The Boy and the Animal

Part I | Twenty-One

"What... Did you just say?" The woman asked.

Dark opened his eyes, finding the woman- whose unwavering coldness had defined the chills in the their captivity- very much... Shaken.

Her eyes suddenly held more life in them than they had for the past week. They trembled, and her hands shook as her very bones quivered. As she stared down at him, she seemed to be looking through him, into her own thoughts that bombarded her like a thousand rain drops. A tentative foot stepped back away from him.

Then, with the unseen smash of a glass shattering against the cold floors, she gripped her head and screamed. Her quaking body fell against the wall of the dungeon, knees buckling until she was reduced to a helpless wounded creature. Dark stared in awe at her abrupt change in disposition, but Jesiter took it without a qualm.

With the woman downed, Jesiter grabbed Dark's arm and pulled him up from the ground, hoisting him on his own shoulders this time and darting for the stairs. Dark's vision blurred as the light passed, and another corridor greeted them. His heart sank. There was only more stretch of dungeon there.

The boy continued running down the stone halls, the patting of his feet filling the echoes as the woman's screams faded behind them. He just had to keep running. This wasn't the first time he had found himself locked behind these walls, and so he knew if he just kept running- if he followed the walls to their end- he would find freedom.

After some time, the two came to a fork in the road. Ahead of them was a wall, on which an intricately framed painting of Tobis hung. Jesiter slowed to take in the sight of the painting. He growled. That face, those eyes, and every wrinkle in that flesh made his claws itch. He wanted to lunge at it, but something seemed different.

The man wasn't looking at him. He seemed to just float there on the wall, fixed in a seemingly uncomfortable position. His arms and legs were missing, so he only had his head and neck, but he didn't bleed. Was he stuck?

Roused from his rising sleep by the prolonged stop, Dark looked up at the boy and followed his gaze to the painting on the wall. He furrowed his brows at the sight of the one who had destroyed everything that he had, but the boiling soon passed under the pain of his wounds.

"Keep going," Dark more pleaded than ordered the boy.

"Bad guy," Jesiter replied. "Jessy fight?"

"It's just a picture, Jess," Dark mumbled. "It's not real. He's dead."

Jesiter pondered his words for a moment. Tasting them in his mouth, he found it didn't sit well in his stomach. Maybe this 'painting' wasn't the real guy, but the bad man couldn't be dead. He could still smell him.

"Smell," the boy grunted. Dark perked up slowly from his shoulder. "Smell bad guy."

Those three words stopped the pain that beckoned him to sleep. The man clenched his fists and wiggled from the boy's shoulder. Leaning on him with his arm around his shoulder, he stared him in the eyes.

"Take me to him."

At just the thought of finding the man who had done this to him, at the very notion that he might grasp any kind of closure or justice, the taste of escape and freedom on his tongue turned bitter. Jesiter seemed to feel this too, nodding, and soon they were heading away from the path to the outside- deeper into the dungeon toward the burnt stench of Tobis.

The chill of the walls gradually grew warmer as they made their way for the target. Carpets littered the path, drapes and tapestries suddenly occupying the barren walls. They must have been drawing near where the keepers slept, something that Jesiter had never seen; still, he trusted his nose and his feet down the corridor. the stench was only growing stronger.

Their feet halted. Before them was a balcony, and, like a plateau overlooking a vast gorge, a deeper room stretched out beyond it. It wasn't the end of the hall they had first sought out, but it was a promise that tasted sweeter than fresh air.

Jesiter looked to Dark for his nod of approval, and, when he gave him one, they sneaked toward the rail of the balcony and sat with their backs against it. Through the cracks in the rail, Dark peered at the room below. Both Jesiter and Dark's fists clenched at the sight.

Lying in a bed with gauze and  tourniquets strapped to his charred skin was Tobis. He was frail as he lied there with healing stones placed on his forehead and limbs, to be sure, but the eyes that gazed into the blaze of the fireplace beside him were everything but. They were defiant, burning hotter than the fire in front of him or the one that left his face and much of his body a black and pink fleshy mess, and, more than anything, they were very much alive.

Jesiter growled and made to jump over the rail to attack him, but Dark grabbed his wrist and forced him back down beside him. The boy shot him a pleading look, whimpering quietly. Why did he stop him? He could have sank his teeth into him right then and there for what he'd done to his home.

"Look," Dark whispered.

Jesiter followed his eyes to a small army of guards littering the room below. He hung his head. All feelings hung to dry, Dark wasn't thrilled about the circumstances either. If he had it his way, he would shove the man into the fireplace to finish the job. But freedom replenished its taste. There would always be a next time.

"Sir!" A man's voice called out. The prisoners jolted and peered through the hole again to find a man in armor that matched the guards they'd left behind rushing toward Tobis. "The subject escaped!"

"What?!" Tobis roared, sitting up from the bed. He moaned and held his side, falling back onto the bed. "How?" He grumbled. The man stopped at his bedside and took his hands. "Where is 2?"

"She's..." The man began, searching for the right words. "We don't know, exactly. She just started screaming and holding her head." Tobis nodded and shut his eyes.

At that, another pair of boots clacked in the room. This time, it was a man in an imperial uniform, face free of a helmet. Dark recognized him from the newspapers; he was the emperor's son- Titus Ale II. Among rumors of butchering his lovers, he was also the sole perpetrator of the war that scarred the land more than three years ago.

Just looking at him sent a chill through Dark's spine.

Tobis glanced over at the man and, sending the guard away, reached for his hand. Titus took it and placed a kiss of respect on his forehead, and yet, as his lips lingered, Dark couldn't help that feel it was perhaps more than respect for the elder.

"My daughter musn't wake. If she knew what we've done..." The old man begged. Titus quelled his worry with a pat of his hand.

"I will fetch Jesiter and bring her to her senses," Titus assured him. Tobis shook his head.

"2," the man corrected him. "She is 2 now." Titus nodded, sitting up from his side to head for his task. The man stopped him. "And bring the animal back to me. Without him, she will never be my Jesiter again."

Dark gasped. That woman was-?!

Titus's eyes darted toward the balcony at the sound of the gasp, but by then the prisoners were already bounding back down the halls for the other end of the fork. He squinted. Wherever they were, he would find them, and the boy would be brought back where his miserable heresy of an existence belonged. And his companion, kin to a breed that had survived its usefulness, would fall to his hands.

No matter how far they ran.