Strangers Among Us

What Harm-3

For, while the son of midnight dreams was dark indeed, even midnight comes in shades, and the darkest black can be darker still than the eye can see. Kiarak did not do such things, for his cruelty always had purpose. This was a rider of shadow beasts, and atrocity was his plaything.

He wandered then to the stable, and he hobbled the mare in the first stall for sport. At the shriek of her agony, Colin leapt from the empty stall where he’d been paging through Alyx’s book. He didn’t panic at the sight of the shadow rider, for he’d seen many such terrors in his life and not recognized them as any darker than the midnight valley. He didn’t even worry when he saw Alyx hiding in the shadows, for he knew she was safe there. But then he saw the panic and the anguish on the mare’s face as she limped, and he began to moan in empathy and clench his hands into fists.

The rider’s face twisted with delight, and he came at Colin to make sport of the boy, but Alyx and her knife tackled him from behind, and the shadow rider fell to the aisle where Colin’s broom had just swept away the straw and the cobwebs.

The shadow lord grabbed the blade from Alyx and rolled on top of her, tossing the blade to the side of a nearby stall. He saw the beauty in her face as the others did, and he despised her for it, and the shades of dark swirled in his mind as he contemplated how best to destroy her. She saw the destruction in his eyes and she screamed, all of her voices at once, and Colin knew he must save her, but he didn’t know how. And so he moaned in great wails that spooked the fairy horses and sent them rearing in a calamity of braying and smashing and chaos. The whole world shook with the hundreds of hooves moved by Colin’s moans of terror, and he forced himself to unclench his fist and reach with shaking fingers for Alyx’s knife. He gripped the handle as the shadow rider laughed with delight, as he towered over Alyx and the slow-witted stable boy. He grabbed at Alyx’s neck and choked the screams from her, but the cacophony of hooves and moans brought the soldiers and Kiarak himself, bursting through the door, a manifest nightmare, his cape of stardust and midnight fluttering like the inky wings of a raven.

Alyx and Colin looked to Kiarak as the soldiers grabbed the shadow rider and dragged him from the stable. Alyx cried bitterly, collapsed in upon herself with relief. And Colin beamed at the stable wall, with Kiarak just in his view. The warlord had saved him once more, just as he had freed him from the vaults and given him the horses and Alyx.

Kiarak stepped forward and helped Alyx to her feet, and Colin’s heart glowed with light, and it took him several minutes to realize that the son of midnight dreams was beating her.

And when he was done, Kiarak dropped her in the aisle, bloody and whimpering, for Alyx had put her safety first, and had not protected his prized war mare.

Then Kiarak saw Colin staring with unfocused eyes and it grated against his patience. He stepped toward Colin and slapped the boy across the face with the back of his iron glove, and the sharpness of the metal was nothing to the sharp metal taste of blood that filled his mouth.

“Stupid boy,” Kiarak spat, the words like flint sparking rock in a black desert cave. And he stalked out with his cape seeping starlight and unsettling dreams behind him.

When dawn came, the shadow beast of the rider galloped across the mountains, its stirrups swinging, its saddle empty. The rider was swallowed by darkness and never found, not even a single shred, of which, it was whispered, there were many scattered about.

And darker still was Colin’s confusion and betrayal, for these things were all too complex for a harmless boy like him to understand. He stood with one fist clenched, the other loose, fingers still wrapped around the blade of Alyx’s knife as she whimpered on his swept floor between the stalls. He looked at the blade as ideas and shadows and plots swirled in his troubled mind.

After a time, after the other stable hands helped Alyx up and dabbed her wounds with stained cloths from the tack room, after they ladled warm water from the trough into her mouth, Colin finally forced himself to move, the knife still gleaming between his fingers. But when every chore was finished, he dropped the blade from his hand, for after all, what harm can a boy like that do?

No monarch could stand against Kiarak and his black hearted army. All the kingdoms had fallen but one, on the other side of the isle of shadow beasts, and the troops marched onward, ready to take the last in the resistance. An elven prince had risen there to guide the foolish in a m******e waiting to happen, for none could stand against Kiarak.

They still speak in that country of how Kiarak fell to the elven prince, how he fell to goodness and justice and the last spark of hope.

They speak of how the warlord charged forward, iron blade gripped in iron glove, and how the girth of his saddle snapped and dropped him to the feet of the army, how they surrounded him with spears, his cape spread out like a midnight of glittering stars.

They don’t speak of the narrow gash across the well-cared-for leather, the jagged cut no longer than a dagger’s length willfully dragged against the grain. They don’t speak of how the leather stretched thin for hours like the bond between adoptive father and disowned son, until it buckled under the strain and snapped. For how could they know how such a small incision could bring down an army of darkness? It’s simpler to give the credit to a regal elven prince and his cheering army of light, their golden banners arcing through the air.

For what harm could be done by a boy like that? What harm, after all.