(it's a working title...)
ONE
“Your sister’s looking for you.”
I looked up in surprise at my mom. She looked so sad. I could tell there were fresh tear tracks across her cheeks. I brushed my fingers under my eyes to make sure I hadn’t been involuntarily crying as I watched the destruction of Viorest. How long had I been staring out that window anyways? An hour? A minute? A day? Long enough for the Bathaali to reach the castle gates, that’s all I know.
“Okay,” I stepped slowly away from the window, feeling as if I were dreaming… well, having a nightmare more like.
My mother stopped me and hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe, and she sobbed into my shoulder. I hugged her back, realizing that in just an hour or so the Bathaali would probably penetrate the castle and we would both be dead. She loosened her grip on me and said in a whisper, “She’s on the balcony in her bedroom.”
I nodded, not looking at her directly, then I started towards Katrina’s room.
“Kat?” I called, knocking on her door.
“It’s open,” her voice reached me sounding muffled.
I pulled the door open and was surprised to find the room cold as a November morning. The doors to the balcony were thrown wide, and Katrina was standing out on it, leaning on the rail, wearing a regal looking pale blue dress, her bond hair pulled up, and a small silver tiara balanced on top of her head. I suppose she wanted to leave a pretty corpse.
I stepped onto the balcony and stood next to her, staring down at the destruction. Soldiers were still fighting, but the battle was becoming more and more hopeless. I would be dead, I thought, Dead and gone.. Since I was only fourteen I really had no obligation to be out there, trying to force back the massive number of Bathaali that were invading the city. Then again… I could probably pass for sixteen, and it had always been a sort of tradition for kings and princess of Viorest to fight along their fellow country men in such desperate times… and die doing so.
That’s probably the one good thing about the destruction of Viorest; no more pressure about being king. I would have been dreadful at it anyway. Kat was the true blue blood between me and her, that was quite clear. Besides, she’s a whole seven years older then me, and that much wiser and cleverer at least. Despite all of this, nobody wanted her to take over for my mom. Why? Well, it’s sort of complicated…
My grandparents, the king and queen of Viorest before my mom, had one daughter. And they really wanted to marry this daughter of theirs off to a prince from Lonkis, because Lonkis had a lot of forests, with a lot of wood, and Viorest had a big harbor and a few boats. My mom decided, “Why not?” So she and this Lonkin prince got married a week or so after they met. The way my mom puts it, she had decided it wouldn’t work by the honeymoon. However, she couldn’t just divorce him. The king and queen hadn’t gotten their wood yet. Luckily for Mom, both of her parents were struck down with cholera a couple of winters after she and the Lonkin prince got married. After that it was pretty simple for her to arrange for him to ‘mysteriously die in his sleep from natural causes,’ especially as no one really wanted this Lonkin jerk to be the king of Viorest.
A couple of months after his funeral, Katrina was born. She never knew her father. Her Lonkin grandparents know nothing of her existence. My mother wouldn’t have it any other way.
Now, here’s where everyone starts smiling and throwing looks at me in the story. Everyone except me. Well… I guess I couldn’t throw myself a look in any case, but as I was saying... This is the part in the story where Ethan comes in. Ethan… I’ll never know what was so great about him, and I don’t really like to imagine my mother in love with him. I don’t really like to imagine this Ethan man raising my big sister as if she were his daughter. I don’t like to imagine Ethan at all, actually.
But, everyone else does. Even people just a couple of years older then me sometimes insist that the few memories they have of the king of Viorest were very fond indeed. Which is weird, because you would think, if anyone could remember him, his son could. At least a little. But, you would be wrong. I was two when he died. Two. I would have been talking by then, at least a little… surely I should remember being two, but then again I’ve always had a dreadful memory. I don’t care though. Like I said, I just really don’t like to think about Ethan. I’ve seen my mother and sister shed too many tears over him. I’ve been laden with too many expectations that I would never have had if not for him. And, like I said, I’m no leader. I’m no king. Maybe the people of Viorest could have accepted that if it weren’t for him, and the fact that I’m, as far as anyone knows, the last living person with his blood in my veins. Maybe… but none of this even matters now, does it?
My thoughts were interrupted by a heavy sniff from Katrina. I slowly looked up at her, and realized on top of the nice clothes, and her pulled back hair, and her tiara, she had also covered her face with powder, her lips with stick, and her eyes with various components that were making dark tracks down her face. Somehow the tears made her even more beautiful. I’ve always thought her dad must have been a handsome man, and Ethan, despite the fact that everyone loves him so, was short and bulky with stupid looking brown hair that likes to defy gravity and stick up and out in every direction... alright, fine, I got my hair from my mom, but it looks nice on her. On me it looks absolutely ridiculous.
“Devin…” Katrina whispered, wiping her eyes and leaving big black splotches around them, “It will never be the same…”
I looked at the complete annihilation below… dead bodies were on every street, many houses and stores had been torched, and Bathaali were either feeding on dead people, or pounding on the castle gates. Then I turned back to my sister, “I don’t think there is going to be anything left to not be the same pretty soon.”
She stared at the dark smudge on her wrist as she muttered, “No more Viorest…”
I nodded, “Wonder what will become of it…”
She shrugged, “I guess we’ll find out,”
“What?” I asked, confused by this statement.
She looked me right in the eye, and didn’t respond for a moment, just stared at me with a rather blank expression on her face, her dark blue eyes shining with more tears.
Crash! My gaze snapped down as the Bathaali finally succeeded in breaking through the gate.
“Kat!”
“Dev, we have to get out of here!”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me into her bedroom.
“What do you mean, ‘get out of here?’” I sighed, “Kat, we’re as good as dead, don’t you realize that? And what the hell are you doing?!”
Katrina had been shuffling through her closet, but she froze, and turned to face me, “Don’t pretend like you know everything, baby brother. I ‘realize’ a lot more then you do, and one thing I’m pretty sure you don’t quite ‘realize’ is that we, can’t, die.” She said the last three words one at a time, with deliberate pauses in between. She sounded so angry, and all the smeared makeup on her face made her look like an aggravated raccoon, a pretty one at that. “But I can’t explain all that right now so just shut up and do as I say,” Katrina looked nothing, and I mean nothing, like Mom. However, I bet if I had closed my eyes I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.
I just stood there, my mouth closed. Kat returned to her closet. She threw all the clothes on the floor, and ripped the drawers out.
I could hear hisses and yowls from below, and my hands started shaking.
Katrina groaned as she tried to pull the back of the closet out.
“Here,” I offered, and helped her yank it away.
“Thanks.”
Behind the wooden board I had almost expected a big gap that would lead to a cavern we could hide in, however, it was just a blank stone wall.
“Kat, what is this?”
“Nothing,” she said, taking the board from me, leaning it inside the closet, and closing the doors. She held the closet shut for a moment, then turned to me, and took a deep breath.
We both listened to the chaos happening on the floor below for a moment.
“What the hell?!” I shouted at her.
“Hush!” she sunk to her knees and began feeling the wooden planks on the floor of her bedroom, “Don’t you get it? That closet thing will distract them for a while,” she explained as her fingers snagged on a certain plank, and she lifted it up.
“Oh…”
Kat through the trap door open wide, she bundled the skirt of her dress together and slid inside up to her waste, then began climbing down a ladder.
Once her head was a foot or so below the floor, I lowered my feet to the first rung, but before I could take another step I froze.
Somewhere in the castle there was a person screaming. It was a scream I couldn’t recognize, but at the same time a scream that was so familiar. Maybe it was the scream I heard as I was being born…
There were Bathaali upstairs now, running through the halls, just outside the door. At any moment, one of them might barge in and see me.
"Devin!" Kat shouted at me. I didn't move. "Come on Dev! Now!" Kat sounded near tears.
The scream ended, and my heart sank.
