Tag: prose

“Think of the children, please.”

She had told them so many times.

“The children. I beg you, all of you. Think of the children.”

They had ignored her, and now James kind of wished they hadn’t.

Their torches light up the cave’s walls, barely pushing back the darkness, just enough for Catherine to read and half-whispering translate the ancient symbols scrawled all over them. James is by her side, one arm around the woman’s neck, and goddamn it, the old hag is still whimpering about children and won’t anyone think of them, please. 

“Shut your mouth,” James growls at her, squeezes a bit. The old woman croaks. She goes still then. Her eyes are fixed on a point over James’ head, going wide and huge and he’s got enough of that. “What is it now, huh? You already insane with fear?”

The rest of the group laughs. Their silver daggers catch the torches’ light, reflect it into the dark.

“James,” Catherine says. “James, be quiet.”

“You know, this is why I’m a hunter.” He pulls the old woman close, frowning when her jaw falls open in silent horror. “Hey, listen when you’re talked to. Unbelievable. But seriously, you people are pathetic. Can’t even take care of a few bloodsuckers by yourself. Aren’t you angry? Huh? They took your children, forchrissake.”

“James.” A gloved hand touches his arm. Catherine’s face is pale like death in the torchlight. “We have to go.”

Something shuffles behind him. James throws a look over his shoulder, the others shifting their torches into his field of vision, but nothing’s there. The old woman lets out a pathetic wail. He shakes her off.

“Crazy old hag. You’re all cowards, your entire damn village. If it had been my kids, I would’ve marched here on my own, killed them all at once – hey!”

The woman is at his feet, digging her clawy hands into his legs where she grips them. “Now you’ve done it,” she whispers. “The children. I told you to think of the children.”

“James,” Catherine says, and then a white hands reaches around her neck and pulls her into the dark. 

“What the fuck – Cat!” 

A torch drops. James whirls around just in time to watch the fire sizzle out on the wet cave floor. For a second, the light illuminates the ground in brilliant, terrifying red.

“Oh God.” He can’t breathe. The torches go out, one by one, each falling when another hand claws into a neck and another man or woman is pulled into the dark.

Then, the old woman is in front of him. Blood pours from her thin lips. James stares, a scream stuck in his throat, as a claw wounds its way through her neck. The last torch blows out.

But the cave doesn’t plunge into darkness.

“The children,” a choir of hundred voices hums. Two hundred eyelids slip open with a wet, sucking squelch. Two hundred small, round circles awaken on the walls of the cave that has never been one but a nest instead, and the scratch of hundreds upon hundreds of stinking nails over rotting stone sway the choir’s soft song into a rhythm: 

“The children, the children, how could you forget the children?”

One day, the wise woman of the village called all the children to her house.

She sat with them in a circle, and they ate and sang together until the moon was high in the sky. The children had never been allowed to stay up as late. They were excited. Their tongues prickled with the spicy soup that the wise woman had given them.

When the fire was just a low glimmer of ash and wood anymore, the woman lifted her hand.

The children that had been laughing and chattering fell quiet.

The woman said: “Show me the palm of your hand, and tell me only the truth. Swear on it.”

“I swear,” said the children. Some whispered it, some barely got out the words, but all of them were shivering because they felt something old and large reach for their hearts. They didn’t know if it was the soup, the woman’s power, the moon, or just their own awe before the world and the night that made them speak truthfully.

The wise woman lowered her hand. She looked at one after the other. Her eyes were warm as the fire, dark as the moon’s shawl above.

“Speak what you wish to raise in your life.”

Everyone was silent for a long time.

The woman turned her head towards the first boy.

“Family,” the boy mumbled. Then, a bit louder, clutching his empty soup bowl, he looked at everyone with honey golden eyes, wide with kindness. “Mine and others.”

The old woman said nothing. Only her head moved from then on, and it pointed to the next, the next, one after the other.

And the children spoke.

“Health.”

“Knowledge.”

“Happiness.”

“Imagination.”

“Adventure.”

“Fun.”

“Strength.”

“Animals.”

While the children said their words, the old woman drank them in. She let then settle into her memory, anchored them where they were safe.

One day, when the children were of age, she would ask them again.

Some would have changed. If they had lost their path, she would remind them of their old words, of the dreams their hearts had forgotten about. That there was a way forward, in whatever direction it may run. If they had found another way for themselves, she would gift them their once-adored word still, so that they had something to always return to and would know that once feeling something did not mean that you wouldn’t ever feel something else.

And if the children still chose the same way, then it would be their time to raise something.

So the children spoke their words. Only two were left now and before the woman could turn her head, they spoke at the same time.

“Hell.”

“Myself.”

The other children shivered. For a long time, nothing moved. Even the fire seemed frozen in the moment. Finally, the woman tilted her head.

“What do you mean?” she asked the two. She hadn’t asked anyone else.

The first child stood up, hands curled into fists, eyes burning. “If anyone gets in my way, I’ll bring all of the world down on them!”

“I’m scared,” whispered one of the children.

The woman looked at the other child, whose eyes were calm as the dark sky above. “And you?”

“Myself,” said the child once more. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

The first child laughed. “That’s stupid. Just yourself? What can you do with that! When I’m older, the world won’t stand a chance against me.”

Before the second child could speak, the old woman stirred. She reached out for the child’s fingers and took them into her own. The other children watched, wary and confused.

“Before you raise any of your dreams,” said the old woman, a smile on her fire-warmed lips, “I want all of you to remember this.” And when the child who stood glared at her, she took its hand as well until it sat and put its head against her shoulder.

“Raise yourself, children, and you will stand against anything. Raise yourself, and the whole world will rise with you. Hell and heaven and every fear will fall if you hold yourself upright and look to the stars. And if you cannot rise anymore, stand. Stand. The horizon has been born for thousands of years, every morning and every night. Admire its strength, when you are weak, but do not forget:

You are the dawn. You are the dusk.

The world will follow. Raise all that you are, before anything else.”

They bought the puppy for Christmas. The fire that warmed it was almost like its mother’s fur, the blankets it rested on so close to its sibling’s touch. Small fingers caressed its body. The food was exciting, rich, strong on its tongue. The puppy decided that it would love these ones forever.

They threw it out on Easter. Snow covered the streets. The road was grey, the sky was grey, its nose felt grey and scentless. It had wanted to become strong for them, had done everything to grow quickly. Its fur was thin still, its paws too big for itself and too small for the world. It howled for hours. Nobody returned.

The woman that found it was different. Her hands weren’t small. Her house was tiny and the scents whispered spices across the puppy’s tongue, twisted its ears inside out and back again. She gave it food, and while the puppy ate, her old veiny fingers wove patterns over its head, and she mumbled words it didn’t recognise in a language that sounded like wind and water and the fire’s wrath.

The puppy stayed.

It wasn’t a puppy anymore.

It ate, it ran, it drank the scents and locked up the magic that the woman poured over its fur when the storm roared outside the windows.

October came. The puppy wasn’t a puppy wasn’t a dog anymore. New snow had fallen.

The woman took one look at it and went to the door, opening it wide. “Run and take from them what you want,” she said, smile black and white from teeth and those that were missing. “But after that, you are mine, and the strength I gave you will be faithful to me, and my fire will warm you for as long as your fur returns to my doorstep.”

The hell hound bared its teeth, crossed the threshold, and lifted its heavy head. The scent had never faded from its memory.

They met their puppy again on a dark October night.

And only the small fingers still reached out to it the same as before, and spoke its name in an awed whisper of “there you are”; the large hands that had pushed it aside and filled it with the cold were now, finally, cold.

“But should I really try? I probably won’t be magnificent at it. Maybe not even great. Or good.”

“I don’t know if you should. Would it hurt you less to not be anything than to be something at all?”

“…well, I.”

“And who knows what’ll happen along the way. So much could happen.”

“Oh God.”

“Anything, even.”

“Right?! Who knows! I don’t! Anything could happen to me! I shouldn’t.”

“Of course you should.”

“But why -”

“You said it yourself: Anything could happen. Anything.”

“Even -”

“The improbable? Yes.”

“…”

“What’s to lose? What’s the harm?”

“Nothing, I suppose.”

“No harm?”

“I’ve looked at all the sides and I found none, really.”

“So?”

“…anything?”

“Yes. Anything.”

The stories you read change you once, but the stories you have written, those you write here and now, the others you will write one day, they change you at every crossroad. Our words will guide us. They already do.

Being human, we’re small. We haven’t been here for very long, neither as our kind nor every single one of us. I like to think that the ancient parts of the world watch us, silent and unmoved above our heads and underneath our feets, and whisper to each other.

We may steal a glance at their shapes, be it buildings or oceans, a forest grown through centuries or the wind brushing through our hair, and we wonder what they have seen and done in their almost immortal lives.

Admiring them with deep reverence, we may forget something – that they too watch us.

And I like to think that even the oldest parts of our planets occasionally turn their senses onto us little humans, if only to wonder how something so tiny can still surprise them after all these eternities.

And deep down, you know it as surely and certainly as the moon orbit the planet that brought you into existence:
You are desperate to learn. You’d do anything to understand. There’s no path you wouldn’t walk, no ocean you wouldn’t cross to study the whispers of flaring energy between stars or the growl-told stories of evolution shining from the eyes of an apex predator.
Everything inside you screams for another glimpse inside the universe. Through the ribcage, behind matter and light, you yearn for an explanation of it all.
So be desperate. Be stunned. Stand in awe and full of questions so that you always find a spark of curiosity even when the world tries to fill you with darkness.
You’re an explorer.
You’re here to learn.

to you. to her. to him. to anyone who’s afraid of the dark tonight.

And watch out for travellers, my child. People on a journey are a force of nature. A goal that used to be a dream does unbelievable things to someone. So if you meet a man with fire in his eyes, a woman with embers in her step, take care.

They may just move you into your own journey.

Curiosity has killed, and it will kill again. It makes mistakes. It drives us into making mistakes. It can be the most terrible of mistakes. It errs. It fails. It destroys.

Curiosity is imperfect. And yet.

Curiosity is worth all of that after you witness what losing it does to a human life.