Though this happened when I was far shorter—perhaps about two feet ago—I can still remember using my neighbor’s sofa as a barricade. Behind me, people were whimpering and quaking in fear. What was I doing, you ask?
I was smirking devilishly.
What led me to this point of reveling in the despair and fear of those around me, you ask? Well, it all started with a dark night, a power outage, and two bored boys.
“You want to ask if we can leave?” My big brother, Andrew said as we sat in church.
“Ya,” I said, “I really don’t understand why we have to go to church at night anyway.”
The reason was series of evangelistic meetings to which my parents seemed intent on taking their children every night. I think we tried to get our minds around the concept, but you really can’t sufficiently explain to two fidgety, pre-tween boys why something that has so far been reserved for once a week is suddenly creeping into their dam-building time.
A few minutes and some whiny, insincere promises later, Andrew and I were happily plodding along the dirt road to our house in the dark.
“I’m glad we got out of there,” Andrew said.
“Me too,” I said. That was usually the safe answer.
“Hey,” Andrew suddenly said, “there’s a light on at the Giebel’s place!”
I looked. “It’s just a candle,” I said, a little annoyed at being tricked for a second into believing the power had come back on.
“Come on,” Andrew said, “let’s go see why they weren’t good children and going to the meeting.”
“We’re not at the meeting,” I said as I followed.
Andrew rolled his eyes as he often did at my naïvite. I cowered for a moment. I really should have known by now that the older brother is always smarter, but I just kept opening my big mouth. When would I learn?
Like two pale shadows in the night, Andrew and I crept along the side of the Giebels’ house. We could hear voices when we got close to the window with the candle. Soon we could make out words. It turned out that it wasn’t just the two Giebel girls, Strep and Gami, inside but their friends, Zarre and Berre, as well.
“I’m scared in the dark,” Zarre was saying, “I’m afraid that thieves will come.”
“N-no,” Strep stammered. She was the older of the Giebel girls and always seemed to think that she was the closest thing any of her friends had to grown-up influence, “There won’t be any thieves coming tonight.”
A big, slow grin came across my brother’s face as he turned around to look at me. I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes had turned the color of crazy. I decided that it would be best if I grinned too.
Then we had a quick, wordless conversation.
Seth? He said.
Ya? I said.
You know what we have to do, don’t you?
Me too! I said. I was slowly learning that this response didn’t always work.
We have to scare them, that’s what! Andrew said, not even noticing my faux pas.
Great! I said.
You’re a great little brother, Andrew said.
“You mean it?” I whispered out loud.
Andrew scowled. “What are you talking about?” He hissed.
“Nothing,” I said. Andrew wasn’t always privy to our wordless conversations.
Then we started grunting and scuffing our feet and doing everything that we thought a thief might do. Apparently, someone inside thought these were things a thief might do as well, because we were immediately rewarded with a thump that sounded like someone falling off the top bunk of a bunk bed and landing on another someone.
Our suspicions were later confirmed when the girls were relating their harrowing experience. “I fell off the top bunk of the bunk bed and landed on Strep!” Berre said later. Andrew and I then nodded our understanding. We had suspected as much.
Shortly after our first attempt at sounding like thieves, two more friends came walking down the dark road. Keegan and Rain, the children of the Skau family, had apparently skipped out on the meeting as well.
“Hi,” Andrew said to them in a conspiratorial tone, “You guys want to help scare Strep and the others?”
“I’m in,” Keegan said. He was the older of the two and usually killed such things immediately, but for some reason he was in that night.
“Me too,” said Rain. I smiled at her proudly. I had taught her that one.
And so I watched my last hope of getting to be early dwindle. Oh well, I thought, at least I know that this is a good idea. All the older kids are going for it.
It was quickly decided that Rain should go inside to be a double agent. I felt not a bit slighted because I had always wanted to be a double agent even since I had heard of them five seconds earlier.
“Hey, let’s go pretend like we’re breaking in the backdoor!” Keegan said.
“Ya, let’s go!” Andrew said.
“I wanted to be a double agent,” I said.
Andrew scowled, “What was that?”
“Backdoor!” I said, “Yay!”
We were soon at the backdoor, scuffling around for all we were worth.
Then we saw Arkadas; the Giebels’ spotted Australian cattle dog with jaws slightly less powerful than a trash compacter.
Another wordless conversation ensued.
Hi, Arkadas said.
Hi, Andrew said, would you be willing to bark at us so that the girls think we’re strange men trying to break in?
A sadistic smile came over Arkadas as well, and I noticed that the color crazy looked far better on a dog.
Gami would later say that she knew Arko was faking it. I would tell her that she was a little too smart for her own good and that she should stop asking questions and spoiling it for everyone else. Of course, that might have been another wordless conversation.
While Arko continued to snarl and bark, I had decided that it was time to speak up.
“Hey,” I said, “won’t the girls get suspicious if none of the guys are around? They might figure out who’s scuffling around and making dogs bark.”
“That’s smart,” Keegan said. I don’t know why he sounded surprised. “You go in and see what’s going on.”
So I did. That had been what I wanted all along. I had been getting bored with the outside job ever since I had discovered that there was an inside one. Once inside, I had been hoping to be able to crash on the Giebels’ couch, but was instead forced to listen to Strep and Rain’s makeshift battle plan.
“We’re gonna kick ‘em where it counts!” They said.
“Great,” I said.
It quickly grew boring pretending to be scared as Keegan and Andrew continued to shuffle outside, but things got interesting again when they threw in a twist—knocking on the front door.
“Hey,” Andrew said, “what are you girls up to?”
I, of course, let the slight on my masculinity slide for the sake of the joke, and Keegan and Andrew were hurriedly ushered in and informed of the situation.
“There are thieves outside!” Strep said.
Andrew and Keegan put on their pathetic attempts at scared faces. I was disgusted. They had obviously not practiced beforehand like I had at all. Then again, they didn’t have an older brother waiting around every corner to help them practice.
“Quick!” Keegan said, “I think I heard something outside.”
Candles were blown out and everyone dove behind a piece of furniture. I huddled with the girls behind the couch in the middle of the room, while Andrew and Keegan crouched in front of us by the window, but I tried to be near the older boys in case I was needed. I hoped I would be needed.
We boys were smiling at the fear in the room, until we began to sense just how frightened everyone was. These girls thought they were going to die! Did we really want to scar them like that?
“I’m scared!” Strep said from behind Rain.
“This is great!” I heard Andrew whisper, “We’re probably scarring them for life!”
“Ya,” Keegan said, “but we should probably stop. We don’t want them tattling to our parents.”
“Okay,” Andrew said, “let’s stand up and tell them it was a joke.”
I thought about mentioning the fact that they were right against the window and from where the girls were huddled in the middle of the room it might look like they were people standing up to break in through the window from the outside, but I thought better of it. I needed to learn that bigger kids knew what they were doing.
“It’s alright, girls,” Keegan said, standing up, “It’s only…”
Later that night, Andrew and I were getting ready for bed. “Is it louder when girls scream at the same time?” I asked.
“What?” Andrew said. I carefully mouthed the words for him again while he was looking at me. “Oh,” he said, “probably. That sounds like one of Newton’s laws of sound or something.”
I nodded, impressed at how my brother knew so much. “Do you think we should help replace the shattered windows?” I asked.
Andrew rolled his eyes. “Come on, Seth. What would Jesus do? I’m more concerned about Arkadas.”
“Ya,” I said, “Do you think he’ll ever stop whimpering and clawing at his ears?”
“I hope so,” Andrew said, “I didn’t mean for him to get caught up in all this. I always felt so bad whenever his head started twitching.”
“So,” I said as we crawled into our respective beds, “are we gonna talk about the fact that the girls turned out to be witches?”
Andrew shook his head. “I think everyone’s decided to leave that alone. But ya, that was the scariest part of the whole evening; the way the girls levitated and ran in the air like that. Best not to talk about it though. Maybe the girls don’t know we saw them use their magic.”
I nodded again. “Good night, Andrew,” I said.
“Good night, Seth,” he said.
“Hey, Andrew,” I said.
“Ya?” he said.
“What are we going to do tomorrow?”
“Well,” he said, “I was thinking we could build a tree house without any adult supervision in the bendy tree out front.”
“Me too!” I said.
A fresh blast of heat from the red desert of coals was just a little too warm to be welcome, even with the biting chill of oncoming night that lingered on Lenara’s half-roasted body. She briefly considered turning her backside toward the quivering embers, but considered how she would look warming her posterior at the bread-baking station, and dismissed the idea with a smirk at the private image.
Instead, she just decided to be glad it was her turn to monitor golden, glistening loaves that served as the main staple in the Defiants’ diet.
Supper had become more than the highlight of Lenara’s day; it was the only time besides when she trained with Sernah when she felt truly warm. Despite the fact that breakfast was typically heated as well, it was eaten hastily among the Defiants and usually wolfed down individually before any personal interaction was made; a quick, lonely stab of nourishment before the days’ chores began. Lunch was even worse. It was usually taken by each person in their respective packs to be eaten when hunger impeded further work.
But Lenara was a people person. She thrived on the camaraderie brought about by a meal spent more in discussion than consumption, and that only ever happened in Marbrook when it was time for supper.
Lenara’s nostrils suddenly flared as a fresh blast of warmth. The enticing smell of fresh bread, crusted to perfection, singed her nose with yeast-scent and heat, causing memories—both recent and barely-recalled—to bubble to her surface thoughts. Bread seemed to be the one uniting factor in her life.
She could remembered the smell from Frenter’s old hut; the old patriarch of the Saget River Village puttering around his tiny living quarters and humming some absent-minded tune as he stirred his famous tomato stew.
“The secret, dear child,” he had once confided in a much younger Lenara concerning his special recipe, “is letting people believe that there is a secret.”
Wave after wave had failed to subdue him, until the slow trickle of blood from the hypothermic corpses began to drift down toward the trampled site of Bacle’s deadly, stationary performance, creating a convex, conical carpet of blood, bodies, and ice at his dancing feet.
Suddenly, the veil of his fighting trance had begun to lift from Bacle’s vision as he had realized that no more enemies were forthcoming. Wary, and not a little proud of his impressive display of dominance, he had quickly swiveled his head to all sides to see what could have possibly brought sense to these monsters among men.
That had been when he saw the Beast.
And now, here they stood; Bacle, surrounded by the congealing evidence of his brutality, and the Beast, backed by a hundred his kind, was staring straight at Bacle from three meters away with something slightly more than a look of respect and a little less than one of admiration on his bestial face. In the short stalemate, Bacle found time to catch his shallow breath and to examine his attackers in depth.
He at once saw that the grandiose tales of the Pangaeans had, at the same time, been far-fetched as well as understated. No great defects, self-inflicted scarring, or fearsome war paint covered the paragons of human physique, and yet their awe-inspiring presence and solemn magnitude was only offset by the sense that they could, at any moment, leap upon unsuspecting prey. Intelligence fought with a thirst for battle behind their stoic, somewhat snarled expressions.
The all seemed to be regarding the gasping, blood-drenched with a certain respect, except for the Beast who simply nodded. Unsure what that meant, Bacle let the silence continue a few seconds longer while he continued to collect his thoughts and his breath, the frigid air stinging his throat and invigorating him in case of another attack.
Finally, the Beast uttered the wholly unsurprising string of grunts that were Bacle’s first introduction to the Pangaean tongue, and the order was apparently understood on his end because what had first appeared to be a backpack adding an extra bulge to the giant man’s fur cape suddenly released its hold from around the Beast’s tree-like neck and fell gently to the snow. Lifting itself from where it had landed, the backpack began to create a miniature moat around the Beast’s right side as it walked forward to receive instruction.
Bacle saw that the backpack was a young girl of about ten years with dark hair similar to her bearer’s and eyes of deepest blue that seemed to signify her as unique. Despite himself, the general nearly laughed out loud at how ridiculously scrawny the girl appeared amid the wolf-men.
Then something happened that did make Bacle laugh.
“We welcome you to our conquest, fierce warrior,” the girl said in flawless Atlantean at a prompt from the Beast, “Please do us the courtesy of letting us know if you will be fighting for us or against us as we subdue this land that we may know whether to strike you down or welcome you as one of us.”
The single guffaw of amusement that escaped the incredulous Bacle seemed to determine his fate in the hands of many, and at least half of the wolf-men began to surge forward at what they took to be a blatant insult. But, shockingly, as Bacle prepared himself for the onslaught, a simple gesture and glare from the girl stopped them in their snow-covered tracks, eliciting another unbelieving smile from the general. A few angry grunts from the girl sent her apparent underlings cowering back into formation.
“It’s alright,” she assured Bacle, turning back to face him, “my people do not understand your displays of…” she paused for a second, “funnying. Allow me begin diplomacy.”
Bacle was still in shock at the words emerging from the girl’s mouth as he tentatively let his blade drop to his side. Aside from her slip-up on ‘funnying’, the little hide-covered queen was speaking as well as Bacle supposed any young Atlantean noblewoman her age might.
“I’m Bacle,” he finally replied, unsure as to whether he should be looking at the Backpack or the Beast.
