ambit
noun
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The guide stopped dead. The slender, wiry man turned to the group he was escorting. All of them were large, powerfully built men carrying large, powerfully built guns. The smaller man was trembling as he spoke.
“We will go no further in this direction. Please, we must go a different way.”
The leader of the soldiers scoffed. “No. We’ll keep going. Our mission is this way, so we’ll keep going this way.”
“No. We will not. We cannot go any further this way. You see this mark?”
The guide pointed to a tree with a simple figure made of bundled and shaped sticks hanging from it. The soldiers looked around, and saw more of them dangling from the trees. It was like someone had made a gallows for dolls.
“Yeah? It’s a little creepy, sure, but that doesn’t matter much.”
“It is the sign. The mark of the boarder to…to His land. His place. We cannot go there.”
“Who? Who’s place?” The soldier asked.
“He is the emptiness. The lack of all things. If you go in there, you will not come out. If you are lucky, you will simply die. It is more likely that you will be erased from the world.”
One of the other soldiers spoke up. He was the smallest of the group, and probably the newest. He did not carry his weapon with the same surety as the others, at the very least.
“What, uh, what’s the difference?”
The guide looked around carefully before answering. “Dead, you still exist. Your memory. Things you did, or made. Erased, it is all gone. Nobody will remember you. Everything you made will be undone. It will be as if you never were.”
The young soldier gulped, and several others looked uneasy. The guide could tell that they did not fully understand though. At least they would most likely not want to go into His domain. That was something.
“Really?” The leader said with a smirk on his hard face. “You girls scared of the boogeyman? Some old story to keep people from wandering too far and getting lost isn’t something we need to be scared of. Besides, even if there is something dangerous in the jungle, I think we can handle it.” He hefted his weapon, pointing the muzzle towards the sky.
“He is not something you can kill. He is emptiness. He is nothingness made real. Even His name is forbidden to say, lest He take offense. If you go in there, you will do so without me.”
The soldier sighed and pulled out a much smaller gun. He pointed the weapon at the guide’s head.
“You sure about that?”
The guide did not blink. “Yes. All you can do is kill me. He will take everything I ever was. If you will not listen, then kill me and go. But it will be the last thing you will ever do. I hope you are ready for that.”
The soldier clicked his tongue and put the pistol away. The guide did not allow his relief to show.
“Fine. You can stay here while we move on. How hard can it really be anyway? We just keep moving in the same direction and we’ll eventually get where we’re going. Come on men, let’s leave this superstitious coward and get this mission done.”
The response was muted. Without any spirit to the voices. But, they followed their leader into His land. The guide went to the trees and began working. He quickly gathered sticks, as many as he could, and began shaping and wrapping them in strands of bark. When he was done, the trees were adorned in several new dolls, each mostly identical to those already there, save for the fact that they carried miniature representations of the soldier’s weapons.
As he looked at the figures, he wondered why he had made them. He knew he had done so, but he had no knowledge of who the were made for, or why they had come here. He let out a heavy sigh. He had eaten, and from the number of figures, had eaten well. The guide shook his head and started on the long way home.
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Horror story material right here, isn't it? It'd probably get picked up by some B-list sci-fi studio and made into a really bad monster movie where the leading woman progressively loses an indecent amount of clothes. And lots of people get tripped on loose rocks or roots that were definitely not there a moment ago. And, of course, the bad CGI monster to top it all off.
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