Previously: Eden wakes up in a strange place that isn’t home and encounters a strange boy.
*
Prompt 2: Authority
“What sane kidnapper would leave clues for us to get out, anyway?”
Eden let out an irritated huff. “If you’re not going to be helpful, then just keep quiet.” She continued to rummage through the room. There was a sullen moment of silence. Then Eden heard Abel shuffle back to the door and fumble with the locks. She gave up on the locked cupboard and wandered over. “What are you doing?”
Abel had taken off his earring and was picking the lock with the tip of the feather. Or attempting to, rather. The door did not have a simple locking mechanism – rather, it looked to be a complex patterning of gears, nuts and bots. It reminded Eden of the insides of a clock or watch.
“Just… trying something,” he mumbled.
“Isn’t that pretty important to you?” Eden said. “It’s the thing that lets you time-travel, right?” She’d manage to wheedle out the purpose of the glowing-blue-feather-earring sometime ago. Turns out that Abel came from a tribe of time-travellers. Who knew, huh?
“The thing that stops me from time-travelling,” Abel corrected absently.
“Yeah, that,” Eden said impatiently. “Why can’t you get rid of it, and just time-travel out of here? Back in time before you – we – get kidnapped? Anyway, how does this time-travel business even work?”
“I don’t know much about it either,” Abel admitted. When Eden looked incredulous, he snapped, “Don’t look at me like that! All I know is that I can’t remove the seal myself, just that someone else has to do it!
“The seal is so that we don’t trap ourselves in eternal childhood,” he continued, poking around the lock. “In our hands it’s like steel, but it snaps like a branch when someone else does it—“
“Then what are we waiting for?!” Eden gasped, reaching for the amulet. “Come on, give it here— I’ll snap it for you, then you can go back in time and stop all this from happening!”
“No, no no no wait—”
“What’s there to wait for? It’s a brilliant plan!”
“No!”
“Abel!”
“Eden!”
They scuffled, Abel holding the brilliant blue feather out of Eden’s reach, but Eden’s superior height won out in the end. She held the feather triumphantly in her hand. “The answer to all our problems!”
“NOOO,” Abel’s face was the perfect picture of pure panic. “I’M TOO YOUNG TO BE MARRIED.”
Eden made a face. “What?”
Abel grabbed the amulet back; Eden let him have it. “It’s like some kind of binding vow,” he babbled, stuffing the feather into his pocket. For something so sacred, he sure did treat it pretty irreverently. “You get tied to the person for the rest of their lives and you can’t be separated and stuff or something bad will happen and—”
Eden raised her eyebrows.
“I don’t know!” Abel wailed. “They were supposed to teach us this stuff next year! Next year! I’m too young to be married. I’m too young to die!”
“Calm down,” Eden said.
“You calm down!”
The door rattled. Both of them tensed, then scrambled away as far from the door as they could go.
Eden pushed Abel behind her. Abel made a noise of protest.
“Shut up and stay back,” Eden murmured. “I’m older.”
Before Abel could protest further, the door slammed open. Men filed into the room – if Abel had to describe them, ‘sinister’ was probably the word. One man stood out in particular as he walked forward, flanked by who appeared to be his subordinates.
“I am in charge here,” the man said. Abel thought that he was smiling, but the scar on his lip twisted the expression, so he couldn’t tell for sure. “…we only want the Traveller. Which of you is it?”
“What do you want with us?” Eden demanded, ignoring his question.
“You misunderstand,” the man said, hands held out placatingly. “It’s not the both of you we want. We just want the one with the gift. The other one goes free.”
Abel tensed. ‘She’s going to give me up and escape,’ he thought hysterically. His hands fisted in the back of her shirt, almost like a desperate plea for her not to throw him to the wolves. He was going to be sold and bought and used, he was never going to see the village again—
In his panic, Abel must have missed part of the conversation, because in the next moment…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
“She must be the Traveller,” the man was saying. “Then… we don’t need you anymore.”
A shot rang out. Eden was screaming. Fingers wet and slippery with his own blood, Abel struggled to reached out for her. She was still screaming as he snapped his seal with her hands.
Abel was gone before he heard the next shot.
*
Once, when Abel was eight, his mentor had been mid-sentence when she just… crumpled..
The class erupted into a flurry of whispers when moments passed and the missus did not pick herself up, assuage their fears and cheerfully carry on. “Is she sleeping?” Cain had stage-whispered to Abel, who bit his lip and shrugged. He felt anxious.
“She’s probably hurt,” Abel stood and declared loudly. His classmates turned to look at him, falling silent. His insides quivered from the attention.
“Yeah!” A familiar voice piped up. Cain stood to join Abel, casting him a reassuring grin. “And if she’s hurt, we gotta help, right guys? Just like the Headmaster said!” The class murmured their agreement and Abel couldn’t help feeling relieved. Cain was the brave one, not him.
Before the two of them could check on the missus, however, adults swept into the room. Headmaster was one of them. He explained that the missus was going away for a while as the adults very carefully bundled the missus’ limp form on a gurney and carried her out. A mister carried on with the lesson promptly, to the chagrin of a dozen small eight and nine year olds hoping that the absence of missus meant playtime.
A few days later, Cain hugged Abel and told him that the missus wasn’t coming back. The newly wedded Missus’ husband had been attacked by a beast. He didn’t make it and, as such, neither did the missus, whose life was intwined with her husband’s.
As he lay in bed, Cain pressed warm and close to his back, Abel understood something very significant. Just as he had watched the thread that was missus’ life being snipped so effortlessly by the hand of fate, he understood that his life was very much the same as well.
He wondered where would a person go when they were dead.
He wondered if there was anyone he could life without, who he would rather die with rather than carry on living without.
Abel didn’t get much sleep that night.
[previous] [first] [next]
