Beyond the Rabbit Hole

Clamor and Burn

With his hand gripped tight on Deathwarden's black leather hilt, Benard kept the blacksmith's morbid prophecy in the back of his mind. He wandered toward the edge of town and peered out at the towering plateaus looming in the distance all around the high-walled city. There were narrow paths in between the plateaus where the streams ran through to the river like the cracks in a cage.

"Suffocating. . ." Benard sighed. He turned around and went back into the city.

While trying to avoid the crowds of the city square, he began to hear the echoing jeers of a different crowd up ahead in the maze of back streets and twisting alleys. The crowd, as he came upon it, was filled with civilians shouting insults and hurling piles of animal feces at the armored man standing at the bottom of the stairs by a shoddy-looking inn. The mob was composed of people of all walks of life from many different cultures and ethnicities, all brought together to scream, "Get out of our city!" until their different-colored faces were all painted crimson from rage.

Benard began to push his way through the furious mob.

Behind the armored man was a young woman cowering behind him. Her glasses laid shattered at his feet. The armored man raised his arms to protect his face, and moved his body as he could to shield the woman from harm. He glanced at the staircase. "Please take shelter inside!"

The woman nodded and scrambled her way up the stairs with her blurry vision.

A hulk of a man wearing nothing but tattered pants and shoes with holes where his bulky toes peered out jumped onto the railing beside the stairs and vaulted over.

With one hand on the railing to guide her up the staircase, the woman struggled to the top step.

With one quick shove, the hulking man sent her barreling back to the ground. "Emperor's whore!" he shouted as he laughed.

"Emperor's whore!" like electricity coursing through the crowd, these words surged through each tongue to the next. They no longer limited their ammunition to just shit and insults. They began throwing stones and pebbles they found on the ground.

"Lady Mantin!" the armored man exclaimed as he ran to her side. He reached his hand out to pull her out of the mud, but a stone grazed the top of his head sending him into recoil. He quickly stood up and held his arms out for protection again. Blood began to trickle down his forehead into his eye.

And the people laughed.

"Ashreya is here?" Benard grit his teeth. "Then that means-"

The hulking man stretched his arms over the railing and leaned into the crowd. Another man in the mob pushed through the crowd with a large object in his hands, while others cheered him on. As that man approached the railing, he struggled to lift a stone brick over his head that was over a foot in length and width. The hulking man reached down and grabbed it from the crowd. He carried it to the top of the staircase and raised it above his head.

. . .

The sound that followed was like flooding water squirting out of a crack at the top of a cliff that sent a boulder tumbling down the mountainside. The brick rolled down the staircase to be the first thing that hit the ground. It landed comfortably beside Ash's feet. The second was the hulking man's head – also at Ashreya's feet. The third was his body that crumpled lifelessly at the top of the stairs.

The crowd continued to jeer and laugh as drops of blood sprayed onto the faces of the mob's front line. It wasn't until the blood began trickling down the staircase that the crowd fell silent.