When the moon turned red, most of the people in the village huddled away in their homes. They hid their children in the root cellars or cupboards and bolted their doors, as if it would make any difference. Two youths would leave Kaviss by the new moon, and there was no avoiding it. So I didn’t follow my mother and my brothers into the cellar. Instead, I sat in the living room, carving a piece of wood into something resembling a dog. 

The night was quiet until the soldiers rode into the village. I wondered if the soldiers were frustrated by the people hiding away like burrowing creatures from the woods. I wondered if they were resigned to being unwanted visitors, the villains to our normal lives. Their horses neighed outside, and I heard distant barked orders. 

The silence outside was interrupted by the sound of a soldier’s horn. Soon, they would make their choices. A young man and a woman would be taken away, never to return to the rolling hills and green pastures of Kaviss. Never to be heard from again.

I wanted to be heard from again. In fact, I wanted to stay in Kaviss. Everyone I knew wanted the same. People who left Kaviss and came back never had good things to say about the other parts of the world. They didn’t like to speak of their time away at all.

“Theodor!” my mother hissed.

The door to the root cellar was open two inches wide. I could see the dull white of her eyes, wide and fearful. There was no point in hiding. They would break down the door if no one answered it. They would find who they wanted and take them away no matter how well they were hidden.

There was a knock at the door, and the trap door to the root cellar fell. I heard the mumbling of voices outside. I didn’t think it would be our house. It was the kind of house peoples’ eyes passed over. There were no flowers in the windows, no tiled roof. Most times I walked past my own house and had to double back. We had gone generations without even one person from our family being taken. It seemed the family’s luck had run out.

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A soldier rapped on the door again, and a few seconds later it turned into a banging. This was a prelude to what would follow. A battering ram, and then each door in the house broken down until they found who they were looking for. I held my hands in front of myself as I walked to the door. I was shaking, and the handle of the door was slippery in my hand.

“I’m opening the door,” I yelled out. “Just a moment, please.”

Why was I being civil? I wasn’t this polite even in temple. Fear brought out  good behavior, apparently. A dozen of them stood outside, their hands resting on the hilts of their swords, when I opened the door. There was no battering ram, but a large man a few feet away looked disappointed that I’d opened the door willingly. I hoped for a moment that they would be equally disappointed in me. They could choose among anyone in the home, and my brothers were suited to adventure than I was. The soldiers didn’t even look behind me.

“You have been called into service,” the leader of the group said. The clasp of his coat was more ornate than those of the soldiers around him, and his hair was peppered with more white hairs. He didn’t need to say he was the leader of the group. The deference the others showed him said it for him.

“Name?” the leader asked.

“Theodor Ardius,” I answered. I wait to see if my mother would open the root cellar, plead for them to move onto another house and find someone else. I’d heard other mothers do it before, through closed windows as my own family breathed a sigh of relief. 

Behind me, there was nothing. My younger brothers were in the cellar with my mother. They were not so much younger, and they had inherited my father’s build and height. The soldiers looked behind me, their eyes pausing at the sliver of darkness beneath the trapdoor.

“Do you wish to say goodbye to your family?” he asked.

I forgot that I had always been a black sheep among them. My brothers who took after my father took his place in the village and on the farm as soon as they were old enough. I took after no one, resembled no one else in the family. I waited for a second, hoping they would come out. If not to protest my being taken, at least to see my face for one last time. There was nothing, and the soldier tapped his foot.

“No. We can go.”