Wern, Fir of Febla: 33 Xiven

Kayin took a moment to stare at Tidesa. The glowing mushrooms that wrapped all the way up the trees were the only source of light, creating a soft, purple silhouette of her holding her face in her hands as the sound of Dhekk’s heavy footsteps faded. The way she so easily twisted to face the tree line, in almost a dismissive way, left a sour taste on Kayin’s tongue. No hello?

She hardly even looked at him. The hysteria of it all, the anxiety and worry from the sounds of screams in the distance when he couldn’t even tell if they were familiar or not—the tingles grew to a burning in his stomach.

“Should I even bother asking what’s going on, or are you just going to say you can’t tell me?” Kayin demanded. Tidesa flinched, but otherwise stayed put. He was always a little bit of a brat to her, but now he was a foot taller and had the voice of an adult; if it weren’t for the awful scars on his face from when he was a child or his generally sloppy appearance, he doubted she’d even know who he was.

At her silence, Kayin continued, “If we don’t do something now, they’re going to get to the village.”

“They already got to the village.” Tae’s voice was taut and quick, strained.

Kayin snapped his gaze to him. The young man he used to joke with and play with after classes had finished tying his armor together, and now pulled his bloody sword out of the dirt. Horror didn’t even begin to describe the feeling of ice down his back, both at the thought of someone as gentle and kind as Tae drawing another’s blood, and at what he’d just said. Now the screams felt louder in his ears; Tailor and Sithie, Dania—were they—?

“What!” He went to stand, but Tae pulled him back down into a crouching position. “What are you doing? We have to go help!”

“Look,” Tae said, shrugging, “I agree, but we can’t launch two unsynchronized attacks. We need to wait for—what’s his name—Dhekk to do his part, or acting now could jeopardize his plans.” Initially, his argument made sense, but it didn’t stifle the urge to bolt toward the source of the smoke.

Kayin frowned, looking toward Tidesa. “Tidesa?”

“Give me a moment,” she muttered with a hand covering her mouth.

“You’ve had four years!”

“No I didn’t, Kayin!” Tidesa snapped back. She finally turned around, eyes red and burning. “I cannot see a future clearly if a Chronus is involved. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

“A Chronus,” Tae echoed, stealing the surprised words right from Kayin’s mouth. “Father Time….”

“The—the person Dhekk is going after right now,” Kayin said quietly, “i-is a Chronus?” Whereas someone like Tidesa could see the future, a Chronus was supposed to be able to control time, itself. How did that even work? How could changing the future bit by bit affect the way someone else saw it? Were there solid paths, or moments of certainty? Until this morning, Kayin would have said it wasn’t possible in the first place.

Flashes of horrible possibilities overtook Kayin’s attention for just a moment. A dark shadow chasing Dania, only to turn back time and take a faster route to get to her, close the distance faster to shove a sword right at her heart.

Interrupting his thoughts, Tidesa finally answered Kayin’s question with a shaky voice: “Not anymore.” She stared over her shoulder for a moment, either bracing herself for what was to come or what she was planning. The sign of Dhekk’s success was a cold relief.

“Can we do anything?” Kayin prompted again. He could almost see the thoughts race in Tidesa’s mind.

“Tae, go to the back of the castle. They need you to organize them.” At her command, Tae didn’t hesitate; instead, he rose from the dirt with his sword, checked around the other side of the tree, then bolted back toward the castle when the coast was clear.

“What can I do?” Kayin asked to the sound of his disappearing footsteps. Tidesa sighed.

“There are so many juggling paths and objectives,” she said aloud, almost in passing, as she looked over the bush. Her distinct un-answer brought the frustration in his stomach back.

“You left me to rot in jail for a crime I didn’t commit,” he spat finally. “Enough riddles. What changes this? What stops this?” At his wide gestures, Tidesa started to glower.

“I do not change the future, Kayin, I just try to see it. Nor do I control people!” Hah. All she did was control people.

The ash and dust formed a lump in his throat that made it difficult to swallow.

“Answer me. How do we win this war? Do we—do we do a counter-attack? Go after whoever rules Wakino to get them to retreat?” The way she deflated at his questions only made his heart race faster. Their attention was stolen, however, by a shift in the bushes by the tree line.

Popping out of cover was Dhekk, running low to the ground with a bloody sword and a fresh splattering of viscera on his shirt. A cut on his shirt revealed that someone nearly got the better of him, but only just.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Dhekk murmured when he rejoined them, panting. He gestured to the tree. “Wasn’t there another one of you here?”

Tidesa flinched away at the sight of Dhekk, one hand over her face and the other on her hip. It seemed a little odd to Kayin that a Namuh of the Future would be squeamish. Instead of waiting for her to get her bearings, he rose to his feet. If it weren’t for the tinge of rust in the air, Kayin could have convinced himself that Dhekk’s newest stains were mud or muck.

“Why—why are you back?” Kayin asked instead of dwelling on the specks of red on the man’s neck.

“Picking battles. Survive to fight another day rather than getting surrounded.”

“Is it really bad?”

Dhekk nodded in response to his question. “Yeah, even with the evacuations from earlier, seems like the guards aren’t doing a great job of keeping them out of the village.” The news made Kayin’s heart stop.

“Dania…,” he murmured aloud. Saying her name out loud only made his heart race. “Tidesa, can you see if Dania is okay? If she made it out?” The woman shook her head.

“I’ve never actually met her. I can only see the future of people I’ve physically touched, and even then, it’s blurry if there are a lot of people I don’t know—”

Kayin grit his teeth.

“Then what good are you? I can’t just stand here!” Before he could even understand what he was doing, Kayin’s fingers touched the soft soot on the tree root to pick up the short sword Dhekk abandoned earlier. “I’m going to go help!”

“Kayin—!”

Even Dhekk shouted after him: “But you’re terrible at fighting—!” Kayin ducked out of Dhekk’s reach, darted around him and ran straight for the line of trees and glowing mushrooms the man just snuck out of. At the sound of crunching leaves and twigs behind him, he just willed himself to run faster, to follow the fresh trail of bent branches and flattened grasses.

Thankfully, being smaller than Dhekk meant he could get through the trail much easier, faster than the lumbering man giving chase. Hopping over rocks speckled in the blood that dripped from Dhekk’s sword, ducking under foliage bent from smacking the man’s shoulders, Kayin eventually followed to where Dhekk first came into the forest’s edge: a pocket of rubble; stone, mostly, a charred tree stump that thankfully didn’t let the fire spread any further.

Kayin used the stump to jump onto the dilapidated wall, hoisting himself to jump over what was left.

Clanking and sounds of screams, explosions and metal hitting metal repeated over and over again. Now that he crested over the stone, he was granted an up-close visual of the situation.

Thick smoke obscured most of the sight; peaks and towers from the castle barely silhouetted against the ash. A small, red glow grew in the distance, accompanied by the sound of snapping thatch and wood, but just as quickly disappeared. Was that how everything survived like this? In addition to controlling time and changing appearances, could the Wakino soldiers summon and snuff fire?

As the smoke parted and ebbed, light glinted just slightly off of something golden in the near distance, alerting Kayin to a group of four or so metal-clad men not fighting, but standing together at the ready.

Their symbols on their chests were fancier than the others Kayin had seen, more detailed. One still had his sword in its sheath, another held a halberd. Their voices were strange; the way they pronounced their vowels made it sound as if their mouths were full of food, but Kayin could still understand what they said.

“—ould be o’er thar!” shouted one, gesturing with his sword just ahead.

“Tigh’en up, les’s go!”

Kayin hesitated just a moment before bringing himself onto the other side of the wall, dropping down with a quiet thud. The soldiers didn’t turn back, just started jogging further away. Kayin followed suit, unnoticed, and kept his arm over his mouth to muffle his gags and coughs. It didn’t take long for Kayin to finally see where the giant oak tree of the courtyard used to be, now a singed and unimpressive beam in the middle of the dilapidated stones. Turning slightly to the right, the group of Wakino soldiers met with others; and though it was hard to see, but Kayin overheard someone say, “My Leige.”

In a burst of excitement, Kayin kept charging forth with his sword pointed straight out. Maybe he could just jab someone and retreat like how Dhekk did, and just keep doing that until maybe he got to whomever was running this attack.

“Is tha’ the one?” Too late did Kayin realize that the soldiers from earlier, now joined with a group twice their size, were pointing and talking about him.

“How ’m I t’know?”

Kayin skidded to a stop by a chunk of collapsed wall, staring, wide-eyed. Were they looking for Dhekk? A tiny voice in the back of his head echoed Tidesa’s panicked confession from the last time he saw her. That dagger was not meant for Ruyer! The dagger that killed his personal guard. The dagger that belonged to someone who was able to make themselves disappear, ultimately framing Kayin for Ruyer’s death.

The group of soldiers didn’t come closer to him, and he kept his hand on the stone as an extra barrier. Though he sweat and the air was so hot, everything inside him shrunk to an icy stillness.

“Close ’nough, bring my Queen his head anyway!” A silhouette through the debris floating in the air—a tall man in golden armor, gesturing with a gauntlet. Was that the King of Wakino? Kayin didn’t entirely have time to wait and find out. Shuffling, shouting, scuffling grew to the left of him, where the doors to the village proper used to stand. Kayin couldn’t quite see anything, but one of the voices sounded familiar, like someone that used to yell at him for something when he was a child.

Four of the soldiers at his side advanced forward toward Kayin while the others darted to the left; Kayin resisted the urge to run, and instead white-knuckled the hilt of his borrowed sword, and broke away from the wall.

He wasn’t a very good fighter, true. But maybe that meant he was unpredictable, and could at least confuse them. Maybe he could get lucky, he could dive through them and stab the King of Wakino, and then they’d be forced to retreat—

It became obvious, at the way at least two of his attackers recoiled and shouted, that they didn’t expect him to run toward them. Leaning into the surprise, Kayin let out a cry with every bit of oxygen left in his lungs. His voice cracked, but he kept screaming, charging forward. More cries of desperate anger joined him; cries he could identify as Birat the Clothier, of the kids he used to listen to stories with like Yulia, of—was that Dania?

Kayin tried to duck out of the way of one swing of a sword, twisting to look and see if it was who he thought.

The quick glance granted him only enough for a seed of hope to sprout in his stomach. There were at least a dozen villagers, armed with sharpened sticks, with torches and farming tools. In the haze, Kayin could have sworn he saw Dania shouting at the top of her lungs, charging forward with a makeshift spear.

A clang forced him to look back to his own battle, the force of one sword crashing against his own. He ducked out of the way of one sword, side-stepped a slash of another. With every fiber of his being, he thrust all of his weight straight toward the man that commanded them to move: short, clad in yellow-tinged armor, an adorned helmet on his head.

Kayin heaved, anticipating the resistance of the armor against the blade he jut forward, but didn’t quite make it that far.

It felt as if someone physically pushed him in the stomach, preventing him from moving, from collapsing, even.

All at once, at realizing he couldn’t move and remembering how that could be, Kayin’s battle cry twisted to one of choked pain.

“Oh,” he realized as he noticed the hilt of the halberd out of the corner of his eyes, “I’m an idiot.”

“Yeh, I think this’ll do!” shouted the king. His smile didn’t make sense. The sword slipping out of Kayin’s grip to land on the floor, suddenly too heavy, didn’t make sense.

The world seemed to slow, but he still couldn’t keep up. As Kayin fell backward, his stomach began to ache, throbbing, wet. He didn’t fall to his back, like he thought he would, but he was able to watch a string of blood trail from his shirt to the point of the halberd being drawn away.

The reflection of a sword beside his face blocked another attack from a Wakino soldier, but he couldn’t turn around to see who held it, or even move. All of his weight fell back into something soft, though not quite as warm as the spreading stain on his shirt.

As Kayin was dragged back, his heels leaving wakes of dirt and soot, his vision faded on the edges, dark and unfocused.

He tried to choke out a sound, but instead of words, warm rust tainted his tongue.

He couldn’t turn his head, just felt it sag to the side. In the crowd of people that cried with courage just a moment ago, Kayin now saw more slumps of falling friends. Kayin tried to blink and focus on them, to see if they succeeded where he could not, but instead found Birat collapsing to his knees with his hands on his throat. Yulia, a friend from long ago, screaming until she couldn’t anymore.

Dania, doubled-over, hands up over her head as if to try and stop the mace from crashing down on her.

But that was all he saw.