The Fall


Chapter 6: Runners


She didn't like the way he was staring at her. His features were frozen between expressions she couldn't decipher, like he was afraid moving them at all would give him away to her, all of him, and his eyes were tense and dark and cold like she'd never seen them before.

It was worse than the time he first found her. He didn't stare at her like she was a threat to him then—in the first moment, she was merely an enemy.

"I know… it's a lot to ask," she murmured slowly, thumbing over the curved edge of her Sky-king tooth, lodged deep in a pocket of her vest. Tyko was weaponless but somehow, in all the months she'd known him, she'd been aware that to fight her and win would be easy for him. Weapon or not.

He was small. His frame was built narrow, fragile; and looked like he'd spent most of his life trying to fight it—lifting heavy things, wielding weapons, scaling cliff faces, hunting against the law for the sake of a family she wasn't sure he had, trying his hardest to break himself down so he could build back up different, better.

He was small. But he was not weak. He could help her.

"Yeah. It's a lot to ask."

"I don't know you," Moth blurted, curling her fist around the wicked-sharp remnant of a beast so powerful in the ancient days of its life that it'd been dubbed king of the sky. It didn't matter it'd never bore any wings, because there had never been any doubt it deserved its title. "I don't know where you came from or why you ran from there, but you've… you've helped me before."

She shifted her weight, clenching her toes inside her worn-out moccasin boots and trying to grip the damp, dark earth beneath them. Because she felt like she was falling again. She felt like she was Eri and Ty was herself, and she would fall and fall till the ground came up beneath her to reduce her bones to powder. Moth shifted and the light sieving through the scattered forest canopy danced and darted across her body and wreathed her skin in ethereal golden warmth, still shielding him in verdant shadow.

"Did you run because… because you were afraid of…" She'd stopped. The words lodged in her throat. She gazed at him more intensely now, the question turning foul in her mouth, because she knew he wasn't the type to fear things. He looked like her but he was nothing like her.

"The tournament? No."

It was exactly the simple answer she was expecting. "So why did you run—?"

"Moth."

She froze in her shifting because now his voice matched his eyes.

"Don't ever ask me that. If I'm ever going to tell you anything, it's not now. It's not tomorrow, it's not the next day. If you promise never to ask again—if you promise to trust me fully—I'll help you."

She should have nodded and retreated through the woods without another word; she should've ran home, fueled by nothing but the hope he'd lended her and the idea that maybe she and her brothers would be okay. She would have burst through the door and hugged all of them. She would have looked Eri in the eyes. She would have laughed with Cain for the first time in years. She would have been the first person ever to put a smile on Abel's face.

Instead, she tilted her head out of the glare dribbling from above, feeling the Sky-king tooth graze through a layer or two of her thumb flesh. "Why help me at all?"

It was merely another question he'd never answer.


She'd run the numbers in her head before. There should've been eight hundred vessel children in all aboard the rattling doom convoy as it snaked along a thinning dirt path curving along a cliff face, the edge overlooking a sea of undulating green canopies far below. The convoy's last stop two days earlier was her village, so the two hundred give-or-take vessels from there had crouched, silent and somber in the carts for hours as the convoy rolled back into towns delivering odd stones to scared and starved children who'd marveled at the electricity or heat or cold or pulse emanating from a rock tentatively clutched in un-calloused hands that'd never worked a day before. There should've been eight hundred children like that—but there was no way the meager number of them came close.

Four towns. She counted. Hers, a small spattering of buildings in a field and a forest's edge, still there only because of the food it exported to the central palace. Then a sprawling metropolis fanning out around a lake that glittered in the slight glow of dawn, alive with the choking reek of fish. And then a city surrounded by farmland. And then a tiny, pathetic sort of town clinging to life under the cover of thick jungle trees. She watched the children from each of them board the convoy with stones pressed to their chests or clasped in their hands—black obsidian, quartz spheres, pumice and sandstone, heavy granite.

Some of them looked at her. In each expression was something familiar mixed with something foreign—both would understand the other's fear, but both had a different way of dealing with it, of living with the situation, of coping with the pressure of protecting themselves and their families and their beasts. In each expression was something Moth could learn from. In each was a desperate question she'd long since answered for herself.

She sat cross-legged on the hay-strewn floor—two days ago it was a cage barely strong enough to resist the rage of beasts unwilling to seal themselves in stones before the odd emptiness in their minds and hearts had been filled. The biggest of them, too strong and heavy for mere cages, had been forced to stone and bound in sorcery from the central palace till the vessel child assigned to them had taken their stone in those pale, soft hands and made them whole, effectively breaking the Darkforce spell and sealing the fates of the both of them.

Ty was beside her. He was lying on his back, between her and a small throng of vessels from the lake city huddling together, whispering about something while they still had voices. Ty was half-asleep, hands folded behind his head, half-buried in the hay strewn across his body. It'd taken her half the journey to notice his Flame-flight had crawled out of her obsidian shell and was huddled on his chest, leathery wings draped across him like he'd told her he was cold and she'd jumped to do something about it. Her eyes were wide open, her thick sunset-colored beak resting across his shoulder.

She wanted to smile, looking at them. But too much had happened that morning. This wasn't enough.

There were runners every year: people that tried to escape the convoy when it returned to take them away. She'd watched it happen twice—someone hadn't been present when the convoy docked in the center square of the city. The first time, when the missing girl was reported to be nowhere in town, Moth had nearly choked on her horror when she'd watched the head convoy guard extend his arm to the sky and stare up into it like he was inhuman and felt no fear for what was above. From the diamond stones in his hand burst two purple shadows unfurling in the dawn light—great wings webbed in dead flesh choked of blood, eyes like sinister binary suns rising at the speed of sound. Z-beasts. Hunters, born of the King's own sorcery. Tyko had whispered to her: "She'll be dead before we get there."

"There" was about as descriptive he could be about the convoy's final destination.

The second time was much less dramatic. It was a young boy that tried to run at the last moment. A guard hit him down with the flat of his spear, spat in his face something he must've rehearsed: "You have attempted to escape the noble fate of a vessel child in the tournament of our King. You now have a single choice to make: Will you beg for death here and die a coward, or will you choose the honor and dignity of a warrior?"

They'd soon led him, trembling, onto a separate carriage of the convoy. He'd been cheated out of the "honor and dignity" his choice was supposed come with.

The convoy lurched to the side as its wheels displaced the loose stone and dirt of the path, careening them to and fro—Moth tensed, hand tightening around her stone, face pressed to the metal grid walls of the cage to watch the far-below canopies swing closer with every stumble of the cart.

They weren't far from the top of the cliff now. That's where everyone said they were going, though to listen to anyone else shut in her cart would force her to ignore the fact that none of them knew anything. They'd perhaps been doomed to participate in the tournament since before they were born, but growing up it'd been such a taboo that no one dared mention it to their faces; no one protested when they were permitted to eat first, never mind it had never been their own hands hard at work to earn the food, to help provide for the others in their troop. Perhaps they thought any mention of what was to come would drag them to their knees in despair—they must be the weak type, after all. Never worked a day in their lives.

Moth didn't need the word of tournament fodder to help her make sense of logic. They were going up. Soon there'd be nowhere to go but down. Nowhere to go at all, because the destination had been reached.

"Hey."

Moth jumped, whipping around when a cold finger pressed into her shoulder. She found herself close, too close, to the pale and staring eyes of a young girl, lying across the hay on her stomach and trying to slither closer to Moth, one of her tiny pale hands gripping a granite rock.

"Feel this."

She thrust her stone at Moth's open hand—Moth raised her eyebrows at the girl, watching her flick her thin blond hair over one bare shoulder, then wriggle to a sitting position on her knees. She wore a white dress that looked like it was made of bedsheets torn up and crudely knitted back together. Dark, sooty stains scored up the sides and around the hem like she'd walked in ashes. She couldn't have been older than ten—the absolute youngest of any vessel children. Her face, gaunt but angelic, was split in an unnerving sort of grin. Toothy and oddly genuine.

Tentatively, Moth closed her fist around the stone forced into her palm, almost expecting flickers of electricity to dance between her fingers—but the experience was starkly different. The rock felt warmer and gritty in her palm, coating it with a fine layer of dust, like it was a stone that'd been pulled from the core of the earth and left to cool for just a little while. Moth felt herself smiling back at the girl, not knowing why it was suddenly so easy. There were the runners; the girl and her undead winged hunters, the boy sobbing somewhere in the corner of his cart. And her brothers. She'd said goodbye, and so had Abel, sick as he was; and so had Cain, sad as he was; and Eri—he'd said something more.

"He's really strong," the girl suddenly whispered, like this was supposed to be a secret between only them. "His name's Dusty. He likes digging. And he's really really strong."

"Mhm," Moth agreed, nodding her head in time with the little girl's as her odd grin split wider.

"Show me your stone. Please?"

"I…" Moth shifted, crossing her legs beneath her again and leaning against the side of the cart. Rustling hay beside her told her Tyko was waking up again, shoving Hawk's weight off him and wincing as she climbed up his back to perch on his shoulder.

"Sure. Here." Moth withdrew a hand from the inside of her vest, opening her hand to reveal her bleached-white pumice stone. The Sky-horse's presence in her mind was like a tide on an empty shore—it settled sometimes, flat on the surface and smooth as glass. Other times, she'd feel a roiling undercurrent beneath the surface, sending waves of sickening uneasiness through her gut. Still other times the waves would break farther from shore—excitement or the razor edge of anger.

Now the tide was high. Her beast wanted to tell her something, something about this odd grinning girl, but even he didn't know what that was.

"Ooh," she whispered. "A sky beast! I can tell."

"You can… touch it if you want," Moth said, shrugging, unsure if that was a bad idea or not. She tensed as the girl's hand flashed out, resting on the surface of Moth's stone for barely a second before she whisked it back, giggling at the spark she'd felt.

"I like Dusty's rock better!"

Moth smiled again, handing the girl's stone back to her. She was rather impressed—even a girl so young and naïve as this one had thus far refrained from revealing anything about her beast but its name. Every tournament, most vessels knew not to reveal the specific kind of beast they would fight with, lest they give another fighter an advantage and suffer the dire consequences of losing in the tournament's beginning rounds. This girl seemed the type that wouldn't know about the secrecy rule or forget it if she did.

Tyko knew the rule. Nonetheless, he'd spent the first half of the journey convincing Moth that he didn't give a damn who saw Hawk out of her stone.

"What's your sky beast's name?" the girl asked happily, a finger hovering again over the pumice. The tide dragged at the shore as it receded, curling into a few small breakers father out.

"Arashi."

Before she spoke, she didn't know the answer to her question. She'd spent two days toying with sounds in her head, word fragments attached to other word fragments, etymology and meanings crammed together in the form of a name that was easy to say, fitting of the powerful Sky-horse contained within her stone, and more than just a pretty nonsense sound—it had to mean something.

Arashi was the best and entirely spontaneous combination of all those things. She felt the tide recede and soothe itself into stillness.

"Oh. Since when?" This time it was Tyko speaking. She looked and saw him sitting like her but leaning over his lap, trying not to flinch as Hawk's small claws dug into his shoulder. Moth thought her eyes were smiling as her big head swiveled back and forth, leaning closer to sniff at her and gaze down at the stone in her hand.

"Since now." Moth shrugged. "How can you sleep?"

The little girl dragged herself rather clumsily into a sitting position, staring out through the bars at the morning expanse of the world below. "Oh, I slept great last night," she announced. "I was really excited when I woke up!" She murmured to herself as she sidled away from Moth, drumming a few fingers on her granite stone.

Moth watched Tyko's brow knit briefly at her words, but he chose to ignore them. "Because I was tired," he said simply. "Aren't you tired?"

Moth felt the exhaustion like added gravity, but there was a wild sort of agitation brewing in the pit of her stomach. Pseudo energy, it felt like.

"And…" Moth looked up as Tyko continued to speak. "Hawk thinks we're there. It's funny—like she's trying to use my thoughts to learn to communicate with words."

Moth stared at him, unsure which part of that she should respond to or ask about and feeling the agitation go ice-cold—still screaming through her veins, but frigid this time, painful. She clenched her fists, shivering, thankful electricity was hot and burning. Staring out behind her, she thought she could trace the curvature of the world with her eyes from this height as the convoy turned onto the flat plateau of the cliff, as the sun slid higher in the sky and stained the edges of everything an ephemeral gold.

"You know what it means if we're there… right?" she asked Tyko, curling her fingers around the metal bars.

Tyko didn't say anything. It didn't mean the tournament was about to begin—no, they had days for that. It didn't mean there was no longer an escape for them—there had never been a way out, not even for Ty. Only Eri had ever managed that.

She looked at Ty. He and Hawk each had her fixed in a stare that near mirrored the other.

Moth swallowed. "It means the girl's dead." She turned back to watch the sun, trying not to shudder at what happens to people who try to find a way out.


In my not-so-brief hiatus, I have decided this story will be organized into three unique parts. Part 1 focuses on Moth. Part 2 and 3… you'll see. From here on out, chapters will slowly start to increase in length. This weird short-chapter limbo in the beginning is going to fizzle out.

Oh, and a reminder, because I'm sure everyone's forgotten about this story: I'm still taking OCs. I've got three so far and they're definitely getting interesting roles. (Thank you Graceful Rage, Starry's Light, and CryoKing96!).

I also went back and revised the last five chapters. I didn't really add to or take away from the descriptive passages; it was more of a hunt for details I've mentioned that I either wanted to change or use later. One of the only major differences now is that a Fire-flight (dimorph) is now a Flame-flight because I want all the beast prefixes to be one syllable.

The name of Moth's parium, Arashi, does in fact have a meaning like she said. It translates as "storm" in Japanese, not that I speak Japanese.

Anyway, review!

-Angel