In Huck's Hands

Chapter 3: Hot Coal

"Im by your side Huck, if you abuse your power I'll just break all your bones to show you the true lesson: Without structure, there is no system..." Aiko's words stuck in my mind, distant yet familiar, as the factory walls around us crumbled away to an ebony blackness.

I blinked hard, trying to focus as the rubble and smoke were suddenly replaced by plush emerald carpets and gilded archways-- A vivid and lucid memory I couldn't escape pulled me momentarily backward in time to its grasp.

I felt my mind retreating into the past, the way it tended to do when boredom or anxiety struck it. Just like that, Aiko's fiery gaze blurred to nothing, her voice morphing into the nasal tone of my childhood foreign tutor. The Svet woman's cheeks flushed crimson, tendrils of dark hair falling across my face as she dragged the scissors close to my ear...

"I don't want to be here..." The razor-sharp scissors she used always made my curly tawny hair uneven...The silly unending foreign rules never ceased to make me look more stupid somehow. If my ancestors could see me from the afterlife they would have thrown up on me for the way I was manicured so hideously by an agent of our oppression.

I knew that the glorified lackey they called a tutor would have something to say to my remark. "It doesn't matter what you want--You are the future monarch Huck." Her azure eyes met mine as she now held the scissors dangerously close to my left eye for several moments.

"We both know you're full of shit." I knew she wouldn't dare to really harm me no matter who's random second cousin she was to the throne of Svet...They would likely have us both executed though, once the long elitist trails of the north took hold.

"Why can't you be like your sister?!" Her angular face twisted scornfully, The woman's shrill voice always reminded me of Buriti Cacti. It had a certain nasally cadence that made the inflections of her voice unbearable. If I spent any more time having my head primped I was going to guillotine it myself...

She shuffled for a moment as she grabbed my nappy hair by the fist full. "I'm not a genius with an addiction to--" My jaw clenched, my words snapping from them like a common alligator, I felt a chilly shift in the room as the Svetlan delegates' blue eyes widened in what I assume was horror.

Small sand particles flowed through beams of sunlight as I turned my face to see my father, his flame-sigiled robe dragged on the floor effortlessly behind him...I never understood why he HAD to wear our riches like they were nothing, to run ragged even the finest silks of the embattled lands of our people. Sickening.

The skinny pale woman bowed low, some mockingly horrendous display of our traditional greetings "Oh, your Highness I didn't know you were here." All the bravado left her voice now that my father was present. I felt her bony grip release my head, small black curls fell to the ground near my feet.

My hair nearly disappeared in the raven-colored tiles lining the parlor room's tiled floor--How long must we bend our will and act as surrogates to these backward snow monkeys?! "He is always predating the shadows..."

My voice cracked causing me to rub my neck, being an adolescent was the worst time of my life. I did not scream authority, slouching in a chair and getting my hair cut like a juvenile hyena in a circus. Yet I knew I could say anything around him, I stuck my tongue out teasingly to my father quickly before pretending to have something in my eye. "Leave us...now!"

He seemed to be in a fairly bad mood as the deep creases on his face made him look like an overly ornate obsidian sculpture. His regal Buritian moldavite crown hung on his head like an ornament on an old mud hut, a reminder of a rule plagued by placation and predation of young tail...

"But Huck still-" Haige began to speak but I thew her a bone, not wanting her presence but also not particularly desiring to see her decapitated for insolence.