High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation?
As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.
Even though Utkarsh wasn't all that far from their home, Mehul only walked there every so often, typically opting to stay at home instead. Their house was small, and though his father called it their hovel, other adults frowned at Mehul when he used that name. They told him it was disrespectful, but Mehul couldn't see why. He thought his home was beautiful. The walls were adorned with red and orange tapestries, woven by his father. Mehul loved them, loved how they seemed to keep them warm at night. Though the rich tapestries might have insulated the house from the wind, they also kept out the sounds of Kyrat almost seamlessly. Most days, Mehul was content with staying at home with his books, but some days that silence was suffocating, permeating the pages and hanging over Mehul's head. He knew his father wouldn't be back till later in the night. Those were the days Mehul trekked over to Utkarsh to talk to the other kids.
They taught Mehul all the group games they would play, like jumping rope and dealing cards. He would dance those days away until the sun fell and the sky coloured, and then he would stop by Tam's house before heading home. She was a bit older than his other friends, but not old enough to intimidate him. He always checked in to see what painting she had done, whether it was on the walls, canvas, or her clothes. She had given Mehul a couple coloured pastels, and each time he stopped by, she would teach him to draw something new. Right now he could do a few local flowers and a crude leopard's face. He wasn't perfect but he worked off of Tam's drawings, copying each angle with care while watching her own graceful brush strokes.
The people of Utkarsh were kind, and very welcoming. At first, Mehul had wanted to bring his new friends to his own home, but as he explored the small settlement, he noted that only the women spun cloth like his father. It began to embarrass him, and eventually he vowed to himself that the other kids would never see the tapestries. Instead he shared different stories about his father: he was a hero of Kyrat, and one of Pagan Min's best soldiers. He was a respected scouter for the Royal Army, with sparkling badges on his uniform. Mehul's father was out from dawn till dusk, protecting them from the terrors of the outside world.
It was true, too: his father had worked hard to clamber up the ranks, and he became one of Pagan's top consultants. After heading a particularly grand operation, Mehul's father came home with a grin on his face and a fat book under his arm. Pagan, having heard from his beloved soldier how much Mehul enjoyed reading, gifted him a book of ancient plays. Pagan was never all that interested in the classics anyhow.
His father told him most of the plays were written in a westward country called Greece, and they were very old. Mehul was enthralled. He flipped through the book constantly after that, reading small sections and poring over the pictures inside. He didn't understand everything he read – who was Chorus? he seemed to be in every single play – but Mehul loved it all the same. He thought of it as a puzzle, one woven by words and images. The pictures often helped him understand what was happening in the writing, but sometimes they confused him more than anything. The images were surreal. On one page was a woman flying in a chair drawn by strange snakes, and on another, a man strapped to a rock with a large bird perched on his chest.
One picture fascinated him more than the rest. It was right in the beginning of the book, accompanying a strange story called "Preface". The picture showed a man held aloft by vines, surrounded by dancing men with strangely disproportionate features. The dancing men had the lower halves of animals, and at first Mehul thought they were part sambar.
He asked his father one day to read the story and tell it to him, for the words seemed needlessly complex compared to some of the other plays he'd tried to read. When he had the chance, he leafed through it for Mehul, and recounted what he'd gathered to explain the portrait. The normal-looking man in the middle was named Dionysus. The other men were called satyrs, and they were part goat. His father had trouble explaining the rest, but from what Mehul could gather, the satyrs sang to Dionysus, who hosted parties where the plays would be read aloud to a crowd of people.
Mehul thought it was very strange, but he was entranced by it all the same. He began wandering more on his walks to Utkarsh, looking for sambars and goats, pretending their queer squealing was a song meant to tell a story of an amazing adventure. He loved listening to the animals, and almost began to resent the insulating tapestries in his house; they made the nights all too quiet. Usually.
Mehul was scurrying through a crowd at the base of a hill, topped by a fortress of a city. He followed a valiant warrior who cut through mobs of maddened soldiers and despicable creatures. Men frothed at the mouths, spilling the contents of their heads across the grass. Snake women tossed their own heads around like mortar shells. He thought he had even seen a dog fighting them, but only as a flash of teeth in the corner of his vision. He kept a bow by his side, and though he aimed it well, he was nothing compared to the warrior carving rings through the enemies assaulting their home. The demons were no match for this hero, and Mehul felt an overwhelming sense of pride for this man. Flakes of gold began to fall from the sky, peppering the bright red battlefield with shining lights. He watched as the golden petals caked onto his hero's armour, dusting him in a blinding brilliance, and soon Mehul found that he couldn't remember what colour the armour had been nor what crest the warrior bore. Searching the man's form, he found a small splash of colour beneath the gold, and though it was surely a lingering sign of the warrior's alliance, he thought the heel was such a strange place to leave a crest, and such a violently red one at that.
A soft bang set Mehul upright in his bed, his eyes searching the dim room to regain their sense of reality. The sound couldn't have been from outside; he'd heard it too clearly. It sounded like the front door. Mehul crept out of his little bedroom, thinking he'd catch his dad leaving for work, but the light drifting in from the windows made him doubtful. They had one clock on the wall outside the bedrooms, and it said it was just past 6. His dad was usually long gone by this point; had he come back? Maybe he dropped off a new book?
Mehul felt a spark in his feet, and he raced into the front area of his little home. There was no book, but there was something bright red on the wooden flooring near the front door. Mehul crept over to it, lifting it carefully in his arms.
He brought the oversized mask to his face and smiled. Although it must have come from Pagan, it was his father's diligence that brought these amazing gifts home. Holding the garish red goat mask over his face, Mehul began to hum, as if singing a story like the satyrs in his fat book of plays.