Forts: Liars and Thieves

by Steven Novak

  “What is it hun? Are you warm enough? Need another blanket?” Chris responded quickly while lifting his rear from the bench, anxious to do anything within his power to make her more comfortable. “What’s wrong? Is it too cold? Want to go inside?”

  “No, I’m fine, I just …there’s something I need to ask you.”

  “What is it? Anything you need, just tell me and I’ll get it for you.”

  Megan shut her eyes tightly, fighting back the oncoming tears with every ounce of strength she could muster and discovering that she was stronger than she ever imagined. Her current situation had proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt. After a breath, followed by a thoughtful pause to corral her wild thoughts, she at last spoke.

  “Take care of them …when I’m gone. Promise me that you’ll take care of them.”

  “Take care of who? What are you talking about?” Chris answered, with a hint of confusion in his voice.

  “The boys. Take care of the boys.”

  Like a duffel bag full of lead, the comment settled deep in Chris’s stomach, further churning his already twisted insides. “What do you mean? Of course I’ll take ca—”

  “I know, Chris.”

  “Know what? What’re yo—”

  Megan shifted her body into an upright position with a slight grimace in order to look her husband directly in the eyes. “I know this isn’t exactly what you planned.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Reaching forward, Megan ran her hand across the side of his face. “It’s okay, Chris. I know that this life——this house, your job—it’s not what you planned.”

  Slightly insulted by her statement, and a bit frightened by the fact that there might possibly be a hint of truth in it, Chris opened his mouth to respond. Reaching up, Megan placed the tip of her finger at the crest of his lips, her weary eyes pleading with him to remain silent a second longer.

  “Just promise me you’ll never give up on them, no matter what. Promise me—promise me you’ll be the man I fell in love with. Be patient. Keep them safe. Try to understand them when you think they don’t make any sense, even if they really don’t make any sense. Do your best. Just do the best you can. Promise me you’ll do that, Chris.”

  The comment threw Chris for a loop, instantly making him both angry and frightened. The idea that his wife of so many years could question his love, patience for, or dedication to his children infuriated him. Watching her lower lip quiver ever so slightly as she gazed up at him with her tired, achingly beautiful blue eyes, he found himself unable to formulate an appropriate response. He was upset that she would even suggest such a thing, and more upset because he knew exactly why she felt the need to, though he was unwilling to admit it. A soft breeze floated in from the north, flapping Megan’s hair wildly and rattling the wind chimes hanging over their porch. While aspects of this life might not have been exactly what he dreamt of, not by a long shot, there was no part of him that regretted a single, solitary moment. The choices he’d made to this point were his and his alone, even those that were unplanned and even those that were thrust upon him. Reaching forward, he placed his hands on either side of Megan’s face. She looked tired, the bags under her eyes set deep and worn. Her skin was a blotchy white and red, every day drawing tighter to the skull underneath. She was losing so much weight, slowly transforming into something leathery and worn and just plain different than what she once was. The lone tear cascading down the curve of her cheek proved almost too much for him to bear and he bit his lower lip to keep from crying.

  Despite it all, he could think of only one word to describe her: beautiful.

  Chris knew that he couldn’t be too upset with her, not now, not when she needed him the most, no matter what she might be suggesting. The sickness had tainted her thought process. This could be the only explanation.

  Leaning close to her ear, he whispered with a warm, comforting breath, “I promise.” Once again, it was exactly what she needed to hear, exactly what needed to be said.

  Pulling her rapidly thinning body closer still, he softly touched his lips to hers before wrapping the blanket over her shoulders to keep her from feeling a chill. The promise was more than mere words, more than a way of calming someone he loved so very deeply that also happened to be in desperate need of reassurance. The promise was as genuine and heartfelt as any he’d ever made. Again the wind blew and again the chimes sang. Megan would remain wrapped in the arms of her husband for ten more minutes before the pair retreated into their home for the evening. After carrying her upstairs, Chris laid her on the bed and wrapped her tenderly in the covers. Almost instantly, she drifted into a deep sleep. Chris, however, would remain awake for hours, staring blankly at the bluish moonlight just outside their bedroom window and listening to her breathe beside him. Like life itself, promises can prove tricky business. Though mind-bogglingly intricate, they are often made on little more than a whim. However, like most things in life, promises rarely last forever.

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  CHAPTER 36

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UNICORNS AND PEGASI

  *

  “Holy crap, you’ve gotta be kidding me! I mean seriously, come on, you guys have got unicorns?”

  Upon hearing the boy’s words, the modest group of would-be rescuers turned in the direction of Donald Rondage with starkly similar expressions of confusion. Standing at the far end of a second, slightly larger hangar-like room, Donald now found himself gazing up at a creature greatly resembling a horse, yet was something else entirely. Covered in course, coal-black hair with an ivory colored horn between its eyes that looked like it had been shaved down to half a nub, the massive thing stared back at the boy with a pair of deep, soulful eyes. Though its basic features were strikingly similar to the horses Donald was accustomed, this creature was bigger than any he’d seen before. From head-to-toe, its body was layered with thick, sinewy muscles, a single one of the beast’s enormous legs nearly wider than the length of his body from head to toe.

  “Uni-what? What the hell is a unikron, kid?” Roustaf remarked from the opposite end of the room, his little body floating next to Tahnja as she climbed onto the back of another one of the massive black-furred stallions.

  “Unicorn, not kron, and this thing right here is one of them,” Donald responded, hot breath pouring from the nearby creature’s nostrils warming the flesh of his face like the heat from a flame.

  “We call them Pegasi,” Tahnja stated with a chirp as she strapped herself into a saddle attached firmly to the black beast’s massive back. “Do you have them on your world too?”

  Donald chuckled slightly. “Well, the D&D nerds spend an awful lot of time drawing pictures of them but no, not exactly.”

  Reaching up, Donald gently patted the thick side of the creature’s neck. Its muscles were so tight and weighty that the action felt remarkably like slapping his hand against cement.

  “Pegasi?” He muttered under his breath, his palm still stinging. “That’s a pretty stupid name.”

  From either side of him, the two Tycarians hooked their meaty arms under his, lifted him into the air, and deposited him roughly in the leather saddle. Though annoyed and slightly embarrassed by the fact that the giant turtles picked him up like a sack of dirty laundry, Donald opted to remain silent. This was partially because he realized he very well might not have been able to get on top of the creature without them. Underneath him, the Pegasi stomped its enormous hoofed feet a few times in the soil, lifting its head into the air for an instant to shake the dark mane running along the back of its neck. From his new vantage point, Donald could more clearly recognize the fact that the horn on top of the creature’s head had in fact been filed to nearly a nub. A series of deep, awkward looking grooves were scraped ragged and rough into the now flat tip of the sturdy grayish colored bone. Not only had the horn been filed away, it was filed sloppily. Scanning the area around him, Donald noticed the same feature present on each of the creatures scattered throughout th
e room.

  “What happened to their horns?” He asked anyone willing to listen while reaching forward carefully to touch the calcified nub with the tip of his index finger.

  “The Ochans file them down,” Tahnja responded, while patting the massively muscled neck of the mostly harmless looking Pegasi she was seated on. “They’re easier to domesticate like this. It’s a shame really; when allowed to reach their full potential, the horns are quite beautiful. This is what the Ochans do best though: take what doesn’t belong to them and distort it to suit their needs. It’s what they’ve always done.”

  From the back of the dimly lit room, an enormous furry creature with dark, deep set eyes and a mouth full of two rows of sharp teeth punctuated by a pair of extremely dangerous looking fangs on either side rode from the shadows on the back of yet another black haired Pegasi. “We can make it to the doorway to Ocha by nightfall but we must get moving,” he remarked assuredly, his monotone voice remarkably disguising whatever emotion he might have felt, if any at all.

  “Don’t worry, Brutus. We’ll make it there in time, and once we do, you’ll have more Ochans to slice open and gut then you’ll know what to do with,” Tahnja responded with subtle grin. Though it had only been a few months since she met him, Tahnja had already become accustomed to the vehemently time-oriented nature of her new friend. Though Brutus was the first and only of his kind she’d ever met, she often wondered whether this was a trait of his species as a whole, or a nugget of personality uniquely his own. To date, however, she hadn’t yet worked up the courage to ask him.

  “Wait a minute,” Donald asked, struggling to maintain his balance on the massive, jerking beast heaving underneath him like a bull moments away from being released from its pen. “Are we supposed to ride these things all the way to Pleebo and Slowamennes? Here’s a little nugget of information that might shock you, but I don’t know how to ride a Unicorn. I don’t even know how to ride a horse. I mean, is black beauty here safe? It’s not going to toss me into a tree at thirty miles per hour or anything, is it?”

  Fluttering across the room, Roustaf came to a stop near the Pegasi’s massive ear, which was nearly large enough for him to walk inside without ever having to worry about hitting his head. Gently the little man ran his tiny hand across the space between the creature’s eyes and just under its horn. Slowly the huffing beast relaxed, it’s previously hurried breathing slowing to a steady pant.

  “On foot it would take more than a few more days to get to Ocha, kid, and I’m talking ten or eleven, and that’s if we ran the entire time at full speed without ever stopping. If we’re lucky these guys can get us there before the sun goes down. Let me give you some advice about Pegasi, slick, and I’ve found this works for most things in life. Just think of them like a beautiful lady,” Roustaf paused for a moment, glancing briefly between the creature’s massively muscled legs. “In fact, as luck would have it, looks like yours is a lady. Listen, kid, just be gentle with her. Treat her right and she’ll treat you right. Get a little out of hand, go and make a move you shouldn’t be making quite so early in your relationship, and she’ll send you airborne so quick you won’t have time to apologize …just like a lady.”

  From the opposite side of the room, Tahnja flashed Roustaf a sly smile followed immediately by a wink. After meeting just six months ago, the pair had grown progressively closer. When fighting alongside someone, wading neck deep through the nearly overwhelming emotions brought on by battle, feelings such as these were not entirely uncommon. As it did to most, war had treated Tahnja harshly. When she first encountered Staci Alexander in the prisoner transport, years spent hiding in the Fillagrou forest had reduced her to little more than a babbling, incoherent flood of emotions. She was lost and alone, drowning in the demons of her past and unwilling to even attempt to fight the currents pulling her down. The budding relationship between her and Roustaf was more than simply a result of circumstance, however. It was more than the fact that that he had saved her from the axe of an Ochan soldier in the courtyard of Prince Valkea’s castle, or the fact that they were, for all intents and purposes, the only two remaining of their respective species. There was a shared connection between them, more than friendship and entirely different from love. It was almost as if they were meant to be, two souls chipped into existence from the same block of marble. This was a feeling she had experienced only once before in her life. Simultaneously frightening and exhilarating, this was a feeling they were only just beginning to explore. Though they had been gone for some time, Tahnja could often see the face of her daughter when she closed her eyes, hear the voice of her husband dragging along the tail end of the wind. Exactly as it should be though, with time these visions and sounds were getting blurrier. At least in part, she attributed this to Roustaf. The strange children and the possibility of what they represented had allowed her to focus her mind for the first time in as many years as she could recall. There was the possibility of hope again, and hope was worth fighting for.

  From the opposite end of the room, the Pegasi underneath Brutus leapt onto its hind legs, snorting angrily into the stuffy darkness. “The daylight wanes, Tahnja,” Brutus stated without a hint of emotion from the mammoth back of the beast.

  Again Tahnja chuckled, glancing at him briefly then turning her attention to Roustaf with a grin. “Well, big guy, ready to do the impossible?”

  Leaving Donald’s side, the little man floated over to her and came to a soft landing on the nape of her long, pink neck. Reaching up, he tightened the buckle on his dirty blue overalls.

  “Six months ago I would’ve thought you and me would’ve been as impossible as impossible comes, doll. Now though, traveling to Ocha, sneaking into Kragamel’s castle, and somehow fighting off a few thousand guards to rescue Pleebs and Walcott? Well, that’s gonna seem like an absolute breeze.”

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  CHAPTER 37

  A NOT SO FRIENDLY WELCOME

  *

  Moments after holding his breath and subsequently lowering himself into to the sticky-thick liquid, Tommy Jarvis found himself overcome with strange, yet altogether familiar sensations. It was at this point the ideas of gravity, form and shape again disappeared into the background, unceremoniously replaced by the absence of things common, understood and quantified. Immersed completely in the strange in-between, Tommy forgot about his father, his brother, his mother, Fillagrou, the Ochans and the war. He even forgot himself—if such a thing were possible. To call the act of traveling between worlds a unique experience is akin to referring to the sea as wet or the arctic cold. While both described the sensation adequately, neither came close to capturing the true nuances of the experience. Though his time spent in this void between universes was actually less than a fraction of a second, the fraction dragged like nails across a chalkboard, creating the illusion of time where none existed. At last the weightiness of gravity slid again sneakily underneath his feet, heralding the coming of a journey’s end. The nothingness around him morphed quite dramatically into something gritty and grimy and thick. His lungs, flesh and lips were again given form; Tommy held his breath as a sandy glop melted around his skin like warm fudge over ice cream. Again he found himself fully submerged in the very same tepid glop he stepped into a moment prior, swimming toward what he believed to be up—or crawling, as the case might be—as “swimming” through a substance such as this was quite impossible. From somewhere above, a meaty green paw pierced the black-brown darkness, flailing wildly and searching for the boy in the lumpy sludge. Reaching upward, Tommy wrapped his hands around the three-fingered hand tightly, allowing it to pull him at last from the soundless depths and into the light. Free at last from the goopy slop, he breathed in the air around him as his body was deposited again on solid ground. After wiping a pile of thick gunk from his eyes, he flicked it away with a twist of his wrist. His eyes wiped clean, Tommy took the opportunity to examine the new surroundings.

  Before he had a chance to fully absorb this new worl
d, the same paw that pulled him from the brown sludge shoved him stiffly in the shoulder and slid his mud covered body across the soil. “Get behind me, child! Get behind me, now!” Heavy, gruff and serious, the voice belonged to Nestor Rockshell.

  At this point, the world around him began to come rapidly into focus for Tommy Jarvis. Standing directly in front of him, sword at the ready, his free hand still shoving the boy behind his thick brownish-green shell, was Nestor. Next to Nestor stood another battle-ready Tycarian, and next to him, with a blade in each hand, was Krystoph. The massive wall of green alien flesh was preventing Tommy from seeing who or what the threesome was looking at, or exactly why they had their weapons drawn. Based on the intensity in Nestor’s voice, however, there was no doubt it was something serious. Glancing briefly behind him, Tommy looked to the muddy liquid from which he was just yanked. Neither Staci, his brother nor the remainder of their group had yet made the journey through the doorway from Fillagrou and into this world. More than likely, it would be only a matter of moments before they did. Without warning, Krystoph broke away from the threesome, charging forward in a semi-crouched position, his jagged teeth clenched and muscles tight.

  The instant the Ochan disappeared from Tommy’s sight, Nestor turned hurriedly toward the boy, leaning his massive shell over of him like a great stone umbrella.

  At the top of his lungs, Nestor screamed at the soldier to his right, “Incoming volley! Get down, Reginald!”

  With the Tycarian’s massive body covering him entirely and bathing him in deep shadow, Tommy heard an odd sound, similar to a whizzing or possibly a hum, getting louder and closer by the second. An instant later, three nearly two-foot long arrows sailed in from above, thrusting dangerously into the soil a few feet away. These three arrows were immediately followed by more—many more, in fact. While some of the steel tipped weapons missed Tommy and the Tycarians completely, sticking upright in the grass around them or sinking into the sandy liquid behind, others contacted the back of Nestor and Reginald’s protective exteriors with sickening clanks. The sound of metal against shell proved terrifying: a hollow, painful, echoing crack that reverberated in every direction.