Rats in a Maze

There weren't always Dragons in the Valley. Whispered legends speak of a time when the Valley had once flourished, where the rivers flowed freely and the commoners’ faces were untouched by hunger. An era when it was safe to leave one’s home under the shade of evening. Where families were whole and orphans a rarity.

No longer.

Whatever the Valley had existed as, before bloodshed tore through their lands, it was beyond the imagination of a barebones gutter rat.

Nyx’s footfalls are hushed as she treads along the street. Her bare soles are accustomed to the stones despite their lack of upkeep, and the darkness of the hour does nothing to hamper her movement. Her ears strain for sounds of the living -- whether it be the promise of a meal or the threat of danger. Idly, she wonders what her life would look like before the Dragons’ arrival.

Quite frankly, Nyx has never believed those tales considering the stark contrast of the Valley she knows as home. After fifteen years, the ache of hunger in her guts is as familiar to Nyx as her own name. Believing in those silly fables certainly didn’t change her lot, anyway, nor did it rid them of Dragons that nested in the center of their town, hands upon their blades, eyes watchful for rebellion.

Ever vigilant. Ever cruel. They took no chances when it came to burgeoning mystics.

The men from the far west -- the guild of assassins who called themselves Dragons -- had settled into the Valley an entire generation and a half ago. They’d embedded their ranks into the hamlet like a tick on a mutt, sucking the life from it year after year until there was little more than a husk remaining. Those thugs were antiquities of the Great Psionic Wars, or so the old hens of the orphanarium had clucked to each other behind latched doors, reminiscent and dreary. Nyx would sometimes hide in the rafters, listening, marveling, unable to imagine her little town as anything else.

A rat snaps her attention down to her bare feet, where it skitters down the street and into the shadows. Pulse spiking, Nyx grins and turns to the boy beside her.

“There, Ari! ‘Fore it gets away!”

The lanky boy, two years her senior, pounces before she can finish her exclamation. With long, wiry limbs, he reminds Nyx of a serpent, lashing out from behind the wall and diving toward the rat with outstretched hands. Despite his speed, Ari misses the scampering vermin by mere inches, then snorts and looks around with wild eyes.

“Thought I had the bastard,” he mutters, righting himself up. “You see it, Nyx?”

Overhead, the moon is reduced to a sliver, like a shorn fingernail hanging loosely in the sky. It provides little light for hunting, but Nyx has always relied on her hearing regardless and closes her eyes. The streets are quiet in the dead of night, the remaining townies too afraid to wander out of their homes after dusk. Nyx likewise hushes her mind, waiting for the telltale scratching noises of rat claws on broken cobblestones, or the squeaks of one fleeing for its life, until finally:

“It’s behind you!” She points, but Ari is already swooping downwards a second time.

A moment of commotion ensues. She can’t see the skirmish as well as she can hear it, but after a smattering of boot scuffs, swearing, and the eventual slap of body on stone, Nyx makes out the prone shape of Ari sprawled on the ground. He must have fallen while lunging for the slippery beast, but as far as she can tell, he’s just as rat-less as he was beforehand.

Nyx muffles a snicker behind her dirty hand as the boy crawls back to his feet with a groan, then asks him, “Did you just get outsmarted by a rat?”

“Quiet and help me find it,” Ari snaps. His ego is likely more bruised than any other part of him, Nyx realizes, and clamps her mouth shut. She closes her eyes once more, letting the distractions of the world fade away, then grimaces.

“I can’t hear it anymore.”

“Damned thing,” growls the older orphan. He’s squinting as he searches, and Nyx strains to hear over the boy’s grousing. That rodent will be their dinner if they can find it before it escapes. The pitiful emptiness in her stomach is desperate to locate the creature again, but Ari’s next words yank her focus to him instead with a flash of alarm. “Ya know, I could’a snared the rat immediately if I’d just used -- ”

“No,” she hisses back. She doesn’t want him to risk speaking of it, especially in the dark.

Too many of their friends have been taken by the Dragons already, to unknown ends. Their parents have long since met their early demises for their associations, plucked from their beds or gunned down in the streets by raven-cloaked men and women alike. It left only the children, a new generation kept under the thumb of brutality meant to prevent any uprisings.

Tev, Les, Rai. All of the older children that reached adulthood and refused to keep their noses to the stones, or had objects shudder around them inexplicably. Those who hid psionic literature, or secretly idolized their ancestors from the earlier years. Too many friends to count.

All taken.

Each name sends pangs of agony to the depths of Nyx’s bones, and the thought of Ari joining their ranks… It’s almost too much to bear. This faction of devils, arriving from the west decades ago and forever marring their lives with blood and terror. Snatching every psychic-bodied adult and grinding their bones between the teeth of war, then calling it a mercy. Nyx can’t fathom what she would do if her last remaining friend were to be the next of the war machine’s meals. The thought clenches at her chest painfully.

Her panic, however, is met with a scoff. "Don't tell me you're scared, too."

Nyx bristles at that, refusing to acknowledge just how frightened she truly is of Ari’s powers being discovered -- not just by the Dragons, but by anyone else in the Valley. Defiance takes the place of fear in her words as she bites back, "I'm not. Just… knock it off and find that rat. It's dangerous to talk about this in the open. And stupid. You know that."

"It's stupid to keep living in fear of what the Dragons will do if they find out about me,” he clips; Nyx can hear the sneer in his voice. “They can't bring us much lower, now can they?”

He doesn’t seem to be expecting an answer as he digs through the trash, looking for rats or scraps to tide them over till tomorrow’s rations, but Nyx can’t ignore the bitterness churning within her. Bitterness at his powers, bitterness at his flippancy. At the nuns, at the Dragons.

At the world.

She really just wants to return home at this point, even if it means going to bed hungry once more, and the edge in her tone is harsher than she intends when she finally responds, "Ari, if you don't shut up about it, I'll be half tempted to turn you in myself."

The boy stiffens and twists around to stare at her, but the angle obscures his silhouette in blackness leaving only his glowing eyes visible, like embers in a pitted furnace. By contrast, Nyx knows he can see the anxiety drawn in her frown, the tension of her posture, with those cursed eyes of his, and she feels surprisingly exposed. Those eyes. That gods-forsaken power. The very power that the Dragons are culling from their city every year, their presence a heel on the Valley’s throat as they stamp out any potential challenge.

Ari should know better than to use it in public and resentment simmers in Nyx’s stomach, overpowering her hunger. Does he want to be taken by the Dragons? Like her own parents, so long ago? Like their parents before them?

She wants to ask him this, but she can’t. The ruins of an empire smolder in those wretched eyes of Ari’s as they stare her down, just as hateful. Nyx’s defiance melts away.

“You sound like Sister Clara,” comes his anger. Nyx flinches at that, thinking of the old blind woman at the orphanage who had originally put the fear of Dragons into them as children. Her harsh discipline left its scars on them both. Ari turns his head to spit, “Those frigid nuns would turn me over if they ever knew. And now you threaten to, Nyx?”

Midnight shadows stretch between the two orphans, their dinner prospects veiled and gone, but Nyx has no mind for the lost meal. Dread is gnawing at her every instinct, and a distant rasp of wind is a loud scrape against her nerves. They’ve been friends since they were both young -- one another’s sole confidants. Ari has always been reckless and recently more frustrated as they've grown older, though now he seems wild with fury at their circumstances. All of the mystics and psionics of the Valley before them were ghosts told in stories, including their own families.

Both of their bloodlines. The labored march of the great wars decades past had left behind gaping furrows in them all, Ari and Nyx alike, sowing little seeds of hate in its wake.

Hate and fear. Nyx finds herself trembling beneath his burning gaze.

“They’ll catch you, Ari,” she whispers. She speaks it like a known fact, because it is fact. It’s unavoidable. There weren’t always Dragons in the Valley, but now they lurk down every alley, awaiting their prey. Not unlike themselves, hunting rats for dinner. “They’ll take you away. Please don’t.”

Ari’s face is still obscured, but she imagines him past those eyes, glaring at her, glowering, imagines his hurt and his rage. Even with his power -- or perhaps because of it -- he’ll never be more than a street urchin or a dead man. The fate of a budding psionic. They’ve talked about escaping together, with growing urgency, all the while knowing it's impossible. No other town will take children of the Valley, not with the Dragons laying claim to them.

They are trapped, Nyx knows, but that doesn’t seem to deter Ari any longer. His glowing eyes narrow, and all of the bluster Nyx had built up reflects now in his tone.

“Let them try.”

The boy holds up his hand, barely visible in the unlit alleyway, and Nyx immediately feels the soul-yanking pull of his psionics being activated. It grips her every nerve, her very core as if all gravity had shifted and repositioned itself towards Ari. She resists, barely, because this isn’t the first time she’s felt the effects of his power.

“Don’t do this,” Nyx repeats, bracing herself against his force the way they had practiced.

Her feet are planted firmly against the ground and she releases a breath, letting the sensations flow around her slight frame instead of catching her in its pull. It's as if Nyx stepped into a river that she cannot see.

She isn’t sure what his intentions are, exactly -- whether he plans to lash out at her directly or draw the Dragons to him -- but he won’t listen to her pleas. Her heart pounds madly in her ears muting the rest of the world to her, adrenaline like ice flooding her veins, as she resists. Down by her feet, a small shriek cuts through the night as the rat they’d been hunting is dragged towards Ari, startling Nyx. Unlike her, the animal has likely never experienced the jarring effects of a mystic drawing upon their magic and struggles away from Ari fruitlessly, clawing at the ground. To the eye, it seems to be pulled by its worm-like tail by an invisible, unstoppable string, dragging the screeching beast along the cobblestones without mercy.

With Ari as the mystical apex, there are no rats in the maze of the Valley, for he can draw creatures and objects to him with his mere bidding.

“I’m tired, Nyx,” he finally answers. His voice is ragged at the edges, consumed by a maelstrom of his anguish. “I’m tired of living in fear, I’m tired of hating what we are. Even before my powers ‘woke, I was tired.”

His hand jerks upwards and the pull of gravity follows, dragging the squirming rodent up off the stones to hang in midair by the tail. Its desperate squeaks are shrill to Nyx’s ears and she winces, watching on helplessly. She knows what’s about to happen. On an instinctual level, she thinks, so does the rat.

“At the very least,” Ari continues, “I can catch this damned rat for you.”

With a clench of his fist, a spark ignites above the dangling critter, combusting from somewhere deep within and immediately spreading outward to its flesh like wildfire.

“I don’t want this,” she whispers. She doubts that Ari can hear her choked words over the sound of the rodent's screeching, but she tries again. “Please, stop.”

“What we have is a gift, Nyx,” says Ari, either ignoring her or deafened to her distress.

Anger flares to life within her as the tail of the rat catches fire. Nyx meets Ari’s gaze, his intense power burning out his own eyes with a bright light, and she doesn’t flinch. She matches it with her own fury, her own anguish, and she clenches her fists.

Something is building within her. Something living, both animalistic and yet so very human. It feeds off her anger, fueling it. Grasping it is foreign, yet also as easy as breathing.

Like taking a lungful of air, Nyx welcomes it, letting that sensation build to her very fingertips until eventually, it feels as though she will burst at the seams. Her squeezed hands are full to the brim, shaking with… something. There’s no time to think, and she doesn’t question it.

“I said,” she inhales, then exhales sharply and opens her palms. “STOP!”

The world reacts. The flames of the rat's tail burn away and extinguish until the rat falls to the cobblestones, which are then swept away by the force of Nyx’s fury. Loose stones fly through the air from every direction. Ari staggers backward from the sheer power -- her power, Nyx realizes -- and he looks at her with wide eyes, unsure of what he’s seeing. His hands are held up defensively over his face as if she might try to strike him down.

Soon, all Nyx can comprehend is the shaking of her voice with every inhale. Is she hyperventilating? Did she just use psionics? In the open?

It’s too much to process simultaneously. She feels dizzy, overwhelmed, and the nausea of the burning rat still hasn’t passed. Unsure of what else to do, she keels over, landing on her knees and sweaty hands then vomits hot bile. What has she done? It plays on repeat in her mind like a mantra, to the voice of Sister Clara. What did you do, useless girl?

As she wipes her face of spittle, Nyx feels fresh tears on her cheeks. This isn’t what she wanted.

Faintly, she can hear a strange sound over the ringing in her brain. It catches her attention, honing her senses, and she lifts her head to see Ari standing above her, clapping his hands slowly. She can’t tell if it’s meant to mock her or not, but she scowls regardless.

“I knew it, Nyx,” he grins at her, then proffers a hand. “I knew I wasn’t alone.”

She wants to tell him to piss off, to find a new best friend after all these years of keeping his secret, wants to tell him that he is alone if that’s how he chooses to use his abilities. That they can do as much harm as good and that Nyx has no interest in burning living creatures alive with what she possesses. But she can’t. Stomach acid is still caked in her throat and Nyx can’t get the words to form, so she glares up at him, reluctantly takes his hand, then rocks back onto her feet.

Ari looks at her, awe in his features, then smirks and says, “There, was that so bad?”

Nyx opens her mouth, coughs, then tries to speak. To say something clever, or snarky. To tell Ari that he’s an idiot for risking this, and an asshole for what he did to the rat.

To tell him how relieved she is that she doesn’t have to be alone, either.

Before she can decide where to start, a noise startles her, jarring her spine straight and swiveling her head to hear better. It didn’t sound like a rat. They had been so preoccupied that Nyx had forgotten the true danger of wandering the Valley at night. The scrape of a boot on the shingles overhead, a mechanical click that rings in Nyx’s mind. Someone is here.

On the roof.

“Ari!” she hisses urgently, but it’s too late.

The Dragon overhead must have taken aim while they were distracted by their fight. With the older orphan’s eyes alight with power, Nyx can see them furrow with confusion, then widen in terror, and then --

An ear-splitting bang cuts through the air from above and straight into Ari’s forehead, splitting the pale skin with a tiny metal bulb that burrows beyond bone, too fast for Nyx to fully fathom. He’s still staring at her, mouth agape, up until the moment that his head snaps back from the impact and he is sent sprawling to the ground for the second time tonight. Nyx can hear the dull thud of his skull bouncing against the stones once, twice, and sees the outline of his legs twitching as if they still intend to run. An eternity stretches on as he convulses until those wretched eyes burn out, fading away like coals. The awe is dead and gone from his face.

The world stops with his movements, along with Nyx's breathing.

Her mind swims, rejecting what’s before her. His limp body. His open eyes. The liquid black pooling beneath his head crawls towards Nyx with a surreal sluggishness.

She finally finds her voice and screams until her throat splinters, "ARI! ARI, NO!"

Her feet take a step into the nightmare puddle saturating his clothing, meaning to kneel beside her friend, the one lifeline she’s had in this world. She means to shake him awake, to prove this isn't real, to scold Ari for being reckless yet again.

Whatever she might have done is meaningless not a second later. As a rough-hewn bag is yanked over Nyx's head, the grisly image is gone from her vision and bruising hands drag her away.

She belongs to the Dragons now.