II

Rylan had no idea what he was doing anymore. He wasn’t sure what he was meant to be doing. Did he chase after Aroha? Did he try and help at the port? It sounded like a massive fight had broken out – possibly raiders. He also couldn’t just abandon this man, could he? He was dying, in dire need of medical attention. Rylan only knew that he couldn’t do nothing.

Okay, think. He forced himself to stop for a minute, trying to slow his heart as it threatened to break out of his ribcage. The Port needs help. Aroha needs my help.

He took one last deep breath, then decided it was better to take some kind of action than none at all. He hefted the man slung over his shoulder and dragged him to the nearest building off the road. He slumped the man against the wall of the building with a heavy thud. He took the bloody bundle of a shirt that the man still clutched feeble and did his best to construct a hasty, makeshift bandage out of it, wrapping it tightly around the man’s shoulder and torso. It was the best he could do for the moment, Penelope might be able to help out more later on. She had a knack for fixing wounded animals on the farm, maybe some of that knowledge could save this man as well.

‘I need to go into the Port and try to help them. Aroha could be in trouble as well, so I need to grab her from wherever she ran off to. Do you understand?’ he told the man firmly. It was more to keep his own thoughts in order than anything else, but it helped.

In his half-conscious stupor, the man raised a weak arm to try and grab Rylan. ‘Don’t…’ he muttered frailly. ‘Run…’

Rylan shook his head vehemently. ‘I can’t. They need help down there.’

Rylan grabbed the man’s left hand in his and clasped it tightly. ‘Just hang on for me. I promise I will be back. I’ll get you help. All you need to do is not die, do you hear me?’

The man could not even muster the strength to respond, but he nodded weakly. Rylan stood up, shaking the worry from his head. The man would be fine for a little while. He hoped. He gave the man one last look over, trying to ascertain if he carried any weapons on him. Unfortunately, they had left the man’s longsword lying by the signpost where they had found him. He did not appear to be carrying anything else on him.

Rylan ran then, straight into the Port. The commotion that had been so deafening just a scant few minutes ago was dying down, but he still heard the sounds of fighting. The clamour of boots running in the dirt and the crack of wood being broken. He didn’t take the main pathway all the way to the Port and instead ducked into some side alleys between buildings so he could try and approach the fray unnoticed for as long as possible. Ducking and weaving through the dirt paths as he had done so many times in his youth, Rylan felt the dread and anxiety building up in his gut and threatening to explode from his mouth. But he kept it down. He had to.

Two side streets away from the Port, he got his first taste of the horror that was occurring in his small waterside town this twilight eve.

Two men lay dead in the dirt. Rylan knew them instantly. The baker’s son, Juno, and the village’s blacksmith, Hargreave. The boy was barely older than Rylan himself, a few months shy of nineteen. His throat had been slit from ear to ear, and Rylan guessed that he must have been trying to outrun the attackers after they had killed Hargreave, who himself had been gutted like an animal a short distance from the main pathway. The two men had tried to run away from the fight and had been mercilessly hunted and killed.

Rylan almost threw up then and there at the mere sight of it. The stench of the two bodies reached his nostrils and he covered his face with his blood-covered hand. Pierced guts and vented bowels. He choked back the tears that sprang on him out of nowhere. His entire body felt as if it were about to give in, and he would’ve loved nothing better than to curl up there in the dirt and die with these men.

He couldn’t. The thought that Aroha was in real danger hit him like a raging bull. He had to find her and her family and get out them of town. Now. They would get the wounded man back to the farm, back to Penelope, and then he was going to get all of them out of here, as far and as fast as they could travel.

That was the plan now. That was what needed to happen.

Rylan ran to Juno’s corpse and turned him over, trying to find a weapon. The boy had none. The attackers had killed a defenceless boy. For what reason? The sadness and weariness in Rylan’s bones were replaced by anger now. Pure, burning anger. Rylan knew he couldn’t give in to it. He needed to stick to the plan. He needed to save his friend and his sister. That was all that mattered. He would kill anyone who stood in his way to achieve that.

Luckily, Hargreave did have a weapon for him. A rusted cutlass probably pulled from the blacksmith’s back wall in a hurry. It would have to do.

He stepped over the body of the smith and cautiously made his way to the main pathway. Peeking out from his cover, he could see the waterfront clearly. There were a dozen or so men milling about. Their armour was unfamiliar to him and he realized it was because there was no uniformity to the crew. The men all wore pieces cobbled together from various other sources. He spied Namarian raider breastplates and tunics, as well as some Kingdom plate and pauldrons; other, less recognizable pieces as well.

A few more bodies lay in the dirt, but Rylan tried to ignore them as best he could. If he saw more friends or people he knew dead, he wasn’t sure if he was going to make it. He saw a handful of women and children being rounded up roughly by the men. They were crying and begging, and Rylan saw some of them being savagely struck for it. An older woman that Rylan recognized as the Milk Barn’s elderly cook was on her knees, begging to the soldier nearest to her. She held onto his trousers, crying hysterically, but Rylan could not hear the conversation. He did, however, witness the soldier strike her with his heavy, gauntleted fist across the head. The sharp, sickening crack of it was loud enough to reach even Rylan. She dropped to the dirt like a sack of flour. The soldier kicked her body but she did not move at all. She would never move again. The soldier spat at her corpse and moved away. The rest of the hostages were silent now, sobbing quietly to themselves so as not to provoke any more ire from the soldiers.

Rylan gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to rush in, cutlass swinging. These were soldiers, and although he had done some sparring and fencing when he was younger, he was sure that a dozen of them would cut him down in an instant. Then he would be of no help to anyone. There was a ship in the Port that he recognized instantly. The sails were unmistakably the livery of Camar – a maiden in gold, praying in a wheat field on a pale blue shield.

A slave raid, Rylan thought. The Camarians were notorious for their use of slaves to work their fields and farmlands, but they usually obtained them through markets, not outright raids.

No, these must be slavers themselves, flying the colours of Camar to avoid trouble on the water.

Rylan was fearful. He had no idea how he could save the hostages that the slavers were holding. He could hear some distant fighting still taking place further in the town. The slavers were going door to door, taking anyone they could get their hands on and killing anyone who resisted. He didn’t know how many were roaming the town right now nor how far they had spread out. He leaned back against the wall he had been pressed against and realized he had hardly been breathing at all. He closed his eyes and hit his head against the wall in frustration.

What do I DO?

Every second not doing something was a second wasted. I’ll try and find some people in the town. They can’t all be dead. I’ll round up whoever I can and we’ll come back to save the rest of them. Yes. That’s all I can do right now.

Rylan glanced one last time at the hostages and slavers standing guard at the ship. They weren’t going anywhere until the rest of their crew came back. He made off in the direction of the nearest commotion he could pick up, sticking to the alleyways and squeezing between the buildings. His youthful days of terrorizing these streets were proving useful now as he knew every nook and cranny he could slip through to avoid using the main roadways.

He heard voices coming from the butcher’s shop, tucked away a short distance from the waterfront. Two men. Laughing. He was too late here. He peeked into the shop anyway. The butcher lay dead on the ground in front of his shop display. There was a slaver rummaging around in the meats behind the counter, chatting with another person that Rylan couldn’t see.

The slavers’ accents were thick and guttural. They spoke the common tongue, but it was heavily Camarian-accented and Rylan had a hard time discerning what was being said. It didn’t help that everybody in Camar spoke a regional slang unique to their particular duchy, and, having never left the Port himself, Rylan was wholly incapable of picking up on their particular euphemisms and colloquialisms.

He picked up a jokey tone in the man behind the meat counter’s voice, as he was shoving slabs of meat into a rucksack. He was able to discern something about the meat being “string-gay” and what he thought had to be a curse on the town itself.

A second man’s voice came from upstairs. The stairway was to the right of the entrance and led up to the butcher’s family’s living quarters above the shop. Most of the shops in the Port were built as this type of structure or else had living quarters in the back of the shop, such as was the case at Aroha’s family’s tailor.

The two slavers shared a brief but furious exchange of words. They spoke as if they were running out of words to say. So quick were they with their tongues that Rylan did not even have time to process one’s words before the other had already started speaking. He caught something about a “dough-er” (and reasonably assumed they meant daughter) and something lewd that he had no desire to decipher.

Rylan waited for the men to finish their brief conversation, growing impatient and ever more anxious the longer he waited on the street. The first man turned his back to the door to inspect the uncut meat that hung behind the shop’s counter, and Rylan took that as his opportunity to rush in.

He scrambled around the counter as fast as he could, but the slaver had enough time to turn and shout ‘Oi!’ before Rylan plunged his cutlass into the man’s chest, his momentum driving both men to the ground. Unwilling to lose his grip on the cutlass, Rylan landed on the slaver heavily, knocking the shop’s display counter over in the process. The wooden display shattered to splinters as it hit the hard stone floor – the sound loud enough to wake the dead in the ringing stillness of the shop itself – but Rylan could not take his eyes from the slaver underneath him. The man looked up at him in pure terror and surprise, the expression still on his face as Rylan watched the light fade from his eyes with barely a gurgle.

Rylan himself did not even have time to register his own shock and surprise before the slaver from upstairs had come running down, screaming obscene curses at him the entire way down.

Rylan struggled to pull the cutlass loose from the first slaver’s chest as he scrambled to his feet. He barely got it up in time to block an angry swing from the second slaver. The shock of the blow reverberated through his arm, but he grit his teeth against the pain. The second slaver kicked out savagely, catching Rylan in the stomach. He sprawled out onto the floor and rolled away from a second strike. The slaver screamed like an enraged bear and came at him again and again. Rylan knew he couldn’t keep blocking all the man’s wild swings. He scrambled across the floor, trying to find firm footing so that he could stand, but the man would not give him a chance.

In a desperate attempt to delay the man, Rylan grabbed a piece of meat off the ground and flung it at him. It was enough. The meat struck the man square in the face, stopping his wild assault in its tracks as the man bellowed in outrage. Rylan used the brief, precious seconds to find his footing, and, having stood up, rushed headfirst into the man, plunging his cutlass into the man’s stomach before he even had time to react. The man’s voice caught in his throat mid-roar, and his sword flopped feebly out of his grasp, clattering to the ground. In response, Rylan wrenched his sword deeper into the man’s guts.

He realized he had been screaming this whole time. He had thought it had been the slaver, but he was shocked to find that the sound came from his own lips, like a man possessed. The slaver dropped to the ground himself, the life having left his body and Rylan looked in horror at the carnage around him. The blood from both slavers covered his torso, arms and even his trousers, and it was all he could do to try and stop his body from convulsing. He did his best to stop there and catch his breath for he realized he was winded as he had never been in his life. No toil in the field, no sprint in the streets, had ever made him this tired before in his life.

His hands still shaking, he retrieved his cutlass from the second slaver’s body. He had to clasp his right forearm with his left to stop the violent spasms that racked his body.

I just killed a man, he realized. Two men! Oh, Mother, forgive me…

The butcher did have a daughter, Lydia, and a wife. Rylan ran upstairs as fast as he could, his lungs still screaming at him from exertion.

‘Lydia!’ he called out. ‘It’s Rylan! The slavers are dead, you can come out now!’

He searched the sparse bedroom of the butcher. Besides a wardrobe that had been hacked to pieces by the slaver, an upturned poster bed and a ransacked chest, there was nothing. He moved to the second room, which was linked directly to the butcher’s own. This one was Lydia’s. He knew it from the times he would fool around with her behind her father’s back, back when they were much younger. The bed was still untouched, and he saw Lydia’s wardrobe was as well. He breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Lydia? I’m here… come out please.’

There was no sound from the wardrobe. Concerned, Rylan approached it cautiously. He drew the door open slowly, warily, and immediately recoiled from horror at what he saw inside. The girl was curled up on a shelf, barely able to fit in the thing at all. Her hanging dresses covered her face, but Rylan had seen the knife in her limp hands, and the blood that had pooled beneath her and dripped down the wardrobe’s drawers.

He couldn’t help it then. He fell onto the bed and he cried. He cried as he had not cried in years. Not since his mother’s funeral. All the exhaustion, all the pain, all the horror and sadness that had welled up inside him since seeing Juno and Hargreave’s corpses broke out of him in an unstoppable wave.

He wept there, head in bloody hands, for as long as he dared.

He didn’t want to leave.

He didn’t want to go any further, but he knew he had no choice. He needed to find Aroha and get out of here.

There was nothing else he could do.

*

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She ran. It was all she knew how to do at the moment.

She ran through streets and past buildings that had once seemed like home and comfort. Places where she knew everyone and everyone knew her and she was safe. It didn’t feel like that anymore. Now the buildings loomed over her oppressively, trying to keep her from reaching home, and the deafening din all around rattled her to her core. She couldn’t even be sure that the din was real anymore. She had heard the screams and cries and the sounds of conflict, but she couldn’t be sure if they were still ongoing or if they had just taken up permanent residence in her mind.

Her parent’s tailor shop was at the north end of town, near the Mother’s temple. It was in the opposite direction of the waterfront, where she was sure the terrible noises ringing in her head had originated from. She just hoped she had enough time to get there before anything bad had time to spill out from the waterfront. Better yet, she hoped that whatever had occurred in the waterfront had been contained and dealt with already.

It was these thoughts that sustained her, even though her body screamed at her for the exertion it was currently experiencing after a few good years of relative inactivity. She had once been quite the sprinter, but the lazy teenage years of working in a comfortable shop, doing nothing more than knitting and stitching patches had dulled her considerably, and she was paying the price for it now as every breath became harder and harder to find.

Eventually, Aroha did reach her home. The sight she saw there stopped her in her tracks so violently that she actually skidded in the dirt, lost her balance and fell heavily onto the rough sand. She didn’t even pay it any mind at all as her eyes remained transfixed on the sight in front of her. The front door of her home had been hacked down savagely, with half of it still hanging on its hinges. The shop-front’s glass windows had been smashed in with what looked like rocks, the display mannequins splayed out on the ground like dead bodies. A fire was raging in the upstairs rooms, the air already choked thick with black smoke and the unmistakable smell of burning wood. There was no glass on the upper floor windows, only wooden shutters to keep out the cold, and the flames were big enough to have already alighted these so as to give the building the appearance of crying fire. Even the sign above the doorway declaring “Marivaldi’s Tailors” was starting to catch fire. Before long it too would be consumed.

‘No, no, no, no…’ she whispered to herself as she pushed herself off the ground. She wanted nothing more in the world than to stay where she was, unmoving, perhaps burning up with the home itself, but she knew she had to make sure her mother had gotten out safely. She hoped against hope that Riario had not come home yet and was hiding somewhere with his friends down at the waterfront, safe and sound himself.

She made her way up the little dirt pathway to her home but stopped almost immediately when she heard men’s voices emanating from within.

‘Where’s ‘e ingots then, ya sullen craw?’ a man shouted.

She heard a woman whimper a reply. Her mother?

She crept up as close as she dared to try and get a peek into the store. She side-stepped some errant glass shards so as not to alert whoever was inside the shop to her presence. The shopfront was empty, but everything had been ransacked inside of it. The mannequins had been hacked with what looked like hatchets, seemingly at random, with limbs and heads scattered everywhere and the clothing they wore strewn all over the floor. The shop counter had been tipped over, with what little coin was in it scattered on the ground as well. There were beads and buttons and shards of glass and all sorts of other knick-knacks and accessories everywhere. The only thing Aroha could think of was that it would take forever to clean up the mess. She could feel the heat from the fire raging upstairs and she knew it wouldn’t be too long before the floor caved in on top of the shop, fire and all.

There was a room behind the shop front that served as the shop’s office and workspace. Aroha and her mother would spend most of their time in there, her mother making new garments and Aroha usually repairing the villagers’ torn and broken garments. She was sure that her mother and whoever was with her must be back there.

Then came the sharp, sudden slap and a cry of pain.

‘Lit’le dosher like ‘is would be rakin’ in the tune, you agree?’ came a second voice. There was another whimper, followed swiftly by another dull smack. Aroha physically recoiled at the sound. It was one she knew too well. One she recognized instantly.

‘So where is ‘e?! I swears to ‘e bloody Maiden, ya bloomin’ hess, I will gut’a like a piglet!’

The anger and impatience in the second voice were clear and Aroha knew she had to intervene somehow. The quiet sobbing that followed was all too familiar. She looked around the room for a weapon. She just needed some time, needed something, anything! She spied a lit torch lying on the staircase that was slowly starting to burn as the fire tried to creep downstairs. They must have used it to start the fire in the first place. She slipped past the doorway to the shop’s workshop as quickly and as quietly as she dared. She managed to spy a glimpse inside, but she couldn’t see anybody from the angle she had. She had to hurry!

She grabbed the torch off the staircase and, steeling her nerves, rushed into the office. The two raiders had their backs to the door as they had been interrogating her mother. The woman was cowering on the ground, whimpering softly and clutching her face. Her beautiful long, dark hair fell over her face but Aroha could see blood and tears on her hand. Aroha had always kept her hair cropped because she hated looking like her mother, now she wanted nothing more to be her. To take her place on the ground. To hold her and comfort her and stop the pain.

It was a sight she hated, a sight she had seen before countless times after her father had too much to drink, or if her mother tried to stop him from “disciplining” Aroha and Riario in the dead of night. It was a sight that was burnt into her memory and haunted her dreams. But it was also a sight that turned her blood cold and froze her on the spot. Her mind went blank as it did so many times before. She felt defeated already. The hopelessness and cowardice washed over her entire body like a tsunami, swallowing all the fight and vigour that she had managed to muster just seconds before.

‘Douse ‘er. She can burn wi’ ‘er shop,’ the first raider sighed. He turned around to walk out and was shocked to see Aroha standing there, torch in hand but frozen in place.

‘Oi,’ he said. His partner turned around as well. ‘Who we gotch ‘ere then?’

Her mother looked up at her through the tears and screamed out, ‘Aroha! Run!’ but her legs could do no such thing.

The two men started toward Aroha, drawing rusty swords from rusty scabbards. They didn’t attack immediately, but they advanced slowly, meaningfully. The workspace was not large at all and they would be on her in mere seconds.

The second man quipped, ‘Oi, be a good lace an’ drop ‘e light ’er, aye?’

‘Aye, ‘and it o’er an’ come quiet li’e. Ye’ll fetch us a pretty tune, ye will,’ the first man chimed in.

From behind them, Aroha’s mother suddenly came to life. She roared like a lioness, lunging upwards from the ground at the man closest to her – the second man – and before he could even react, had plunged two wooden knitting needles straight into his shoulder, just below the neck. The man bellowed in anguish and his partner whirled around in surprise, sword at the ready.

Aroha felt life returning to her body, felt herself able to move again. She rushed forward with the torch in her hand, swinging it wildly at the head of the first raider. It connected and he screeched in such inhuman pain, the likes of which Aroha had never even heard in her life before. He slashed back at her wildly and reeled backwards at the same time which caused his swing to go wide, doing nothing more than nicking Aroha’s shirt. He clutched his burnt face in pain, blindly swinging his sword.

Out of nowhere, Aroha’s mother jumped on his back, still screaming, her arms wrapping around his neck in a make-shift chokehold. The second man had recovered from the shock of being stabbed by this point and he grabbed the mother by her hair, trying desperately to drag her off his comrade. The first man kept Aroha at bay with wild swings of his sword and she was unable to do anything but swing the fire around wildly herself.

The second raider, through great effort and pain, managed to get a grasp on Aroha’s mother with both hands – one on her hair, the other on the back of her dress – and with all his might he was able to heave her off his friend. She landed on the floor with a heavy thud, and the man made sure she could fight no more with a swift blow from the hilt of his sword to her head. Her body went unnaturally limp immediately. Aroha, distressed, tried to side-skirt the wildly flailing first man to reach her mother but there was no opening for her. The second man grabbed the knitting needles from his shoulder and threw them to the ground in disgust before tapping his comrade on the shoulder.

‘Oi! Stop wingin’ it! ‘e oldie is out, grab ‘er tyke an’ let’s be mint!’

‘Witch lit me!’ the first raider screamed, still swinging. ‘Me peepers is out!’

‘Ope yer eyes, ya plonker!’

The first raider realized he had had his eyes screwed up in pain this entire time and was not, in fact, blind. Just very, very burnt and very, very angry.

‘I’m gon’ wring ‘er winder,’ he snarled viciously.

‘Do wha’ ye li’e, but we can’ go back empty. I’ll take ‘e oldie, ye kill ‘e lace,’ his friend conceded. ‘Jus’ don’ be tarry.’

The first raider advanced on Aroha, who had been watching all this transpire in shock and confusion. She had no idea what to do, the raiders were bigger than her and much, much meaner. She swung at the man coming at her with the torch again, but the trained raider caught it deftly in his hand and wrenched it away from her forcefully. She tried to turn and escape from the situation, but he was on her in a second, knocking her to the ground. She could only watch in horror as the second raider walked past her, her mother slung over his undamaged shoulder awkwardly, as he carried her out of the workshop. All she could manage was a feeble, ‘No,’ as they left.

The first raider grabbed her leg and dragged her across the ground. She turned onto her back as best she could and kicked out at him with her free foot. She connected a few times, but the raider eventually grabbed her other leg as well. He kicked her viciously in the side and the stomach a few times for good measure and, while she was recoiling in pain, he hefted her to shaky feet. She fought as hard as she could against him, but she could do nothing to stop him as his hands slowly closed around her throat.

‘Be still! ‘is won’ take lonk, yer bloomin’ witch!’ he snarled.

He was close enough that she could smell the burnt flesh on the right side of his face where her torch had connected. She could smell the sourness of his breath as he breathed heavily on her, exhausted from his efforts to kill her. She could feel his fingers tighten around her throat. Her lungs screamed out for air. Her body began to lose all of its power to move as she lashed out feebly against the raider’s strong arms. The edges of her vision were getting dark and she knew that she was dying.

She knew that she would never see her mother again, or Riario. Or share another glass of wine with Rylan and Penelope. She knew she would never be able to see the world or taste new foods or hear music and dance. She would never hear new, wonderful stories or even gather some of her own to tell one day. She would never kiss another person or fall in love again.

This was how it ended. In her burning home, choked to death by a monster. And she didn’t even know why. She had no idea why this nightmare was happening to her.

But the struggle had taken too long, and fire is always hungry.

While the confusion of the fray downstairs had been wasting precious minutes, the white-hot flames upstairs had been ever-raging. And they were still hungry. And wood is weak.

The floor above the workshop was massively deteriorated as the fire in the room devoured it. A heavy beam from the roof far above fell to the ground below and the floor it fell onto was too weak to hold it. The entire floor collapsed under the weight of the ceiling beam and the beam itself fell even further, onto the raider who was choking the life out of Aroha beneath it.

The beam hit him on the head and he fell to the ground, taking Aroha down with him. She prised his fingers free from her throat in the maelstrom that was occurring around them as both of them were showered with bits of fiery debris. The raider had been pinned under the weight of the burning ceiling beam while Aroha was left gasping greedily for the sudden air that flooded her lungs in front of him, thankfully unharmed by the massive beam itself. The air was acrid and boiling and choked her, but she had never been so happy to breathe before, so she gulped it down like a floundering fish on the shore. Her vision began to clear up as she spluttered and wheezed and was finally able to take stock of the situation around her.

The entire workshop was being engulfed in the flames that the collapsed floor had brought down with it and Aroha knew she had to run now. She had to escape before it was too late to do anything.

Leaving the screaming raider under the smouldering beam that held him to the ground in its warm embrace, Aroha scrambled back to her feet and ran out of the burning workshop as quickly as she could. She dodged another burning beam that collapsed almost directly in front of her and, after what seemed an eternity, stumbled out of the smoke and flames back out into the shop-front, choking for fresh air. Thankfully, the entirety of the building hadn’t collapsed in on itself yet, only the room above the workspace, which happened to be Aroha’s room. The flames had descended the staircase on the right side of the building however and they were completely ablaze by this point. Aroha realized she was crying, though whether it was from relief or pain or sadness, she could not be sure. She took a moment to catch her breath, stumbling woozily over to shop counter and crumpling onto her knees beside it.

I still have time! I can still get to Ma, she thought to herself. I just need to get up. I need to get up and leave this place. I just need to get up…

There came a roar from the workshop behind her; a demonic scream, full of pure, unadulterated rage and madness. Aroha turned around in terror, just in time to see the raider descend upon her. His skin had been charred black and in some places was cracked and blood-red. His entire face was a screaming mask of fury, his hair burnt off and his skin peeling. He fell upon her, still screaming, and his cracked, burnt hands closed around her throat once more.

‘KILL YE!’ was all she could hear as he shook her violently.

His skin still crackled and smouldered and Aroha was assaulted by the terrible smell of burning meat. She reached her hand out desperately across the floor, trying to grab anything that she could use as a weapon against this beast. Her vision once more clouding over, she finally managed to grasp an object. A piece of glass! It bit into her hand, but she barely felt it as she brought it up and stabbed the raider throttling her in the neck.

She stabbed him over and over again, countless times. She did not stop. To stop would have been her death. His blood spilt all over her as he gasped out in shock. Eventually, his hands around her neck went completely limp and a second later the man himself buckled on top of her, dead. The shard of glass that had saved her clattered to the ground from her limp hand. The exhaustion from the exertion she had gone through finally caught up with her as she tried in vain to push the heavy dead-weight off from her. She spat out the man’s blood from her mouth, crying and screaming in equal measure as she tried to will her muscles to get the strength to be free from this creature on top of her. She managed to wiggle out from under the weight, but she hadn’t the strength to do anything else. She just lay there on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, her body ignoring all of her commands to stand up again, to escape. The smoke from the fire was choking her, cutting off the oxygen to her brain. Her head felt heavy and foreign.

Suddenly, she was being dragged across the floor once again. She cried out in surprise, but a vision of Rylan swam into her vision. ‘I got you, Aroha. I got you,’ was all he said, over and over again.

He dragged her out of the shop and collapsed behind her. He managed to prop her up, her head in his lap. He stroked her hair. He was crying. She could feel the tears hit her face. She hadn’t seen him cry in years. She realized she was crying too. She grasped his hand and though they exchanged no words, each knew that the other was thankful and relieved. They sat like this for a spell, just grateful to be in each other’s company and to see the other was still safe and alive. A moment of calm and companionship amid unimaginable turmoil. While they sat, the shop’s floor finally gave in, and the upstairs rooms crumbled into the shopfront, expunging ash and smoke outwards before they contented to just float through the air lazily. The brick of the building itself was holding the structure upright as best it could, but the inside was a truly glorious bonfire at this point.

There was nothing left.

It was all gone.

‘It’s all… Aroha, it’s so… The Port,’ Rylan tried to say. He gulped down his tears as best he could. ‘We have to leave. It’s all gone. They killed… so many people. Slavers.’

Aroha coughed as she tried to speak up. Choking and hacking, she managed to say weakly, ‘No, he took my mother… Have to get her back. She… she saved me, Rylan.’

Rylan composed himself as best he could at the moment. ‘They have the waterfront, Aroha. At least a dozen of them. More in the streets, going door to door and picking off stragglers. They got Juno and Hargreave and Linus and Lydia and… and…’ he waved his hand feebly. ‘We can’t do anything against them, there’s too many. They’ll kill us.’

‘The waterfront?’ Aroha asked. She managed to sit up by herself and wiped the tears and blood from her face as best she could. ‘Riario?’

Rylan shook his head. ‘I didn’t see him. But they’ve been sparing the women and children. I saw them being loaded onto the ship.’ He reached out and grabbed Aroha’s hand and pleaded with her. ‘Please, Aroha, we need to leave. We need to get to Penelope and leave this place. There’s nothing more we can do right now. We’ll just be killed.’

‘But… Riario… Ma… I can’t just leave them.’

Rylan looked deep into her eyes and she could see the pain in them. She knew he didn’t want to leave either, but both of them also knew that the two of them could do nothing against what was happening to their quiet village. Resistance would be folly. They would be killed, or worse. The only words that escaped his lips were, ‘Please.’

Aroha nodded through a fresh stream of tears. She knew she couldn’t fight a dozen hardened raiders. She would just have to hope her mother and Riario were still alive, even if the slavers had taken them. That was all she had left to hold on to right now. At the very least they could get to Penelope and get out, the three of them. At the very least.

Aroha got up shakily. Rylan was still on the ground, despite his own words. She offered him a hand and helped him to his feet. He nodded his thanks and the two took a moment to find their bearings. Each knew the other had gone through something immensely terrible. There was just so much blood everywhere. Neither wanted to talk about it. There would be time for such things later perhaps.

Then they left the Port.

They knew the raiders were still around, roaming the town, because they heard a few fights and shouting as they made their way carefully to the edge of town, sticking the side roads and dirt paths they knew so well. Many of the buildings had been set alight, and they tried to stick close to these as it was most likely the ones the raiders had finished with. They met no-one else alive along the way, but the carnage the slavers had wrought upon their little fishing port would haunt them forever.