Chapter 2
When I wake up, my head’s spinning and I realize I’m incredibly parched. Oh, and did I mention that I’m being secured by metal to the walls of whatever building- she called it “Rico”-something – that Kilo carried me to? And I’m blindfolded. (Maybe they’re not total barbarians. They have metal, somehow. They must have to venture out of the jungle to a mine way out there, where the plague must not have affected, because these bonds look new).
I’m only awake for a few minutes when I hear voices outside the building, arguing as quietly as they can but not quite reaching the level they must’ve wanted, because I can hear them through the walls. (Yay for superhuman hearing. Note the sarcasm, though yes, the ability is very occasionally useful).
“You have to,” says a man.
“No.”
“You will do it and play your role well. Your grandfather would approve.”
“No.”
“You would do well to listen to your elders, impetuous one. I could force you to do it.”
The other voice shakes a bit, and I’m shocked when I realize that it’s Arcya talking to the mysterious man.
“You wouldn’t dare do that.”
“Wouldn’t I?” replied the first voice, and I hear a sudden thud against the edge of the building. “Do it within this upcoming week, or suffer the… consequences.”
She must’ve shoved him out of the way, because the next second, she comes in from a door to the right of me. (Unfortunately for them, the blindfold does not deafen me).
“Okay, so, I managed to secure your release. And there are people you should meet waiting for you out there. Everything will make sense soon, I promise. But for now, you just need to go out there. What’s your name?”
“Sarah,” I say.
I try to pinpoint the location of her voice before she stops speaking, but her voice is resistant to that, and I’m still blindfolded.
I blink, and in that short period of time, she’s unfastened my bonds and gone pretty far away. Actually, her breathing is so far away sounding, I can tell that in the span of a few seconds, she ran to the other side of the building. “How- why- what?”
Arcya pokes me in the back, hard, and comes around to the front of me after untying my blindfold. She says semi-quietly, but also proudly, “Well, let’s just say this. While I was talking and you were trying to pinpoint my location with your ears- good try, by the way – I was actually standing behind you. I can mimic sounds such as the door opening, and also throw my voice wherever I wish. It’s a natural talent. Plus, I made it sound like a different door was opening at the same time the door I went through opened.”
Hmm. Interesting. I see the door she went through and everything. What about that conversation from earlier, though?
“Really?” I realize I sound almost too skeptical and work to become more cunning.
“Well, what about other human’s voices?”
Her face stiffens, and her manner becomes slightly more guarded. “Perhaps. If I tried.”
I continue, “Maybe a man?”
“Maybe,” she replies coldly.
I nod, keeping my face impassive, although I can tell that THAT particular conversation was not her talking to herself. Then who was that man?
“Go in front of me,” she says sharply, and I can tell that she wants to distract me from her strange ability and the conversation she must know I overheard.
I stand up slowly, walking out the door with her closely trailing me. When I come out, I see Lily, Ben, and Aria waiting there, also trailed by their own guards and looking just as confused as I’m feeling inside.
“Welcome to the village of Azrolm. As former prisoners, you will be watched carefully and work for the good of the village. You will adhere to the rules and customs of Azrolm, including not hunting tigers, not harming others with words or physical attacks, and will undergo training before you are released into the village completely on your own. The people who are trailing you will be your mentors,” says a tall man, less brawny than Kilo but with authority in his voice.
Arcya looks like she can’t decide whether to be pleased, annoyed, or angry. So she tries to do all three at once (which doesn’t work at all, in case you were wondering).
A quick glance around shows that the other mentors are either completely happy or very… not happy. I guess Aria and I were the lucky ones, Ben has a boy-chaser, and poor Lily has a mentor who doesn’t want to be a mentor at all, judging by her scowl.
To be more specific... Lily has a black-haired girl who is superbly disdainful of her. The black-haired girl has a sneer on her face like she smells dung under her nose. Aria has a short, stocky brunette girl who is beaming at her and chattering away rapidly. Ben has a tall, gorgeous brunette who looks extremely happy (almost too much so) to be around him.
Actually, she’s more than gorgeous. Her brown hair falls in natural curls down near her waist, she has soft, full lips, her blue eyes are just the right shade to complement her hair, and her smile is truly stunning. That’s not to mention how skinny she is. Note to self re: why the fixation on her beauty? I shouldn’t care..
“Follow your mentors now, and they will begin your training by showing you around the main parts of Azrolm,” says the tall man.
I start to follow Arcya, and she simply points out buildings as we pass them, walking in nonsensical patterns.
“The main things down on the ground are our prison, the spring we get water from, and some other buildings for sick or injured people. But the real village is mainly in the trees… which means your first lesson is tree-climbing.” She says the last sentence with a slightly nasty smile on her face, like she thinks I’m going to - insert either ‘fail’ or ‘fall’, whichever you prefer-.
“Oh, tree-climbing? I don’t know whether I could EVER do that,” I say sarcastically, sizing up the nearby trees. I walk to the largest tree within sight, vaulting it like a pro. I climb up the first ten branches (which is no picnic to do) in a matter of a few minutes.
She has a slightly disappointed look on her face, but a grin at the same time.
“Lesson one complete. Wrong tree, though.”
I jump back down and follow her to a monster of a tree, even larger than the one I just vaulted. When I walk up to it and begin climbing, she stops me for a second with only twelve short words.
“That was a joke,” she says, laughing hysterically. “You didn’t actually need to climb a tree!”
I resume shimmying up the tree, annoyed with her but determined to still have my fun.
Then there are two of us climbing up the tree, swinging from branch to branch like monkeys, and when I reach the foliage, I force myself through it.
We clamber onto the top of the tree at almost the exact same time, but I hoist myself up a few seconds before she does. Arcya laughs before starting to climb back down. I follow her to the bottom.
“Now what?” I ask.
Arcya’s panting too hard to respond. Arcya walks back around the tree with a guarded expression on her face, pointing out a part of the tree that looks identical to the rest of it.
I stare at it, utterly confused. She lightly shoves that part of the tree. She must have lost her senses.
I gasp when, instead of getting a massive bruise on her shoulder, she forces a giant door to swing open.
“Welcome,” she says, “to Azrolm.”
I suppose when most people think of living inside a tree, they think dark, smelly, and cramped. This was the opposite. It was relatively spacious, with the huts looking almost identical to the outdoor ones. I guess it was pretty, but to me, it just screamed “flammable everything”.
“This is just the beginning. The leaders live here. Time to go into the actual base,” Arcya says, walking straight forward.
“This isn’t the base?”
She laughs, pushing open another door.
“Oh,” I say. This is more like what I thought it’d be. “What happened to the village being in the trees?”
“Oh. Well, I guess I meant in between the trees,” she says with a grin.
There’s a decent amount of greenery in the village. About a hundred huts and what appear to be fields to grow food in (I think they’re called ‘crop fields’) are scattered throughout it, far enough apart that it’s not totally cramped but also close enough together to be easily defendable.
Also, a natural spring bubbles up nearby, easily accessible and flowing at a steady pace but not so close that it runs through the village.
There are no trees taking up ground space inside the perimeter of the village itself- instead, the trees form the walls of the village, and flashes of sunlight through the foliage temporarily blind me every few minutes while I gaze around the village in awe. They must work very hard to keep their ground free of weeds, because it looks like normal grass to me.
Arcya laughs again, this time at the look on my face, and shows me to a small-but-cozy hut.
“This is all yours,” she says. “When you hear a gong, come out of your hut and go to the largest one in the village for dinner.”
I nod and she leaves, allowing me to explore the house. It has two rooms - the room you walk into (which has a very tiny wooden couch) and a bedroom (which has something like a wardrobe and a bed). When I fling open the wardrobe, I look at the first thing that catches my eye, a dress, with distaste. On it is pinned a note. ‘For special occasions only, unless you want to be attacked in your sleep and maimed or otherwise harmed. Happy move-in! Arcya’.
I laugh, checking for other things and finding a shirt with pants to match, not dissimilar from the pair I saw Arcya wear.
When I slip on my new outfit, it surprisingly fits me almost perfectly (the pants are slightly too short to be pants but not short enough to qualify as shorts). The outfit still manages to be practical and comfortable, despite the sort of rustic prettiness, and I can tell that wearing this outfit all day would be extremely easy.
Before I have time to enjoy my new outfit for too long, a large gong makes me realize that she was serious about the gong being a dinner bell.
The noise echoes and vibrates through my hut until I snap out of my strange stupor and walk out into the village.
Chapter 3
I can’t see any particularly large buildings, so I do what every sensible (and starved) person would do. I follow my nose to a building that seems even smaller than the other huts, if possible. When I tried to open the door, it wouldn’t budge until a woman walked out.
She has a fearsome scowl on her face that I can’t resist wondering if Arcya is her relative, whether the woman’s daughter or niece.
“No food directly from the kitchen,” she spits, whirling back around and slamming the door.
Whew. That was a close one. I’m walking away when the door opens. I turn, only to get a bucketful of water in the face.
She mutters something about “Arcya needs to teach her a lesson” before slamming the door with just as much vigor and energy as she had before.
My hair drips while my stomach grumbles, and instead of following my nose, this time I follow the other people, who look at me weirdly. I guess either I’ll have to get used to that or they’ll have to get used to me. (By the way, the second option is probably not realistic at all. In case you didn’t know that I’m strange).
I wait for a bit when I see the hall they’re going into, just long enough for the sun to dry my hair. When I walk into the food hall, pretty much everyone’s already eating, and I awkwardly grab a plate, load it with this weird mush they call food, and sit down next to Ben, Lily, and Aria.
At least, I try to sit down next to them. Before I can do anything but smile at my friends and begin to say hi, Arcya grabs my arm, tugging me towards a head table that must be made up of the important people in the village.
“You have to greet them first,” she hisses through her teeth. “And anyways, you have to sit with me, and I’m not sitting with your friends.”
Bewildered, I look at her, even as she propels me forward. “What do I say?”
“‘You must forgive me for my lateness. May the blessings of Ajuhn be bestowed on you. Atry omnizar’. Then they’ll tell you ‘May the blessings of Ajuhn be bestowed on you. Atry omnizar’ and they’ll bow to you and you bow back, then you come and sit with me,” she whispers in my ear.
“Atry-whatsit?” I whisper back, but by then, I’m already in front of them and I’m desperately racking my brains in an attempt to remember what to say. So, instead, I do the gist of what she said, just more flowery.
“I humbly beseech of you forgiveness for my lateness. It is unforgivable. May the blessings of Ajuhn be bestowed on your deserving personages. Atrey omnizer.”
It may be a bit of a stretch, and yeah, I guess it’s ‘omnizar’ not ‘omnizer’ and ‘atry’ not ‘atrey’, but I think they liked it because they smile at me before giving the rote response Arcya had told me they would.
“May the blessings of Ajuhn be bestowed on you. Atry omnizar,” says the oldest one, bowing in sync with the other ones.
I bow back and go to Arcya’s table, which has a few people that aren’t talking whatsoever.
“That was a disaster,” sighs Arcya.
“What’s with the ‘blessings of Ajuhn’ and ‘atry omnizar’?” I curiously ask.
Although she still looks slightly annoyed, she relaxes slightly when she proudly replies, “Ajuhn founded our village, so if you have his blessings you’re supposed to have good luck. Atry omnizar is a respectful goodbye, almost like saying that you regret it but, if the other person is so kind as to let you go, you must leave. If you’re the second person that says it, it’s giving you permission to leave and saying goodbye as well.”
“So you have your own language?”
“No, just a few words that we use in place of English, which Ajuhn spoke as well. It makes it simpler to say long, polite things when you have just two or three words that mean the same thing.”
I nod, reaching to take a bite of the food. My stomach turns and I begin trying not to cough and splatter the mush all over the table. It tastes almost as bad as eating salt and sugar together in one bite.
A glance over to Lily, Ben and Aria’s table is enough to prove that they’re having the same reaction; Aria, the one who can stomach the most disgusting concoctions the best out of everyone in the group, looks squeamish. The others are all in varying stages of nausea.
Arcya and the rest of the villagers, however, are having no trouble eating the mush.
When I’ve finally eaten all of my mush (which required alternately telling myself there would be no midnight snacks and trying to pretend that it was something at least semi appetizing), I see Arcya walking away with her wooden plate and I follow her, my own plate in hand.
Arcya puts it on another table (wooden, of course) and walks up to the head table again. I wait for a minute, watching to see what she does. It’s just the ‘blessings of Ajuhn’ again and ‘atry omnizar’, so as soon as she’s left the building, I imitate what she did and follow her out of the hall and into the still sunny village area.
I lose her for a second, but she reappears a second later. I notice a bulge in her shirt I never saw back in the food hall when she goes through the tree-door thing we went through to get into camp.
Arcya turns around impatiently, just as I’m about to catch up to her. “Go back to your hut. The curfew starts soon.”
“Then why are you still out?”
“I said, go back to your hut.”
People sometimes tell me I have a death wish. I just think I’m incredibly stubborn.
“No.”
She sighs, sprinting away. I follow her until she disappears around the edge of a tree. I strain to hear her, hearing only the sound of splashing water off to the side. Maybe she thinks the sound of the water will cover the sound of her walking?
I walk towards the sound, stumbling through foliage until I come into a clearing. When I look around, I realize I’m on the edge of a cliff.
Arcya’s there too, primed as if she’s ready to jump.
Before I can say anything, she jumps into the nothingness of the seemingly endless abyss!