Seven Years Later

The countryside seemed a much better place to raise a child than the heart of Naukratis, so I moved.

The little town of Oakbridge I thought was the best place for a “widowed” father to go with his only son. Not just for the schoolhouse the community had built there, but for the lovely, unmarried women who might find a lonely father an attractive prospect.

But, to woo such ladies, one must appear a decent father, and when the school’s headmistress called me to her office to talk about Zac’s behavior again, I felt my prospects dwindling.

Keren sat behind her desk when I walked in the room.

The school’s elven headmistress wore luminescent rings on either middle finger. The rings were made of gold, and their red stones, aglow with Ancient runes, pointed inward. A ball of golden light, like a fist-sized sun, danced in the space between her hands as she swirled them about.

That same golden light illuminated Keren’s snow-white face and made her silken hair glimmer like the night sky. Her doe eyes shone a deep shade of amber, jewels half-hidden behind smiling eyelids. Those pointed, elven ears so perfectly framed that soft, inviting face.

But that smile wavered when her pupils swiveled to me. “Ahv. You’ve arrived.”

I rubbed the back of my head and shrugged my shoulders before positioning myself on the chair across from Keren’s desk. “You wanted to see me, ma’am?”

Keren snickered and shook her head. “Ahv, how many times have you come to see me in my office again? By now we don’t have to be so formal.”

“We do when I’m in trouble,” I said. “I am in trouble, aren’t I?”

“No, but Zac is,” she said.

“If my son’s in trouble, so am I,” I responded. “I promised myself I’d raise that boy right.”

Keren sighed and said, “Your son nearly beat another boy senseless today. I had to use a kinetic ring to pull him off. He was flailing about like a brood of vipers.”

“This one’s not my fault!” I blurted out. The instant I saw her annoyed brow I knew that now was not the time to be making such poor attempts at humor. I groaned and held my cheeks in both hands. “Ugh! Did my son explain why he beat the other boy up?”

Keren shook her head, the copper earrings I’d just then noticed swaying with her dark locks. “He hasn’t said a word since I put him in the Lonely Room. I told him he could come out when either he talked or you came to get him.”

“I see.” I tapped my fingers together and pursed my lips, exaggerating the depths of my thoughts. “So, I can go in and speak with him now?”

“Yes, you may.”

With her emphasis on the last word I knew she’d just corrected me again. “Thank you,” was all I said in response, avoiding eye contact as I passed her and walked to the door of the Lonely Room.

A sign was posted on the door with a picture of a sad face. The first time I saw it, I snickered at such a silly-looking doodle. But after so many times I’d passed it, I’d come to feel some sympathy with that frown.

And, of course, for the boy behind that door.

When I entered he stood in the far corner, muttering. The moment the door opened his mouth closed. His dark eyes cast down as he kicked at the floor. Behind his back hung his arms, fingers locked together. His dark hair had fallen over his forehead, and when I entered he tilted his head forward to hide behind his hair like a mask.

This was one reason I no longer allowed him to decide how long his hair would grow to be, for I made sure he’d never be able to hide his face from me. We would deal with each other face to face, as men.

But I also understood that if I were to enforce the rule of us meeting face to face as men, then I needed him to trust me as a fellow man. So, when I entered I flopped down to sit on the floor next to him and sighed. “Plain walls… no toys… no one to talk to. This isn’t so great, is it?”

Zac shook his head, but remained silent. His eyes slowly found their way up my chin, the bridge of my nose, to my eyes for a second, and then to the top of my head.

At least it’s face to face, even if not eye to eye…

Sitting this close to him, I could hear his uneven breathing through his nostrils. His heart must have still been pounding from the fight.

“Do you want to talk about what happened?” I asked.

Zac shook his head and lowered his eyes to my nose again.

“Huh…” I gave a confused look. “That’s funny, I think if someone made me so upset that I beat him up I’d want to talk about why I got so upset. Otherwise it would just make me sick inside.” I faked a comical gag and held my hand over my mouth.

Zac pursed his lips and raised his fist to hit me. I did not flinch, and his knuckles stopped so close to my face that I could smell the chalk on his fingers. After a moment, he withdrew his hand and returned it to its proper place behind his back.

“Sounded like you were talking to someone just a second ago,” I said, giving a quick glance around the room. I suspected that he was talking to his “invisible” friend, Mr. Muk, again. Some of the other parents, upon hearing that Zac was talking to an imaginary companion expressed some concern, but I always thought it was good that he always had someone to talk to, even when I wasn’t there. Or, in moments like this, where he didn’t want to talk to me.

“If it was Mr. Muk you were talking to,” I said, “Maybe we can talk to him together?”

Zac shook his head.

“Well…” I continued, “...in any event, we can’t leave the Lonely Room until we talk about what happened.” I shrugged. “Those are the rules.”

Zac clenched both his fists down at his side and ground his heel on the floor, his nostrils flared, and blurted out, “He said you killed my mom!”

For a moment, I forgot every word I knew. But I shook my head to snap out of it and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Who did? The other boy?”

“Yes!”

“That’s quite the accusation… do you believe him?”

Stolen novel; please report.

“No!” Zac grunted. “He’s a liar!”

“Is that why you hit him?” I asked. “Because he lied about me?”

“No, that’s why I spat on him,” Zac said, a hint of pride in his voice that he failed to suppress.

“Oh.” I scratched my beard at the jawline and said, “So, I guess he didn’t like that much?”

Zac looked up, over my head again. “Yeah. He twisted my arm.”

“And that’s when you hit him?” I asked.

“No,” said Zac. “That was when I kicked him.”

I snorted with laughter, but immediately suppressed it. In spite of how funny I found it that he completely missed my point, I didn’t want him to think this was a good thing.

“So, that’s when you fought back. Did it hurt?”

“Yeah…” he rubbed his belly, likely a place where the other boy had hit him.

“So, what happened next?” I asked.

Zac proceeded to tell me the whole fight in copious detail. The boys took the fight to the ground immediately. Every punch, every bite, every kick he remembered so vividly. But he wrestled his way to the top and began beating on the other boy with both fists. That was where I stopped his story.

“You beat him and you didn’t just get up and run away?” I interjected.

“No…” Zac said with a questioning look.

“Why not?” I asked.

“He said you killed my mom!”

“And he’s a liar?”

“Yes,” he said, stone-faced.

“So, you beat him up because he’s a liar?”

“Yes.” Immediately after the word left his mouth and he’d crossed his arms he got a look like he’d just been caught with his toes in a mousetrap. “No! Because he was hitting me! He started it!”

“Sounds like you finished it,” I said. “But then you didn’t stop when it was over.” I shook my head. “The boy you beat up, what’s his name?”

Zac pouted and looked away from me again. “He started it!”

“So I hear. Can you tell me his name, Caz?”

Caz was an affectionate nickname I’d come up with for him when I taught him how to spell his name and showed him what it looked like spelled backwards. We knew it was the name only family was allowed to call him. A name we never used in front of strangers.

And this time he fought the smile the sound of his nickname fought to bring to his lips. “Lii,” said Zac.

“Lii was his name?”

Zac said nothing, his bulbous eyes attempting to bore holes in my chin.

“I’ll assume that’s a ‘yes.’ Does Lii have any older brothers? Or friends?”

Zac said nothing, but the paranoid glance to his left spoke volumes.

“Because,” I continued, “If Lii does have friends you might have to worry about them coming to get revenge. What are you going to do if his friends or his older brothers come to pay you back?”

“Umm…” his eyes widened and his forehead wrinkled with stress.

“Dang…” I crossed my arms and gave a sympathetic sigh. “You’re in big trouble, I think. What are you going to do? I don’t think I could fight so many boys off at once without getting hurt real bad! Could you?”

He looked up at my nose and shook his head.

“So, what are you going to do?” I asked.

“Maybe… apologize to Lii so he’s not mad.”

“I heard Mr. Benji did that when he was a kid and it worked.” I gave an enthusiastic smile and nod as I mentioned the name of his hero, the man who was like an uncle, or even a second father to him: Benjamin Strato.

“Yeah!” He gave the faintest reflection of my enthusiasm and a nod of his head.

“BUT!” I raised an index finger to draw his attention to the seriousness of what I was about to say. “What do you do if the other boys don’t forgive you and start coming to get revenge anyway?”

“I…” he scratched the back of his head, “I don’t know… try to fight them all?”

“You could do that.” I cracked my knuckles. “But, do you want to know what Mr. Benji did when a bunch of boys were coming around to beat him up?”

He nodded his head, now with a slightly bigger smile.

“He started making friends with other boys. Teachers too.” I gave a soft grin and a nod of my head. “It’s true! He said once he had more friends those boys stopped trying to beat him up.”

Zac gave a skeptical, “Pffft!” and shook his head. “Mr. Benji’s the strongest man in the world! He can fight them himself.”

“It’s what he did, I’m telling you...” I pointed my index finger at his chest. “You… you ask him some time. He’ll confirm… he’ll tell you it’s true.”

“Hmm…” his eyes still gave a little skepticism, but his head gave a slight bob. Just shy of an agreeable nod.

“So…” I clasped both my hands together. “Once we get out of this room, what’s your plan?”

“Make lots of friends,” he said with a nod.

“Aaaaaand…..?” I brought my face in closer to emphasize my prompting.

“Uh… Apologize to Lii…” he rolled his eyes at the last part, but my gut told me that despite his disgust he was sure to follow through.

I pushed myself up to my feet and dusted off my knees with my hands. “Well… sounds like you have a good plan. Just wish you didn’t have to go through this. Maybe if you hadn’t spat on Lii you wouldn’t have to worry, but now you do.” I gave a forced, paranoid glance back and forth, as if Lii’s friends were about to jump out of the corners at me instead of him. Though, to make it seem scarier, I imagined lions wherever my eyes fell and let my face reflect my imagined dread.

He swallowed a lump in his throat.

“Well, let’s go home for now,” I said, making my way to the door of the Lonely Room.

Zac followed me as I left, and Keren stood beside her desk just outside the room. She held out a short stack of papers to me. “If you’re heading home, don’t forget these.”

“Paperwork I need to fill out?” I asked, taking the stack from her hands.

“No, she said, and as she spoke I saw that it was a stack of drawings. Two things I recognized immediately; Zac’s drawing style and the creatures I’d encountered in the depths of the Ancient ruins. My blood ran cold as the memories of my most dangerous encounters flooded back into my mind. “The kids had an assignment today; draw twenty animals.”

“And the animals Zac drew… were all darklings…” I mumbled as I flipped through the pages, beholding each of the grotesque and bizarre forms of the monsters who lurk in darkness.

“Yes, they were,” said Keren, the smile on her face not as reassuring as she intended. “It seems a lot of boys really like darklings.” She shrugged. “It makes it easier for me to teach them about those monsters.”

My brow furrowed and I glared at her. “Why are you teaching children about darklings?”

Zac interjected with, “Because they’re neat!”

Keren laughed. “Actually, it’s because darklings are dangerous, and I feel the children ought to know about what’s out there.”

I shook my head, unable to fathom why children needed to learn about evil in such detail. “They need to know more than ‘Darklings are bad, so stay in town, near the Everburn’?”

Zac snatched the stack of drawings out of my hand. By the look on his face, it seemed to me that he was worried I might tear up the drawings. As worried as I was that my son, who might very well be Zahac, was interested in darklings, I had no intention at all of destroying his art. For that matter, I’d never torn or ripped one of his drawings before, a fact which made me wonder what some of the other children’s parents might have done in front of him.

Keren shrugged, and snapped me back to reality and the current moment when she spoke. “Hey, the community voted on this lesson plan. If you don’t like it, then I suggest you talk to the other parents in town about it and see if you can get them to vote to change it.”

I sighed. “Right… sorry… forgot this isn’t really your fault.”

I left the school hand in hand with Zac as he regaled me with all he knew about darklings and all the “awesome” forms they took. The huge, four-legged darklings with silver-colored skin and snakes coming out of their faces. The tall, two-legged darklings with bodies covered in thick layers of fur, tusks protruding from their mouths like boars, and bull-like horns adorning their heads. The winged darklings with three pairs of talons reaching down below them, their claws sharper than razors. He spoke of them with such wonder, but each time he mentioned one I had a flashback to seeing such creatures in the ruins, just before they tried to kill me.

After listening to him talk on and on about darklings most of the way home, I finally stopped him and said, “You know so much about them. Do you know what to do if you ever actually see one?”

Relief and pride filled my heart when his eyes widened and he said in a solemn voice, “Run away. Get back to the light of the Everburn as fast as I can.”

I gently ruffled his hair and gave a loving smile. “That’s right, Zac. Darklings are dangerous.”