The Last Gift

Ch’Voga heard the Monotooth return.  He opened his eyes and its skullish face hovered above his own.  He wanted to laugh at the irony that his last companion should look so much like his people’s mythological representations of Death itself.  He was near giddy; whether from his joy or dehydration he could not say.  “There you are,” he whispered between cracked lips and a swollen tongue.  “Been gone a long time.  You seem to have had a rough…a rough go.”  The creature’s normally scarred and nightmarish face with its gaping maw was even more wounded than before.  One eye-orb was smashed, the forehead looked cracked and something black and faintly blood-like was oozing out and caking on its ashen skin.  “I-I… when I saw you were gone, I prayed for you.”

“Quite remarkable really.  Such… clarity I’ve had since you’ve been gone.  How so many of my prayers have really been about...about me.  My mission.  My service.  My fame.  My glory.  My safety.  But I prayed for you, dear friend!  I knew not your peril, and in… indeed, you seem to have had some.  A sign.  A sign that what I saw… was from Him.  Yah…Yahweh led me to pray for your safety.  I e-even prayed for your soul.”  He reached up and carefully touched the monster’s face.  “I didn’t even think you had a soul?  Are you man or machine?  I do not know, Yah knows.  I prayed you would be… reborn.  Made… new.”

The Monotooth slid away from him then.  “No,” he wheezed.  It was getting harder to talk.  He had so much to say!  “Please, please, last, best friend, come here, come close!”  The creature hopped almost in place.  “Closer.”  An increment more.  “Closer.”  Another inch and Ch’Voga, with all the strength he had left, grabbed its bony arm and dragged it the rest of the way.  “Friend, I call you friend no longer!  Three gifts I have for you!”  He whispered his instructions to the creature, forcing the hapless monster to chop that it understood all he had told it.  Then he shoved his bag with its precious copy of the Holy Scriptures into its fingers along with his second gift and a great sigh of relief.

“Now, now the final gift.  The last gift I have to give.”  He told the Monotooth and it recoiled, slashing the air and if it could,  Ch'Voga thought it would have screamed.