the spear was thrown, the deer lay dead. The leaves quivered in the wake of Death.
Everything seemed smudged out now. She could barely feel the heavy weight of the food as she carried it on her shoulders. Her mind was abuzz with the noises of the future.
She had the prize. She was the survivor. She. She.
The cave was a night’s footache away from the forest. A large rock, shaped like the tribe leader’s head, stood close to the edge of the forest that overlooked it. As she stepped out of the inky blackness of the trees and into the the vast deep blueness of the sky, she realized that the rock was nowhere in sight. The voices in her head stopped, as if plunged into icy cold water.
“Aaaarrhhh” she screamed, flinging the deer from her shoulders. She was lost. She had lost.
But her anger was soon quenched by the cold. The animal skin draped on her shoulders was old and she had nowhere else to go. The wind was pitiless and the ground hard. The forest moaned its tales of sorrow, lost to the world. She rubbed her hands together and a little current of warmth slid into her arms for a moment before it fizzled out. She did it again and it leapt back into life, caressing her insides. She had done this many times before but had never thought about it. How did she know how to make warmth? She had not been taught and yet she knew what to do. It was almost as if her hands knew what had to be done. What if, she thought, everything else, the trees and the stones around her, knew it too. What if all she had to do was bring them together to make warmth?
In a daze she picked up the dusty stones that lay next to her feet and rubbed them together. Warm! They were warm!
She grabbed two other stones and rubbed them too.
Warm again!
Harder and harder she rubbed them together, till she could feel their warmth without even touching them.
Harder! Faster! Faster!
A thin slice of light crackled in the stones and she dropped them in astonishment.
Her hands were chaffed and her fingers sore but her eyes had been dazzled by the flicker of light and she wondered if she had been dreaming with her eyes wide open. She picked up the stones again and rubbed them against each other in a swift, harsh movement. There it was again! Light! Warm, burning light!
Something whispered to her mind, a memory of the lights in the sky before the rain. They cracked open with a deafening sound and set forests aflame. Like two pieces of stone rubbed together. A forest aflame!
She ran back to the forest and gathered the leaves and twigs that lay on the forest floor. With a new urgency, she rubbed the stones together and set the flicker to the leaves. Nothing. She did it again. Nothing. Nothing. Till one flicker licked a dry twig and it blazed yellow and red, crackling in a broken voice and rising into the air in a thin wisp of grey smoke. She took a leaf and held its end to the twig. The yellow flame engulfed the green in a warm, liquid flow. She looked straight at the white core of the warmth, the fire in her hands.
In a short while, she lay seated next to a large, burning pile of leaves, warm and oblivious, the world bright as day.
She would have fallen asleep had it not rained. The storm clouds had rolled in menacingly and woken her up from her drowsiness. The rain pelted down, snuffing out the fire derisively. Drenched and cold again, she faced the forest for the first time since she had made the fire. Without the fire, the gnarled and knotted trees seemed to be stretching their sinister arms towards her. The forest stood before her like an army, poised to attack. Suddenly, she felt more like a prey than a hunter. Her fire seemed to have darkened the darkness, dissecting the world into eerie shadows that waved their languid bodies over her head. Her constricted eyes could not make out one form from another and the entire forest breathed heavily like a single, hideous creature, waiting to devour her. Alert and timid, she grasped her spear and made her way into the darkness.
The muffled sounds of nocturnal creatures wafted through the air. The leaves cupped the rain till they could hold no more and sent it dripping to the forest floor. She decided not to go too deep into the forest as, for the first time in her life, the darkness frightened her. The fire was still blazing in her eyes and she could not tell one direction from another. That was when she felt that she was being watched.
Could it be an animal waiting to eat her? Or a shadow trying to drag her into the deepest darkness of the world?
She could not stay to find out. She must move. Slowly, she felt her way towards the edge of the forest but a crack of light in the sky lit up her surroundings in a deathly glow and exposed the cracked grins on the faces of the trees. She heard a fierce growling behind her and started to run. Her feet got tangled in the wiry undergrowth and she fell. Another crack of light and it seemed like the trees were closing in on her, pointing at her with their rotting fingers. She scrambled to her feet and ran ahead, losing her bearing in a sea of waving tree-tops. Shadows crept towards her, mocking her attempts to escape. Tiny blobs of light popped in front of her eyes. The growling of the sky pounded in her ears. Her flame was extinguished. The darkness took over.
She was found by her tribe the next morning, delirious in the sunshine, talking about lights in stones and shadows in trees. They took her back to their caves and left her on her own. She filled the cave with pictures. There were pictures of smooth triangular waves which she said was the light in the sky that she had held in her hands and of gnarled faces, disfigured and withering like the diseased trees in the forest, which she said was darkness.
The dead carcass of the deer lay forgotten at the edge of the forest where it was slowly devoured by vultures and Time, the omnipotent scavenger. Next to it lay a pile of black, burnt leaves; the embers of a flame that had led to the discovery of darkness.