End World: Volume One

Chapter 3 - It Takes a Village to Raise a Child Part 1

Sefara was on her way home. The sky was caught between blue and a shade of violet as it neared dusk. The setting sun deepened the shadows in the yellow fields. Sefara was in her thoughts, she played back the events of the day...

***

In the alleyway, Sefara stood whilst Khaya sat leaning back against the wall. The Terror lay still on the ground. Sefara looked at Khaya who, for a while now, had his eyes on the floor. The silence was insufferable.

Sefara had met Khaya's parents on two occasions, both highlighted by their affection for their son.

Parents, she felt, sheltered love, and to be loved by a parent was to fill the vacancy not as a guest but as the resider of laughter and joy, sadness and tears, anger and she supposed even resentment. In such a place Sefara was merely the shadow of a daughter, given form momentarily by fears and excitement. But even then, she could do little more than haunt.

Perhaps this was why she had been left alone in that house, maybe her saviour knew the fate of an orphan and left her behind because of it. She had felt so alone before meeting Khaya, the last thing she intended was to condemn him to a life like her own,

"Maybe if we tell your parents, and we explain to them..." Sefara tried, but guilt smothered her words.

Just as the dreadful silence threatened to return, Khaya responded, "Then what? Somehow all will be forgiven?"

Sefara could never have claimed to understand his parents' love better than he, but surely even in these circumstances, it had the capacity to forgive. But that wasn't so much the point, she discerned.

"You heard him Sefara, the Peacekeepers will be coming for us —if they aren't already. Involving my parents would put my whole family in danger," Khaya explained still facing towards the ground.

He cried out in frustration, but more so anguish. It was sudden, but Sefara understood his feelings all too well. It was what parents sheltered their children from, the responsibility she had carried for as long as she could remember. Sefara squeezed on the locket in her hand,

"I'm sorry," she apologized, "This is all my fault."

Sefara held on tighter to the locket, fully aware that she contradicted herself, she wished she had let it go.

"If I hadn't chased after him. I-I just... I was starting to remember something," at that moment Sefara thought Khaya might yell at her and call her selfish, in fact, she wished he would. Instead, he looked up at her, concern in his dark eyes,

"Your parents?" he asked.

Of course, he had always been that way. To some degree, it was as though he felt her troubles were somehow his responsibility. Like accompanying her to help with the Festival, he had no interest in being an artist but he knew it was important to her.

It would only make Sefara feel worse, but he deserved an explanation, she owed him that much,

"No, no it was more like the fragments of a memory. There was a man, he had a locket just like this one, with his wife on one side and his daughter on the other. I think... I think he's the one who rescued me," Sefara explained.

Khaya's face softened, if only a little bit, "Sefara..."

"I couldn't make sense of it but I thought...he might have had some answers," Sefara confessed, as she looked at the collapsed corpse on the ground.

Without warning tears fell from her eyes, she didn't want to cry but the longer she stood there the more she yielded to her most painful thoughts.

She tried to wrap the bandages around her arm, it hurt, it hurt a lot but she felt she deserved it. She held one end of the bandage between her teeth while wrapping it with her right hand that held the locket. She could barely see what she was doing through her watery eyes.