Lan Kai-Le

1995 years after The Long Night

Xi Qiáng Forest

The others were kind to him. That soothing presence, hidden somewhere behind the fog in his head, just out of reach made the boy believe that he was home. The wolf pack dragged him by the scruff of his clothes, all the way to their den, but they didn’t eat him, they fed him instead.

The boy, newly turned five years old and dizzy with fever, woke up however long later to a warmth like he’d never known. Seeing he was conscious, the wolves gathered around, sniffing him and cautiously licking his face… Lan Kai-Le felt the largest wolf, the one he was lying against, gently puff out a breath against his cheek, as if saying good morning.

The boy was not scared of the creatures. They shared meat with him, which made him sick at first but he eventually got used to it. They brought him to the river where they drank water, and at night, Lan Kai-Le would fall asleep nestled in the middle of their pack, fingers tangled in the beasts’ fur as their soft breathing lulled him easily to sleep.

After recovering from his injury and being reacquainted with his parents’ ring a little while later, Lan Kai-Le hid it along with his parents’ other tokens in the furthest, darkest part of the den, underneath a stone that only he would remember. Some of the cubs dug it up a few times but they stopped after Lan Kai-Le got into a fight with them and their parents carried them away.

The boy had been so integrated into their pack, that after several months he started exhibiting habits of the wolves… they groomed each other, and they groomed him, and so he began doing the same, using his hands instead of his tongue. Lan Kai-Le observed and adapted to their sleeping and hunting patterns, learning from them how to hide his scent and how best to stalk prey. The creatures shared with him everything, their lives and eventually their deaths.

Lan Kai-Le whimpered along with the rest of the pack as their leader lay unmoving in the den. She had been like a second mother to him, and had protected Kai-Le from the other wolves and creatures who had tried to hurt him. Seeing her die was as if he was back at the farm, clinging onto his parents’ lifeless bodies as their blood seeped onto his hands and stained his soul.

Lan Kai-Le left the wolves a few months after this. He began to understand that even if he felt safe in the forest, loved and cared for, he was not a wolf and needed to learn to become human again. That was the only way he could become strong enough to find Xie Xingyue, and avenge his parents…

The little boy parted with the wolves after much sadness, lingering feelings telling him to stay, it would be so much easier to just forget… in the end, he gathered the rings and coins, noticing in the time they’d been buried that ferns had grown over them, and Lan Kai-Le left for Xibù Shataar.

He knew there wasn’t much else he could do than beg on the street for loose change and scraps, but if he stayed in the forest he would become too happy. He needed to become stronger, become an animal. And that was what human beings were best at.

Lan Kai-Le spent the next few years in the shadows of the city. He doesn’t remember speaking the whole time. Humans were always cruel to people like him, those that were different or that looked easy to hurt. Kai-Le took every beating, every hissed insult, every dirty look. He took them all and he made himself stronger so that soon, no one could raise a hand to him. No one dared…

On occasion, over the course of his youth, Lan Kai-Le would reach his limit of human interaction. It happened every few months. He’d have a particularly horrible encounter with a stranger, or be chased off someone’s land a bit too harshly… the boy would return to the forest during these times.

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The creatures, be they large or small, always welcomed him back into their home. Kai-Le came to the forest when being reminded he was human became too much to bear.

It was many, many painful, long years later, about the time he was fourteen and the age one might begin an apprenticeship, that he’d first been contracted to kill someone.

Lan Kai-Le was sleeping, as he often did in these streets, at the dead-end of an alleyway, a ladder just in arms reach in case he needed to flee to the roofs in an instant.

A large hand had grabbed him by the hair and yanked him up before he’d even heard the man approach, and then Lan Kai-Le was fighting for his life in the form of trying to keep the stranger from stealing his parent’s trinkets, always tied on a string around his neck, close to his heart.

The man grunted and yanked hard on the cord, choking Lan Kai-Le until finally the boy was able to get his hands around the stranger’s own neck and squeeze-

Kai-Le had been living in Xibù Shataar at the heart of the industrial part of the city for well over nine months now. It was part of his foolhardy attempt to locate a steady paying job as soon as he was of age. Understandably, he was at his wits end when it came to dealing with the darker side of living on the streets, where you were easily divided into the weak or the strong. And he could never afford to be on the wrong side.

Maybe because of that, because the only other option was to die, or maybe because this stranger’s hands were on the only thing Lan Kai-Le truly valued; the remnants of his mother and father, maybe that was why the boy squeezed as hard as he did.

Blood welled up under his nails on the man’s neck, and then Lan Kai-Le heard a dull snap. In the darkness, lifeless eyes stared back at him, and from deep within his soul something whispered to Lan Kai-Le that his own reflection was just as dead and cold.

He’d killed. Why did he feel justified in doing so, when his parents and village had also been murdered the exact same way?

As endless thoughts cascaded through his mind, Lan Kai-Le looked up and saw someone watching him from the mouth of the alley.

“Very impressive, boy!” The man chuckled. “But you must not be very smart with anything other than your hands-”

Lan Kai-Le stood there frozen, the stranger approaching him with a heavy limp and a dull sort of smile on his face, as the body of the thief finally crumpled to the ground. Then the man before him gestured at the cord around Kai-Le’s neck.

“Any man worth keepin’ alive knows to keep his money as close as possible! That’s the stuff keeping you fed, keeping you warm, yeah?! It’s gotta be sewn into your skin! Even if thieves do get to it, everyone involved gotta know it’s a life they’re stealing…”

Something about the man’s words made sense of Lan Kai-Le. He decided the next time he was in a safe place, he’d find a way to sew his parent’s items into his skin, or as close as he could.

“Say,” the man’s eyes narrowed as his grin grew wider. “I know an opportunity when I see one and you are definitely it!”

He looked around briefly and then slipped a small purse out of his belt, shaking it in front of Lan Kai-Le’s face with a smile. It made a noise that to the boy, always sounded like a dinner-bell.

“I’ll give you the whole thing if you can take care of someone for me,”

The boy didn’t respond so the stranger drawled on-

“You know! Kill ‘em! I’m too old to get my hands dirty, or I would… this rascal took off with most of my family’s savings and broke off his engagement to my poor daughter on the same day!! As a father and a man, I can’t let it go! So, what do you say, boy?! Care to get a little more security with those hands of yours that are so talented?”

It hadn’t been much of a choice. This stranger didn’t know, but the boy was on his second week of sharing scraps of food with stray dogs, unable to spend his money or trade the valuables that his parents had left behind.

My life is more important, Lan Kai-Le reasoned, as he thought about taking someone else's… it’s more important because my life is not just my own, my life is my mothers and my fathers and everyone in my village. My life must be able to make amends to those that were slaughtered.

Lan Kai-Le had always feared and dreaded becoming human. Becoming a monster. The longer he spent in the city, the more he was coming to realize that for him, there had never been any other choice.