Through The Storm

-1-

A child wailed in its mother’s embrace, not all the village residents could afford to send their pregnant women to Beimini, or their children to Nafoura, Claude thought as he walked one step after another, as all the others of his village did. An entire month passed since they started their forced diaspora.

The Order of Purification decided their village was a crucial point to secure for the war. They only learned of this as the commander of a company came crashing their gates.

Most of the elders of the village left to find a safe spot away from the fighting nations, run to a better place, they said, establish a new community not involved with the machinations of the great ones, they said. But now, one month had passed, and ten people fell to the jungle or the red gangs roaming it, and the safe haven, the better place, was nowhere in sight.

It was not that Claude despised this nomadic life, he would have embraced it without objection, if they didn’t have this many children with them or this many injured people, or if they knew at least where they were heading.

In his short life of eleven years, he never witnessed this amount of violence, Nature was not that violent, even the predators, they killed sparingly, not humans though, he learned of recent that humans can’t possibly be an outcome of nature, as nothing in nature was this vicious and evil.

He stopped listening to the elders, everything they said in the past proved to be a lie, humans were not products of nature like they told him, and the so-called balance was just old men’s tales, as he had seen the path of devastation the warring factions left behind, and nothing came from nature to counter their destruction and mayhem.

He also lost belief in the benefits of an orange aura, and he wished for his aura to never settle, for what good was their aura, if all it communicated were the screams and wails of plants and animals.

The more powerful among his village even felt the pain of nature herself varying in intensity from one devastated area to the next, bending under pressure and halting the whole village to minister for their pains.

Claude didn’t like Agartha at all, and if the chance came, he would leave the inner earth for the surface one. At least there, he would not feel the pain those people felt, the pain of the supposed mother of all, nature.

-2-

“No, please, Master soldier,” the woman cried as she clung to the tunic of the soldier. “Spare my daughter, please she is too young.”

The soldier who had the insignia of a burning tree, denoting him as one of the contingents under the Dragon Lady’s command, just laughed and kicked the woman viciously in the face.

She crawled after him, while she screamed, “Take me in her stead, please, have some mercy.”

“You wanted mercy?” He dropped the girl and returned to her mother, drawing his short sword as he walked towards her. “Here is your mercy.” He plunged his sword deep in her chest.

The woman looked at her daughter’s frightened eyes and whispered, “Run.”

Then she climbed up the sword and caught the hand which held it in a death grip, then she shouted louder, “Run.”

The girl looked with big eyes and trembling lips at her mother, but before her mother repeated the word for the third time, she started to run. She ran as tears flew behind her small frame, between soldiers maiming the people of the village, pillaging their lives’ work. She ran through their ranks at the border of the village, and she ran still, deep into the forest. She stopped when she finally hit a large shard of a broken tree and fell to her face, losing consciousness in the process.

The next morning, she woke up as something was licking her face. She shook the sleep from her eyes and jumped back.

A wolf pup was wagging its tail to her, it was a young one, as it didn’t change the color of its coat yet to the usual brown and red of older wolves. Its coat was just frosty grey. The wolf pup barked at her, then jumped back and forth, taunting her to play.

She smiled, and her smile hurt as her lip split when she fell last night, then all the memories of night before came back, overwhelming and flooding her.

She reached for the pup as fresh tears stung the cuts on her face. “Where is your mommy?” she asked the pup.

The pup approached her and nuzzled under her arm and whined a bit.

“I think they killed your mommy as they killed mine.” She hugged the pup and cried for some minutes.

Then the whimpers of the pup woke her up from her misery. She carried the pup and stood. “Don’t worry, I am a purple. I will find food and shelter for both of us.”

She kissed the pup which nestled happily in her arms.

“My name is Dahlia, what is yours?”

She rubbed the pup’s belly with one hand and it wiggled its paws in pleasure as a response.

“I will call you Hardy because you survived the hardships of the war.”

She smiled and didn’t mind the pain coming with the smile.

“Now, let’s find something to eat, the soldiers always leave lots of dead small animals in track, one must be fresh enough to eat.”

-3-

“Vlad, please, we have to go.” A young woman pulled on a young man’s arm. “They will come after us, please.”

“Mary, they have killed my whole family, as if they were cattle.” Vlad looked in a daze at the burning farmhouse. “I lost everything in less than an hour.”

“Please, Vlad, we have to move, or would you want to face your parents’ fate?” Mary shook him hard.

He finally looked at her with sad eyes. “Escape Mary, I have nothing to run for.”

She slapped him hard, that tears started to flow from his eyes. “You have your life, you fool, you can gain everything back.”

“With what?” he cried. “There is no farm to come back to, the manticores poisoned the land beyond salvation.”

“You can trade, your father was not just a farmer.” She pulled him, and he started to walk slowly by her side. “Your father was a frugal trader, you can do this with almost nothing, I believe in your abilities.”

Vlad followed her as tears ran hot on his cheeks. He allowed her to drag him as he thought, Trade with whom? There will be no villages left standing after this cursed war ends.

He walked beside Mary, his betrothed, hoping death would catch them swiftly in the next days, hope was too painful to contemplate, death was a mercy.

-4-

“Mellie, take this fruit to the elder.”

A woman in her late thirties, and a large scar crossing a once beautiful face, gave a half-ripe fruit to Mellie. “It is soft enough for her ruined teeth.”

Mellie nodded and walked back through the makeshift camp towards the bed of the last elder of the village.

All four other elders died in the first month since they had to run out of their village. Mellie thought sadly, so had most of the young children.

Mellie graduated Nafoura only a few months before the war. She didn’t even get to finish her studies in Meg Mell when news Zarzura’s fall reached them.

The city council decided to ease the burden for a coming war by sending all village born graduates to their home villages. By the time she reached the village, she was only a few days ahead of the reds, and she didn’t even get to settle down or even see both her parents. Her father was drafted in the war effort, as he served in his youth as a squad lieutenant, this was why her parents could afford to send her to Nafoura in the first place.

Her mother, once considered the most beautiful of the oranges, now had a scar to mark her as past beauty, a reminder that would never leave her of the horrors of the war.

“Thank you, Mellie.” The elder smiled a toothless smile. “You would be a great woman someday, I have seen it in my dreams.”

“I just hope that I will see my father again, elder Agatha.” Mellie smiled sadly.

“You will, and he will come victorious.” The old woman started to doze off just as she finished her sentence.

Mellie sighed and walked back to her mother.