Center of Attention

What Becomes of Us?

      "Don't lie to Firstien," I scolded him. "You even keep telling yourself that you'd kill him. Destroy the world because you know there's no way to fix the future."
      He grimaced. He seemed indifferent to my voice, like I was just a plague inside of his head. "No," he gruffly voiced to me. "There has to be a way. You don't think the faeries know something?"
       "Faeries are stupid. They have the lives of goldfish, even butterflies since you compare the two so much." I shook my head despite the fact he couldn't see me. I knew that if I was standing right next to him I would have hit him hard in the head for not listening to me. I had the answers, after all. "You'll get nothing, and you'll have wasted time. How short of time do you have left here?"
        "I only have two days. That's what Sobollum said."
       "And then? You've wasted a night drinking and playing Sad Man's Cards. You keep wasting time when he's right there. You have a knife, so do what Sobollum asked of you and kill Firstien Istinti! He is of nothing!"
        I could hear another voice, one that was breaking through every single barrier. I knew who it was just before he spoke, and I hissed in his direction. He didn't answer me.
      "There is another way," Giartt had whispered. "Don't listen to Ogillitiy."
      "Leave!" I screamed. "Leave his damned head, you superficial brat of a Fae!"
      He laughed. "Shouldn't I say the same about you, Ogillitiy? You want your own father to die?"
      "Why do you want him to live?"
       Giartt sighed. "I don't know, but I also don't know what will happen if he does decide to save him. The world is full of many greys. This will be the time to see it all in black and white."

       We found trees again. Thankfully. I was starting to think that it was strange that a human and a Fae were walking through the large expanse of hills with few houses that caressed the tops of the grass. These trees were all pink, however. There were springs of waters all around us, and they glistened as the pink leaves slowly fell into the water. It was as if we were in Summer all over again, but the air didn't become warmer. It was all still cold, and my feet were still sore from the night before. I wasn't used to this much walking.
        We trudged on anyway. We kept going through the pink landscape until we hit the edge of a large river that was flowing South to a waterfall that seemed to stretched down into the void of nothingness below. There was nothing to cross the large gap between this edge to the other unless we swam it, but the water was too fast to get even a good grip. I also knew nothing of swimming. We had no accessible water more than baths and the kind that ran through our houses. It was never used in a luxury like swimming. Smallik leaned against a tree with a sigh.
I had taken this chance to rest my own feet, and I collapsed close enough to the water to feel the small droplets hit my face. My eyes closed for a long time before I ended up slightly falling into my own dreams. I imagined Mavara with pinkish skin and wings of ancient dragonflies that no longer walked the earth. Her eyes were not black but a navy blue with many more white speckles than Smallik had, and I saw her smile as the oncoming wrinkles from age crinkled up her cheeks. She was talking to me. I just couldn't hear the words. For a while, I imagined her that way, and her hair was so long and expansive down her body. She was smiling the same way she had when she was telling me her last words.
           There was one point where I heard Smallik snoring, and I opened my eyes to see that his body slouched downwards to the bottom of the tree. He was snoring. Loudly. I stared at him for a while before returning back to my own dreams with my deceased wife. It just... He looked troubled as the water had landed on his face.
            "Ifvi nore katta!" The shout woke me from my sleep, and an arrow was pointed towards my head. Though the language did sound Faean, the people behind the weapons were not Fae. Their bodies were made of tree bark, and they had branches with leaves growing out from the tops of their heads. They also had black eyes, but these seemed more sinister. The arrowhead was pinned against my forehead with a force to leave a scrape. It did because I felt the blood trickle down the center of my nose.
       "Asina gorei nipi?" the tree man asked me. I was speechless. I didn't know what to say back to a language I didn't understand.
       He pulled the arrow away and began to stretch his long fingers across my forehead. They began to grown all the way around my head until I was pinned into the tree by his branch fingers, and he was just two breaths away until his lips would touch mine. I repulsed at the idea.
       "Can you understand me now?" he asked.
       I blinked. "I... I-I can."
       "A human. And a Fae." He turned to Smallik who was also pinned to the wall by another tree person. "What are you doing in our domain?" As he turned back to look at me, I lost my ability to focus. He was intimidating. "Answer! I will not take any sign of disobedience in the domain of us Eldritch!"
        "W-we're trying to find faeries!" I shouted in fear. As an Enforcer, I was a joke, but I didn't have a gun. There was just a knife, but my arms were pinned by elongated branch fingers.
         "The faeries already passed through this domain. They're on their way to Viagos. That is not why you're here, old man."
         "Damn you, I'm not old! I'm 43!"
        He smiled, every part of his mouth breaking apart like bark does when it's peeled by human hands. "Does that really matter when you are going to die? You have trespassed our domain, and you will be persecuted for your crimes."
         I wasn't going to die to a damn tree. Though that didn't sound like a bad way to go in 9127, I wasn't going to try and die. I didn't want to live in the void again. I didn't want to see Giartt telling me that I had to go and change the world all over again like some shitty repeat story I didn't want to live. My arms resisted the branches until they had ripped away from them, and my fist had impacted the eldritch's face. He had twisted his body until his face hit the dirt. His branches had completely pulled away from me, and I started to hear him curse in that other language all over again. That didn't stop my assault. I grabbed the other eldritch that had Smallik pinned to his tree, and I took out my man-made knife. It cut through the gaps in the bark perfectly, and they only thing that came out from inside was sap that stuck heavily to the blade. He collapsed onto the ground. My hand wrapped around Smallik's wrist. I started to run into the direction of the river, and I jumped in.
          My body dropped like a lead ball. I couldn't breathe at all until I felt arms pull me up over the water, and they held me tight as we were pulled through the tides. It was only a moment before I saw the edge of the waterfall before we were tumbling over the edge like the waves. I saw the water below, and it was filled with rocks. I was going to die. I was going to die again. I shut my eyes tight, thinking of nothing but the void, but then I felt a sudden jolt of air underneath my soaking torso. Looking up, I saw Smallik fluttering his large wings as they continued to move back and forth faster than I could keep up with. He was struggling, I knew, and I had no way to help him. Except... I started to untie my Enforcer vest and unbuttoned my shirt. They dropped into the rocks below, but I realized I was losing half of the weight of the clothes I was carrying. My sopping wet hair smacked against my face as Smallik began to fly away from arrows being loosed in our direction.
          "Damn it, Firstien!" Smallik yelled at me. "I've had all of these opportunities to kill you, but I just can't get myself to do any of it!"
           I tried to catch my breath. "Why... would you want... to kill me?"
         "If the world ends, the future won't be around to bite me in the ass! Everyone and everything will be gone, and all I have to do is kill you! But I can't!" He gulped, and we started to lose our momentum over the pink trees. "I'm afraid to die, Firstien! I'm so scared of losing everything, and yet I'm tasked with killing the one thing in the world that will end it all for everyone!"
         "Then don't kill me! There's another way besides killing the Center that will fix the future!"
         "But what is that?"
          I lowered my gaze. My body was starting to hit branches as he was losing speed. Eventually, he tumbled to the ground below, and his body rolled until he hit the base of a tree. He groaned. Loudly. I managed to get myself to my feet to run over to him, but I tripped and landed next to his body in the same position as him. I started to groan myself from all the dirt and cuts I was accumulating.
           "Smallik," I breathed. "I... don't... know the answer. But... I do... know there's another way to save the world." I blinked at the pink sky. A few leaves landed on my face. "I believe in that everyday."