Phony Potions

Chapter 1 Part i

I guided my miserable donkey with my few meager belongings toward the fiery oasis of sorrow. I gazed upon the ribbon-like moon bridges that spiraled down from the clouds, landing behind the city's intact but useless walls. Moon Giants, just as bright as the twisted path they walked upon, trudged skywards. They were like dust motes from this distance, but my donkey still slowed his pace, turned his head away. I urged him toward the burning city; I knew the residents' loss would be my profit and the Giants were leaving. It would be relatively safe now that they'd eaten their fill. I was a scrawny man, not worth eating in the first place.

"Come on, you dumb donkey, the fire burnt itself out." I tugged at his reins. A change of the wind and the stench of smoke overwhelmed him. The stubborn animal dug his chipped hooves into the dirt. He would move no more. His wet eyes glowered at me, daring me to try. I wasn't strong on the best of days; emaciated as I was now, it would be a contest I'd lose.

I tethered him to a tree and teetered the rest of the distance to the city's gate. If I'd been less hungry, I'd have heeded the dumb donkey's advice, but it'd been days since I'd eaten real food. I wasn't desperate because I felt hungry, the opposite. The pain was gone, instead I felt light and weightless and spots frequently swam in my vision. If I didn't eat soon, I would never have the pleasure of feeling hungry again. In the chaos of the fire, there had to be unattended food or luxuries I could sell for food if I survived to the next town.

Even before I was close enough to make out the myriad screams as words, I could tell they were not the shouts of fear of fire. The fire was only a symptom, not the cause of their misery. The tendrils of the receding moon bridges were squirming worms in the water. I was the fish that staggered unevenly ever closer. I hesitated outside the city walls until the last of the snaking moon beams glinted out of existence in the cloud, taking the last lingering Moon Giant with it.­

I squeezed my way through the crumpled city gate. I noticed the large cog mechanism for the gate's opening and closing was smashed. On the road in front of the gate was a maze of frantic carts, an array of disorderly hoof prints and piles of skeletons. Yellow-white bones stacked neatly without a spot of blood or muscle. Picked clean.

They had tried to evacuate when the threat from the sky had arrived. The gates were designed to open slowly and close quickly. Gates usually keep the enemy out. Gates were obvious targets. They'd been destroyed, the entire city's population had become a captive meal for the Giants. That explained why I wasn't smelling burning flesh, ignited hair. The remains were all tidy. The Giants didn't have a taste for coin, and I plucked up plentiful coin that had spilled amid the forest of femurs, eye sockets of skulls or hidden underneath humeruses. I did my best to not think of how these were people less than a day ago. I wasn't stealing; they didn't need this coin anymore and I did. The Moon Giants had wiped out entire families. If I didn't step in and get the gold, then it would go to the Arcanacracy's treasury.

Further from the gate I did encounter corpses and near-corpses. The dying that had been hurt either fighting the Giants, or by the panicked trample to avoid them. Many people had been injured and pinned beneath the collapsed wooden beams and overturned carts. A young man reached out to me, his skin on his arm bubbled from the heat. A shop stall had fallen onto him, pinning him to the ground. I wouldn't be able to lift it, my vision still swaying in dizzying loops from left to right. The heat made the dizziness worse. I kept walking, his wailing at my back. My dad would have stopped to help him, but my dad wasn't here.

The bakers' stone ovens were made to withstand heat and so were still intact. Ironic, as the building attached to it was half-collapsed, shattered wooden beams sticking up at violent angles. I opened one of the many oven doors by its small iron knob. Inside sat a loaf of bread, still warm. I yanked it from the stone enclosure and tore into it. Eating. I was eating. A sad state of affairs when this was a special occasion, dining with the dying cries of the wounded around me. But eating was eating, and I made it through half the loaf before the feeling of my stomach returned. I finished it before said stomach went from hunger pangs to content. I emptied my flask, knowing the bread would soak up the water and fill the remaining want.