The Fall
Chapter 8: Lions Among Sheep
She remembered running like this before.
But then, she had been aware with every grazing step she took that she was running for her life—just hers, only hers, never mind the brother she had left so quickly in the dust.
And now, she wasn't sure what was pushing her so hard, streaming with the other vessels in the arena tunnels like blood through veins. Surely they all knew they wouldn't die—the tournament hadn't even begun yet; there was no chance of that. Surely they knew that no one racing beside them had any desire to see the others fall and suffer; only for their own families to survive and prosper as best they could in a world that didn't like to see anyone survive and prosper. Surely they knew they were all the same.
Moth knew those things, weaving in and out of bodies she didn't see as living, breathing. In reality, there was not much to run from at all, not among hundreds of others that had lived with her same burden for years and years, that possessed enough combined power to summon Caliosteo's destruction if they would all just stop, breathe, look around, fight.
It hadn't been like that, the first time.
They found it because of Eri.
He did have working legs, at some faraway point in his life. It used to be him that collected the bark and stone he used as canvas, the fruit and flower petals for dye. He came home most afternoons a microcosm of nature—twigs in his hair, red and green stained hands, river water soaked into his pants, miscellaneous fragments of color and foliage in his arms.
And most afternoons he would take his haul straight to his room and hardly leave it for days, sketching trees from memory, birds in flight, the pattern of shadows on their bedroom floor, any image that had stuck with him he felt he had to petrify on something solid, so he'd never lose it.
That afternoon, he had pulled her in with him. She liked to marvel at the lack of symmetry in their room – the side that was his was cluttered, colorful; the stone walls were streaked with mini-paintings and color tests, and her side contained a bed and nothing more. Up until that day, adopting any hobby or pastime like that had seemed futile to her; sad and pointless. Eri had never been like that.
"Moth," he said seriously, looking her straight in the eyes. Their room had no door, but it was the most private space in their home. Upstairs was too close to the rest of town. Abel was lying sick in the room he shared with Cain—but he never liked to open his eyes, and you never knew if he was awake or asleep.
"Eri," she whispered back, copying his tone.
"I think you should come with me the next time I go out for supplies."
So she did.
But that time, he didn't go for the stream near home where the flowers grew, or the grove of dead trees north of town where he collected most of his bark. He went south. Often Moth had seen townspeople walk on the southern trails early in the morning, always alone, but always more than one each time she had leaned against the tiny window in her room and watched.
She had kept to the trees and thick undergrowth that morning because Eri did, slinking with him in the darkest green of the shadows, never letting a drop of gray sunlight touch their skin.
They passed a large, turquoise lake, a silver layer of refracted light glittering on its surface. It almost blinded her to the large and misshapen rock she could see protruding from the earth on the far bank, surrounded by mangroves.
The trees thickened as they trekked on, that morning. They got taller, darker, more unfamiliar, roped together with tangles of vines. The sun climbed higher. The world began to feel surreal and so much larger than she'd ever thought before. Something told her not to speak, not till they got where they were going.
She held her tongue at the daunting cliff face that soon loomed before them, the hidden snaking path Eri took to scale it. She didn't remark as the ground got further and further away, as they climbed so high they became level with the sun.
And at the top, more trees. A "jungle", she later learned, filled with a chorus of harmonized bird whistles and rustling leaves and the shrieks of creatures unknown.
Then, the stone juggernaut, sealed onto the ground in a dark, warm clearing across a river like it had sprouted there. It must've had roots.
Eri guided her to some low-growing ferns, pushed her into the undergrowth, told her to wait—she did, and soon saw what she expected to see: a few familiar faces from her village emerging the way she and Eri had come and climbing the steps to the stone pyramid like they'd done it a thousand times before, and others coming from the eastern direction, people she'd never seen in her life.
They gathered inside. Eri led her up the steps, forced her against the outside wall, whispered, "If you're quiet, you can hear them."
Moth heard them.
By following a lone woman in the woods he'd recognized from their village, Eri had stumbled upon not only the stone pyramid, but also what was presumably the only anti-King rebel organization across all of Caliosteo.
It welcomed the two of them with open arms, the day they finally decided to reveal themselves—though, like the rest of them, they had fashioned hoods out of hide to wear over their heads and hide what they could of their faces during the meetings. In the months she and Eri attended their gatherings, they never learned a single name of the hundred or so that were usually present.
Their activities were minimal—during meetings they discussed in low voices the nature of the government's corruption, the way troops in one member's village had been denied food for days simply because they had no vessel child; how palace soldiers had completely taken over trade operations between Ribular and Ilium and that those poor fish-eaters must be starving to death over there, especially in the winters when the oceans are barren; the way one scarred older woman had been near beaten to death a while back because she had been too sick to meet the birth quota when it was assigned, eighteen years ago.
And outside the meetings—the goal was simply to spread the rebels' influence, and do it in such a way that no palace member ever caught wind, and no village councilman that knew would have even an iota of incentive to expose them. Eri and Moth were warned over and over to stay out of that business. Far too dangerous for children of barely twelve years, especially vessels.
So they did—they stayed out of it. Cain never knew, Sage never knew, Abel certainly never knew. It was common for vessel children to want to get away, to prefer solitude, to spend hours among nature rather than voices. There was nothing suspicious about them, and as far as they could tell, nothing suspicious about the nameless few they watched leave town certain days at dawn and return by noon with jugs of water or bags of gathered berries or firewood. No, it was never their village that tipped off the higher authorities; the blood of all those dead was never on their hands.
In the last meeting, one man snapped.
He tore off his hood to reveal a young but wizened face, smooth of wrinkles but cracked by stress—his sudden motion jarred everyone, a break in the streaming stillness that commanded most rebel gatherings. "I'm sick of it," he said flatly. His black eyes were piercing and there was nothing familiar there.
He backed away and commanded the attention of everyone in the room—his hand raised, fingers spread wide, a silent rallying cry. "Standing by. Watching the world be poisoned like this, with people like that who think everything is owed to them—sick of it."
Murmuring, shifting—but sounds of agreement, encouragement. This is what they needed, Moth had thought, someone strong enough to push them from cowering within the fortified walls of the pyramid, from whispering to only the most trusted loved ones about the revolution that had to come about.
"Talking does no good, not like this."
"He's right. Taking action, that's the only way anything changes," another voice piped up, a man doing nothing to disguise his voice. The hood came off. He had a strong face too, a heavy set to his jaw and brow, a powerful, unfaltering gleam in his eyes, and it was in their faces that Moth found more hope that something would change than in anything anyone had ever said at the gatherings.
Even the words that followed did not compare.
"Overthrow the King."
"Set up a new government, no more monarchy."
"No more tyranny."
"Tell everyone we know that the rebellion is real."
"If they have hope, they'll rise up, they'll fight."
"Kill the King."
"If there's hope, it lies in the vessels."
Moth's eyes flew wide and she backed up against Eri at those words, feeling the prick of a hundred sets of eyes as they bore into she and her brother—yet she was rescued—
"But how? How do we 'take action'?"
She noticed with unease the way the black-eyed man still had his hand spread in the air, like a signal she didn't know how to interpret, something that must've made sense to someone who was not her.
The strong-faced man was watching him closely.
"It's very simple," he called, making sure his voice would carry everywhere in the room, unlike the weak candlelight at the center that barely permeated the dark.
But it was not so dark that Moth couldn't see the way his smile turned sinister.
"You have a plan?" a woman asked, losing the low edge she'd forced her voice to take on in this room, among these people.
"I'll take that," someone muttered, and Moth felt it, Eri felt it, the shiver of hope that coursed through them all, the spark of righteous energy igniting in her chest. The black-eyed man had been waiting for that.
His hand snapped shut into a fist made of stone, and something inside Moth jolted. The sound of sharpened metal pulled out of a sheath seemed to come from everywhere at once till she realized that it did, and those were swords flashing in her peripheral vision—
Eri's voice in her ear: "Run."
She didn't see or hear the blades cutting through flesh but she smelled the blood and felt the aftermath. The first scream was at her back when she bolted, and then a chorus of inhuman sounds rising behind her as she fled, as the hooded soldiers lying in wait revealed themselves, lions among sheep.
In her fear she was invincible and unthinking, and her steps were so fast and light that she hardly touched the ground, breaking into the meek pseudo-daylight of the jungle outside and barreling for the thick cover of trees, running and dodging under vines, weaving through trees, cursing herself when she felt her legs begin to tire and go numb, when she felt tears prick at the corner of her eyes at the horror of the world she lived in and the immutable inevitability of blade-wielding soldier at her back—
When she saw the tiny stone well in the ground, almost invisible behind a pair of ensconcing bushes, it was instinct that pushed her inside it, the animalistic instinct buried deep within her that relished the comfort of warm, dark spaces.
And inside it she found herself alone, weak. She felt warmth, but it came from the red dripping down her arm; and it was dark, but only because her eyes were closed and she never wanted to open them again, not in this world.
She waited, still alone, till another kind of darkness took over. In her hysteria she thought it was death.
Moth shoved the others aside when she could, leapt over one or two that had fallen, forcing herself faster, faster still—she burst through the arch into warmth and sunlight that still weren't enough to melt the chill still grasping her heart from the memory of knife teeth and dead, soulless eyes.
She skipped steps when she could, bounding down the cracked stone stairs onto hard-packed earth, feeling the crowd break away beside her. The sound of footsteps and frantic voices whistled in her ears. Flashes of light erupted in her peripheral vision, then one so close she felt the white heat against her face and her hand flew to the pocket that held her pumice stone. Sparks darted between her fingers.
Tyko.
She skidded to a sudden halt near the cliff's edge. For a moment the sound of his name had flooded her wild unthinking and took control—where was he? Was he the small dark-haired boy she'd pushed against the wall, out of her way? The cowering figure she'd leaped over in the halls?
No. Tyko wouldn't cower. He wouldn't be pushed aside.
But none of the vessels breaking away from the archway had his face, his quick and peculiar way of moving. He was not among them, and for a moment she felt utterly weak, utterly alone, doomed to cower and be pushed aside—
The electricity trying to scale her hand out of the pocket suddenly popped and crackled; she tore it out, watching faint steam curl from its porous white surface as it grew hotter, too hot to hold.
On instinct she tossed it.
In the air it suddenly blazed white, a metamorphic silhouette of a misshapen sun that sprouted and bloomed like a flower. The tide in her head swallowed the beach and she gasped at the cold flooding her body, ducking her head till the light died. It was nothing like the sinister glow that'd birthed the guard's zombified killing machine, back in the arena. Arashi's light felt warm and powerful—a sunrise, but the sun was close enough to touch.
She looked again when shade fell over her, from the darkened form of the giant Sky-horse crouched there. His fur whipped wildly in the wind as it picked up, his blue eyes narrowed with purpose. Moth felt a tugging in her chest, watching his odd paws shift the earth beneath him, the muscles rippling in his legs—more than anything, he wanted to run, a desire she felt burn through her like silent fire.
A growl trembled in his throat. The end of his muzzle was close enough to her face to touch. His narrow, pointed ears—each longer than her arm—seemed to twitch at every noise, no matter how faint. Dust clouds swirled between his restless paws.
"Tyko," she whispered to him, pulling herself away from his eyes and searching among the small shapes racing away and the writhing bodies of beasts large and small and unfamiliar to her as they broke from shells of light. But she saw the glinting of iron claws, fangs that shimmered like rows of knives, heard the savage grunting and snarling of anachronistic creatures that could tear her to pieces like nothing—and here they were in the open, broad morning sunlight, just beyond the shadow of the sandstone arena's western wall. And Tyko was nowhere.
Arashi snarled—it was a deep, airy sound, like nothing she'd ever heard.
From the arena, the stream of fleeing vessels had near stopped. Still Tyko was nowhere.
"Okay," Moth said. "We run." She turned to Arashi and grabbed for his left foreleg—she didn't flinch at the static rippling in his fur as she bunched it in her fists. The Sky-horse dropped his shoulders immediately and Moth scrambled up onto his back as quickly as she could manage, feeling the rise and fall of his breath, the way the hair on her arms and head began to rise as she buried her hands in the dark fur of his mane, the shifting of his bones and muscles as he stood again.
From his first step, Moth decided she never wanted to go back to her own legs again. Arashi was aware of his own power—he knew he could sprint from here to the cliff's faraway forest beyond the arena and hardly tire; perhaps he could even leap the distance to the ground below the cliff and glide on the winds he commanded so the fall would feel like nothing.
In the distance, an unearthly noise—the Z-king's shriek. The whittling round had started and Arashi began to run.
Moth gasped when she felt herself slipping, locking her legs in place, pressing the side of her head into his mane and gripping harder. Her hair clung to her face the way it did in winter when the air was choked of any moisture. Beneath her, she felt his shoulder-blades grinding back and forth, the impacts of his paws on hard-packed earth—in his sprint he spent more time flying than he did touching the ground, but there was no panic in his motion, simply speed and confidence and power.
They rounded the sandstone arena, heading for where the space between its wall and the sheer edge thinned out to almost nothing, a snaking path where the rocks were loose and unstable—she would have been anxious if not for the adamant swirling currents in her mind that carried away and drowned any negative thought that tried to piece itself together.
A sharp-edged bark behind her. The sound was so odd and out of place that she risked falling and whirled around.
A doglike creature was suddenly sprinting in their wake, covered in blood-red fur and deep black stripes across its paws and muzzle. Moth's eyes fell on its white teeth, the ground its claws tore up in its mad dash for Arashi, and the small boy clinging to its back as it ran, locking eyes with her and glaring.
A Flame-wolf—small but tough fire-spitting creatures that tended not to show mercy. It would lunge for them when it could, sink its jaws into Arashi's back and grind them against his spine, unbalance them and leap off the moment they started to fall, if it didn't decide it would rather ravage them with fire and tear apart what remained with its claws.
The thought sparked an unfamiliar sort of fury in her.
"This doesn't end till the numbers fall," the boy shouted, eyes trained on her.
"Yeah," she murmured.
Something dark flashed in the corner of her eye, something hanging in the sky. It tipped to the side and its blackened wings unfurled, its bright cobalt eyes gleamed. A Z-wing, carrying a guard on its back, the same sort of creature they'd sent after the girl who ran.
The guard was watching them, she knew.
Arashi leapt across a hole in the path, paws scrabbling for grip on the other side.
Surely the guards wouldn't let a vessel child die.
Arashi felt every thought that passed through her mind—it was a mind that no longer belonged to her, not as long as he existed physically. He sensed her intentions, the quick flash of ideas and conclusions that led to what he did next.
Moth watched the Flame-wolf pause only slightly, bunching his legs to make the jump across the gap. Arashi used her sight—he slammed his shoulder into the rising arena wall beside them with such force that everything shuddered, Moth cried out and clung on harder, the Flame-wolf gave a yelp as the rock it stood on crumbled and fell the dizzying distance to the forest canopies below. Unbalanced, it leapt back onto wider ground, narrowly avoiding tumbling off the edge. The boy's eyes had gone wide with horror.
Arashi recovered from the impact like it hadn't happened, putting on more speed as the path below them broadened and they emerged onto a ledge, overlooking the wide plateau between the arena and the thick woods farther out.
"Go," Moth said, but she didn't have to—Arashi leapt over the edge and the wind blazed alongside them like it was trying to keep them airborne, though it wasn't quite enough. They slammed into the ground and it crumbled beneath his paws. He kept on, out in the open under a sky empty of clouds or anything but muted morning light and dark blemishes where the Z-wings circled. His legs felt unsteady now, and Moth sensed his rippling confusion, like now that he stopped to think about it, it'd been so many millions of years since last he'd ran so fast; now that time had passed and his bones were different than they'd been, running again was difficult to get the hang of. "Keep going," Moth whispered, training her eyes at the space between his rabbit-like ears where the trees were sprouting, up on top of a short craggy cliff.
His steps were uneven. They flew at speeds faster than Moth had ever gone before; the wind that whipped at her was frigid and biting—she willed him to calm, grabbed for the intangible currents in her mind and pulled them to a halt, slowed her breathing as much as she could bear. Like a switch she could feel the confidence flooding back, the weight evening out beneath her as they traversed the plateau.
Their vast space was almost empty. To her far left, a fight had broken out—a devilish striped creature lunged for the skies on powerful back legs, jaws snapping shut on open air as a tall-crested beast feinted out of his reach on awkward patterned wings. The winged beast warbled and screeched flew in furious circles, whipping at the Flame-beast as it spat red-hot embers that fell and sizzled on the stone below.
Moth didn't want their attention—she urged Arashi faster. Her heart dropped when the devil carnivore whipped its head towards her. She saw the intent in its eyes across the distance—the Sky-horse was the easier target.
"Go!" she cried again. No way it could follow them over the ledge—besides, vessels would want to stay out of the woods with Flame-beasts.
Arashi leapt the last of the distance, forcing his enormous body up the sloping rock wall, searching frantically for footholds. Moth felt them go vertical. She clung desperately, eyes on the red-and-white Flame-beast as it raced for them and the speck on its back that was human. Its teeth were yellowed, deadly sharp.
The distance to the ground stretched further—but it could still reach them if it jumped.
Bolting pain suddenly shot through her; Arashi yowled. Barely she clung on.
Above, a reptilian face eyed them from over the ledge; blue-green, small, angry—Sea-spike. It had kicked rocks over the edge into Arashi's face and his pain had registered inside her somehow. Now were trapped between the Sea-spike bearing down on them and the Flame-beast as it closed in; panic fluttered somewhere at the base of her thoughts and she wasn't sure whose it was.
The Sea-spike gave a whine and stomped at more loose rocks; Arashi ducked his head, trying to flatten his vertical body against the stone wall.
Loose rocks again.
She checked a second time—Z-wings circled nearby enough. Still watching.
Arashi lunged suddenly; the Sea-spike yelped and tried to dodge to the side as his paws flashed over the edge—it was close to the real edge now, the one that fell away to an empty chasm of sky and the treetops far, far below. A deadly drop, if the guards truly would let anyone die.
Jaws clamped on empty air below them. Arashi gave a last burst of strength, even more static coursing through his body, and careened onto flat ground, driving his momentum hard into the Sea-spike's flank. Moth heard the sound of rippling electricity, of breath knocked from ancient lungs, of a heavy spike-tail swishing in vain, the noiseless panic of the white-blue creature as it toppled off the real edge, the human cry that belonged to the second face that fell with it—
Arashi did not wait. The Z-wings in the sky did not move to save them, not even the beast's stone as it retreated for its last moments.
"No," Moth breathed in what felt like silence.
Into the trees they fled.
In a vastly unprecedented turn of events, I'm alive!
Flame-wolf: andrarch
Z-wing: z-ptera
Sea-spike: jiango
Also featuring a random s-raptor and jara.
One thing I DID do with my time for the almost-year I was gone dealing with life stuff was get about 80% of this story's outline finished, and most of that work happened in the past month so it'll be done soon. At the very least, part one is all outlined. I THINK there will be three parts. Maybe four. I've got a bit more outline-wrangling to do.
Oh, and that OC thing till I post chapter ten is still going.
Anyway, I would absolutely appreciate reviewing and following and favoriting if you would be so kind, and I'll try to have chapter nine up in about a week.
-Angel
