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.