Turn, Fir of Apla: 28 Xiven

Although he could get away with a lot due to his new title, Kayin did find ways to get in trouble. Mostly, though, it was for not wearing shoes. The attendants even begged him.

“Please, Your Highness. For your safety, we advise that you wear your shoes.” But they were hard to walk in. Even though they felt nice to sit in, it made him noisier, clunkier.

One afternoon in particular, right after lunch, Math got canceled because Teacher Dopi got sick. So now Kayin wandered the halls, tapping each candelabra as he walked, humming a lullaby Aunt Aayin used to sing to him, willing himself to be just a little bit taller so he could fully grab onto one and swing on it like a tree branch.

On the other side of the hallway walked the king with his Chief of Staff, Arill. They chatted mindlessly, but ended their conversation once they saw Kayin.

“Young Prince,” said Arill, “where are your shoes?” He shrugged as he came to a stop in front of them. Arill’s eyes still lit with amusement, but she frowned at him. “Please wear your shoes.”

“I don’t like them.” Kayin didn’t even look at her, just stared at the sleepy, old man that stood with half-closed eyes.

“You will get used to it, Your Grace.” Without anything left to say, Kayin just stood there, staring, waiting to be dismissed. Arill let out a soft laugh, finally alerting the king to the moment they were in. The man blinked, as if just waking from a long slumber.

“Ah,” he sounded as he looked down to Kayin. “Hello.”

He raised a brow, but gave an awkward wave. Arill laughed again.

“Pardon us, Young Prince.” They continued walking, moving past him in the hallway. “He reminds me of you when you were little, my King.”

The idle comment made his stomach flop, the acid burning his insides.

“I’m nothing like these people,” he thought to himself as he came around a corner. This was the back of the castle, where large, glass doors lit the entire hallway with a weak sunlight. The clouds from the earlier storms still lingered, even though the Cold Season was supposed to be over.

Kayin went outside, usually, with his herbalism class to dig in the dirt and examine various flora inside the bricked walls of the kingdom. They never went further than that. Never went to the actual city of Yatora. Never to the forest. The forest didn’t even seem to curl around these walls the same way, Kayin thought as he approached the doors.

Guards mumbled their greetings, which he ignored, when he shoved his way to the outside world. The walls were so tall. Old, built by generations before, and even jagged. Climbable.

As he breathed in the fresh air, he pointed over the giant wall.

“Is the forest over there?” he asked the guard at the door. The guard didn’t even look where he pointed.

“Your Grace, the forest is that way.” He pointed over Kayin’s shoulder. Kayin frowned and continued to gesture in the opposite direction.

“Then what’s there?”

“Nothing to concern yourself with, Young Prince. It’s not safe.” Not safe? He knew the forest better than his own hut! Kayin scoffed in response, and took a few steps over to a lone wooden bench against the castle walls to step up onto it and look over. He was still too short, though. And while he could see the tips of the trees and mushrooms in the direction the guard pointed behind him, there was nothing directly over the part of the wall Kayin looked at. Weird.

“Please get down from there, Your Grace,” the guard said weakly. Kayin glanced at him with a raised brow. “What happened to your shoes, Your Grace?”

Kayin rolled his eyes, but hopped off of the wood and onto the stone as he continued to stare straight ahead, straight into where Rinesa began to set in the west , where no mushroomtops glowed.

A scraggly tree provided shade to some common flowers that he already studied in his herbalism class. He tried climbing it before, but Teacher Tisa asked him not to. Well, Teacher Tisa wasn’t here.

With a quick glance behind his shoulder to the guard by the door, Kayin hopped up onto the tree, hugging it, as he tried to scurry his way up.

“Uh!” The guard couldn’t even form words for the first few seconds that Kayin climbed, one foot on the crumbling stone wall, one foot on the tree, all the way to the top.

“Wait!” Another guard, now.

“Follow him!” the other shouted.

“No! You know what happened there—go around to the forest; tell Tidesa what he’s doing!” Pft. Maybe if he was Princess Sepik, he’d be important enough to follow. Kayin grit his teeth and jumped against the tree to the top of the stone wall. He pulled himself up with a groan, his skin tearing against the gritty brick, until he finally swung his legs over.

He hesitated, sitting on top of the stones for a minute, breathless. His shin stung from his new scrape, but it hardly registered now.

The reason why he couldn’t see any forest was because there wasn’t any. It was just a wide, desolate acre made of nothing but a low fog that covered the floor. It looked as if someone took a giant chunk of the forest and just cut it out to be absolutely nothing but fog.

If he looked directly down, the fog moved and ebbed slowly with the gentle breeze. There was a ground there. Something dark, brown and dirty. Leaves, maybe? There seemed to be tree stumps just ahead, at least.

He glanced over his shoulder back to the castle yard. The guards had finally left him alone, stopped bothering to try and get him to obey. Would they even notice if he just left? If he jumped down, ran back to the village to go live with Dania and her parents?

Kayin dangled his feet over the edge of the stone without much more thought, and pushed off and away. He thought the edges of dried leaves or twigs would cut his feet, but landing was as soft as a pwoof. When he took a breath, the air burned him, choking, hot.

He’d just landed in a pile of ash, and now he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and when he started coughing and stepping forward to try and get out of it, his feet kicked smooth, hallow rocks that sounded like tree branches against stone.

No songs or chirps came from the gerries or bugs, no guards called for him. Other than his poor attempt at getting some air and his awkward tripping on the floor, everything was completely silent.

Coughing this hard made his eyes water; it, at least, made it easier to wipe the ash out of his eyes so he could see again. He lifted his shirt collar over his mouth, hacking into it, stumbling over more of those rocks. Through his blurry vision, Kayin tried to squint through the ash and fog to see what he stepped on.

As he gathered his breath, he poked at the rock with his foot, flipping it over in the dirt to try and get a better look—

Kayin stumbled backward, gasping in more ash as his arms flew back to try and catch himself. The snapping and crunching beneath him confirmed his nightmare: these were bones.

He couldn’t scream, he couldn’t do anything but sputter and gasp and try to crawl away. The skull he poked didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before, not the shallow graves of the villagers that the ground rejected after the Cold Season, not the decomposing bodies of the edia he saw in the forest—but it certainly looked like what Tailer and Sithie said a peka looked like: massive face, snout as long as a horse’s but as pointed as a gerrie’s, with sharp, jagged teeth.

He continued to choke in horror as he tried to scramble to his feet. The broken bones scraped at his palms and his knees when he flipped over to try and get up. But something made him pause. He could feel a chill run through his body, nothing to do with the sticky humidity that wrapped around Icheami’s air like a damp rag. A large tug in his chest told him to go back and run, as fast as he could. With a gulp of horror, Kayin turned around and started back toward the wall, which he could hardly see through the ashen fog. Was he even going the right way?

Crunch, crunch, snap, crunch; over and over again, stabbing and scraping the pads of his feet. Tears welled in his eyes, burning and blurring his vision. It wasn’t until he stumbled that he realized in horror: that crunching, that snapping, was not matching his steps.

The slightest wail escaped his lips as he ran, no longer able to make out any shapes in front of him at all. Where was the wall? He didn’t go that far! He must have been going the wrong way—

In response to his cry, a deafening screech. Something strong and sharp bit down, hard, on his shoulder. Stinging, pulsating. Teeth against bone. Hot, sticky saliva mixing with his blood, wafting a rusty sourness into the burnt air. Just when he thought the thrum couldn’t get any worse, when he thought that maybe if he screamed that it would stop, more crunching overcame his senses: some from under his hands as he fell to his knees, some coming from the massive snout that just crushed his shoulder in its jaw.

The teeth ripped at his arm, pulling pieces of flesh off bone as it twisted away. It didn’t sound like his scream. He’d never been that loud, that hoarse before. But it had to be him, because after a sharp smack against his right cheek, the screaming stopped, and he was out of air. Kayin fell back into the bones and twigs in the ash, his vision too blurry to make out much else than the long, bloody snout of the creature that attacked him.

Somehow, as everything began to throb, Kayin managed to keep his eyes open long enough to watch the thing slump to the side, a useless heap. From its ribs came out a blade, that under the splotches of blood, still glinted in the light a brilliant gold.

His vision speckled and faded, despite his strongest urge to try and see what happened, who stabbed the beast. But it didn’t make any sense anyway. Donning the sword was a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, brown hair exposed from a fallen hood.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so hard to reconcile if the woman didn’t turn away from him and shout, “Kayin!”