Thanks everybody!

Hi Readers!

After consulting with a few trusted resources in the publishing-sphere, I've decided that I unfortunately won't be posting any further chapters from The Phantom Forest on this blog. I'm hoping to avoid any future publication conflicts -- it can get sticky with the interwebs, I hear. However! If you're interested in reading further, please feel free to comment or tweet me with your email address and I'd be happy to send you a few more teasers! I'm open to sharing the story with whoever wants to keep up with it, but I've recently discovered that there's a fine line between "publishing" something and just sticking it up on your blog, even if you're still in the editing process. So I figured, better safe than sorry!

Thanks again for all the support. I've gotten a lot of really solid feedback even just from these first two chapters, so the experiment, as short as it was, has definitely been super worthwhile!

Cheers,

Liz

Chapter Two

Haben lay in a heap on a bed of red desert sand, collapsed right beside the portal he’d just barely pulled himself out of. The sun, high and heavy in the violet sky, beat down on his back mercilessly. He feebly glanced over at the portal, barely inches from where he lay. The glossy black puddle on the ground, slick like oil in the sun, was his door to world of the living. He never knew where he found the strength, once the hunger hit, to slip into the mortal world. It was all a dark, dizzying haze. He had no control. His ragged, uneven breath was not his own.

When the starvation overcame him, it was always the same: he would stumble towards the nearest portal and throw himself inside of it. On his way through the darkness, he would become the creature. His black, shredded robe would fuse to him like a second skin. His jaw line would expand to three times its size. Two scaly black wings would sprout from his bony shoulder blades; it was painful, like being stabbed from the inside out. He could almost hear his bones and muscles scrape together whenever he morphed into the monster. There was something about it that he enjoyed, despite the pain of it. He was becoming something fearsome, something deadly, something he could have never imagined becoming during his earthly years. Then he would emerge, always in a body of water, and shoot straight up to the sky like a bullet. He would gnash his enormous, razor-sharp teeth with frenzied abandon and attach himself to the low hanging clouds above the city.

Then, he would send the wind. This was always the most exhausting part. He could scarcely pry his eyes open by the time it was over and he finally released his grasp from the web of fog in the sky. He would crash into the river below. The water would absorb him, recognize him as an intruder, and thrust him back to the Underworld.

He hadn’t moved since his return. He was enveloped in starvation’s iron grip now. These moments before Khronasa signaled him for the sacrifice were nothing short of excruciating. He was all rage, all fire, all hell.

“Caaaaa. Ca. Ca-CAWWWW!” An alarming crow from some kind of animal pierced the vacant silence.

Haben couldn’t help but roll over onto his back and squint up at the sky, looking for the source of the odd sound. A winged creature, silhouetted by the blinding sun, was circling directly above where he lay. His perception was dull and fuzzy, but he was certain that he saw it. He was also certain that he’d never, ever seen it before. Had Dohv sent it? Was he being watched? He’d never been watched before.

Hypnotized, he stared at it as it continued to circle him, over and over, round and round. His worried mind grew hazy and dark as a fresh bolt of hunger electrified him from head to toe. He pulled his knees to his chest with a low moan.

Suddenly, another noise disrupted him, though this time it hadn’t come from the strange figure floating up above. It was a shrill, grating ring that almost seemed to originate from his own ears. It started small at first but grew louder and louder by the second. He flung open his eyes, ravenous. The ringing meant Khronasa was calling him.

He rose to his knees, every inch of him quaking and quivering with anticipation. He could think of nothing but consuming the thing that was waiting for him at the other end of the portal. He’d forgotten what it was. He’d forgotten it was a human being. All he knew was that it would end his suffering.

He gazed down into the glossy blackness of the portal as the thin layer of flesh covering his shoulders began to prickle and twitch. His bones ground against his muscles and he spasmed as his shoulder blades jutted out from his back. They twisted themselves into two black, grotesque looking wings. He heaved a sigh, stretched his emaciated limbs like a stalking bird of prey, and dove headfirst into the portal. The blackness swallowed him whole.

The mysterious winged creature circling overhead released one final, ear-splitting crow before retreating off to the West. Whatever it had come to see, it had seen.

***

The howling wind outside rattled the stained glass windows of General Simeon’s stately mansion upon the hill. The streets of Khronasa below glistened in the lamplight, slick with sleet and rain. General Simeon pulled an ancient looking bottle of liquor from his sturdy oak cabinet and refreshed his drink.  These hours were his most treasured:  the rain, his drink, his moment to revel in his grand deception.

But tonight he was troubled. Today, during the ceremony, he was struck as though he had seen a specter. He caught his warped reflection in the stained glass window and heaved a desolate sigh, pressing his fingertip to the atrophied canyon of flesh carved into his left cheek. Today, he had seen the weapon that had destroyed his face for the first time since the night of the incident. He was sure of it.

A girl had entered the square: a striking, slender, black-haired young woman with filthy clothing and bare feet. She was a pretty thing, though it was neither her fierce gaze nor her young, supple figure that had caught his eye. There had been a scuffle and she’d pulled a weapon from her dress. It was a fang, about the length of her fist. It was white, iridescent, and glistened in the sunlight. He recognized it instantly, as though a memory had come careening out of the past and knocked him to the ground.

The man who wielded the fang the night of the occupation had been shot. He knew this, he’d seen it happen. But the man had two children, a boy and a girl. He had let them go. Why, he couldn’t recall. He might have had a fleeting sadistic plan for them, a plan he quickly lost sight of the moment the battle intensified.

Those children had been in the plaza today and the girl had the weapon that had mutilated him. He wanted her and he wanted it. He gave orders to have her followed after the crowd had dispersed that morning. He wanted her brought forth to him, bathed, groomed and wrapped in satin so he could mangle her the way he had been by her father all those years ago. The longing pumped through his veins like thick venom. He had waited all afternoon for news of her whereabouts, but none had come. Yet.

He listened to the rhythmic march of heavy boots outside as his guards changed shifts. A muffled salute: “Our fate in his hands!” followed as one troop passed another.

Our fate in his hands. Emperor Caius was a man. Yet the slogan, ingrained into the minds of the masses over the years, had finally trumped that fact. He always enjoyed a private chuckle at the phrase’s irony. Their regime had toppled a religion and abolished the notion of gods, of prayer, and of fate. But their proverb promoted the very thing they had destroyed: blind faith.

General Simeon knew it was only human to long for someone who had all the answers. When he first arrived in Khronasa those seven years ago, he knew the transition from worship of gods to worship of a figurehead would be a seamless one if he could maintain just one thing: fear.

He studied the Khronasan religion with relish prior to the occupation. He observed their traditions. They sacrificed their citizens twice a year to a demon none of them had ever seen. They told their children stories of torture in the Underworld to keep them on their best behavior. It would be easy. He would just swap one ethereal force for another.

Yet his greatest tool in this illustrious manipulation, the thing he was the most proud of, was allowing the Khronasans to keep one, and only one, of their old traditions. The Khronasans clung to the practice of the sacrifice, despite what it had become. All the while, Simeon used the occasion to keep the people anxious, to keep them in line. He was the one responsible for selection of the victim. Anyone could be next. The people would do anything he asked to keep their loved ones safe from the pit. It was, in a word, ideal.

There was only one element that was beyond his control: the demon itself. In plain sight, he was just as skeptical of the demon’s existence as the rest of the Federation. His cabinet and bodyguards balked at the Khronasans’ beliefs and he had too, until he led a sacrifice for the first time seven years ago.

It was eerie to begin with that dark clouds gathered the instant their victim was placed in the pit. Yes, that was strange enough. Rain drenched the countryside within hours and the pit completely flooded. The night of the first Federation sacrifice, Simeon and his fleet planned to pull their drowned prisoner from the pit around midnight and burn his remains. But when they arrived, an alarming scene greeted them: swirling green clouds had gathered directly above the pit, backlit by a wavering, sickly yellowish light. It wasn’t the sun. It couldn’t have been, it was the middle of the night. Simeon remembered staring up into the mesmerizing sky, struck by trepidation for the very first time.

Then they looked down into the pit. Their victim was gone, chains and all. They shined a light down towards the murky water. No trace of his body remained. They stood there, dumbstruck, as rain pelted their uniforms and filled their boots. There was no conceivable way the man could have escaped without unlocking the chains with a key. Could he have had help? Perhaps. But then where were the chains themselves? They had been soldered to a pole at the bottom of the pit.

The General looked down into the watery grave and something caught his eye… the final remnants of a whirlpool: perfect, circular currents leading straight down to the bottom of the pit. Where had that come from? Someone had beat them to their victim’s prison. And that someone, in all likelihood, was not human.

General Simeon swore his bodyguards to secrecy. Torture and eventual death was the penalty for revealing what they saw that night to anybody.

It was clear that they had tangled with a society steeped in greater mystery than Simeon could have ever imagined. He was voracious for answers. He read whatever confiscated Khronasan literature they had not yet burned. He studied the remains of the temple they had destroyed months earlier. If there were truly mystical forces governing the society he thought he rightfully governed, he knew he ought to get in good with them, and fast.

He built a shrine to Dohv, Lord of the Underworld, in the basement of his mansion. He locked it down and forged only one key. Emperor Caius would surely have his head for paying tribute to the pantheon they strove to abolish. But he couldn’t be too careful. He needed to keep both the Khronasan spirits and the Emperor placated at once. It was the only way to ensure that the city remained under his control.

The clock struck midnight in the General’s study.  He swallowed the last swig of his drink and placed the glass down with a definitive clink.  It was time for his invocation; time to give thanks to Dohv.

He paused momentarily, making sure he heard no footsteps down the hall. To be safe, he deadbolted the door to his study. He then produced the solitary key to his shrine and made his way towards the door to the basement. It looked like little more than a locked closet to an outsider. He lived in fear of prying eyes, of loose lips. He slid his hand into his pocket and wrapped a finger around his pistol’s trigger. His thoughts were poisoned by paranoia each time he approached that door. He unlocked it, swiftly moved through the entrance, and slammed the door shut right behind him as though he were afraid someone might slip through the crack at the last moment.

He crept down the stairs, barely daring to breathe, and lit a dim oil lamp in the corner. The golden light illuminated the artifacts he had confiscated from the oblivious Khronasans over the years: Amulets. Worry stones. Statues of Dohv of all shapes and sizes. He paused to gaze at one of them, sculpted of glistening white stone.

The Khronasans represented Dohv as a massive reptilian creature with razor sharp fangs, a forked tongue, and flames leaping from his lips. He stood upright on human-like feet. His scaly hands sported opposable thumbs and his eyes were a cat-like golden-green. He was a hybrid of man and reptile, both grotesque and utterly fascinating in the same breath.  He stood with his long fingers clasped together at his waist, staring down the worshipper. He was always watching. His image, though delightfully imaginative, sent shivers down Simeon’s spine when he reminded himself that the creature quite likely existed… somewhere.

He unrolled a carpet onto the cold, concrete ground, then knelt to the floor and produced three animal bones from a crude leather pouch on the shelf. The banned Khronasan literature indicated that there were certain creatures from the Underworld that occasionally wandered into the land of the living. If anyone were lucky enough to gather their remains, they could use them to communicate with Dohv as part of the ritual of prayer.

He had threatened a decrepit old Khronasan witch doctor years ago for her pouch of bones, the ones he now spread out in front of him. The woman assured him that the bones were the ribs of a Creeback, one of Dohv’s favorite pets. Simeon never had a way to be sure, considering he did have a gun to her temple when he demanded the bones of her. But he chose to interpret her tears as proof of their authenticity.

As he kissed the bones one by one and lay them gingerly on the carpet, his thoughts wandered to the haunting girl with the fang. He’d often wondered if the fang had come from a similar, mythical creature. The piercing sting of the puncture wound was unlike any pain he had ever experienced. Worse, he thought, than taking a bullet.

Once the bones were arranged just so, three ends touching so they formed a triangle, he bowed his head and began his incantation.

“Praise be to Dohv, revered Keeper of Life and Lord of the Underworld. Tonight I send you thanks once again for preserving your promises. As I have sworn to bolster your strength, so you have bolstered ours. In return, I shall never tire of cultivating power for you.  Your river will deluge with death.”

The General was nothing if not a shrewd negotiator.  He had read that there was a connection between the calamity on Earth and Dohv’s power, specifically as it related to the mythical River of Past Lives. Times of great calamity on Earth were of immense benefit to Dohv; the more deaths in his river, the more power Dohv was able to generate. Simeon saw an opportunity to strike a deal with the immortal.

He began to ask Dohv for protection against assassinations and uprisings, for both himself and for Emperor Caius. In exchange, he and the Federation would provide him with a constant flow of death.

The most recent attempt on his life was thwarted by little more than sheer luck; a rebel from the forest had broken into the armory and stolen a gun. As he raced up the winding staircase towards the second floor of the mansion, where the General was holding court, he suddenly slipped and tumbled backwards. Eyewitnesses said his neck smacked against the marble stair and he was instantly motionless. Simeon interpreted this fortuitous incident as a sign that Dohv had been listening to his prayers. He worshipped all the more fervently after that day.

He closed his eyes and finished his benediction:  “Send your messenger the Haben to fetch his sacrifice. Build our strength, as we will build yours.”

With that, the lamplight flickered and the floorboards beneath him rattled with the rolling thunder.  A cold breeze from an unseen source swept through the chamber and sent a chill straight through his skin.

He knew the storm outside had intensified, that the magical, inexplicable elements of the weather were about to unfold. As he stood and collected the sacred bones from the floor, he entertained a tantalizing thought: to find the girl with the fang. To torment her and disfigure her pristine young face. To toss her in the pit after all was said and done and never see her walking the earth again.

                                                                           

 ***

“Let me clean him! I want to rip the bones out!” Miko hovered over the silver trout Seicha was preparing to slice open. A rickety slab of wood balanced atop a flat crate, which passed for a kitchen table, stood between them.

“Wash your hands first. The grime under your fingernails doesn’t belong in our food.” she said with a wry smile.

Miko bounded over to a rusty cauldron hanging over the open fireplace. He plunked his hands in and yanked them back out with a howl.

“Owwww! Why didn’t you tell me it was hot?!” he snapped.

“It’s over the fire. Of course it’s hot.”

He sucked on his fingertips sullenly as he traipsed back to the table. He grabbed for Seicha’s fang and pointed it at the belly of the fish.

“Now, just make sure you’re slicing in a flat, sideways motion--”

But he’d already cut a perfectly straight incision. He smiled and wiped the blood off the fang before handing it back to Seicha.

“I know how to do it.”

Seicha made a soup from the rabbit Miko shot earlier that day. She stirred in a few wild mushrooms that grew behind the little log hut they called home. She cooked the fish over the open flame and tossed their two sacks of grain over to the corner of the kitchen.

“I’ll make bread tomorrow,” she said flatly. She hated admitting that they needed the grain.

She and Miko ate and listened to the rain pitter-patter against the walls of their windowless wooden refuge. The two of them were always silent during the rain after a sacrifice, out of respect for the one who was suffering at the foot of the hill. She got up a few times to move a bucket to more accurately catch a leak or two. The dirt floor of their cabin often turned to sludge in bad weather.

Seicha lined Miko’s hammock in the corner with a warm, sheepskin blanket. He undressed and put his dirty clothes in a burlap sack in the corner. Seicha insisted upon a clean home, even if it was a home without a proper floor. They would live with dignity. They would wash their clothes in the river and would store the few possessions they had in their proper places.  

As he climbed into his hammock and buried beneath the blanket, Miko finally piped up: “When I cut the fish up tonight, I thought about something. Do animals’ souls have trees in the Forest of Laida? Or is everything just the same? Like is the soul of that fish the same as the soul of another person, and maybe the soul of that fish will be a little boy one day?”

The Forest of Laida. It was one of the only pillars of their religion she had been taught about. She and Miko rarely spoke about it. The mere mention of it filled her with sadness. It reminded her of her parents and the world that they’d lost.

She settled into her own hammock, right beside his, and pondered his question.

“I don’t think we ever considered the souls of animals. That’s not to say we didn’t respect them, you know? But we never thought their souls returned to trees in the Forest of Laida after death, the way ours do.”

Miko nodded and made himself comfortable in the hammock. Seicha eyed his furrowed brow and knew he wasn’t totally satisfied. She wished she remembered more about their faith. Her father would have been able to answer this question eloquently.

“What does the Forest of Laida look like?  Do you think we ever see it, when we go there?” he asked.

“Well… Mother and Father said that hundreds of people had written about what the forest looked like but every account was a little bit different. Obviously a living human couldn’t write about a place that living humans had never been to.”

She lay back in her hammock and watched a single raindrop on the ceiling swell with water as she tried her best to unearth memories for Miko. She counted the seconds before it surged to its breaking point and tumbled into the bucket on the ground.

Finally, she spoke again: “Father said something like... ‘Imagine the quietest place you possibly can. No breeze, no birds, no voices. Now imagine that place is a forest, and that forest is bigger than anything any human could ever comprehend. You can’t even begin to understand it’s size.’ That’s what he thought it was like.”

“So it’s big and it’s quiet,” Miko summed up.

Seicha shrugged and stood from her hammock. She shuffled over to the cluster of candles in the corner and began snuffing them.

“I wish we knew more. But I suppose that’s part of the adventure of getting to the afterlife. You wouldn’t want someone to spoil that surprise for you.”

Before she extinguished the final candle, she added, “But the forest is important. It’s special to all of us.  It’s the reason I stopped crying about what happened to Mother and Father. It’s probably the reason a lot of people stopped crying. I know someday their souls will come back for another life. Nobody’s ever really gone, you know?”

“Would we know them, if they came back?” Miko asked.

Seicha paused before answering. In her painful younger years, she had wondered about this often.

“I doubt it,” she said. “But just knowing that someday they’ll be on Earth again is a comfort. They may be right now, if their tree sprouted flowers. We have no way of knowing. But it’s nice to think about, isn’t it?”

Miko nodded, accompanied by a yawn seconds later. Seicha blew out the last candle on the kitchen table. “Get some sleep.”

“Can we work on the boat tomorrow?” Miko asked in the darkness, referring to the little rowboat the two of them had been constructing over the past few months. “It still leaks.”

“Sure, we’ll work on the boat.  Goodnight, Miko,” Seicha cocooned into her hammock but did not close her eyes.

She always stayed awake as long as she possibly could before surrendering to sleep. She tried hard to keep watch, to listen to the woods outside their cabin for any intruding footsteps. This was the time of day, and usually the only time, in which she yearned for a even an hour without responsibility. She wondered what her days might feel like without that constant pang of worry in her chest. She thought about someone else’s story, about a girl who didn’t wear a fang around her neck and who didn’t live in fear of losing the only loved one she had left. But these musings were always silenced by fatigue. She never had time to dwell on them for long.

It was only a few minutes after her body gave in to sleep that the muffled yelp of a dog filled the night.  Seicha woke with a start. Her heart was already thundering. She soundlessly rolled out of her hammock and crept towards the door. She touched a fingertip to the fang around her neck as a tactile reminder that she was carrying protection. She paused before opening the door, glancing over at Miko for a moment. He was sound asleep, snoring with his leg dangling over the edge of the hammock. She would only be a moment. She opened the door and stepped out into the thick blackness of night.

They were far from the city, miles from any streetlights. The fractured moonlight through the trees would be a traveler’s only guide at this hour but the rain clouds had obscured it entirely. Seicha squinted past their front door in vain. She couldn’t see a thing. Instead, she closed her eyes and listened.

She combed through the sounds she heard: An owl. The rain, tapering off. The rush of the river up ahead. She heard no barking. Thinking she must have been dreaming of her father’s old dogs, she turned back towards their hut.

Craaaack! A branch snapped. The sound was deafening. This time she knew she hadn’t imagined it.

She froze for a second, weighing her next move. To wander into the darkness could be fatal. To do nothing could put them in even greater danger. She turned and walked a few paces. One, two, three, four steps. Then she stopped again and listened. Nothing. Five, six, seven eight--

She heard a rustling of leaves, then another snap of a branch. She whirled around and came face to face with a dark pair of eyes glistening in the dim moonlight. Seicha breathed a sigh of relief. The eyes belonged to a tiny fawn. It had probably been separated from its mother and was disoriented.

Then, all at once, a dog snarled, too close for comfort. Seconds later, a dart zoomed through the air out of nowhere. Seicha felt it breeze right past her ear, prickling the hairs on her neck. It lodged itself into a tree trunk. The fawn squealed and bolted away into the night.

Seicha stared at the dart, wondering for a second if it was one of Miko’s, but this one wasn’t handcrafted of wood. It was a long, metal needle, probably full to the brim with some sort of dangerous chemical.

Seicha sprang to action, yanked the fang off her neck, and wielded it like a talon in her first. The dog howled, wherever it was. She couldn’t see an inch in front of her face. She ran towards the sound, fang drawn. She’d be damned if the dog and his master got anywhere near their cabin.

She caught the blurry outline of a male figure a few yards ahead, facing her as she ran. The moonlight reflected off the shiny medals decorating his breast. He was a military man, one of the General’s cohorts. Why would he come all the way up here?

Before she could curse herself for the lapse in security, another dart came flying out of the darkness. It grazed her shoulder and landed right behind her. Someone was aiming at her, but not to kill. If they were they would have been shooting bullets. Though she wasn’t necessarily sure this was better.

She barreled towards the man with her fang thrust in front of her. She would fight him no matter what weapons he had. She was close now and she knew he could see her. He shot one more dart from what she could see now was a heavy, powerful looking black firearm. She dodged the needle by mere inches and flung herself right towards the shrouded spy’s looming figure.

“Arrrrghhh!” She released a guttural scream as she tore through the night and aimed her fang at his throat.

He grabbed her shoulders before she could slash him and kicked her hard at the knees. Her legs buckled and she crumbled. He grabbed her around the middle and whirled her around, holding her from behind. She struggled against him and threw her weight forwards, taking him along for the ride. He careened right over her head and crashed to the ground.

Seicha felt her shoulder dislocate as the soldier flipped over her head. But this was no time to focus on pain. Leaping over the stunned soldier’s limp body, she sprinted towards the cabin. She would need to grab Miko and run. Maybe they’d swim in the river so the dog couldn’t track them.  Maybe--

A piercing sting suddenly spread from the back of her knee towards the very tips of her toes. Her legs gave out within seconds. She’d been hit. She wearily looked behind her and saw the fallen soldier aiming his dart gun right at her.

This was no ordinary venom, not like the kind Miko made from crushed yew and holly berries. This was something toxic, something potent. She tried in vain to pull herself up but it was as if her muscles had liquidated. The light rain falling from the sky resembled tiny diamonds, tumbling in slow motion. She panicked. Was she dying? Why would they kill her so suddenly? The General’s men never killed without dragging out the torture beforehand.

With her final scrap of strength, she hung the fang back over her head and tucked into her shirt.  She silently prayed that she would escape whatever was to come and get home before Miko even woke up. Then her wrist went limp and the world around her capsized into nothingness.

                                                                              

Pink.  Pale, shiny pink was the first thing she saw as her eyes fluttered open.

As her vision cleared, she realized she was staring at her own knees, curled up to her chest, covered by pink satin fabric. She stretched and winced. Her dislocated shoulder had been corrected but she was still covered in bruises. She examined the dress she was wearing with blank curiosity. It was dainty, girlish, taut at the bust line.

She sat up with a start when she saw that her fang was still hanging around her neck. Why hadn’t her captors taken it? Instead they had put it on full display. She turned her weapon over in her fingers, all the more troubled now. She noticed her nails were painted the same pale pink as the dress. She had never even considered the idea that fingernails could be painted. She touched her hair. It was soft and clean and fell in delicate waves across her back.  When had all this happened?

She took in her surroundings. Soft golden light enveloped the room, radiating from two large bronze floor lamps and a dimly lit crystal chandelier hovering above her head. Footsteps resounded from the room above her gilded holding pen and the chandelier jingled ever so slightly.

The sofa she lay on was made of polished leather the color of rust. A thick, patterned carpet spread across the floor, a collage of blue and cream. It was a far cry from the cabin she’d been abducted from. A bookcase lined one of the walls, filled with old leatherbound volumes and ancient looking parchment scrolls. A sword with a bejeweled handle was propped up inside of a glass case beside it.

Several golden plaques were arranged on the wall, all of them bearing the seal of Emperor Caius’ Federation: the black silhouette of a lion roaring with two white rifles crossed in front of it. It was clear she was not among friends. The windows were constructed of priceless stained glass, each boasting a different abstract design in blue, red, purple, and gold. This looked like someone’s study, a quiet place to reflect and indulge in one’s luxuries.

She heard the door creak open and she sat up straight, her arms pinned to her sides. She dug her rosy fingernails into the sofa. The large bookcase obscured the doorway and she was not able to see who had entered right away. Soft footsteps filled the room. She had been expecting thumping boots and the cocking of a rifle. She took solace in this gentle tread until she saw the scar on the face that had just become visible in the lamplight. General Simeon smiled at her. His left cheek dimpled and turned in on itself, creating a gruesome fold of flesh underneath his eye.

“Hello,” he said, still smiling at her. “I’m very glad you’re here.”

She said nothing. What could she possibly say in return? “I’m certainly not glad?”  

She kept silent as a stone and watched as Simeon crossed to his oak liquor cabinet and removed two glasses. She looked at the contents of the cabinet with disbelief. Bottles of every shape, size, and color lined the shelves. He probably drank more wine in a day than she and Miko drank water in a week.

“I’m going to finish off this one if you don’t mind,” he held up a bottle, half full of dark red wine. “Unless you’d prefer something different?”

She stared at him vacantly until she realized he was waiting for a response. She just shook her head.

“I think you’ll like this one. It’s a rather good year. Seven years aged, as a matter of fact,” he poured the wine into the two glasses and put the empty bottle back in the cabinet. “I like to save the bottles when it’s a special occasion.”

He approached her, offering her the glass.  With no other choice, she cautiously took it. He sank down beside her on the sofa and draped his arm across her back, his fingertips far too close to her neck.

“Go ahead, drink. Tannins often calm the nerves, in my experience. And if you’re nervous, don’t be! Nothing unexpected here.”

She stared at the contents of the glass. It hadn’t been freshly uncorked, it could easily be poisoned. She politely took a small sip and released it back into the glass in the same mouthful. She cautiously lifted her gaze to him. He hadn’t noticed.

“Oh my, what is this pretty thing?” he marveled with affected interest, pointing at her fang.

She caught his eye. She tried to focus on anything but his grotesque scar for fear that just a glance would give her away. But his eyes were glimmering as his lips turned upwards into a smirk.  He already knew exactly who she was. She felt as though the floor had dropped from beneath her.

She was motionless as he took the fang into the palm of his hand and twisted its cord between his fingertips playfully. Then, he lifted it off of her head.

He stared right into her eyes as he said, “Just because I gave you a head start didn’t mean I wouldn’t catch up eventually.”

She held a paralyzed expression as he dropped the fang in a glass vase on the table nearby. She heard an echoey ping as her weapon hit the bottom of it. Her gaze darted to all corners of the room, taking stock of her escape options:  Windows: how high up were they? Door: were there guards right outside? Sword: could she break the glass case? Her focus was diverted when she felt his fingers in her hair. His long nails scraped against her scalp. She winced as he stroked her like a house cat.

“You didn’t think I’d forget all about you and your family, did you?” he laughed. “How could I? I think about you every time I look in the mirror!” His tone was alarmingly genial. Seicha’s gut twisted.

“Let’s discuss your future, shall we?” he said, maintaining his counterfeit concern. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I know you and your brother live in squalor and bathe in the river and only eat what you kill. You deserve better, don’t you think?”

She could think of nothing else to say except, “We’re all right.”

She realized she hadn’t spoken until that moment. All her courage had flown from her. She was locked in a room with the nightmare himself. He chuckled and traced a finger from her hairline down her neck. Her skin turned to gooseflesh. She stared at her feet.

“Let’s not play games, you’re far from all right,” he pressed. “I can help you. If you promise not to run. I’ll give you and your brother everything you need to live comfortably for the rest of your days.”

She was noticeably trembling now; Her pink fingertips quivered against her knee. If you promise not to run. And what would he get in return? She didn’t dare imagine. She had to get out. Ice cold fear rose into her throat that would have manifested itself as a scream if her voice wasn’t so utterly crippled.

“You don’t say much, do you? Seicha?” he leaned on her now, forcing her to sink onto her back.

She pressed against his chest, shoving him away as he slid his weight on top of her. She spied a silver medal dangling around his neck, right underneath his shirt. The wheels in her mind spun wildly. She could get out, she could fight him. As long as he wasn’t expecting a fight.

“Y-you...you say--” she began, trying her best to appear timid yet convinced. She stopped pushing him away and let her hands fall to her sides. “You say you’ll help us?”

He grinned at her and slid his hand against the small of her back, drawing her closer. She could smell stale liquor on his breath as he grabbed her chin and pulled her face against his. His scar was a pale crater of deflated, dead skin that looked even more horrendous up close.

“Such a pretty face,” he remarked, stroking her cheek. “Suppose I cut it off?”

She could not afford to wait. She had to act. Now. Now, now, now…

He moved a hand up the side of her leg, then underneath the satin sheath of her dress. She felt as though she were swallowing bile as he touched her there.

He chuckled as he murmured into her neck, “I’ve been looking forward to destroying you.”

He turned slightly, fishing something from his pocket: shiny, silver, sharp. A dagger.

She lunged forward and snagged the medal hanging around his neck. She flicked her wrist and twisted it until it was taut around his throat, then yanked it upwards in one swift motion. Simeon did not have a moment to counterattack. He flailed his fist around, trying in vain to aim the dagger as he struggled to breathe.

He tumbled off the sofa. Seicha sprang to her feet as she heard him choking and gasping for breath on the ground. She kicked over the vase on the table and heard it shatter to bits. She stole back her priceless weapon and hung it back around her neck. Her courage had returned in spades, but Simeon was already regaining composure.

In the split second before she turned to thrust the fang towards his gut, she heard Simeon groan furiously from behind and felt his hand ensnare her ankle. He threw her to the ground. Her shoulders scraped against the crystals of broken glass on the carpet.

He pinned her wrists to the floor as a pointed shard of glass burrowed deep into her skin.  She kicked and thrashed at him to no avail.

“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t fight,” he snarled.

He dug his teeth into her neck like a wolf shredding a carcass, then smacked her across the face and bruised her eyelid with his heavy ring. Then he relented for the very briefest of seconds, just to unclasp his belt... a second that was about to cost him dearly. She had one free hand…

As he dove back towards her, his face met with the pointy end of Seicha’s fang. She had but to merely hold it up. He impaled himself upon it. He cried out in excruciating agony as Seicha twisted the fang three times around inside his cheek before yanking it out, drenched in blood. She wiped her filthy hands onto the front of the pink satin dress, staining it dark red.

She leaped to her feet and inspected her gruesome handiwork. She had drilled a hole in the right side of his face, a mirror image of the one her father had carved on the left side years ago. She could scarcely believe the gory coincidence but had little time to process it. The General began pathetically crawling across the carpet, a river of red gushing from his wound.

As he clutched his torn face, he sputtered: “You’re fodder for the Haben you filthy bitch. Make no mistake.”

The hell she would be. He began to lose consciousness and curled into a ball on the blood soaked carpet. She stood above him menacingly, holding the fang to his exposed neck.  She ought to slice it wide open, she thought. Just as she began to prepare for a long, deep stab--

“Excellency?!  General Simeon?!” she heard an anxious voice cry out from the hall.

His bodyguards must have heard the scream. She loosened her grip on the fang furiously, knowing to leave him alive was to leave herself, and Miko too, forever in danger. But she’d be shot on the spot if Simeon’s bodyguards caught sight of the horrific scene. She hung the fang back around her neck.

She grabbed a plaque off the wall and glanced wildly at the stained glass windows. They were her only way out. She plunged the plaque through one of the windows with all her strength and it shattered.

She hoisted herself up onto the ledge, peered outside, and sighed with tremendous relief when she saw they were only on the second story. A low, sloping rooftop was just a quick jump from the window.

She climbed through the hole in the glass, tearing the seam of her long skirt. As she stretched her leg as far as she possibly could towards the adjacent roof, she heard the door to the General’s study open.

“There, the window!” she heard a bodyguard shout.

She kicked off the heels on her feet and watched them tumble down into the darkness. She drew in a deep breath and vaulted forwards. She scrambled down the roof in her bare feet as the guards gathered at the window.

“Shoot!”

She had no choice now. She jumped as the loud crack from the guard’s rifle resounded through the night.

A clump of bushes in the garden below softened her fall but she felt her right wrist collapse under the pressure. She cradled it in her left hand. She knew she’d probably just broken it.

Another gunshot rang out. She bolted off through the mansion’s backyard, towards the evergreen forest beyond. She was exposed as she raced across the manicured lawn. Lights inside the mansion’s windows flicked on one by one. Word of the violence in the study was probably spreading through the house like wildfire.

She heard another gunshot, but it was further away now. She sprinted towards the safety of the woods, ignoring the thorns that punctured the soles of her feet.

She ran and ran, never slowing for a second. It was at least an hour before she could see the hilltop, her home, in the distance. The fiery pink of dawn crested the horizon as she finally paused to rest her aching body against a huge oak tree.

She buried her face into its bark and heaved a long-stifled sob. She hid her tears against the sheltering tree, crying as though she were afraid someone might be watching. She wondered what it would be like to run home to her mother and father, to go to a place she felt safe. But she steeled herself within seconds and steadied her breathing. She was the protector now. She couldn’t afford total disintegration.

She pulled herself away from the tree and continued to weave through the woods. She prayed Miko would be exactly where she left him. She couldn’t bear to imagine what could have happened in her absence.

Prologue & Chapter One

Prologue

A pale, rosy dawn spread its arms wide across the Underworld’s deep violet night sky and Haben wondered, as he had every sleepless night since his arrival, why night and day were even significant in this place. A man, he knew, was required to count the days, to mark the seasons. It was how he might anticipate an event, how he might judge how long he had been in a certain place and when he ought to move on. For Haben, there were no events to anticipate. And because he had already reached his final destination, there was no use judging how long he had been there and when he ought to be going. A man needed the warm light of day to tend to his duties and the dark shelter of night to shed his inhibitions and become who he truly was. Haben no longer needed these intervals because Haben was no longer a man.

“Time”, as he had once known it, became immeasurable when nothing actually changed. It was like floating along a vast ocean, looking out on the same horizon day after day. Motion was entirely imperceptible even if motion was occurring. It meant nothing. The years rolled onwards, like a tide he could scarcely detect.

When he first arrived in the Underworld and was handed his eternal sentence, Haben had feared restlessness. His first impulse, after having inhabited a mortal body, was to consider the eons of nothingness that awaited him, to wonder what he would do to fill his endless hours. He didn’t realize that the thing he was about to become, the creature he was evolving into, had little regard for such concerns. That thing, that creature, wanted very little. When he was tortured, he wanted it to end. That was all. There was nothing else. The soul he carried in life began to decay inside his demonic new body. He grew cold to the core and found himself unmoored from the world around him. Nothing was ever new. Nothing would ever change here.

And yet he couldn’t shake the compulsion to emerge from the tunnels of the cave network at dawn each day to watch the sun come up. The ritual felt like a souvenir from the world he once knew, a world that had required him to rise when the sun did. He peered over the cliff, not observing anything in particular because there was never anything new to observe. But he enjoyed the way the Underworld’s landscape appeared when it was bathed in early light. Even its darkest corners seemed a little warmer, though he knew better than to assume that they were.

He always began his gaze on the West side of the landscape, where the sun rose, a mirror image of the morning sky in the world of the mortals. The sun’s rays reflected off of a tall, oblong shaped tower of black tinted glass at the easternmost edge of the horizon line: Dohv’s Palace, where the Keeper of Life, his master, controlled his empire and all who served him.

Tiny streaks of sunlight stroked the edge of the cliff and he lifted up the sleeve of his ragged robe to feel their warmth on his icy skin. As he caught sight of the identical black tattoos on both his arms, he couldn’t help but think, as he always did, of their thinly veiled resemblance to shackles. Diagonal lines, originating at his elbow crease, criss-crossed all the way down to his wrist, creating the appearance of a cage on his skin. Dohv marked each of his immortal servants this way as they entered the afterlife. Haben could always spot another one of Dohv’s demons. They all sported the same permanent dye on their arms.

He remembered the first time he had observed his immortal body in the sunlight, how horrified he had been when he realized he could see straight through the flesh on his arms if he looked hard enough. He inhabited a new sort of encasement for his soul, different from the body he’d had in life: pallid, translucent skin housed organs that did indeed circulate blood, blood that would never dry up so long as the universe endured. Consequently, he could still experience whatever physical pain Dohv deemed proportionate to his actions in life.

He had only seen his own reflection once, in the dark glass floor of Dohv’s palace as he stared at his feet, awaiting an audience with his master.  He was struck by the face of the man staring back at him. His eyes, lively and green, which had suited his face so perfectly in life, now appeared bulged and disproportionate above his protruding cheekbones. They were the only defining feature on a sunken, ashen face situated below his now hairless head. He was gaunt, sallow... decayed. He had not looked at himself even once since then.

He surveyed the world below him, cataloguing the patchwork of places he knew by heart: the Desert of Mourning. The Shore of Awakening. The River of Past Lives. He paused for a moment to watch a daisy chain of ghost-like, amorphous figures skim along the inky river’s surface, like a delicate cobweb lazily undulating in the breeze. There were so many of them in the river now, so many more than there had ever been before. Their spindly arms and legs crested the water’s surface more and more frequently now, as though the river had become crowded.

Suddenly, he drew in a sharp gasp as his vision blurred like foggy glass. He doubled over with an agonized growl. He huddled against the entrance to the cave and braced himself for what was just seconds away. Here it comes... Here was his punishment from Dohv. Here was the hunger.

Most demons needed neither to eat nor sleep. But Dohv had deemed that he was to starve until the unnatural, grotesque notion of feeding on human life no longer made him cringe. Then, and only then, the mortals would send him a human sacrifice. He would hate every minute of it. This was the penalty Dohv had concocted all those years ago, the thing he felt best suited his wickedness in life.

The first brutal pang of starvation hit him like a fierce tidal wave and forced him onto his side. He drew his legs to his chest and gnawed on the top of his knee to keep himself from screeching like a tortured animal. The horrible, hollow pinch of hunger spread from his middle to all corners of his body. His fingertips and even his eyelids quivered with weakness. It was, he concluded ages ago, probably the breaking point of starvation for a living being, the moment a man would succumb to death. But for Haben there would be no release. There would be no death.

He would ask his victims to forgive him if he could bear to think of anything but tearing their earthly bodies to shreds in those moments. And even as he howled and cursed Dohv’s name for such a gruesome sentence, he had to admit he most likely deserved every excruciating moment of it for the crimes he had once committed.

1.

“Why do we believe in things nobody’s ever seen before?”  Miko asked as he and Seicha trudged through the forest on the outskirts of Khronasa that raw spring morning.

Seicha was taken aback. She’d been escorting him to sacrificial ceremonies since they were children and he’d never prodded her with these kinds of questions before, the kinds of questions that signaled to her that her little brother wasn’t quite so little anymore. He was almost twelve summers now. She should have known this was coming.

“People have seen the spirits,” she said, though she wasn’t so sure of it herself. “When Father and I would go fishing, I used to see the river spirits. They were like shiny, silver dragonflies. Just underneath the surface. And Father saw the Black Beast. You know that. We have the proof right here.”

Seicha ran her fingers along the smooth, pearly white surface of an animal’s fang hanging around her neck and held it out to Miko. It was both her most valuable weapon and most treasured heirloom, a trophy pulled from the beast her father killed seventeen years ago She’d barely stood on two legs at the time, but her father had retold the story of the kill so often that she swore she’d been right there with him. The fang was a perfect half moon shape with a jagged tip, about the length of her own hand but not at all heavy as it hung on her chest. The light weight and unyielding sharpness of the fang made it an ideal sort of dagger. She often thrust it between her second and third fingers, brandishing it as though it were a talon that had sprouted from her fist.

“How come I’ve never seen the spirits then?” Miko muttered. “You think maybe the Federation scared them all away?”

Seicha nodded. It was likely. Since the occupation of their peaceful village seven years ago, she had to admit that she hadn’t seen a single otherworldly thing cross her path. A strange, quiet desolation had fallen across the land like a heavy fog. Either the spirits had been frightened into hiding or she had simply stopped believing that anything magical would happen again.

“Could be. I wouldn’t doubt it,” she replied.

Miko hopped over a molded, mossy stump and paused cautiously before asking his next question.

“What about the Haben?” he breathed, as though saying the creature’s name aloud would summon it. “Nobody’s ever seen him. We don’t know if he exists. And if he doesn’t, then what’s coming to get Henshaw at the bottom of the pit tonight?”

“It doesn’t matter what’s coming to get Henshaw. He won’t be there in the morning and that’s all we’re meant to know.”

A frigid breeze whipped Seicha’s mane of black hair across her face and into her eyes. She adeptly tied it into a knot behind her neck. A brutal windstorm had ravaged the landscape for the past two days and had only just begun to fade away. But she was scarcely affected by the cold. She was already consumed by the chill coursing through her blood as they made their way towards the sacrificial pit at Khronasa’s city center.

“You don’t believe in the Haben anymore, do you?”

“Not like I did when I was younger.” she replied. “Before Emperor Caius and the Federation took over Khronasa, it was private. They would have never made us watch, you know? And only criminals were sacrificed. Never, ever children. So it was easier to believe in the Haben because he could be anything you wanted him to be.”

“But now?”  Miko dodged a fallen tree limb as he trailed behind her.

“Now it just seems like General Simeon is using the Haben to scare us. Think about it.  It’s the only one of our old traditions they haven’t banned.”

“I wonder if he thinks the Haben’s real,” Miko scoffed.

“General Simeon doesn’t strike me as someone who believes in ghost stories,” Seicha remarked of their city’s ruthless, calculated leader, appointed by the Federation those seven years ago.

Twice each year, in eerily perfect intervals, a fearsome windstorm would rattle Khronasa for precisely three days. The entire population would barricade inside their houses and shiver with apprehension. On the third day of the storm, one among them would be chosen for the sacrifice. That day was today. The victim selected by General Simeon was a boy of only about thirteen summers named Henshaw. When Seicha was young, the threat of sacrifice to the Haben had hardly crossed her mind. She never thought she’d be at risk; it didn’t seem real. All she’d ever been told about the soul-devouring demon was in a little rhyme the children learned to remind them to stay out of trouble:

His tongue’s black as coal from the souls he’s swallowed
When you walk home tonight, be sure you’re not followed
For if you’ve been guilty of treason or theft
The Haben will feast on what life you have left

He sends evil to Earth, such mischief he makes
The famines, the floods, the wildfires, the quakes
He acts out of fury, the hunger he feels
So child, stay in line or you’ll be his next meal

Despite the gruesome nature of the whole thing, Seicha wished she could believe the Haben was actually coming. She longed for proof of the gods she once believed in, of unseen forces in the universe guiding her along. But the more likely, tragic truth was that Henshaw would be pulled from the pit and presented to a firing squad in the dead of night. It seemed logical, she figured, that the Emperor’s regime would use her people’s old superstitions against them. Every other aspect of their faith was now forbidden.

She and Miko made their way through a labyrinth of fallen trees, coming to a clearing where the skeleton of a once great temple lay in a heap. The sparkling, white marble edifice had once been a place of worship, devoted to Dohv: Lord of the Underworld and Keeper of Life. Now it was nothing but a heap of marble shards on the ground.

The temple was demolished seven years ago, nearly to the day. Seicha knew that many Khronasans hid scraps of its shattered columns under their beds at night, but nobody dared to worship at the foot of its crumbled remains. To be spotted worshipping the old pantheon was a sin worthy of execution, or maybe worse, a lifetime of servitude at General Simeon’s mansion.

Seicha acutely remembered the night the temple was razed those seven years ago. She had watched from afar, on a secluded hilltop, with five-year-old Miko nestled in her lap. The newly minted orphans gazed down wordlessly at their burning village as a thunderous BOOM echoed through the countryside and rattled the very pebbles under their feet. It was the sound of the temple collapsing, of hard marble smacking against hard marble, of the earth absorbing the little faith her people had left.

Miko suddenly snapped to a halt and held his breath. “Shhh,” he held out a hand to Seicha. “I think I see a rabbit up there.”

He swiftly yanked a slender, hollowed out tree branch from his worn leather belt and produced a pouch of razor sharp darts from his pocket. He zeroed in on a rustling holly bush just beyond the edge of the temple. He shook the pouch and a walnut shell full of gummy red paste fell into his palm.  He dipped the point of his dart into the homemade poison, getting ready.

“Don’t get dinner just yet,” she hissed and put a hand to his wrist. “If we take meat to the ceremony we’ll be robbed. Use your head.”

Miko sighed and shoved his weapon back in the pocket of his faded brown tunic. Seicha frowned at the way the leather stitching on the deerskin was fraying and how tightly the sleeves hugged Miko’s arms. She’d need to make him a new shirt soon. He was growing so fast.

“I don’t want to hunt after the ceremony. By then I’ll be even hungrier,” he grumbled.

“No meat at the ceremony. We can’t draw attention to ourselves. Don’t pretend like you don’t know that.”

The two of them traipsed through the woods towards the place where the rocky, muddy earth gave way to a gravel pathway that led to Khronasa’s central square. The desolate city of crude cinderblocks and rusty red rooftops loomed before them. Seicha tucked her fang inside the front of her dress, concealing it.

Seicha and Miko had lived far away on the hilltop beyond the forest since the occupation, but she could easily recall what Khronasa had been like before then. It was a cluster of small yet solid log cabins grouped together in the meadow, with fenced pastures dividing each family’s plot of land. Her family’s horses and wheat crop had been situated right outside her bedroom window. There were no streets because there was no need for them; they did not have motor vehicles. The Federation did, so the Federation built the roads.

Seicha remembered a blacksmith’s cabin not far from her home and an array of seamstress’s shacks and grain dispensaries. Now there were no goods or services that the Khronasans could trade among them. The Federation gave its loyal citizens just as much as they needed to survive. Seicha hadn’t seen a single business open its doors in Khronasa for the past seven years.

Many chose to hunt and gather instead of accepting the Federation’s assistance. Seicha and Miko were among them. Yet General Simeon saw to it that even the rogue Khronasans on the outskirts of the city would still find themselves at his mercy. All the arable land was owned by and farmed by the Federation. The woods and the hilltop produced no crops. This was the reason that today, and only today, Seicha and Miko ventured into the city for the sacrificial ceremony; each spectator would receive a sack of grain on their way to watch the boy march to his death.

Seicha and Miko met up with a young family of hunter-gatherers on the path who had also come from the forest: a husband and wife, barely older than Seicha’s seventeen summers, and their frail, barefoot daughter, stumbling painfully across the gravel. The family was of pure Khronasan blood, which was rarer and rarer with each passing year. All three resembled she and Miko, with thick black hair and honey-gold skin. The little girl looked up at Seicha with a fierce, starving blankness, as though she were scouring Seicha for food with her dark, almond shaped eyes. They walked nearly in step with one another but nobody said a word. It was another sacrifice. There was nothing to say about it.

The central square of Khronasa spread out before them as the pathway widened. A covered platform of polished marble, flanked by six huge pillars, stood in the middle of the plaza. The grandiose structure stood out awkwardly amidst the shoddy concrete buildings that lined the cobblestone and dirt roads. Seicha noted the ancient silver gong situated at the front of the plaza platform, engraved ages ago with images of her people’s demons and gods, a relic the Federation had stolen and reclaimed as their own. General Simeon would ring it once it was time to depart and abandon Henshaw in the pit. She had gazed upon it year after year and was disappointed to realize she couldn’t name a single one of the figures etched into the silver. Her parents had scarcely begun to teach her everything about the complex mysteries of their faith. Now they were gone, the teachings gone with them.

Just below the stairs to the plaza platform was the pit, the same pit that Seicha’s forefathers had helped to dig when their village was established. Only now, the pit no longer belonged to her people. A few of the General’s servants were splashing buckets of water down the steep sides of the hole in the ground, making sure the muddy walls were slick and impossible to climb. Seicha had never wanted to be close enough to peer down into it, but she was sure it was incredibly deep. Nobody ever climbed out.

She reached for Miko’s hand as they eased in with the throng of anxious villagers waiting in line for their grain. He squirmed and lightly slapped her hand away. She was sure at the last ceremony he’d still grabbed for her hand at this moment, afraid to be separated. Now he shoved his hands in his pockets and stared straight ahead.

As they fell in line, Seicha scanned the plaza for General Simeon. He usually didn’t enter until he was sure all eyes would be focused on him, but she always made sure, every time she came here, to spot him first. She liked to know where he was at all times, to assure herself that he wasn’t watching her. It was his face that had seeped into each and every one of her nightmares since the night of the occupation.

She glanced around the plaza at the weary faces on all sides of her as they shuffled towards the front of the line. All of them had stories like hers. Anyone who had been there the night of the Federation takeover had their own horrible memories playing over and over every time they closed their eyes. Every time she closed her eyes, Seicha saw the General.

At sunset on the night the city fell, her family’s hunting dogs started howling in a blind frenzy. They burst out the door, never to be seen again. They had heard the march of the army in the distance like an impending thunderstorm. Nobody else had.

Seicha recalled with alarming clarity being only ten summers old and standing in the doorway, impatiently calling out to the dogs. Without a warning, an explosion rocked the earth beneath her feet. Cabins nearby were engulfed in flames within seconds. Seicha’s father, Oskar, yanked her back into the house and told her to hide under her bed. She watched her neighbors streak past her window, fleeing in terror. It wasn’t long before the flames from a second blast hit their cabin. She, her parents, and Miko, barely five summers old and teetering on wobbly young legs, bolted from their home.

They ran for the hills, mounted on their two horses, but they did not get far. A line of Federation soldiers halted them, positioned like a barricade on all sides of the village, each one armed with a heavy semi-automatic weapon. Seicha had never seen a firearm before in her life. Nobody had. General Simeon stood at the center of the stoic militia, clad in black from head to toe, barking orders to his men in a strange language. Suddenly, he changed his tongue. He addressed her family and neighbors directly:

“The first man to flee into the woods does so with a bullet in his back,” he had said. What was a bullet? Nobody knew…

A man who lived nearby ignored General Simeon’s threat and drove his horse through the barricade of soldiers, towards the forest. The opposition didn’t hesitate to fire. Then the crowd of stunned Khronasans understood what a bullet was.

It was all a feverish blur after that. The Federation army pelted her people with gunfire. The Khronasans fought back with whatever weapons they had, still not fully understanding the evil they were up against. Seicha and Miko’s parents threw the children to the ground and lay atop them, shielding them from the storm of fire above.

She hadn’t seen it happen, but she’d heard it: one of General Simeon’s bullets hit her mother square in the neck. She scarcely had a moment to process where the deafening crack had come from. Her father sprang to his feet as her mother’s body rolled listlessly off of her own.

Oskar’s closest weapon in that moment was the beast’s fang. He was wearing it around his own neck that night. As General Simeon kept his gun fixed on their helpless family, Oskar lunged towards him, brandishing the fang like a sword. Seicha watched them struggle in terror. Oskar knocked the gun from Simeon’s hand but missed his heart upon trying to stab him with the fang. Instead, he plunged the fang deep into General Simeon’s left cheek and twisted it, creating a gaping, bloody hole in the side of the wretched man’s face.

BANG BANG! The soldier to General Simeon’s right fired at Oskar, defending his master. He was gone in barely a breath, asleep forever beside his wife on a blanket of dried leaves and dead twigs. It was autumn and the ground was covered in fallen yellow leaves that night. Seicha remembered little about that moment, but she would always recall how deeply red her father’s blood appeared against the golden forest floor in the moonlight.

Though petrified and pierced with grief, Seicha had barely seconds to absorb the thing she’d just witnessed. She sprang to her feet as the General lifted his head and blood cascaded out of the hole in his face. It dribbled down his chin like a river of molten ruby against his chalky skin. He looked at her, he gazed right into her eyes. And he smiled. It was the wickedest thing she’d ever seen. He smiled at her, as if promising her that this was only the beginning.

Her stomach turned. She clamored for Miko as he whimpered, not understanding anything. She remembered how he shrieked when she tore him from their mother. General Simeon was still watching them as she slowly mounted one of the abandoned horses standing nearby and then helped Miko up. They locked eyes. He was still smiling. What was going to happen? Would he chase her? Shoot her? What?

A sudden explosion from the other side of the hill distracted Simeon for the briefest of seconds. The soldiers surrounding him ran towards the source of the blast, as though they hadn’t been expecting it.

Simeon turned to join them, but spun back around at the last second. He cradled his gouged cheek and stared her down.

Gritting his teeth through the heinous pain, he said to her, “I’ll give you a head start for being so pretty. Better run.”

And then he was gone. She looked down at her parents’ bodies in despair, realizing that nobody would be giving them a proper burial. She spotted the beast’s fang hanging against her father’s lifeless chest. She dismounted and pulled it off of him. It was like taking a piece of him with her. She wouldn’t dare leave it.

She and Miko managed to steal away unscathed towards the hilltop as the fighting quieted and the night wore thin. They found an abandoned hut and made it their home. Miko only spoke to ask Seicha where their mother was. He said nothing else that entire winter. She cried in silence only after he was fast asleep at night.

General Simeon’s grotesque, blood soaked smile echoed across her memory every time she made an appearance for the sacrifice. Today was no different. She would be old and preparing for the grave and would still never forget that face.

She noticed they were nearing the front of the queue now and that Miko had moved in front of her. He was about to accept his burlap sack of grain from the dead-eyed, yellow-haired Federation woman who had just thrust a bag into the arms of the brittle old woman in front of him. Every person who showed their face at the ceremony, elderly and young children alike, earned the simple reward.

The silver gong suddenly rang out across the plaza, once, twice, three times. This was their signal that the ceremony would begin soon. Seicha kept her eyes fixed on the platform, waiting for General Simeon. She felt her fang against her skin as she breathed, confident that it was hidden from view.

“Thanks,” Miko grunted as the Federation woman tossed a sack of grain into his waiting hands.

“Thanks, what?” she snorted at him.

“Er...thanks, sister,” he corrected himself, annoyed. He rolled his eyes as Seicha passed him by to accept her bag. She pinched his elbow sternly.

Seicha took her own sack and calmly said, “Thank you, sister.”

She met Miko at their usual spot, far on the edge, a good distance from the pit. She always wondered about the people who pushed their way to the front of the crowd, the ones who desperately wanted an unobstructed view of the pitiful victim. There were quite a lot of them. She had never understood it. It was as though they were watching something that wasn’t real to them.

Booooooong. As the sound of the gong dissolved into the air, Seicha spied General Simeon and a team of sturdy, armed bodyguards coming up the hill. General Simeon was a small man with short legs whose face was fixed into an eternal scowl, his left cheek upturned at the lip. All his skin had been pulled taut to cover the loathsome hole in the side of his face. The scar was like a crater of atrophied flesh, a gray, dead spot that consumed his entire cheek. Seicha couldn’t remember what he looked like before her father had mangled him with the fang. She chose to imagine that he’d been young and handsome at the time and that her father had scarred him forever. It was most satisfying that way. Now he was a monster, as foul as the one they were about to sacrifice a child to.

The child, Henshaw, trailed behind General Simeon, trapped at four corners by the team of bodyguards. It was a sickening sight. The boy was shackled head to toe and couldn’t have gone very far if he’d tried, with or without the guards. To have them present was only for show.

Seicha gazed at Henshaw as he shuffled down the gravel walkway, eyes pinned to the ground. She remembered seeing him once or twice before. Freckles dusted the apples of his two youthful cheeks. He was one of the healthier looking children in their destitute city, but no longer. His face was drawn and grim today, caked with mud and tearstains. She wondered how he’d been chosen. She wondered that every year. There were always rumors, but never any answers.

Chilling silence rippled across the anxiously chattering crowd as General Simeon and his brutish pack of bodyguards led the small boy to the pit. All eyes were on Henshaw now.

Seicha squeezed her eyes shut for this next part. She hated it the most. This was always when the silent victim would break to pieces and start to cry, to plead for mercy, to scream. They were always ignored and forcefully tossed into the muddy pit. It was an end without dignity. It would be the same for Henshaw. She couldn’t watch.

Just as the first whimpers from Henshaw echoed across the quiet, captivated crowd, a different kind of sound forced Seicha to open her eyes. Miko was whispering furiously under his breath. Seicha heard his feet scuff against the gravel as he grunted.

A boy about Seicha’s age with matted brown hair and thick, meaty arms was trying to tug Miko’s sack of grain from his hands. Miko kicked and fought back, glaring daggers at the greedy boy. Seicha silently moved towards them to intervene. It was a strange sight, two boys fighting wordlessly in the middle of the solemn crowd. Miko spat in the boy’s face. The boy wasted no time in retaliating. He swung hard and punched Miko, making direct contact with his left eye. Miko went down, clutching his face, but did not stop hugging the bag of grain to his chest. The boy proceeded to kick him in the face with all his strength. Seicha flew to Miko’s aid and tried her best to shove the boy away. He elbowed her back with little effort.

Miko coughed and spat out a wad of blood onto the filthy gravel. People were taking notice now. Their worried whispers engulfed Seicha like smoke as General Simeon began his ritual blessing.

“On this day, we sacrifice our brother Henshaw to the Haben. Henshaw shall defend this city and her people from the evils of nature, the evils we cannot foresee...”

The whispers expanded to a gentle roar of disruption as the larger boy continued to kick Miko into oblivion. Seicha had seen quite enough. She tore the fang from under her collar and sprang between them, pointing it at the greedy boy’s face.

His gaze shifted nervously from Seicha’s menacing eyes to the razor sharp tip of the fang. He threw up his hands and retreated almost instantly, weaving through the crowd like a frightened deer in the forest. Miko still clutched the bag of grain to his chest like a shield as Seicha clasped his hand and pulled him to his feet. She hadn’t realized how many people were watching. She also hadn’t realized that General Simeon had stopped delivering his remarks. The entire area had fallen quiet. Her blood ran cold.

Seicha turned her back to the plaza platform, swiftly threw the cord back over her head, and dropped the fang down the front of her dress. She breathed heavily. Her heart was racing. She wasn’t sure how long all eyes had been on them. She wasn’t sure Simeon had even seen them. She turned back around slowly, hoping to appear as casual as possible. Relief washed over her as General Simeon continued his speech.

“Because of Henshaw’s great sacrifice, this beautiful city shall remain safe from the wrath of the demon. And so, we thank you for your sacrifice, Henshaw.”

“Thank you for your sacrifice, Henshaw,” the entire audience repeated in monotonous unison, right on cue.

Seicha glanced at Miko as he wiped blood from his mouth with his sleeve. They exchanged a look. His face was red, and not only from the bruises. She gave his shoulder a squeeze.

Boooooong. The gong resounded across the city one last time. General Simeon had struck it, signifying the end of the ceremony. Seicha could hear Henshaw’s muffled cries at the bottom of the pit. They always left the plaza as soon as they could. There was no reason to stay and listen to the victim plead for his life to no avail. Some people lagged behind, draining every drop of drama that they could from the ordeal. This would be the most exciting thing they’d witness all year. But most, like Seicha, always turned to leave the second the gong was hit for the last time.

“We’ll stop by the river to wash on our way home,” Seicha said to Miko, draping a protective arm around him. He wriggled out of her grasp.

“Fine. Then we hunt,” he replied flatly, still glowing with shame.

Seicha glanced at the platform once more before heading in the other direction. She immediately wished that she hadn’t. Instead of exiting with his security detail, General Simeon was still standing beside the gong, looking out at the audience. It took her a moment to realize that he was staring directly at her. She could feel his harrowing gaze from halfway across the plaza. And although it was difficult to see from this distance, although she couldn’t be sure... she thought she saw him smiling at her. The nightmare reared its ugly head and Seicha shuddered violently. She snagged Miko’s wrist and nearly dragged him from the city square. She didn’t look over her shoulder, but she knew, from the shiver she felt at her back, that General Simeon was still following her with his eyes. She swallowed hard and enmeshed herself with the dissipating crowd, trying desperately to become as lost as possible. She wouldn’t feel safe until the red rooftops of Khronasa were far, far from their view.

                                                                 

WOOSH! One of Miko’s darts sliced through the air. He bounded over to a patch of brush and seconds later, produced a rabbit. He’d only washed in the river a few brief seconds. He wanted to forget the whole ordeal, and Seicha knew better than to force the issue. So she let him get to hunting.

He held the rabbit up by its ears proudly. It dangled in the air, paralyzed by his poisoned dart. “Enough for dinner?”

“Sure,” Seicha said and approached him with the fang drawn. She handed it over to Miko. “He’s a big one. Better cut him quick before the poison wears off.”

“Know what I would do to General Simeon, if someone threw ME in the pit?” Miko said, more loudly than he should have, as he dislodged the dart from the rabbit’s flesh.

“Quiet Miko, we’re not far enough from the city. Someone might hear you.” Seicha’s stomach twisted as she glanced around. She was almost positive they hadn’t been followed. Almost.
 
He narrowed his eyes and gave a sly little grin.  “I’ll be quiet.  But don’t you want to know?”

“Seems you’ve been thinking about it a while.”

Miko slit the rabbit’s throat nonchalantly with the fang as he elaborated. “I think about it every time we have to go watch.  See, I’d be in the pit.  And I’d make sure you were up in a tree somewhere nearby. With this,” he held up the blow dart. “Then, right as the General’s finishing his speech, you’d start raining poison darts down on him and all the guards.”

“I’d have to be a lot straighter of a shot to accomplish that.” Seicha scoffed with a smile.

“Nah, you could do it. People are supposed to be able to do things they never could before when they’re trying to save someone’s life. You know?”

“All right, then assuming I’m able to do it…?”

“Right, right, so within a minute everyone guarding the pit is either dead or almost dead, unconscious, you know? Just depends how good your shot was. Including the General. And I just know that once he’s down, even if he’s not dead yet, people won’t be scared of him anymore. You know? They’ll rush right over to me and get me out of the pit. And the whole town will finish off all the guards, a huge …masser, um…mass…” Miko struggled, trying to recall the word.

“Massacre?”  Seicha offered.

“Massacre, exactly!” he shouted, a bit too excitedly. He lowered his voice. “And that’s how I’d get out of the pit.  Everybody just listens to the General because they’re afraid. But they don’t REALLY care about what he says.”

“Your massacre would be a little bit difficult considering those guards would have guns.”

“But don’t you think that if somehow General Simeon were gone, that people would stop listening to the Federation? Wouldn’t everything go back to the way it was?”

“Not everything. The Emperor still rules over Khronasa, you know that. He’d just send another General to replace Simeon.” And then she added, “Besides, you can’t even remember how it was before.”

She held out her hand and he placed the fang into her palm.  She wiped the blood onto her coarse gray skirt and hung the fang back around her neck.

“Well, you told me it was better back then,” Miko said. As he stuffed the rabbit’s carcass in his burlap knapsack, he stopped to consider. “You know, it’s funny. If you’d never told me how it was before, I’d really never know, because I was too young to remember. I’d think things were always like this and then I’d never think things could be any different. That’s awful. Do you think that happens?”

“Of course. I think it happens all the time,” Seicha plodded along the path beside him.

Her eyes landed upon an enormous steel structure in the foggy distance, stripped down by explosions and the elements over the years. It was her landmark in the forest, the thing that helped her orient herself. Yet she had no idea what it had once been. All that remained were four tall stalks of metal held together by scraps of wire. It swayed in the breeze, back and forth, day by day, just barely evading collapse. It had always looked that way, as far back as Seicha could remember her own name. There were plenty of old ruins in the woods, but whenever she paused to gaze at this particular mysterious architecture, she would find her flesh was prickling and she couldn’t tear her eyes away. It was as though some faraway force was trying to make sure she understood that this thing, whatever it was, meant something. Yet nobody, not even her father, had known anything about it.

“For example, what do you suppose that is?” she pointed towards the twisted steel anomaly on the horizon.

Seicha enjoyed the moments in which she could teach Miko something new about the world. These moments were rarer nowadays, the older he became.

“You know nobody knows,” he replied.

“Exactly. But once, a long, long time ago… somebody knew what that was and what happened to it. But the story’s lost forever because nobody talked about it. Nobody talked about it on purpose. So the children of the children who were alive when it was destroyed never knew a thing. Once the last person to know the story died, proof that it ever happened also died.”

“People say it got destroyed in the War of the Thieves.”

“But what do you even know about the War of the Thieves? Nobody talks about it.”

“There were machines and four big bombs.”

“Those are the things everybody knows. What else?”

“Well. I mean...” He shrugged after a moment. “I guess you’re right. Not much else.”

“That’s why it’s important to talk about how things were before the Emperor took over. People shouldn’t be allowed to forget, people ought to learn from the past. You say you want to go back to the way things were. But we can’t even be sure what it was really like. We can’t let the Federation do that. We can’t let them pretend that there was nothing before they came along.”

“Right.”

Miko was silent, allowing his mind to marinate her words. Seicha unhooked a small fishing spear from her belt and nudged Miko towards the South end of the forest.

“Let’s see if we can catch a couple fish before the rain picks up,” she said, pointing to the gray clouds up above, heavy with the rain that would bring Henshaw’s demise.

If there was one solitary hint that the spirits she and her family once worshipped indeed existed, it was the rain. Without fail, each and every time a sacrifice was made, storm clouds gathered and heavy showers would saturate the earth by nightfall. It was like clockwork, even if the sun was shining all morning. The General’s fleet could go ahead and snatch the innocent victim from the flooded pit at midnight. But something, someone knew there was a sacrifice waiting and sent the rain each and every time. She was afraid to have faith in the spirit world. She’d been skeptical about anything other than her own survival for the past seven years. But someone’s hand was controlling nature, and Seicha was sure that it wasn’t General Simeon’s.