From this hammock they recovered something, grabbing it firmly and raising it for all to see like a sacrifice to the gods governing his impending doom.
A head, human in semblance and female in faded appearances, was revealed before Mr. Edward, its pallid face stricken with the gossamer hints of livor mortis's chilling touch.
Glowing green, sunken, and emaciated eyes stared at him, Mr. Edward, that is, with a lifeless longing, bereft and unspeaking, bruised and torn skin caught between putrefaction and ruin.
It was death, irrefutable in its likeness, the final immutable truth.
" /ጥ ⩤⩃Ϟ Ȟ/⩯," one from the crowd shouted giving way to a discordant and almost feral response from the rest.
It was chaotic so that even Mr. Edward couldn't help but sink into the pits, his eyes darting between the menacing yet remarkably carefree men who held the dismembered head and the maelstrom that was the raging crowd.
His mind raced. He could not run away, and the only plausible solution required some degree of diplomatic action—a feat rendered impossible by the insurmountable language barrier.
Yet whilst he could not understand the words spoken, he could at least hear them, each strange syllable dripping with malice.
"ጥȞ/Ϟ &/ꓓ?"
"Ȟ⍥⩤ ጰ𐑮ŋԐᒻ"
"/ ጥ⍥ᒻꓓ ߠ⍥ŋ ጥȞԐߠ'𐑮Ԑ ⩃ᒻᒻ ጥȞԐ Ϟ⩃⩯Ԑ"
"⩃ռꓓ ȞԐ'Ϟ Ϟ⍥ ⩤Ԑ⩃&"
"ѦԐȞԐ⩃ꓓ Ȟ/⩯!"
"ѦԐȞԐ⩃ꓓ Ȟ/⩯!"
"ѦԐȞԐ⩃ꓓ Ȟ/⩯!"
The cacophonous, rage-filled voices of the crowd dragged him from his daze, and Mr. Edward, instinctively sensing the peril ahead, stood up, eyes widened and voice raised.
"It wasn't me, I found it like that!" He shouted when he shouldn't have.
But his pleas were met with an unyieldingly hostile response from the crowd.
"⩤Ȟ⩃ጥ ⩤⩃Ϟ ጥȞ⩃ጥ Ϟ⍥ņռꓓ?" One yelled, "Ȟ⩃Ϟ ȞԐ Ᏽ⍥ռԐ ⩯⩃ꓓ?" Another continued, an undertone of confusion or surprise mixed it their voices.
It was of no surprise to Mr. Edward that his words were as foreign to them as theirs were to him, but here he was, the illiterate, the madman, yet again accused of murder.
It was harrowing, this feeling of isolation, a chasm of loneliness even amidst a sea of human forms. Yet Mr. Edward was not having it. He had to prove his innocence; he could not endure another wrongful accusation.
"Not me," he shouted again, this time frantically gesturing with his hands in an attempt to convey meaning.
But his time had run out.
A crushing force seized the nape of his neck, and he was hoisted like some trifling doll by one of the red-eyed men, his breath stolen by the suddenness of it.
Mr. Edward, eyes widened, and limbs thrashing vainly in a desperate attempt to free himself, shouted. "It wasn't me, it wasn't me I've been framed!"
But none could understand him, and yet they spoke so harshly to him, their words, though unintelligible to Mr. Edwar,d, cutting deep at him as he could, to some extent, understand what they tried to portray.
"Ȟ⩃ռᏵ ጥȞ⩃ጥ Ᏽ𐑮ԐԐռ ԐߠԐꓓ Ѧ𐑮⩃ጥ"
"Ȟ⍥⩤ ጰ⍥ŋᒻꓓ ȞԐ ⩯ŋ𐑮ꓓԐ𐑮 Ȟ/Ϟ ⍥⩤ռ &/ռꓓ?"
" Ϟ/ᒻԐռጰԐ " One of the red-eyed men shouted with a rather powerful and resounding voice at the seething crowd, quieting them immediately.
There was silence in the hut, an eerie pin-drop silence with the only sound being the faint yells of the entity known as Mr. Edward.
But what was known and what was known by them were two irreconcilable things, like different sides of a surface.
Mr. Edward, now on the receiving end of what he could only comprehend to be the wrathful outraged voices of the crowd, was forcefully dragged outside, the people giving way.
The grip of the man was like an immovable force that he could not escape even with the strongest of wiggles.
The transition from the confines of his prison to the outside was a torment, not a relief, for Mr. Edward.
He had once wished to explore the world beyond the mud hovel, but now that he had been thrust into its clutches, an overwhelming dread seized him.
His first instinct was to gaze upward, to seek the sky as one might yearn for salvation, yet what greeted him was a void, an impenetrable chasm of darkness, one so absolute that it seemed to consume any notion of light.
Yet from this abyssal firmament, a persistent, dreary drizzle descended, soaking the ground and air alike, cloaking everything in eternal dampness that suffocated rather than refreshed.
The only break in the endless night above was the strange rope's slender tendrils that writhed like the broken limbs of some nightmarish leviathan.
They stretched from the void, curling downward to the ground like the forgotten remnants of a long-dead world.
It was only the faint, sickly glow of fungi clinging to these grotesque appendages that allowed Mr. Edward to perceive them at all.
The fungi's eerie luminescence was no comfort, for it painted the world in pale hues, casting everything in shades of decay and hopelessness.
Without warning, the hands that dragged him forward tightened, and Mr. Edward found himself unceremoniously flung to the ground.
Pain blossomed in his chest as the air was driven from his lungs.
He struggled to rise, each breath a fight against the weight of the world pressing down on him.
His hands sank into the wet earth, a thick, black mud that clung to his fingers like the cold grip of death.
Desperation seized him as he looked around, and what he saw made his heart race with terror.
The structure he had been dragged from, if it could even be called a structure was a conical hovel of damp, grey mud.
It sagged like the corpse of some ancient beast left to rot.
From the hut, ropes woven from some coarse, fibrous material extended and were lashed to the nearby trees.
These trees, if such abominations could still bear the name, stood like twisted sentinels in the gloom.
Their bark was black as pitch, and their leaves draped over the branches like wet, rotting cloth.
The roots of these monstrosities dug into the unforgiving rocky soil, festering with patches of the same luminous fungi that plagued the ropes above.
All around him, these trees dominated the landscape, their grotesque forms blending into the ever-present shadow.
But even they could not hold his attention for long, as a crowd began to gather from the void, their pale faces observing him with a curiosity that bordered on menace.
They were human, or so they seemed at first glance but something about them was deeply wrong.
Their skin was pale, unnaturally so, devoid of the healthy imperfections one would expect.
Their eyes were not like the strange, red-eyed, or green-eyed men who had dragged him here; those had glowed with a terrifying intensity.
No, these beings were different, their gazes dull, almost lifeless in comparison.
Yet there was something far more disturbing in their very ordinariness, as though they represented a grotesque mockery of human life, a far more beautiful imitation that bordered at the uncanny.
Their hair, long and thick, seemed washed out, faded to the point of near colorlessness, and their eyes sparkled with a cold, distant gleam, like the reflection of the moon upon a stagnant, frozen lake.
Even more unnerving were the men, robust, their forms exaggerated beyond what seemed natural, their muscles bulging heavily under their skin as if they had been molded for labor by some cruel hand.
The women, too, were lithe and unnaturally graceful, yet there was a wrongness to them, an unsettling perfection that made Mr. Edward's skin crawl.
Despite their familiar forms, there were subtle distinctions that pulled them further from the human frame.
Their eyes were wider, more predatory, their ears slightly pointed, and their breath so strong that Mr. Edward could feel its pull from several feet away, seemingly wanting to suck the very air from his lungs.
His own breathing, labored and shallow, seemed futile against the greedy vacuum their presence created, but he could tell that, in essence, he appeared one and the same.
But then there were the children. They gathered around him, their curiosity palpable, yet it was their breath that struck him most.
It was as though they consumed the very air of the world around them, their eyes wide and gleaming with an unholy light, their features twisted into something both innocent, perfect yet monstrous.
Mr. Edward recoiled instinctively, his mind reeling with the implications of what he saw.
"What kind of unnatural forces have shaped these creatures?" he asked, his heart pounding in his chest as the strange beings continued to stare at him with their angered eyes.
As he was dragged once again across the rocky terrain, his limbs aching and his mind fevered, Mr. Edward's thoughts turned inward, struggling to grasp some rationale for the horror that surrounded him, his situation dawning on him as he asked again as though expecting an answer from the void.
"What abominable conditions had shaped them into this?"