I CLAMPED MY hands over my ears, but it didn’t shut out the boy’s wailing. The ground beneath my feet, ashen and cold, seemed to shudder under the noise. I set my feet and locked my jaw, but my lips curled back into a snarl. It was like nails being driven into my ears, into my very brain.

When at last the wail stopped, I found myself on my knees gasping for air. I put one hand on the well, and slowly, carefully, peered over the ledge.

“I’m here to help you,” I said down into the darkness.

“Liar. I know what you did to the others.” The boy’s misery was palpable, as thick as the pain still ringing through my skull.

“Others?” I said. “What others?”

In answer, the boy screamed again. This time I was prepared for it, and dove to the ground, clutching my head and waiting for the storm to pass. When it did, I sought a little radiance to ease the pain.

“I’m coming down,” I said. “If you scream like that again, I’ll fall on you.”

“I won’t let you take me!” he shouted. “I want my mother! Mother!”

I sensed the scream coming, building up like tension in bowing glass before it shattered. Still, I thrust one leg carefully over the lip of the well, and then the other. I braced myself, but the shock didn’t come. I heard nervous shuffling, and heavy, frightened breathing. Pressing one leg to the far side of the well, I braced myself, and then began to climb spider-like down into the darkness.

My limbs trembled under the strain of the climb, and my own breath came in heaves, until I felt a solid stone beneath my feet. The pale moonshine of Alain’s Flame far above my head was little more than a hint of grace so deep in the well. It picked out strange, ethereal lines on the brickwork that lined the well, which was a little more than half as wide as I was tall.

The floor of the well was bone-dry. Perhaps I’d hoped for water, but even the memory of such a thing was gone from here.

I turned and found the child curled in a ball against the wall, without a scrap of cloth to him. He was filthy, his nails grown long and wild as his hair. He glared at me over his knees, trying to hide the trembling in his bones.

I knelt and held up one hand. I wished in that moment that the hand were less ugly. Less corpse-like. But that was what I had been given. What we all had, we denizens of Hell: only these decayed, lesser forms, these shreds of memory of what we once were.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said quietly. “Can you trust me?”

“The Wolf hunts the others,” he said. “He eats them.”

I shook my head. The very idea made me ache. “I won’t eat you. How long have you been here?”

For a long moment, he did nothing but stare. Then, slowly, “I miss my mother’s singing.”

“Singing?”

He nodded. “I used to hear her singing when I played in the trees. She would sing to me to come home. Did your mother sing to you?”

I thought about it, but there was no memory there. “I don’t know,” I told him truthfully. “I can’t remember much.”

“That’s all I remember. And then…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “It was cold and dark. The trees were strange. And I walked for a long time, searching for my mother. Listening.” I shifted, sitting on one leg, stretching the other before me. By the pale light of the flame high above us, I let the boy remember. “And I sang back, but she stopped answering. I heard other children singing… sometimes they cried. They were looking for their mothers, too.”

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“What did your mother sing to you?”

He opened his eyes, and the whites shone with a little radiance of their own. “Gulls in the sky by the great gray shore, my lover sails home to me. He brings me a necklace of gold, he brings me a gown of silk. My lover is a man of the iron men, and yet I love him so.” There was a familiarity to the words: a comforting, earthen tune. I knew it not, but surely the songs I had once known had not been so different.

“A good song,” I said.

“She sang to me to come home, for my father did not. He went over the sea, but he never came home.” The boy bit his lip. “I used to pretend I could hear him laughing when the gulls cried. I climbed the Torich Rock that overlooked the sea and stared. I wanted to spy him there, and when she sang for me to come home, I could bring her the news.”

I heard the grief in his young voice. And, perhaps, I glimpsed the memory of my own child. A memory stolen and sealed away, I thought with simmering fury. “What’s your name, lad?”

“My name?” He seemed to have to think about that for a long time. “Ebin,” he said at last, though the word sounded unfamiliar in his mouth.

“Well, Ebin,” I said, standing and stretching. My arms and shoulders were sore. It was about to get worse. “I’m going to get you out of this hole. And then we’ll figure out what to do. Climb on my back.”

It was no easy task to haul the boy out. Coming down was hard, but going back up was a much greater challenge. I was tired, and the boy was a dead weight on my back. He locked his arms around my shoulder, and his legs about my waist. I marked him as at least four stones, skinny as he was, but that was far more than I’d carried. I let the radiance burn in my blood, carrying strength to my veins as I shoved my way up back up the well, sliding one foot, then the other, one hand, then the other. Alain’s flame swelled above us, coming ever closer.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing at the ball of light.

I answered with a grunt, getting my hand on the rim of the well. With how poorly the stones were set, I didn’t want to risk too much. “Up,” I said. “Carefully.”

Cautious as he was, I got stomped on as the boy threw himself over the edge of the well. Relieved of my burden, and desperate to lay on the flat, firm ground, I followed him a moment later.

A dozen dark figures stood around the well, their faces turned to the flame. Children, all of them, thin and tall, short and broad. They were lightless, like the one I’d come across with Param and hte snake-face. Yet, I could see definition emerging from their gloaming silhouettes, as if eager to be pulled from the shadow.

“Cinderborn,” said one, pointing. They hissed like a nest of snakes. Jaws unhinged, and I sensed that crackling tension again: screams of rage and terror surfacing from their nightmares. So many might split my skull open, and drive me back into the dark. “The Wolf!” they howled. “The Wolf!”

“No!” Ebin cried, throwing his hands up. “He is not the eater! You’re wrong!”

His bravery was startling. But by the light of Alain’s Flame, I saw something that closed my throat with anguish. Even as Ebin strode forward, offering calming words to the gathered lost ones, I saw the ugly, morbid scars that stretched across his scrawny back. Something had flayed him wide open. A bear, I thought, or some huge and ruthless hunter. He could not have survived that.

No wonder he’d lost his mother’s song.

“The Cinderborn hunt us,” snarled one of the children, falling into a feral squat. “They eat us. They send their snakes to poison us.”

“This is not the Wolf,” Ebin said again. “He saved me from the well. He saved me from the two who cast me down it.”

“Cast you down it?” I said, but the boy didn’t hear me. He was talking to the children, and they listened. Uncertainty painted faces glimpsed through twilight. I had an idea, feeding a little more radiance to the orb of Alain’s Flame. It grew brighter, and so did their faces. The holy light scoured away the darkness, and drew their eyes.

“Do you remember it?” I said. I held still, offering no threatening moves.

“The sun,” said one. And the others nodded. The darkness burned away, until only children remained. Small, gaunt. None of them could have been more than eight summers, for they had the look of children about them, and not even a ghost of the adult. They were scared. Their nervous eyes turned to the trees, as if seeing them for the first time. And then to me.

“Where are we?” Even Ebin looked to me, confusion on his face.

I sat back and took a breath. How do you tell a child it’s dead?