***

They were crying. Everyone he ever knew. They were all crying, or dead.

He had lived for eighteen years, but no amount of experience could have prepared him for the carnage surrounding him. The world lay before him, engulfed in flame, crimson tendrils of heat rising from bodies and lapping the air, as if they were the tongues of hellhounds, begging for morsels from Heaven above. However, the sky did not even respond with tears of pity, only cold, gray indifference. It was as if the boy were an herb in a furnace, being pulled every which way by chains woven from his heartstrings, binding and drawing him to the corpses of the ones he grew up knowing, thus holding him still.

He had been hiding next to the walls in safety, watching them collapse while he shook, unsure of if it were from physical trauma or terror. However, some ethereal force, perhaps that of a shock so great it was no longer shock, or perhaps that of a love so great it was no longer love, drove his feet forward, sending him to his younger sister in the center of the bombarded courtyard. She lay on the ground beneath the corpse of her personal guard, crying out her older brother’s name, tears streaming down her face on one side and blood down the other. One of her eyes had been blinded from the strike of one of the courtyard pebbles, which had flown about the scene like shrapnel. These pebbles, meant to protect her by alerting her guards’ ears to an assassin’s footfall, now took the price of an eye from their mistress.

He marched on, his mind spellbound to her agonized visage. As his feet stepped forward, he heard the beats of a dragon’s wings from over the walls of the citadel, striking every few moments. Following each metronomic pulse, from the sky rained the leviathan’s breath into his home, hundreds, or maybe thousands of whistling balls of flame. They floated down and burst as they hit the ground, crackling, exploding, and multiplying as they landed.

Regardless, he walked. Each tread of his produced a crunch from the pebbles beneath, reminiscent of that of dried bones, picked clean by nature. He paid no attention to the wailing guards he passed, or the servants hidden by the outer wall, staring at him in bafflement, or their children, weeping over their lost loved ones. None of it mattered at all. He had to keep walking, onward to his younger sister, trapped in the burning courtyard.

Fire burst around him, filling up his sight and his ears with the anguished death throes of many he had once known. The cannoneers lay limply next to their bamboo cannons, blackened and torn apart from usage, those loyal men clutching their repeating crossbows with the remnants of strength remaining in their dying bodies. At least, that was the case for the unlucky few who still had hands with which to hold them, who had died bleeding out from being struck rather than an immediate impact.

No, he had to keep moving. The boy had to keep marching forward. A bone-chilling shriek echoed through his head, elicited from a woman familiar to him.

“Young master!”

He turned to the wall he had left to search for that voice. It had come from his maid, panic chiseled into her face by a divine hand. He looked above himself and saw another wave of blaze coming down from the sky. He closed his eyes, and his vision faded to black.

***

Drip. Drip. Drip. Splash.

He could hear the sound of… what was it again? He felt like he knew the noise so well, yet he could not remember it at all. It sounded almost cold to him. Wait, what was cold? The cold was scary. Scary things were bad. Bad things were things he didn’t like. He didn’t like the cold.

He wanted to shiver, yet he couldn’t. That cadenced dripping, that small, frail sound expanding into a grand roar every few seconds, beckoned his focus to each one as the meter by which he could sense time’s passage.

He could not open his eyes. He could not move. Maybe he couldn’t do any of that? Why did he think he could? He didn’t want to think about a thing, but couldn’t help it at the same time. He hated having so many unanswered questions, when all he could do was stay still and simply breathe. Someone spoke.

“Wake up.”

If his body could run, and if his tongue could cry out, he would have long done so. Every inch of him wanted to run away from that noise, which disrupted the din around him, which was in retrospect symphonic to him. Never had he heard such a loud noise as that simple voice. Never had he heard a noise which came from a discernible direction. Never had he heard something aside from the constant, peaceful racket from before. And why did he know it meant something, or that it was a voice? For that matter, why did he know what a voice was?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

His eyes opened suddenly. How did he know the meaning of the words, when he didn’t even know he had eyes? How could he understand the words of this voice so lucidly? Why was this, among all that he had heard, the most sure and reliable to him?

He was exhausted, desperately desiring for some rest for his sluggish body, which felt as if it were filled with mud, yet his mind raced leagues beyond what his body could ever run.

He was lying down, face up, his nostrils filled with the stench of alcohol, blood, rot, and other such lovely scents. He was cold. He could see, but not far enough to perceive his own hand, even if he could be permitted to lift it up. All that worked was his ears, though he did not even know what hearing was.

The only indicators he had that time could have been passing were the constant dripping echo and the intermittent torrential downpours of water into a shallow pool. As time passed, the silence grew louder and louder to him, and the drips and pourings began to become pleasant moments of respite, because they distracted him from the hasty, shaky exhales of the one who spoke before.

He mustered all the strength of his body to call out to whoever had spoken to him.

He made no sound.

He tried to move his right hand.

It did not respond.

He tried to lift his right leg.

It did not obey his will.

Panic enveloped and slowly constricted his heart, crushing it to a bloody pulp incapable of operation.

He heard the voice again, a nigh-indistinct twinge of emotion beneath it this time.

“You may speak.”

His mouth burst open, and he began to yell, crying out in terror.

The voice spoke again, colder.

“You can't, can you?”

He continued to scream, terrified and hyper-aware of anything his ears could hear.

Suddenly, he could hear the loud shuffling of wool in the distance, along with the clatter of stones, the striking of wood on stone, and iron on wood, as if the creator of the noise had suddenly stopped dead in its tracks. After some time, he could hear strange pitter-patters, clinking, and shuffling noises approaching, and feared them as they came closer.

The voice trembled a bit, as if to share his sentiments.

“...Live well.”

Live… well?

He slowly clenched his hand. Wait… he could move his hand? In it was a strange, granular yet wet element, different in texture from his skin. He raised it slowly, and splotches of it slipped out of his hand, onto the stone pedestal, camouflaging with it as soon as it landed.

It was supposed to be there. What he just lifted was supposed to be below him. It was mud, a part of the ground.

And yet, it felt like it was in his veins, and his body was as heavy as the stone he sat on.

He slowly rose, and sat up straight. He was sitting on a rudimentary pedestal made from two large, smooth stones, one stacked on top of the other. Around him was a damp, dark place, with many stone blades reaching out to one another from the ceiling and the floor. Much of the ground had smaller spikes, making it quite hazardous to walk on. Small patches of dark blue moss slightly lit the place, though the amount was so little and sparse that the patches of light could not even touch one another. His torso was clothed in lustrous satin, and his legs were covered by burlap. Between his knees lay a patternless white mask with holes for the eyes, but nothing for the mouth or anything else.

On his left was a vast, shallow pool of water which reflected the bioluminescent moss. At its center, large outpourings of water crashed onto a small jagged stone horn, submerged in the basin.

The manic clanking sounds were getting louder, louder, and louder still from the hole in the ceiling from which the pool’s water came.

The sluggish mud in his veins was quickly replaced with a liquified, then frozen fear that gripped his very core. He had to hide himself.

He rolled off the pedestal to his left, putting himself between the pedestal and the wall, away from the approaching sound. On his way down, he nearly impaled himself on the ground’s blade, but missed it slightly and instead scraped his right arm on it, landing in a puddle of water beside it. He screamed, holding the gash with his other arm, stamping his feet on the ground and lifting his pelvis. In his wanton thrashing, he lifted his body with his good arm, and saw his reflection in the pool.

Perhaps it was an instinct inherent to all creatures, perhaps it was one unique to him and his ilk, but such quandaries were for a different time.

After one look at his reflection, he knew that he was dead.