Going down in flames...

[The Cinderella Man]

((Closed to Hana.))

Don’t count the teeth of a gifted horse...

It was a sound philosophy, the first rule in the handbook of his ilk, and Victor abided by it this time around as well. Because life didn’t present you with a multitude of options when you were a homeless prizefighter whose fighting record started to count more losses then victories. People had a subtle title, calling themselves wanderers or adventurers when they found themselves in similar position, but down in the essence they were all the same outcasts with sky for a roof and a bench for a bedroll. Bums with a title. Such a life wasn’t really life at all; it was a constant struggle to make the ends meet and oftentimes failing in that simple task.

That was why when he was offered a seemingly tedious job, Victor accepted it with no questions asked. He was hired by a group of shady looking merchants to transport some goods from Radasanth outskirts to a farm estate near the foot of the Jagged Mountains, east of the impressive Corone capitol. His employers failed to fit the archetype though, their faces unshaved and rugged, their attires deviating from the pompous prissiness that most merchants insisted on. On top of that, the amount of money offered seemed ludicrous – five hundred gold pieces at the spot and another five hundred once he delivers the goods.

They had only one request; the seals on the crates had to be untouched once he reached the destination and he couldn’t know what the contents were. And though the knavish appearance and the clandestine reasons were enough to make even the most ignorant pause and ponder about the ramifications of accepting such a job, Victor had no such issues. The money was good, the task was simple and the fact that he might be smuggling illegal substances failed in comparison with his empty pockets. Besides, he was just a middleman, making an episodic appearance in a burlesque that existed before his appearance and would proceed long after he’s gone. And the law always tended to go for the big fishes in the pond.

The day around him was ominous. The clouded sky insisted on being the harbinger of bad things, turning the already monotonous stone streets into a duller shade of gray. People were scuttling through the streets like enshrouded ghosts, protecting themselves from the harsh wind that came tumbling down the Jagged Mountains, bringing the flavor of the snowy peaks in tow. The storm was gathering but it was an occurrence typical for this time of year, making the clouds bulk and disperse within hours. The prizefighter hoped they would do the latter soon or he would wind up being drenched to the bones by the time he reached his destination. As if to foil his positive thinking, the thunder rumbled like a belly of a gargantuan beast up north and the wind slapped him once again.

The weather wasn’t his most prominent problem right now though. The merchants provided the horse, the carriage, the goods, but failed to put the harness on the beast, thinking that Victor would be more then able to do that on his own. Victor was thinking the same... until he gave it a try.

“The headgear attaches to... to the bridle that is tied with... this here thing that should pass through... ah, yes, through this loop and beyond the chinch whatever...” his mind tried to describe as his hands worked on harnessing the tranquil animal. The horse neighed once or twice if he would pull on the leather straps too hard or tried to force a strap where it didn’t belong, but in the end Victor managed to get the job done. “And it only took me, what? Half an hour. Sheesh, serves me right for not paying attention when my dad used to do it.”

Eventually, the prizefighter climbed onto the wagon and took the reins in his hands. They seemed to be slanted to one side and not attached to the headgear at the same height, but that didn’t matter right now. He liked to improvise; he would deal with the problems as he went. The leather reins slapped the horse moderately, Victor clucking the beast forwards, but even as he did so the binds that he so expertly set up detached and made the horse step forwards without the carriage in tow. The beast stopped, shook its head almost in a mockery, making Victor roll his eyes and rub his temples. He would be better of carrying the crates with his hands.

[Hana]

Hana almost felt like a child again.

She remembered once, when she had been four or five years, her mother, Ulani, took her on a trip, just the two of them. Ulani brought the child to her grandparents’ home, in a large camp brimming with the spice farmers of Fallien and their families. Ulani’s sisters, who by then had had children of their own, treated Ulani with a cold courtesy they believed to be deserving of someone who’d married a foreigner and left, but were charmed by Ulani’s spunky, dark-skinned little girl. Hana was fascinated by her beautiful aunts (who were, nevertheless, hardly as gorgeous as her mother in her eyes), but intimidated by their children.

Her little cousins stared at their newfound relative for quite some time. In that time, Hana felt like a spectacle in one of those gypsy caravans that her older sister, Aysha, said would take her away if she didn’t behave. Even so, it was not in her nature to take haughtiness sitting down, and before long she was running around with the best of them, the leader in a heated game of tag.

This time, however, she found herself doubting her ability to conquer the social scene. She could hardly conquer the weather, and found herself constantly trying to ignore the chill settling on her bare stomach. Early on in her journey, she’d been forced to put on her coat, and even now was tempted to actually button up the thing. A brutal wind had decided to assault her on her very first day away from Fallien, whipping about in a way that made Hana’s multitude of tiny braids smack her repeatedly on the sides of her face. She shivered and hugged the coat closer to her body.

Despite her inability to adapt, she felt like a child because she was once again put in the middle of an unfamiliar group of faces – rather pale faces, at that! Pale, and exotic, thought the young Fallien-born girl as she passed several other people on the paved road leading up to a tall, striking city a mile or so further. She heard a name tossed around – albeit in more accents than she’d ever heard before, even as a trader’s daughter – that said she was on her way to Radasanth. Glancing around at the plethora of warriors, merchants, traders and nobles clustered on the sides of the road to escape the wind, Hana realized that she’d learned more about this continent from eavesdropping than from what the captain had told her.

She’d had a fine trip across the water between Fallien and Corone, enjoying the sound and feel of the ocean and sharing her story with more travelers than she cared to count. After telling them about her intention to broaden her horizons and make some money for herself, she couldn’t help but add just how much knowledge she already possessed, just by listening to her father, Taye, speak of his former life in B’nesh—

Just then she heard a loud noise, made in protest, it seemed. As she buttoned up her coat over her bare stomach, she saw a carriage just up ahead. Not much of a stylish way of transport, but it looked sturdy, like her father’s handmade carts back home. The driver in this case was obviously frustrated – he was a muscular-looking fellow, brown-haired and pale – these people were all starting to look alike! His carriage’s horse was bound to run off in disgust if he couldn’t be fastened correctly.

Hana felt a twinge of empathy as she watched the man massaging his forehead. She had had plenty of trouble when trying to hitch up the horses at home when their spices were due for the traders. She’d even almost run over her father, once.

“Hey,” she called out, unsure of whether he could hear her in the violent wind threatening to worsen. “You need some help?”

Without waiting for an answer, Hana set herself upon the task of refastening the reins in their proper places. Within a few minutes her fingers worked fast, looping the reins back through their metal rings at the bit until they were both at the same height. As soon as she finished, her brown eyes caught onto another mistake – the binds around the horse’s midsection weren’t inserted where they should have been.

Chuckling aloud, she looked up at the man in the seat and grinned. “No wonder this old mount keeps running off! You haven’t harnessed him to your carriage.” She tilted her head to the side, as if trying to see past him. “You need some help binding this thing, or would you like to use your expertise again?” she asked teasingly.

[The Cinderella Man]

Victor was a boxer and as such probably not the brightest star in the sky. Smart people, after all, didn’t pick a getting-hit-in-the-head business as the profession in which they tried to build a career. But even his rigid, rather simplistic cogitation has been around the block, it journeyed with him from one Corone town to the other, and the conclusion was always the same. People suck. If you’re bleeding to death on the hot cobblestone road, chances were you’re going to be robbed of your boots before somebody would even ask what’s wrong with you. Minding your own business wasn’t just a skill that townsfolk had, it was a goddamn religion and people cherished it conscientiously. And even if they did actually opt to assist you in one way or the other, there was always a catch. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

That was why, when he was approached by the peculiar, coffee-skinned woman, Victor’s first thought was a question, wondering what she wanted in return. The fact that she was a woman failed to dissuade the prizefighter from his usual mentations. “A woman can get to you in a thousand different ways, Vic, my boyo!” Arslan, his boxing trainer always liked to say, and he was damn right. It was a woman (though at the time she was so much more, an angel, a saint, a goddess. Amen.) that got him into fighting, and it was that same woman that in the end tore his heart out and let it bleed on the smelly canvas of the boxing ring. Delilah wasn’t an angel, she wasn’t a saint. She was the knife that still stood lodged somewhere in between his shoulder blades.

The woman before him, however, seemed to be out to prove him wrong. She got to work resolutely, her fingers moving the apparel with a purpose and trained skill, and in a matter of minutes the horse was once again harnessed. This time the right way, it seemed, and it didn’t make sense to Victor. People usually helped you after they milked you for some returning favor. That was why his usual slightly frowned expression changed into one of mild puzzlement as he descended from the carriage.

“I... uh... Sure. Some help would definitely be appreciated, young miss. Last time I tried to do it, it took me half an hour and...” he paused as he got closer to her, his smirking face looking down at her tanned visage. “Well, I guess you saw what happened.”

The closer he got to her, the weirder she seemed. Now he could notice the myriad of miniscule braids that formed her hairdo, the piercing through the eyebrow that must’ve hurt like a bitch when she made it. He was only in Fallien once, following Doji Kadenzaa on her own personal crusade, but he was rather certain that this girl was fresh out of the desert realm in the south. Of course, he thought, that explained the whole shebang. She wasn’t from around here and therefore she didn’t fit the profile that years of plodding rigorously chiseled into his mind. But like the horse and carriage and this easy-pickings job, she too was an unexpected gift and he wasn’t keen on prying into the reasons for her benevolence. Instead he let her work, sticking his hands into the pockets of his black leather coat and pulling it closer to his body.

The chocolate-tanned lass certainly knew what she was doing, he would give her that much. She knew what went where and about three strong wind gusts after she begun, his wagon was finally ready to roll. He figured somewhere in all the tying and strapping, she was bound to fire the usual request for something or other as a payment for her services, but there was no such thing. That consequently made Victor actually feel like he owed her something, because the balance in his head wasn’t used to such benefaction.

“I’ll be damned,” he finally spoke again, taking the horse by the bridle and pulling it forwards just enough to see the carriage behind it move as well. “I guess it’s easier to do it properly when you actually know what you’re doing.”

The sky above them rolled another thunder down the Jagged Mountains, the clouds above them turning midday into evening with their glumness. The rain seemed to be hanging right above their heads, itching to shower the land bountifully. Most people got this message that the nature was sending, fleeing from the streets and withdrawing into the coziness of their homes. The girl’s braids flew rampant in sync with their coats that got tousled by the fierce wind. He could’ve just bow his head like a gent, thank her and try to outrun the rain (as unlikely as it was). But the feeling of debt combined with her intriguing exterior forced him to do otherwise.

“Say, you wouldn’t be interested in earning five hundred gold pieces in a hurry?” And only when he spoke those words, he realized how wrong they could be interpreted. He decided to remedy this before he got a slap in the face and a kick in the groin. “I... uhm... I have to deliver this cargo to an estate a couple of hours of riding towards the east, and as you could already notice, horses and carriages aren’t exactly my...expertise. We’d be back in Radasanth before nightfall if all goes well.”

[Hana]

Even smack dab in the middle of the spicefields of Fallien, Hana wasn’t so isolated that she had never seen someone more pale-skinned than herself. Of course, most of the people she knew were lighter than she was. The looks she had inherited from her father had associated her with words like ‘chocolate’ and ‘russet,’ shades of brown rarely seen even in Fallien, where the peoples’ skin were burned dark by the sun.

Every now and then, however, there came one or two – sometimes even an entire caravan – of pale-faced traders looking to do business with Hana’s father, Taye. Pale-skinned, all even lighter than the golden Fallien dwellers, and every trader could hardly bear the heat on their backs. Some even fainted. Hana’s family chided the newcomers for their lack of intelligence when it came to being well prepared. Without the proper coverings, their skin would surely peel underneath the unforgiving Fallien sun! Even so, most of them were invited to stay at Hana’s home to recuperate from sunstroke, and each time, the young girl observed them studiously. Now she saw the same likeness in the man before her.

He was much taller than she was, like most of the people she’d seen on this continent, taller by a foot, at least. And he was dressed as though Corone were about to go through a heavy snowfall, though the sky above them didn’t dissuade her from thinking it just might happen. His dark coat matched the color of his hair and his eyes, deep brown and trying to hide his mild curiosity as he glanced at the braids on her head, her multiple piercings, the dark skin. Hana smiled again as she gave the reins one last tug to make sure. She certainly was a unique person in these parts, just like she had been back home. She imagined how the man’s mouth might drop at the sight of her tattoo and less-than-typical clothing.

At the rate the wind was going, he might get to see them anyhow, what with her partially unbuttoned coat coming undone in the gale. The black girl stroked the side of the restless old horse’s neck, trying to soothe him so as to keep him from spooking in the violent wind, as she listened to the dark-haired man’s offer.

“Five hundred?” she said, obviously attracted to the idea. Less than a few hours in the Corone countryside, and she’d already been offered a job? Julian will be eating his own words, she thought gleefully. Her brother had never had much confidence in her as an intelligent traveler and free agent.

And, well, she was clearly better than this guy at handling a horse and carriage. This was precisely her area, and after fifteen or so years of working with both horses and carts, her knowledge ought to pay off.

“That would be great!” she answered loudly, trying to speak over the whistle of the wind, her hair thrashing about. “Money is what I came here to make.” Patting the horse on its haunches, she stepped forward to the much taller man before her and shook his hand ardently. “Lehana Sinji, but Hana is better. Don’t have to spend so much time wrapping your tongue around the consonants,” she added with a grin, but it soon vanished as she felt something wet on her forehead, Looking up, she could see drops of rain landing sparsely on the ground, the clouds bleak and heavy with an impending shower.

“We should get moving,” Hana said to the man, scaling the side of the carriage’s seat and sitting on the opposite side. “I hope this thing is built better than my dad’s. Sitting on carts always makes my butt sore by the end of it,” she remarked candidly. Though there was a little hood over most of the seat, she didn’t expect to stay entirely dry, and pulled her coat over her head and shoulders a bit, exposing her stomach and allowing the cold to seep in.

She didn’t entirely mind, though. When one has spent her entire life with a brutal sun beating down on her skin, it is refreshing to experience even a chilly blast of wind and rain.

[The Cinderella Man]

Victor considered telling Hana about the other requisition his employers made, but decided that she didn’t need to know that their cargo is probably not fresh carrots and tomatoes in crates. Given her enthusiasm and rather extrovert demeanor, she was bound to pry deeper into the matter – like women usually did – and before long, he would become curious under the tide of her questions. And that is what he didn’t want to be. As it was right now, he was playing ignorant and that was the kind of attitude that got the job done. Or got a person killed. He hoped for the former.

She shook his hand with substantial vigor and strength and it surprised the prizefighter. His sister Yavannha – who was growing up to be quite a philosopher back in Scara Brae and somewhat of a bitch as well – always liked to say that you could judge a person by their handshake. If it’s limp and uninterested, the person is weak-willed. If it’s weak and sallow, the person is prissy and too big for one's breeches. If it’s strong and fervid – like Lehana’s clearly was – the person is bound to be bold and self-confident. Victor mostly called it baloney because the method was mostly hit-or-miss, but in this instance it certainly seemed true because the woman was already up in the carriage seat, speaking about her butt and how it had a tendency to get sore after long rides.

“A damn shame,” the boxer allowed a rather jesting thought, his mind replaying the image of her climbing up on the wagon. “Since it’s not really a bad tail end. Not too bad at all.”

None of that came out though, not in a form of a smirk and definitely not in spoken words. He maybe was a man and somewhat of a bum, but one didn’t have to be a knight to have manners. Instead he climbed up next to her, eyeing the bulldog clouds that started doing their job, announcing that there is a very good possibility that they would be drenched by the time they left the outskirts of Radasanth.

“Well, pleasure to meet you, Hana, and I’m not just saying that. I’m Victor Callahan,” he spoke once he got settled in the seat. “As for the wagon, I have no idea. They gave me the horse, the wheels and the cargo and told me where to take it. I guess we’re about to find out if it makes a smooth ride.”

It didn’t. Even if the sky didn’t unleash cats and dogs on them, the trucking of the carriage down the cobbles wasn’t too comfy at all. And when they left the city limits and the slick stone turned into boggy dirt, it became even less of a pleasurable ride. Because of the fierce wind, the rain didn’t fall; it cut its way through the air at a mean angle, slapping their faces with every gust. Of course, the whistle of the wind and the rapping of the thick raindrops on the canvas of their wagon strangled every attempt at dialogue, further amplifying the misery of the pair. And suddenly the five hundred gold pieces didn’t seem like too much for this job. There was nothing that Victor wanted to do more then get out of the soaked shirt that clung to his bulk beneath his coat, getting more itchy and chaffing with every thought of a fireplace and a roof over his head. And given the duration of their journey and the humdrum rain-soaked environment around them, such thoughts weren’t few and far between.

In between mental bitching that his mind did, he vaguely wondered how was Hana handling this. Compared to the dry heat of the sandy dunes, this kind of environment must have been a significant deviation from what she was used to. He wanted to ask her about it, but a thunder crashed so close it made him wince, dissuading him from any inquiry for the time being.

Luckily for Victor’s rapidly degrading mood, the stormy clouds that looked so ominous above them dispersed just as fast as they gathered about an hour before. The rain stopped almost as if somebody turned it off, introducing the sun through a crack in the gray dome. It came and went, beaming over the sopping earth, but it was a harbinger of kinder weather. It did little to aid the soaked pair, but it was a welcome change from the forbidding overcast that seemed to be moving further south. Victor ran his fingers through his hair rapidly, shaking off some of the dampness and once again thinking that it was a wise decision to get a haircut about a week ago.

“Gods, I thought it would never stop,” he spoke, his voice finally unhindered by the ruckus of the storm. “I guess you aren’t used to this kind of weather. You’re from Fallien, right?”

He looked at the peculiar girl and suddenly the queer tiny braids that formed the gist of her hairdo didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Woven so tightly it made the prizefighter wonder just how much time did it take to make them, they weren’t great at accumulating the moisture. If it weren’t for the obvious dampness of her coat, it would hard to decipher that she was just through a storm.

TAP-TAP

Victor at first didn’t register the sound, discarding it as raindrops that found a hole in the canvas and were not tapping on the wooden crates behind their backs. And just as he was about to completely push it out of his mind, waiting for Hana’s answer...

TAP-TAP-TAP

Definitely not the rain. But did he really want to know what it was exactly? No, probably not. Probably best just to let it slide. Hopefully Lehana wouldn’t hear it and whatever it was – something alive perhaps, his mind pondered – it would get tired after a while.

[Hana]

A flash thunderstorm was something Hana hadn’t seen a great deal of, and while she had instantly decided that it was something unpleasant, it was far better than the weather she was used to. She could live with dry heat as long as she had the proper shelter and equipment to keep herself hydrated. And the nights were cool, as well, but not too much so. The Fallien desert, especially the spicefields, maintained a symmetry that kept its inhabitants from drying out and shriveling up in the torrid heat.

However, when someone like Hana was involved daily with tasks that required manual labor and gratuitous straining of the muscles, the dry heat could get to her. She was muscular and more than capable of being a farmhand, but she was still a big girl. It seemed that the pressure of the sun against her skin always made her far more uncomfortable and sweaty than her brother and sister, who were graced with their mother’s slender build. Hana and her father got stuck with the muscular bulk, which had its shortcomings as well as its uses. For instance, Hana’s body density never did well during a long haul of bags of spices from the field to the caravans when the sun was pounding down on her back.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it. After having experienced the stinging, blinding whirlwinds that were the product of a sandstorm, Hana decided that a thunderstorm was infinitely better. Although the rain slapping her in the face hurt just as much as several grains of sand, at least it was cold and brisk. The dampness soaking through her coat was more refreshing than perspiration saturating the back of her shirt. And best of all, a thunderstorm wouldn’t fill her mouth with sand if she accidentally opened her mouth too wide. Even in her wet discomfort, Hana was almost enjoying the coldness of the sky and the bright, marvelous (if not heart-stopping) flashes of lightning.

She obviously couldn’t say the same for Victor, however. The man was plainly cringing from the weather, his back hunched and his eyes intent on the road, trying to ignore the violent skies. The young Fallien woman couldn’t stifle a laugh, however, though it was swallowed in the whiplash of the wind, every time Victor’s body jerked at a bolt of lightning.

Feeling another stab of sympathy for him, she leaned forward, feeling the rain sliding across her scalp between her braids and soaking her shirt. She pulled at Victor’s reins until they were pulling just tight enough to keep the rain-drenched horse closer. She sat back, satisfied, but even wetter than before.

As if on cue, the rain slowly began to calm down, slowing to little drops that Hana could barely feel, and then stopping completely. The gray landscape suddenly brightened itself into a myriad of shades of green, now allowing the young woman to see the miles and miles of trees, their leaves limp with draining rainwater. Even the grass on either side of the cobblestones was shining in the clear sunlight. Corone was more beautiful than she had expected.

She glanced over at Victor, who was sitting straight up now that he could look ahead without being stung in the eyes with rain. He was a younger man than she’d thought he was, younger and more vibrant without the gray rainclouds hovering just over his head. In this light, he wasn’t all that bad-looking either, the dark hair contrasting splendidly with light skin, but his tentative demeanor kept him from – from something, she wasn’t sure what. He obviously was careful to stay the way he was.

Well, we’ll just have to change that, thought Hana with a covert grin. She would keep herself from being an obvious flirt, like she sometimes was, but Victor looked as though he could use some prying open in that head of his.

“Yeah, I’m from Fallien,” she said in answer to his question, peeling her coat off of her dampened skin. At least the rest of her was relatively dry, a surprise after the flash storm. “From R’uuya, actually….you know, the spicefields. My dad’s a trader, if you didn’t guess already. He’s from a desert country on a different continent, but he came to R’uuya and never left, because my mother is one of the most beautiful Fallien women you’ll ever see,” she mentioned smugly, though she tapped her arm and added, “I don’t look a whole lot like her, of course. She’s much lighter. She and my sister—“

A noise from the back of the cart interrupted her, but she dismissed it as the crates knocking together from the unsteadiness of the cobblestones. “She and my sister look almost like twins, though. And as big and pregnant as my sister is now, she’ll probably have a whole litter of light – alright, what is that?” she said, spinning around in her seat to stare into the back of the carriage. She was already irritated with the wetness on her skin; she didn’t need the crates bumping together every five seconds while she was talking.

But this hardly seemed to be just an ordinary knocking of wood upon wood. This was the kind of tapping a person might make when trying tentatively to catch someone’s attention. This was someone’s finger tapping against something in their carriage.

“Victor…” she stared into the slight darkness of the cart, eying the crates closest to her. With her ears trained on the area behind her, she finally caught – but just barely – something crying. Muffled, but plain, there came a final noise between the taps.

Something human was whimpering in their carriage.

Her brown eyes narrowed and apprehensive, she looked hard at the man beside her. “Victor, what the hell was that?”

[The Cinderella Man]

When Hana started to speak in a clamorous bold manner that seemed an undisputable aspect of her demeanor – which Victor didn’t mind a whole lot, he was silent enough for three people – he thought that the peculiar sound from the back of the wagon would cease. Or at least get overruled by her voice. And for a while it did, and she spoke tenaciously of her home, her parents, her family, as if they were friends that met after years of being apart. It was queer for him to be involved in palaver with somebody so blunt, so he mostly took the info in and nodded at what he thought were the appropriate places for a nod.

The only time he felt inclined to speak was when the chocolate-skinned girl mentioned that she looked nothing like her gorgeous mother. He begged the differ. From what his cursory glances revealed – and he was tempted to fire a couple her way once she took off her sopped coat – Hana was by no means an unattractive girl. Sure, there was a bit more of her then when it came to normal women, but Victor always thought that expressions like normal and beautiful were strictly subjective. She looked a bit unusual with her weird piercings and the large picture tinted over her stomach, and there was a bit more muscle in her curves, but nothing that would significantly thwart her fairness. In fact, it actually gave her a certain exotic beauty that put her above all the normal girls that came a dime a dozen.

And then, when he was certain that whatever squirmed in some crate behind them finally gave it a rest, Lehana’s sentence was cut in half by the tapping sound again. She reacted in a manner she spoke, harshly and abruptly, turning around and inspecting the back of the wagon. “Busted.” his mind commented and the irony of it was that he had no idea what he was busted for. She looked at him long and hard, her black eyes filled with doubt and anxiousness, maybe even a tinge of anger. He couldn’t look into them for long. It seemed that their blackness would devour him and expose the mystery that he tried to keep hidden.

“I... I don’t know,” he finally spoke, eyes on the road and the reins once again loose in his lethargic hands. “I think we’re not supposed to know. They never told me what the cargo really was. But they did make it clear that the seals on the crates must remain untouched.”

The wooden box behind him whimpered again and Hana was still boring a hole in his temple, and Victor wasn’t curious anymore. He felt guilty. It’s one thing to play the big dumb brute and wash your hands from something you didn’t know about, but it was another when you knew that there is something amiss, and you fail to act. That’s when bad things happened, when good men failed to act. Was he a good man? Delilah always said that he was, that he was one of the last pure souls or some similar mushy mumbo-jumbo that back then seemed sacrilegious to him. But back then he was flying on wings of affection and such benevolent speeches were taken in stride. Right now he was just trying to make it from one day to the other, and five hundred gold pieces would enable him to prolong that for at least a month or two.

His eyes hesitantly turned to Hana and now there seemed to be some definite anger brewing there, accompanied by the haunting muffled sniffles from within the crate. Victor shook his head and rolled his eyes in surrender. It’s always the women. They always got him in so much trouble with their irresistible eyes – just, truthful eyes – getting him either beaten to a pulp or running for his life. Asuka did so, Doji did so, Feru did so, Delilah did so... The history seemed cocked, locked and ready to repeat itself with the Fallien woman.

“Alright, damnit! Fine. We’ll take a peek. We probably won’t get the money, but whatever,” he spoke, a bit irritated, but a bit anxious as well as he pulled on the right rein and made their carriage take a detour into the nearby trees. What if it was just an animal and they squandered one thousand gold pieces on that piece of information? No, that wasn’t the outcome that worried him. What did was: What if it wasn’t an animal?

[Hana]

For a brief stint in her childhood, Hana wanted to please everyone. She had been in a stage where she was constantly apologetic, especially to the strangers who would take up rent in her house from time to time. Of course, it was long before she got used to the visits from foreigners, and she was still a naïve little girl. It took her some time to learn that she didn’t owe everyone an apology, and once she had adjusted to sticking up for herself, she no longer needed to please everyone. Instead, she began to believe that everyone should be pleasing her.

It was for that reason that she could stare down Victor without a guilty conscience. Why in Jya’s name should she feel bad about ignoring some insignificant little rule in a case like this? There was something eerie about it, something that was obviously bothering the both of them, and Hana had no misgivings about taking liberties with their cargo. She wanted to know what was in that crate, and by the Gods, she would find out.

“What’s this about not getting the money? That’s ridiculous. I mean, honestly, they’re not going to hold your pay hostage because you peeked through a box. If you ask me, that’s sketchy,” she asserted with certainty. “And besides, they can’t not pay you now. You’ve gone through all this trouble already.”

As he steered off of the path, complaining about their potential losses with an exasperated note in his voice, Hana eyed him shrewdly. He seemed to have been as confounded by her unflinching stare as anyone else unlucky enough to fall under it. The girl couldn’t help feeling bad for him then – she seemed to find herself doing that a lot today – because he really did look as though he were in need of this job. As strong a man as his demeanor and constant silence said he was, she had the feeling that emotionally, he was as weak as whatever nameless creature was sitting pitifully behind the wood of that crate.

But for all that weakness, even if it was just speculation on her part, he was an undeniably good guy. He deserved a mind at ease.

“Don’t worry, Victor, it’s probably nothing too bad,” she said gently, climbing over the seat to land softly in the back of the cart. It squeaked loudly as she hit the boards, creaking with her weight, but she focused on the create before her, which had stopped making noise. From this spot in the cart, she could see that they had stopped in the still-wet grass just inside a ring of trees off the road. The Fallien girl took a moment to admire the greenness of everything after the rain, and then looked back up at Victor.

“I can try and reseal this once we’re done with it. I won’t get you in trouble, but if I do, I’ll back you up.” She looked back down at the crate, and in the brief silence after she spoke, she heard breathing. But it was not the animalistic breathing of a mammal heaving a heavy breath – it was a shudder of a breath, a frightened sigh.

A little more anxious now, she pulled her iron dagger hastily from the side of her waist and dug into the crack between the top and the side of the crate, breaking through the seal. She heard little noises coming from beneath her still, but kept going around the entire top of the crate, her facial muscles clenched in concentration.

When both sides of the seal were broken, she wrapped her nimble fingers around the corners of the lid, pausing for a moment. She already had a feeling that what she was going to find would do nothing to soothe her nerves. Hana lifted the top of the crate upward and, with a grunt, threw the top over the side.

The first thing she saw was hair. Long-ish brown hair hanging down, disheveled. And the head beneath the hair lifted itself up to stare at her with big, petrified eyes in a round little face.

It was a little girl, a human girl. Her hands were bound in front of her, dotted with a few splinters from the wooden crate, and a gag in her mouth. She cried out, the sound stifled by the cloth between her lips.

The young Fallien woman fell back onto her knees, her mouth falling open despite her attempts to remain composed. “Victor!”

[The Cinderella Man]

This won’t end well...

Even after Hana’s reassuring words, Victor knew that everything was going downhill in a hurry despite the fact that their wagon was now standing completely still, nestled in a batch of trees that smelled of humidity and leaf decay. The people that hired him weren’t the kind that let things slide, gave you a pat on the shoulder and told you to do better next time. Not those knaves with their false smiles, itchy fingers and slightly frowned looks. When they said that the seals weren’t to be touched, they meant it. And when they didn’t say what repercussions might occur if the seals were, in fact, touched or broken, it didn’t mean that there weren’t any to be afraid of. It meant that there were some, but you didn’t want to go beyond that door. And there is nothing quite as terrifying as a closed door.

Hana obviously had no such worrying thoughts. She jumped in the back, paused only to hear another whimper and proceeded to break free whatever was making the noise. Victor joined her tentatively, taking a seat on what seemed like a sack of wheat and letting her do the work. She was, after all, the one who wanted to see the contents and throw their money away. He wondered briefly what would’ve happened if he proceeded from Radasanth alone. Would he succumb to his curiosity eventually or would he block it out and hum some tune to cover the noise? Probably not, but it was a possibility. He maybe was a good man once upon a time, but rough life often gave birth to insensibility and he felt the seed growing within him for a while now. This time Lehana was here to pluck it out. What would happen the next time around?

When Hana finally took of the lid from the noisy crate, all mulling that currently revolved in Victor’s head like a set of cogs stopped instantly. Because there was a girl in a crate, a barely living and barely living young girl with a filthy rag stuffed in her mouth. Her eyes were haunting, disbelieving, bloody from the crying, the eyes of somebody that didn’t know anything but the fact that she didn’t want to be here. Her faded gray linen shift – that seemed large enough for a grown woman, let alone a skinny ten year old – was tattered and smeared with dirt marks. Hana shouted Victor’s name in dismay and accusation, but at the moment all that the prizefighter could do was stare in those lost, frightened eyes of the dirty-faced girl.

“I... I... Bloody hell. I didn’t know,” he finally muttered, making a precarious motion towards the girl to remove her restrains. Her already wide eyes became even wider in a split second before she scurried towards the other corner of her wooden prison, uttering another muffled whimper.

“Easy there, little one,” Victor said, gesturing with his hands that he means no harm. He was now squatted next to the crate with what he hoped to look like a benevolent face and what he hoped to sound like an amicable tone. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to take those ropes off, alright?”

It wasn’t alright. When there was no more room to move away, the girl buried her head into her knees, sobbing audibly and shivering all over. Victor, never a mushy emotional man that cried at funerals, felt like something ripped his heart out and started to peel its layers off as if it was an apple. He paused his approach for a second, looked up at Hana who was still caught in an apparent state of shock, then proceeded to untie the rag that prevented the girl from speaking. The knot was tight, making the fabric of the gag cut into the girl’s cheeks, but he managed to loosen it and ultimately slip it off. When he did, she coughed, but the sobbing continued to stab at his heart, making him feel like human crap.

“You’re safe now,” he said to the lass, taking out his combat knife with an intention to cut the binds that made her wrists bloody and sore. But even as he pulled the weapon out, the moist brown eyes that peeked through the tousled curtain of her hair went panic-wide and this time, without the gag, she managed to scream. Her hands clutched to her chest as she once again pushed against the interior of a crate. Victor regretted pulling out his menacing-looking knife and regretted even buying it during his expedition in Fallien. Whatever this girl went through, she had some obvious trauma and prizefighter’s lack of subtlety thwarted his attempts to help the girl.

[Hana]

Hana had always had a sort of rap for getting into trouble, but she hadn’t expected it to follow her all the way out to the Corone countryside. She didn’t know what to think after seeing that her and Victor’s carriage carried human cargo, so she sat with her elbows on her knees, watching guardedly as Victor fumbled with the girl’s binds. She couldn’t help but stare at him, the suspicion in her eyes rather obvious, but after a moment, she knew it was ridiculous.

Of course it’s ridiculous. It’s Victor. Victor’s a good man, she thought. He said himself he didn’t know. Hana’s instincts were more than successful in trying to alert her to the fact that just the mere presence of this little girl meant trouble – of what sort, she didn’t know – and a lot of it. Whatever the girl was being shipped for could be nothing good, considering the circumstances, whether it was slavery or something more disgusting and unbearable for the Fallien girl to think about. Forget it – the whole thing is disgusting. Trying to brush those disturbing images from her scattered thoughts, Hana could only watch as the muscular man tried to soothe the young girl into cooperation.

But she drew the line at brandishing weaponry. “Take it easy, Victor. Think before you wave that thing around,” she said, not without a hint of irony, as she herself wasn’t especially well-known for thinking before doing. Her fingers wrapped around the side of the crate, Hana peered inside at the brown-haired child, who had pulled herself together as tightly as the human body was meant to go. Her shrieking had slowed to a deep heaving of the chest accompanied by whimpering.

Hana couldn’t stand seeing those big brown eyes staring back up at her in sheer fright. She’d always been fond of kids – their innocent questions, their unashamed honesty, their ability to free themselves from the unsympathetic reality of the world around them. No child should have had that right taken away, least of all this frightened little thing weeping in the middle of their cargo.

“Hey, sweetie,” she said softly, sitting up a little more so the girl could see her. “It’s okay, we just want to get you out of those ropes. We’re not going to hurt you.”

The girl was looking up at the odd Fallien woman with those same frightened eyes, but she said nothing, only choked out a sob.

“I promise, I’m a good guy,” continued Hana, smiling and holding her hands up as if accused. She grabbed her field dagger from the ground and, cautiously, brought it over the side of the crate. It wasn’t cautious enough – the girl was going to go into hysterics again, she could see it. So the young Fallien woman reached across the crate and took hold of the rope between the girl’s hands (not an easy task, considering the child’s tight position), cutting through the binds quickly and withdrawing both hands from the crate when she finished.

The little girl, who had been crying out from her first sight of the dagger, breathed in raggedly and looked at her hands. She sniffed heavily, but didn’t move; only looked at the odd, dark-skinned woman before her.

“You see!” declared Hana lightly, making sure the dagger was back on the floor before she dangled her hands over the crate’s edge again. “I’m not bad. Neither of us are bad,” she added, glancing at Victor. She smiled, encouraging him to follow her lead. They were never going to get anywhere with Victor’s sour face on all the time. “You just take the rest of that rope off your wrists, alright?”

The girl seemed to consider it, her breathing still uneven, then pushed against the binds on her wrists. They fell, finally, to the floor of the crate, after rubbing into the open wounds on the girl’s arms and making her cry again. Calluses and bloody sores wrapped around her wrists like some sort of disturbing jewelry.

Something rose in Hana’s throat, something that made her feel like she had to throw up or cry, maybe both. “C’mon,” she said firmly, extending her hands slightly towards the girl, who flinched. “Let’s get you out of there, huh? It’s alright, really.”

Surprisingly enough, the girl latched onto Hana’s arms, her skin hot with tension and fear. Without much difficult, Hana stood up slowly, pulling the girl out of her prison and setting her down on the floor. She felt the girl’s weight swaying a bit, so she didn’t let go. Steering her to the front of the wagon where Hana and Victor had been sitting, the Fallien woman picked the silent, lightweight girl up and settled her into the seat. It was like moving a pile of clothes instead of a person.

“Okay, there we go,” said Hana, beginning to feel as though this were to be a long, one-sided conversation. “You want something to drink, or eat—“

An immediate nod from the pathetic little head was enough.

“Victor, you got any water or food for this kid?”

“Cadee,” the girl croaked. Hana looked back at the child for a moment, her mouth hanging open a bit in surprise.

“Cadee? Your name is Cadee?”

The girl looked hesitant to answer, but gazed bravely at the Fallien woman. “Yes.”

“Gods, listen to you. You need a drink, honey.” She turned back to Victor, her face grim as she thought of something else. “Victor,” she began, softly enough so that it would be difficult for the girl to hear if she weren’t listening closely. “What’s in the rest of this cargo? I hope it isn’t any other kids. I don’t think they would have survived by now. I don’t hear anything. And who the hell gave you this job?” she asked, more out of curiousity than anger. "I know it wasn't your fault. But she's in bigger trouble than we are."

[The Cinderella Man]

You need a drink, honey.

“That makes two of us,” Victor thought, still sitting on the damn sack of wheat (or at least what he hoped was wheat) and still completely befuddled with the whole situation. He should’ve known that something was amiss. No, that wasn’t quite true. He knew that this deal was haywire from the moment he was introduced with the terms. Nobody paid that much and wanted furtiveness in return if the deal wasn’t as rotten as Bazaar fish on Saturday afternoon. But illegality wasn’t as much of an issue when your stomach and your pockets were empty. However, there was wrong over which he could walk over and then there was the kind that forced him to regrow his conscience on the double. And Cadee was certainly the latter.

“I don’t know who gave me this wretched job., he started, pulling out his combat knife and cracking open another crate. Turnips. Not very fresh either. And even if they were, raw turnips weren’t very edible. “They didn’t seem too eager on revealing their bloody names and I didn’t bother to ask. When somebody shoves five hundred gold pieces into your hands, you become mighty ignorant in a hurry, if you know what I mean.”

Victor opened another, found potatoes, then moved onto the sacks. Despite rather lousy results in prospecting, there was a relief in him that there were no more tied and gagged children within the cargo. The sacks were filled with beans, wheat and something that looked like a peas only smaller and not green. It didn’t matter because none of it was edible without being cooked and he and cooking weren’t on best terms.

“There’s plenty of stuff here, but we’ll need to cook it. I’m going to build a fire,” he said to Hana, his knife once again scaring the girl just enough to make him feel stupid for not putting it away before approaching. He sheathed the weapon clumsily, but Cadee failed to find her trustworthy just yet, clutching for Lehana tightly and diverting her eyes from the prizefighter. He couldn’t blame her. He had an aversion towards children and they mostly felt it on some primal, sixth sense level. It’s not that he exactly disliked them or anything, but rather that he didn’t know how to act around them and this lack of ability to commune was disconcerting enough to always keep him at safe distance. He couldn’t prattle, he couldn’t be the softie that spoke in that idiotic mushy accent, but he could be a hardass and it was like a dark aura around him.

When he started to break the crates into firewood, he remembered that he had a water flask in his gym bag. He pulled it out, neared the front of the carriage again and tried to hand it over to Cadee with a weak excuse of a smile. Ultimately, it wasn’t too reassuring so he just placed the tin flask on the seat and return to what he was good at; breaking stuff. It was hard to smile when you had nothing to smile about for years now. Smiling wasn’t like riding a bike. It was like a muscle. If you trained it and used it on daily basis, it came out naturally like it did with Lehana. If you refrained yourself from using it, it would atrophy and eventually die. And Victor’s smile was dying a little bit each day for years now.

After finding a relatively dry patch of grass within the grove, the boxer built a small fire from the wood he acquired by dismantling Cadee’s prison. Luckily, he always lumbered a small pot on his travels – sticking to his own motto to always be prepared – so there was something to cook in. However, given his ineptitude in the art of cooking, the pot didn’t see too many delicious meals during the travels. Most of the time it was just a vessel in which Victor warmed some water for tending his wounds.

“Uhm... Do you think you could make something, Lehana? I’m... Well, not really good when it comes to cooking,” he spoke, scratching the back of his head and feeling mighty embarrassed and dumb again once he brought a little bit of everything he found in the back of their wagon. Not good at cooking, not good at dealing with children, not good at anything except being a two-time loser that liked to classify himself as a pugilist. Well, that wasn’t completely true. He was good cannon fodder, but given the fact that the requirements for that line of work were being big and dumb, it wasn’t something to be proud of.

Victor took a seat by the fire on the opposite side from Cadee. He reckoned that he looked way too much like her initial captors and gave girl enough room to adjust. The rotten feeling in his gut only got worse as he looked at her. Flinching at every strange sound, sitting on the ground humbly and staring at the crackling flames, holding his canteen in both of her hands as if it was the greatest treasure in the world, she seemed like somebody that just escaped the clutches or a sadistic tormentor. People that did this kind of things weren’t human, they were beasts. Victor wanted to make them pay, make them go down long and painful, make them taste their own sweat and blood and tears before they finally meet their maker. But he wasn’t a hero. Even now, as the three of them sat around the fire, all he kept thinking about was what the hell was he supposed to do with this frightened little thing that was afraid of her own shadow?

“I should’ve known there was something wrong,” he said to Hana, his eyes peering at the fire and through it, at the frail lass. “Those bastards. They knew I needed the money so bad that I won’t ask any questions. They came to me after one of my boxing matches – another loss, of course – telling me they needed some muscle to protect their cargo. And when you start having more losses then wins on your record sheet, you’re not exactly picky, if you know what I mean.”

[Hana]

Hana nodded promptly when Victor asked her to cook. “Sure, just gimme a spoon and I’m all set,” she answered, taking the collection of vegetables from Victor and pooling them in her lap. She sat diagonal from both Victor and Cadee, feeling somehow that she should be keeping an eye on both of them. Cadee needed it more, obviously; the poor little thing looked as fragile as a porcelain doll, and her pale face didn’t make it too hard to believe. Victor, on the other hand, sounded as guilty as though he’d tied up the brown-haired girl in the first place, though he clearly hadn’t. Hana had the impression that, as he awkwardly shrugged off his inability to cook, the guy’s self-esteem was as deflated as Hana’s was overblown.

And she knew full well that hers was overblown. She wouldn’t have come to Althanas at all if it hadn’t been for her rather disproportionate ego. She would have spent a good few years having accepted the fact that her siblings had started their own successful lives and had left her to help her mother and father. It wasn’t an altogether bad lifestyle, considering it involved a free roof over her head and plenty of food, but it was her parents’ lifestyle, not hers, and Hana was determined to forge her own name in the world.

Now she wasn’t so sure she was glad to be where she was, but she would make the best of it. Wasn’t that how a future was made, hadn’t her own father said so? ‘Out of the throes of misfortune,’ or something? And anyway, she wasn’t entirely unfortunate in this case. On the other side of the fire sat two people that Lehana didn’t regret meeting at all.

“You know, technically, you’re still doing what they asked you to. You’re protecting the cargo – er, Cadee,” she insisted, correcting herself. “Although I can’t say the same for the vegetables,” she added with a chuckle as she waved the potato in her hand. She’d grabbed her knife from the floor of the wagon, cleaning it off on her pants and cutting into the potatoes. She made sure to cut them into medium, three-sided sections, just like Ulani had taught her. Hana’s mother was a stickler for technique when it came to cooking and harvesting.

“You’re a boxer?” she asked Victor after a minute, looking up from the potatoes. She saw out of the corner of her eye that even Cadee’s downcast eyes glanced over at the muscular man in interest. “Well, even if you have losses, you’ve got to be good to make it that far in that field. My brother Julian used to want to be a boxer when we were younger. He used me as a practice dummy,” she said dryly.

Cadee tried to stifle a small giggle, a sound that immediately caught Hana’s attention. The Fallien woman looked over at the little girl, who was still clutching Victor’s water canteen like her life depended on it, but a smile lingered at the edges of her trembling mouth.

“Was that a laugh I heard?” asked Hana quietly but suspiciously, grinning slyly at the girl. Cadee pulled her knees up to her chest, holding them there and burying her chin in the folds of her voluminous shift. But there was a little more life in those brown eyes now, and it gave Hana hope for the girl. “It was! Oh, by the way, you can just call me Hana. And that’s Victor,” she said, pointing at the boxer with her dagger in her hand. “He’s a nice guy, he’s just quiet, like you,” she said, smiling at both of them.

Cadee wasn’t smiling now. She just looked at the other two, mostly at Lehana, hugging her knees tightly.

“Look, Cadee….do you remember anything about…what happened to you?” Hana asked carefully, keeping her expression serious and concerned. “You don’t have to tell me stuff you don’t want to tell, but I think it would be good if we could find out. It’s completely up to you.”

The girl hardly moved – she was already in the most protective position she could be – but she looked down at the flickering fire, watching its sparks fly outward. “I don’t remember,” she said suddenly.

“You don’t remember anything?” Hana asked gently.

“I don’t….I don’t remember a lot,” said Cadee somewhat defensively, her voice going up a note or two in her frustration.

“It’s okay.” The Fallien woman stood up and silently dropped the potato sections into the nearly-boiling water, sitting back down again to cut the long beans in half and letting the hissing of the pot fill the silence. She watched Cadee with kind, cautious black eyes.

“But there was a house,” the little girl offered after a moment, putting her legs down but still holding onto the canteen. “A big house….no, a….an orphanage,” she said, sounding a little reluctant. “And it caught on fire. It was everywhere, and…” She sounded as though she were about to cry. “And….I couldn’t see anymore. I think I fainted,” she said with obvious distaste.

She breathed in, and continued, both with difficulty. “I woke up, and…there were a lot of men there. Bad men,” she said with firm sincerity. “They thought I was asleep and I heard them talking about me. I don’t remember what they were talking about, because….because one of them hit me when I started crying,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “He hit me on the head, too, and I couldn’t….they tied me up—“

Hana poured the beans into the pot, set the rest of the vegetables on her coat, and stood up. She walked slowly to where Cadee, her eyes threatening to spill over with tears, and the Fallien woman cupped the little girl’s hand in her own. “Cadee, you can stop now, it’s alright. You don’t have to tell us anymore.” She felt horrible for having set the girl to the task of recounting her experience.

Cadee didn’t speak for a few seconds, her fingers clutching Hana’s firmly. “But you should know, you said you should,” she said apologetically, her speech interrupted by sniffling. “They said…they said I had something. They were excited about it, too. They said I had potential.” She stopped then, looking up at Hana. “But I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why that would make them tie me up and put me in that crate.”

[The Cinderella Man]

Victor listened to Cadee’s grievous account of the events that preceded her capture and the image in his head started to crystallize a little bit. Even though the girl’s memory was still rather hazy, it was a good insinuation at what really happened and what the reasons for her abduction were. The bad men were most likely slavers, merchants of the living whose line of work was outlawed in Corone. That’s probably why they wanted to keep the transportation clandestine, hidden under the ruse of a washed out prizefighter trucking some sporadic foodstuffs. The potential she spoke of was probably mentioned because of her youth. While Victor wasn’t exactly in the know when it came to the black market – especially the slave branch of it – he was rather certain that you could get a wad of cash for such a young prospect.

“They were probably slave traders, these bastards that took you,” he started after a period of silence that followed Cadee’s doleful story. “I dealt with their kind before...”

When Cadee’s eyes went from lethargic to flustered he realized how terrible that could be interpreted and that was more then enough for him to bite his tongue and reformulate hastily. “Not with them as in working with them, though. No, a couple of months ago there was this crook in the Slums that snatched people from the streets and peddled them out of Corone. Long story short, me and a couple of guys decided to nose around, maybe put a stop to it, but wound up in even more trouble. What I did find out was that slavers usually have a location outside of the actual city where they gather the kidnapped before dispatching them to their new masters. I think that’s what they tried to do with you, Cadee.”

The petite girl didn’t seem terribly interested in Victor’s speech, his words failing to elicit any kind of reaction except an occasional glance through the curtain of her unkempt hair threads. Instead she held on to the canteen with her left and to Hana’s hand with her right, still crumpled up in her defensive sitting position. And once again, Victor could blame her. If he was in her shoes, he wouldn’t really give a damn why somebody beat him senseless and packed him like a batch of apples. She was going through a nightmare and even though the wretched thing seemed to be over, rewinding and replaying it wasn’t something she was terribly keen on doing.

“Do you maybe have some family left in Radasanth?” the prizefighter asked, shuffling through the embers with one of the crate fragments before feeding it to the gentle flames. It was perhaps a dumb question given the fact that Cadee mentioned orphanage earlier, but quite frankly, Victor was at a loss on what to do from this point on. He was pretty much a bum, vagabonding from one battle arena to another, with no static place to call a home. And even if he had such a place, what was he to do with a child? Gods knew he could barely take care of himself and when it came to raising a kid, he was about as deft as a blind juggler.

Cadee at first didn’t seem like she heard his question, her eyes locked on the bubbling pot whose contents finally started to smell like something edible, then let out a silent “No” that got muffled by both her knees and the shift that she pulled over them.

“I see. Well, I have a friend who’s a Marshal in the Corone Rangers. A good guy. Hero stuff, if you know what I mean,” Victor said with a smile that came out a bit more naturally now. “He’s the one that got me out of the trouble with slavers back in Radasanth. I reckon once we had a good meal, we head on back to Radasanth and track him down. I assure you, he’ll tear those evil men a new one.”

Cadee might’ve smiled languidly at this, but her current position prevented him from seeing it. Her eyes did seem a bit more vivid now, less tense and frightened and more observant and tranquil. Gradually she was tearing herself from the disconcerting events of the past and focused on what was ahead of her. Somewhere deep inside of her, coy and afraid to surface, was a sliver of hope that she might make it alright with these two strangers.

With another silence creeping between him and the young girl, Victor turned his attention to his bag-o’-stuff. He rummaged through it in search for the small ceramic bowl he carried around for times he actually had something to eat, then after finding it, he fished for utensils. Well, utensil since he mostly carried just a spoon. This forced him to take out the rather large boxing gloves in order to move them out of the way. By the time he found the renegade spoon, the voice of Cadee caught him by surprise.

“Those look funny,” she said, almost surprising herself with the newfound courage to speak. Victor looked up, acknowledged that she was referring to his bulky gloves, and smiled at the girl.

“Now that you mention it, I guess they really do,” he replied, picking up the pair of scarlet gloves, each with a different inscription on the front. “You want to try them on?”

Cadee didn’t reply, but she didn’t seem to protest against it either, so Victor placed the bowl and the spoon next to the cooking pot before getting up and making his way around the fire with a pair of boxing gloves. The girl seemed a bit stiff as he approached, but when he hunkered with a smile and turned the gloves around so she can put in her tiny hands, she finally let her knees drop. She moved tentatively at first, but soon her fists were nestled in the warmth of the gloves that each looked as big as her head. Victor couldn’t stifle a chuckle at the sight.

“What does it say?” Cadee asked, trying to decipher the writing on them.

“It says Architect and Destruction. That was my nickname back when I knew how to fight. Architect of Destruction,” he said, hoping that the ominous name wouldn’t frighten the girl, but it seemed that he managed to break the ice just enough for it not to.

“You must’ve been a good fighter... To have such a mean name.”

“I guess I was. But that’s a long story and a sad one at that. I reckon Hana might have a better story to tell while we have a bite to eat.”

[Hana]

“Of course. I’m a master storyteller,” declared Hana, leaning against the side of the carriage and relaxing herself. The tension she’d unknowingly had building up in her body seemed to be disappearing as swiftly as the sun was doing now. Cadee may have been as beat-up as a punching bag inside, but she wasn’t broken. It was easy to see that she could be salvaged from the wreckage that was her life. As inept as Victor claimed to be at tasks like handling a carriage and cooking, he appeared to be just as capable at waking Cadee up from her horrendous misfortune. Both the brown-haired man and the little girl sitting on the cart seemed to be waking up from a stupor in their lives, and it made Hana smile.

“Just give me a bit to think of something good.”

She decided to give them a little more time and room to get comfortable with each other, and sat back down on the grass, ignoring the slight dampness of it, and let the popping of the boiling vegetables and the soft dialogue between Cadee and Victor calm her down. Hana had to fight to keep her concentration from slipping as her eyelids began to droop. Even as fast as the day had gone, it had been eventful enough to drain a good portion of Hana’s endless energy. Every now and then she’d pick up Victor’s spoon and give the pot a stir, the scent of the boiled vegetables awakening her ravenous appetite. Don’t go stuffing your face, Hana reminded herself sternly as she removed the pot from its place on the fire, setting it on a flat stone nearby but leaving the fire to keep them warm. Who knows when Cadee last ate?

“Coooome an’ git it!” she drawled in the loud, twangy voice her mother would use to catch everyone’s attention for dinner – as a joke, of course. Some of the foreigners who dropped by their farm had accents she could hardly believe, and Ulani did like to imitate the lot of them.

Cadee’ looked as though she were picking herself up as Hana ladled the stew into Victor’s bowl and set it down on the grass for a moment. The Fallien girl dug briefly through her coat pockets. “Where is it, damn thing….here!” In Lehana’s hand was a small packet of green, prickly looking things, in several different shapes and shades. “You need a little kick in your dinner,” she sang, tossing the package up and down in her hand before pulling some of its contents out, clenched tightly between her thumb and forefinger and spreading pinches of it over the vegetable stew.

“These are cooking spices, from Fallien,” she explained lightly as she approached Victor and Cadee. “That’s where I’m from, too. Careful, it’s hot.”

Cadee set the canteen just to her left, still reluctant to have it far from her, and took the bowl of stew gingerly, letting it rest slightly on the shift over her knees. Spoon in hand, the girl got hold of a potato and blew on it for a bit longer than was needed. Hana grinned as Cadee ate the potato wedge whole, chewing deliberately and, thankfully, smiling a bit afterward.

“It’s good,” she decided, attacking the stew with a heartiness that Lehana would never have guessed she had.

“Don’t burn your tongue, kid,” warned the Fallien woman, though kindly. She glanced at Victor with a laughing expression.

“Ah wom,” replied Cadee, her cheeks bloated from the excess amount of food in her mouth. It pleased Hana to see that not only had her cooking skills passed muster, but that Cadee was opening up to her more and more. Maybe it would work out. Maybe they could find Cadee a home, a good, safe one, and get that friend of Victor’s to take care of the dumbshits who’d done such a horrible thing to the bright little girl before her. “I’ve never been to Fallien,” Cadee ventured quietly once she’d swallowed a good chunk of the vegetables.

“Maybe I could take you there someday,” said Hana, jumping up onto the seat of the carriage and sitting next to Cadee. “Would you like to hear a story about Fallien?”

The girl nodded curtly, swirling the spoon around the remaining bits and pieces of food in her bowl and leaning her head back against the carriage front.

“Well, it’s not a story about Fallien, per se…” began the Fallien woman, leaning back like Cadee and watching the stars flash into existence in the fading light. A curtain of blue was falling over the country sky, and Hana felt a measure of peace after the hectic events of the day. “But my dad told it to me. Do you know who the Jya is?”

“No…” Cadee’s voice was trailing away into fatigue as she absentmindedly spooned the rest of the food into her mouth.

“Guess that was a dumb question, sorry. The Jya is the mother of Fallien, the one who takes care of its people. A new Jya was appointed twelve years ago, when I was seven. That was when the Jya Y’landis Kehtoara died.

“My dad was going to Suravani’s Oasis that day. I remember us all hearing about the death of the Jya, and Papa was going to go and find out who the new Jya was. He was practically in the middle of nowhere the whole way there, but he saw something he said he’d never forget.” Hana paused for dramatic effect.

“What’s that…?” came the small voice from beside her, curious but only mildly so. Cadee’s eyes were trying vainly to stay open.

“Well, first he saw a fire. There was already a pile of ash beneath the fire, so he figured it had been burning for quite a while. It was in the distance, so he couldn’t really rush over and put it out, but he saw something come out of it. The fire roared and ignited again, climbing as high as these trees. He saw the wings, first. Huge, red and gold wings that stretched out like sunbeams, the body itself like the sun. It was a Phoenix, being reborn, a young Phoenix, and it called out to the sky and flew on the wind, right over my dad’s carriage. It looked right at him and took to the sky.”

Hana stopped again, glancing over at Cadee, who was only seconds away from slipping into sleep for the night, and finished her story. “They are reborn when a great warrior dies. My dad figures it was a tribute to Y’landis Kehtoara’s death. He’s never forgotten the sight of it.”

Cadee’s soft snore was the only sound next to the crackling of the fire after Hana stopped talking. The Fallien woman looked over at Victor again and smiled. “Am I good, or am I good?”

[The Cinderella Man]

Lehana’s story managed to both awaken one part of Cadee – her interest – and put the rest of the tyke to sleep and Victor was extremely glad for that. The girl seemed like she didn’t have a restful slumber for at least as long as she didn’t have a good meal, and given the ravenous manner in which she wolfed down the offered food, that didn’t happen in days. So with the warm food in her belly and in an environment that finally didn’t feel hostile to her, young Cadee drifted away to sleep with less then a relaxing sigh. Her head was leant on Hana’s shoulder serenely, her hand holding onto the shirt of the dark-skinned foreigner.

And while that image should’ve been blissful enough to bring some comfort to Victor, Lehana’s story brought a touch of melancholy in his mind. She spoke of majestic, mythical bird being reborn in the name of heroes and distinguished warriors, and he thought how such accolade was unattainable for the likes of him. He wasn’t a great man. He had no exceptional skills that elevated him above others, no magical abilities that made the people stare and awe. The only thing he knew how to do was box, and even that he did rather poorly. There would be no Phoenix rising when he dies, no tears shed over his death, no solid proof that he ever existed. In the end, his worst fear would come true and he would be forgotten. For every hero that perished there were at least a thousand souls that depart without as much as a footnote on the gravedigger’s journal. That thought alone was enough to thwart his spirits momentarily.

Hana didn’t allow him to sink into his usual self-loathing though. The girl was certainly a coltish piece of work, gloating over her ultimate success in both the cooking and the storytelling department. The prizefighter looked at her, did his best to chase the sudden attack of sadness that crept into his mind with a faint smile and bowed his head jovially to the Fallien lass, admitting her victory. She was good. He wouldn’t know where to start when it came to telling tales, and even if he managed to conjure some sort of fictive story, it was bound to be as intriguing as a funeral recession.

“What exactly was in those herbs?” he whispered a jest, both his voice and his face serious for a second before crumbling in front of another smirk. He picked up the empty ceramic bowl from Cadee’s lap, gently extracted the spoon from her tiny hand and descended from the carriage seat. “I’ll go get you some. I’m not really hungry. All of this got my stomach in a knot.”

His sister always said that he was too emotional about stuff. It usually couldn’t be seen on the outsides that he kept rather phlegmatic and standoffish, but there was always something brewing behind his plain brown eyes. Right now it was a strange mixture of gladness about the way things turned out and fear for those that might yet transpire. Victor didn’t like events that he couldn’t predict and this entire encounter with Lehana and Cadee was as maverick as a lightning on a stormy sky. God only knew what else might happen before the day’s end.

He sat on his hunkers next to the dying fire, poured two ladles of the stew in the bowl and got up to face a man with a crossbow pointed at his face.

“Drop that and get your hands above your head, scum!” the bearded man spoke, his finger disconcertingly close to the trigger that would send the boxer to kingdom come. Victor considered obeying, then remembered the girls that sat on the wagon, perfectly calm and unaware of the threatening man, and despite the fact that he felt as if somebody put his bowels into movement, he opted for a hostile plan of action.

His wrist jerked the small bowl, pushing it towards the ominous man and pulling it back in one motion, expelling the steaming contents onto the man’s face. His reflexes didn’t abandon him, his battle experience kicking in and making him duck and dodge just in time to evade the fired crossbow shot. The man before him screamed in horror, clinging to his face and throwing the weapon away to attend to his visage. The prizefighter didn’t give him a chance to recover. He tackled the man’s gut, throwing him on the ground and firing a devastating punch at the man’s nose. With a sickening crack, the bone broke and the shrieks stopped.

“Lehana! Get her out of here! There might be others...” he tried to shout in panic towards the girl with the sun-kissed skin, but even before he got to finish, he noticed a pair of hooded figures standing beside the wagon, their crossbows pointed at the two girls. His hands shot towards the crossbow of the fallen man, his mind ignorant to the fact that he had no idea how to operate the weapon, but before he even got a chance to pick it up, he was struck from behind fiercely.

Victor’s vision diluted, blurred the environment into a mush of dark greens and olives with an occasional brown as a face loomed over him.

“It’s hard to find good help these days,” the voice from above spoke, but to the boxer it was distorted to the point of incompressibility. He felt as if he was on his knees, the ref was counting and he had nothing left in him. “Playing around with our merchandise, have you?”

That was the last thing that Victor heard. A kick to the side of his face rendered him unconscious effectively.

[Hana]

Lehana could have spent the rest of night in that spot, watching the fire spit sparks into the sky and letting Cadee use her as a makeshift pillow. The little girl’s hand latched onto her shirt was more reassuring than anything that things were going to be alright. As Hana breathed in and out softly, letting the stillness envelop her and cast her deeper and deeper into sleep, she couldn’t help but smile at what came to mind. I’m going to be a great aunt, that’s for sure. Aysha’s kid’ll love me….

She was about to rouse herself from lethargy to ask Victor if he had any kids, but found that she was the recipient of a much more unpleasant wake-up call. At first there was only shuffling in the dark corner of the encampment where Victor was, a voice she thought to be his, then a yelp. Hana sat up at once, her eyes trying wildly to focus after falling half-asleep.

“Lehana!” Victor’s voice was more alert than it had been all night, his tone panicked and his face almost terrified. “Get her out of here! There might be others—“

Shit! What the hell is going on?!

Instinctively, Hana’s hands wrapped around Cadee’s shoulders, shaking them. “Cadee, wake up! Cadee! We have to get out of here!”

The brown-haired girl was awake as soon as her name was spoken, but instead of looking at Hana, she was looking right behind the Fallien woman. At first all she could do was stare – it wasn’t hard to see her slipping right back into the shell she’d been while trapped in the crate. Her pupils seemed to thin, and her little hands dug into Hana’s arms, her nails leaving indentations as she clung tightly to the Fallien woman. She screamed shrilly.

Hana released the brown-haired girl and spun around as though dancing, her right fist flying, though it felt to her that she was moving in slow motion, thinking wildly that she hoped her aim was right and that she wasn’t going to die within the following seconds. Her brother had taught her how to fight – she could only trust that he’d taught her the right way and that Cadee’s fear was enough incentive for her to knock out whatever was standing behind her. She felt her fist connect with something soft, the weight of whatever she’d made contact with unexpectedly heavy, and at the same time a bolt of heat ran up and down her left arm.

When she brought her hand back, she stared down, breathing heavily, at a man whose dark robe and accompanying hood cast shadows on his tanned skin, but her focus was on the large black bruise that was spreading around his right eye. He was squirming on the ground, cradling his head in his hands and letting out muffled groans as he did. But then Lehana saw the crossbow lying on the ground at his feet and, remembering the uncomfortable heat on her arm, looked warily at the blood winding around her shoulder in strands like serpents. At least it hadn’t done more than get a good scrape at her side, though it hurt like hell.

Feeling a rush of adrenaline, she pushed at Cadee’s back. The girl sounded as though she were hyperventilating, but she moved fast, stumbling over the kinks in the floor of the carriage and scrambling over the seat. “Go, go—“ Hana was chanting as though it could make them both move faster, but she hadn’t seen the second man approach her from behind, and the throbbing in her shoulder was joined by a fresh wave of pain in her head as something very solid connected with her skull.

She was seeing stars, but they faded in and out of her vision with an impossible speed.

“Cadee...” she shouted, her voice growing faint as her hands stretched weakly to her sides for her knife, her naginata, a piece of wood, anything, but then she felt the strength in her legs give out, and she hit the floor of the carriage seat, the world falling into darkness. She saw Cadee screaming in panic, staring back at her with terribly frightened brown eyes.

----------------------------------

In her unconsciousness, Hana couldn’t do much else but pray to Ghral, the B’neshan goddess of summer whose crest was tattooed on the Fallien woman’s stomach. She couldn’t imagine a worse time to fall back on her religious inclinations, but it was the only semblance of thought or dream that was allowed to pass through the wall of fire in her mind.

And then her eyes struggled to open, and succeeded. Every blink was painful, but through the haze of soreness, Hana could see that her surroundings were dark, very dark and very different from the woody encampment she had been in only seconds before. How long had she been out?

She tilted her head to the side and, trying vainly to ignore the jabs that struck the back of her head, saw a rusty-looking grime covering the wall she was leaned against in strands. It made the room look almost primordial, and when she found the strength to lift her head, she observed, with alarm, that the gritty floor, dirty walls, and long, thick bars running vertically in a long row all comprised what had to be a jail cell. The Fallien girl sat up, her panic now very obvious as she tried to move without succumbing to her whirling vision.

Though the only light in the cell was far away and didn’t give much to go on, Hana could see the faint outline of a man a foot or two away from her, his brown hair matted with dirt and congealed blood.

Victor.

She crawled slowly over to him, feeling queasy and nervous that he wouldn’t wake up. And where was Cadee? “Victor,” she croaked, leaning against the wall next to him for support and clenching his shoulders. “Victor, wake up. Victor are you alright?” She ignored the fact that it was a stupid question, because he clearly wasn’t alright. She needed him to be awake, because as independent as she was trying to be, she couldn’t handle this on her own.

[The Cinderella Man]

Victor wasn’t quite certain of the exact number of times that he woke up after being bludgeoned into unconsciousness, but he was pretty damn certain that it was becoming hackneyed in a hurry. He knew that there was always trouble in the world, but the fact that the wretched thing seemed to have the ability to home in on him was starting to irk him. In Serenti he got knocked out by some nickel-and-dime thugs. In Concordia forest, a bunch of pretentious, tree-hugging druids punched his lights out. Hell, even when he wasn’t on land, trouble found him on board a ship called Deadalus that ultimately got overtaken by pirates that threw him overboard without blinking twice. More and more the boxer begun to think that he was genuinely jinxed and that someone up above was having a blowout while watching his feeble attempts to defy fate.

So today his head was once again a couple of cubic inches short to properly hold whatever was throbbing within his skull. His consciousness was just around the corner, so close he could almost grasp it and reestablish it, but he didn’t feel like doing so yet. Another five minutes, just until the headache stopped knocking on the walls of his mind. Even when he heard a rather distant voice calling his name, he tried to brush it away with something that should’ve been words, but came out as a muttering of a drunkard that woke up in a water trough. However, the second time his name was spoken, it was accompanied by a pair of hands that caught him by the shoulders and pushed him up in the seating position. This probably wouldn’t do the trick and woke him up if his head didn’t touch the moldy wall behind. The headache that merely knocked before became a battering that he couldn’t ignore.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m awake,” he mumbled, his eyes shooting open and struggling with sharpening the image that they saw. His hand made a move towards the back of his head, made contact with the crusted blood that made his hair sticky, poked at the lump below and decided to leave it be for the time being. Only then he actually ascertained that Lehana stood in front of him, peering at him with those large black eyes that, despite their abysmal depth, seemed rather rattled. Once he took a glimpse at their environment, he found out the reason why they deviated from the usual half-amicable, half-brassy look.

They were locked in what seemed like a dungeon cell and like all the cells Victor ever visited, this one failed to diverge from the archetype. Filth on the floor, mould on the walls, weak, almost weary looking illumination... Yep, they were certainly in a bloody prison. “How come they never make these prison cells nice?” he said, the jest a mere product of his currently miserable state and the splitting headache that reminded him with every second that it won’t go away. Another look at Hana’s eyes made it rather clear that it was no time for jokes.

“You doing alright, Hana?” and then, once she put some distance between them and he noticed that there was something missing, he added: “Cadee? Where is she? Did she manage to escape?”

It was a rather ridiculous question, but given the fact that he suffered some serious trauma, it was good that he was able to form reasonable sentences. As if to answer his question, a whimper came through the barred wall that looked over the hallway and further into the opposite cell. Victor did his best to push himself back to his feet, using the slippery wall as support, before he approached the rusty bars. At first he couldn’t see a thing, the opposite cell clad in deep shadows. But then, after his eyes managed to adapt to the faint luminance, he could see a familiar looking figure. With her shift drawn over her knees and her head buried in her hands, there was little doubt who occupied the neighbor cell.

“Cadee? Cadee, is that you? It’s Victor and Hana! Are you alright?” he spoke in what seemed like a tone that tried to be both hushed and yet strong enough to reach the girl. For several seconds there was no reply, just minute rocking as the girl sat in the corner. Then, almost in a whisper, Cadee’s voice crept towards them.

“They... They said I must help them. That I had potential... That I burned down that orphanage,” she mussitated, almost as if she was merely talking to herself. “Fire. They say I can create fire. That’s why they want me.”

“Who are they, Cadee? Did they hurt you?” Victor asked, his hands gnawing at the rust of the bars from the desire to hurt the evildoers, and yet at the same time, that same hands wanted to cradle the frail lass.

“A little bit. I... I don’t know who they are. There’s an elderly gent... Looks like a priest. He said he’d make me his pet,” she said, her answers interrupted by faint sniffles. The more she spoke about the ordeal, the more frantic her rocking became, making her hit the wall with her back.

“Bastards,” the boxer uttered below his breath, and then spoke as softly as he could: “Don’t worry, Cadee. We’ll get you out of here.”

But regardless of how much he tugged on the hoary bars or how many times he shouldered the padlocked doors, the metal would not budge. He looked around the cell, but the damn thing was barren, without a single item that could help them in this instance. “Damn it! There has to be something. We have to find a way out of here, Hana.”

[Hana]

The Fallien woman usually tried her utmost to keep her mouth clean in the presence of anyone younger than herself, but the circumstances were too horrible to comprehend without fouling the air with curses. Hana began to mutter nasty words under her breath in the Fallien tongue – as fluent as she was with Common, she’d always thought that its vocabulary of curses was far too limited. She was much more creative in her native language. And anyhow, she knew it was highly unlikely that either of her companions were well-versed in Fallien curse words.

“I know we have to find a way out of here,” she answered tersely and frantically in Common once she’d gotten the verbal frustration out of her system. “I just…” Hana rested her forehead against the ruddy bars, trying to clear her head and the nausea that seemed to be sticking with her. “I just don’t understand it. Shit.Why do people do this?!” She slammed her left palm against the padlock of the door in aggravation. A bolt of fresh, sharp pain skittered up and down her bloodied left arm as she began to pace, the metallic ringing of the padlock echoing through the hallway of cells. Cadee shuddered.

For a moment Hana had to evacuate every other presence from her mind, to ignore the pounding in the back of her head and the sick feeling that was slowly but surely making its way from her stomach to her throat. The fact that she was a prisoner was enough to send her mind and her innards reeling as though she’d been hit in the gut as well as the back of the head. Then there was the disturbing imagery of Cadee’s confession.

And it was fairly safe to say that she and Victor wouldn’t be getting paid for the interrupted cargo delivery.

“Okay,” she said finally, her heart banging around in her chest like Ulani organizing her pots and pans. “Okay. We’re going to get out of here,” she declared with a confidence that felt a little more like a question waiting for confirmation. “Cadee…”

The curtain of dark, gritty hair swung as Cadee inclined her head at the Fallien woman. She wasn’t quite snapped out of her panicky reverie yet.

“Cadee,” repeated Hana with a little more tenderness, trying to control her voice – it seemed to want to travel up several octaves in her fear. She approached the bars again and wrapped her calloused fingers around them, smiling unsteadily at the little girl. In her own despair, she’d forgotten how abysmally frightened the girl must be by now. She’d gone through enough with her capture. To think, that someone – a ten-year-old girl, no less! – could create fire, and enough of it to destroy something several times her size was just that; unthinkable. Power like this was the substance of legends, even in Fallien. And power like this was a burden that no one as innocent as Cadee could have to bear. The thought of the barbarians who’d done so much to put the little girl though so much pain, and the sick bastard who intended to use the girl for his own benefits, made bile rise in Hana’s throat and her own brand of fire rise behind her black eyes.

“I’m not going to let them get you, Cadee.”

The girl sniffed heavily and rubbed her nose against the already-filthy sleeve of her shift. “Y-you promise?”

“I promise. We’re getting out of here, okay? So you just hang tight for a second.”

Cadee scuttled closer to the bars of her cell, gripping the metal with trembling, sooty hands. Her prison was obviously no cleaner than Hana and Victor’s. “But you’re in there….and I’m in here…how are we gonna get out?” Her voice cracked again.

Biting her lip with furious determination, Hana took a few steps back from the bars, slipping a little on a small puddle in the middle of the cell. She got the feeling that it was urine, but instead of lingering on the subject, she bounced forward and swung her right leg high and forward, aiming for the padlock. The door jiggled slightly but stayed in place, and the padlock made a spectacular tinny noise loud enough to wake the dead. After a few more failed attempts at this, Hana slumped against the bars, clenching her fists. “Damnit…”

She looked at Victor hopelessly. She felt almost as badly for him as she did for Cadee. The poor guy had only wanted to make a little extra coin for himself, and now he’d been slammed most unpleasantly into a predicament involving two strange girls and a dirty jail cell. They hadn’t even gotten a bite to eat. Hana wondered vaguely, if only to keep her thoughts from straying to We’re gonna die, if the fire was still burning in the little countryside glade with….

Fire. Fire.

Her eyes bright with excitement, Hana whirled around and peered through the bars at Cadee. “Cadee! You can make fire!”

Cadee screwed her face up in puzzlement, sitting up straighter. “I know that….”

“No, no, I mean, you can use your power to melt the locks on the doors! I mean, if you can burn down a building, you can melt a little piece of metal—“

The girl looked stricken for a moment. Hana coughed sheepishly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Can you try it?”

“I don’t know how!” protested Cadee, fidgeting with her hands. “I didn’t even know I….did what I did before! How do I do it now?”

“Just focus. Maybe all you have to do is think it, but do it forcefully,” encouraged the Fallien woman. “Try focusing on ours, over here. Imagine it melting or something.” Hana gestured at Victor to move back from the door, but before either of them could leave plenty of space between themselves and the padlock, something yellow sparked inside the padlock, as though someone had lit a match inside it. Flames began to lick the sides of the lock, and with a whoosh of sound, a large flare arose from the padlock, shooting out in all directions.

“Whoa, whoa, Cadee!” yelled Hana, leaping backwards, but as soon as she did, the fire seemed to melt away, leaving a charred residue on the padlock.

“I’m sorry!” wailed Cadee, her voice muffled by her hands over her mouth.

“It’s okay, we’re okay,” breathed Hana, though she almost wanted to laugh a little at the girl’s astonishment at her own power. “You’re just not used to it yet. You could light a hallway of torches all at once with that fire of yours. Keep trying, just keep it steady this time…”

For the next few minutes the ritual repeated itself: Hana and Victor kept at least three feet away from the door, Cadee’s face twisted in fierce concentration, the lock erupted in large flames, and vanished seconds later. Until the sixth or seventh time, when the fire that Cadee created hovered along the metal curves of the padlock, shrinking a little in size but not in intensity. Seeing that it had not vanished jarred Hana into a series of encouragements.

“Good, good! Just keep it like that, a little longer, a little more…”

Beads of sweat rolled down Cadee’s pale face. Hana could see her twitching a little with her enormous effort. The flames remained in place but grew in size again, and beneath the white and blue core of the fire, Hana could see the metal thinning, running down the sides until, with a start, she saw it drop from the front of the door and roll along the hallway until the fire itself was put out by the dirt piled around the bars.

“You did it! Victor, she did it, we’re out!” said Hana with delight, tugging at Victor’s arm as she pushed the door open. “Kid, you’re amazing. Now let’s get you out of there the same way, huh?”

[The Cinderella Man]

According to the proverb, the road to hell was paved with good intentions and while Lehana and Victor wouldn’t necessarily end up in the eternal flames of the underworld, it was quite clear that their good intentions weren’t getting them anywhere good. Nowhere but climbing up the walls like mice in a labyrinth without an exit. The cocoa-skinned woman grouched something in what must’ve been her own language before she picked a fight with the door just like he did several moments ago. And just like him, all she got out of it was a pain in her hand and thickening of her frown. The imprisoned boxer reckoned that all the rattling would attract the attention of the crooks that threw them in the slammer in the first place, but when Hana calmed down, the only sound in the proximity was the one of Cadee timidly sniveling in the corner of her cell.

If the stone floor wasn’t covered with grime and slime, Victor would’ve probably sat back on it while the Fallien woman tried to ease Cadee’s mind. But given the fact that floor’s level of appeal was next to none, the bruised prizefighter propped his back against the wall with a cheesed off expression appearing on his lineaments. Usually, when he was forced to face the music or got in a pickle with no obvious way out, he would make peace with it, put on a phlegmatic mask and wait for the inevitable. But today it wasn’t just his worthless life that was on the line. There was a stranger that he drew into this ordeal and a girl that should’ve been lying in a warm bed right now, hugging some plush teddy bear without a care in the world. But fate was a bitch and it treated all with the same frivolity.

His attention snapped out of the pissed off mulling and back to reality at Lehana’s mention of fire. It seemed like a sound plan, there was no doubt about it. It also seemed like a good way for all of them to turn into well-done heaps of flesh if the potential firestarter just happened to overdo it. But given the fact that there was a good chance that Hana and Victor awaited a silent execution and a nameless grave, even a chancy way out seemed like a godsend. So he let his companion do the inciting and exhortation while he kept an attentive ear on the door at the end of the hall.

This almost got his eyebrows and hair scorched. He was right next to the door when Cadee gave it a go for the first time, nearly blasting both the padlock and half the cell with her conjured flames. But with Lehana’s soft words of encouragement and guidance, the frightened orphan slowly got a hang of it, her flames heating up the lock gradually. Victor – ever the skeptic when it came to magicians, bunnies that came from the hat, summoned creatures, fabled wizardry and a myriad of other tricks – had to finally yield to the realization that magic wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Especially if it got him out of a tight spot such as this one. He still wasn’t particularly interested in how it worked and he definitely wouldn’t be taking lessons in the local mage’s guild, but the resentment that he usually had towards prissy magicians and their razzle-dazzle was gone for the time being.

It seemed like ages until the padlock finally lost all integrity and fell onto the ground. The smell of what Victor classified as a mixture of brimstone smoke and coal dust was prominent in the air by now, but none of them cared too much about it. They would be leaving the discomfort of these cells soon anyways... Or at least they thought they would. Even as Hana made a move for the door, the boxer finally picked up some movement from beyond the heavyset, iron gates that barred the exit from this section of the dungeon.

“Wait, stop. I think somebody’s coming,” he said in an austere whisper, steadying the foreigner with his hand as his eyes focused on some random spot, his ears tensing to their utmost to clarify his assumption. It took them only a second to do so. Resounding footsteps could be heard, thick-soled shoes on stone with a pair of mouths that palavered on something he couldn’t quite catch. “Not now, bastards. They’ll see the padlock. We need to do something quick.”

Kneeling hurriedly next to the bars, Victor reached towards the padlock only to withdraw his hand before touching it. He maybe was getting hit in the head for money, but he wasn’t stupid. That thing was bound to be as hot as a poker. The footsteps clicked louder, positioning the owners of those heavy boots on the other side of the door. Victor’s right hand went to the left sleeve of his shirt, struggled with tearing it off before he wrapped the cloth around his fist. The makeshift glove was a feeble insulation, but it gave him just enough time to pick up the semi-melted padlock and place it position it in the manner that made it look somewhat uncompromised. It wouldn’t pass closer inspection, but if everything went according to the plan, whoever came through that door wouldn’t get a chance to study anything closely except the texture of skin on Victor’s knuckles.

“Alright, listen,” he said to Lehana, holding both of her shoulders as he explained. “I’ll lure the guards to the door. With any luck, he’ll get close enough so I can shove the door right at him and knock him down. Now, you’ll have to get the other one. Go for the nuts. It works every time, and if it doesn’t, pop him one on the nose.”

There was no more time for discussion. The lock of the rusty door clacked and the door screeched like a cat in heat, introducing a pair of varlets that had the same every-Corone-crook beady eyes, sharp lineaments and three-day beard. Instead of crossbows, spiked clubs hung on their hips as they continued their conversation and advanced down the hallway.

“Hey! Hey, you two numbskulls! Yeah, you two inbred idiots, I’m talking to you,” Victor shouted, attracting their attention somewhere around the first insult. “I want to talk to whoever is in charge... If he has wits enough for talking, that is, since the two of you definitely lack it.”

“That’s a big mouth you have on you, chump. How about I knock all the teeth from it and shove my...” the boxer could think of several conclusions to that sentence, but none of them came to pass. Because it was at that exact moment that the guard stepped in front of Victor’s jail cell with his club patting the palm of his free hand. And that was the exact moment that the prizefighter shouldered the door that knocked the bastard away, sending him sprawling over the floor. Hoping that Hana would do her part, Victor came charging out like a rabid beast, burying a knee in the rogue’s chest as he came on top of his fallen form before he launched a hook that shattered the jaw bone of the man below. Just in case, another punch landed on the already malformed face, an experienced pugilist’s fist colliding with the nose.

There was no time to waste and Victor knew it. He left the kayoed – and possibly dead – man, snatching the club from his hand and approaching Cadee’s cell. The girl was once again nothing but a grimy ball in the corner, observing everything through her tangled hair threads. “It’s going to be alright, Cadee. We’re getting out of here,” he assured her, lifting the club and hammering against the padlock on her cell. The rather aged looking thing sustained three hits, breaking after the fourth.

“Come on. We have to hurry before more come,” he said, his voice rattling as he extended a hand towards her. She didn’t accept the offering though. Instead she ran straight towards him, wrapping her hands around him desperately, burying her face into his chest. He embraced her heartily with his free hand, feeling the way he always felt in such situations - awkward. “You’re going to be alright, kid. Now, go to Hana and stick to her no matter what. I’ll take point.”

[Hana]

Tiptoe, tiptoe. Shuffle. Step lively now, as her father always said. Hana towed Cadee behind her but made sure to keep a firm hold on the girl’s clammy hand. The two of them didn’t allow much more than their toes to touch the ground, making it look as though they trod on stepping stones in a creek.

They had good reason to. As soon as Victor had darted out of their cell to attack one grotesquely large guard, Hana flew like a bat out of hell to face his counterpart, a rough-and-tumble sort with an equally unattractive mug for a face. What little brain material Hana suspected him of having served him well at first; the man was obviously more prepared for a rebellious assault than Victor’s unfortunate victim. He made as though to shove Hana back against the bars, an action that might have thrown the Fallien girl back into the unpleasant oblivion of unconsciousness. Her heart nearly jumping out of her throat, Hana’s quick reflexes came into play, and she dropped to the musty dirt floor beneath her as the man’s fists went sailing into the air.

He grunted in irritation as his blows glanced off the bars, undoubtedly leaving a bruise or two. Hana slid in as close as she could without endangering herself too badly, and brought herself back to a standing position in the blink of an eye, but not before burying her knee in the man’s crotch with as much as force as could be applied.

The guard howled in pain, sinking to the floor in an almost pitiable state. Hana took a brief moment to allow herself a victorious “Hah!” It was doubly satisfying as she remembered that her mother had always said that if a man was boorish enough to try and hit a woman, it was up to that woman to relieve him of what little manhood remained to him. He was probably the same brute who’d decked Hana in the first place, she reasoned.

Suddenly aware that she had, once again, lingered too long on her own achievement, Hana took a step back from the man, who’d barely begun to recover from that staggering blow, and threw her fist into his face with renewed vitality. He almost blocked the hit, but was too slow (and still rather occupied with his previous injury). There was a rewarding crunch as her fist rammed his nose, and Hana needed only to hear the telltale thump as he hit the floor to know he was out.

“Siblings,” she remarked to Victor as he beat against the padlock on Cadee’s door. “Nice to know fighting with them is good for something.”

After Victor freed a grateful Cadee, the three of them made their way down a narrow, intimidating passage to the left of their cell block. They were a motley group, their tense, disheveled forms hugging the chipped, yellowing walls. At a corner or two, they encountered a passing sentry, upon whom Victor would immediately bestow a good cuff to the head. He had an admirably proficient way of striking, his arm twisting and locking as he administered the blow. If she were less nervous, Hana would have been asking him what styles of fighting he’d studied and whether or not he thought he would survive a few rounds against her brother, Julian.

However, she had no time for banter or even for a comment in passing. The three escapees had to keep their feet moving, especially after knocking out more of the lax guards around the prison hallways. Every shifting shadow, every flicker of a lamp made the Fallien girl’s heart race, her fingers clenched tightly around Cadee’s bony shoulders as she maneuvered the small girl in front of her.

Cadee was silent as the grave, reverting very close to the state in which Hana and Victor had found her; frail and agitated. Both girls relied heavily on Victor’s leadership as they wound through hallway after hallway. It reminded Hana very much of the hide-and-seek games she used to play with her siblings. But there would be no collapsing in a fit of giggles at the end of this game, no playful chiding when one of them was caught. It felt as though the whole world were out to tag them.

As they walked, Hana lowered her face down to Cadee’s level and whispered in her ear, “Cadee, if you can manage it….leave some fire behind us. That way nobody can follow us out. Just as a precaution. Can you do that?”

Cadee seemed to be deeply concentrated on staying in between the two adults, between her only layers of protection. She tilted her head slightly to indicate that she’d heard, and suddenly her small hand was clenching Hana’s arm. Whether it was for strength or to keep herself from falling over in effort, Hana wasn’t sure. She kept her free hand on top of Cadee’s tightly.

With a rush of wind, a stream of fire erupted in midair behind them, falling and spreading to whatever little flammable particles lay on the floor. Hana looked over her shoulder. The glow of flame illuminated her dark skin in a faint golden flush, and gave Cadee’s already anxious face a petrified clarity. Hana gently pushed on the small girl’s shoulders to urge her ahead.

“Good job, kid. Let’s just keep moving.” Hana suppressed a shudder. It was nearly as terrifying to know that she had to be the grownup in this situation, that there was no guiding hand to press her on now, as it was to be running from someone in the first place. She suddenly felt a desperate need to be home.

Dark as it had to be outside, Hana saw, with a comforting lift of her heart, the outline of trees and bushes in the shine of moonlight just ahead of them, through the rings of glass in a window. “There,” she croaked over Victor’s shoulder, surprised as how unused her voice felt after just a few minutes of silence. She felt a momentary wave of embarrassment when she realized just how much time she usually spent talking.

“We’re almost outside,” she whispered to Cadee, who gave a tiny little jump in her steps – a comforting sign that the laughing Cadee was still in there somewhere – and hurried.

Just a few more steps, thought Hana. Just a few more.

[The Cinderella Man]

Even though in that moment, as he braved the stony halls of the dungeon, he might’ve given out the impression of somebody who did heroic acts before breakfast, Victor was probably just as scared as the pair of girls he escorted. His heart was rampant, his palms showered with the same cold sweat that seemed to creep over every square inch of his skin, his train of thought running on circular tracks that kept reminding him that death could be lurking around the next corner. It was easy to be courageous and believe that death was ‘just a beginning’ (as one of his favorite sayings claimed) when you weren’t neck-deep in crap that could be the end of you. It was easy to punch somebody in the face when you had a ref that would stop the fight before the worst happened. But when your life dangled on a thin thread and you risked losing it every moment, it turned made the insides of even the boldest men into a queasy mush.

But courage wasn’t the lack of this sensation; Arslan the Ever-complaining Trainer of boxing told him that before his first bout. Courage was feeling like a sissy, but reaching into the maw of the beast anyways and ripping its guts out. That was what Victor was doing now. Not so much for his own sake, but for the sake of the two that followed him. Knowing that a terrible fate awaited both Lehana and Cadee should he fail or give up was like a slap that woke you from a drunken tantrum. It set his eyes on the goal; getting them out alive.

Achieving that wasn’t a walk in the park, but more like a walk through a forest, where you never quite knew what expected you on the next step, but you still didn’t have a hard time doing it. It was this ease with which the boxer dealt with the inattentive brutes that lazed in the shadowed hallways that made him believe that they were actually going to make it. Through the benighted passages they went, as silent as a trio of people with absolutely no knowledge in the art of stealth could be, up the stairs, reaching the halls where the air was less damp and more energizing. They even ran across a room with their possessions. The man in charge of the equipment unsurprisingly objected against the pair’s claim, but with the combined efforts of Vic’s mitts and Hana’s feet they made their case and got their stuff back. The prizefighter even decided to liberate a big fat pouch filled with shinnies which he stuffed into his pack. Shouldering his sack o’ stuff and donning a pair of his fingerless, iron-plated gloves, Victor led the way towards the door that led out into the night.

Opening door ajar just enough for one of his eyes to check out the surroundings, Vic waited and watched, watched and waited until he was certain that there was nothing underneath the silvery film that the moonlight cast over the courtyard. It appeared to him that they were in something that once used to be a fort, but the lack of upkeep made the entire complex look decrepit and rundown. The fortified walls were neither fortified nor walls presently, just continuous knee-high heap of rubble that separated them from the hollow darkness of Concordia.

“I think the way is clear,” he whispered to his two companions that looked just as antsy to get out of here as he was. He looked Cadee in her wide, innocent eyes and couldn’t stifle a reassuring smile even though he was currently as unsure as a city slicker in the middle of the Fallien desert. When his eyes moved to the blackness of Lehana’s irises, sought for some sort of reassurance that wasn’t there, then returned to Cadee’s as he continued speaking. “When I open this door, we run for the forest as fast as we can, alright? Will you be able to do that or do you want me to carry you?”

The mousy girl wanted to be carried away, not just out of this prison but somewhere far away, somewhere where the bad men wouldn’t be after her and where Victor and Hana could take care of her. She wanted to close her eyes and keep them shut until she finally found that which she lacked her whole life; safety. But regardless of how she looked like, Cadee wasn’t a child anymore. If all the hardships of life taught her anything, it was that she had to fight for what she desired. She needed to run and win her freedom. Her grimy face nodded skittishly before she said: “I will run.”

And run they did. With nothing left to say or do, Victor shoved the door out of their path and led the sprint through the grassy yard. He could hear some voices from within, distorted and agitated, probably cursing the gods and fighting the fires that Cadee started, but they wouldn’t be able to catch them now. His eyes were everywhere and nowhere, their motion driven by panic, making them notice nothing. Luckily, there was nothing to be noticed. It seemed that most of the bastards that entrapped them were either sleeping or dealing with the commotion the trio left in their wake. “Amateurs,” the boxer allowed a cocky thought as he closed in on the degenerating outer wall. They are going to make it. The forest was right there, within their grasp.

And then it was gone.

A wall made of spikes shot out of the ground as if the ground was the back of a porcupine, making Victor collide with it. Its texture was as smooth as glass and as cold as... Ice? Yes, it was a wall made of ice, conjured out of nowhere to murder their hopes of liberty. Before they even tried to go around it, two more were erected, trapping the three escapees in a blind alley made of ice. It was then, when he looked towards the only route that they could take, that Vic saw the man responsible for thwarting their prison break. Standing on the ledge of one of the crumbling watchtowers, a man in monkish white robes stood, his white hair dyed silver by the full moon. There was an aura around him, a mist both vague and tangible, and it seemed to pulsate as if it was in sync with his heartbeat. He stepped forward from his perched position, looking as if he was about to take a leap of faith into nothingness, but even as he did so, a platform made of ice appeared beneath his foot, serving him as a step, then another, and another, until he stood on the ground. The grass bended before his aura, first succumbing to frost before it was completely petrified.

“You didn’t actually think you’d get away that easily?” he asked, his voice emotionless and bland, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. His eyes spoke a different story, blue flames raging within them chaotically. “Oh, you did? Isn’t that absolutely marvelous!” he added, chuckling at first, but then breaking into a maniacal laughter that seemed to echo despite the fact that the sound had nothing to ricochet of.

“I don’t know who you are, magician, but if you don’t let us leave, I’ll...” the prizefighter threatened him, standing before the pair of girls and feeling his heart jumping into his throat.

“Oh shush,” the mage retorted coolly, barely sparing a glance on Victor and his chest-beating. Instead, his eyes peered at the girl that latched onto Hana as if the brown-skinned girl was her ticket to salvation. “You’ll do what? Punch me? Your brutish kind disgusts me! So ungainly.” Still looking at Cadee, the wizard’s fingers snapped and a wardrobe-sized segment of the surrounding wall snapped off and came at Victor from his right. It knocked the pugilist off his feet and slammed him against the opposite wall, nearly crushing him to death. With the brawn dazed and temporarily out of the picture, the malicious wizard was left with the brains and the sheer magical talent.

[Hana]

Hana clenched and unclenched her teeth, trying to shake off the bout of homesickness that suddenly descended upon her. These last few seconds, as the three sprinted toward the edge of the woods, were crucial, as they tempted catastrophe to fall upon the group. She wanted desperately to believe she would get out alive; it was only characteristic of her. If there was anything Hana believed in – excluding her concrete faith in the distant B’neshan deities – it was the notion of a fairy tale. The age-old conviction held in a sort of stalwart reverence by children across the continents, the principle of right against wrong, good against evil. Nice guys finishing in first place and sweeping up all the glory that came with it. The heroes were supposed to win, and any other ending would upset the world’s balance, only to be righted again by whatever eventual hero came along. It was, as Hana had gleaned from her parents’ stories, the way of things. Before tonight she had not imagined it possible for that way to be rerouted completely.

Hana saw that solid belief deteriorating before her very eyes.

Their exit quickly made itself into a barricade, the ground tearing apart with a metallic sound like several swords being drawn from their scabbards. Ice rose in tall pillars above them, the ends as sharp and lethal as teeth. More erupted out of the wet grass, locking Victor, Hana, and Cadee in another prison that was, clearly, far less escapable. The very air seemed to freeze, clogging itself up with frost that bit at the Fallien girl’s skin. Shivering, she drew Cadee closer, all the while staring at the ice spikes standing firm around them. “Victor,” she managed to choke out, fear and gruesome fascination suffocating all other thoughts. Cadee, breathing raggedly, tried to muffle her crying by burying her face in Hana’s shirt.

One arm still wrapped tightly about the girl, Hana stretched her arm out to touch one of the ice pillars. She yelped and pulled her hand back, seeing a silvery residue fade from her skin. It felt as though she’d been burnt. But then why was there coldness seeping through her flesh to the marrow of her bones…?

“Your brutish kind disgusts me! So ungainly.”

Her heart flip-flopping in her chest, Hana whirled around. She hadn’t noticed the other man descend, only saw him staring at the frail girl clinging to the Fallien woman like there was no tomorrow. Victor began to protest, and was immediately silenced by this white-garbed fiend. At the snap of the magician’s fingers, a portion of ice slid cleanly out of place, and hurled itself at Victor. The boxer was thrown back against the back wall of the prison, crumpling instantly beneath the massive segment of ice.

The Fallien girl shrieked, and turned around to gape in shock at the perpetrator, her numerous braids whipping the side of her face. Smothering the urge to shrink away from the wizard, she thrust herself in front of the little girl, who’d begun to scream as soon as Victor was knocked out. The wizard seemed, finally, to register Hana’s presence, though he didn’t look away from Cadee.

“Why are you doing this?!” cried Hana, her voice mounting in pitch and horror. Cadee was clinging to her waist, crying and whispering consolations to herself. “How can you hurt people like that? Where’s your compassion?!”

“Compassion?” The magician laughed, the nastiness of his voice grating on the ears. For the first time, his glance flicked over from Cadee to Hana. “You are in no position to argue anything, dear girl. Least of all compassion. Was it compassion you demonstrated back in my dungeon, knocking the head of every innocent spectator come across? Or the unfortunate souls burnt raw and red by young Cadee’s fire?”

Hana’s jaw dropped, stunned by the ridiculousness of his rationale, yet she could think of nothing with which to justify herself. The wizard smiled, satisfied by her silence. If it weren’t for the cruel laughter and the raging ambition in his eyes, he would have been able to disguise himself perfectly behind a mask of cold detachment. “Thought not! Do not presume to declare some childish recital of rights and wrongs to me! It’s unflattering in someone as young and new to reality as you. You’re too green to properly judge anyone.”

He angled his head to examine the Fallien woman, the moonlight silhouetting his profile, but not enough to hide the unpleasant smirk. “Though ‘green’ is hardly appropriate for someone of your….hue,” he said evenly. “‘Dirty’ might suit you better.”

Hana growled and swore noisily in a vulgar mess of Common and Fallien. Normally she let such trifling remarks on her color slide, but in this particular situation the envelope had been pushed a mite too far.

Seemingly amused by her fury, the wizard only chuckled. He snapped his fingers again and let the ominous chink! of cracking ice fill the silence. Hana, her hands thrown out to shield Cadee, felt as heavy as stone and couldn’t move. She watched a hunk of ice, as big as the first, extract itself from a spike, then vault across the grass in her direction. It crashed directly into Hana, but was close enough to Cadee to graze her skin and knock her off her feet. With an intense pressure from the cold weight on top of her body, Hana struggled to grab hold of her consciousness before it slipped away into a painful void.

“Now,” began the wizard as though he’d just finished a tedious set of chores. “My pet. Cadee, is it?”

Cadee still lay on the frozen grass, sobbing quietly to herself.

“I suppose I should’ve been more careful about roughing you up like that,” he continued apologetically. “But you do have a tendency to cling. It isn’t becoming. We’ll attempt to fix that.” He looked down at her, his eyes cool except for the spark of greed. “Get up, girl, and come here.”

The sobbing had stilled, but there was no answer. No movement, apart from the occasional twitch.

“I said, come here,” said the wizard impatiently.

The little girl’s body, so tense and hard from the wearisome night, seemed to release itself. “No,” she answered, in a voice that was not quite her own.

The magician’s blue eyes, already steely, hardened. “What?”

“No. Leave me alone,” came the stern reply.

“I should inform you that I don’t tolerate this sort of disobedience,” said the wizard, apparently offended. “Come here before I am forced to move your legs for you.” He held up his fingers and mimed snapping them. “I am quite capable.”

“I—said—NO.” Cadee shot up from the ground and sat on her knees, her hands curled into knobby fists. It would have been a comical, infantile sight were it not for the look in her eyes. The irises had gone from a soft brown to a metallic gold, making it appear as though they were aflame. She gazed at the wizard with alarming ferocity.

But the wizard stared back, with anything but fear. “Aha! I see,” he exclaimed, clapping his hands in delight. “So provoking defiance is the key to unlocking your true potential. How marvelous. I will harness you yet.”

“You hurt them,” said the incensed Cadee, throwing out her bony arm toward Victor and Hana, both of whom were still unconscious. A shower of white-gold sparks flew from her fingertips. “And you were gonna hurt me. But you can’t now.” She rose to her feet, her knees shaking. “You can’t hurt me anymore.”

The wizard opened his mouth, all set to chastise the girl for her babyish sentiments, but no words came out. A red flush stained Cadee’s cheeks underneath the fiery golden eyes, and around her delicate frame spiraled streaks of brilliant scarlet and orange. Her hair lifted from some unseen wind as the scent of burning copper sizzled in the air.

Then, all at once, the ring of ice around them melted at a startlingly fast pace, water pooling in the ground and evaporating. The wizard sensed the ground beneath his feet heating up, felt the grass singing his feet through his shoes, and he raised himself above the ground, walking backward into the air on frozen steps that appeared at his whim. The ring of holes from the icy spikes were suddenly shooting flames as high as the prison, the fire licking the walls and igniting every dry tinder it touched.

Hana’s eyes flicked open. Her vision seemed to be revolving, moving from white-tinged red back to darkness, until she resolved not to let it rush up and swallow her again. Her head and stomach ached, but she could no longer feel the intense weight of the chunk of ice. Looking around hazily, she saw that the ice was gone. And the world was flooding fire above and below, eating up everything in sight.

Scrambling backward against the prison wall next to Victor, the Fallien girl shrank back from the flames. Though somehow the fire wasn’t engulfing the little patch of grass where they sat, Hana felt singed by it. The black girl who, until yesterday, had lived her entire life underneath the harsh Fallien sun, had never felt heat as fierce as this.

“Hana.”

At the sound of a familiar voice, Hana looked up. And up. There was Cadee, floating above the ground and glowing with red and gold like some hellfire angel. But her face, looking back down at the Fallien girl with eyes like hot iron, was still the face of the frightened little girl tied up in the wooden crate.

“Wake up Victor and go,” said the voice that was and wasn’t Cadee’s.

“Cadee…” Hana’s own voice began to break. “I can’t leave you here.”

“Yes, you can.” The words were soft and resolute, echoing with an astonishing volume from such a height.

“No, I can’t,” said the Fallien girl, trying to stand up, but wobbling back to the ground with a thump. “Cadee, no. No!”

“Please, Hana,” pleaded Cadee, letting some of the little-girl pitch back into her tone. “Just go.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and then Hana felt obliged to obey this strange new incarnation of Cadee, a Cadee that seemed to have broken out of a shell. The Fallien girl crawled over to Victor, careful to avoid standing too high and getting her braids caught in the fire.

“Victor.” She shook his shoulders hard, wanting him to fix this somehow. “Victor, wake up, please, wake up.”

[The Cinderella Man]

Cadee was tired. She was tired of life lived as a fifth wheel. She was tired of being pushed around, shoved in the corners, hiding in the shadows in fear of the next bad thing that would bring her life another step closer to hell. She was tired of being a helpless nobody whose secret wishes went in smokes, whose words fell on deaf ears, whose very existence was insignificant. She was tired dancing to the sad tune the fate played on the harp of her life. Her entire life was a one way street that kept winding downhill, leading her to this point in space and time where she finally had a choice to make a difference. To make a stand.

Cadee remembered. Early days were vague to her, but she remembered all the mocking and prodding and jesting and malice that made no sense to her young mind. She remembered the filter of tears through which she looked at other orphaned children who pointed fingers, threw words at her that hurt more then any rocks, alienating her from their little band. She remembered the foul names that signified how different she were from the rest. She remembered the loneliness and that one-armed doll made of rough canvas which her hands smoothed and smothered every time they played and she wasn’t invited. And she remembered the flames. These manifestations of her childish wrath danced at her whim, leaping from one bed to the next, eating everything she grew to hate. She remembered the screams. She blocked them out ever since that day, buried them under the floorboards of her brain, but she remembered them now. Their accusations, their pleas. Their announcement of death.

Cadee was guilty. None ever pointed a finger at her and blamed her for the fire at the orphanage that day. None who knew her true nature were alive to throw a different kind of fire and brimstone at her. But she was guilty of a gruesome execution. Her juvenile mind found a way to suppress the memory, to deceive itself that no such occurrence ever took place, to carry on, but she knew. In a way, she always knew. She just wasn’t ready to wrestle that demon from the past yet. She wasn’t ready to look into the faces of all those who wronged her and ask them for forgiveness. For, even though they took away her youth, she took away from them everything else.

But now, she wasn’t a child anymore. Now she knew that closing her eyes and hiding in the corner wasn’t going to make everything go away. Now she had a chance to redeem herself. A dam somewhere in her mind broke and the tide was making its way to the final resolution. She would stop the inferno from ever occurring again.

Her saviors were at her feet, both pleading her to snap out of it, to make a run for the woods with them, but their words got scorched by the hell she raised all around her. In a lifetime of misery and heartache, Hana and Victor were a lighthouse, something that shone far on the horizon, reminding you that there was something other then storm in the world around you. But they weren’t a part of her world. They never could be. She would never be their adopted daughter and they would never live happily ever after. Such stories were for children and she wasn’t a child anymore. Heroes only lived in fairytales. In the real world, you did your utmost and hoped it was enough to achieve a personal victory. Because, in the big picture, everybody lost.

She didn’t say goodbye to them. Such a words would tear her little heart asunder. Instead, an innocent “thank you” left her lips, defeated the constant hum of the burning flames and reached the pair of the only two people that were ever kind to her. And then they were gone. Vibrant flame tongues built a wall of fire between the pair and Cadee in an instant. Only a narrow trail wasn’t scorched, leading away from the fortress and into Concordia, ushering Hana and Victor away from the young pyromancer.

Once again, Cadee was alone, but this time she was going to do the right thing.

***

Neither of them wanted to leave. Neither of them ever voiced that thought, but it was apparent in their eyes, their facial expressions, the reluctant way they trudged away from the emblazed courtyard of the decrepit citadel. But Cadee never gave them a choice. Her fire was mad, making their skin hurt from the sheer heat that it emanated, but still leaving them oddly unharmed. The coolness of the night beneath the tree crowns should’ve been soothing, but wasn’t. They both would’ve gladly traded it for being able to stay with Cadee, help her out somehow. Little did they know that they would only be standing in her way. Standing in the way of something she had to do not only to save them, but to save herself.

They were well past the underbrush and beneath the stately elm trees when it happened. The flames receded almost completely, until there was nothing but the light of the moon illuminating the landscape again. And then, like an earth-bound supernova, she exploded. The light was eye-scorching, her roar deafening, her might quaking the earth as if it was breaking by the seams, sending a wave of heat darting through the forest. Cadee unleashed her regrets and let them fade away forever in the flames. In those flames she was liberated. In those flames she was reborn.

Somebody was screaming into the explosion, a futile cry that got lost in the thunder and the subsequent sonic boom. Only when his throat started to ache did Victor realize that he was the one screaming.

[Hana]

Hana watched Victor scream. But she couldn’t scream herself.

The night, it seemed, was to be peppered with hints of irony. The Fallien woman’s mouth was constantly in motion, ejecting her loves, her fears, her musings, her boasts, her favorite swear words; anything the people around her weren’t interested in hearing about, they heard it anyway. She wore her heart on her sleeve, as goes the old adage. Yet in the one hour she ought to be howling with grief, with despondent relief, not a sound broke from her mouth.

Instead she looked up at the billowing black smoke curling around rings of gold and white, the ignition that was the final phenomenon in a grim, startling night full of phenomena. And began to have thoughts that didn’t bear thinking about.

Cadee was a story that wasn’t supposed to happen. In the tapestry of Hana’s life she was a stray thread, something that had loosened the tight-knit familiarity by a notch. And after only one night, she’d snared that tapestry on a hook, leaving an irreparable break in the folds, just by the mere fact of her existence. Now that she was dead, the threads of her life that had so swiftly interlaced with Hana’s hung loose, unable to be woven back.

Death, however minor its victim in the eyes of society, was still like a chokehold around the Fallien woman’s neck. She’d never known anyone who died before, excluding those she knew by family association. A feeble great-aunt, an ancient neighbor from three generations ago, maybe. But never a friend.

A friend. Hana pictured Cadee hovering several feet off the ground, rising, her lank hair and thin face ablaze in a corona of sulfurous flame, yet her skin didn’t burn. She’d looked as though she were lit from within, the beneficiary of some secret authority and confidence. And unease.

It was unfair. It was completely, horribly, terribly unfair. Cadee had lost the chance to change her miserable life and Hana had lost some small inner portion of herself that believed in the innate goodness of all things. And worst of all, Cadee had chosen her death. She’d chosen to be a martyr and had crafted the means of her demise herself. What was childish innocence, what was hope if it could be twisted so? What was the worth of preserving the appealing naiveté of the young, when the young themselves now had the ability to corrupt it long before time required them to?

She was wrestling with more than her vanished innocence and Cadee’s death. She had the guilt to deal with, too, and guilt was a thing that Hana didn’t often allow to perch on her shoulder. The weight of it was too much, even when it was dispensed to other characters. There was herself, of course, and Victor. And then there was Cadee, the wizard, and the wizard’s thugs. Somehow everyone was to blame, and part of her was glad for it.

Hana looked back down at Victor, who stood in the same position, his mouth partially open in a scream that had already ended, and left his throat dry and swollen. With the same sorrow, the Fallien girl walked up behind the boxer and wrapped her arms around him, holding tight.

* * * * * *

At her insistence, Hana and Victor traipsed back in the direction of the fortress. Or whatever was left of it. Victor hadn’t flat-out refused, but it was clear that a restless hesitation held him back. He, like Hana, was probably not imagining the site of the explosion to be the most pleasant of spectacles. But Hana had to see it. If there was something left behind, maybe she could finally shed some of her waiting tears. If not….well, either way, she would not abandon Cadee’s soul to loneliness. In Hana’s culture, one did not walk away from the newly dead. They respected, even celebrated their ascent to heaven.

As they came nearer and nearer to their destination, the canopy of trees soaring high above their heads couldn’t quite smother the lingering scent of charred wood and ash from the fire, but it lifted Hana’s spirits by a margin. The ground was cool and soft beneath her feet, lurching slightly is she pressed down hard, not like the stiff soil of R’uuya spice fields. Moonlight fell against the leaves in splashes of pale emerald, and though it was silent now, there was a certain atmosphere in the spaces between the trees, a comforting stillness. It was a beautiful landscape, and its beauty was all the more obvious because it distracted the Fallien girl from what lay ahead, if only for a moment.

The moment was gone as the soft brown earth turned into blackened cinders. The height of the trees dwindled until Hana and Victor were passing only burnt stumps. The stench of smoke grew razor-sharp, and Hana’s heart – rather acrobatic these last few hours – did a back flip in her chest.

The deadened part of the forest gave way to a vast clearing. It hardly looked like the same forest, until Hana realized it was where the fortress used to be. Her breath catching in her throat in an audible gasp, she strode ahead, the steps quicker and quicker. When she finally stopped, she stood almost in the very center of a wide, gaping crater. The large jail in which they’d been imprisoned not two hours ago was demolished. Not even the remains of a skeletal frame, save the piles of soot here and there, stood as testimony to the fortress. Everyone inside – and outside – was gone as well. There was no trace, as far as she could see, of the wizard, or Cadee.

The Fallien girl sank to her knees, her hands folding in her lap. Her shoulders heaved with the last effort of trying to contain tears, and as she blinked hard to keep them back, she caught a glint of – something, something shining amidst the blackened earth. Reaching wordlessly into the soil, she sifted dirt and ash through her fingers until they revealed a small, hard lump.

She stood and walked back to Victor, wiping the lump with her thumb and examining it with an open mouth. When she reached the boxer, she held it up in her fingers: a coarse gem the color of blood, flashing like a thorny star. A diamond, a diamond in the rough. Like its creator.

Hana smiled weakly. “I guess she liked us okay,” she said in a husky voice. It was then that sorrow really fell upon her, and she dissolved into tears, sobbing quietly and wrapping Victor, her remaining friend, in another embrace.


((Spoils: A small red diamond that was formed from the intense heat of Cadee’s fire.))

[The Cinderella Man]

A part of him hoped to find Cadee standing in the middle of this hole in the earth, grimy-faced and scared, just as she was when they opened up that crate a day ago. It was the naïve part of him, the part that still believed in the goodness of the white and the malice of the black part of the spectrum. But that part believed in a different world, an alternate dimension where there was always some deus ex machina to ride in and save the day. Here and now, in the land of Corone on the world of Althanas, there was no place for such naivety. The good didn’t always win. And even if it did, it was never a clean victor, never a straight-out kayo that left no room for discussion on who won and who lost. It was always that irritating shade of gray that left an ashen taste in your mouth, making you weigh and measure how much you gained. How much you lost.

He didn’t want to go back to the blast site. He knew that there would be nothingness waiting for them there, a lousy replacement for a sweet little human being that was supposed to be sleeping in a bed somewhere, childishly ignorant of the troubles of the world around her. Even though Victor knew Cadee for only a short while, she grew on him like a habit. The good kind. She was an incarnation of the daughter he wanted to have, an embodiment of his younger sister who he never protected as much as he should. And now she was gone and they were supposed to walk away with nothing but a memory of her sacrifice. A memory. Memories were overrated, they faded away with time, like pictures taken several decades in the past. How long before he forgot Cadee’s face? How long before he forgot today’s date? How long until she became a victim to the forgetfulness of the mind?

Because he feared the answers to those questions, he followed Hana as the Fallien lass backtracked towards the citadel. He thought that if he witnessed the aftermath of Cadee’s sacrifice, he would find some solace, feel the magical residue of her goodness. But there was nothing magical to be found. The entire place smelled like a volcano eruption, charcoaled and left for the forest to cover with its greenness in the subsequent years. There were no bones, no debris, no trace that there was ever something here except billowing ash that forced a bitter taste into Victor’s mouth.

Unlike him, Hana was more perceptive. The girl was wrestling with the events of the night courageously enough, but when she fished out a blood diamond from the very center of the crater, she couldn’t contain her emotions anymore. She whimpered and sobbed into his shirt, holding onto him almost desperately, and it was in Hana’s flood of emotions that Victor did find some abatement. Losing Cadee in such a manner was devastating, but knowing that somebody else cared made it almost bearable. Almost.

Stroking the girl’s braided hair, the boxer stared at the sky above that was completely oblivious to what unfolded below its starry dome. “Aye, she did,” was the only reply he could conjure. Words were needless here; they didn’t have to tell each other that they felt like crap. They both realized that in the theatre play that was Cadee’s life, they were but statists in the final chapter, playing the role assigned to them and unable to change a damn thing about it. It was this helplessness that hurt the most, the fact that they couldn’t save Cadee from all that haunted her. They were simply witnesses to the love that only a child could have. Unreasonable love, unheeding, unstoppable. Absolute.

He wanted to offer some condolence to his companion. He wanted to tell Hana the pious crap that his father served every Sunday, preaching how people went to better places once they perished. But right now, in the wake of Cadee’s death, he couldn't force such words past his lips. What kind of a better place was there if the only path that led to it went straight through hell?

“Come on, let us leave.”

Radasanth wasn’t far, but Victor was certain that trekking to it would prove to be the longest walk of his life.

((SPOILS: The pouch that Victor snatched while running out of prison. It contains 1000 gold pieces which Hana and he shared evenly.))

[Witchblade]

Story

Continuity: - 7.5 Well, the story was set up easily enough, giving the reader a good idea where both of your characters are coming from. Victor himself never needs much of an excuse, his lives in Radasanth; it was Hana that had to come up with something for being all the way in Corone from Fallien. Her reason was plausible, travelling there to earn money and good on a few adventures. Her first day in Corone and already she’s getting pulled into massive amounts of trouble, poor girl.

The quest storyline was interesting. In the beginning when you found the poor kidnapped girl, it was rather obvious where this was going to lead to in the end. With some kind of eventual conflict between Hana and Victor and the people that hired him to move the ‘cargo’, as it was. You really do leave the reader to believe the girl was captured for some kind of sex trade, but as you move through to the end you learn it’s something completely different. I honestly thought for a few posts there until that wizard guy showed up that you’d thrown that in to make it more convenient for your characters to escape. That’s not exactly something you want your readers believing. By the by, the ending scene was very emotional, especially Hana’s post. I really enjoyed it and I’m sure being more attached to the characters I would have cried. But the conclusion felt a little lacking, the quest just ended with them hugging. A very nice emotional conclusion, it just felt like it was missing something and I found myself going ‘now what’.

Setting: - 9 Setting was beautifully described throughout the quest. I really enjoyed the fact that it started pissing down rain in the beginning of the quest. It served no actual purpose to advance the storyline, but it just made the weather and environment a lot more real. You two work well as a team, what one of you doesn’t manage to describe in one post, the other will pick up and finish it off. It gives it a nice feeling, like setting from the perspective of two different characters—because this is honestly coming from two different people—who each notice different things.

Pacing: - 8 It was a slow start in the beginning, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I actually enjoyed the moment of talk between Hana and Victor. Even after the crate was opened and they found little Cadee, the pacing of the story was rather slow and steady allowing the characters to interact and get to know one another. Once the illegal smugglers, kidnappers, whatever you want to call them showed up everything went to Hell in a hand basket and things quickly started moving along. I didn’t like how easily Cadee started coming out of her shell. It was a matter of hours and the girl was already trusting Hana and Victor. Yes, they were nothing but nice to her, but someone in her position should be a little more cautious. After all, she’s not really a child anymore after going through all that.

Also, post 20 from Hana. The post above that was of Victor taking down one of the guards and leaving Hana to do the same with the other. Now the following quest Hana, you take the reader right out of the action by going into the escape part and then reflect on the fight. This can work sometimes and really well, however not here. It completely destroyed the tension that Victor had set up, I already know Hana wins against the guard and gets away unscathed, why do I want to read about it now?

Character

Dialogue: - 7.5 Dialogue flowed from character to character and even inner dialogue seemed true and real to me. I find of missed Victor’s sarcastic remarks in this one. From all the other quests I’ve judged with him in it, he has a habit of making these cynical, sarcastic remarks about what’s going on around him and I believe I only caught that once in this quest. It didn’t take anything away from the quest, but I always enjoy those remarks.

Hana, your character has a habit of switching to Fallien when she’s upset and swearing in her own native tongue. As someone who also uses a Fallien character, I know how much fun this can be, especially when the other characters don’t know what you’re saying. However, I think you should look into actually putting the words she’s saying into the quest, it always ads something when you can actually see and read what she’s saying, even if you don’t understand. This takes nothing away from your dialogue, which is fabulous, I just think it’s something for you to consider.

Cadee’s dialogue was good, in the beginning very child-like, very innocent. Kids do say the darnedest things sometimes, but I found that Cadee was saying some very adult-like things, even before her strange little transformation. Sometimes, kids do surprise you with what they say, but I believe you overused this and I found myself wondering sometimes if a child, even a traumatized one, would say something like that.

Action: - 8 Action was true to the characters. Hana easily coming out and showing off her mothering side once they had Cadee out of that crate. There wasn’t a lot of fighting in this quest—kind of surprising for a Victor quest—but that’s not only what action stands for. However that being said, I would have thoroughly enjoyed it if Victor had gotten the chance to punch that mage right in the face, repeatedly. Cadee seemed to learn to control that little fire gift of hers rather easily for someone who didn’t even know she had it before, but I suppose as a natural gift to her it wouldn’t take much. I would have liked to see more of the sneaking around the fortress they were in. There was mention of Victor having to knock a few other guards out and from the description it didn’t just sound like a few. Some of that tension in those moments of creeping down the hall would have been nice to read about.

Persona: - 9 I love Victor is his uncomfortable behaviour, mixed with a child that just seemed to adore him by the end of the quest. Hana’s flamboyant, bubbly and talkative nature was a wonderful conflict to Victor and quiet reverie and the fact that Hana could actually read Victor so easily was nice. I think those two compliment each other rather nicely; I’d like to see them thrown into another kind of situation. Maybe Hana would be able to bring Victor out of that little shell he tends to hide in from time and time. And of course, between these two characters we have Cadee, controlled by both of you. She comes across great for an NPC, a lot of the time NPC’s get stuck with dead personalities and they only serve to move the story along, but Cadee played between the both of you like an actual character.

Writing Style

Mechanics: - 7.5 The usual mistakes really, Duro you have a habit of forgetting to put words in a sentence. Things like ‘the, it, to’, just it still tends to break the flow up. The reader can easily substitute the word in where it should be, but watch out for that. I know you re-read your posts, but you’re still missing this as well as the wrong tense and just the wrong word in general. One I noticed was from your first post; you used ‘meet’ instead of ‘meat’.

Hana you have similar problems, but I’m rather certain I noticed fewer of them in your writing, especially towards the end.

Technique: - 7 Both of you have an interesting writing technique that is clearly yours. There was some foreshadowing used in the quest, especially when Cadee mentions the burning orphanage that she herself set on fire.

Clarity: - 10 It’s clear, what else can I say? Sentences were written clearly and I never once had to go back and read something, besides for my own personal enjoyment in doing so.

Wild Card: - 8 This was a good quest and a good read. I would have liked something else to happen after the incident with Cadee, it just felt like it was missing something.

Total: 81.5

Reward:

Hana receives 850 experience and 500 GP!
Victor receives 2,900 experience and 500 GP!

Victor also receives another 500 GP that he stuffed in his jacket and forgot about from the beginning when he received half his payment!
Hana also receives the blood diamond found amongst the ashes!

[Cyrus the virus]

EXP added! Good work!