The Fall
Chapter 5: Evil
"Jump." His voice was quiet, like the word scared him. He swallowed, shuffled his feet on the hard stone beneath them. "That's all we have to do."
She felt the flesh of the inside of her throat dry up and crack when she tried to speak, when she felt her lips move but heard no sound.
He turned his head, to look out at the hazy light of dawn, the blushing pink colors cast by the sun clouding the edges of the sky. Looked at the canopies of green trees, the sea of jade and viridian. He looked at it like he was seeing it all for the first time or the last.
No, she wanted to scream. She grabbed his arm, anchoring him to one spot, preventing him from moving any further. You won't. We won't.
"We have a choice, Moth," he snapped, whirling to face her, to grab her by the shoulders. One of the moments where she swore he was taller than her even though they both knew he wasn't. She and him were the same—his face was a mirror to hers, minus the more feminine curve of her nose and her jaw. His green eyes were hers, his angry thoughts, his unkempt fiery hair. "For the first and last time of our lives, we have a choice. We can grow up in fear, fighting battles we can't win or lose, knowing we don't even have anything to fight for...or we can just choose not to. It's not giving up, Moth—it's making a choice."
The ground fell away, inches from their feet. All he had to do was take a step backwards. All she had to do was not let go, not fight, make her choice.
She spoke. She didn't hear her words, she only watched the sad curve of his mouth as he smiled at her, as he dropped his hands to hers and squeezed. Something beat at the inside of her skull, writhing in pain, in terror, some many-legged creature that tore at her thoughts in frenzied desperation. It was part of her, the part that made the other choice.
She was holding his hand as her thoughts spiraled into a maelstrom of screams she couldn't decipher, faces she'd never see again. Her nails dug into his flesh as they stood on the edge of the rock face and looked down. As she let her eyes fall closed and her body fall forwards.
But when her eyes opened, she was sobbing silently, clawing at her hair, burying her face into the layers of cloth packed beneath her. Her face contorted, her chest heaved, tears poured from her eyes. Her hand stretched out for the small thing she knew was lying beside her, the electrified stone half-hidden beneath a piece of fabric—upon contact, invisible, gentle sparks traced up her arm, a calmness seeped into her thoughts, but it wasn't enough.
The darkness was blinding. There was nothing to see but the sloping of the sheets around her body, the valleys and summits they formed, illuminated by the muted starlight that fell through the tiny sliver of window near where the wall and the ceiling met, that small part of their room that was above ground.
She coughed, the muscles in her chest contracting painfully with the force of her sobs as she tried to swallow them away.
"Moth…" The raspy voice from the bed below hers made it all worse. She shoved her fist against her mouth, trying to stifle her hitched breaths. She pulled the stone closer to her body.
"It's fine. You'll be fine." Right—he thought she was crying for a different reason.
"No," she whispered, forcing the tremors out of her voice. "Just go back to sleep."
"You're the one who needs to sleep. They cart you and Tyko away at dawn."
"I know," she murmured into the cloths of her bed, pulling them in a bundle around her when the cold of night danced across her shivering skin.
"You know what happens when you go. All you have to do is pay attention to everything they tell you. Best chance of…"
What? Winning?
She let out a wavering sigh. "Two days ago," she began, sniffing, "you said me and Cain were…'going about this all wrong'. Remember? What was your idea?"
Silence.
"Tell me, Eri."
She listened to the creaking of his bed frame as he shifted. "It's not what I know you're thinking, Moth."
She flinched.
"Doesn't matter now. Just go with our strategy—fight with everything and drop out somewhere in the top ten, if you make it that far. Don't try and lose in the beginning if that might happen anyway later on, no matter how hard you fight."
Moth nodded. The best idea. The idea that half of the troops across Caliosteo probably shared, the plan that would save them and sacrifice everyone else. It would only work for some—for the strong or the smart or the lucky.
Her stomach began to churn, because she didn't know if she was any of those.
When dawn rose, there would no longer be a choice. She could feel the clockwork of the world turning, shifting on its axis as the countdown ground on, numbering the last hours in which she would be herself, in which Eri was Eri and Ty was no one. She sensed the weight of the choices she could make in those moments—jump, run away, jump—and felt them deteriorate as she let seconds pass.
Her heart fluttered faster than before.
She pushed herself off the bed and jumped down to the floor, startling Eri where he lay.
"What are you doing?"
She stood, alone and awkward, beside his bed, dull eyes falling on the square of darkness and silver light that slipped through the window. "Skies. I don't know." And she didn't, she really didn't. Like hell she had the courage to run. And they both knew she didn't have it in her to jump.
It was dark out there, but the sky was a lighter blue than the dead of night should have been, a tentative color that didn't have a name, not really. It was a shade between shades, a harbinger of dawn—knowing that, there was no way she would force herself to sleep again, force her mind into submission to melt away those last hours of the closest thing to freedom she'd ever feel.
She gripped the rock even tighter. Thunder rippled from outside, the echo of it billowing into their tiny room.
Moth paced towards the doorway, sighing. "I'll come back before dawn. You know, to... say goodbye."
"Moth," he whispered as she left, but she didn't respond, stooping to grab her vest near the threshold where she'd tossed it. Silent as she could manage, she stalked through the short underground hallway and up the stairs of tough cobblestone—she was nothing more than a breath of wind caught by a window and spun throughout the house, silent, almost unnoticeable.
Almost.
At the top of the stairs, she stopped, some half-buried instinct inside her forcing her body to freeze when she felt eyes bore into her back. She whipped around and didn't know what she expected to see there—the all-too-familiar face of a certain dead relative she thought she saw, those few nights ago out in the forest; the dark silhouette of the metamorphic tyrant who ruled the universe; Eri—never mind how impossible all of it was.
But he was none of those people. He was just Tyko, standing alone at the bottom of the stairs, watching her.
"Can't sleep either?" he asked, so quiet she barely heard him. Or maybe she didn't—maybe she knew what he was going to say, maybe she could somehow read his lips in the darkness.
She shook her head, beckoning for him to follow her.
Moth emerged into the cold room above ground, where the rickety door was always left ajar, another place where the night could seep through and chill everything. "We don't have that much time left," she rasped, hearing him approach behind her. "So why sleep it away?"
She sat down in one of the chairs at the table, feeling it wobble beneath her weight.
"Well," Ty said quietly, "if you're asleep you don't have to worry about it."
"But if you're already worried about it, you don't sleep."
"Funny how that works."
Silence. Ty sat at the other chair, crossing his arms—and in one of his hands she could see the small dark stone that held his beast—and staring out through the open window. Moth draped her vest over her legs, feeling the hard thing inside one of the pockets: her dagger. The dinosaur tooth she'd found, out there, somewhere near where the Sky-horse's first body had fallen.
She'd shown it to Ty before. That's a Sky-king tooth, he'd said. Trust me. See the serrated edges? The way it thins out here? That's how you know.
Moth would have to leave behind the Sky-king's tooth. Any weapons minus the beasts themselves were strictly forbidden.
"You know," Ty said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. "You still haven't told me how exactly you found your Sky-horse. He couldn't just show up out of nowhere, Moth. There's something you're hiding."
Oh, she though meekly. This.
She turned over the pumice stone in her hand, flinching at the bursts of invisible static that rippled up her arms, the sweeping coldness through her head.
Visions. They were back, sprouting just as wanton rushes of foreign emotion, flashes of color, but blossoming into memories that weren't supposed to be hers, reeling before her eyes like she was living them.
She tensed, closing her eyes, but the colors intensified. The sounds were louder, rougher—she saw flashes of light, of hot red and cold, stark white, a jolt of pain behind her eyes, the silhouette of a figure standing over her—but none of it was real. None of it was hers. Rather, it belonged to the Sky-horse contained within the pumice stone she held. Rather, it was his first memory of this life, the hot and painful moments of rebirth.
"Moth?" Ty's voice sounded so far away. "Moth, are you okay?"
"Fine," she murmured, straightening in her chair. "I'm fine." The flashes were dissipating, but the cold wreath around her mind was still there.
No, she thought frantically. No. That was a dream. He didn't find us in the middle of the woods. He didn't revive you in front of me.
The coldness surged in power; she shivered. The Sky-horse was trying to tell her something, manufacturing images and emotions and shoving them at her, begging her to understand.
That it was real.
He had come to life on the shore of a lake in the dead of night, taking his first breath in a world devoid of anything but darkness and the sound it makes, the chorus of crickets in the bushes, the lapping of water on the bank, the footsteps of an old man walking away.
Maybe he heard her breathing, where she lay—just beyond the boundary of the forest, passed out from fear or from the sorcery of the man who was contiguous with the night. Maybe the events had played over and over in her head while she slept, her dreams morphing the memory into something unfamiliar, even chimerical.
Something about it all had startled her awake, hours past dawn, fear fueling her mad dash from the lakeside and shattered rock, stumbling through the undergrowth of the forest, her crazed emotions ricocheting between her and the Sky-horse, woken by her terror.
It was tumbling from her lips now; she could feel it if she couldn't hear it. Ty was staring at her as she spoke, his dark eyes pulled wide.
She must've mentioned something about how she trekked to the lakeside as often as she could to sit by the remains of the Sky-horse's first life, how somehow she felt a sort of connection with a skeleton, because he nodded in recognition—he knew that part. She'd told him before, and it had only added to his confusion as to how she suddenly had a live beast.
Maybe she started talking about the evening she stayed out too long and fell asleep, not wanting to return home, how she'd noticed the dark-robed figure approach her in what had to be a dream, how she could've sworn it was her dead grandfather. Not how a small part of her knew that it wasn't.
"And then what?" he asked.
"And then he revived the Sky-horse. And the dream ends."
"Moth. The dream…" He was shaking his head at her, face ashen, eyes bright with awe. "Moth, it wasn't a dream. You know who that was, don't you?"
Yes.
"I know who I thought it was," she said, exasperated, leaning forward across the table to look him in the face. "I swear it was him, Ty. "
"You knew your grandfather?" he asked softly, skeptically. "Be honest, Moth; are you sure?"
There was something in his face, something she didn't like. It was pity.
"Yes," she snapped. "I did. I saw him around the village before he died, Ty—he's talked to me. About the tournament. He knew things about my mother that only her father could know…" She trailed off, eyes darting back and forth across his face, wondering why that expression of pity had some fear in it now, too.
"What about your mother?" Ty asked urgently, quietly. "What does she say about him?"
"She…she says nothing. Won't talk about him. He's been gone so long he has to be dead."
"Have you ever told her you met him before he disappeared?"
"No. He said... I couldn't."
Silence. The part of her that knew the man was not really her grandfather and her dream was not really a dream also knew what Ty was getting at, why his face was so fearful. It was the part she clamped down on, suffocated, ignored.
"And then, he showed up by the Sky-horse fossil," she murmured, running her fingers nervously over the stone in her hands. "Brought it back. Maybe he's a sorcerer." She forced a laugh.
"No." Ty said it firmly, his voice hard as steel, staring her straight in the face. "Moth, it wasn't a dream. The man who found you that night was Zongazonga." She barely had time to flinch at the name, to duck her head and clamp down on her tongue before she could blurt I know. "The man you've talked to, the one who looks like he's your grandfather, he's Zongazonga."
She was silent and still. Here he was - he'd never even met the man and he had the strength to realize the truth, to say it out loud, and then there was her - suffocating it in the dark part of her mind for years, desperately refusing to acknowledge it.
"Your grandfather was the Majestic Vessel fifty years ago. He won the tournament, didn't he?"
Moth pulled her knees into her chest.
"Think about it—your mother won't talk about him because he's long gone. I bet she never knew him. You can't tell her you've met him because he's not really him. She'd know. He makes his rounds, Moth, every so often, every few years—there's nowhere in Caliosteo our dear old king hasn't been."
She closed her eyes, burying her face in her knees. Every few years. Last time she'd seen him, she'd been nine; after he left, she'd convinced herself he died because he never came back. Before that…six? The memory was a smear at the back of her mind, a blurred image of herself falling at a tall man's feet, staring up to realize he looked familiar, a face she'd seen before in someone else's, ghosts of his features in that of her brothers and her parents.
"Why would…he…talk to me, Ty?"
"He must've known who you were, Moth. A vessel child, a relative of his current body. He's the most powerful sorcerer in the universe; of course he knew."
"Yeah?" she rasped, swallowing hard, sighing a muffled sigh into her knees. "That's not really an answer."
"How's this?" Ty asked, and she listened to him lean closer to her, across the table. She raised her head. "He saw something he could manipulate. I don't know why he would, I don't know why he gave you the Sky-horse before the doom convoy. Maybe there's no good reason, maybe he just felt like it."
She was quiet, staring back with hollow eyes.
"But you thought he was a good person, didn't you? As your grandfather, anyway. Some kind, wise old man. Look, Moth…"—his eyes suddenly turned intense—"You can't do that, with Zongazonga. He doesn't think like we do. No matter what he does, no matter what he says, no matter whose body he says it with—remember that he's evil. I... I can't define evil for you, Moth, not really, but he's the only definition you need. He is the personification of evil, of savagery, of bloodlust, and his people mean nothing to him."
Sky-king: tarbo. Moth has a tarbo tooth. Technically I'd reserve 'king' for the strongest theropod of the type. Tarbo used to be, but then aeros came along... But I don't know what else to call tarbo but I have ideas for aeros, and tarbo was the OG strongest anyway, so there.
And since there are tarbo and parium fossils around where she lives, you can probably deduct that her village is near the lake of Petrified Woods. Probably. I'm pointing it out just in case.
Anyway! I'd be so thankful if you reviewed and sent OCs if you've got ideas!
-Angel
