The first thing Erik heard was his mother screaming. He woke with a gasp, his hands
reaching into the darkness before his mind caught up with the years. Damp straw
scraped his palms. Stone pressed against his back. He was eleven, not five, and his
mother had been dead for six years. The cellar had once stored wine; now it stored him.
He could almost hear Denna correcting that thought in her gentle voice: A room is not a
life, little wanderer. The distinction had become harder to remember. Somewhere
beyond the walls, LeFae slept, its markets shuttered, its harbor quiet. Erik knew almost
nothing of that city except what his mother had told him. He knew every crack in the
cellar wall. He knew the sound of Damon’s boots and the long silence that followed the
turning of the lock. He knew how to make a crust of bread last two days. He had begun to
suspect that knowledge and living were not the same thing.
He barely had enough room to stand up, let alone stretch out. Now and then he can hear
one of the feline size rats scurrying around. This is the hand that he’s been dealt in life,
locked away night after night by his drunkard of a father, fed the measliest scraps of food
that even a stray dog wouldn’t take the time to pick at. His only transgression in life is
being his fathers son. His father says he is a mistake and nothing but a disgrace to his
name. Ever since his mother died, the boys father had turned to the boy to use as a vent
for his violent rages, though the physical pain was nothing compared to the pain that the
boy felt deep down inside his heart.
Erik barely remembers what the light of day looked like, let alone the world that lie
outside this small room. He can vaguely remember a time before this when he was a
small boy of about five and he still lived upstairs in the actual house with his mother. She
had always protected him amidst his fathers violent rages and in turn she herself took
the full force of his fathers anger, more often than not leaving her beaten and bruised.
Though she was always strong, he knows that now, for not once when his father beat her
did she ever cry out. She stayed strong for him. Now and then they would get a break and
have a day or two of peace when his father would leave for a night or two of drinking and
whoring. Even though he would lock them in, they still cherished these moments like no
other.
When Damon was away, the house changed its character. Denna would put a blanket
over two chairs and call it a mountain fortress, or scatter beans across the table and
declare them an army. Erik always insisted that his soldiers should win. Denna insisted
that even the bravest army required a plan. Once, as rain drummed on the shutters, she
told him about peaches ripening in the summer sun. He asked whether they tasted better
than bread. She laughed and promised to show him one day. That was how she spoke of
the future: not if, but when. When they reached the sea. When they found Jared. When
they lived somewhere with windows that were opened for fresh air rather than watched
for danger. Erik believed her, because the alternative was too enormous to contemplate.
Erik listened, taking in every word of every story she ever told, he would memorize every
word she said and every night he would repeat to himself all that she had told him. That
brave little boy vowed that one day he and his mother would escape this place and the
wrath of his father. He spent all of his time alone dreaming and planning on a life based
on all the adventuresome tales his mother had spun for him.
Denna waited after Damon left, listening for the familiar scrape of the lock. It never
came. She stood very still, then tested the door. It opened beneath her hand. The
freedom of that small movement frightened her more than she expected. She gathered
clothes into a blanket, found the few coins she had hidden, and knelt before Erik.
“We’re going on a journey,” she whispered.
“Now?” he asked.
“Now.”
“But it’s raining.”
“I noticed.”
He watched her trembling fingers tie the bundle.
“Are you cold, Mama?” She pulled him close.
“A little.”
“I’ll keep you warm.”
For a moment she held him so tightly he could scarcely breathe.
“You already do.”
They snuck out into the rain through the back door, which let out into a small dirty
alleyway behind the house. Denna took Erik by the hand and led him away. Denna was
shivering and deathly scared by the thought of getting caught by Damon and of what he
would do to them. There was no turning back now. Erik was excited and completely
consumed by the sights and sounds and smells of the city, the heightened rush to his
senses left him completely mesmerized.
They made their way quickly down the alleyway and onto a side street. Denna’s intention
was to make it to the docks in the port and find passage on a ship to, or at least towards
D’Ruth, where she had last known her brother Jared to have lived. She had enough coin
for the two of them to get by for a month or two, it would have to be enough.
For a single suspended instant, the street ceased to exist. Denna saw Damon, Damon saw
the bundle, and Erik saw his mother’s face change. It was not surprise alone. It was the
knowledge that every careful plan could be destroyed in the space between one heartbeat
and the next.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Damon asked. Rain ran from his hair.
Denna tried to answer and could not. Erik felt her grip tighten. He had thought the city
was too large for his father to find them. He learned that night how small the world could
become.
The sudden impact of her shoulder crashing into his chest sent him staggering back a few
steps. If she had been a quicker person Denna could have gotten away, but she wasn’t
and she didn’t, in fact, she didn’t even try. She just stood there in shock, the world
around her forgotten. Damon grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and flung her around
the corner into the alley in which she had just come from.
The boy screamed at his father, pleading with him as Damon sat over Denna punching
her repeatedly in the face, her features slowly started to distort until she was soon close
to unrecognizable. Erik tried to stop his father, but what harm can a five year old boy do
to a brute of an adult? Erik grabbed one of his fathers arms in an attempt to push him off
his mother. Damon flung the boy into the wall, in which his body slump down against,
weak and defenseless. Erik couldn’t move, he knew his father was yelling at his mother
while he beat her, but he could no longer make sense of the words. The only thing he
know in this moment was pain. The boys last memory of the outside world is that of his
father grabbing a nearby chunk of cobblestone and crushing his mothers skull. That
sound he did hear, and he knew then that his father would kill him next. In that moment
he gave up on life and unconsciousness took him into its cold embrace.
For years Erik had believed he might one day wake and discover that the alley had been a
dream. But the sound of the stone was always waiting. He pressed his forehead against
his knees until the memory passed. Above him, a board creaked. He stopped breathing.
Nothing followed. In the cellar, silence had never meant safety. It meant only that danger
had not yet announced itself.
His nightmares have been getting worse and worse, dreams of the foulest creatures and
daemons. This time he was sure it wasn’t just a dream, something about the dreams was
wrong and he knew it and felt it within every bone in his body. A short time later, as he is
lying there pondering his dreams, he hears a scream.
He is brought out of his daydreaming by the scream, coming from somewhere outside
the house. Erik then noticed he could also smell smoke. He put his ear against one of the
cold stone cellar walls to see if he could make out what was going on. He heard women
screaming incomprehensibly, children crying, and men shouting.
There was something big going on outside. The sounds came from all directions and
seemed to be getting louder and more frequent. The smell of smoke was also intensifying
greatly. Erik went up to the short ladder that led to the kitchen to try to listen through
the trap door. He couldn’t hear anything coming from inside the house, only the screams
a cries in the distance.
Deciding to test the waters amongst the chaos, he yelled for his father, waited a moment,
then yelled again. Nothing. He knew now that it was finally time for him to attempt his
own escape.
He had loosened the stone a little at a time, working when his father was away or too
drunk to hear. At first he had imagined digging through the wall. Later he had imagined
using it as a weapon. Eventually the work itself became his private proof that Damon did
not control every movement of his hands. Now he carried the stone up the ladder. Each
blow shook his arms. Splinters caught beneath his nails. Smoke thickened above him. He
struck again, and again, until the boards began to yield. He did not feel brave. He felt
terrified of dying without ever seeing the sea.
The kitchen was full of thick black smoke and it looked as if half the house was ablaze.
Erik ran through the smoke, tall for an eleven year old boy, he had to hunch over slightly
to remain below the cloud of smoke that seemed to linger. He made it to the front door
and had taken only a couple of steps outside before running into his father.
Damon lay sprawled out on the ground, blood was everywhere. What Erik took to be one
of his father’s arms was laying on the other side of the street. There was a long gash
across his father’s midsection, out of which his entrails hung and lie piled up next to his
body. Erik felt no joy nor pity in that moment, he just stepped past his dead father’s
mutilated body and ran.
The sky overhead was darkened by smoke which seemed to hang over the entirety of the
city as if it were nothing but the blackest storm cloud. It seemed to Erik that every
building he could see, that every building he passed, were all ablaze. It was as if the while
city was on fire.
He ran, he knew not where, only that he needed to get out of this fiery inferno, out of
LeFae, and though he was pretty sure he had kept going in the same general direction, he
made no headway, it seemed he was more lost than he had thought.
A woman knelt beside a child in the street. A soldier tried to lift a beam from a fallen
doorway. Another man, his pockets bulging with stolen goods, stepped around the
wounded without looking down. Erik could not understand how the same disaster made
some people generous and others cruel. He had thought the world beyond the cellar
would be simple: there would be freedom, and therefore goodness. LeFae was teaching
him otherwise. He walked past a shattered fountain and heard himself asking a question
aloud.
“What happened here?”
No one answered.
The cobblestone streets seemed to be rivers of ash and blood. For every ten dead bodies
there might be one single living person, sometimes they just sat there in shock. Why was
no one trying to put the fires out? What happened here and what is currently going on?
Erik, no longer running, walked on wearily.
Erik trudged onward, the sound of the fires gradually increasing until they were but a
deafening roar that seemed to drown out all other sound and made him feel as if his ears
would bleed. He soon realized that he must be going in the right direction as he was
seeing more and more activity, people trying to put out fires, people tending to the
wounded, people looting from burning shops and dead bodies.
The smoke was thinning up ahead, he walked on, every step through the bloody ash filled
streets drudging up memories from his deepest and darkest nightmares. He swallowed
them down and continued on. He soon came upon what he first mistook to be just
another mutilated body, and as he walked past, a second glance showed him that it was
much worse. Even though its head was missing he could still tell that this had been no
mortal being, this had been one of the Palaios Manari, one of the most dreaded daemons
right out of a horror story. The dead creature had hooves in place of its feet, and though
hard to see as they were half buried amidst all the blood and ash, were its great black
feathered wings.
Erik felt his breath catch in his throat, took a couple of steps backwards and stumbled
over something, falling flat on his ass. He looked down in disbelief and shock at the
object. It was the grotesque horned head of the dead daemon. Erik scrambles back to his
feet and ran.
Erik ran as fast as he could and as he ran he noticed a break in the rolling clouds of
smoke overhead. He changed direction slightly and ran towards the break, a small hole
in the clouds of smoke overhead in which an abnormal amount of sunlight seemed to be
pouring through, sending a large blinding beam of light directly downwards. Erik kept
his eyes on it as he ran towards it, knowing deep in his heart that this was where he must
to, he went on.
Soon a bright shimmering pink light slowly fell to the ground through the beam of light
in the clouds. Erik ran faster then as the clouds started swallowing the sunlight once
again. He soon rounded a corner and stopped dead in his tracks, for directly in front of
him was a cloaked man, rising up into the air, a glowing pink sword in one hand and a
glowing blue one in the other. The man came to a stop hovering some thirty to forty feet
overhead. Erik watched, stunned, as the man swung both glowing swords through the
air.
He examined the amulet in his palm. The markings were neither pictures nor any letters
he knew. Denna had started teaching him to read, but Damon had ended the lessons.
Erik turned the metal toward the sun and thought he saw one mark shimmer. When he
blinked, it was still. Perhaps he was imagining things. After a man had flown above the
city with two glowing swords, imagination seemed a poor accusation. He slipped the
chain around his neck. The pendant rested cold against his chest. It felt less like treasure
than a question someone had forgotten to ask.
Not knowing why, but feeling a strange need to do so, Erik went to where the man had
risen from. Near that spot was a crater in the ground. As he looked into the crater
something caught his eye, something small and metallic glistened at the bottom. He
slowly climbed into the small pit and started wiping sand and debris away from where he
had seen the object. His hand touched cold metal and he pulled out a shiny amulet. He
picked it up to inspect it closer and found that it had some kind of writing or runes on it,
weird shapes or letters that he didn’t know, couldn’t know as he’d never been taught to
read or write.
Erik put the amulet over his head and climbed back out of the hole. He could just make
out the bay from here, it was in the same general direction he had previously been going.
He decided to continue on and make his way there and try doing what he and his mother
had previously attempted and failed at. He would go to the docks and find passage to
D’Ruth. He had no money but he would find a way to track down this uncle Jared of his
whom his mother was so fond of.
A warm breeze blows through the streets of a city left lying in ruins, more than half the
houses and buildings have been destroyed. Anything made of wood has most likely been
burnt up. Many of the homes and buildings have collapsed or fallen over, leaving debris
and litter scattered through the streets.
Citizens and soldiers alike have been trying to clean out all the debris and sift through all
the wreckage looking for survivors, but I was extremely slow going. There were many
people whom took stranded families into their homes, though many more were left on
the streets to fend for themselves. It was a good thing that it was summer and that the
nights were warm, as many more would have perished had this all happened during the
winter months.
People took up residence wherever possible, a few preciously abandoned warehouses still
stood and now houses hundreds of homeless. Some slept in broken down and half
collapsed homes and structures, some in alleys under any protection or overhang they
could find, some in plain sight. More than a few made for the nearby villages of Tarina
and Sivrais, both of which hadn’t been effected during the attack on LeFae.
Things hadn’t gone at all as Erik had hoped. Upon reaching the docks, he had discovered
that there were no ships. He later overheard merchants talking about how no ships could
enter the port until all the debris was cleaned up, and there was a lot of it. It looked as if
the entire sea was made up of broken wood instead of water.
The soldier distributing rations looked as though he had not slept since the attack. Rikka
greeted him like an old acquaintance.
“You again?” he said. “You were here yesterday.”
“So were you,” she replied.
“I gave you food yesterday.”
“And I ate it yesterday. A terrible habit, I know.”
The man shut his eyes briefly. Then he noticed Erik’s hollow cheeks and the
marks on his wrists. His expression changed. He handed the boy an extra portion.
Take it before I change my mind.”
Erik stared at the food. He was accustomed to scraps being thrown at him, never offered.
Rikka tugged his sleeve.
“Come on. Before he remembers how grumpy he is.”
Erik spent his first night as a free man under a small wooden bridge, underneath which
also ran a small stream. He didn’t remember climbing down under the bridge, but that
was where he had ended up. Nobody saw little Erik as he slept, curled up in the fetal
position and clutching himself in a chilling embrace.
Erik woke underneath the bridge to a bustle if noise, mostly voices, coming from nearby.
Upon emerging from his sleeping spot he saw that nearby was a large crowd of people,
they were surrounding a couple of wagons. As he stood there watching, a small hand
grabbed him gently by the arm, and he recoiled as if stung. Then he got a look at his
assailant as she said: “Come on, they’re giving out rations and they’re gonna run out
fast!”
They ate beside the stream. Erik took tiny bites until Rikka told him there was no reason
to save the food for a punishment that would never come.
“It’s yours,” she said.
“All of it?” he asked. Her face changed. She set her bread down.
“Erik, did somebody tell you that you weren’t allowed to eat?”
He looked away. She waited, and he discovered that her silence was different from Damon’s. It did not demand an answer. It made room for one.
“Food!” She says, “They’re giving out food.” She then grabs Erik’s hand. “We better hurry
if we’re to get any!” She says in a heavenly voice as she leads him towards the wagons.
Erik let himself be led, though not because of the food, it was her beauty and demeanor.
The joy, positivity, and confidence she possessed were a complete mystery to him and he
wanted more than anything to know more.
Erik and Rikka ate their rations together down by the creek next to where Erik had slept
the previous night away. Erik was more full of questions than you could ever imagine,
this being his first real interaction with anyone other than his parents. He couldn’t help
but feel out of place when in conversation, so for the most part he tried to stay quiet,
which in turn made him seem more of an enigma to little Rikka and made her question
him even more.
They sat and talked for a short while after eating, each questioning the other about
themselves and their lives. Rikka turned out to be thirteen. She was from somewhere to
the south called Ardmore. Like Erik, her mother had died when she was such a young
child that she could barely remember her. Though unlike Erik, her father had loved her
and her mother.
Rikka’s account of Svetlana grew quieter as it went on. She spoke of chores that never
ended, a closet that became a prison, and threats against the uncle she loved. “I thought
she was a witch,” Rikka admitted.
“Did she do magic?” Erik asked.
“No. I just couldn’t understand how an ordinary person could be so cruel.”
When she said the winged creature had killed the woman, she looked ashamed of her own relief. Erik thought of Damon lying in the street.
“Maybe you’re not happy she died,” he said. “Maybe you’re happy she can’t hurt you anymore.”
Rikka turned that over for a long time. “Maybe,” she whispered.
Rikka had believed that Svetlana was a real witch and was glad when the terrible winged
creatures had busted through the door and killed the evil woman. Rikka knew it was
wrong to be happy over any death, as life was precious, but she knew in her heart that it
was okay if the person was truly evil, and Svetlana had been the most evil person that she
had ever met.
Erik found out that Rikka was just as new to LeFae as he was. He told her of his past,
opening up to her about his mothers death and his time in captivity and it felt good to get
it all off his chest and not worry about what anyone else thought about the pitiful
existence he had spent under his father’s abusive custody. He knew the main reason she
was so positive was that she was just so happy to be alive and free in such a big world.
They learned the city together. Rikka declared herself their guide, although she knew
scarcely more of LeFae than Erik. When he asked how she recognized the merchants’
quarter, she gestured at the shops.
“Because merchants work here.”
“Merchants work everywhere.”
“Do you want a guide or not?”
They found a ruined statue on a hill, helped an old woman carry firewood, and received two apples in return. Erik bit into his and stopped walking. Rikka laughed at his expression. He had never eaten a whole apple before. Sweet juice ran down his chin. For a moment, the city was not ruins or grief or danger. It was sunlight and fruit and the sound of someone laughing beside him.
One evening, the two lovers were on the outskirts of LeFae sitting on a small bridge
letting their feet dangle out over the small stream underneath. It was there that Rikka
made Erik promise that he would never ever leave her, and that if they ever got separated
they would find each other, no matter what. They would stay together, get married and
live happily ever after. Erik promised this as their little hands became entwined. Both
becoming filled with the feeling of fluttering butterflies in their stomachs. Rikka leaned
over and kissed Erik on the lips for the first time. Their lips had just made contact when
Erik found himself suddenly falling.
At night, the nightmares returned. Rikka woke once to find him sitting rigid beneath the
bridge.
“Your father?” she asked.
“Some of it,” he answered. “And the creatures.”
She drew her cloak around them both.
“They’ve gone.”
“How do you know?”
“Because people would be shouting if they hadn’t.” He almost smiled.
“What if they come back?”
Rikka considered this. “Then we run very fast. Preferably in the opposite direction.” She did not pretend she was unafraid. Instead she told him that courage sometimes meant being frightened and doing something anyway. He thought of Denna and finally understood a little of what she had done for him.
As summer settled over LeFae, Erik discovered a kind of happiness that did not arrive
with fanfare. It came in the morning when no lock turned above his head. It came in the
sight of Rikka’s hair catching the sun, in the taste of bread shared without fear, in their
foolish arguments over which distant building might be a palace. He still wanted to find
Jared in D’Ruth. But each repaired section of the harbor brought a new anxiety: the sea
might carry him away from the first friend he had ever made. Rikka’s uncle might return
and take her back to Ardmore. They spoke of these possibilities and found no answer,
except that neither wanted to lose the other.
The old bridge beyond the outskirts was Rikka’s choice.
“Important promises deserve important places,” she said.
They sat on its low railing, feet swinging above the stream, and watched the evening light turn the grass to gold.
“Promise you’ll never leave me,” she whispered. Erik wanted to say that nothing in the world could separate them, but he knew too well that promises did not govern the world.
“What if something happens?” he asked.
“Then we’ll find each other,” she said.
“No matter how far?”
“No matter how far.”
They imagined a house with a garden and a kitchen and plenty of windows.
“And no locks,” Erik added. Rikka squeezed his hand.
“No locks.”
They promised to marry when they were older, and to try to live happily ever after. Erik felt the unfamiliar fluttering in his stomach and realized he wanted every future day to contain her laughter. Rikka leaned closer.
“Close your eyes,” she said.
“Are you going to push me into the stream?”
“Erik!”
He closed them. Her lips touched his. The kiss was brief, and it seemed to stop the
whole world. Then the railing shifted beneath him. He felt himself tipping backward. He
opened his eyes and reached for her hand. The water struck hard, driving the breath
from his lungs. Pain flashed through his head as it met the stones. Cold water moved
around him, mingling with the thin tendrils of blood drifting from his wound. He lay on
the streambed, staring upward. The bridge was empty.
“Rikka?” His voice came out weakly. He tried again. No answer. He had not blinked as he fell. His eyes had never left hers. One moment she had been there, her green eyes fixed on his, and the next she was gone. She had simply winked out of existence.
END OF PART ONE
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