The Barefoot King

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Part I (of III): Fight or Flight

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(Special thanks to weighed and measured for beta-ing!)

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A band of poachers dragged a dead male cat laguz down the dusty streets of Daein, mired in its half-human form, strangled by two lengths of rope cinched tightly around its thick neck. The burly, grime-drenched poacher at the head of the group held a severed, striped tail and bore it like a standard, holding it above his head proudly. A wall of people dressed in once-white gray tatters had gathered around to watch the spectacle, some flanking the poachers six, the rest trailing behind in an exultant swarm.

A blue-haired orphan boy named Pelleas stood in the storm and let himself get carried away by the wave, floating roughly wherever the crowd directed him. He was nearly thirteen, and like all of the children watching, he had been pushed to the back, forced to stand on the tips of his toes to see the precession. The crowd increased in size as they moved down the road, encircling the poachers, fighting to catch a glimpse of their catch. People cursed and cheered and hurled slurs, some yelling for the cat’s head as the corpse scraped against the coarse gravel.

“What’s goin’ on here?” Pelleas asked as people roughly pushed past him to get to the front of the mob. He knew exactly what was happening but nonetheless felt the need to ask, and he asked several times before he could be heard over the din.

“What’s goin’ on? Well, what th’ell do you think’s going on, kid?” A tall, burly man in a torn grayed-out shirt pushed his way beside Pelleas and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Pelleas could barely hear his loud shouts over the human vultures’ cacophony. “They caught one o’ them sub-humans slinkin’ around the market stealin’ fruits. They’re draggin’ it through the streets.” The man’s lips contorted into a wide, crooked smile. “They’re gonna bring it around, let er’ryone see it.”

“I see. Bring it around,” Pelleas said unenthusiastically, repeating what the man had just told him, trying to process it. He wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his tunic. “So they caught one of them sub-humans.”

Well…if that’s the way it’s s’posed to be, then…

Hot and unmerciful, the sun abused Pelleas as he passed through. The sun must have been angry at something, as it only seemed to shine harder and hotter with every passing minute. The dirt road was only mildly warm underfoot. Like everyone else in the barren backwoods of Iolana, Pelleas walked barefoot, the thick ensconced calluses on his feet daring the gravel and sharp rocks strewn around to bleed him.

He stood on his toes again and tried to see over the heads of the tall men in front of him. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of one of the poachers lumbering forward, and occasionally he saw the body briefly as it thump, thumped against the ground.

Amongst the other plain townsfolk of Iolana, Pelleas found ways to make himself inconspicuous, whether it was as one of the many dejected children at the orphanage or as a street urchin in the middle of the road or as a shadow of a shadow in the shadows of an alley between stone hovels and decrepit wooden shacks. Exciting happenings were as common as a total eclipse, so whenever anything remotely interesting took place, the townsfolk all gathered and reveled, and the revelry was always loudest and most joyful when it was cruel.

Stray elbows struck Pelleas in the ribs and people pushed him out of the way as they fought to the front, bouncing from one person to another, swept along in the growing tide. People shouted and chanted and thrust their fists into the air, and someone inadvertently punched Pelleas in the side of the face.

Pelleas followed the crowd, wondering where they were all going and when they would stop, when someone called out from behind him.

“Hey, Pelleas!”

Pelleas’ friend, a scrawny boy wearing dark green rags, ran from the street behind him, empty but for the trailing crowd. He pushed through a few rows of people until he met Pelleas with a loose handshake. The crowd moved along as they stood still.

“Miles!”

“You hear what’s been goin’ on?” Miles said. His face was marked by freckles and covered in dull gray dust. His eyes were beady mires in his small, rounded face and his hair was dark red under the layers of dirt and oil and grime. He smiled and kept smiling, showing off his yellow-gray teeth and the gaps where two of them were missing.

“No, I—I haven’t,” Pelleas said. A gust of wind blew through the empty street and blew sand into Pelleas’ eyes. “All I know is that they killed a sub-human, and they’re draggin’ it through the streets.”

“Well, that’s pretty much’n the all of it. He had it comin’ to him, didn’t he? They sayin’ things are gettin’ pretty rough. They don’t want any sub-humans slinkin’ around here. Make an example of ‘im, t’s what I say. Kill them all! Kill them all! Right?”

“Wait, w-what do y’mean that things are ‘pretty rough’?”

“Somethin’ about a subby insurgence, Pelleas!” Miles said. His green eyes lit and burned red. “There’s going to be a war—well, sorta, but not really! They’re massin’ soldiers to crush some sub-human rebels! It’s suppose’n to be a secret, but e’eryone around here knows about it. Cat subbies, tiger subbies, somma dem birds, King Ashnard’s a’gonna kill ‘em all—they say he like to bleed things, don’t he?”

“There’s going to be a war? Why?” Pelleas stopped and his friend looked impatiently from him to the mob, which was steadily moving away, breaking into smaller groups as the poachers dragged the cat into the heart of the village, towards the lone, small tree in the dead center of town.

“Things’re gonna be a’changin’, Pelleas,” Miles said, grinning. Pelleas had never seen him so excited, bouncing from one foot to the other. “People’re saying the king’s trainin’ more knights an’ footsoldiers an’ he’s hirin’ mercenaries—guys who fight for gold, y’know—from e’erywhere in Tellius, even Begnion an’ Crimea, so he can get their swords an’ their secrets!”

“Oh, I—why?” Pelleas stammered. He knew the idea of his country having lots of new soldiers should have excited him, but all it did was give him a gnawing, sour feeling in his stomach. He felt stupid.

Now he probably thinks I’m stupid. I—I don’t know anything about sub-humans either…

Miles did in fact look at Pelleas like he was stupid. “Why d’you think, Pelleas? There’s rumors goin’ around, but I know the truth. World war!” His eyes exploded with awe and he bore every one of his stained teeth like stubby little yellowed firecrackers. “Nobody says it in front of nobody else, but everybody knows that whenever the king gets all his new soldiers ready he’s gonna take over the world. The world, don’t’cha know? And Daein will own the world! I can’t wait!”

But what does that do for us? Pelleas wondered. He smiled because Miles was smiling, but he didn’t feel happy, and Pelleas wondered what was wrong with his brain. I don’t get it. What did that sub-human do so bad anyways? Nobody said anything about that…

“That’s—swell,” he managed.

“What’s wrong with you, Pelleas?” Miles asked, his mouth twisted into a strange sort of smile. “You sick or somethin’? Whoa, look how far ahead everyone is! C’mon, Pelleas, don’t you want to see them string that subby up? They’ll be all gone by th’ time we get there, c’mon!”

Before Pelleas could answer, his friend was off, chasing after the poachers, laughing. Pelleas followed him down the long, long road, running at half-speed, listening to the sounds of distant celebration. By the time he caught up with the mob, it had already made its way to the center of town, hooting and shrieking like nothing human as it raised the laguz up. Pelleas had to stop and clutch his knees to catch his breath; his lungs felt about to implode and his legs ached.

Pelleas stood and tried to push through from the back of the throng. A man Pelleas could not see called out. “This what happn’s to sub-humans ‘round here! This what happn’s to lesser breeds!”

By the time Pelleas sorted through the crowd, the noise had settled down and people started to disperse. Finally he saw. Pelleas had heard stories of sub-humans being hanged and strung up on trees before, and they were always hung by the neck. This one wasn’t given even that courtesy. Already strangled to death, the cat had been dangled upside-down from the highest branch by a rope tied around one ankle, swinging like a pendulum, its head almost scraping the ground. Its eyes were rolled back and its neck was red and chafed where the two ropes had wound around and cut into his flesh. Its bare chest and stomach were covered with deep knife gouges, some of them fresh, and between its legs was a gaping fissure where its manhood had been (Twelve-year old Pelleas didn’t even know if laguz had the same boy parts as beorc did.)

The sight made Pelleas want to vomit, and he did, right at the base of the tree, and everybody looked at him like he was crazy, just like Miles had. When he stood up and wiped his mouth clean, he felt countless eyes gawking at him. His ears and the back of his neck flushed hot and he wished he could disappear, maybe melt into the dirt until he was thick-gooey-Pelleas, a liquid hiding under the surface of the road. People started walking away, mumbling amongst themselves until the crowd had dispersed, and even Miles had left him without saying a word. A crow cawed overhead.

What if that was me? What if it was someone I knew?

Unwilling to look up, Pelleas looked down at his dirty tunic, looked down at his bare, rough feet, and felt the dirt crusted on his face, and he knew he still looked the same as everyone else, and even his blue hair was nothing unusual. He knew he was the same, the same as all the dirty little children in the orphanage, but for the first time in his life, he felt truly different from the people that came and went around him. And for some strange reason, staring down at the dirt, thinking about the life the cat might have led, Pelleas retched again.

-

Pelleas took comfort in his routine, in his habits. He always said hello to the same orphans every day if he could find them, he always tapped the eating table twice with both hands before he gnashed at his black bread or drank his grey stew, and he always went for a slow walk starting at the same time every day. When one of the orphans was carried out to the graveyard, he found someone else to greet, and not even torrential rain could stop him from taking his daily walk (although if it was very cold he generally cut them short.) Sometimes he counted how many steps he took to get places just for fun. He was accustomed to people looking at him and talking to him like he was crazy. Sometimes he called himself crazy, only half-joking, and someone always agreed, only half-joking.

On normal days, Pelleas walked from the orphanage in Iolana towards a lush grove to the southeast, the greenest place in southern Daein, surprisingly close to the barren dusty wastes to the west. He gathered water from the crystal-clear brook and made it a habit to visit the small shrine in the heart of the forest. By the time he arrived, he was usually out of breath and soaked with sweat, but sitting on a stump or in the soft earth of the grove made him feel better. The peaceful sounds of water trickling and birds cheeping happily always calmed his body and his nerves.

In a clearing of the wood, where the sun shined unfiltered through the canopy line, there was a very small stone building in disrepair, covered in spidery vines of ivy and surrounded by undergrowth. At the front of the shrine, a white-gray marbled goddess stood timeless vigil as though millennia could be witnessed in-between blinks. The goddess was Fortuna, one of the original deities of Tellius, and Pelleas reckoned that such statues only remained in Daein. In Begnion, they had all been torn down and hammered into dust, or so he heard; according to the decree of the Senate of Begnion, there had never existed a “Fortuna” or any deity of her kin.

The Fortuna, the very real Fortuna, had fallen into ill health. In her left hand, her wheel with eight spokes was cracked and starting to crumble, and many years prior her right hand had fallen off completely, a feature which seemed only to make her appear more mysterious and entrancing. She was beautiful, as all goddesses are, but time had not been kind to Her Lady. Her nose had fallen off, her eyes remained hidden behind a stone blindfold, and her cheeks were cracking and fading in the face of the angry elements. Her billowy marble cape—a master artisan’s touch—was beginning to tear, leaving unraveled threads of stone lying beside her. The weathering and small cracks almost gave the impression that she was crying tears of marble into her sunny smile.

And despite this, Pelleas found her very lovely. She was quiet and unassuming, and seeing her always smile as she did, so pleasantly and calmly, reassured him that yes, through cutting rain and wind or snow, she would remain there for him if ever he needed company. He was never shy or self-conscious in her presence as he was around other girls; hers were the only bare breasts Pelleas had ever seen, but a sculpted cloth concealed her lower half and her modesty well enough. She leaned back against the wall as she was meant to do, and it seemed fitting that her legs were beginning to crack, so that only her sacred shrine at her back kept her from falling to her knees.

Pelleas sifted through the weeds and knelt at Fortuna’s feet. She was supposedly a goddess of luck and good fortune, and since Pelleas had known a healthy amount of misfortune, he knew that he had found the perfect place to spend his time. Pelleas didn’t know any prayers of any sort, so he usually asked Fortuna just to give him and his friends good health and money. He wanted to believe—and convinced himself to believe, with ferocious insistence—that if he wished often enough and forcefully enough and purely enough, that Fortuna might extend her hand to him and enrich him, if only a little. Above Lady Fortuna’s head in the stone wall was carved the words “Fortune Favours the Bold” below a small engraving of Fortuna’s eight-spoked wheel.

On either side of Fortuna there were small entryways where broken stone steps led down into a small room with eight unlit metal braziers in a circle and a low table roughly carved from rock. In the center of the perfectly square room—in fact, it was the only room in the shrine—the symbol of a wheel with eight spokes lay etched in the floor, identical to the wheel that Fortuna held. Pelleas always wondered exactly what type of ceremonies had performed here, but he could only assume that it involved fire somehow.

The street whisperers told a grim story about a worshipper of the fire goddess Igna, who had traveled to Sienne in the heart of Begnion, preaching the virtues of his goddess in a crowded plaza. When the Senate’s soldiers found the disciple, they put his faith in this fire goddess to the test by binding him hand and foot and throwing him into a bonfire before a crowd of hundreds. The man had not been quite as devout as he had seemed. Pelleas chose not to believe that story. There were plenty other horrific tales passed around the streets of Daein by gossipers. Pelleas chose not to believe those either.

It was a day like any other. Two weeks had passed since the hanging and it was only a week and a half before his thirteenth birth-day. The shrine in the overgrowth was one of the only places Pelleas had found where he was sure no one would disturb his reading. Even the boarded up, empty library he frequented to filch abandoned books often had bats and large rats passing through, and that was a much darker and more frightening place to spend time anyway. The silence in the sacred shrine was comforting. Sometimes Pelleas wanted nothing more than some time alone to gather his thoughts and relax.

A finely-carved stone table sat almost against the far wall. Pelleas placed down the book he had brought, slipped his legs cross-legged under the table, and began to read. He had taught himself his letters in secret because no one else he knew could read, and he made a promise to himself that he would finish the book he had now, The Great Heroes of Old Crimea, before his birth-day came. By his estimate, he had only about two hundred pages left, and a lot of them had detailed, well-drawn inkings taking half the space or more. He had started reading three days earlier, and he had a feeling that with all the beautiful illustrations (some of them painted in with water-paint), a good friend of his might like to see it also. Pelleas had read about ten pages and saw a fantastic colorful picture of Rillant the Righteous with his blade Lionclaw when he heard the voices.

“This the place? This beat-up old shrine?” A rough man’s voice.

“Yes, the old shrine of ‘Fortuna’. This is it.” Another man’s voice, softer and more melodic than the first.

The shrine had entrances only on one wall, and the voices came from the other direction. Pelleas held his breath and crept to the far wall, peering out a thin vertical slit in the stone. Two men walked through the woods towards the building, their feet stamping through the grass. One man was tall and stout, in leather armor and a skullcap, carrying a large steel sledgehammer. The other man was short and young—no older than twenty—in priest’s robes, with a cream-orange cloak clasped at the shoulder and the royal emblem of Begnion on his breast. His skin was deathly pale and he coughed as he walked.

Pelleas waited until the two men circled around of the building, then hid under the stone table, pressing down against the floor, trying not to breathe. He closed his eyes and opened his ears.

“So that’s what this ‘Fortuna’ lass looks like, eh?” the tall man said. He laughed. “Might be I’d like to have a ride on ‘er.”

The young man’s brow contorted strangely. “That…thing is no more than a contemptible icon—no goddess and certainly no living woman. Ashera is the one true deity!”

The other man laughed again. “Right, then. You know, maybe you could get more of us blokes to believe in your Goddess if you let your priestesses do a little extra? A wee bit of ‘prayer’ in a quiet bedroom could do anyone good, innit right?”

“You must not suggest such things,” the young priest said between coughs. “Maidens who pledge their service to Ashera must swear a strict vow of celibacy. The Goddess does not take kindly to a woman despoiling herself by—”

“Ah, come off it,” the tough man said, amused. “That’s too high a stannard; I don’t know how you little white-cloaks do it. No church c’d tell us what t’do, not where I growed up from. I don’t know any virgins t’all, wot. Bloody hell, I don’t think I c’d go wi’out fuckin’ for a week, let alone f’rever!” He chortled and snorted loudly. “Listen’na’me, lad, girls are no angels. They don’t grow no wings nor rise from the dead an’ they piss like you an’ me do, just from diffe’n places, innit right? This Fortuna here ain’t no diffe’n’en’at—you look under her robes an’ sure as sunrise you’ll find her cun—”

“Enough!” the priest shrieked, mortified, before going into a racking spasm of coughs. Pelleas wondered when he would stop, but finally he did, gasping for air, and took a deep breath to compose himself. The two men seemed to be right near the entrance of the shrine, and though they were some distance away from where Pelleas was hiding, they almost seemed to be coming closer with every word, their feet rustling noisily in the underbrush. Pelleas tried to crane his neck up just enough to catch another glimpse of them, but to no avail.

“We were sent here to purge this monstrosity,” the young priest said. He tried to raise his voice to some heroic standard, but to Pelleas he still sounded more like a sickly bard sucking on a medicine spoon than a daring hero. “These ‘elder gods’ the people of Daein still worship…that these things still even exist is contemptible! With all this blasphemous iconography corrupting them, I am not surprised that the Daein small-folk still resist the goodly teachings of Ashera! We have come to do the Goddess’ work!” The priest gathered in his voice all the venom and disgust in his voice of which he was humanly capable. “This…heathen goddess—kill her!”

The tall, strong man laughed loudly, grunted in the affirmative, and then there was the horrible crunching sound of steel striking stone, again and again and again. The first blow of the hammer startled Pelleas so much he hit his head on the bottom of the table, but fortunately his cry was muffled by Fortuna’s dying wails.

Thump crash

Thump crash

Thump thump crash

Thump

When the song of metal stopped, the tall man sighed contentedly, and the footsteps moved around the side of the building. Pelleas slipped out from under the table, nursing the bump on the top of his head, careful not to move too suddenly. He crept to the wall and looked through the window slit, heard the sounds of the two men bickering over money and compensation and the will of the Goddess and other things, saw their backs slowly walk away, and soon their voices faded along with their footsteps, and Pelleas was alone again. He sat back on the ground and exhaled deeply, heart beating out of control. His forehead was glazed with sweat.

W-what happened? Were those people…from Begnion?

Pelleas gathered his thoughts, collected his book, and walked unnecessarily slowly out of the shrine and into the brush. When he saw Fortuna, he gasped. The sledgehammer had crushed her skull beyond comprehension, split into pieces no bigger than fingers. Her blindfold had been ground to bits. Her left hand was broken apart and the wheel with eight spokes was no more than dust blowing in the breeze. Her corpse lay in fragments, silent and soulless at the foot of the sacred shrine. Pelleas stood before a pile of rubble.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head. He felt his heart sink as if to mourn the stone woman. When he closed his eyes he could still see her smiling gently at him. “Why?”

Pelleas heard a rustling in the brush off to the side and suddenly froze, holding his breath. A rabbit bounded his way out of the bushes and hopped across the clearing, and Pelleas exhaled deeply. His hands trembled from fright, his heart beating out of control.

Pelleas returned to the shrine and tried to read, but as hard as he tried he could not concentrate on the stories. The words of heroes and legends tumbled around in his head and fell right out again, chased away by a man’s laugh and the sound of a sledgehammer rising and falling, and finally, the silent sounds of a stone woman screaming. So Pelleas closed the book and left, taking one final look at Fortuna before returning home, with time enough to think as he walked back to the orphanage.

-

Pelleas did not think that anyone knew he was celebrating his birth-day, let alone that someone might have thought enough of him to give him a gift. But on the day Pelleas turned thirteen, one of the villagers whom he knew fairly well handed him a small satchel of gold coins and put his hand on Pelleas’ shoulder so hard the young man buckled.

“Yer thirteen now, heh Pelleas?” the man said. He was about forty, bald as an ox’s ass, and blunt as hell. “It’s time you got made a man of yerself.”

“W-What do you mean?” said Pelleas, beginning to feel his cheeks turn to burning.

“Go down to the Pink Lady, pub south down the road—you good to go walkin’ a bit, yer a young man now—and give this t’the barman, big feller, big shoulders, you’ll know him when you see him. Tell him you want a mug of Golden Serpent mead, it’s the best around, honest, I ain’t leading you wrong—then tell him you wan’ see Felicia. She’s the most ‘spensive girl, but she’s the best at what she do, take my word f’rit.”

The way the man laughed unnerved him even further.

“F-Felicia? Is…is she a…a whore?”

“What did you think? Ain’t no way yer’ll ever gon’ be a man without hav’n’ commerce with a woman! Now go, if ye wanna get back before sundown. It’s no more n’ an hour down’na road.” The big man leaned down to Pelleas and he could smell ale lingering on his breath and in his unkempt moustache. “But that there gold’ll be enough to carry ye well through the night, if you know my meanin’, son.”

He gave Pelleas a hard slap on the back and disappeared before Pelleas could say anything more. He clutched onto the satchel of coin for dear life and held it up to his chest. Pelleas knew all about brothels and the women who worked there. Most of the older boys in the orphanage and the villagers who lived in houses and huts along the dusty roadway saved their coin for days to buy a whore for an hour or several. No matter what he did, Pelleas couldn’t understand what the allure was in buying a woman. It wasn’t possible to pay someone to love and cherish you, that much at least Pelleas knew.

No one would even tell him what it was a boy did with a girl behind closed doors; everyone always said ‘Mind your own damn business’ or ‘Go see for yourself’. On that day, his thirteenth birth-day, it was partly morbid curiosity and partly the desire to become more comfortable around females that set Pelleas on the long walk down the road, south towards the next village over where the infamous Pink Lady Inne stood.

When Pelleas arrived there some two hours later, red-faced and nearly wheezing, he found that the inn was no more than a small little place, longer than it was wide, with a stone facade and a creaking wooden sign upon which was writ “The Pink Lady Inne and Tavern”.

Lodged above the tavern’s open door was a large wooden figure of a bare-breasted succubus with large bat-like wings and sharp fangs, her arms extended in greeting. In her hand she held a lantern that burned unerringly with crimson fire even through the rolling gusts of dust and sand that the winds kicked up through the lane. Ostensibly, The Pink Lady was merely a house of drink and revelry, but oftener than not the drinking areas were empty. Anyone who knew anything about anything knew that the lustful demoness above the entry signified the presence of a brothel. Pelleas looked up; above, the succubus looked out over the dusty road, but the nipples at the end of her wooden breasts seemed almost to be looking down at him like knobby little brown eyes, peering deep into his soul. As he walked through the doorway, his body began to shake.

Excepting what appeared to be regular drunks sitting at tables and the end of the bar, the inside of The Pink Lady was utterly bare. There was no interior lighting save for a smoky-glass lantern hanging above the bar, one large enough to illuminate the entire room. On the far wall, a stuffed moose’s head peered down at the bar patrons with disturbingly empty eyes.

A broad shouldered man in a tattered grey coat tended the wooden bar, scrubbing a glass mug with a grimy white rag. He watched Pelleas as he entered and lifted himself up onto a high stool. The barman looked down on Pelleas.

“A-A mug of, ah…muh…mead. Gold—er, Golden Serpent,” Pelleas stammered, and the barman looked at him suspiciously until the thirteen year-old produced the necessary gold from his satchel. Not one to refuse anyone willing enough to pay, the burly barman poured Pelleas a large tankard and set it on the counter. He was about to turn away when Pelleas said, as nervous and uncertain of himself as he had ever been in his life, “And Felicia! I-I want to see Felicia!”

The barman stopped. “Aren’t you a little young t’be seein’ surrmone like Felicia?”

“I-I can see whoever I want to be—to see!” Pelleas stammered, trying his best to be confrontational and failing miserably. He spilled the rest of the gold in his bag onto the bar. “Look, I have the gold. I’m a man now! I can do what I want to do!”

After a few seconds of silence, the barman shot Pelleas a dirty look and shrugged. “If yer willin’ to pay, I’ve no mind to stop you.”

“W-Well, then, just—let me finish my drink!” Pelleas said, grasping the tankard in both of his small hands, trying desperately to avoid the embarrassment of dropping his drink and spilling it.

“Tell me when yer ready, then.”

Pelleas lifted the mug to his lips, breathing in the cloying smell of the mead. He meant to take one sip, but accidentally tipped the mug and gave himself a tremendous gulp. Coughing and sputtering, he set the mug back down with a mighty clank. The mead was almost sickeningly sweet, like a lick of fresh honey, but also bitter, and utterly overpowering. Pelleas hunched over the bar, head against the grain, fists clenched, coughing the rest of the swig down, trying to fathom just what kind of hammer had hit his palate with such force. The barman merely looked at him, shook his head, and grimaced before turning away.

“Oi,” Pelleas said, first softly, then louder. “Barman! I-I want to see Felicia.” He pushed his flagon of drink away, not intending to take another sip.

The barman disappeared up a stairwell at the back of the tavern and reappeared a minute later.

“Lad!” he called gruffly. “Follow me.”

Pelleas followed the big barman like a man tromping to the gallows, head hung low, eyes trained on the creaking wooden floorboards as he passed by and up the winding stair. His heart pounded furiously, sweat forming on his forehead. He followed the barman down a hall on the second floor, past several sets of closed doors, behind which Pelleas could hear long, drawn-out moans and grunts. Finally they came to the end of the hall. The barman took a key from his pocket, unlocked the door, and walked in, Pelleas on his heels.

“Here’s yer charge for the day,” the barman said to the woman inside, chuckling. “Hope ye like babysittin’.”

The barman left and Pelleas found himself alone with the woman named Felicia, who sat on the edge of the bed. The room was painfully small, with nothing but a small window for air at the head of the bed, and there was nowhere else to sit, so Pelleas sat down on the other side of the bed, kicking his legs back and forth. Felicia took a drink from a cloudy green bottle, wiping her mouth with her sleeve when she was done. Pelleas turned to look at her.

The whore’s face was plain and unexpressive but her cheeks were sparkling clean, her hazel eyes ringed with dark shadows. Her long, dark brown hair tumbled and rolled ungracefully down her shoulders. She wore a dirty, torn red shift that barely concealed her heavy breasts and a pair of tight gray breeches worn low on her firm hips and cut off at the knees, as though someone had carelessly taken a knife to it. She was short and thin, and her legs were smooth and shiny. By Pelleas’s estimation, she was at least thirty, but probably not yet forty.

“Are you the one who came to see me?”

“Um, yes.”

Felicia cocked one of her eyebrows. “You’re a little young to come around here, aren’t you, sweet?”

Pelleas bit his lip and looked away. “I-I’m not ‘a little young’, I’m…I’m thirteen years old today.”

Felicia laughed. “Oh, my. You certainly are a big man, aren’t you?”

“So…do we get started now?” he asked timidly.

“If you want to.”

“I—I don’t exactly know what it is whores do,” Pelleas said, blushing again.

“Well, you’re going to find out soon enough, aren’t you, sweet?”

“Do you like doing…what you do?” Pelleas asked suddenly, turning his upper body around to gaze at the whore. Felicia swung her legs, tipping her little tippling bottle of wine to her mouth and taking a long draught.

“Why not?” she said at last, shrugging. “What more could I ask for? I have a good job. I get paid for doing something I love. What do I have to complain about? I’m happy with what I do. Plus…I have something to live for. I’m a happy person.”

Pelleas didn’t believe her, but he couldn’t place why. He was used to having feelings he didn’t understand, having knowledge he had no idea how to utilize. Those feelings were becoming far too common recently, and he knew that if he asked anyone what they all meant, he would be told to “wait until he was older” or worse, laughed at. When he looked at Felicia, dressed in her short breeches and tight shirt, he felt something different. His groin tightened, he felt himself going rigid, and it was uncomfortable—physically and mentally. He felt ashamed, and as usual, he didn’t know why. Pelleas shifted his legs and squirmed, but the whore looked down briefly and then back up, and he knew she could see right through him, see all his embarrassing childish secrets.

Stop it, stop looking at me…

“Do you want a drink of wine?” Felicia said, holding out her bottle. “It’ll make you less nervous.”

“No thank you,” Pelleas said. The bittersweet taste of the honey-wine still lingered and stung inside his mouth.

“Well then. I guess now I’ll have to show you what I do for a living,” Felicia said, chuckling. Her voice was lusty and mirthful. “You know, they say it’s the oldest job in the world.”

“Oh. Really? Oh.”

“You’re all red.”

“I-I’m sorry.” It was all he could think to say.

Felicia laughed. “Ha ha, you’re so cute when you’re embarrassed.”

“S-Sorry…” he said, more insistently. His cheeks and the back of his neck were on fire.

“You don’t have to apologize, sweet. I like you.” The whore reached out for Pelleas’ breeches, and he recoiled. “What’s your name, sweet?”

“I-I’m Pelleas,” he answered, almost as if by reflex.

“That’s a good name. A good manly name.”

“S…s-stop it.”

“My name is Felicia,” the whore said, though Pelleas already knew. “So, Pelleas…are you ready? Most men don’t wait this long before getting to it.” She got up on the bed and crawled on all fours over to Pelleas, who still sat with his hands folded on his lap, trying to avoid gazing at her bouncing breasts or tart pink lips. Felicia turned his chin towards her with one of her long, ladylike fingers. She pulled his arms closer and made to kiss him when she looked into his deep blue eyes and stopped abruptly.

“Do you have a purpose?” Felicia asked, the smile disappearing from her face.

“A…purpose?” Pelleas blinked. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

Felicia grabbed Pelleas’s shoulders, and in an instant her demeanor had become serious. Her eyes met his and refused to turn away, and even before she spoke he could feel the shivers slither down his spine.

“You must listen to me, boy. Soon…the world will be plunged into darkness. You must embrace the darkness! You must listen to the words of the dark salvation! Look at me! Listen!”

“W-What?” Pelleas stammered, trying hastily to writhe away from the whore’s tight grasp and failing.

“One day this world will be covered in shadow,” Felicia said, inflecting her voice. The way she sat, the way she looked at him, the way she talked; it was like she had become another person. “The Six Great Devils will rise from the earth and those foolish people who think they worship a merciful goddess will be consumed, consumed! The hearts of all us mortals will be devoured by the Six Great Devils that rise from the earth and our souls will all be plunged into eternal blackness.”

Her voice grew louder, her breasts heaving with every exclamation. Pelleas felt the sudden urge to get up and run, run away as fast as he could, but his legs were paralyzed and Felicia’s fingers had a tight grip on his shoulder blades.

“We must embrace their arts, the dark arts of the Six Great Devils, the forbidden sorcery of the shadows! We can be saved, if only we believe in them and pledge our souls to the Cause of the Dark Goddess! We must give all our worldly possessions, all our tainted material of greed away! Only then will we be saved from the wave, the terrible wave of shadow, the consuming wave that washes over us, the Great Flood born anew in the form of the watery darkness! We must submit our will to the darkness! We must save our souls!” By the end, Felicia was shouting. “Submit to the dark salvation! Surrender to the Cause!”

At last, the whore released her grasp on Pelleas’s shoulders. He waited and watched as Felicia took several deep breaths and several long draughts of her cloudy wine, holding onto the edge of the bed with her small hands, clinging onto the bedsheets with her long nails. When she turned back to Pelleas, her gaze was not as unflinching and her eyes did not have the same terrifying glint. She took another drink and sighed deeply.

W-What was that about? What’s going on?

“There’s a salvation in darkness, Pelleas,” said she at last. “The dark few, those few who worship the Six Great Devils and our sacred Goddess of Darkness…if you believe in their dark Cause—truly believe— then you will be saved.” She looked up at the ceiling. “It all makes sense now. Everything I earn I give to the dark few, the dark worshippers. They collect all the evil gold, all the greed of humanity and purge it of its dark taint by sending it into the Abyss. This is the only way I can keep living. Everything I own I dedicate to the Cause.”

Pelleas had nothing to say. He sat on the edge of the bed in stunned silence, unable to believe anything he had heard, unable to believe anything about darkness and Great Devils and Causes. He recalled the fellow who had given him his money had said that Felicia was the most expensive girl at the Pink Lady, and Pelleas finally understood why she wore rags and drank cloudy-looking wine despite this. He felt a sudden surge of something that might have been pity, and it manifested itself as a wave of nausea.

“Give away everything you have, sweet,” Felicia said to him, nearly pleading. “It won’t do you any good. It won’t make you happier.

“You only have to believe, Pelleas. Just find something to believe in. That’s a lesson all young men should learn. Some men never learn how to have faith, to submit themselves to an outside power. All they want is control. To save yourself, all you need to do is…submit. Just give up your control. It’s so easy. Just lay back, close your eyes…and smile. Enjoy it.” The whore paused and smiled, her eyes closed, and for a few seconds she appeared to be in another world. Pelleas thought she looked sad, but he couldn’t be sure.

“I’m sorry…that’s probably too much for you, isn’t it? You’re probably confused about all this. Well, you don’t have to learn all your lessons today, so…”

“Lessons?” Pelleas said. She was talking to him like someone might talk to a child, but he bit his lip, too shy to voice his frustrations. “What lessons do I have to learn?”

Felicia laughed and took a drink. “All young men learn the same lessons, sweet. The only difference is how they react. I love to watch them react.”

“I—maybe I should leave,” Pelleas said. His teeth were still chattering, his hands twittering. The whore put her hand on his and patted it.

“I feel sorry for you,” Felicia said. She took another drink.

“Ah, why—why is that?”

“Don’t you know what you want?”

“Er, what I want? What do you mean?”

Felicia laughed and smiled, her legs crossed. Pelleas tried not to look hurt. He was used to people being condescending. He was used to the way people talked as though he couldn’t hear them clearly. He could hear them perfectly well.

“You’re still just a little boy. Real men know what they want…and what it takes to get it. You’ll figure it out one day.” Felicia stood up and finished what was left of her drink. “I have to get back to work, all right? It’s going to be a busy day, sweet. Run along now. If you ever find yourself back here some day, come see me. I’ll make a man out of you.” She took the bottle by the neck and held it out for Pelleas to take, and she left the room without looking back, her hips swaying all the while.

Pelleas looked at the bottle in his hands. He didn’t think anyone could make someone else a man. Only time did that. He was angry and he didn’t understand why. Pelleas threw the empty bottle against the floor and kicked it aside. He felt small and insignificant, and talking to Felicia only made him feel more immature. He didn’t belong in taverns talking to whores, and he didn’t belong on the streets wandering as the dull-eyed rats did. He felt empty, and his head throbbed unmercifully. He wanted to go somewhere, but he didn’t know where or why. Only that he needed to go.

Pelleas hung his head and left.

-

Pelleas never had the chance to become close to anyone at the orphanage. Most of the children ostracized him for his shy demeanor, wild-looking dark hair, and preference to spend time alone thinking; those whom he did befriend were without warning adopted by widows, wealthy landowners looking for farmhands, and infertile families desperate for companionship from as close as Nevassa and as far away as Begnion. Usually the children were all too happy to leave Pelleas and the dirty, poorly-lit orphanage behind. The patrons from Nevassa could at least afford to feed their children two full meals and perhaps an apple to break their fast, and those from Begnion were often amazingly affluent, seeking a child from Daein to prove how they could turn a “garbage child” into a marvelous high-class social trophy. The few girls Pelleas had enough courage to say hello to and lightly befriend were usually taken away to become servant girls at best or low-wage prostitutes at worst.

The one friend Pelleas knew that had always accepted him and hadn’t gone away either by running to freedom or by being adopted was a girl of twelve by the name of Illumina. Visitors quite frequently came to the orphanage where Pelleas bided his time, but no one ever as much as gave Illumina a second look, even though girls (oftenest the oldest-looking ones and the ones with the widest hips) were always adopted quicker than boys were. To hear Illumina tell it, she had been there two years and only one woman so much as inquired about adopting her.

Illumina was short, even for a girl. She had short legs and short arms but long, smooth reddish-brown hair flowing down past her shoulders. She wore the same long, simple white dress every day, now stained an ashen gray from years of sleeping in dirty straw beds and playing in the dusty streets. A small, dark red bow rested comfortably at her collar. Pelleas thought the bow was cute. Pelleas thought everything about her was cute. She always looked sleepy, her eyes half-closed, but whenever she laughed she opened them, a beady and beautiful shade of violet. Her freckled cheeks were caked with dirt and blackened with soot, but whenever he teased her playfully, she turned rosy pink, and Pelleas thought it was the cutest thing he had ever seen. She didn’t talk much, but whenever she talked to him or sang, Pelleas always enjoyed it. Pelleas loved the sound of her voice.

The other girls all made fun of Illumina. They called her faerie, brownie, stray cat, dwarf; always made her “it” when playing “finders, hiders” and then disappeared; never let her play with their dolls or let her join in when they sang “Little Old May”; never once let her jump rope with them, even though Pelleas had heard her ask them politely many times. Pelleas couldn’t understand—couldn’t even begin to rationalize—why anyone would treat someone with such lovely eyes so cruelly.

Illumina was the only person at the orphanage besides Pelleas who knew what chess was, let alone how to play. Whenever Pelleas wanted to play a few games, he went to her and they’d sneak up to the abandoned library where they could play and talk without being disturbed. Sometimes they spent the whole day there, playing and talking, and she taught him “Little Old May” and many other girly songs that the other girls wouldn’t sing with her. In the dark, dusty solace of the library, when he knew that only he and Illumina were around, he didn’t mind singing those girly songs, as long as she sang with him. Illumina was the best friend that Pelleas had.

Besides the small shrine in the forest dedicated to Fortuna, the long-abandoned library some ten minutes down the road from the orphanage was Pelleas’s favorite place to spend time. The door was firmly sealed by layers of wooden boards, and all the windows were sealed, but Pelleas never let that stop him. Whenever he wanted to find an old tome to peruse, he’d sneak in through a gap in one of the boarded up windows, climb up the half-broken flight of stairs to where a railed wooden walkway supported by large beams encircled the upper part of the building. Pelleas liked to lean over the railing and look down at the few tables and bookcases on the dusty floor some fifty feet below. The shelves were largely empty—it had been that way since before the library had been abandoned and left to gather dust and shadows—but nonetheless there were enough interesting books to keep a knowledge-hungry, perspicacious young man occupied for years.

The existence of a library in that part of Daein (or anywhere in Daein save Nevassa, for that matter) was itself strange. It was a remnant of hundreds of years past, when, according to local legend, a group of traveling mages came through looking for a place to read and study their magicks in peace. Soon after, they again left, taking their most valuable tomes with them, leaving only storybooks and instructional texts behind. Pelleas was also surprised to also find a set of marbles hidden in a nook behind one of the bookshelves, and a chess board with pieces lying in another near a book on the history of the game. Although the library was dusty and dark, Pelleas liked nothing more than to sit in a shaft of light filtering through the partly-splintered wooden roof and read.

On a bright, cloudless day some two weeks after his thirteenth birth-day, Pelleas woke up early and asked Illumina to come with him to his little hideaway and play a few rounds of chess with him. They walked together down the dusty lane, completely empty in the early morning winds, and came upon the library. She followed him up to their usual place—the upper walkway, in the biggest shaft of light there was—and sat with him on the floor with the chessboard between them.

“Pelleas,” Illumina said, surprisingly serious. “You had your birth-day recently, right?”

Pelleas nodded.

“Ah, well, I didn’t say happy birth-day! I’m sorry!” Illumina tried to curtsy while sitting down, which amounted to little more than a quick flip of her dusty dress. She broke into a wide grin. “Happy birth-day, Pelli!”

“Thanks, Lumina.” Pelleas felt his ears get a little hot. “I’m glad you remembered…”

“So, what’s it feel like t’be three-n’-ten?”

“Uh…” Pelleas stopped for a moment, his hand lingering on the base of his wooden knight. Finally, he moved it forward and said, “It’s not much different than being twelve, actually.”

Pelleas turned to Illumina and caught a glimpse of her beautiful eyes. “I-I feel the same as I did back then, at least.”

“I’m only twelve, y’know. I’ll be thirteen in a coupla months though, honest.”

“Oh, your birth-day is coming soon, Lumi? I’ll make sure to find you a present, somehow…”

“Ah! Now I remember!” Illumina said. She scrambled to her feet, in her clamor almost knocking over the pieces on the chessboard. “I hid something special for you. Wait here.”

Pelleas watched Illumina as she ran around the walkway over to the steps down and charged to the lower level. She disappeared into a small alcove, and when she returned, eagerly bounding back up the staircase, she was holding a large, leather-bound white tome under her arm. Illumina ran up to him, nearly stumbling on the way and almost knocking over the chessboard again, and handed him the book.

“What’s this, Lumina?” he asked, taking the tome.

“It’s a book!”

Pelleas laughed. “I know that…silly duckling,” said he. “Where’d you get it? Was it on one of the shelves?”

Illumina shook her head so violently that her long auburn hair became tousled, scattering helter-skelter across her shoulders and in her eyes. “No, I…got it somewhere else.”

Illumina paused. She sat down opposite Pelleas and moved a pawn two spaces forward.

“I had it for a long time…I don’t know where I got it from, but I’ve had it ever since I can remember…I couldn’t read it, so I never did. I want you to have it, though. Sorry I didn’t get you it sooner. Happy birth-day, Pelli!”

“Lumi…thank you,” Pelleas said at last, nearly speechless. He held the book up to the light. There was nothing on the cover but a familiar image of an eight-spoked wheel in the center. As gently as if he were holding an infant, Pelleas opened the book. On the very first page, written in black ink with a long, flowing script, were the words “Fortune Favours the Bold”. Pelleas gently shut the book and set it down beside him.

“I love…it.”

Pelleas reached out his hand in gratitude to touch hers and he left it there, his rough, dusty fingers lingering on hers, squeezing gently. He felt his heart murmur just a little. Illumina merely stared at him, happy but oblivious.

They sat down again and continued to play chess for a while.

“One day I wanna learn my letters,” Illumina said cheerfully, rocking back and forth, hands on her knees. “That’s what I wanna do.”

“I know my letters,” Pelleas said, unable to avoid feeling proud of himself. “I could teach you how to read books, an’ stories, an’ things if you want.”

She giggled. “Ohh, you’re so sweet, Pelli! And so smart. I knew you would know your letters! That’s why I gave you my prized possession, my little book. ‘Cause I knew you were so smart.”

“N-Not really,” Pelleas said. He moved his tower two spaces forward. “I-I’m not that smart, honest.”

“Well, I think you are,” Illumina said, so matter-of-factly that Pelleas had to laugh.

“Thanks, Lumina,” he said, blushing. “You know, how about this: As a birthday present, I’ll teach you how to read, wot? I’ll start early, so by the time your birth-day comes ‘round, you’ll know your letters right good.”

“Yes, yes!” Illumina clapped her hands together happily. “I like the sound of that.”

Pelleas and Illumina talked for nearly an hour as they played their game of chess, stopping in-between so Pelleas could tell her about some of the books he had read recently. He still had his copy of The Great Heroes of Old Crimea, and he showed her pictures of Rillant the Righteous with his silver sword Lionclaw and lion-charged shield, and Edmund of Jouand with his steely greatlance Serpentia.

“They’re all so grand!” Illumina said. “Are there any girl heroes in there?”

“Aye, there are a few heroines here,” said Pelleas, smiling. He pushed aside the chessboard—the game about even in material—and slid beside Illumina, rapidly fingering through the old, yellowing pages of his tome. He was almost to the page with the colorful, full-page picture of Astrina, Sage Extraordinaire, when he heard a terrible thump from the floor below and his heart jumped against his ribs.

“Pelli?” said Illumina as another loud thump racked the side of the building. The boarded-up wooden door trembled and buckled. “Pelli, I’m scared,” she said, clutching onto Pelleas’s arm.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay,” Pelleas whispered urgently. He wanted to grab onto her hand or at least stroke her hair comfortingly, but he couldn’t work up the nerve. He only stared down through the wooden railing at the door below, waiting on a single breath.

I’m scared, too…

There was a third tremendous thump and finally the door caved in, splintering into jagged pieces. A large foot kicked the rest of the door down and three men burst into the abandoned library, looking around.

“Get down, Lumi!” Pelleas hissed quietly, pressing himself down against the floor as Illumina did the same. He crept closer towards the rail and looked down as the three men below searched around, pushing over bookcases and flipping over tables.

“Where the hell is she?” one of the men barked. “You said y’saw th’ little girl go in here. Where the hell is she, Goddess damn it? I want her! If you were fuckin’ lyin’ to me, I swear I’ll—”

“No, no, oh, oh,” said another, a man with a squeaky voice. “I saws her, I saws her, I told you, I seens her go here lots of times with some other lad bastard, oh, oh. I saws her go in here before, I know you that, oh. An’—an’ I heard voices, honest, honest!”

W-What’s going on? Pelleas thought. Are they in here looking for Illumina? Who are those men?

“Look, the stairs!” the first man said, a big shirtless man with mussed black hair. “Get up them, maybe she’s up there!”

Pelleas watched in horror as the three men bounded up the stairs to the upper walkway. Beside him, Illumina sobbed quietly, shaking.

They’re gonna find us. They’re gonna find us. Oh, Goddess, help me…

“There they is, oh, ohh!”

Before Pelleas could gather his thoughts, the three men were upon them, staring him and Illumina down threateningly. Pelleas slowly helped Illumina to her feet. She wiped the tears away from her eyes and clung tightly to him.

The three men were all big, ugly, and they smelled like cheap ale and the deepest part of a latrine. Just seeing the horrible glint in their eyes as they leered at Illumina made Pelleas want to vomit. The big man in the middle of the three had a huge great-axe slung over his back, and the others had hatchets hooked onto their belt. They stood several feet away, and neither Pelleas nor Illumina had the nerve to move even an inch.

I could run backward but I couldn’t get away if I did. And Lumina…

“Just bad luck she happenin’ to be an ugly one,” the most muscular of the three said, spitting in Pelleas’s direction.

“She ain’t that ugly, no, no, oh?” said another, a short man with rustled brown hair and a wraith-white weasel’s face. “You don’t gots to look at her face when you’re havin’ her, what, what, just close yer eyes, what, what, oh?”

“No, but she so tiny she goin’ be ripped bloody when we all done wit ‘er and what we do then, won’t be no good then,” said the third, a tall man with pale gray skin and a long nose.

“Oh, oh, then I gets it first, come on!” the weasel man said excitedly. “So’s I gets her all new an’ clean-like, hmm hmmm? I like them young, hmm hmmm mm—”

The muscled man backhanded him with his fist so hard that Pelleas could hear the crack. The weasel man screamed and grabbed his face.

“Shut your bloody mouth. If she a maiden I take her, no damn questions,” the muscled man said. “Just for that, you get last. You can go ‘round the back way if there ain’t nothin’ left for ya. I’ve somethin’ learnin’ for her what can’t learn in books.” He smiled with an incomplete mouth of gray teeth.

The weasel was too busy whimpering and covering his bloody face with his hands to argue.

“So what we do with her when we done, she got no family or nothin’, an’ no one to sell her to for,” the tall man said.

The muscled man growled. “Bugger that! We try an’ know that out later!” he snapped, and he walked quickly towards Illumina.

“D-Don’t come any closer!” Illumina stammered. “No!”

Pelleas opened his mouth but nothing came out but a nearly inaudible squeak. He wanted to do something, anything, but his legs felt like jelly and his timpani heartbeat shook and rattled him into inactivity. Finally, he held his arm out to hold Illumina back and stepped in front of her.

“N-N-No….no, don’t,” Pelleas said, but his voice was no more than a dead man’s murmur. He reckoned he might as well be dead, for all the help he could be.

Just don’t hurt Lumi, just don’t hurt Lumi, take me, but leave Lumina alone, please…

“Bugger off, lad,” the big man said, smothering Pelleas’s face with his gigantic palm and pushing off violently. Pelleas flew backwards several feet, falling against the floor so hard he felt the breath being jolted out of him. Still on his back, with the world spinning around him, he could only hear Illumina screaming as the big man grabbed her and slung her over his broad shoulder.

Dizzy and in more pain than he had ever felt in his life, Pelleas staggered to his feet, resisting the urge to fall to one knee and close his eyes.

“Pelleas!” Illumina cried, beating at the man’s shoulder with tiny fists as he carried her away. She looked over at Pelleas. Her beautiful purple eyes were drowning in tears. “Help! Please!”

“Shut up!” the muscled man snarled as he stomped away across the walkway, and struck her sharply in the back of the neck. Illumina fell silent. “Lil’ bitch…”

Pelleas called out her name, and when she didn’t respond, he stepped forward unsteadily. The tall man pulled a knife and held it in front of Pelleas’ face, barring his way across the narrow walkway.

“We ain’t havin’ no problems with you, now, so don’t go cock up and get’chself hurt too. There ain’t nothin’ you can do, bloke,” he said. When the two other men had left, the tall man pushed Pelleas down, sheathed his knife, and turned away. “Best go on memberin’ this, lil’ bloke, that life ain’t no fairy-tale and you ain’t no hero.”

Pelleas waited until the tall man was gone, then scrambled to his feet, down the stairs so swiftly he almost tripped and rolled to the landing. He took the last three steps in one great leap, then charged to the door and leaned out, cocking his head back and forth, looking through the dust storm that shrouded the horizon lines with sandy grays and yellows.

“Lumina! Illumina!” he cried. The dust-winds whined and whistled. Pelleas looked to the left and looked to the right down the road, and looked across the street, but the men were already gone. He wanted to go left, he wanted to go right, but his feet wouldn’t go. The more he yelled, the more sand flew into his mouth, suffocating him, causing him to choke and cough and almost retch.

“Where are you?!” Pelleas cried out, standing alone in the dust storm. “Lumina, where are you? Wh-where—I can’t help you if I can’t find you! I—I’ll find a—I’ll come…I’ll…”

The wind whistled. Pelleas suddenly felt sick—nauseous, shaky, his mouth turned to cotton. When he clenched his teeth, he could hear and feel sand crackling, coarse and thick on his lips. Pelleas lowered his head and shielded his eyes with his hand and walked down the street.

Minutes later, or maybe hours, Pelleas found himself at the orphanage, the familiar weather-worn gray shutters clink-clink-clanking in the storm.

Pelleas sat on a windowsill searching the angry outside, baring his face to the breeze and letting the wind choke him until he purpled, whereupon he drew back and tried desperately to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered to no one at all, though several of the orphans turned in his direction and looked at him strangely.

Pelleas couldn’t sleep that night, and the next morning he refused to leave his ratted little straw bed, occasionally falling into dreams, dreams that trampled him underfoot like wild horses. Sometimes it was the flames that trapped him, and sometime a man with no face and a long knife for a hand, and sometimes it was a demon with six heads that ate him alive. But worst of all was when he dreamt of Illumina falling from the sky, bound by legs and arms, crying and screaming to him to help her, come save her, but his legs had turned to stone and right before he woke up, he had to tell her “I can’t.” He woke from that dream with tears in his eyes, and he realized with dismay that it was barely even mid-day.

He told the masters of the orphanage that Illumina was kidnapped and they did not believe him. They would not even look him in the eye. Pelleas wandered through the streets, asking whoever he could find if they’d seen a cute girl and three scary men, and invariably the answer was no.

Lumina…where do I look? Where are you? Don’t leave me…I need you…Lumina…

That night, Pelleas did not dream. The next morning, he left the orphanage without breaking his fast, walking south along the dusty road towards nothing in particular. He wandered until the cobbled road turned to a dirt path and snaked through a field of low grass. He kept walking until somewhere along the way he found his answers.

Pelleas once believed that no one would ever hang a human unless they committed some vile treason or brutal murder. He once believed that the gods and goddesses would smile upon the good and give them happiness and health. When he finally found little Illumina, hanging naked from a tree beside the roadway, Pelleas knew he was wrong. Oh so wrong.

Her captors had left her there, maybe to die, maybe already dead, strung upside-down with a rope tightly wound around her small ankles. They had beaten her almost beyond recognition, her tiny skull caved in, her beautiful eyes hollowed out and crawling with maggots, her bare chest caked with blood and grime. Pelleas saw her, and when he saw her he clasped his hand to his mouth in horror, turned his back, and ran, ran as far as he could until he collapsed at the side of the road and started to sob. He didn’t want to remember her that way, as a shell of the girl he once knew, beaten and defeated. He wanted to run away forever and never look back, and maybe when he finally stopped he could meet her again, maybe in another world.

For four days, Pelleas’ world was sand and rain and cold. For four days, up was down and left was right and light was dark. No one else in the orphanage knew why he was sobbing or even that something was wrong or someone was missing; they didn’t really care one way or the other.

For four days, Pelleas cried uncontrollably, as lonely as he had ever been in his life. He felt as though he had more than lost a friend; he felt as though he had lost a part of his identity, as small as it might have been. Without her, he wasn’t in the right to say what kind of person he was, and it shamed him to realize that even when she was alive, he couldn’t say what she meant to him. He didn’t know her well enough, but more than that: he didn’t even know himself.

For four days, Pelleas mourned.

On the fifth day, he knew what he had to do.