Consciousness returned to Ald carrying the acrid stench of an indeterminate loss. The silvery beam coming through the window of his room betrayed the night and the full moon, called Father’s stare by poets whose talent no living Felsian aimed to match, looming over the city of siblings.
He sat onto his futon and took in his room. Too humid, the atmosphere was too humid today, and maybe it would damage the sole painting hanging from the wall, a depiction of his orchard gifted to him by a wandering sister and friend, now estranged.
His closet, doors of reinforced forgewood shaped by his very hands, lay with them ajar. The mat on the floor had a particular oddness about it, as if something from the dream had followed him into the world, as if he had repeated a word so much it had lost its meaning. But like a word that has sated one, the mat meant nothing. The dream itself was there only as a recollection of feelings stripped of memories. Something had been lost, and the memory of it being lost had been lost too.
He smiled when he found himself wondering if he was mourning the initial loss, or the loss of the loss. It didn’t matter: Spring had come, and Kali was still sleeping. Maybe he had time to take a bath and wash the slick sensation that covered his skin away. It felt like he had slept on a mound of dirt or manure, despite knowing it as a simple layer of sweat.
He opened the sliding window to let a load of stagnated air escape from his room, and then was when it landed on the windowsill, donning her feathers, colorful badges dressing a raven like a macaw.
The image annoyed him. This bird was weird: he had never seen one like it before, and yet could swear he knew it. Maybe it was some soldier’s exotic pet, escaped or simply being let to roam free around Felsia. Furthermore, those colors marked it as unwelcome in the night: red, blue, and green, proudly flaunted by the day dwellers as they hopped between branches.
The night seemed to stretch the longer he stared in the bird’s eyes, and therefore he shooed it away.
With her gone, Ald sat up from the bed and headed for the bathroom.
----------------------------------------
Pandemonium tilted her head as she stared at the Felsian. With a pair of eyes on reality and another inside Ald’s mind, she was matching what Ald saw in his hallucinations with the objects spread throughout the jungle. Any moment now, he would use that oblong rock to his left as a bar of soap. Nude and with his stare wandering across nothing real, Ald believed he was taking a bath.
Caretaken, nowhere and everywhere, pervading and incorporeal as he had always been, derived amusement from toying with the Felsian’s mind. He was simpler than other masterworks: he didn’t act out of a primal need burning deep inside, and his thoughts were comprehensible, if you had a way to spell them out. His was a somewhat childish malice, used not to kill for killing was fast, fleeting, boring. His was a somewhat childish malice, used to torture, like a brat tearing the legs out of an arthropod just to see it squirm. It was, if one wills, the purest malice, for there was no possible benefit to be derived from it. Amusement wasn’t one, as Caretaken didn’t crave it, didn’t need to be entertained nor sook it. It was a collateral of enacting this torture, that deserved, on itself, to be. Evil that existed for its own sake, as simple and as despicable as that may be.
Ald grabbed the stone predicted by Pandemonium and began rubbing it on the skin of his arms. On his mind, he was taking a relaxing bath, even if there was something slightly off with the soap and the feeling of the water, as if everything was a bit too rustic, and the water denser than it should. Yet all was real enough. For Ald, the jungle was a Worldvein away once more.
After putting his drapes back on, the Felsian wandered around the clearing. The eyes of the parrot opened wide and the corners of its beak lifted unnaturally. “You are going to make it rain just for him, aren’t you?”
Caretaken answered with a wave of egoistical satisfaction. Zaburanatea was as simple as him, although she denied it. Few masterworks were born with a purpose, as that was a privilege of divine fodder. He had been born to torture his prey with no rhyme or reason, Wintertoll to hate his brothers and sisters, and Zaburanatea to bring forth her own twisted justice. But, oh, weren’t all justices just as personal and just as twisted? The All-Carver had not left their children any orders to follow, it had not been his purpose. There existed no underlying framework of morality, no wrong or right. All justices were equally unjust in the light of all their peers. The gods were as righteous as they were foul criminals, and he was as right as he was wrong in what he did. But Zaburanatea didn’t understand it that way. For her there was a meaning behind the word “justice”, a righteous path to follow. And he couldn’t torture her out of such childish vision of the world, which was a shame, because when everything else died, the only ones he would have to carry on his purpose would be other masterworks.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The parrot snickered. “Your conceit is delicious, brother.”
Then a voice welled from the matter all around, only for Pandemonium to hear. “And your omniscience annoying, sister.”
----------------------------------------
After a short trek, dressed still in their thick winter clothes because the young spring sun had not yet thawed the last remains of the cold season away, Ald and Kali climbed the ivory stairs on the inner side of the great white walls. The stone had been roughly hewn, as if climbing the walls without taking the tower’s ladders had been but an afterthought. Yet the walls had soon become a popular spot for participating of the rains, a place where future caretakers could stretch their arms and catch the precious cocoons before they reached the ground.
Ald patted the chalk and knife on his pocket: A runic arrangement could help them with their reach, if the Nasciturial Clouds were led slightly astray from the Felsian frontier by the newborn winds of spring.
And the Nasciturial Clouds were gathering all right. Charged with lightning and stealing the pale appearance of a cadaver, the clouds pumped through the skies, spiraling towards a convergence point. The maw of a monstrous celestial worm closing over the eastern Felsian firmament: onerous yet unheeded omen for the souls of those about to depart; invaluable blessing for the soul of the city.
“It’s beautiful!” Kali said, pointing at the clouds above them, running across the top of the wall, running along the battlements with her hand extended to caress the bricks. On those walls she had been caught, and there she would help Ald catch a little sibling.
Ald smiled as he sat by a group of brothers and sisters that, leaning against the interior parapets, in front of a ballista readied to repel or kill something aberrant and unknown, couldn’t hide the satisfaction in their faces.
“Leave some children for the rest of us, Ald!” Joked a lanky individual of unkempt hair and heterogeneously-yellowed teeth.
“Four years is enough time between two adoptions, Sabarol. How’s the wine business going?”
“The climate of last year was kind with my berry plantations last biennium, so come autumn I’ll have a high quality batch done. A blooming business to defray the costs of raising a little one, don’t you think?”
Ald shrugged, smiling at the gathering clouds. “A knife commission or ten may have helped secured Kali’s food and diapers during her first year.”
A sister of a long, curled mane with black spots and deep eyes stared at Ald without saying a word.
“Hello Galari. How’s life treating you?”
“I need no pity from Elvisat’s little ward.”
“As always, I see.”
The woman groaned, and Ald turned towards an empty patch on the white ground, a good spot to draw the runic circle. He put the colored chalk against granite, and began outlining the enchantment. He didn’t like formulaic sentences for his spells, so each one was a small act of creativity, of using the wiggle room structure and—sometimes—word choice allowed.
He got lost into the clauses. A pause there, a stronger synonym there. Polysyndeton? No and no and no and no. Alliteration or parallelisms? A bit at the north, a bit at the west, at bit at the southeast of the carefully crafted circular creation. Hyperbaton unreliable a tad too was.
So lost he was in the inscription that he didn’t notice the stirring of the clouds, the spawning of that year’s firstborn. Yet Kali, eyes wide open at the skies, did. And she skittered along the battlements, running to catch that trailblazing cocoon that fell in a straight line. She extended her little hand past the wall and grabbed onto the wool as the celestial cradle fell, a little fish biting a sinking anchor.
Her scream pulled Ald out of the reverie, just in time to see her lose her footing and fall through the crenel.
He exploded in action, standing and rushing to where Kali had stood a second before, a an instant too late to catch her from the ankle or the feet. Voiceless he witnessed her fall, the little girl having let got of the cocoon in vain. That was what the wool was for, after all: the newborn Felsian inside would suffer some turbulence, but ultimately land barely bruised, if at all. Kali didn’t have such protection, and she cried out as she fell, calling for Ald, that, despite extending his arm towards the void couldn’t cat her. And so Ald witnessed, during those fateful instants stretched into a tortuous sequence, Kali slipping away from him, from life, plummeting head first towards the grassless dirt.
The crack and the splat delivered the blunt reality to him, and, in silence, Ald stepped back. He slapped his cheek, bit his hand to wake up from the dream, and yet remained awake in this absurd nightmare. Then, not shouting, as the cocoons fell around and his brothers and sisters gathered to watch the tiny bloody blotch with a broken neck that lay at down below, he tried to climb the battlements, take the only way to avoid the blame and be with Kali, even as the others grabbed him. “Let me go! I need to jump! I need to jump!”
And he insisted and insisted, until a brother, member of the city guard, knocked him out for his own good.