Falcon Island: Chapter 1 - Aureleus

Chapter 1 - Aureleus

            I wake up cold and wet.  Another nightmare.  The steady roar of the rain outside my treehouse presses down on the forest canopy.  Thirty-four days of rain.  I might be slick with sweat, but the roof is more likely leaking again.  Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.  Thirty-four days of drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. I have nearly forgotten what being dry feels like.

            The wet and the cold are not what wake me up.  I have learned to sleep through that.  It is another nightmare.  Every night, I face a new terror in my dreams.  Every night, I die a new death.  This time, I’m drowning.  It was fire last night.  Buried alive the night before.  I’ve been poisoned, hung, slashed through the neck, stabbed through the heart.  Eaten.  The first was being eaten.  Thirty-four nights ago, the night the rain began, Orcs ate me alive.  They crawled out of the soil, eating the dirt to create tunnels.  The first thing I saw were jaundiced yellow eyes dotting the floor, then their gaping mouths with unhinged jaws tore open the floor of my hut. No one was ready.  They jumped out from underneath my cot and immediately grabbed my arms.  They each towered over me; their limbs were thick as logs and their skin was grey and green like a gangrenous fungus.  They pinned me down on my cot, then chomped down on my toes one by one.  Then my fingers, then they just dug into the rest of my flesh.  They held me down and feasted.  I woke with blood on my arms.  I had scratched myself in panic.

            I sit up slowly.  My feet swing from the cot and alight on the soggy wooden platform of my treehouse.  I take a moment to grudgingly thank the birds that I do not live on the ground.  I pull aside the drapery of the window and see that it is still dark outside.  Granted, it has been dark for thirty-four days.  Daytime is simply a brighter shade of gray now.  I have very little hope of ever seeing the sun again.

            I prepare the fire basin in the center of my platform and bring sparks to my fingers.  My one respite from the chill and my soaking bones is my fire magic.  In the face of endless water, from the sky, from the ground, from the sea, fire is the one entity that makes me feel sane.

            “Rus.”  I hear a gruff voice outside on my landing.  I know him, but this early in the morning, I am not inclined to entertain.  “Rus,” he says again, “Are you awake?  I saw you light your fire basin from outside.  Can I come in?”

            It is too early, and still too cold. I certainly will not sleep for the rest of the night, not anymore, now that he has come.

            “Just a second, Aureleus.  Give me a moment to find something dry.”  He knows I have nothing dry.  No one does. I would put my tunic on, but it still has not dried from the day before.  My tunic used to be a rich navy blue.  Now, it is a permanent murky grey, like the sky, like the water, like my skin.  I leave it slung over the back of the chair.  He knows I just need to clear my head.  The rain gives me headaches. 

            Instead, I run through my prayers hurriedly under my breath. 

            “Hail, divine birds.  End this dreadful rain. The end.”  Then, without putting my shirt on, I open the door and Aureleus stoops through the doorway and stomps his way in.

            “If that is how you pray every morning, it’s no wonder the rain hasn’t stopped.”  Aureleus stands a full head and shoulders taller than I am.  He has grown so fast, and he seems never to stop.  After he dwarfed me in height, his muscles swelled with power.  He is a specimen of physical accomplishment.

            I thought he would not hear my morning prayer, said more out of habit and ritual than out of faith, but I should have remembered his gift for prying.  Aureleus inherited only the best attributes from his parents: he has the keen eyes and ears of his mother, an Elf.  I knew her briefly before Aureleus was born. Aureleus’s brawn and massive physique, he received from his father, an Orc.  It leaves a sour taste in my mouth to imagine his father, with gnarled teeth and grey skin, hulking above the rest, inflicting an elf with his curse, raping her and leaving her to suffer. Aureleus is the only one of his kind, an Elf-Orc, and he always reminds me of our impending doom.  But then I look at Aureleus’s calm face and slouched shoulders, warming up by my fire, and I know that he is just a boy trapped in the visage of our enemies.

            “It is not polite to snoop on someone’s prayers. And if Charybdax and none of the other gods are listening,” I continue, “why should you?”

            “It’s not snooping.  You’re a human in an Elven village. One of the only ones here without pointy ears,” Aureleus grins from behind the flame and flicks his pointed ear with his finger.  He often points out my un-Elven nature, as if this is some detriment. I would much prefer my human blood to his Elven blood tainted by our enemies. 

            “And am I not to listen to one of our revered clerics?” he asks with a wide smirk. He has pulled my one chair to the fire and taken a seat, leaving me to stand.  He removes his wet tunic and drapes it over my almost-dry shirt.  “An Avox of Charybdax, surely you must have some sway over this rain!”  He removes a boot and pours out mud onto my floor.  The dank stench fills my hut quickly.

            “I suppose I’ll prepare breakfast while you sit there and warm yourself up.”  I pull out a trout I had been saving from the water barrel.  I gut and filet it, then lay the filet on a damp plank over the fire.  The salty aroma of the fish mingles with the rot of Aureleus’s large wet feet.  The smell lingers near the back of my throat.

            He is quiet while the hickory plank fizzes and pops, and the fish steams.  I decide that if he will linger, and his sour odor with him, I would know his purpose. “Aureleus, it is very early in the morning.  Why are you not asleep, and why are you here instead of in your barracks?”  

            He responds in a hushed tone.  “I’ve been thinking about the Ryeldar Outpost.”

            “The Ryeldar takeover again?  That was three seasons ago.  What is your fascination with that lost outpost?” I ask.

            “No, sir, I’m not just talking about the takeover.  I’m talking about the attack.  How did we not know it was coming?  How did we not have any warning?  I’m more interested in knowing how it all happened.  I know we lost a lot of men and a lot of land at that outpost, but I think we learned a lot more about our enemy.” 

            It always scares me to hear Aureleus call the Orcs the “enemy.”  Surely he must know how many times his own comrades in our army have said the same about him.

              “What did we learn, Aureleus?  What did we learn that we did not already know?  They are savages.  They torture their prisoners. The only reason they do not immediately kill their prey is to watch it squirm.  They want to see the looks on our faces as they peel our flesh from our bodies!”  I take a deep breath.  He knows what this topic does to me.  He knows Orcs send waves of anxiety through me.  I attempt to hide my fear, but I am certain I fail.  “Our men were likely tortured for a week before we even learned the outpost was lost.  What more is there to learn about the damned Orcs?”

            He just looks at me with his dark eyes.  He does not turn away.  “Are you finished with your burst of panic?  May I continue?”

            After a few moments, my breathing slows, and I consider what Aureleus might say. Ryeldar was our westernmost camp. The attack on the Ryeldar Outpost was a mess, mainly because it took us nearly a week to find out that anything was even wrong.  Two caravans of supplies went out to Ryeldar, each two days apart, like normal.  When the first caravan never returned to Stratos Tower, a messenger pigeon was sent.  When the bird never returned, Stratos Tower sent a human messenger.  It was only after the loss of eighteen people and three birds that a scouting party was sent to investigate.  The scouting party reported the loss and the takeover.  Smoke from the outpost, skulls on sticks, drawings in blood on the walls, and the Orcs, the hulking toothy brutes marching the perimeter with their rusty swords, playing like soldiers, and others slinging bodies over the ramparts tied by their ankles.

            Orcs made me sick.  They did all the same things to my village, but we saw them coming.  Some of us got out and relocated here to Cloud State villages.  Not a single person from Ryeldar has returned.  And now, Aureleus is convinced he has some new information to explain how these brainless thugs managed to completely take over our most frontline military installation.  Even through its impossibility, I need to know Aureleus’s theory.

            “Please continue, Aureleus,” I say, returning to an air of calm annoyance.

            Aureleus rears up his thick chest and raises his hands in front of him, like he is holding the idea up for me to see.  “Underground.  I think they came from underground!”  His smile is big and toothy like his forbears, and I can tell he thinks he is the cleverest man in Cloud State.

            “Don’t be preposterous,” I respond.

            “It’s not preposterous!” he retorts.  “How else could they have taken the outpost without us seeing them?  Ryeldar is in the central plains of the Island.  Have you been there?  You can see for spans without anything blocking your view.  Unless our own bird-gods lifted them up and they flew to Ryeldar, an underground approach makes the most sense!”

            “Aureleus, it is too early in the morning for these ridiculous ideas!  I do not find them funny or worth discussing.  Never in the twenty-year history of Orcs on Falcon Island have we seen any evidence of burrowing Orcs!  Orcs are simply too stupid!”

            I regret the words as soon as I say them.  Aureleus knows, and he stares me in the eyes again.  He is only sixteen years old, but he is stronger than any man I know.  His stare knocks the wind out of me like a fist.  Aureleus responds after a few quiet moments, just as before. 

            “Are you finished?”

            “Yes.”

            “I will ignore that racial slight.  I am not stupid.  Orcs can burrow.  Our legends have them crawling out of the belly of the volcano Radicus, and thirty-four nights ago, you dreamt of burrowing Orcs.  I have been keeping track, too.”

            I hate being an Avox of Charybdax, the Blue.  Every dream I have is seen as prophecy, and never as just my own neuroses. 

            “It was only a dream,” I say.

            “You say dream, Rus.  I say message from the gods.  As a child of Crovax, myself, I do not believe in coincidence.  This season-long rain is not coincidence, and neither are your nightmares.”

            “Aureleus, you have the wisdom and faith of a child, and that is sometimes refreshing.  But listen to me now.  Be reasonable.  How could the Orcs dig?  They do not have the tools, or the expertise.  Any expeditions would end in cave-ins, unless of course…”

            “Dwarves, Rus!  Dwarves.” Aureleus completes my frightening line of thought.    “Deserters.  We know from the reports that Orcs are in the Dwarven tunnels of High State. We know their phalanxes are falling.  I think Dwarves are helping the Orcs on our side of the island in order to save their own skins.”

            “This is a heavy accusation.” I pause to take a breath.  “I will take it before the Elder Council for their consideration.”

            Aureleus grins again.  “I already have.  Pack your things, we leave tomorrow at first light.”

            “I beg your pardon!”

            “I already told them.  I talked to Yisho, the chambermaid, who told Elder Paviq.  He approved.  Of course, he approves every mission that sends me out to die, but I’ll show him I am right.  You can expect a summons to the Council today to discuss it, but you might as well pack up.”  Aureleus had stood up and was putting on his soaked tunic and muddy boots.

            “Wait, Aureleus, you can’t volunteer me for your fool-hardy missions!  I can’t go out there again.  The rain…”  My voice falters.  I hate appearing weak to this mighty warrior.  I sigh and say, “I am too old for a trip like this.  The rain makes me nervous.”

            “Everything makes you nervous, Rus, but never fear,” and suddenly, Aureleus is his cheerful, relaxed self again.  “I will protect you, as you have protected me.”

            His blast of insight strikes me again, and he is out the door into the pouring deluge.