It is a calm day in the village of Wolfwater. The sky is blue and cloudless. A cool breeze carries the sweet scent of nature through the air.

And hidden among the glistening golden fields of a small farm on the outskirts of the village is one strapping young lad named Ben and a peculiar young chick called Bucky.

“The coast clear?” Ben murmured, crouched low to the ground. He shifts his feet, the heavy stick in his arms and uncomfortable position straining his muscles. But he holds steady. He can’t afford to be caught before the day’s even begun.

His pet pokes her head out of the wheat field, her beady black eyes scanning the clearing. She squawked quietly in answer and hopped out, followed soon by her eager human.

“We did it, Bucky!” he cheers. “We got out with nobody seein’ us! Byron ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

The chick chirped at him, staring pointedly at his cargo.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

The boy lumbered over to a conveniently placed log in the middle of the clearing and plopped himself down. He slung his bright red pack down by the log, a familiar perch to his avian pet. After setting the long branch between his legs, he pulled a small carving knife from his boot and set to shaving down one end of the wood.

“This was a good find,” Ben muttered absently. “Not too heavy, not too thick. Good size for a sword…”

Bucky chirped in agreement, watching with fascination as his knife sliced away slivers of wood. The boy grinned at her over his work. Of course he was pleased with his own meager skill. Having never seen a master carpenter at work, it’s easy to become overconfident.

A good half hour later—and plenty of splinters and cuts hastily bandaged with pieces of cloth from the pack—he had himself a wooden training sword.

“That oughta do it,” Ben declared. He ran his hands down the length of the weapon before testing the point. It just barely scraped his finger. “It won’t stab too good,” he admitted with a slight frown, “but it’ll get the job done.”

He hopped to his feet. “Alright!” he growled. “Let’s do it!” Setting his boots in the dirt, he held up the wooden stake with both hands in a rough guard position. In his mind’s eye, he faced a devilish green goblin, holding a wicked-looking dagger in its skinny hands. It was hunched and scrawny, standing at about eye-level—he cursed his short stature, but goblins were generally child-sized and he was, well, a child.

At Bucky’s trilling cry, he lunged forward, thrusting the pointy end at the goblin’s chest. It dodged to the side before quickly retaliating with a quick swipe toward his arm. Ben parried, knocking the goblin’s dagger away. His sword struck its arm with a sickening crack.

The monster dropped its weapon and stumbled back, clutching its broken limb to its chest. Seizing the opportunity, Ben raised his sword and charged forward with a bellow. Though the goblin tried to retreat, it tripped on an unseen rock and fell back.

“Hup!”

Ben brought his sword down. It landed with a thought, shearing clean through the dirty gob’s head.

“Hooowee,” he sighed, stepping back. “That’s another gobbo down…”

The boy flopped down into the dirt, panting. Bucky chose this time to chicken-dive into his chest, driving out what little air remained in his lungs.

The boy merely laughed at her antics. He reached up to pat her wings but winced at the contact. Though her soft downy feathers were normally pleasant to touch, the wooden sword had rubbed his hands raw. He held them up to the sky in contemplation.

“Gonna have to put some leather on the hilt,” he said. Bucky dipped her head, pecking at the collar of his shirt. Her razor sharp beak got dangerously close to his throat, but the boy laid unbothered. “O’her that… I think we got ourselves a fine and dandy weapon.” He touched the sides of the chick’s head with his less damaged fingertips, squishing her cheeks.

“Whaddya say, Buck?” he asked. “You think we’re ready to go gobbo-huntin’?”

“I think for sure not!” an imperious voice growled from behind them.

Ben immediately sat up, knocking a distressed Bucky off of his chest. “Wha-Byron?!” he asked, turning around.

The older boy stood fuming, his thick bronze arms crossed over his muscled chest. He glared down at Ben from under his wide-brimmed hat. “What on Vacuous are you doin’ out here, boy? Ain’t I told you to help Layla wit’ the coop?”

“But I did! I got the chickens out,” he said, gesturing toward Bucky. She bobbed her head and clucked. “Then I did a bit o’ sweepin’ and whatnot…”

“So why she’s still scrubbing?”

“Well, if she weren’t too busy poutin’ and-”

“Ain’t none o’ that,” Byron interrupted, stomping forward.

Ben tried to scramble away from him, but Byron moved faster than his size suggested. He snatched Ben’s collar, yanking him to his feet.

“Heya!” Ben protested. “Lemme go, you brute! Bucky!”

The chick swiftly answered her human’s call. She jumped and aimed her beak for the hand holding Ben. He grabbed her by the neck just as swiftly. The chicken squealed indignantly, trying to peck at his fingers. 

Byron growled and shook her a bit. “Stop that!”

“You stop it!” Ben retorted, kicking him in the back of his knee. The big man hardly flinched. “Aw, you big boulder piece a-”

“Shut it!” came the bellowing command. Both boy and chicken went silent, withering under Byron’s dark eyes.

He shoved Bucky into Ben’s arms, getting a grunt out of the boy. Chicken safely secured, Byron held onto him tightly as he started marching back to the house, lecturing all the while. “I expected better outta you, boy. You know how much the farm needs you.”

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The lad hung limply in his brother’s grip, letting his feet drag behind him. “I was just takin’ a break,” he whined before yelping when Byron suddenly dropped him.

“Ben,” Byron said, his voice deeper and more gravelly than usual. He got down on his haunches, looking the younger boy right in the eye. “Harvest is just ‘round the corner. We can’t have you slackin’ off like this. We got work to do, boy.”

Ben averted his eyes. “You got Cedric, though…”

Byron snorted. “The sorry lout who’s out and drunk half the day? Hell, Ol’ Bess was more useful, and she stopped giving milk way back when. Drain on every one o’ my coins. Now come on, up now.” He grabbed Ben by the arm and stood, pulling the other boy up with him. Pushing Ben by the shoulder, he continued their hard march back to the house.

“I need you,” he continued, “to be better. We ain’t got time for you to play around like this. You gotta step up. We’re the only men in this house, you know that?”

Ben mumbled his affirmative, which satisfied his taskmaster until they got back to the house. Of course, seeing the chickens pecking at the dirt in front of the porch made him none too pleased. Ben winced as the grip on his shoulder tightened.

“Momma!” Byron called. His deep baritone sent the chickens scattering.

“More work for later,” Ben muttered into Bucky’s crown. She clucked sadly.

“I’m in the sittin’ room, come on up!”

Ben was pushed forward. He glumly led the way into the house, where the boys found their mother where she said she was, sitting on their only nice cushion in their abode, an offending-to-the-eyes yellow color with ruffles on the arms and a high back. To Ben, it seemed like it’d make a good evil wizard-king throne if it wasn’t so…yellow.

Momma was in the middle of repairing one of Byron’s old shirts. From the way she tried to hide it in the pile of laundry next to her seat, Ben guessed it’d be one of the few gifts on his birthday in a few weeks. He didn’t like hand-me-downs, but well, money was tight around here.

Byron stepped around him, planting a kiss on the aging woman’s spotty forehead. She patted his check with a thin hand once he’d pulled away. Bucky hopped out of Ben’s arms to run to her, immediately getting picked up and settled into her lap.

“What’re you two boys doin’ in so early?” she asked, leaning back with a smile. One hand shakily ran through Bucky’s feathers, smoothing them out. “Dinner ain’t for a few more hours, yunno.”

“What do you think?” her eldest son asked, jerking his head towards the younger. “Caught him playin’ with the darn chicken out by the fields instead o’ cleaning the coop like I told ‘im.”

Ben scowled. “I did my part! Not my fault Layla’s so slow!”

Byron rounded on him, using all of his bulk to loom over the boy. “And you know you stay till the job’s done, boy,” he growled, emphasizing his last words by poking his chest with one meaty finger. “You don’t go lazing about playing with fake swords! We ain’t adventurers or nothing!”

“Says you!” Ben shot back, standing firm against his towering figure. “And who are you, telling me what I can and can’t be and what I gotta do around here? You ain’t my-”

The palm of Byron’s hand cracked him against his jaw. He stumbled back and fell on his bottom, clutching his face.

Silence pervaded the room. Ben stared up at his brother in shock, the older boy’s face a mirror of his own. For a single second, the family was still.

Then the first tear rolled down his round cheeks and shattered the silence. Bucky squealed with fury and leaped out of Momma’s lap to run to him. Byron apologized profusely, trying to hug him. Ben jerked away from him. His legs propelled him across the floor until his back slammed into the wall, where he hugged himself into a ball with Bucky in the center. He rocked back and forth, clutching her tightly.

“Byron.”

The young man flinched at his mother’s voice. Her tone made him young again, not much younger than Ben was. He shrunk under her angry eyes. Then he steeled himself, opening his mouth to defend himself, to cement his position as the head of the house.

His eyes glanced at his quivering brother, and the fight left him. “Sorry,” he muttered, stuffing his hands into his overalls. He went stomping out of the house, muttering about the cows.

Momma’s gentle hands and soft voice eventually coaxed Ben out of his ball. Bucky slipped out of his grasp. She’d served her part for now. At Momma’s nod, she waddled out of the house, occasionally stopping to glance back at Ben.

Ben huddled into his mother. She pet his hair and brushed away his tears. When he had finally stopped sniffling, she brought him to the kitchen. After dipping a rag in their make-shift sink bucket, she dabbed his face with it.

“You know he means well,” she whispered. “That doesn’t mean he was right, but he means well. So he’s gonna come back here and make things right later. You don’t gotta accept it. You don’t even gotta listen. But he’s gonna do it, just cause it wasn’t right.”

“I won’t. He’s always actin’ like he’s better’n me and I-I hate it. I don’t wanna be a [Farmer], Ma, I hate it. I hate him! He’s not-he’s not-”

“You listen to me,” she interrupted, cupping his chin and making him look up at her. “We don’t hate family in this house, you understand? We’re all we got.”

“But he-”

“We’re all we got!” she yelled. At his wide-eyed stare, she looked away, taking the time to calm her breathing. After a moment, she turned back to him, her voice steadier now. “I’m sorry. We’re all we got, Benny. So we ain’t gonna hate. We ain’t gonna hit either. That boy…” She trailed off with a sigh, setting the rag down on the edge of the bucket. “He’s tryna be something he’s not yet, I know. But you bein’ a little troublemaker ain’t helping either, Benny.”

She gave her youngest a stern stare. His big brown eyes stared back and broke her instantly. With another sigh, she wrapped him up in a tight hug that he immediately reciprocated.

“You’re so much like him,” she murmured into his hair.

Ben went stiff at that. “Him…?”

“You’ve got his spirit,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. He looked up at his mother and saw her staring out into space. “His determination, too, haha… Stubborn as a bear, that one… Know where that led ‘im, though…” Her voice tightened in the last sentence. Her eyes glimmered as she remembered past things.

“Momma, I’m sorry…”

The older woman blinked, coming back to herself. She quickly wiped away the tears before they could fall. “Nothing to be sorry about, Benny,” she said, forcing a smile. “You are who you are. I wouldn’t change a darn thing about you, baby.”

He groaned as she pinched his cheeks, much to her great pleasure.

“But I do need you to take your chores a bit more seriously now, you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She patted his good cheek and pecked his forehead. It hurt her heart just a tiny bit to see him grimace. “I ain’t gonna let you slackin’ on helping Layla with the coop get away either,” she said, pulling away. “I’m thinkin’ the attic needs a little dustin’...”

Ben slumped against the bucket. “Aww!”

He didn’t see the glint in her eye, nor the small smirk on her lips as she pushed him towards the stairs.

“Go on now,” she said. “You can help Layla out once you’ve finished. And you know, if you wanna be finished by dinner… I’ll let you have Bucky up there.”

“Really?” he said, perking up. “Can I?”

She’d barely nodded before he was running out the door, calling for his beloved pet. She smiled at his fading back.

“So much like you, Bernie,” she said softly, settling back into her chair. “I wish you could see him now…”

Lydia looked to the ceiling, where the secrets of the past lay hidden… And as she heard the pounding footsteps of her youngest son and excited clucking, she thought they might not stay hidden for much longer.