The Fall


Chapter 10: The Game


The world had become a symphony of sounds she'd scarcely or never heard in her life:

There was wind, and the wild whistling of it curving around cliff faces half as high as the clouds; a melody.

The trees caught it and shivered, for the wind was cold to the touch, so high up; a harmony.

And piercing, grating shrieks from anywhere; she would hear them if she focused in any one direction—a warbling cry of a creature she imagined had feathers, long and slender limbs, a narrow snout lined with tiny razor teeth; a rumbling groan of an animal bigger than a house, a whole street of houses, a head many leagues away from the tip of its tail; a guttural roar, a beast not much different in size and brutality than Dusty had been.

Screams, too—she could marvel at how close to human they could sound, or how close to monstrous the vessels could be in their terror.

Yet beneath the overhang she had found some kind of peace.

Above her the sky was blue, and vast, and cloudless; a cold and lonely sort of blue, and it evoked no fear in her now. Trees stretched up from the clearing's edge, from where the jut gave way to it, leafy arms breaking the forested horizons into rustling fragments. A deep, almost metaphysical exhaustion was rooting her there, laying back against the rise and fall of Arashi's flank, and her breathing matched his, her eyes rested half-closed, her lips parted and were dried by the wind, leafy pieces of shadow darting and dissolving over her face, her arms, her bare legs. She could imagine herself somewhere else, if she wanted to. She didn't.

There was a point that the little girl's cries muffled and died out, and any remnants of the noise were carried away with the sound of undead flapping wings, clinking armor. The Z-wing and guards had left them there, still, basked in the phantom ebbing pain that clung to them both.

Moth was awake in a dream. The fire of Arashi's pain was numb and warm.

She thought about life. Some people fought for it so hard, she'd seen—Cain, Eri, Tyko, Arashi, in their own ways, everyone she'd ever known, everyone she'd ever seen.
Had they ever laid beneath a naked sky like her, she wondered, had they felt another mind press up against their own and understand it more deeply than they could, had they been so overcome with pain and exhaustion that there was nothing left that wasn't burned away but the capacity to feel happy—

No. Happy didn't suit them. Any of them. It didn't suit her. It didn't suit this world.

This life. I don't need it like you do.

When her eyes closed, she knew that she would sleep forever, and it was all she could've ever wanted.

And the symphony shattered with a noise so discordant and otherworldly it made her want to cry, so loud but so far away in the empty space it cut through to reach her; her eyes drew further open with every modicum of volume it gained, the ground was suddenly gone beneath her and she fell skywards, her thoughts ripping through layer after layer of numb, dreamlike apathy, and the ocean in her head that had been flat as glass was a torrent she was sure would rip her apart—

She screamed and it was a sound that could've come from the mouth of any creature alive that day that had been dead for millennia, and it would've been the same.

The noise was gone, and she was left alone.

Between the two of them flashed an image of a zombified creature standing as tall as a house with eyes that burned, ducked into the shadow the sandstone arena cast upon it. It was the Z-king's cry, almost the same as the sound that had started the whittling round half the morning ago. No—it was the same.

Moth forced herself to her feet, shivering violently in the silence that cowered in the wake of such a sound. She was afraid, she realized, but not of the Z-king, not of the death she had witnessed.

She turned to Arashi. He had risen. Sparks of white prickled in his fur, and he looked straight at her, and in her mind flashed an image of her own face. The colors were wrong, mismatched, too dull, but it was her.

She was afraid of what had almost killed her, the dull and soothing apathy she had mistaken for happiness, the liquid feeling in her veins that had been so heavy it would've drowned her there and she would've felt nothing but the lovely dark that pulled them both under.

There had been nothing like that in her before, no feeling or lack thereof so powerful it could stop her heart.

Arashi gazed at her with a sort of flat urgency.

"Would I have died?" she rasped, so weakly the words sounded like wind. "Would we have died?"

Arashi tilted his head.

"That doesn't make sense," she said. "Are we all so ready to die that it only takes a thought?"

There was almost nothing between them now, no rippling of water, no false-color images.

"Or was it you?" Moth could not stop shivering. "Arashi, are you dying?"

A growl rumbled within him.

NO.

It was the same as he had spoken before, the echoing noise in her mind when it threatened to give way to whatever downward spiral lead to madness.

His limbs were trembling, she realized. It was so subtle it appeared the wind was only rustling his fur.

"Oh," she whispered. She stepped forward tentatively, instinctively, aware in the back of her mind that the symphony of these woods had not yet picked up again. Her hand reached for him. With effort he came forward to meet her, a vast creature she didn't think could scare her if he tried, and he pressed his heavy muzzle with an unexpected force into her palm. She gasped at the weight of it, the fizzling electricity against her skin, and then the dull flash that turned his silhouette white, a reverse shadow eaten away by light, and he was gone, and a small pumice stone rested in her hand.

The whittling round was over.

Somehow she knew: the Z-king would scream again, and then again, until every surviving vessel had returned to the arena.

With a burst of energy, she made for the face of the overhang and began to scale it, determined to prevent the Z-king from breaking a little more of the world with its voice.


The way back was simpler.

Through the woods from which she had came, towards the cliff where bad things happened, then into step with a small group of nameless vessels she didn't recognize, heading back to the arena. It seemed they all understood the Z-king's call with no explanation. Moments ago they could have been fighting each other to the death, on the backs of savage beasts with bloodlust in their eyes or cowering in the shadows of creatures ready to give their lives for nothing; but now they moved as a unit, thankful in their wide-eyed-ness that they had survived this day, and that they had a chance at the endless months to come. Moth felt at home with them, and no one spoke. She followed them into a shallower path down the cliff that fed into the plateau. Across an expanse of rock was the pale-colored juggernaut; the arena, and she felt them on edge with every step, wondering when the Z-king would scream again for the stragglers.

Across the plateau, others moved. Some ran. One or two flew on the backs of winged beasts, no arrogance in their eyes as the traversed the plateau in mere moments. Moth looked—for a small dark-haired boy, a raptor-sized Flame-flight circling somewhere nearby, but there was nothing, and the seed of worry in her took hold and sprouted.
It grew with every step.

On the plateau's other side, they worked their way up a narrow slope to the cliff's edge, where they'd be close enough to touch the arena's foundations and cling to its side as they traced their paths back to the looming stairs where they'd entered, picking a safer way this time because they weren't afraid for their lives, not at this moment, breathing heavy sighs of relief when they broke into the cold, stale darkness of the tunnels where they all remembered sprinting in a blind panic hours ago.

They entered the vast bowl of the arena's center, flooded with noon light this time instead of shaded in a soothing lavender.

In the middle was an uglier, evil sort of purple. The Z-beast had not moved, but it slumped, its snout near grazing the brushed dust of the arena floor, like the light was sucking the energy from it, like its scream had been of pain and nothing more. Beside it, several Z-wings crouched. Moth noticed the guards pacing at their feet, the small group of vessels sitting there with heads bowed or buried in their hands. They were all silent.

Where the walls of the arena sloped down in squared-off increments, steps or seats or both, scattered groups of vessels huddled. It seemed there was a choice—the steps or the Z-beasts, but the way those sad kids crouched in the shadow of beasts rotting where they stood made it seem like there had been no choice at all, not for them.

There were more guards directly ahead. Moth followed the stream of vessels towards them, gripping her stone till she could feel the electricity like warmth against her skin.
She stopped when she reached them. This was neither the Sky-sloth man nor the one that had released the Z-king. This was a woman, too tall, hair cut short like a man's.

She glared at her expectantly, with hard, black eyes. In her hand was a leather-bound notebook.

Moth tried, "Moth of Null-king?"

The woman gave a slow shake of her head. "No, Moth. Tell me your beast. Troops don't matter anymore."

She said it like they never would again.

"Sky-horse."

The woman nodded, a languid, absent motion of her head, flipping back in her notebook and glancing down at the stone in Moth's hand before drawing a quick strike on the page. "Congratulations for clearing round zero."

She said it like an insult.

Moth left her eagerly, heading straight to the left where the others were gathering. They were silent. They watched her, turning small stones over in their hands; they looked absently towards the pseudo-horizon of the arena's edge; they sat in exhausted stillness and did nothing at all. She scaled the steps with her head down, but the worry suddenly bloomed from the tips of her toes to an empty space beneath her heart and her head snapped up, and she met the eyes of a hundred lonely vessels and found nothing familiar. Tyko was nowhere.

She found somewhere empty, somewhere high up where she could see everything within the sandstone walls. Moth sat down. She searched the tiny shapes between the rotted flesh creatures in the arena's center, but they were only smudges, specks of dust in her vision, and any one of them could be him—stone-less, destroyed, alone, a walking punishment for the rest of her family waiting to happen; and if he was down there then she hated him; she hated him for saving her when he did, for saving her again only days ago, for agreeing to this when he must've known he'd never last, dooming her family by claiming to be one of them—

"There you are."

Moth jumped.

Tyko planted himself almost clumsily beside her and he let out a heavy sigh.

"Ty—!"

"You ditched me back there." There was a distant glassiness in his gaze. Some of his hair was singed, and black soot clung to his shirt.

"I...I'm sorry?"

For a moment his eyes slid sideways to meet hers, and he flashed her an empty grin. "Ha. I didn't need you, anyways."

He looked away again, the ghost of his smile lingering on his lips. His palms were clasped between his knees, shielding something black and volcanic in his hands. "And you didn't need me either."

Moth watched him. She narrowed her eyes. "Where were you?"

He seemed to be focused on the vessels flooding the arena now, the tiny specks far below that tried in vain to fill the sandstone-colored negative space, but the focus was hidden behind the empty sheen between him and the outside world, the pale film over his eyes.

"Tyko."

"Just here," he muttered quickly. "We hid out in those tunnels."

He looked straight at her and she remembered the day years ago when she had done the same—though she had been running from men with swords, not beasts made of sorcery that didn't need weapons.

"You're scorched."

"Yeah. Something found us."

"What did?"

He almost grinned. "A Flame-crest, I think they're called. The only one in the whole tournament. We took it out alright, but—"

"The only one? How do you know?"

She had a vague image of the creature: dark-scaled, small like a raptor, speckled with orange spots and donning a rounded crest on its head. There was something else about them, too. Something they could do that was unique to their species and a few others.

"Well," Ty started, "it was the last Flame-beast to win a tournament. Not sure how long ago. But they've only given out one each time since. That's how it goes."

Moth was silent. She would have asked so many times before how he knew what he knew—but it was never a good idea, not with him.

"What?" He was looking at her again. His eyebrows were pulled together, an expression somewhere between irritation and worry.

"Have you seen a Null-king yet?" she asked. She didn't know what they looked like. Ty did. Her grandfather did—a Null-king had been part of him, once.

"Not yet," he said. His face had softened. "But we will. It's out there."


The man that owned the Z-king, long since stowed away in a diamond stone in his pocket, stood beneath them.

Of "them" there were hundreds—had the whittling round done anything at all, she wondered? Had anyone been taken out but the girl that lost her balance over the cliff, the vessel with the Flame-crest Ty had defeated, the little girl and Dusty?

She knew the tiny group the other guards had escorted away from the arena where they had been held hostage had been the rest of them, a sad few she'd never see again, victims to a fate she'd never know.

"Six hundred ninety-six," he called. "Now, that's a good number!" He wore a grin that belonged nowhere, and it stood out on his face with a kind of arrogance that made her hands curl into fists.

"Seventeen eliminated—rather quickly, for that matter. I'm sure you saw the other soliders escort those poor half-souls away. Unfortunately, they're a bit done for."

What does that mean?

"I've got good things to say about the rest of you all. You're particularly brutal this year. In fact-"

He paused, and Moth shivered when his eyes met hers, and it happened so fast and so deliberately it was like he'd been keeping tabs on her position since she returned to the arena so he'd know exactly where she was, for this precise moment. Tyko felt it through her shoulder where it pressed so lightly into his and he turned to her. Moth ignored him.

"—seventeen were taken out, but if you bothered to count, you would've noticed we only had sixteen gathered down below! Seems like this tournament, you're not afraid to kill."

He was smiling at her; a sick smile; no, a smile that said, you must be sick in the head.

"Moth," Ty growled through his teeth, "why's he looking at you?"

"Seventeen in half a morning," the solider went on. "We've had these things last days just to get rid of three or four, you know."

He surveyed them. Perhaps he was comparing all those other six hundred ninety-five faces to hers, seeking out the features they had in common, wondering if it was a narrowness of the gaze or the absent twitching of a brow that meant killer. More likely they meant scared, alone, anxious. Maybe through certain twists of fate those traits may lead someone to kill. Maybe they were simply destined to.

"Alright then," he said quickly. "We can get the lot of you into teams of three now, which is a bit of a tricky process, mind—for today, you all get scores out of ten for your success in the whittling round. Tonight, aptitude testing begins—another score out of ten. Score high enough out of twenty and you may get the chance to pick a team member."

Moth stiffened.

"It's like it's a game," Ty murmured without moving his lips. "Someone died and we're all just playing a game."

Moth flinched.

"Unfortunately I've been tasked with reading off every score while the others deal with... your mess." Apparently there was no other phrase for the vessels that had already lost.

"You'd best remember what I say," he said as his face hardened. A scathing glare cast over the lot of them, all near-seven hundred, huddled in a tiny fraction of the arena's sandstone seats, close enough to hear but far enough that the weight of his gaze was not so heavy, not so sharp.

"Now. For round zero: the ones. If I call your name, you're damned near useless and you've earned a one."

The waiting began.

It didn't feel like it at first. Moth sat forward, leaning over her thighs with her mind on edge like any moment she'd hear her own name, though she knew that wouldn't happen; they would reward brutality, not punish it, and she was the most brutal of all.

No, she thought. It wasn't just a guilt-ridden phrase she had used to feel sorry for herself; she truly had done more wrong than anyone out there—the Flame-wolf she had almost knocked over the edge with no second thought, the Sea-spike and the girl she wittingly killed, the trap she'd set for Dusty, the inhuman grief she'd inspired in the girl that lost him—

And after. She had existed in a haze of pseudo-happiness, the aftermath of a cathartic deluge.

And now. The guilt she felt was not real. The guilt, or whatever it was, was naught but a thin veneer wrapped around a ball of indignant, entitled fury; that whatever peace she'd tasted beneath the overhang belonged to her.

Her name was not called.

The soldier moved up along the list of scores and the sun, warm and harsh, slid past its zenith.

Some vessels got up and left, trickling down towards the arena center with one or two others and rounding the curve of the edge to the tunnels. The living quarters must've been down there, she realized, and she drifted into another light-bleached haze, leaning further and further into a kind of welling exhaustion that was only a meager fraction of what had possessed her beneath the overhang—but she threw herself into it willingly—leaning further and further into Tyko's shoulder so she felt it when he jerked upright suddenly, a shrill and unwelcome jolt in the flat unbroken drone the world had ubiquitously dissolved into.

She blinked, looked at him again—the world was burned blue—and he said, "Five. Did you hear him?"

The soldier was locked in a pace, back and forth across a step a bit below them, and deep in a steady and unconscious concentration. He was calling out fives and names she'd never heard and the beasts that would associate with them till the end of their sanity.

"What? Did he call me?" It was harsh and almost silent whisper.

"No." Ty gave her an odd look. "Me."

"Five," she finally echoed. "Because you hid?"

Ty shrugged. "Guess so."

"Why not a one, then?"

"I guess Flame-crests should be difficult to take out."

The way he said it—there was no pride. No satisfaction. Moth wondered what he had seen in the wake of his victory, Hawk perched on his shoulder in the stale dark, watching the human half of the Flame-crest crumble when it had to stand alone, both utterly unsure of what to make of it. Maybe the moment it had fallen, they had both fled again in the dark and hid away from any noise till came the noise nothing could hide from—if only so they wouldn't have to see that again.

The soldier moved on to the sixes. More vessels were leaving, following the others down along the arena walls towards the archway, though they couldn't have been sure of where they were going.

Moth listened. Her name was not called, and Tyko didn't move.

Sevens. Nothing.

The crowd around them had thinned out drastically—she looked, a swift turn of her head right then left, and decided there were less than fifty among them now, the most successful survivors of round zero.

Her eyes fell on someone familiar, and he stared right back. She wondered where the sandstone rock that held his Sea-spine was—in his hands or his pockets?

"Moth and her Sky-horse: eight."

He lingered on this one. She could feel it. It was long enough for a few heads to turn, vainly, searching halfheartedly for the unknown owner of a name they'd never heard before.

The solider moved on.

"Eight," Tyko murmured. "Alright. Come on."

He started to his feet, grabbing her by the wrist. She resisted for half a second, catching the stone-hard gaze of the solider and ashamed that they had disturbed the sacred near-stillness of the group. Those that remained hadn't been standing to leave—they wanted to see who scored the tens.

But she followed Ty. She looked back and scanned the rest: a meager group of tense kids, mostly older than her, sitting in solemn silence like they were remembering every score that came out of the soldier's mouth, every name and the faces they defined. She would never remember them all. These were the threats, the people standing between her and anything she could hope to gain, and there were too many to keep track of.

"Come on," Ty repeated under his breath.

They descended.

"Eight," he said when they reached the bottom. The sandy floor stretched a distance so vast it could swallow them.

It took her a moment to realize what he'd said was a question, and then another to realize she was already shaking her head.

Ty hadn't let go of her wrist. "Hey," she said softly, wriggling it out of his grasp. He gazed back at her, his face almost exactly level with hers. She might've had a bit of height on him. "What happens now?"

His response was so immediate it was jarring, and all she could do was blink at him. "We play the game." He knew her well enough to understand she hadn't been asking about the testing later that night, the tournament's first round coming soon, the way they'd fight and win to ensure the best possible rewards for her family—any of that. They knew what to do. There had never been any question there. "That's all it really is, Moth. A game."

She sighed and felt her heart plunge again into a pit of cold guilt. She had been searching for an answer that didn't exist.


Flame-crest: guan

I just realized that this song I know by my favorite band, called The Moth, actually reflects a lot of what'll happen with Moth's character throughout the story. I'm not telling you who it's by. I just think the unintentional parallels in the lyrics are really cool.

Okayfor the third time in a year, I'm having issues with Word. I'm starting to think it's just my computer. Hopefully I can get a new one soon and the act of typing words onto a screen will become less of an exercise in controlling my more violent emotions.

Aaaaand no more OCs. So I can go finalize my outline now.

Starry's LightI'm gonna just say that review was more entertaining to read than probably anything I've ever written. Loopy and detailed reviews are the best... though hopefully you eventually stopped being sick? In most of my stories I got into this habit of just responding to reviews in author notes but if you want me to respond in a PM or just not all, lemme know. And yes! Your OC has a vivosaur. I guess I shouldn't say what it is here but she's gonna show up real soon and it's gonna be cool. And also I'm really super glad you get excited to try and figure out what the vivosaurs are because that's exactly what I'm going for with that. Anyway! Chapter nine was so fun to write. And so was reading this review. Thanks so much for leaving them.

Go review or something, fellas. All eight of you guys. I see you.

-Angel