by Scott Beith
Each ruins that we crossed was depicted on the map with different renderings of the nymphs who once lived there, along with unique star constellations that symbolized a long forgotten form of navigation for them to travel with. The towns also had illustrations of the local tribes and their various indecipherable evolutionary talents. Milena’s war room walls were yielding clues to all the secrets and sacred places within both The Badlands and The Borderlands alike. It was a piece of tapestry I observed thoroughly, as there was a chance with each town we passed through and investigated, the finding of my original family and homeland, at least before the climate and the predators of the region had driven them away.
Unused by our queen, who was always pedantically leading the army from outside, her war carriage wagon never again was needed to be used or opened up and its tents expanded as it was designed to do in times of great crisis. Instead we were using it for its vacancy simply because there was no longer any need for it – the war had been won – and the four of us were the only nymphs without any form of role or function in her convoy.
This meant all we had to do each day was sit down together as a group and talk about the ridiculous adventures we had been on. We laughed at the stupidity and naivety of all the mistakes we’d made over the last few weeks.
Akoni’s story had trumped the grand story of Anna’s first arrival at the hideout when he told the laughable tale of what had happened to him when he was trying to reverse the polarity of the conduits in the pit. How the scared miners and their children had booed him and thrown wrenches at him from a distance, while he’d politely asked them to stop so he could concentrate on saving us.
The funniest part being when bold children ran up and started kicking him before their mothers dragged them away to safety. At the time, the situation had been dire, but upon hearing it in retrospect, it was rather amusing.
And so after a third long day in a mostly unseen transit, ignorant to all the soldiers sweltering in the dry and desolate sands outside, we eventually took it upon ourselves to go out and see a bit of the sands and dry forests we were starting to pass through. The sun’s heat losing its domination over the ground as some areas of shade were available to us while passing through some ancient and clearly prehistoric abandoned towns.
The spiders that coached us along were sticking to the dying trees’ narrow shadows as they sluggishly pulled the carriages through the old and large indigenous ruins, surpassing an extinct civilization called Kardos without care or wonder, only to leave the brief woodland canopy and re-emerge in the white sands of another harsh desert.
The environment was constantly changing from one extreme to the next: one moment it was so dry that it felt as if we were in a decade-long drought, but then the next there’d be an onslaught of flooding rains and lightning.
By late afternoon, our travels stopped completely, with us taking refuge during a fierce storm. Soldiers huddled around wagons heavy with stashed jewels of gold, no doubt wishing they were the ones inside the wagons as they stood exposed to the cold wet winds. Those same soldiers watching their precious jewels slowly become lost to ferocious winds powerful enough to knock various cups and stashed silverware into the open desert we had just battled to come up from.
Loose canvases were being bashed against the caravans’ wooden framed hulls while our soldiers resorted to rubbing their own hands under their shirts while underneath the pouring rain. Most of them probably wondering whether we’d enraged the guardians that lived in the clouds up above due to the unjust way we had treated their defeated captives.
It was no secret that superstition was always greater in the rural areas, and as far as I could tell this was as rural as it could ever get. But also, I think there was more to it than that, for Kardos and its long surrounding flat desert was once considered the holy land of our species. Allegedly, this place – The White Desert – was where storytellers proclaimed forest nymphs who came for atonement were reincarnated as ascended beings.
It was the famed place where ancient carnivorous siren zealots chose to abandon the life of the hunt and strip themselves bare in one grave hope that doing so would earn them rightful transcendence into a newer and better class of our species, adapting photosynthetic wings and flying up into the clouds to live on nothing more than the light of the sun and the moisture in the clouds. It all felt rather ironic that an empty lifeless white desert could be home to the very spiritual location in which all the wisp old wives’ tales were said to have first been conceived.
But looking outside at all the crackles of lightning and thunder within the pelting rain, I was starting to wonder if those old myths had some merit after all. That our thievery and unjust treatment of Midas’s loyalist was not a great deal different from how the gnolls had treated us over the last decade, and perhaps we too had made enemies of the angels above for giving into such greedy vices like the gnolls had.
The rain was relentless and unforgiving as it battered down upon our armies. Conditions one would base on divine provenance, even if those deities weren’t willing to break their own rules of intervention and smite us down themselves, but rather just refuse to give us favour in safe travel considering our ungracious trek across their sacred lands
From inside the shelter of our sturdy tented caravan, I watched men whimper in fatigue and battle the cold while the windy monsoon besieged them.
I, Arlo, Anara and Akoni, and those closest to us, were safely tucked away within the middle enclose of the wagon carriage, and had even brought our spiders inside. I and the others played card games and chatted while we waited out the storm – probably the only ones on this voyage enjoying themselves. And, as ashamed as I was to admit it, I was personally taking every moment I could to spend with the prince, all whilst his own betrothed was still at home, up keeping leadership roles with her wise gypsy oracle of a mother.
Something in Arlo’s gentle gaze had become so compelling for me, enough magic to stave logic away. As with the gods above my head, I was certainly lost. Encapsulated and enthralled, trying to fight my own true wants every time we laughed and playfully bickered, pushed and nudged each other. Determined to stay beside him, despite how much harder I knew I was making it for the both of us, since when we returned home we would have to stay apart.
“As if this is fair,” Arlo stated, slumping down beside me and Ode shortly after losing his hand in a game of poker, childishly upset over being eliminated third from the cabin tournament we were playing. Leaving Akoni, Anara and Zephyr in the race to win the royal junkyard prize: one of the preserved harvested bots we’d collected from the death trap platform. One that had been stuck on the cable of the crystal as it was pulled up.
“Akoni’s clearly cheating,” Arlo whined to me, looking directly at his friend’s glasses from the distance, questioning whether they gave him more than standard sight and vision.
“I bet he is,” I replied. “But only because he knows how many cards Anara is secretly holding on to,” I whispered back, enlightening him to how the game had truly been played all along. The two of us losers spectating their great cheat-off from the fluffy centre pillow pit while the fierce contest continued from the small round side table near the left wall above us. Two equally great illusionists next to eliminate Zephyr, a man who had absolutely mastered the concept of a poker face.
My prince was willing to feign a sense of anger and frustration upon his loss to hide a certain sense of happiness I knew we were both feeling after successfully orchestrating this whole event as a ploy to trick Akoni into finally enjoying himself again.
The unspoken hope that we could together help our shared best friend to momentarily forget his family troubles and be able to enjoy himself for the first time since all of the craziness began. At times, Arlo showed me that he could be that kind of humble individual: someone like his sister who could cleverly but subtly trying to remedy an issue without others realising what he was doing, or ever receiving credit for it, despite how much I knew he craved the
acceptance of all his peers.
Over the past few days of travel, Akoni had done a very good job in hiding his despair, but all of us were literally close enough to each other to be able to ignore the signs of his inner turmoil. Of how he kept unusually quiet and reserved, abandoning conversations disinterestedly, as if too lost in his own thoughts as he hid behind tinted sunglasses so we wouldn’t see his sad eyes.
But we all noticed that every time he left to check on his mother, he would return a little more quiet and distant, like he was losing the confidence in his abilities to synthesize a remedy to remove the debilitating gold hand print currently welded into her skin from Midas’s corrosive touch.
There was one silver lining to all the grey clouds above him however: Anara was a sucker for helping those who needed her, and his gloom was distracting him from being the usual clumsy babbling self he normally was around his crush. This meant he was finally getting his golden opportunity to win Anara’s affection. And after the tournament ended, and Anara claimed here trophy prize, Akoni got to show off his own true talents, impressing her with all his wit and wonder. She watched him, enchanted by his magic, as he used electrical sparks from his fingertips and that of a laser condensed via the gold pen he borrowed and reconfigured from me, concentrating his static electricity into focused light as he carved programmable imprints into one his father’s small discarded ruby heart and sapphire mind crystals.
The expert technician sparking and indenting the blue crystal with high voltage as he formatted the stone and carefully altered each binary crack in delicate circuitry based sculptures. His optical glasses magnifying the tiny images he had to deal with as he tediously navigated a path of least resistance for the electrical current to pursue.
It was cool for the rest of us to watch for a time, observing the crystal flickering and glowing as he worked. Although as the hours passed on and nothing else was happening, everyone but Anara had simply lost interest and gone to bed. Once he’d achieved what he wanted, he woke me and Arlo up to show us the resurrection of the harvesting clockwork bot we had seen in the pits. Only he’d re-modelled it with a secondary heart that gave it an element of choice when it came to obeying the rules Midas made for it to follow, allowing it to possess a sense of individuality and consciousness no different than all other sentient life.
Anara had stayed awake the whole time, sparks truly flying as she stayed beside him while together they brought the creature back to life.
Anara had been handing him tools, working no differently then she would as a nurse for the doctor during his surgeries. She kept faithfully to his side and helped to hold and make the awkward inner frames visible to sight as Akoni worked around them. The two of them just as responsible for the beast’s rebirth, as both of them were just as ecstatic and happy to wake us up when it was time to reveal their greatest masterpiece. They were an enchantress and scientist raising the prowling gnoll raptor from the grave, which was more like a baby than it was a robot or revolutionary mechanical device.
Powered by Akoni’s mystical purple fairy fire flames, the large baby critter ate silver grails like pet chow, feeding its fiery heart as it sustained itself.
Even after we went back to bed, the two parents that built this machine must have stayed up all night continuing to teach and train it, having to manually educate it about the differences between right and wrong.
Akoni had gifted Anara her own protective metal prowler, symbolising the means of all new beginnings, and creating something she could mother and tend to, for it was more like a child than it was a pet companion. This also helped inspire Akoni to remember that he was not his father, but was instead a man who could see the full potential of broken things: a genius able to convert a rudimentary and primitive tool into something with unparalleled complexity and intelligence.
Just before she helped put it to bed, Anara chose to name her new pet ‘Puppey’ after some derivative of Akoni referring to it as a newborn pupil in need constant reassurance and teaching. Their marvellous creation plunking down beside them as it entered a dormant sleep near both of their arms, as that’s how I found them all in the morning when I woke up.
22
Mountainside Pass
I woke to the sounds of grumpy soldiers getting up from just outside the walls of our private caravan. Most of those early morning risers were miserably moving back and forth around their sandy tented campsites while they woke themselves back up, sluggishly splashing their boots through slowly evaporating mud puddles while they prepared to begin travelling again. They bantered with each other as they moved around, talking about desertion, obviously too fatigued to care about what they said out loud, ready to simply leave and never come back, already despising the very hot sunrise they had prayed for all throughout those windy and relentless midnight storms.
I got up feeling amazing, though, finding myself enclosed under the clean hanging sheets I and the others had initially used to separate our quarters. I was glad to get up and move out among those weary soldiers for some fresh air, even if most of that air smelt like drying cracked-clay dirt and the stained campfire ash still fuming under tenting shades. I wondered across the flat shallow white desert of our carnival-appearing military encampment, surprised to feel just how intense the strength of the sun was upon its rise, and just how quickly it removed the small puddled water seeping through its cracked drought-stricken earth.
Regardless of the general depressive vibe, however, I found a certain comfort in my early morning stretch and walk, catching up with the prince and the younger members of his former beta regiment over by the closest neighbouring supply caravan. “Morning,” I called out, approaching him and his friends, who made room for me inside their highly selective chat circle.
“Morning,” the prince and his friends replied back.
“Hey, Kya, It might be a bit of an ask, but do you think you and Anara could scout for us today?” Arlo then said to me, his question quite formal and polite as he casually leant back, with one foot pushing against that bunkered caravan, trying to appear as cool and chilled as possible in front of his friends. “A few fell sick from last night’s storms, and they really could use some extra help now.” He delegated.
“Yeah, sounds good to me… I can go ask the princess if you like,” I kindly responded, more than happy to oblige, figuring it would be a better way to enjoy the day rather than exploring nothing while we wasted away in the confines of the same boring caravan all over again.
“Sweet,” he added triumphantly, only to push himself off the caravan in order to stand up firm and straight, fairly content with how well he’d handled his first minor dilemma as one of the highest ranking officers in his mother’s army. “Alright, well let’s all get moving then – just one more long day in paradise, guys!” he then sarcastically quipped to everyone in the circle, clapping his hands together in an attempt to confirm his orders with some need to make us all move into action.
As with that being that, a rather bitter crowd all silently split off in varied directions. I headed back towards our own nearby caravan with the intention of waking Anara and Akoni up, surprised to see they were already out of the caravan. I was even more surprised to see the caravan was now home to a bunch of random grubby soldiers, who were throwing off their dirty shoes and parking themselves under the thin blankets of our sectioned off compartments in the caravan.
“They need the break more than we do,” said Anara, appearing abruptly beside me. “I hope you don’t mind,” she added, always seeking forgiveness over permission, but quite likely already clued in about the scouting plans I had come here to ask her about, seeing as she always had an ear in every room, at any given time.
“No, it’s fine. I was going to ask if you would like to walk point with me today?” I asked coyly, naturally assuming she was nosy enough to already know Arlo sent me to do so, and I wouldn’t need to mention to her that it was under his command.
“For you, of course,” she replied, “but not be
cause Arlo asked me to,” she then added cheekily, not even willing to hide her stalking ways, but rather immaturely locking her elbow against mine and playfully skipping me forward towards the north end of our encampment. Well prepared, she unveiled a thin lightweight sun umbrella from her other hand, opening it above our heads as we ostentatiously crossed the long flat sandy plains of densely populated campsite, and started moving towards the more isolated front edge of the convoy, where most of the soldiers were already unpegging the canvas walls of their carts and tents, just as keen to move on as soon as the orders were asked of them.
By midday, Anara and I were far ahead of the moving convoy, always looking back and simply watching stubborn pride beginning to break the toughest of men and women, heat exhaustion and sleeplessness causing them to become irritable, teary and even get violent with those nearest and dearest to them.
Where being a few leagues ahead of everyone else, all Anara and I could do was watch and wait helplessly, witnessing members of the army break down and fight each other.
Loyal spiders tackling and trying to eat soldiers at the request of their riders, only to be beaten down, restrained and arrested by the masses as our new-found patrol duties began to reveal just how grim our situation had actually become, and just how destroyed the army’s morale had become, due to our long overstay in the dry and endless white desert.
Anara and my biggest priorities were to look ahead and keep searching for the fastest path towards the wilderness rainforest mountainside path somewhere near the red canyon ridges far ahead. We carried the burden of being able to do nothing to help, other than stick to our duty while Arlo tried to keep order of his most disgruntled soldier friends, who continued to push and fight over whatever food scraps others believed they were more entitled too.
Hours had well and truly passed before we even caught glimpse of what we were looking for, progress only seeming real once the white sands beneath our feet slowly thinned upon the gradual introduction of stray hollow pine tree spurts of shade. Trees becoming more and more abundant as one bountiful precursor to the very beginning of a lush mountainside jungle pass that was gradually getting closer and closer into our view.