Algernon Black

(Chapter 79) Only Living Remains

After the battle between Loy and Farris, it wasn't even up for discussion that they would take the children back to their village of Baryta. Cal joined them on their trek and Loy accounted for the delay in their travels by adjusting the timeline in his head. So long as they passed through an old shortcut of his they could still go everywhere they needed to before their final stop at Attwood. But that would mean he would have to cross the one place he had been avoiding for the last five years. Loy tried to push the memories to the back of his mind, but it was hard too when the only living remains of it was complaining before him.

"They're heavy," Beal whined. After hours of hiking into the second day, he was losing feeling in his knees as a child that weighed nearly as much as himself snoozed away on his back.

"A real man can do at least this." Cal clapped back, carrying one kid on his back and the other in his arms. He walked like the extra 100 pounds of weight was nothing, and Selice wondered if it was Cal's body or mind that was too dense to feel fatigued.

"Don't take anything Cal says with too much substance," Loy said, carrying the boy who had come the closest to dying on his back, who hadn't woken up since his fight with Farris. "I once saw him try to swallow a coconut with its shell on."

"I did swallow it!" Cal insisted. "And now my stomach has the hard skin of a coconut lining the inside of it."

"That is so cool." Beal beamed in honest amazement.

"What did I just say?" Loy scolded to thin air as Beal's fascination with their newest traveling partner countermanded any logic.

"Why are you so short?" Cal accused Beal after taking in the small statue of the boy, seemingly for the first time even though they had been together for nearly two days now.

"I don't know," Beal admitted like he was disgraced with himself. "It's my own fault. If I was stronger I'd grow."

"Exactly!" Cal exclaimed. "You need to be eating a thousand figs a day minimum and start carrying around cows on your shoulders."

"People can't do that," Loy said growing ever the more exasperated.

"Any farmer can!" Cal yelled back. "Which just shows how weak you are!"

"Ha!" Beal laughed, pointing a finger at Loy. "Exactly you're not that toug-'' But his taunting fell off when he saw Loy's cold-blooded eyes warning him he better keep quiet.

"This could be a dangerous pairing." Selice breathed out, as Cal continued lecturing Beal on how to properly lift a cow.

"If the teenage brat wants to crush himself to death with a cow, we're just going to have to let it happen," Loy said giving up on reasoning with either of the two idiots. "If we're lucky maybe we can save the cows."

"I would never be crushed to death by a cow!" Beal declared, waving his fists into the air.

"You want to test it out?" Loy threatened, to which Beal shrunk back.

"I can find us a cow," Cal said with certainty.

"Maybe another day," Beal muttered, putting more thought into the actual logistics of such a thing.

Selice adjusted the little girl with braids she carried in her arms. Oira was her name and she rested her little head in the crock of Selice's shoulder as she dozed off. Selice could tell they must have been extremely sleep-deprived with how soundlessly they all slept.

Loy watched Selice on from behind, finding it endearing she could be so nurturing. "You almost look like you could be a parent."

"Same to you." Selice said, gesturing to the boy Loy carried.