Ten Steps

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The young man woke up, in the gentle embrace of a warm sky, and he knew, that something was wrong. There was always something there, in the night, in the depths of grace, and in the wrongs of this life. He knew what it meant to exist.
He knew what it meant to be wrong.
He was so wrong.
He got up and heard the rustles in the bushes, unable to contain his excitement. Something rendered him speechless, but he could hold onto that speechlessness just for a little longer.
Ten steps were ahead. He gathered it all up and contained them in his momentum. He was the caretaker of marching steps, and he made sure each was deliberately prized.
He could only contain himself and march onward toward the next stretch, by which point he knew that he could only do it again, but in each successive stretch, there was a growing sense of longing. 
He ran back and forth when he heard a loud sound, because this was it. This was, in a spiritual sense, his potential awakening. If he encountered a beast far beyond his capabilities, he would be freed in a spiritual sense. What else would he be at the end of it all? This was his passed-down destiny.
He got up again, after having sat down for a long while, because he was in need of a break and of a return.
Ten steps were again ahead of him, but this time, he knew well his limits. If he dared to march again, he knew well that the loud sound would reappear, but this time with the danger of a thousand suns blasting heat light upon his skin. He knew well the imminence of his death, if he ever decided to go against the flow of the road mistakenly. And this flow that he was thinking about was the way in which all roads demanded a certain segmented approach to traveling them in terms of time. If he went too fast without breaks, he would meet his end. If he went too slow, the same occurred. If he knew well the shifting pace and how it interrelated with the day-night cycles, he might end up escaping. But as for why he had taken this road, that was something he knew well. It was just not something he wanted to think about right now, especially with the shadows creeping closer in the distance.
The shadows and their nature were abstract, but they were very clearly there. There was this layered feeling that made them feel ethereal in an abstract way, and impendingly threatening in a clear and physical way.
There was nothing left to argue about. He knew that he just had to step into the flow of the road, because the shadows were the ones monitoring his behavior and attitude in relation to the road's dynamics, as if it were a soul, as if it were prized, as if it were the only thing left to guarantee in this world. The shadows were just a representation of what the young man thought to be the supernatural forces that made this road so obscure and scary. When things occurred, he attributed them to supernatural forces outside the bounds of space and time and the corporeal realm.
But part of him recognized that this was only start of it all, even if the underpinnings of his fear came from nonsense. He knew well that there was something to be warned about.
That thing was a man, a threatening one, one who had gone insane and mad, one who had lost his old life and began anew, one who had loosened his grip and found it too compromising, insomuch that he hated it and wished that it was gone. This was what made him dangerous, because he had extremist thoughts, one that wished for the destruction of all things banal, because he saw the extreme in the banal, everyday things; the ones where children sprung up and found themselves in adoration, the ones where people found themselves happily adjusting to the scenery, the ones where people guaranteed their livelihood or destruction, even if it came out of a misinterpretation or a lack of resources, learnings, growth, and knowledge.  
The young man knew that the threat to him, the aforementioned man, was in front of him right now.
He only had to open his eyes, because all this time, he had them attached to the ground, using only his peripheral view to secure his footing and navigation. If he raised them up, he would be cut down, and not just in a step-by-step way, but in a way that ensured culmination and the death of all things in his eyes, which meant death of his soul, of his mind, and of his body. And that was why it was the death of all things for him. But the opening-eyes thing was metaphorical.
The threat was here though, even if he was laughing amid a large crowd of mutilated and disfigured corpses.
The young man, Adrian, was stunned beyond belief, and his ancient years of being a child saw the end of history and time, because his subjective experience could comprehend insomuch that the objective, vast, mountain-flake-world-forming, universal level was his little bubble of a mind.
Adrian, with everything that he was, could only stop still.
He was cut down on the fourth day of the new year.