by Travis Smith
He resigned himself to continuing along the street rather than sneaking behind the houses. The short walk through the outer quarter was unsettling even in light of the things Patrick had been though in the past several days. He glanced from side to side during this short walk, scanning the area for the skinny cat he’d encountered on his way to the fields, but it seemed that even that creature had sought shade to escape the heat.
At the second group of buildings, Patrick was less surprised to find not a sole person out in the open. He drew his knife, however, and steeled himself to go into one of the quiet cottages. Even with the profound silence of the area, he steered clear of the buildings on his left, where he had heard the clatter on his way through the first time. He approached a house on his right and peered through one of the windows. No one appeared to be inside, but he tightened his grip on the knife in any case. He had no plans to starve to death in this forsaken wasteland, and, while he hoped he didn’t encounter anyone while pillaging this house, he had no qualms about killing them if such were to occur.
4
Once inside the small house that considerably resembled his own and every other in the district, Patrick scanned the dark den as his eyes adjusted from the white-hot brightness of the day outside. Nothing seemed particularly threatening. Decorative sculptures and carvings littered the floor, knocked off of their respective tables and stands, forgotten and abandoned. A wicker chair lay on its side near the far wall. A few ceramic plates and bowls were scattered about the middle of the room. Patrick was sure the kitchen area would be an even greater mess, and he wasn’t disappointed.
He held his knife ready to strike as he crept around the dark corner and peered into the kitchen. He glanced down the hallway toward the two dark sleeping quarters, but no one appeared to be in any of these rooms. The house was vacant.
In the kitchen, cabinets and drawers were open, some even torn off their hinges and sliders. The contents of nearly every one was spilled upon the floor and scattered from wall to wall. Not all the valuable goods had been taken or destroyed, though. Patrick felt delighted and hopeful anew to find jars of cornmeal and even a variety of preserved fruits and vegetables from far south of Mitten and Central Fordar. He opened his sack and carefully began hoarding the glass jars, taking care not to damage them with his large garden shears he was saving for a rainy day. The sack was almost a quarter full when he noticed a jar of what looked to be pure water lying beneath an overturned drawer. He held the jar up to the sunlight that shone through the window and marveled at its clarity. He hadn’t even thought to check his own supply of water since the incident, but he certainly wasn’t prepared to trust the groundwater or well water after everything that had happened.
While Onton and many of the other smaller districts peppered throughout the large nation of Fordar utilized wells and rudimentary forms of running water, the greatest supply came from the skies. Even the aristocratic districts in Reprise had the good sense not to waste such a simple and precious commodity. Rainwater was collected in pots and buckets and cheap, thin jars, and the containers were stocked and stored by every family who wished to live through a single working day. These jars of water were often used as small, basic trade items. Even the poorest of families had enough drinking water to last through the longest droughts, and even when the weather outlasted them, they could resort to the communal wells. Lately, though, things had changed, and not for the better.
Patrick found three jars of what appeared to be usable water and stowed them in his growing pouch. At this point he began sweeping and sifting through the clutter and broken glass and wasted, rotted foodstuffs on the floor. He was creating a confined clamor and heard not when the cottage’s front door—which he had unwittingly left cracked—was pushed open and squeaked quietly on its hinges. The sound, minute though it was, should have alerted Patrick’s heightened senses, but in his current excitement, he heard nothing until the intruder had come too close.
5
By the time he gave up and stopped sifting through the litter, Patrick stilled for just long enough to consider the possibility that he might not still be alone in this cottage. He’d left his guard down just long enough for someone to creep out of the shadows and blindside him while he was here in a stranger’s house on his hands and knees.
Before the thought fully entered his brain, he heard the click directly behind him as something stepped upon a lid from one of the broken jars. He immediately wheeled around fast enough to sprain something in his neck, reached unsuccessfully for the knife in his waistband, and landed flat upon his back on top of his satchel, crushing several of the jars he’d just placed inside and sending flares of pain into his back as shards of broken glass pierced his skin. Excited by Patrick’s sudden movement, the thin cat he’d encountered earlier that day dropped the piece of blackened banana peel it had picked up from the floor and screeched its sincere disapproval. The cat backpedaled and slid the broken jar’s lid across the dirt floor. Its paws wind-milled comically as it struggled to regain footing with its back paws before rolling over onto its back, twisting its upper body impossibly around to face the doorway, and tearing its way back out the front door, mewling and howling all the way.
“You bastard!” Patrick yelled, seizing a jar of brown fruits that appeared to have captured some air inside and throwing it after the cat, who was long since out the door and on its way across the street.
He stood up and gingerly rubbed his back, trying to brush off as much of the broken glass as he could without doing any more damage. Upon surveying his flattened, wet satchel, his frustration flared again, and he picked up the pack and threw it angrily at the wall, an act which he later came to sorely regret.
Frightened at being caught so off guard, angry at being frightened, and even angrier at losing more than half of the food and water he’d just salvaged, Patrick picked up his sack, slung it over his shoulder, and set off grumpily out the door. In his ire, he didn’t even think to look out the windows.
Outside he immediately knew that he had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and no way to escape. In the streets that had been utterly deserted only moments before, what seemed to be the entire district of Onton stood in a vast crowd that expanded nearly all the way to the market center. Many—if not all of them—were already staring directly at him.
What flashed through Patrick’s mind in that moment was not what one may call “his life,” but a single, coherent memory of the last day that he had felt genuinely alive.
6
News from Reprise travelled swiftly, even with the considerable Great Sea separating the land from Fordar. The old king was slain, and a much younger man had usurped the throne. A man who not only failed to share the direct bloodline of The White—The Vita—but who had challenged and somehow overcome the white magic upon which Reprise and the surrounding nations had functioned so prosperously and harmoniously for hundreds of generations. A man driven by greed and corruption who defied every basic principle by which the citizens of the world lived and had always lived.
In some places deserters were instantly slain. In others they were imprisoned and enslaved. In others still they were tortured and brainwashed. The Baron had roots and trustees deep in the heart of Fordar at the time that he stole the throne in Reprise, so patrolling and controlling both great nations came with ease. Children were to be indoctrinated from birth, thereby instilling the tenebrous values of what became known as The Barony of Reprise—the kingdom that was. Many of the young were instantly taken by The Baron’s deputies and enslaved and imprisoned for future use or experimentation. Most precious goods and resources were ordered directly to Krake, the former king’s city in Reprise, where The Baron would likely hoard them and generously reward his loyalists while the rest of the world fell to shambles around his mighty kingdom. The magic that once presided over the lands had faded, and in its place descended a dark and foreboding curtain.
The elders felt it as much as the children, who were exposed only to bits a
nd pieces of conversation and rumor and hearsay. The parents worried, as parents are wont to do, but they generally hid this concern from the imaginative minds of their children. But the children worried, too. Playtime in Onton became more often than not a time to sit and morosely lament all that would be lost when The Baron’s men decided to give their small town a visit and take many of them into captivity. The severity of this new reality weighed on the minds of Patrick Oliphant and his young peers in a way that often wouldn’t begin until long after puberty has finished. This was the first of many causes for Patrick’s expedited maturation.
Time alone with his thoughts during the nights—which seemed much darker than they had before—was bad enough; Patrick soon grew weary of the doleful discussions in the fields behind the outlying sectors of Onton. When playtime came—at the hottest hours of the day when work in the cornfields was most often put on hold—he found himself thoughtlessly ambling around the outskirts of the district, picking blades of grass and throwing small clumps of dirt by himself.
On the day of the incident, Patrick had ventured deep into the cornfields, much farther than he was used to travelling when he and the rest of Onton were out picking crops. He lay in the tall grass and stared at the blue sky, trying to remember how much bluer it had looked before everything had modestly darkened. To keep his mind off thoughts like these, he closed his eyes and began to softly sing the songs with which his mother would once send him to sleep. His gentle, prepubescent voice escaped with a mellifluous clarity that may have been startlingly impressive to anyone, had they been around to hear him.
“Soft, darling, as the wind,
The time has come for slumber, then
You’ll wake to find a bright new day
Where all your woes have whisked away.
The Night shall take you in her arms
To shield you from unrest or harm;
You’ll wake to find a bright new day
Where all your woes have whisked away.”
Patrick repeated the refrain until his voice trailed off and his mind stopped racing and, while night had yet to come, his rest shielded him from worry, unrest, and harm. He awoke to find the day bright still and his woes as whisked as ever. But only for a few more precious moments.
He swiftly made his way back through the cornfields toward the outlying quarters. The sun had not quite reached the horizon, but he had dozed long enough to likely lead his family to wonder where he had gotten off to. When he reached the outermost group of cottages, his heart skipped wildly and a wave of unreality washed over him. Every human he’d ever known appeared to be pacing mindlessly and wordlessly throughout the streets like reanimated corpses. But these weren’t corpses. These people weren’t dead and never had been. They were dreadfully, undeniably sick, though. Dismay nearly brought Patrick to his knees as he observed two unwed individuals fucking beside one of the small houses. “Fucking” was the only way to describe it, for these two were not making love. This was an animalistic, instinct-driven act whose function could be only to spill seed and fulfill base desires. When the man on top finished and bit the woman below, Patrick had to stifle a cry. But when he took a chunk out of her arm, she reached up and did the same to him. The two stood and walked away without a single word, still chewing on each other’s flesh.
Patrick allowed the tears of horror to stream freely down his face as he ducked and crawled and dodged his way back toward his own home, observing the atrocities before him on the way. These were no longer his friends and neighbors. These were doltish carcasses who appeared to exist only to bite and fuck, forever spreading disease and diseased offspring. The thought of being noticed and captured by one of them was worse than any fear of captivity or enslavement Patrick had felt. To be bitten or, worse, raped by one of these monsters…The notion was enough to send the boy into insanity. But the worst was yet to come.
When he finally arrived home with the naive hope that his family would be different despite the fact that everyone he had encountered was gone, he found the door standing open and the house empty. Empty save for a broken window and a tough glass vial lying in the kitchen floor. The vial was thick and cylindrical like an hourglass, but the ends of the tube were flat, so it may stand upright. These ends seemed almost squared, as four hard black prongs emanated outward and curved toward the center of the vial. These four spiraling prongs looked to serve as a type of stand, and between each set of four sinister projections were a series of small holes through which a gas or liquid likely escaped and infected Patrick’s family, friends, and neighbors. An odd insignia on the base of the vial caught Patrick’s eye. The tiny holes formed a circle around the outer edge of the base, and inside this circle was a painted logo:
Patrick dropped the vial in shock as a figure stumbled through the door and bumped clumsily into the wall. The thing was utterly, eerily silent save for its inelegance. It did not speak or mumble or even grunt. Patrick’s father stood before him, but he could only be described as a shell of his father that once was. His eyes were black and sightless, and dark circles of sickness radiated out around them. The skin of his face was gray and drooping on his skull like that of a decaying corpse. His smocks were in tatters; with only one dirty shoe and his pants completely removed, a large erection protruded from his exposed waist. The organ looked to be the healthiest part of his body. When he reached forward and sauntered toward his young son, the boy did not hesitate to seize the large knife from the kitchen tabletop and drive it into the monster’s chest, but he didn’t even attempt to stay the tortured scream that escaped his burning throat nor the agonized tears that teemed and cascaded down his youthful face.
The final bitter tears of his innocence.
The Cave:
Part 2
The Stranger stood and swayed on his feet in the dark cave as the miserable wave of torment finally washed over him and faded. The screams of the dead and betrayed began to fade, the pangs of longing and regret in his chest and gut began to wane, and the insurmountable feelings of helpless damnation escaped him in one long, slow, shaky breath. And suddenly the world was silent.
With the ruckus in his brain subsided, The Stranger observed a quiet so unsettlingly ubiquitous that he feared to even move. He struggled to speak an interrogative to the clearly empty space around him but could manage only a strained grunt that nonetheless echoed and clanged around the cave. He winced at the out-of-place sound. It hurt his head and seemed loud enough to damage his ears. So he continued to stand in silence, waiting for something to happen.
Was this the afterlife? Was this the act of dying? This looked like no afterlife about which The Stranger had ever learned. His memories were fading rapidly, even the vivid images from mere moments ago of fingers of the undead reaching up from the earth to grip his ankles. Even the memories of fighting through a dark cloud of sorcery and unrest while explosions and lightning lit the world around him. Even the memories of holding a blood-soaked blade and fighting ferociously for his own life but mostly for the life of his son. He held up the hand that had wielded the sword but could scarcely even make it out right in front of his face. In any case he had no doubt the blade was gone.
He had come so close. So close after so long and so much. He had travelled so far and fought so valiantly, and for what? To be plucked effortlessly from his world and imprisoned in dark nothingness? Memories of his quest had vanished, washed away with the wave of damnation that had just anguished and rinsed his fraying mind. Memories of the violent battle moments before were now mere sparks of distant recognition, like a flickering, dying star, lost from sight among countless others in the night sky. Even the numerous cuts and abrasions on his skin seemed to fade and disappear.
For all intents and purposes, his quest appeared to be at an end. Memories of it were gone. His sense of purpose and determination were gone. His weapons and worldly possessions were gone. All that remained was a pulsing, habituated single-mindedness that screamed at him, I have to find my son! But he was stuck. Stran
ded sightless, defenseless, and vulnerable in this dark tomb. He could see and hear nothing with such clarity that he was easily convinced it would stay that way forever …
And then, miraculously, he thought that he could see. He glanced again at his hand and found that it was slightly—noticeably, but slightly—more visible in the gloom. He looked up and thought that he could faintly make out a wide, dank tunnel leading away from him in the darkness.
Chapter 4:
Calm Before the Storm
1
Long before darkness took over the land, when the man who would become a wounded stranger on an island was still just a young adult, the city of Krake was the most wealthy, bustling, carefree city in all of Reprise. A castle on the sea, the White Kingdom towered above the cobblestone streets in the market square, the lush, green, rolling hillsides, and the expansive vegetable gardens where men, women, and children alike roamed and merrily plucked ripe, healthy tomatoes, ears of corn, carrots, and peas. Men awoke each morning and made the decision to spend the day working or to spend the day relaxing with family depending on how he felt upon rising. The incentive to work and take part in the community was not based on a compensatory system of pay, but on a unique niche for every individual in society. Each man, woman, and child had his or her own specific set of skills that would benefit everyone. Some awoke each day and tended the gardens, others wandered the streets and repaired damages to said streets or to houses, others still travelled deep into the forests surrounding the city to hunt for meat to bring back to the butchers. Meat from hunters could be traded for a basket of fruits from southern cities, a line of fish from the anglers on the docks, or even a house visit from a healer or potioner. A wide variety of services was required by every family, and to master every art oneself would be nigh impossible.
