Day Four

By the fourth day the boys could no longer move their hands to do anything. Their tendons and muscles had seized from the excessive heat damage over the previous days.

Their skin had stopped moving properly over their bones, now just a torn glove made of the remains of what was only so recently young and supple.

A sharp knock rang, dark and menacing throughout the home. The boys strained to rise and make their way to the door. As neither of them were able to grip the door handle, their sister who had snapped awake, came to help them.

The awful feeling that she was aiding in their demise wracked her to her bones.

Outside the house they were met by two Cast Soldiers, the most imposing of figures, waiting like reapers collecting the damned.

On the way out, the eldest reached behind himself but missed the door handle, his fingers sliding down the door, leaving skin, blood and flesh on the wooden panels.

He stifled a scream of agony to protect Fawn from the reality of the situation, but she was well aware of the severity, although she could not reconcile what she was seeing with what she was feeling.

With a hopelessly sad look on her face, her eyes glossed, her little voice croaked out through a distressed sob.

“But ... ”

Both of the boys shuffled away, walking as if death pulled them by their feet. With their ever-persistent refrain, they could only murmur.

“My life ... ”

They walked in catastrophic excruciation back up the hill. There was no sign of the jeering or judgmental implication from those that saw them anymore. It seemed others were finally starting to understand the significance of what was happening. The boys were proving that the cruelty of those who stood over them knew no limits in this apparently heartless place.

With the ferocious sun coming up once again, the boys fell into their boxes. Lying amongst the dried blood, shredded flesh and lost fingernails, their crippled and suffering bodies were, as ever, pushed back into exposure.

As they lay twitching and whimpering, their spirits had finally broken. The sun rose higher, scorching them without mercy. With no outer layers left to their skin, the light began burning flesh down to bone and heated their stomach acid to the point where it expanded and corroded what was left of their throats, leaking into their tired, fractured muscles.

Their eyes were completely burnt over, with no movement possible. What was once a fluid had all but entirely crystallized, making them both wish they could free their hands to tear their eyes out entirely, to end the suffering.

With gums bleeding, their teeth collapsed inward as the molars broke from reactive clenches of desperation.

Constant physical stagnation let the sun boil the blood in their veins, searing them from within. This was a torture no living creature should ever have to endure, and yet they had been forced to choose monstrous inhuman suffering.

Shaking terribly, the elder tried to turn and see, but could make out no details, nothing but a bloodied cloud. The comfort of looking on his beloved brother’s face had been replaced forever with searing pain, and a sensation that he knew was the last of the fluid in his eyes solidifying.

He slowly worked to form words, as his voice filled with agony. With his tongue swollen, body broken and collapsed, he tried to share kind words, remembering Fawn, with his baby brother.

“Faw—”

His voice quaked, his expression showed fear, terrible fear, as finally his tongue slowly split down the middle, and he bled his last.

The younger brother, racked with terror, mustered the last breath that he had.

“Fa ... Faw!”

His voice expired and vocal cords snapped. His mouth fell open, where it remained. There was no life left in him.

Fawn, sitting in her window, was watching the sun go down, anxiously awaiting the return of her siblings.

This time, the boys were brought down the hill by their torturers.

When Fawn saw the bodies: burnt, broken and bloodied, her stomach twisted horrendously and she felt the awful cold that came from understanding what she saw.

Panic breathing, she ran down the stairs. Their mother had finally come down but her cowardice continued, keeping her inside. Cast Soldiers had both boys piled onto one stretcher, dumping them on the ground several paces from the house, with the irreverence of those inconvenienced by the carrying of someone else’s burden.

Their bodies fell from the stretcher and rolled slightly apart, several paces from the door, scraping burnt flesh and congealed blood from them as they tumbled. Fawn ran like she never had before, utterly disregarding her own Cast-inflicted injury.

Driven by grief and shock, she crashed to her knees between the bodies of her two beloved brothers.

She reached slowly down toward each of them. As gently as she could, she placed a hand on each of their shoulders, and through torrential tears she barely controlled her own voice.

“I ... love you too.”

The child shook and finally made a sound no one ever wanted to hear. Her scream measured the existence of the Village, and found it wanting. People heard her throughout the dilapidated homes, and on the dust covered footpaths. The echoes carried to the mountains beyond.

She screamed in pain and sorrow all at once, her expression of savage torment took cycles from her life, and left her without any of the light and joy that was once in her young, sparkly eyes––eyes that now reflected nothing but the harsh glint of suffering.

Finally, her mother came out of the house to face the reality. She grasped the scale of her failure as she slowly approached the bodies of her children lying on the street, the truth that she had done nothing to save them—out of a fear for her own life. It was more than she could bear, sending her fleeing back inside to crumple on the floor.

Fawn continued to wail like a lost soul, and into her breath she slowly wove the words that scraped like claws at her mother.

“You ... did ... NOTHING! You should have helped them! You should have done something!”

In the True Darkness, she sat crying on the ground with nothing but the destroyed corpses of her once-loving brothers to keep her company. Thoughts kept repeating in her mind.

Why did they do it? Why did they die for me?

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Little Fawn never truly understood the full scale of the punishment she would have suffered, had she not been shielded from it by her brothers. The obsession began in her mind: that she must learn what it was that they died to save her from.

If her brothers were still alive they absolutely would not let her find out what she had so narrowly avoided, but now with their bodies the only reminder of what they had done, she felt with a deep certainty that she must know why it was worth their lives.

An intense focus and resolve, normally reserved for those of many more cycles lived, grew in her mind. She would do whatever was necessary to discover the truth behind the cruel, ruling hand of the Cast that they all feared, no matter the time it would take, or force of will it required.

Having set her mind, she went back into the house to ready herself for the journey that had so many unknowns to it. Given that this was not something she had ever done before, she had sparse knowledge to draw on to prepare herself.

Passing her worthless parent kneeling on the floor, she sent her a scowl of hatred, seen only by the flickering orange light of an herb burning in a ceramic plate hung from the ceiling. Even then, her mother again tried to make some motion to the revealing nature of her clothing.

Fawn reacts in a concerted movement, tearing at her dress: making it so short as to no longer conceal her perfunctory undergarments, which themselves are poorly made clothes that look more like coarse polishing cloth, than anything suited to wearing against one’s skin.

Her mother reels at the exposing of so much of the child, and opens her mouth as if to say something. Before she can even draw a breath, the little girl, once so rich in jovial revelry, takes up the razor knife that her brother used not two days ago to make his point, and stabs it right through her mother’s constantly reaching hand, pinning it to the dirty ground.

The woman lets out a shriek that is cut short as her daughter stifles it with her free hand. With venom in her voice, and savagery in her beautiful eyes, Fawn stares at her.

“They died so I could be myself ... and you, you cannot take that from me now.”

With a single movement she steps on the knife still piercing her mother’s hand, to hold it where it is. So fast and powerful is her impact on the blade, that it forces a reactionary spasm in her mother’s legs, skating them backward against the ground and wedging her foot under the crude wooden floor behind her. The staked woman cannot summon the strength to remove her hand from the ground, or the will to split her hand around it.

As her mother looks up at her in panicked disbelief, the determined girl then strips all her remaining garments from her body, stands naked over her mother and leers at her with great intensity.

“Why am I so horrible that it makes me criminal?! Why is my body so evil that I must suffer, and my brothers have died?!”

As she stood over her mother, truly revealed for all that she was, there was a clarity to her now from head to toe, unveiled in a way that was utterly forbidden.

Her body was one of perfected delicate symmetry, with light muscles moving in an idealistic way across her bones. Nothing about her body was any more, or less, than perfection and balance.

There seemed an almost unworldly nature to her skin, which captured the subtlest of reflected light from any source and let it move unfettered over her.

Awestruck, her wounded mother tried to comprehend just what it was that had happened.

It felt as though all was lost, when only a few short days ago she was a provider of hearth and home.

As the true magnificence of her daughter started to sink in, she had the two most contrasting of thoughts: that of a mother who was in a way proud of her child for her strength, and yet the other was that of a person who believed what she was seeing was wrong, so wrong in fact that she had no way to reconcile it in her mind.

As the feelings of prejudice and mindless conscription to regulation came thick and fast to replace whatever reverence she may have had for her child, she drew her pained breath to scream at her.

“It’s your fault! You are the Godsless animal that brought this upon us! You!”

She then collapsed back to her prone position, knife stuck firmly between the bones of her hand.

With a reaction such as this, Fawn began to see the reality of the situation: her mother was truly weak-spirited, and so resolved to sit and watch her for a moment, to think.

Slowly, but with great purpose, she moved in front of her writhing parent and sat cross-legged beside the pool of blood soaking into the dirt floor.

Looking deep into the eyes of the carer she once loved so, seeing nothing but judgment and disdain took all warmth from her heart.

An understanding was forming that the woman she was looking at had a compulsion to report her criminality, in a poorly conceived attempt to gain favor with the controlling hand of the Cast.

Slowly her misery began to strip away, leaving only resolution in its place.

Lying on the cold ground, struggling from the searing pain in her hand, her mother looked at the petite harbinger sitting across from her like a goddess in judgment, made of a flawless physique and pitiless gaze.

Regarding the sheer visage of her once-familiar child, her mind flared with rage.

How can she exhibit such disgusting behavior?

Observing the growing bile in her mother’s eyes, the truth became clearer to Fawn by the moment. Ever increasing in scale, like the crimson stain forming in the dirt, was the new truth. The truth was, her mother ... now endangered her life.

Fawn knew now that she could not depend on her mother, or truly even trust her to keep the wolves of the Cast from the door. She began to consider what that really meant for her.

As the menacing reality started to encroach upon her, she arose from her cross-legged position. Moving with remarkable strength, she simply stood straight up from the side of her ankles and slid her feet into position, ignoring the pain in her wounded foot. With little effort, her musculature worked in faultless concert as she moved.

Watching her daughter rise with such grace brought a moment of reverence to the wounded shell that her mother now was.

The thought was quickly replaced by contempt, as the muscles around Fawn’s hips and stomach pleated and relaxed, announcing her nakedness with such flagrant disregard for proper standards.

So determined to bellow at one who was no longer considering her words, finally her mother screamed at her.

“Cover yourself, animal!”

Fawn moved away from her irate mother toward the stairs.

Glancing back, she saw that the blood-sodden patch of dirt was still growing larger. She imagined that the knife in her mother’s hand would somehow eventually stop the bleeding.

She had, of course, never inflicted an injury upon anyone before, let alone such a grievous one.

Confident that her mother was at least no threat while pinned to the ground, she continued up the stairs and began to conceive of a garment for herself. She would, after all, need something that concealed her. If she was to pass unnoticed among the others, she would need to blend in a little bit.

Now she knew that her defiance of expectations would lead to all manner of attention she did not want.

With only two or three fluid movements, she was over the rails and up the stairs. She was truly powerful in her small body, almost in a way that made moving herself around a matter of thought only, not effort.

She went to her mother’s room to gather some of the terrible cloth from which all their stark clothing was made.

She started picking out pieces that she thought would be somewhat useful, and hopefully be a little more comfortable and smooth against her soft skin.

As she reached down to get hold of a small piece of cloth, she found herself trailing her fingers down her stomach for a moment. She felt pleased to be free to make contact with her own body, however brief, without fear.

As the moment of relief passed, the grief for the loss of her brothers came pouring back.

Their determination to let her be herself had, in the end, come at the highest of costs.

Finally, she gathered herself and looked again at her body as something she had been gifted, rather than something to be ashamed of. This thinking, of course, was why her brethren gave their lives for her, and they carried that resolution of belief with them to the absolute end.

She discovered a type of cloth that she didn’t recognize, due to its softer weave. She imagined a design she could wear that would meet with the expectations of others that regard her, while still reflecting some of what she truly was.

With that, she re-fashioned her underclothes with the new material, making new wraps more gentle against her skin than the coarse rag in which she had always been enrobed. She then went on to conceive outerwear more like something that moved with her. The outfit was now a bare minimum consideration, made only to insulate her from the harsh environment—not simply a controlling hand, sewn into clothing.

She readied herself to move downstairs again. She must face the reality she had placed aside for the time taken to make her clothing.

Moving less comfortably than she had while she was bare, but far more freely than in all her previous days, she leaped back down the stairs.

Arriving at the bottom with a graceful poise, she saw her mother—weakened, pale, and without the will to struggle against the knife through her hand.

Fawn had inadvertently made a trap for the suffering woman. She was caught by her foot between the planks of the boarded area ... and thanks to the blade pinning her wounded hand out of reach of the other, she could neither remove the knife nor move herself to recover.

Nevertheless, it was for the best. Fawn had no doubt that her mother would have run to report her at first opportunity.

Fawn stopped to consider any possible alternative. She still had the hope of a child, and the want of a daughter for her mother’s approval.

But what can I do?

At that moment her stricken parental figure saw that she had made a new garment for herself, one that was still an outlandish defiance of social standards, and tried once more to object.

It was clear. Fawn’s last hopes faded as she pulled the knife from her mother’s hand and, freeing her foot, propped her up against the table. With no strength left, the majority of her blood seeped into the dirt. Her mother tried to sit up but slumped against the table leg.

Fawn now regarded her with some sympathy, but as she reached out to assist, her mother still spent the effort to form the word ...

“Animal.”

With what breath she had left.

Feeling the true weight of her coming solitude, Fawn began to sob once more. Her family, her love, and truly even her youth ... lost.

All that remained was her immaturity, a condition which now felt like such a burden.

Through the glaze of tears, she watched the last of her once-beloved mother’s blood leak away into the ground.

An exhausted sleep came over Fawn as the cold of isolation closed in: no longer a family member, just a lonely child.

–Garrick M Lynch–