Scarab and Fire

The scarab was colored bright green, and brown lines in the middle. Piercing orange eyes, staring at you with a malicious intelligence. It was her unlikely companion on this trip he was taking. This journey. Go south west and you will find what you seek, it had rasped. It never spoke after that. She would have liked to have pretended that it had not spoken. That she had been deluded. But strange things happened around her. Her brain would not let her forget. Every time she thought she might stand a chance, the memory of that day would come hurtling back, crystal clear. Like the eyes of the scarab in her pocket.

Hot and humid outside, she was walking back home from soccer practice. Feeling empty, she had just been picked on again. Stumbled on a rock, tripped and fell barely using his hands to avoid hitting his face. Could feel the burn on them, as what she was sure fresh wounds had opened on them. She raised her head, making to get up, and there it was in front of her. She shivered, scrambling to get up. The scarab had scuttled around one side of her, and then to the other, and then back in front of her. Her brain was screaming, but her limbs would not move. The scarab had said what it had, and then she had passed out. When she came to it was still there, and she knew what she had to do. She picked it up, put it in her pocket, and her dreams had told her what to do. She would go southwest. So she did.

She would find the fish with the stripes. And she had. Over the rainbow, past the clouds, past the fallen star. She found the fish. Living under a stone bridge. It was night when they had met. The scarab had scuttled out of her pocket, and past her face, past the glazed eyes that were as if she sleepwalked, had scuttled onto her shoulder. The fish had appeared whiskers and stripes and all. They had spoken. She had known what to do. The moon was sleeping, she was a full moon today. 

She had walked and walked and walked. Stinking fire, burning water. Through humidity and cold, through warm and cold. Stumbled through snow, disgusting, muddy snow. She felt the prick from the elements on her face and feet and hands. She walked for years. Somehow she subsisted on the elements. The scarab did not age. It was always there. On her shoulder, in her pocket. Never fading, never ageing. She walked all the way across the earth. Until she made her way to her destination. She descended, and then she walked farther and farther. Deeper and deeper. Her face would have burned off, had the scarab not been with her. It might have. She did not notice. Her face was a skull, a shell of her former self. It was hot here in the center of the earth. It smelled, and yet she was at peace. There was a lake of fire, and this was where she and the scarab parted ways. He stepped down off her shoulder, she stepped forward into the lake, tentatively, one step after the other. The fire bubbled in anticipation. She stepped all the way in. The scarab giggled as only it could. On the surface, the world erupted in flames.