THE FORSAKEN LAND OF GENèSE | LOST KINGDOM

  600

  Household on an ordinary.

  Fingerprints set the table with fork and spoon.

  Bottle for the wailing future.

  Another for the silent foundation.

  Meat and bread and sugar for the energetic tomorrows.

  Warmth upon a platter for the one who made them present.

  Mother’s daily adoration dripping down her forehead.

  An echo’s call into the city, resounding in many homes alike.

  In supper’s march, they march together, varied upon the tile.

  Matching strides upon a welcome mat.

  Footsteps carved in bark by the door.

  Father, son and son and daughter, then son and son and mother.

  Strength of oakwood for a patriarch.

  Dogwood’s beauty for a bride.

  Untamed evergreen, a brothers’ quartet.

  sapling of an infant child.

  A sudden turn away from the supper.

  Tucked their chairs under the table.

  The eerie atmosphere of an empty family home turned thick, either youth prepared to escalate if the other made a move. In the end, however, it was the shepherd who let the matter rest.

  Because once again, his imagination had gotten the better of him.

  A home set out on an ordinary.

  Final banquet lain to rest under the shroud of time and spider’s making. Seven pairs of forgotten memory lined up and fading into the open—footsteps into oblivion. Saplings rooted in sandals left by the open door.

  “I hurt you just now.” Solvanel bowed apologetically. “Forgive me.”

  “Huh?” Saint retreated half a pace, suddenly wary. “No. No—don’t do that. You can’t do that.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “If you’re going to boil my blood, the least you can do is let me bleed off some stress. Ten per cent. That’s all I was going to use to kick your ass. Saint’s honour.”

  With some difficulty, he made it back to the table and touched the dust-laden vessel, rubbing the grit between his fingers. “Though we leave and may never return, the warmth of a home is an old friend—waiting.” I will not allow you to look down on my brother, but please, have some respect while you’re at the dinner table.”

  Saint laughed. A single bark of it, sharp as a cough. “You hear yourself? Brother. Dinner table. Respect.” He looked away, still grinning. “Fine. Fine. I’ll play house. Just don’t expect me to be the mommy.”

  “Anyway,” he said, yawning. “What’s the plan, little man?”

  Solvanel tried to reconcile Saint with the man who’d rounded up his people while he was missing. Then he remembered his ex-brother, tripping over his feet after a night at the bar, whispering to his grandmother not to tell that bitch, his grandmother, that he’d come in late.

  Without another word, he set foot on the sand to confirm his suspicions. Both feet firmly planted, buried even. He counted:

  One second…

  Two seconds…

  Three.

  As he thought.

  The sand was incapable of siphoning his breath. Though still hungry, thirsty, somewhat injured and very fatigued, his fire was burning at the expected intensity, the same one it had been since consuming the fruit.

  “Something requires my immediate attention,” he announced. “You two stay behind and protect the others.”

  Albane, curled into a ball, answered with a small sob.

  His inner flame was calmer after the earlier defeat. And like Solvanel’s, it had shown no sign of weakness to the sand. But the giant was too thick—too obvious—to take this time. And Solvanel knew, with a quiet certainty, that he would throw himself in front of death for ‘his brother’s’ people.

  If not before, then now, after being defended by the one person who ‘cared’.

  How pitiful, he thought, tightening his wrappings.

  One would think the infant of the home had returned.

  Solvanel walked the empty streets, trying to keep his thoughts from scattering again.

  Not blind in the conventional sense, his mind craved visual stimuli, and his imagination was the best he could offer, albeit counterfeit mercy. Therefore, in tandem with his more outlandish daydreaming, he developed a habit of filling in the blanks.

  Sticking to the wall, Solvanel felt his way around the city.

  Each seam in the masonry became a sentence; each chip and fracture, every footnote left by the silent calamity, repurposed into a pleasant memory from the people who’d fallen to it.

  This was where two sisters played pretend, their bare feet slapping warm stone as they argued over who got to be the queen and who had to be the beast in chains. The shallow groove his toes found became the line they’d drawn with a stolen bit of charcoal, a border no one was allowed to cross unless they paid a toll in laughter.

  The broken corner of a threshold turned into a place an old man sat every evening, whittling nothing in particular while the street drifted past him like a slow river; the pebble-smooth depression in the wall was where a woman leaned her shoulder as she waited for someone who was always late and always worth it.

  He built the city gently as he moved—gave it voices, gave it errands, gave it small domestic urgencies that had no place in ruins. Even the cracks had their uses in his mind: a seam to tuck a flower into, a groove to hide a note, a chipped step that tripped a boy into a girl’s arms and made them both pretend it was on purpose.

  A market where baskets brushed knees. A courtyard that smelled faintly of bread he could not actually smell. A doorway that had once framed a mother’s reprimand and a child’s sulking retreat.

  And when his fingers met a stretch of masonry that was wrong—too smooth, too cold, too clean to have been left by time—he simply widened the lie to cover it, as if imagination could patch over whatever the calamity had done. Letting himself believe for a moment that the world were not so cruel; that it was instead so strange and so beautiful that an entire city had chosen a game of hide and seek.

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  Rather than succumbing to the temptation of a demoness’ forbidden fruit…

  “Ready or not…” He mused, thinking of the only participant left. A silver bar and a stele who thought it won the game. “Here I-”

  Suddenly, a feeling climbed his spine.

  Not a chill—an alarming heat.

  For an instant, he was back in the desert, the sun bearing down upon him with the intent to kill. This heat, however, was a warning. And the body moved before the mind could argue.

  Solvanel slid aside, five steps between himself and the assailant.

  When he turned, breath tight with readiness, his surprise curdled into a deep, deep disappointment. It was a flame he knew too well.

  Saint held the pause like a vindictive knife, then guessed in a row, “Here I am? Here I stand? Here, Saint—please accept this bribe in exchange for not telling anyone that I talk to myself when I’m bored.”

  “I told you to protect the others,” he said, trying for sternness.

  “Sorry,” Saint said, ruffling the shepherd’s hair. “But as a personal rule, I don’t take orders.”

  His eyes narrowed behind the wrappings. “The pattern of your flame… you’ve drunk yourself into a completely different man.”

  “That’s the idea,” Saint said.

  “One who is incapable of contributing.”

  “Oh, I can.” Saint tapped his temple. “Orders just… don’t stay.”

  Solvanel’s gaze penetrated the theatrics.

  A man’s inner flame was far more honest than he could ever be. It had changed, twisted by drink into a different man. And the sand, tugging at the heat, siphoning mercilessly at the source. Gluttonous, the grains, however, were no match for the steadiness of his breath.

  “You are unaffected.”

  “I do my best.”

  “No.” The shepherd stepped into his way, eyes narrowing as he re-evaluated.

  He knew the reason for his own immunity.

  The giant—a bottomless reservoir overflowing at the mouth, burning at an intensity the flesh itself could barely tolerate. The sand had no issue siphoning his breath, but there was far too much of it to pose a threat to his well-being. Thinking about it now, perhaps it was all the better for him to set foot on this forsaken place.

  But Saint had been moving through the city for days without even knowing what the sand did to the breath of life. If he were like any other man, he would already be dead.

  “The sand does not affect you,” Solvanel said. “Why?”

  “I could ask you the same question. I won’t be losing sleep over either of those two, but what really happened while you were down in that treasury?”

  “Despite your earlier promise, you still do not trust me.”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Because my eyes can see through all forms of deception.” His voice carried a cold, earned certainty. “You claimed a weapon from the treasury, did you not?”

  “…”

  “Did you not?”

  He sighed. “Don’t get your hopes up. I don’t ever plan on using it.”

  “Then you should have left it behind for someone else.”

  Saint sneered—a sharp, cutting expression undercut with resentment. “You really are just some dumb kid, aren’t you? Instruments of a certain strength aren’t chosen. They’re the ones who do the choosing. And if they choose you, it’s already too late.”

  Solvanel did not answer at once.

  Saint’s words hung in the air like a stain and Solvanel’s world had narrowed to the man before him.

  His jaw tightened. “…Too late for what?” he asked, though he already felt the answer brushing against the edges of his mind.

  Or rather, aimed for his skull.

  A whistle closed in on them from somewhere far away.

  He tossed Saint aside as a blur streaked toward them—a deadly whisper slicing the air.

  His hand shot out, closing around the projectile at the last possible heartbeat.

  The needle drove him to the ground in one brutal push.

  The world tilted beneath him, ragged breaths scraping his throat as darkness edged the corners of his vision. Sharp pains flared, akin to being stung by miniature insects under the skin, his dehydrated muscles tearing apart from a power still far too great to be his.

  Still, the needle surged in power to match.

  The characters of his name swirled inside the blade, pulsating with every effort of resistance. The instrument seeking his demise was being fueled by the heat of his breath. It was only getting stronger, while his flame dimmed under the pressure.

  But even as the cold spread through his veins, Solvanel’s grip tightened on the needle’s shaft.

  This was no surrender.

  “You cannot be serious.”

  Solvanel grunted. “What?”

  “We don’t have the time for you to be play-fighting with your instrument. Call it off before the locusts come chasing after us.”

  The calm in him was a provocation. Solvanel’s lips twisted into a sneer. “You expect me to reason with it? What manner of fuckery are you spouting, you dolt?”

  “Why did you realise it if you don’t know how to use it?”

  “Realise?”

  “Your soul. Why did you call it out of your soul if you don’t know how to dismiss it?”

  “I did no such thing!”

  “Wait? It’s not yours?”

  “No!”

  “Then claim it!”

  “You said weapons of a certain level-”

  “I know what I said. Try!”

  “Ugh!” Solvanel groaned as the needle slipped out of his grip. It went into his other arm and stopped momentarily. Then, it started drilling through the bone.

  “Argh! I refuse!”

  “Shit!”

  While the shepherd was distracted, a rotating glint was arcing through the air. Saint, still not fully recovered, righted himself as best as he could and launched the rock he’d taken from the tower.

  The weapon diverted from its original trajectory, thudding dully into the sand beside Solvanel’s head. For a heartbeat, nothing moved but settling grit and the shepherd’s breath forcing its way through his teeth.

  Then the dark under the collapsed arcade shifted.

  A presence unpeeling itself from shadow.

  He stepped forward into the weak light—burned beyond recognition.

  Char climbed his neck like a second collar. One ear was half-gone, melted into a puddle of flesh. The hair along his temple turned ash. The smell—old smoke trapped in fabric, bitter oil, the faint metallic sourness of someone whose body had been extinguished, but whose flesh was still cooking underneath.

  His gear looked as if it had survived the same ordeal.

  The leather had darkened and stiffened. Metal fittings dulled to a bruise colour, warped at the edges as if they’d once run. A strap across his chest had been repaired with wire, the twist uneven. He carried himself heavily. Footsteps drag—a groove that marked the distance and difficulty of his trek.

  His gaze passed over the scene with quick, fluent contempt: the needle half-buried in the dreamer’s flesh, the rock still in Saint’s hand, the fresh divot in the sand where death had reconsidered. The corner of his mouth lifted, not quite a smile—more like recognition.

  “Well. Well. Well,” the mercenary said. “Do the heavens have eyes?”