The Land of Make Believe

by Michael Arnold

  When the air made the specific sound the front line and all those behind the front line sat up, and then arched their backs, leaning into the beasts.

  “Is there a king, a leader of some sort here? If so, make yourself known before the king!”

  Amose heard the petition from behind the wall. He demanded his over-beating heart to beat normally but it didn’t listen, instead it banged harder against his chest as if it was trying to get out. He walked close to the beams of the city’s walls.

  “Who are they?” Amose asked. One of the faces inside one of the beam slid down inside, making itself visible to Amose. “They are the wolf-people, of course, Amose!”

  “Okay, okay, then we will see what they are offering and, by all means, let’s see if we can avoid something bad from happening!”

  “My king is inpatient and he hates waiting. So I suggest someone behind there speak,” the horn blower yelled.

  Amose gave a head nod and the huge beam that formed the enormous door began to open slightly. Before Amose’s eyes, stood his greatest fear. The number of wolf-people to Amose was staggering. He hadn’t seen anything similar in his life.

  “Are you a leader here, or just the spoke-person here, Dog?”

  “I am both, Wolf. And since you are a wolf and I am a canine, you know our people and your people have no dealings with each other. That is a respectable truce that has been set about ten years ago. I thought you knew that, Wolf!”

  There was laughing in the background, and then, as the line began to separate, Fenris stepped out, armed of his trusty staff. Amose could better see the beast now that Fenris had stepped down from it. His fiery orange eyes, his stout and muscular frame and how he, the beast, stood there waiting for a word from his master to do damage and probably kill.

  “All hail the king!”

  That scared Amose. He wasn’t expecting the loud sound from the horn. He watched as the wolf-people bowed at Fenris’s feet. “I am the King of Dark Forest now and they honor me for what I have done, and soon you and your people will do so as well!”

  “Where is Bodolf?” Amose hoped and believed that Bodolf wasn’t dead. If Bodolf was in fact dead, then it was common sense what this person, who he had never seen before, wanted, not just from him but from the city itself.

  Fenris chuckled loudly. His chuckle was thunderous and it shook the ground as it came out of his mouth.

  “Bodolf is no more; I have freed the wolf-people of their bondage and suffering from him. Now it is time for us to find freedom, power, strength and rejuvenation and it is in that city.” He pointed to the Canine City. “My people are hungry and thirsty for every resource under the skies. And these are there right where you stand, where the rest of your Canine-people are.” Amose swallowed hard. “We are here to take what will be ours. We want Canine-land.”

  Chapter 13

  Inside the city you could have heard a feather hit the ground. Amose, with a serious glare plastered on his face turned to look at his band of men. Their wide eyes and lips that were stuck together so tightly told one story. Surprise. But Amose thought differently. He associated that distinctive display with fear.

  They are scared. They are going to run with their tales between their legs, and I am going to have to deal with this alone, he thought. He slowly turned back to Fenris who now had drawn the glowing rod from his side.

  “I am the leader here. I am Amose and my people depend on me, this is our home, this is all we have and if I lay down my weapons and give you what is our home, I wouldn’t be the leader that they deserve. I can’t give you my city if that is what you are asking!” Amose blew out a sigh of relief when the yellow- eyed King agreed with him.

  “Okay, I agree with you, Amose. I’m not asking you to lay down any of your weapons, nor am I asking you to give me your city. If you want to then that’s up to you!” Fenris said with his back turned to his people.

  “I am very much capable to handle my own business. By the looks of things I say that I am doing a pretty good job! I said I want your city and I – we – are going to take it. You can either stand by and watch, or if you’re the leader that you say you are, you will fight and defend it, won’t you?” King Fenris yelled.

  “Wait, you don’t have to do this! Although Wolves and Canines don’t dwell under the same roof, there can be an exception. We can work this out. We can sit down. My counsel and your counsel can work and live together despite our differences,” Amose shouted in response.

  Now it was Fenris’s turn to glower at his adversary. But the stare was petrifying. “You’re no leader, Amose; you are a coward and a liar. I see it in your eyes. I see it all over you. You are weak just like Bodolf. That city is mine. Wolf-people seize that city, now!”

  At Fenris’s command the frontline ran toward the walls.

  Light gray balls of smoke came out of the face in the beam in the door. The mouths in the faces in the beams were relentless. The gray smoke balls smashed onto the ground with loud explosions, creating utter chaos. It sent the beasts and their wolf riders backwards before they could steer them forward.

  Amose and his men watched from the distance. They stood waiting until the smoke cleared to see the damage their defense had done. As the smoke was lifting slowly, the smell of burning trees invaded in the air, the nicely mowed lawn was now showing patches of smoldering grass.

  “Yes, we’ve done it! We have defeated the wolves,” one of the band of men yelled out. Then a few of them walked beyond the city walls’ door to confirm what all their eyes saw. Soon every Canine-man was out there looking at Wolf-people and their beasts.

  “This is our land, this is our city, this is a place of peace and I, Amose, guardian of the Canine-people, am a leader. And I will make sure that peace will remain amongst me and our people!” Then as the Canine men raised their hands in victory, one of them felt a sharp pain in its gut.

  The arm which he raised in victory became stiff and very painful. “My arm!” His words were a whisper and couldn’t reach beyond the yells of the Canine men’s victory yell. The first cry of pain was soon followed by another, then another, and another. These Canine men were all feeling the unseeing stabbing of a sword and the stiff pain that accompanied it.

  “Men of the Dark Forest, rise now and destroy every Canine in sight!”

  Suddenly as if someone called each Canine man by name, they all looked where the order came from. That’s when they saw twenty of their men encountering old age. The rapid aging was showing from the immediate wrinkles to the voice that strained to talk.

  Amose and his men were speechless seemingly frozen in space and time until, out of the thickness of the part of the smoke that ventured back then disappeared into the morning air, Fenris emerged out of its residue. Blood that dripped down from the top of his helmet hit his mantle which was now torn to pieces. He ripped that tattered mantle off his body and snarled like the wolf he was. As he went by the beast and the fellow wolves who hadn’t succumbed from the explosions, Fenris tapped every one of his body parts as if it was a signal for the resurrection of the beasts and the Wolf-people.

  Under the disbelieving stares of Amose and the Canine-people, they began to rise.

  “Rise, my people, rise, rise! Now I say! And destroy every Canine-man in sight,” Fenris yelled as he drew a sword from his back side. It glowed with a radiant blue and orange fire. The first enemy he came to, a Canine-man who had already been affected physically with sudden old age, he drove his sword straight through his chest cavity.

  The Canine-man stood there in shock as blood gushed out of the wound and poured onto the soil of the Canine-people’s land. If there were in fact fear in the hearts of the Canine-men it quickly vanished when they saw their very own get slaughtered by the enemy.

  Amose was one of the first to see Fenris’s sword go deep into one of his own people and was also the first to regroup as one of the beasts leaped at him. It took a spear and then a knife across the beast’s throat to lay him down eternally.


  A wolf-man, who caught him, instead of killing him from behind, only got Amose’s attention. With his knife still dripping with the beast’s blood, Amose jabbed that same knife into the exposed throat that the steel helmet didn’t protect.

  “You don’t belong here! I will kill you all!” Amose yelled.

  Fenris used his iron arm to knock a spear away that would have sunk deep within that arm. He spotted Amose and he wanted to get to him. He wanted to reach out and grab Amose, deal with him personally, but he couldn’t. He was too far away. And between him and Amose there were beasts, Canine and Wolf people fighting.

  Amose spotted Fenris. Their eyes locked. As Amose got ready to run at Fenris, Fenris quickly grabbed one of the Canine-men by his arm and with the sword he cut the arm completely off from the shoulder down, then walked away.

  Amose wanted to get to his fallen man, help him, save him, tell him that everything was going to be alright, “just hold on a little while longer and I will get you to the healing well.” But he wouldn’t get to him and there wouldn’t be any healing well for him. He would die there, on his own land, resting in his own blood as those wild beasts would trample him, leaving parts of his body scattered across the ground of Canine-land.

  The combination of the beasts and Wolf-people were taking a toll on Amose and his group. Not only were they losing men but they were losing them with very little effort. Amose tried hard to focus on what was happening presently, but his mind dwelled in what was happening earlier instead.

  “We may have to get back inside. They are killing us; we are losing badly, Amose,” one of the men said before he himself used a dart gun to put one of the beasts down.

  “We have to keep on fighting,” Amose yelled. “If we stop now and leave, we leave the rest of our people out here to die at the hands of this tyrant!”

  With space between him and everyone else, Fenris pointed the long, blue rod at the faces in the beams, as their black ghostly cheeks filled with the gray clouds that killed some of the beasts. Out of the blue end of the staff, Fenris struck the faces in the beam. Many of the Canines watched in horror as their defense began to come down right before their eyes.

  Amose now felt as though all hopes were lost when those faces, their defense mechanism, turned black. They cried out for aid with screams of: “Help, help, help us, Amose!” But there was nothing he could do. Or was there?

  Fenris saw that there were other beams with other faces in them. Without giving it a second thought, he began to run in the direction of the other faces. When he got to the side of the city’s walls, Fenris pointed his rod at the face that had already been affected just like Bodolf and the dead Riel had been.

  Fenris walked around when he felt the blade of a hunting knife go deep into his upper thigh. He yelled out, not in pain, but in ferocious anger.

  “Whoever you are, King or Fenris, where my people lay with their blood on your hands, so shall you lay too!”

  Amose ran a blazing speed then leaped up and out. In his hands there where two knifes, not as full-sized as the one Fenris yanked out of his thigh but they were still damaging. Amose slammed the two knives into Fenris’s upper chest.

  The pain was enormous. Fenris stumbled back and even then as the blood poured out and ran down to his iron chins, Fenris still wasn’t willing to die easily. Amose kneeled him in the stomach and racked at his eyes with his long nails. Fenris stumbled back again before falling to the ground.

  “This day the Gods of death will deliver you into my hands, Fenris!” Amose yelled. Amose, now ready to kill Fenris, went to draw his spear from the holder on his back when he heard the yelp, yelp, and howls from a land beast.

  Before Amose could turn, and spear the beast, it had jumped him and was sinking his bloody teeth into Amose’s face, pulling and tearing at it furiously. Now, it was Amose’s turn to feel the agonizing pain of an inflicting wound. While Amose fought to stay alive, Fenris yanked out the two knives that had been plunged into the upper part of his chest. Those yellow beaming eyes told one thing: he hadn’t lost the battle yet. Fenris thought about his rod and how he could easily use it to finish Amose once and for all.

  No, he will suffer. I will make him suffer. Then he will have my permission to die! He waited until Amose had barely escaped the land beast by the skin of his teeth, when he walked up to him and hit him with the side of his metal arm shield. New blood came out of his mouth.

  “Amose, you would have been better off running. At least you would have gotten away with your life. Now you are going to die, once you are done suffering!” He used his helmet – made of solid steel – to ram into Amose’s head.

  A few of Amose’s men, who spotted Amose and Fenris fighting, tried to intervene and help. They were either mauled to death by the beasts or killed by the Wolf-men. Right there, in the yard of Canine-land where the grass was green and the flowers grew beside pink rocks in the water that was called marine, was the ground for dead and badly wounded Canine-men.

  When Fenris was done beating Amose, who was unrecognizable due to the mauling and the amount of punishment Fenris had imposed on him, he could barely balance himself on his knees.

  “Now, as I promise you have now got my permission to die!” At the point of a sure death the arrogant leader, Amose wasn’t going to jeopardize his pride by begging for his life. Although he knew he had a wife, a daughter and hundreds of people depending on him, he was willing to die rather than risk his pride being lost.

  “Is there any last words that you want to say on behalf of yourself or your pitiful people, Amose?” King Fenris said.

  Amose peered up with a face that was shredded in parts and ripped open in others. One of his eyes was opened, the other one was missing.

  “I have nothing to say except I hope you die by Canine hands or by anyone you encounter who is bold enough to stand up to you and your thieving people!” A smile, that bore blood and cuts from Fenris’s fight, showed clearly, but not as clearly as his reflection in the blade of the sword.

  At the same moment every one heard her voice: “Please, I beg of you. My name is Kalite. I am a Canine-woman. I asked that you have mercy on my husband, Amose. And then would you have mercy on my people. Here, in our city, we have all the resource that you want and need, but please spare our lives so that we may be of some use to you and your people!”

  What are you doing? You must have lost your mind. Do you know what they are going to do to us? Go back to the bunkers and get out of the city. They are going to kill all of us! Amose wouldn’t have much strength to utter another word. He was fading fast.

  “Why should I spare him? He is no good. He is hours from death! There is nothing that you can offer us. This place is for the taking. It is ours. You, your people all of you belong to the Wolf-people now. You no longer are your own!”

  Because I love my people and I love my husband, who is at death’s door, if you’re going to kill him, you’ll need to kill me too!”

  “No, Kalite! Get back to safety. They are going to kill us all anyway. Go now!” Amose yelled as best he could before he would exhale his last breath.

  “Shut up or I will kill you now, Amose. You’re in no position to speak on her behalf. Your time for speaking is done!” Fenris placed the sword back in its side holster. “Very well, I will spare your husband and your people and call a truce.”

  Whisk-pey and Ento followed closely, using the seclusion of the trees that evening while after falling several times, Olen was able to then keep a distance long enough to lead Whisk-pey and Ento back to his house.

  He thought that the garage would be much more secure than his room. Then he reconsidered his decision when he thought about his dad going in there at all hours of the night to get away from his mom, whom he said should get an award for the worst nagger in the world.

  What am I doing, he thought when he let Whisk-pey and Ento into his room after they climbed the nearby tree reaching the second level of his mother and father’s house. He didn’t want any of his sket
ches displayed when they got in the inside of his room. He was able to put them away very quickly. When he closed his window, he saw Camden and his mother get out of their car.

  “Don’t you think you need to ask Camden about the sketchbook, Olen? And don’t give me that crap about being scared, not after all you’ve done. You are far from being scared of anything. I must say you surprised me, Olen. For some reason now I put my trust in your decision making. I trust you even though I don’t trust that…, that…, well you know what I mean and who I am speaking about, Olen.”

  “This is nice. I like it. This is similar to our place back in the Land of Make Believe,” Ento said.

  “Yes, very much so. But why isn’t in a tree if it’s called a house, you did say house, right, Olen?” Whisk-pey asked.

  “Yes, it is a house but it is not a tree house, because it is not in a tree. Take the word tree from house and you’re left with the word ‘house’ and that is what we have here: a house,” Olen explained. “Your day has really been challenging,” he added. “I think it would be good if you would lie down and get some rest. It could really help regain your strength. You may need it soon. You never know.”

  Whisk-pey, with Ento on her shoulder, walked past Olen who was still standing by the window. He took a glance outside, paranoid that someone saw a girl whose face looked similar to that of a dog. But there was no one there.

  “These pictures, they are gorgeous. Where did you get them, Olen?”

  Go ahead. There is no need in being quiet. Tell her! Olen’s double said.

  The picture that you see there is called a ‘wilder beast’. My next door neighbor, who is only like seven years old, something like that, came up with the idea for me to add the horns. He does so great coloring the stuff that I draw, I let him color it. You see in the corner ‘by Camden and Olen’. He suggested that I put his name first since he believes that he’s done much of the work,” Olen said.

  Very good Olen I am proud of you. What was so hard about that? Olen’s double asked. “You don’t know when to shut your trap, do you? You go on and on. Shut up!”