TRIGGER WARNINGS: Discussions of: murder, neonaticide (not by parents, but that’s the closest word I could find for what happens), attempted kidnapping of young children, a child committing a murder (NOT the newborn murder— wanted to specify that), grief/pain/horror/anger/all the emotions that come from murder, attempted kidnapping, and a child being driven to taking a life
Chapter 10
Poppy
“I didn’t really care about the King of Ragdon until I saw the fire.”
I hold my breath as Phoenix’s entire body shifts from anger to grief. He trembles and swallows, screwing his eyes shut as he grits his teeth. His muscles tense, and he drives his paws more firmly into the ground. His fire pulses, seeming to react to whatever memories Phoenix is seeing behind his closed eyelids.
“We never really kept any sort of calendar like some of you do in the Sea. We lived far out in the forest, so fucking far away from the fucking cream puff.” Phoenix snarls, baring his teeth as he stands in a jerky movement, tail lashing as he slashes at the sand and sending an arc spraying up into the air. He’s trembling, shaking, vibrating hard enough that I wonder if he’s about to explode. “But you’d say we’re somewhere around twenty and I didn’t particularly care much about the cream puff until about a decade ago.”
I flinch when some of the sand hits me but don’t say anything. Myles sits down behind me and Wyatt beside him.
Ky walks up to Phoenix and looks at him with a long expression, a well-worn grief in his face.
The grief is a decade old. It’s half their life old.
“I never cared much about the cream puff until I saw their bodies. Each of their bodies. I thought the cream puff was a just a story. I knew he was real, but I didn't think he'd be able to get to us. I didn't think he'd ever actually reach us, touch our lives. I didn't fucking care about him.”
“We were playing,” Ky whispers. His shoulders slump and his face slackens as his eyes go blank and distant. “We were ten and wanted to play in the forest.”
“We were kids,” Phoenix hisses, voice cracking. “We were just playing.”
Phoenix spends the next several minutes pacing. No one speaks.
The wound is raw, still fresh, even ten years later. I wonder if it had even begun to scab over, if the nerves had begun to knit back together. I don’t think so. Perhaps every time the King came up, the memory was ripped back open, bloodied and bruised and flayed, torn apart again until the pieces can be jumbled back together in something resembling a whole once more.
I hunch over. I've seen similar grief in students whose family members have ended up hurt, but nothing quite like this. Being their teacher, I interacted with them, but never in such a personal way; I couldn't. There was always a hierarchy. I was the teacher, and they were the student. They could talk, but they couldn't truly share, not in the way I wished everyone could. But here, Phoenix has laid it all out. Ky, too, although I'm not sure either could stop if they tried. Their emotions pour from them like a cascading river.
“Onyx found us out in the forest. He…” Phoenix pins his ears, flashing his teeth. “He was our father. He was a General. The cream puff made him. He never told us how. Never got the chance. We were only ten, and they never talked much about the cream puff. Said he wasn’t very nice, but they never said much. I don’t think they wanted to. We were far away from the cream puff. So far away. They thought we were safe. They’d run and they hadn’t found us in ten years. Surely we’d be safe, or so they thought. Shoulda been. We never saw anyone.
“They both knew that the cream puff was bad, but I don’t know if they realized how bad,” Phoenix adds, voice suddenly so soft and broken.
“We never figured out how they found us,” Ky says.
“Probably Spyro,” Phoenix mutters. “Little fucker can go invisible. I know now how to find them —just throw up a fuck-ton of smoke— but none of us did then. Onyx and Ivy left, but they were the only good ones. They actually had a heart.”
“Onyx found us and said we had a sister. Our mother, Ivy, had just given birth to a daughter, and we had a newborn sister.” Ky’s face lights up with a smile. “We were so excited. We had a new sibling to play with. I wanted to know what magic she had. Onyx could control stone. Ivy could control plants. She could grow anything and entertained us as kittens with her creations.”
“I wanted to know what our sister looked like,” Phoenix says. “I thought she’d look more like me, but Ky thought she’d look more like him. We’d argued about it for weeks, to the point our parents had to get involved.”
“Who was right?” Myles asks. I tilt my head to the side, curious to hear the black cat’s response.
Worry creeps up in my gut, a snake coiling around my insides. I’ve only met Ky and Phoenix, and I’ve never heard of Onyx or Ivy or a sister of the brothers. I fiddle with the hem of my shorts as concern grows for where this story is going.
Phoenix’s expression darkens into a scowl. He growls with a rage I haven’t heard before, though it’s not directed at Myles and he doesn’t lunge. His flames burst from his pelt and billow toward the sky in huge clouds of reds and oranges streaked with blue. His jaws part far enough that they could wrap around the entirety of a person’s throat. There isn’t so much anger written across his body so much as there is pain. Memories painful enough they have consumed him.
“I don’t know,” Phoenix says, voice hoarse and softer than I’ve ever heard. He chokes on his words, but smothers it with a snarl. “I don’t know.”
Phoenix takes a breath, gaze settling into something steeled and cross. “Onyx left before us and reached home first. We were a ways behind. By the time we got home our home was… it-.” Phoenix spits and hisses, throwing his head to the side. “Our home was on fire.”
“The fact that we were playing so far away from home that day is the only reason we are still alive,” Ky says. “If we were at home, we would’ve died.”
“They would’ve all burned, and I would’ve been killed by the Guard and Soldiers.”
“The King ordered your deaths,” I breathe.
Fuck. The King was bad, but… I knew he’s done this before. He did it to me and Alex, but… what will he not do? What line will he not cross?
Phoenix sneers. “Was that not clear to you before, Grey?”
“It was, but just… I know he’s that bad, but to order the deaths of children.”
“My parents didn’t deserve it either,” he snaps, eyes flaring. He fixes me with a glare and holds my gaze. “They were everything I had beyond Ky. I had the three of them, and my life was complete. My sister would have added to what I, at ten years old, thought of as the perfect life. I know now there’s no such thing, but when I was ten, I didn’t need anything more than my family. My parents did what they thought was right, and the cream puff in all his selfish idiocy forced them to meet Lucius before they were supposed to. They deserved to know their daughter, just as their daughter deserved to know her family.”
“Your parents did not deserve what happened to them. They left the King, like you said. They turned their backs. That must’ve taken extreme strength and courage.”
“It did,” Ky says, voice firm and final. “They gave up the stability their jobs as Generals would have offered to do what they knew was right and offer us a life outside of the confines of what the cream puff would have demanded of us.”
“They gave up everything,” Phoenix spits, baring his teeth. He slashes at the sand, purple claws carving gashes that turn to glass with how hot his fire is burning. Tail lashing, he paces and squeezes his eyes shut.
I spare a glance at Myles and Wyatt.
Wyatt looks back at me, expression sad and soft. They incline their head in a silent question of if I’m ok. When I shrug, they seem satisfied and nod when I return the question. Myles doesn’t look up from where he’s leaning against Wyatt’s shoulder. He has one fist pressed to his mouth and the other clenched tightly around his staff.
Phoenix laughs, humorless and strained. He pulls his lips back, teeth fully bared. Something wild glows in his eyes. Something other. Something unhinged. Something that I have no doubt could be unleashed on an army of Guard and Soldiers and destroy them all with how much Phoenix shakes, with how much he’s struggling to hold on.
“You can take a break, Phoenix,” Wyatt says, voice level and calm, though I can tell the story has bothered them. “You do not need to share more if you do not wish to.”
I’m not sure Phoenix hears them; he’s too lost in his head.
“Our father, Onyx, was kind, and our mother, Ivy, was, too. They were Generals in the cream puff’s army, until they turned their backs on him. If Jabez was created from his housecat body as Ice and the soul of a murdered human, I would be entirely unsurprised to hear that’s how the cream puff created Ivy and Onyx as well. Ky and I shouldn’t even exist.”
Ky snorts.
“Ivy and Onyx might’ve had a stolen soul in their body, but they always had more of a soul than the cream puff has ever had.”
“Damn fuckin’ right,” Phoenix mutters. “I want to crack open the cream puff. I will, and when I do, I bet I’m gonna find just stale bones and dust. He’s gonna be so far dead he’ll be just a shell with a cruel smile carved on its face. No being with a soul can do what he’s done. There has to be a reason for what he’s done. No one can do what he did and sleep.”
“I don’t think he does sleep,” Myles says. When Phoenix narrows his eyes, Myles continues. “I started Guard training but only went for a few days. I figured out that I really hated it very quickly and got out quick before anyone else realized I did not have the same enthusiasm the others did, but while I was there I heard all these rumors that the King doesn’t sleep. There’s enough… details to the rumors that I’m tempted to consider that there’s some truth to them and that the King may actually not sleep. He’s certainly not an average human. There’s something very, very wrong with him, to say the absolute least. Something drove him from what Jabez said he was when Jabez was alive as Ice to who he is now.”
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Phoenix shakes his head, dismissing Myles entirely. “Jabez is mistaken. The cream puff cannot be two different people. He has always been who he is now. Jabez just didn’t realize it.”
I bite my lip. I want to say that I don’t know that I believe Jabez was mistaken. I want to say that I know I don’t have the full story but that I think it’s entirely possible who the King was before he took to the Amethyst Throne was different to some degree than the King who ordered the deaths of Onyx and Ivy.
But right now, when Phoenix is sharing such a tense, intimate story, is not a good time.
Phoenix shudders and shakes his head again. He looks a decade younger, a kitten just beginning adolescence. “Don’t say it, Grey. He cannot be two different people. He’s always been a monster. I don’t know that he’s ever been human.”
“I don’t think he’s two different people. The King has only ever been one person. The most I was ever going to say was that I believe people can change, and sometimes those changes can be big. I didn’t mean that I believed the King was ever two separate beings. He has always been responsible for his own decisions. He could’ve said no at any time, and he hasn’t to this day.”
Phoenix snorts. “Don’t hold your breath for someone like the cream puff growing a conscience. He won’t. He ordered my parents to burn to death for the supposed crime of being decent beings. You won’t talk him off the Amethyst Throne.”
I close my eyes, pulling my legs to my chest and crossing my forearms across my knees, cheek atop them. “I know he won’t listen to reason like you or I will.”
“We do not think the same way, Grey.” Phoenix’s voice is rough but calm, grating but clear. “Do not hold your breath for me either.”
“I know,” I murmur, cracking open an eye to watch the flickering reflection of light from Phoenix’s flames on the uneven surface of the sands of the Badlands.
Dried blood cracks into scaly pieces and flakes off my skin with memories of the fight against the Guard and Soldiers and the two Guard I killed. I remember the sheer panic I had felt taking the lives of each of the Guard. It took so long, and everything within me wanted to stop. Time slowed down watching the first Guard fall to the ground, and choking the second took an eternity before Lucius finally came.
I start to scratch at my forearm to scrape the blood from my arm but stop when Myles places his hand over my own. I glance up, then look away, unable to hold eye contact and feeling somewhat embarrassed.
“Please,” he says. “Don’t. I’m here. We can wash it all off in the stream, ok?”
“After they’re done.”
I don’t want to interrupt. I can’t imagine if Alex had burned alive.
Except that a part of me has already run through the possibility. She’s missing, and I don’t know what happened to her.
xxxx
“By the time we reached our home, the fire had consumed it in its entirety. It was all on fire.”
“I could do nothing,” Ky said, tears soaking into the fur on his cheeks. His voice is so soft that I have to strain to hear him. He sinks to the ground, paws slipping on the sand. His eyes are locked on something in front of him, though he’s looking past it, lost in a memory. “I can create anything and could then, but it’s always an illusion. I could’ve created an illusion that the house wasn’t on fire, but what would that have done? I wasn’t as skilled then, and even if I had created the perfect illusion with the abilities I had then, I would’ve only been able to make an illusion that the house wasn’t on fire. I wouldn’t have been able to target each of their minds directly like I can now. Nothing I could have done would have changed the fact that our house was burning down before us and our parents and newborn sister were inside.”
“I’m fireproof,” Phoenix says, lip twitching in the beginnings of a snarl. “I cannot burn now, and I couldn’t then. Set me on fire and leave me for a century, and I’ll still be here when you return. I can’t burn. So I ran into the fire. Neither of us knew how long our family had been in there. Maybe I can save them, I’d thought. If I got close enough, maybe I could control the fire. How naïve I was. I can control a fire like that now, but I was weak then. The fire was too big, and I was too small.”
“Nothing could either of us could have done would have changed the fact that they were already dead.” Phoenix takes a deep, shuddering breath that chatters his teeth. He closes his eyes as his nostrils flare. “They were already died. My guess is that they died from smoke inhalation. That’s my very, very twisted hope. I know fire. I am fire, and fire is me, as Onyx always said. He was stone, and stone was him. The fire burned fast and hot, which creates less smoke than a cooler and slower-burning fire, but it was an enclosed space for a while and there was so much fire that they’d had to inhale some smoke.” Phoenix squeezes his eyes shut and I feel tears roll down my cheeks as my heart clenches in my chest. “I at least hope that if the fire itself dealt the last blow that forced them from Erebus to Lucius that they were already unconscious to the point they felt nothing. The cream puff shouldn’t have gotten that last bit of cruelty. My family shouldn’t have had to suffer like that.”
“I’m so sorry,” Wyatt whispers. “There’s nothing I can say.”
“The King doesn’t deserve the Throne,” I murmur.
“No one who burns a house down full of innocent beings does.”
Who decides? Who decides who is innocent? I want to say, but I hold my tongue, then hate myself for even wondering that when Phoenix is sharing how the King burned his family alive. But Onyx and Ivy and their daughter were innocent. They were all innocent.
xxxx
“We tried to kill all the Guard and Soldiers who had been there and killed our family,” Ky says. “I summoned an illusion of a monster, but it wasn’t very convincing. At least, not like my illusions can be now. The Guard and Soldiers taunted me. I couldn’t do much against them; I wasn’t powerful enough with my illusions and if I were to have physically attacked them, I would have lost. There were too many of them, and I was not physically strong enough or skilled enough to take them all down. Phoenix killed them all. He burned them all alive, in an act of fitting karma. That was the first show of what his powers could do in the way of what they can do now."
“I killed the Guard who held the torch last. I saved him for last,” Phoenix says with a wry twist of his lips, staring somewhere between right at me and right through me. “I sat on his chest and clawed at his face until I was screaming, and then somewhere in there I broke his neck. That was the first time I killed someone, but I was shaking so much that I barely remember it. I couldn’t calm down for what was probably ages. They set our home on fire sometime in the early afternoon, but after I left the house and ended up killing the Guard, the next thing I remember was that it was so dark outside. It was so quiet. Ky was with me and we were curled up together.”
The flat affect of Phoenix’s voice makes gooseflesh prickle on my skin.
Tears stream down my cheeks. I wipe at my face, and they drip down my fingers, slick and salty, but they just keep coming.
He was ten. He was ten, and he felt he had no other option than to kill. I don’t think he had any other way out if he wanted to live. They killed his family, and they would have killed him, too.
Did he feel the same way I do after killing the two Guard? Did he feel the rising panic, the shaking fear, the mounting horror at the realization at just what taking a life truly means?
He was ten, though. I’m not. He didn’t have any other choice. He had just witnessed his family’s murder.
“The King needs to be defeated. I’ve never felt otherwise,” I say, “but I don’t know what else to say.”
Ky nods. “He does. Do you now understand why neither of us will agree with you that there’s a way to defeat the cream puff that involves anything other than killing him?”
I incline my head. “I do. I will never tell you that you shouldn’t feel how you feel. That would be cruel of me.”
“But you do understand?” Phoenix presses.
“I do,” I reply.
“Do you agree?” he pushes, taking a step forward.
I don’t move and think for a moment, trying to find the right words but finding myself unsure of what to say. “I… I know that your feelings are completely valid, Phoenix. I might feel differently, but I am never going to say that you shouldn’t feel how you do.”
“How will you make the cream puff pay if not by death?”
“I don’t know, but the idea of punishment isn’t a black and white answer.”
“It is with the cream puff.”
I sigh. “It is more clear-cut than with other cases. I will agree on that.”
That makes Phoenix snarl. His eyes light up and he bares his teeth, lashing his tail.
“I saw their bodies. I saw their bodies burning in the fire. Tell me, Grey. What kind of monster does that and does not deserve death? What punishment fits burning two parents celebrating the birth of their child for the shortest stretch of time prior? What would you tell my parents and sister you did to hold the cream puff responsible and get justice for them if not death? The cream puff still breathes, yet they do not. My sister barely got to breathe. She never got a name that I got to speak. I never got to know her. I never got to teach her anything. We never got to play. We never got to create games together. We never got to run through the forest. We never got to chase each other. We never got to play fight. She never got to grow up. She never got to walk. She never got to run. She never got to feel the sunlight on her fur. She never got to experience the thrill of magic through her veins. She never got to see what the outside of our home looked like. She never got to truly meet our parents. She never got to meet me. She never got to meet Ky. She never got to learn how to hunt. She never got to learn how to control her powers. She never got to learn what her powers are. She never got to eat. She never got to drink. She never got to nurse. She never got to wrestle with us. She never got to speak. She never got to swim. She never got to climb. She never got to do anything. She felt the slightest bit of love for a tiny bit of time, and then all she felt was fear as she burned alive. What would you say to my sister?
Phoenix ticks his head to the side, muzzle wrinkling with rage and frustration. “What could you say to her that would justify her losing her life so young? What did she do? She was an infant, barely born, had only just made it to this side of the world from Erebus’s creation. What did she do wrong that justified her meeting Lucius before she had even nursed once?”
I hesitate.
It’s not about that, I want to say. It has nothing to do with her being so young. I just don’t want more deaths. Your sister didn’t deserve to die. She deserved to get to feel everything Erebus’s world has to offer. She only got the shortest little glimpse from within the embrace of her parents. She deserved to get to experience everything you just said and more, everything she wished to experience and more. I just don’t want more deaths. I don’t know if taking more lives will give the justice that the King deserves. I want him to pay in full. I want him to pay for everything. Every single thing he has done.
I echo my thoughts, and Phoenix’s expression darkens into something murderous.
“The cream puff cannot pay. There is nothing that can make him pay. He doesn’t get to breathe when my parents and sister do not. Every bit of air in his lungs is stolen from every breath my sister should’ve gotten.” He stalks up to me, and for a brief moment I grow concerned he will throw me to my back and pin me down again. “Every breath he takes should’ve gone to her.”
A shudder passes through Phoenix, too many emotions to count bubbling up within him. Me, as well. I can almost reach out and poke the swirling feelings coalescing all around us, moving far too fast to be able to work out and make sense of.
“I know you care, Grey. I know you care about life with some fucked-up sense of don’t take lives. But even you must believe that the three lives of my parents and sister matter far more than the one life of the cream puff.”
“Yes,” I say. “If given the choice between saving your parents and sister or the King, I would choose your family every time. However, the argument of which lives matter more is one I do not like to use. Between your family and the King, the choice is more clear-cut, but it implies there is a line and an inherent worth that some lives have and others don’t. The argument can be made with a level of convincing evidence for those like the King and your family, but that leaves a grey area in the mid-.”
Myles elbows me. “Probably not the best time, Grey.”
I spin around to face him. “Huh?”
Myles gives me a shrug. “Probably not the best time for another debate over the morality of killing and what worth the King’s life has.”
“I-… true,” I admit.
“We returned a year later,” Ky says, changing the subject. “It’s the only time we’ve ever returned to where our home was.”
“There were still a couple of stones that Onyx had summoned for the home, but the rest was mostly gone,” Phoenix adds. “The field was filled with poppy flowers. Those weren’t there before. We never knew our sister’s name, but we thought Ivy might’ve been trying to tell us she and Onyx had named her Poppy from within Lucius’s claim. That field never grew anything but grass and dandelions in the decade we lived there, but it was filled with poppy flowers that day. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.”