Curse of the Red Evil

by Zel Spasov

  “Miss Starosta won’t be happy about this,” said one of the techs. “If news about this spreads, the secrecy of our cult will be in danger. Miss Starosta wants to make sure that everything goes according to plan.”

  “Miss Starosta isn’t here right now,” said Persephone. “I will deal with this.” She looked at the nurse’s assistant with her icy stare. “Also, we’re not a cult. We’re an organization. There’s a difference.”

  Hidden behind a turned-over table, Doctor Petrov was half-heartedly giving out orders. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this situation, but as the official director of the hospital, he was expected to meet some minimal requirements.

  “Doctor Petrov,” Doctor Dimitriou said, “find a way to get into the dining room. If we don’t bring the patients back to their rooms in a short time, people will find out. And once they know that you can’t run this hospital, well, then... they will find someone who can.”

  The doctor’s body went stiff with terror. He muttered a “Yes... of course...” and started lecturing the techs on how to break through the barricade.

  Amid the chaos, Persephone noticed Nurse Venari’s silhouette out of the corner of her eye. Persephone could smell her fear, taste it. Varvara shifted uneasily from side to side, averted her eyes, and disappeared behind the corner. Persephone would have to deal with her later.

  Now she had a more urgent task. The meek Director Petrov wouldn’t be able to break into the dining room. The burden of capturing Cayden laid on her shoulders. She was afraid that even Bernard would fail to get to him, especially if his brother, Zacharie, appeared. Cayden was too dangerous to be left to wake up. No one knew the damage he would be capable of once he was released out into the world.

  Chapter 7

  S omewhere along the River Toska, Cayden, the Sloth, and Charles drifted down the stream on their raft. Next to them lay their shield, from which the arrows of the guard jutted out. On both sides of Toska grew groves of trees, and every now and again a hill appeared behind them to diversify the otherwise flat landscape. In the distance, Cayden could distinguish the silhouettes of wheat, but even with the light of the full moon shining on them, he couldn’t see anything else.

  The Sloth, who had just literally been hanging from the moon, was now sitting calmly on the raft. A slight smile perched on his face as he pawed in the river, leaving a path in the water. The wounds of the arrows were still visible on his legs, but the bleeding had stopped. The Rabbit seemed tired but tense. His tail shivered slightly from time to time.

  Cayden was still dazed by recent events. He felt that several weeks had passed since he had woken up in that bed in the room without a roof. He still had no idea what was going on, and he was generally unhappy with the situation. His rescuers had brought provisions with them, which he had attacked as soon as they had gotten far enough from the city walls. However, the food hadn't calmed him down. He was being drawn into one situation after another, without anyone asking him whether he agreed. Ever since that Frog…

  “You don’t look so well,” Charles interrupted the flow of his thoughts.

  “Yes, you see, back there, I almost died,” replied Cayden.

  “It seems like you have a lot on your mind,” said the Rabbit.

  “Since when do rabbits talk so much?” asked Cayden with annoyance. “And did we just hang from the moon?

  “Yes,” said the Rabbit. “Was it your first time?”

  “You could say that. How did we…?”

  “I don’t know,” said Charles, shrugging his shoulders. “Just like that.”

  “What do you mean, 'just like that’?”

  “Like that.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “How do you beat your heart?” Charles asked. “Or how do you make your liver work?”

  “Well…”

  “That’s right. You don’t know either.”

  “I know!” Cayden said. “There are centers in my brain that send electrical impulses to my heart, which makes it beat…”

  “All right,” Charles said, “and how do you make your brain send those 'electrical impulses’?”

  “It’s not conscious.”

  “So you don’t know.”

  “Fine, I don’t know,” Cayden said.

  “In the same way, the Sloth doesn’t know either. But he did it anyway,” the Rabbit said conclusively.

  “But I can’t grab the moon.”

  “Have you ever tried?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “It’s impossible!” Cayden threw his hands in the air in despair.

  “How do you know if you’ve never tried?”

  “The distance to the moon is too large. A human can’t reach out so far, and even if he could, his hands would freeze in the cold of space!”

  “And still the Sloth grabbed the moon today.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Cayden said.

  “And yet it happened.”

  Cayden decided not to ask more questions on this subject. He feared his head would explode.

  “Who are you anyway?” he inquired instead.

  “You… Don’t you remember?”

  “What don’t I remember?”

  “Oh, you really don’t remember,” the Rabbit said. “This is bad. Or good. I’m not sure.”

  The Rabbit hesitated. The Sloth nodded at him, then returned his cheerful gaze back to the landscape. His permission seemed to distract Charles’s doubts.

  “I’m Charles, and this is the Sloth. We are members of the Resistance!” the Rabbit proudly said.

  “Which resistance?”

  “The Resistance. There’s only one. Did you see that red thing that grabbed Jean? That was the Red Evil.” Charles’s voice became gloomy. “That’s our enemy.”

  The Sloth gazed calmly at the river ahead. After a short silence, Charles continued. “You’ve been here before. You were the King of Agapea.”

  “Of course I was,” said Cayden in a sarcastic voice. “And we all lived in the castle like a big, happy family.”

  “So you do remember!” said the Rabbit enthusiastically before noticing Cayden’s sardonic expression. “Oh, right. Well, it’s true. The Sloth, Jean, and I were your subjects and friends. But one day you just disappeared, leaving the throne empty.”

  The Rabbit fell silent again. He fidgeted nervously with his paws, avoiding eye contact with Cayden.

  “Then…” he said in a trembling voice. “It appeared. The Red Evil. We don’t know where it came from or what it wants. It seized power and corrupted the hearts of people. It made them forget… Almost no one remembers the times before It arrived.”

  “Then how do you remember me?”

  “We fled,” Charles replied. “Jean, the Sloth, the badgers and I, we all escaped to Windhaven. We’re headed there now. Queen Mira governs over the city and is preparing for war against the Red Evil. She is our only hope. Or she was.”

  Something in Cayden responded to the name “Mira.” His heart pounded a little faster, and he remembered the dream he’d had in prison. The red-haired woman in the picture… He fumbled about his clothes and found with relief that the illustration was still in his pocket.

  “Don’t tell me this is her,” asked Cayden, showing the picture to the Rabbit.

  “It is,” he answered.

  “When I woke up, I had this illustration in my pocket. We must’ve known each other.”

  “You were… friends, before you vanished. After that, the queen stopped discerning between good and evil.” Charles’s voice was full of pain. “Now she doesn’t just want to defeat the Evil, she wishes to destroy all of Agapea.”

  “Let me guess—that rain of fire we experienced earlier was her fault?” Cayden said.

  Charles nodded. Cayden remembered the devastation he had witnessed tonight. Undoubtedly, many had lost their lives in the fires, and even more their homes and their families. He himself had almost died. It wasn’t too fa
r-fetched to assume that the person behind the attacks had a distorted sense of justice. Even if the Red Evil was as bad as Charles described it, there was no excuse for endangering innocent lives.

  “And King Fraud?”

  “He’s just a pawn,” Charles said. “It’s using him to control the population from the shadows. It goaded King Fraud and Queen Mira into starting a war, which will end in the destruction of both cities. We have a plan to defeat the Red Evil and stop the bloodshed, and you’re playing a major role in it. We have to convince the queen not to attack Agapea. If we don’t, thousands of innocents will die.”

  Cayden pulled out the ruby from his pocket. He concentrated on it, wishing strongly for his memories to be restored.

  The stone responded with the words, “Come to me…” The whispers were beckoning him to go back to the castle in Agapea. Fear squeezed his stomach as he thought of his encounter with the Evil. It wanted to suck the life out of him with its horrid tentacles. There was no way he was going back there, thought Cayden as he pocketed the ruby. He needed a break from all of this, somewhere far away where he could lay in a hammock and sip a cocktail from a coconut shell with a little pink umbrella in it.

  Yet he felt responsible for all those innocent souls they had left behind. The image of the child and its mother next to their collapsed home was imprinted in his memory. He tried to chase it away, but it was impossible. Jean was there too. Cayden had grown fond of the amphibian. The more distance he put between himself and the city, the guiltier he felt for abandoning them. A strong urge to try to save as many as he could pulled him back to Agapea, despite his fear of meeting the Evil again.

  Don’t be a fool, he told himself. This wasn’t his problem. Plus, maybe this “Mira” person could help him restore his memories. Now that he knew her name, he felt powerfully drawn to her.

  “I’m coming with you to Windhaven to meet Mira,” he said with a deep weariness in his voice. “Maybe talking to her will help me remember who I am. As for your war, I’m sorry about what happened, but that’s not my problem.”

  “But… we can’t do it without you,” Charles said.

  “I owe nothing to Agapea. Everyone there wants to kill me. They even condemned me to death! Let them save themselves.”

  Charles’s ears drooped. Silence followed. The only sounds that could be heard in the night were the slight rumbling of the river and the songs of the insects on the shore. Cayden listened closely and managed to distinguish the words of their songs, most of them about love:

  “I’m Mattèo,

  when you said no

  you broke my soul,

  oh, my Dulcinea!

  I am to blame?

  For I came

  too late for my dame,

  oh, my Dulcinea!”

  So that’s what the crickets were singing at night. The Sloth moved. With his paw, he pointed behind them to the river. Cayden couldn’t see at what he was pointing—the only thing he noticed was the water trail the Sloth's other paw left behind them. The wave disappeared after a few meters, and the surface of the river became smooth again.

  “Do…” said the Sloth. His slow, calm words startled Charles, whose ears stood at attention. “You think… that… the trail… in the water… steers… the raft?”

  “I’m sorry?” Cayden asked, not understanding.

  “Why…” said the Sloth, “do you… let the past… steer… the present?”

  The moonlight reflected in the water. A little farther upstream, the bright light coming from the smoldering buildings in Agapea created strange images on the surface of the river. The city shone under the night sky. Thick pillars of smoke rose high into the darkness.

  The Sloth opened his maw, and out came a long and slow yawn that lasted for at least half a minute. After closing it again, a process that also took a long time, he said, “Time… to sleep…”

  His body slowly relaxed on the raft’s wooden surface. His breathing became even deeper than it had been before. Then his frame started to shrink. With each exhalation, he became smaller. Soon, the Sloth was the size of a small plush toy that could fit in Cayden’s pocket. His quiet snort had lost his deep bass; it sounded thin and light. Charles took the little beast carefully into his paws.

  “Take him,” he said to Cayden, who looked at Charles with confusion. “The feat of grabbing the moon tired him. He will return to his normal size when he wakes up.”

  After he cautiously took the little Sloth in his hands, Cayden took off his shoes and dipped his feet into the water, then leaned back on the raft and put the sleeping cub on his chest. As soon as his head touched the solid wood, he fell asleep. It was the first real sleep he’d had since he had woken up in Agapea.

  ***

  General Varvara Venari stood on the landing platforms at the fortress of Windhaven, together with two members of the elite guard. She was a resolute woman with an upright posture; straight, light-brown hair; and hazel eyes. Wounds from previous battles marked her face, and a sword hung from her waist. She was waiting for the last member of the group sent to attack Agapea to return.

  Soon, she saw the mysterious rider, wearing silver armor, approach the castle on her winged beast. Far back, behind the walls of Agapea, a giant Sloth caught the moon in his paws.

  The rider pointed her mount to one of the landing grounds. As she approached it, the rider pulled at the reins of the beast, and the wyvern landed lightly like a sparrow.

  When the mysterious rider unsaddled her wyvern, Varvara approached and bowed. The rider took off her helmet, revealing her face. She had fire-red hair tied into a battle braid and cold, blue eyes.

  “The other wyverns have already come home, Queen Mi—” Varvara began to say.

  The queen walked around her, ignoring her. The soldiers placed their fists on their chests, greeting her with a “Queen Mira!” She ignored them as well and continued toward the war room. General Venari ran behind her. Mira was moving too fast; Varvara was finally able to catch up with her in the hall.

  An orderly chaos filled the room. Maps lay on the tables, and military advisors were running around, consulting each other, pointing at lists and moving various figurines. When they noticed their queen, they fell silent.

  “Carry on,” she said sharply.

  Her subjects resumed their activities. The queen entered a small room with simple furnishings, adjacent to the war hall. It held only a wooden table with two chairs. The room was lit by candles hung on the walls and placed on the table. A pile of papers—an inventory of the armies, the supplies they had, and so on—were lying scattered over it. The general followed the queen in the room. When Varvara came in, Mira ordered her to close the door.

  Mira’s stance betrayed her anxiety. Her hands were balled into fists at the end of straight arms, and her knuckles had turned white. Varvara noticed Mira’s armor had blackened in the places where the firehounds must have hit her with their lava. Her chain mail had failed to protect her completely—the skin of her left elbow had been burned.

  “Mira, your arm…” she started to say, but the queen interrupted her:

  “I saw him, Varvara,” she said.

  “Who…?”

  “Cayden. I saw Cayden.”

  Varvara blinked, startled. Cayden’s arrival could turn everything upside down. After his sudden disappearance, the world had plunged into chaos. People had lost hope. Queen Mira and she had fought for survival. With a lot of sweat, labor, and blood, they had escaped from their fearsome position and had found shelter high in the mountains, in the fortress of Windhaven.

  Now that they were on the brink of war with Agapea, his appearance seemed more than a coincidence.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “I was so close to him, Varvara,” the queen said. “I almost had him. They attacked me before I could reach him. By the time the battle was over, he had disappeared without a trace.”

  “But… How? Where has he been all this time?”

  “I don’t know,�
�� the queen said.

  The two women fell silent. Varvara remembered the day when Cayden had vanished and the Red Evil had appeared in Agapea. Mira, she, and countless others had been forced to flee the city or become Its slaves. That day had changed their lives forever. Over time, Mira had begun to blame Cayden for what had happened. His sudden disappearance, which had coincided with the emergence of the Red Evil, had led many people, including the queen, to believe that Cayden had betrayed them.

  There was a knock on the door. Mira said, “Come in!” and a messenger stepped into the room. He carried a piece of paper with him.

  “Message for General Venari!” he said.

  Varvara took the paper and read it quickly. The note was from the colonel general, reporting a shortage of provisions.

  “Problems with stocks,” she said after reading the note. “Nothing serious, but I will need to make additional calculations.”

  The letter focused her mind on the current situation. With or without Cayden, Windhaven was preparing for war against Agapea.

  Over the past few months, Queen Mira’s craving for revenge against the Evil had grown stronger. She was ready to stop It, even if it meant breaking ancient traditions.

  The last assault on Agapea had happened during the sacred Festival of Nine Moons, a holiday with which she and Mira had grown up. By custom, war was forbidden during the holiday, and before this day no one had broken the ban.

  What was worse, the queen had ordered her soldiers to kill anyone standing in their path. According to her, all inhabitants of Agapea were subordinate to the cause of the Evil and therefore an enemy. Varvara had been there when the queen had given the order. Though the instruction had been against her morals, her duty was to follow her queen’s command. A deep wrinkle appeared on the forehead of General Venari. She was fighting with herself.

  “What is it, Varvara?”

  As a general, she had no right to contradict her queen. Such offense could be punished with imprisonment… or death. But Varvara’s conscience left her no choice. She forced herself to say, “It’s the Festival of Nine Moons.”