SERAVEL ROVODIA, the son of the tyrant Fire Potentate, is a model citizen of all sorts. Obedient, punctual, and most of all, silent. When his friend and long-time confidante gets arrested for alleged sacrilege against the administration, Seravel sta...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
2407 Iclis 16, Reshpe
His dream last night wasn't the gibberish landscape he had grown to think of dreams as. Instead, it was a memory.
From the lens of his mind drowning in sleep, he watched how he first met the boy. It was in the same alleys and twisting roads of the oasis. Sera had snuck out of the Palace in his wish to find a rhenne fruit that wasn't purple. If memory served right, he heard of the idiom "when the eye sees a pink rhenne", and had gotten interested if, in fact, the fruits have a pink variant.
In his dream, he saw himself getting lost in the city. He remembered his hollow breaths rattling in his ears, his sweat dripping from the side of his face, and his skin getting lashed with blades of sand and other desert debris. The suffocating feeling of not knowing where to go, the shallow fear of never making it home, the stilted frames of the cityscape melding into a fluid, nondescript sight. Sera remembered it all.
Mostly because what he's feeling now wasn't that far off.
In his dream-memory, he had gotten in the way of a merchant cart. The aksaba had screeched when its driver pulled the reins back just in time to avoid hitting him. Sera then burst into tears. That's where Neylan found him. The boy had gone with his father in his trading rounds and, as soon as hearing another child wail, had stumbled off the back of the cart.
"Hi, name's Neylan," the young version of his friend said, extending a dark-skinned arm at him. "What's yours?"
Sera couldn't remember what his younger self had blubbered but, soon, he was sitting with his legs dangling over the cart's corner with Neylan. The boy chattered away, explaining tons of stuff to Sera—and consequently, his dream—couldn't replay anymore. But he did remember how Neylan's voice replaced the dread in his gut and the fear gnawing at his veins. When Neylan's merchant father had dropped Sera off in front of the Palace, Neylan's eyes widened.
"Whoa, you live there?" the golden-haired boy had asked. "Cool! We could play catch for hours on end in that courtyard. Better than my cousin's playground."
A hand flew in the air and smacked Neylan upside the head. Sera remembered the boy's father ducking his head and apologizing for his son's behavior. Sera was too young to realize why people bowed and talked so formally with him and having Neylan treat him like a normal person brought a bout of fresh air, no matter how thick and humid.
Perhaps, that's why Sera invited Neylan to hang out with him whenever he and his father were in Calca. And he had been looking forward to it since then. They did things normal kids do, like shooting fire blasts at dagrine rears, laughing at the smell of burning fur wafting in the air, and dashing away madly when their owners came screaming and waving their arms in frantic gestures.
Sera missed those times. It was one of the rare moments he didn't have to pretend he was someone. When he was with Neylan and his merchant of a father, Sera wasn't the tyrant's son everyone knew him to be.
