“How can you?  He had saved my life and you turn him away?”  Zeh’s wife was in tears as she fumbled to get some cake to give to Hew.

“No.”  Zeh grabbed the cake in fear.  “I am sorry.  You have done many great things, but to help you will mean to serve you.  The ruler will kill us.  He says you are trying to replace him and that any followers will have the same fate.”

“You know what I am about.  Your wife was dying from a disease that they had caused and that they had willfully spread.  They are foreign people spreading their germs across all the lands that they have conquered.  You need me just as I now need you. They will continue with their survival as they try to kill our people.  I am not looking to replace such evil.  I can only be me and I look for our people to live as they have always lived, long and prosperous.”  Hew whispered.

“Even still.”  Zeh frowned, knowing his words of being very true.  “I cannot.  We must live to fight another day.  We cannot have them kill us all, for you.  I am sorry.  Leave.”

Hew grabbed the cake before running out the door.  He had taken a knife from a homeless.  They were the only ones that assisted him, but he couldn’t hide forever.  He moved on away from the city, into the shadows of the wild bushes, up into the mountain.  The soldiers preferred not to enter the mountains due to the wild animals that often mauled them.

The path was pitch black, but Hew could see where the soldiers couldn’t.  He was born on the land and knew every inch of it.  His family had many years in history, built the stone mountain and the shallow areas of the sea and rivers.  He knew every inch and was proud; until the foreign ruler came with his kind and spoiled with every step they made.

His favorite bush was ahead, many of days as a child he had ran to it to hide from his father’s punishment.  His mother knew where he was, but she never told.  He missed his mother.  She had died at the hands of the foreign ruler, Zander, who had come with vast multitude of military men, killing all he saw, immediately on sight.  He did no talking, no negotiation, nothing but immediate death to reduce Hew’s people.

Hew sat, once again, in a fetal position, and began cutting the branches off the bush.  Then he ate the rest of the cake and thanked the life and soul of the earth to have given him replenishments.  The foreign people didn’t like the beliefs of his people.  They didn’t like the way his people looked.  They didn’t like the natural powers that his people harnessed.  They didn’t like the fact they couldn’t live without them.  Everything they had learned was from his people.  They were indeed foreign.  He knew they were foreign, because there wasn’t no one from earth that didn’t know how to marry it.  They carried diseases that degraded their skin, their bones, and their blood.  Blood, he has never seen before.  The color of their blood was different.  Their foreign blood was riddled with living parasites living within their body, causing much diseases and depletion.

The cross over to the other side was just beyond the hill on top of the mountain, where he would be safe.  The ruler wasn’t able to penetrate the land of the wild.  It was too much jungle, plus he preferred to focus on keeping his seat.

Hew’s feet were sore and he wasn’t sure if he could make it before daylight.  Barefooted and in a barley bag pants, he was fighting the active night bugs eating at him.  He dug a hole in the ground to lay in and to cover himself with the dirt.  He laid in it, leaving his head out on the bedded dirt pillow.  His eyes were about to close, when he heard footsteps trampling up the hill.  Luckily the bush was camouflaging him, but still he knew he had to move.

Unraveling himself from the bedded dirt, he shook it off while kneeling down.  But the military was getting closer.  He ran to another bush hoping he wouldn’t be spotted.  A thorn had entered the front of his feet making him stumble to the ground, while holding back from crying out.  He pulled one of three thorns out, when he heard a swooshing sound pass his head.  Not knowing what to do, he bent forward and quickly pulled out the other two thorns.  But before he was able to get back up, a fiery arrow went past his head, scorching his hair.