Lost

Author: Seth


Cold. It was so unbearably cold. Why had they come this way? Any other direction would have been better, any one but this.

Shivering uncontrollably, Naebi poured every ounce of her concentration on doggedly pushing one foot past the other through the freezing drifts of snow. Weakly, the red haired girl held onto her brother as best she could, simultaneously pulling him through the knee deep flakes and drawing what little strength she could from their shared body heat.

Lowering her head instinctively as the scything gust of the blizzard cut into her face, the half-Talon’s mind immediately skittered into the refuge of past memories; anything to drown out the hopeless despair of the present.

It had happened so fast… One moment she was fishing Ryuu and Manari out of the Ginsei after their little glider had (predictably) malfunctioned, and then the screaming started.

Chaos erupted.

Panic had spread through the city faster than a virus the moment the rebels had made their move, and of course the commoners had reacted in the worst way possible. They had stampeded.

She could still remember the suffocating crush of bodies on every side of her. It was the most she could do to keep hold of Kaizu, much less fight her way to the rest of the crew. The mindless terror infected her, had infected both of them as the two of them were swept along with the tide of human bodies, and they had kept running, and running, and running, even when they burst from the northern gate and the bodies pressing in on them from every angle had dispersed.

“Hey, onee-san, are we gonna die?”

Shaking the cobwebs of memory from her mind Naebi hugged Kaizu tightly, never letting up their pace for even a moment.

“Don’t say that, otouto.” She whispered back to him. “We’re going to live through this, just like we lived through those slave traders. We’ll go back and see Manari, and Ryuu, and Haru; just you see.”

Why couldn’t she have been braver? Why couldn’t she have seen past that blind fear to the warning signs that had blared at them as night started to fall, bringing with it the first downy flakes of snow?

And now they were lost, irreversibly lost and so far past the point of no return that they could do nothing but go forward. Go forward and never stop, not even for a second because the moment they listened to that little, deceiving whisper in their ears promising peace, they would fall into a slumber. A permanent one.

“Don’t worry Kaizu,” Naebi shivered, her use of his name betraying her own fear, “someone will find us. Someone will save us.”

Grasping the smaller boy tightly, the orange eyed girl plodded on, even as darkness started picking away at the edges of her vision.

“Someone will save us.”