“It’s getting late,” the guy whom Derrick introduced as Artam said. “We have to return to Belzcakir before nightfall.”
They trekked through dense forest for a great while. It was indeed getting darker. The last thing they wanted was to stumble into some brutes looking for easy prey. Artam was right. They had to make their way to Gartâr and leave this place. But Kiano needed to know what had happened to his village and his mum before anything else.
She was a strong and talented witch, but she was no match for the prowling beasts lying in wait at every turn. Besides, they didn’t even know how to get out of the forest or in which direction to go. They were bound to wander through the darkness, whether they headed to Gartâr or the ramshackle hut on the top of the conical hill.
“Even if we knew in which direction to go,” Kiano said. “We still wouldn’t be able to reach Belzcakir before nightfall.”
“But we’d at least try,” Artam replied.
“You guys don’t have to tag along,” he said, looking at the two guys from left to right. “I’ll be fine on my own.”
“That’s not the point,” Derrick chimed in.
“What about this,” Artam said. “I’ll search for the hill from the sky and lead you there.”
Derrick frowned. “How are we supposed to understand what you’re saying, though?”
“I’ll turn into a raven, but not completely, so you’ll be fine.”
“Do you even know how to do it?” Derrick asked. “And what if the royal guards smell their way to us?”
Artam snapped his fingers, and, in the twinkling of an eye, a pair of huge wings grew out of his spine. “The guards have their hands full fighting the creatures, so what do you two say?”
Neither of them said anything, so Artam took it upon himself to ascend to the heavens. Soon enough, he found what appeared to be a hill near a village and guided them to it. Kiano felt like he had been gone for thousands of years.
The sight that emerged was nowhere near what he had in mind. Nothing could have prepared him for what lay ahead beyond the mighty trees – nothing at all! The beasts had destroyed the iron gate and slaughtered the villagers. Some had lost several body parts and others had turned into mush.
He left the boys behind and ran up the hill with a pang of ache in his chest. The first thing he saw was the wrecked door. He threw open it and found his mum in a trail of blood. She, along with the rest of the villagers, fought for her life but was brutally slain.
His legs gave in; he choked back a sob and trembled beyond control. His entire world had shattered. He came too late. His mum would’ve been alive had he ignored the inmate and come straight to his village. But he did not. She fought alone and eventually succumbed to her injuries.
Derrick and Artam caught up with him as he broke down in tears, and they watched him without saying a word at the doorway as he shrank for every passing second. Artam made his way to Kalani after a while and closed her soulless eyes.
The grief on his face told Kiano that the raven guy knew what taunted him this very second. Artam looked like somebody who had lost someone dear too – someone he missed and would forever be indebted to.
After a prolonged pause, he wiped the tears away and forced himself up. He brushed past Derrick and fetched the shovel his mum kept hidden behind the ramshackle hut. The autumn rain poured down and drenched him as he dug a grave.
Derrick and Artam shielded the shallow pit with whatever they could to keep the driving rain at bay. By the time he finished digging, the downpour stopped as if to deride him, and he carried his deceased mum to her final resting place.
They found a dirty blanket tainted with blood inside the hut and covered Kalani’s disfigured face with it. Kiano looked away, unable to face her as the two guys covered her up. Derrick then hopped into the shallow pit to receive the stiff corpse, while Artam blew a protective spell over Kalani to keep the critter from eating through her shrouded corpse.
He plonked down next to the newly dug grave after bidding farewell and sunk into his own world, but he did not weep buckets; he drily observed something in the distance as untold thoughts crossed his mind and took over his body.
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It was no use crying over spilt milk, but the remorse was eating his heart out, anyway. It was not his fault, but why did it feel like it was? The moment he saw the stranger and went to the grove, things went downhill. It was not a coincidence that the giant brought him to the dungeon, either.
He was part of a puzzle. But why? What was so special about him that…
“Are you okay?” Artam came into his sight of vision when he least expected it. “You don’t seem well.”
He briefly turned his face away. “I’m fine. See that place over there?” He pointed left towards the woodland near his village and stood up. “It’ll take a while to get there on foot, but it’ll be worth a shot.”
“What’s over there?” Derrick asked as he approached them.
He hesitated: “The Great Forest of Secrets.”
Derrick’s brows curled down. He knows about the infamous forest, Kiano noticed. The Great Forest of Secrets was shrouded in legends, known only to a select few. Issjia, an elf as old as the mists of time, ruled the home of light and dark elves in the mystical land – Druasdûr. His sons, perhaps just as widely known as Issjia himself, ruled Freyskul in the west and Reivenir in the east.
Kalani told him about the Great Forest of Secrets when he was much younger than he was now. She said that Issjia was a kind soul who would protect those who needed his help.
The spells that protected Druasdûr were beyond what the beasts could break through. Belzcakir could fall any second, but Druasdûr was a haven. They had to find Druasdûr, whatever it cost, and wish upon the stars that the trolls wouldn’t catch them before they found it.
Should they fail to find Druasdûr against all odds, they would have to traverse through Berstaan, the Land of Dwarfs. From there, they had to cross Reivenir and, finally, reach Gartâr. The route was far from desirable, but it was the only safe way to reach Belzcakir without going back to the forest they left behind.
“How do you know?” Derrick asked.
He glanced at the unmarked grave. ”My mum told me.”
“Even if you’re correct, what makes you think the elves will help us?” Artam said. “They won’t just let anyone in, especially not two children created by the Queen.”
“I… This may sound ridiculous, I know, but I hope they pity us and give us a place to hide for a few days. Or just until the trolls give up their search for us.”
“The trolls won’t give up, not that easily,” said Derrick. “We’ve literally ticked them off! They’ll harbour a grudge against us till the day we die.”
“There’s only one way forward,” Kiano said. “It’s either Druasdûr or Berstaan – take your pick.”
Artam breathed out, clearly annoyed with the choices. “Those dwarfs won’t be greeting us welcome! But anything’s better than being turned into soup, I guess. What do you think, Derrick?”
Derrick didn’t reply, he simply took the lead down the hill and they followed right on his heels – towards the Great Forest of Secrets. They went past a devious path that soon forked into a trail that led straight to the virgin forest.
The crooked, uprooted trees looked like sculptures, and the hollow pits on their trunks looked like luminous eyes. No living beings were roaming here; they were the only ones with a beating heart.
Artam, who was furthest back, picked up speed and caught up with him right then. Kiano could tell the guy wanted to say something to him almost instantly – he didn’t have to wait too long to find out what bothered him.
“About your mum… She was human, wasn’t she?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just answer. She was a human being, right?”
“So, what if she was?” Derrick sneered.
Artam rolled his eyes. “You guys really don’t understand how this—”
“What’s your point, even?” Derrick asked.
Kiano decided to interrupt those two before things spiralled out of control. “He wants to know how I was conceived… because no human can give birth to a sorcerer.”
“And because no beast can knowingly kill another child of the Queen,” Artam added. “And if they indeed had, his mum would’ve turned into dust by the time we buried her.”
“You’re right,” he said with little thought or intention to conceal his past. “Kalani ripped me out of my mother near the Céinai mountain. Both my mother and I were dying when Kalani found us. People who were once my mother’s closest neighbours chased her to her death in the dead of night. If Kalani hadn’t found her, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Do… do you ever wish she hadn’t? I mean, saved you?” Artam asked.
Kiano cracked a half-hearted smile. “You know what, I do, sometimes, yeah, I do. How do I put it…? It feels unfair.” He choked back a sob. “That I’m alive. But the one who brought me to this world isn’t. I always felt like, I don’t know, that I should be the one who should’ve—”
“I’m glad she saved you,” Derrick interrupted. “How else could we have met someone crazy enough to save us from the trolls’ lair?”
“Hey, speak for yourself!” Artam said as he took the lead through the Great Forest of Secrets. He hopped like a rabbit. “I only kept you company the entire time we were stuck in there, you know!”
Kiano and Derrick erupted in laughter at this remark and picked up the pace to catch up to the raven guy, who noticed them at the eleventh hour and sprinted as fast as greased lightning. They eventually slowed down and spent the night in a glade full of smooth rocks.
Kiano lay on his back and admired the moonlit night sky. Derrick had already dozed off and Artam was facing away from him.
He was thinking of Kalani and couldn’t sleep a wink. All this time, he yearned to return home, but his home was no more. What was he supposed to do now? Kalani raised him as a human, he even felt like one.
But he didn’t belong to the sorcerers – or the humans. Besides, the sorcerers would never welcome him to Céinai, neither would the humans in Gartâr and former Jewarta. He had nowhere to go and for the first time in his whole life, he felt so alone that it scared him.