Page 11 of Blood Red Woes

And that’s how I spend my dream, in a constant state of a tug-of-war with an unknown entity trying to pry me open.

When I wake, I wake with a start, and I moan and roll over to my side, wanting to sleep more. Whatever that weird dream was, it didn’t help me feel well-rested. It’s like I need a second sleep after my first sleep.

“My.” Rune’s voice barges in where it doesn’t belong, and I moan, not wanting to get up yet. “You certainly enjoy your sleep, don’t you?”

“Shut up,” I whisper. If Rune was a person, I’d hit him. Push him out of the room. Do something so I can get some nice, uninterrupted sleep.

“There is nothing for me to close,” Rune says, clearly not understanding what shut up means. “Regardless, Rey, don’t you think you should get up now? It’s the dawn of a new day—”

Now, when he says that, I jerk up to a sitting position. “It’s dawn?” I ask. “As in, I slept the entire day and night away?” I rubthe sides of my face, still feeling groggy. As if to reinforce that fact, a yawn surfaces. It’s a very vocal yawn, let’s just say. I’m a little whiny when I’m tired.

Which is to say, about all the time.

“How very ladylike,” Rune muses as I swing my legs off the side of the bed.

“You’re a freaking tattoo on my wrist,” I tell him. “How would you know what’s ladylike and what’s not?”

He mutters a noncommittal, “True enough, though I am a rune, not a tattoo,” but I’ve already tuned him out. I return to the water barrel in the kitchen of the house and fill my stomach up again—and then I realize I have to pee something fierce.

I take care of business outside. Even though my stomach is full of water, I’m starving. I need to eat, need to find something. With the state of the place, I don’t know if there will be anything edible left in any of these houses.

It’s as I leave the yard of the house I slept in that Rune tells me, “Laconia should be another five days’ walk, if you keep up a good pace and don’t oversleep.”

Five days? Oh, my God.

“Dude,” I whine. “I can’t last five days without food.”

“Well, then we will have to watch for something you can eat, then. If I were you I would look for a satchel of some kind to take some of that water with you.”

As much as I hate to admit it, he’s right. If I need to, I can go longer without food than I can without water. I go back in the house and search for something that could pass for a canteen. In the room with the small fire pit, AKA what I call a kitchen, I find something that would work. Made of leather, it smells old, and it’s no longer than my forearm, but it has a strap attached to it, along with a carved lid of sorts to keep the contents inside. The water might taste weird coming out, but it’s better than nothing.

I dunk the old leather flask into the water barrel and fill it up. Once it’s capped, I’m ready to get this show on the road. I step outside as I adjust the strap around my shoulder, carrying it like I would a single-strap backpack or side bag and resting it on my hip.

Rune lights up a trail, and I follow it. The glowing trail leads me right through the charred bones, and I do my best not to look at them, but when you’re walking by a mound of bones you know belonged to people…

I glance at the bone pile as I walk by it, careful not to step on any stray bones or kick any with my feet. I see, at a quick glance, maybe fifteen skulls? Nowhere near enough to be everyone here.

Rune must know what I’m thinking, because he says, “Perhaps some managed to escape. It very well could be some made it to the center of Laconia.” But as he says it, it’s obvious he doesn’t quite believe it himself.

I don’t say anything, but I think it: no parent would ever leave their children behind. And odds are there are more skeletons scattered in the town. It isn’t like I went through every dirt path and searched every single house.

This village was a massacre. Something came and decimated them all.

Could it have been the empresses?

The path I’m walking has another stone archway separating the boundaries of the village to the neighboring field. I step under it and ask Rune, “Do you really think the empresses’ magic could do something like this?”

None of that was natural. Not a single thing. If, say, bodies were tossed into a burn pile, the whole village would be nothing but dust and old ash. It’s like whatever it was attackedonlythe humans there.

The humans and their pets, maybe.

“We are in Magnysia, which is ruled by Empress Krotas. It is a land whose justice system is an eye for an eye, a land where strength and power are respected, a land of fables and forests. The magic Empress Krotas used has always been the magic of destructive, brute power.”

He says that like I should automatically know, but all of this is still new to me, so I’m clueless. “What’s that?”

“Fire.”

“Oh.” I get quiet after that. Could a magical fire do that? Could it stick to living people and avoid burning down houses? I don’t know, but I’m done talking about it now. It’s depressing and I need to focus on my own survival.

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