The Ballad Continues…
CHAPTER 9
The second arena was dry. Hot.
A desert stretched around them: beige sand, jade cacti, and tufts of brittle grass. A glaring blue sky arced above them with three suns clustered in the middle. It was scorching. Sweltering. Enough to drive gods mad.
Cage peeled his robes off his skin. Sweat slicked him. His saber dragged through dunes, his skin overheated, the metal glinting from the magmatic sky. Smoke shuffled beside him, black leather boots trudging through sand. Her cheeks reddened beneath the suns, nose flaking in curls of dead flesh. But she didn’t wince. Didn’t blink. She just stared ahead into the endless waste.
“I’m sorry,” Cage said. He wasn’t sure why he apologized, but he knew he should.
“Stop,” Smoke said. “Do not apologize to me. Do not apologize to anyone. No one deserves our apologies after all they’ve put us through.”
Cage blushed and dipped his head.
Smoke glanced at him and frowned. “It’s not your fault,” she said, her voice velvet now instead of iron. “It was never your fault, Cage. Not this, not before, not anything. My anger is not directed at you.”
“Okay.” Cage trudged forward, head hanging, arms swinging by his sides. The desert wind lashed at his robes, whips of sand and debris. Dust coated his nose and throat as they made their way through the great nothing.
An emerald blur flashed before him. Sinuous, serpentine, a coil of scales and tail and fangs. A javelin, reptilian, shot from a cactus. Without thinking, Smoke whirled in front of Cage, a storm of pure instinct, and sank her dagger into its tough, chewy skin, nailing him to a sunbaked rock. The monster emitted a cry like an infant: tortured, shrill, a human keening that cemented Cage to the hot sand beneath his boots.
It was a trick. He knew it was a trick. But his instincts were to care, as Smoke’s were to cut, and he couldn’t help but shed a tear for the snake cursed to hurt.
Cage twitched, restless, leg bouncing. His jaw clenched hard enough to crush his molars if he were someone who could be crushed. He couldn’t focus on the snake split around Smoke’s dagger, his eyes bolting to the sand, to the sky.
“Cage.”
He flinched at his name, at the brand of recognition, at the tenderness in Smoke’s voice.
“Let it go,” he whispered, arguing for the sake of arguing. Nothing he said could change this snake’s fate.
Smoke frowned, her pale brows pinched in concern. “If I do, it will attack again.”
“Then let it attack,” Cage snapped. His fingers quivered against his robes, rustling the silk. “I don’t want to win. Not like this.”
Smoke sighed and faced him, defeat in her gaze. “We’ve already won, Cage. If we lose, we doom every world—”
“I know.” He tugged at his hair, pacing the desert, back and forth, back and forth, the heat melting into his bones. “It’s just . . . I didn’t choose this.”
“I know. Me, neither.” Smoke removed her dagger from the snake. The Jaculus. Cage remembered it now, from the musty, dog-eared pages in Deadrock’s library. He paused, studying the ripple of scales, the arrowhead skull, the fins along its tail.
And in his hesitation, the Jaculus attacked.
The snake looped around his neck and squeezed. Cage choked, wheezing. He dropped to his knees, prying at the scales, but the Jaculus wouldn’t budge. The beast stared at the boy with large, molten eyes, yellow-orange like the core of a peach. Its fangs lowered toward Cage’s arm, wet with venom.
Smoke didn’t hesitate. She plunged her dagger through the snake’s skull and ripped the Jaculus off Cage. He keeled forward, fingers grasping the sand, the pebbles, clutching dust as if it were gold. His heart hammered against his ribs, and his lungs refused to fill. He gasped, panting, drinking air like water, failing to calm the terror in his blood. Shaking violently, his skeleton betrayed him as he curled on his side beneath the roasting suns.
“Cage.”
His name again. Softer now. A prayer.
“Brother.” Smoke knelt beside him and kissed his shoulder, the snake within her fist and blade. “It’s okay. I refuse to let it not be okay. But I need you here with me to do what must be done. When it’s over—and it will be over—no one, person or fate, will ever own you again.”
Cage shuddered, tension coiling his muscles into chains. He was irritable. Frustrated. And wanted to lash out. To blame the hand he had been dealt, the entirety of misfortune, on Smoke, because she was safe. Because she would take his blame. She would absorb all his pain, gather all his panic, suffering his fury to harvest his calm. But that wasn’t fair to her. And it was too human of him, this boy built by gods.
He stood. Drew his saber. The curved iron steamed in the suns, casting a crescent shadow. He focused on his periphery, on the cacti near the fuzzy horizon, on the boulders that dotted the desert like broken kings. After a minute, his worry shrank, chipped away beneath the mallet of his will. He imagined their cottage, the simple beauty of gathering berries and water from the stream. The way the forest smelled after rain, damp and clean and warm with the promise of spring. How Smoke would play cards with him at night beneath a full-bellied moon and a sky crowded with stars.
The image grounded him, returned him to his roots.
He nodded at his sister and clutched the fragile calm like an anchor.
Smoke pinned the Jaculus to a rock, then drew a square around the snake. The reptile cried again, the sound more human than Cage, a babe abandoned in this blowtorch wilderness to fend for itself with the only language it knew.
Violence.
Moody, silent, Cage stabbed the square. Orange light, Mi Chrome, flooded the desert, spilling from the symbol like blood from a wound. The monster screeched, a dying plea, then faded into the sand.
The second Fallen was dead.
Gone.
Cage feared he was dead and gone, too.
Brilliant, the conflict in Cage is wonderfully put, and your writing, damn you Halo!!! Magmatic! Love it!
So, maybe this shows the state of my brain, but I want to live in YOUR mind. It is so fascinating and you weave such beauty and strength through the traumatizing darkness. Gorgeous, phenomenal Halo. ♥️🌹❤️🔥