WE BECOME THOUGHTLESS

seven | a name

september song // agnes obel

Alastair soon realised that this boy was everything he thought a man of Weles would be. Stubborn, angry, brutish – a picture definition and visual image of everything everyday Chrysos society would find repugnant.

It was almost refreshing.

He limped through the snow, over pieces of broken ship and splintered wood. Alastair moved ahead, grinding his teeth at every huff he heard from the boy behind him – just stay still, he glimpsed over his shoulder, you know I won't do anything. But still he persisted, even when his face screwed up and he bit down a groan of pain.

Every turn he took, Alastair was certain he would find the bloodied and broken body of either the Weles girl or Chrysos soldier. The wreckage was a massive clot of splintered wood and rope and torn fabric, and in the distance they could see nothing but snow-capped forest, not even the trace of distant smoke in the air.

They were completely, devastatingly lost.

At the sound of his stumbling, Alastair turned around, leg resting on a piece of debris, and thrust his hands forward in exasperation. "Your own stubbornness will kill you before I even get the chance to!"

The boy looked up through a veil of dark hair, glaring. Wrong thing to say.

"You know what I mean." Alastair huffed and pulled his hood over his head.

Instead of responding, he muscled forward on one foot and trudged through the shallow snow, inspecting pieces of broken material and casting his eyes anywhere other than the mindrenderer ahead. No need to regard the enemy more than he had to – this had nothing to do with the individual and everything to do with survival.

Through his teeth, Alastair exhaled and turned around. The fabric of his jacket did nothing to keep the cool air from chilling the body beneath, wrapping around him like a second skin. He kicked a piece of wood. How on all that is holy did we survive a fall like this?

"What's your name?" He attempted.

There was no response, only the sound of strained steps and quick breaths.

"My name is Alastair, if you wanted to know." He filled the silence.

At that, the boy looked up and frowned, crinkling his freckled nose. "What kind of name is that?"

Alastair stood up a little straighter and peered down from his perch on an upturned piece of debris. He might've looked imposing in his hood and dark coat, shadowy face and lean figure – sometimes he forgot to shrug away the personality he had built for himself during his time in the military. "It's an entirely respectable name, at least where I'm from."

The boy brought his chin up and seemed to work his mouth around the sound of it, like a strange taste he hadn't yet experienced. "Alas-stah – too hard to say, you people muddle things."

"It may be hard for you," Alastair glared. "Given your level of intelligence."

The boy glanced up, fists curling at his sides. Behind the burning in his eyes was the identifiable anger Alastair had noticed the night before, before the fight, when he was just another face in a crowd of people whose lives he was going to destroy. He suddenly felt overwhelmingly guilty, a weight that was cold and sunk into the depths of his stomach. The boy couldn't do anything – with his ankle, the chances of him entering a fight with a mindrenderer and leaving victorious were close to none.

Instead of responding in Chrysosian, the boy cursed fiercely in Welish, speaking words Alastair didn't know the meanings of, only that they were certainly something vulgar and deservingly cruel. Still, Alastair couldn't help the insult – the boy had tried to kill him, his anger didn't go unjustified.

Rolling his eyes, he stepped off his perch and landed in the snow. "Now tell me what to call you."

"I would prefer if you didn't call me at all."

"Sometimes we don't get what we want." Alastair snapped. "Tell me."

There was a moment of silence. Long, cold-blooded silence, before the boy decided to speak again, low like a murmur, yet hot with anger. "Cole."

Alistair nodded absently and picked up the pace, more to get further from the angry Welish boy than anything else. His body sagged under the weight of exhaustion, blurring the fringes of his vision, and the only thing he wanted then was to be tucked away in his bed – even if it was just a soldier's mat, rough as sandpaper. Some mindrenderers were given fourposter beds with silk sheets and pillows like cloud, but luxuries like that were earnt, and the only way a mindrenderer in the military could earn something was through violence. The mindrenderers with beds like that were the most dangerous.

Alistair spotted a body ahead, and the taste of blood entered his mouth, copper and salt. It was the soldier, or what remained of the soldier. The body was half buried under a mound of ship-wreckage. A dead hand lay in the snow, fingers curled in a shallow puddle of blood.

"Well, Cole, I think we might be the only survivors out here." His eyes roamed the body ahead. Dead, definitely dead.

Cole trudged forward and came to a halt next to him, breathing heavily as he saw the dead soldier crushed under the weight of the ship's structure. His breath hitched, only for a moment, before his eyes darted and he scanned the surrounding debris, searching wildly for anyone else.

"I think that's it." Alastair scanned the forest around them, chewing at the inside of his cheek. The trees seemed to whisper along the wind, hushed like gossips, turning with the breeze to mutter with the tree next to them. "There's no one else here."

Cole's eyes narrowed. "There was – there was someone else, she has to be here somewhere."

"She might've fallen from the ship while it was falling, she could be anywhere." Although the words were dry and flat, the desperate glancing of Cole's eyes made the guilt twist in Alastair's gut like a knife already buried deep into the flesh. He barely fought the urge to add in a quick I'm sorry, because that was silly and surely would not be appreciated.

Cole was unable to keep the wince from his face as he dropped his bad foot into the ground, and his shoulders shook only slightly against the pain. "Doesn't matter. Keep moving, we have to heal up quick."