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ANTON
With a heavy and disheartened sigh, Anton peered up to the glowing orb in the sky. He leaned his back against the mass of bones, tapping his fingers rhythmically along the ground below him, dirt gathering at the tips.
Not one bone. To be clearer, not one single bone he’d touched had belonged to Nahli. He let out a roaring scream that spilled throughout the Bone Valley, and it felt good, but it still wasn’t enough.
From Anton’s left, soft skeletal feet padded through the loose gravel of the dirt.
“Rip me apart, Roka. Just tear me apart, and throw my scraps anywhere you please,” Anton groaned, meaning every word. What good was he to anyone?
His entire body had grown exhausted, and his flames had started to close numerous times, but he forced himself to remain awake. The thought had crossed his mind that he could walk through the door, find Maryska, and let her do her worst to him. He deserved it. He knew she would come back at some point, and it was his fault for parading Nahli out in the open.
“Have you really tried to look, Anton?” Roka pulled up beside him on his hind legs, head bobbing.
Of course he had! Narrowing his flames, Anton hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “Have you seen this newly formed hill of remains? That’s all my doing.”
“Hmm.”
Anton slapped the dirt below, causing several bones to rattle. “Hmm, what?”
Roka pawed at something on the ground to his left, and Anton edged forward to see a skeletal piece that appeared to be an ulna. “Another bone to add to the pile, I suppose.”
“Look closer,” Roka murmured, twisting out of the way so Anton could crawl nearer.
On the ivory bone rested a fissure that had never healed completely. He snatched up the skeletal piece, feeling as though his bones had their own lightning-fast heartbeat. “It’s hers!” He held the ulna under the orb in the sky’s light. “It’s a piece of Nahli.” A look of astonishment crossed Anton’s features as his jaw widened, and his flames brightened.
“And you believed it to be impossible.” Roka’s delicate jaw fell slightly open in a grin.
“This is just one part of her, though.” He gazed out and scanned the entire valley of bones. “How will we ever find the rest?”
Roka patted the side of Anton’s leg. “Time, Anton. Time.”
“We do have plenty of time—I know this, but if we can’t find her...”
Anton couldn’t let that happen. Determination filled him, greater than when he’d started. One piece was more than he had to begin with, and he would find another and then another.
Something about the gnarled tree seemed to call to him as his gaze drifted that way. He dashed in that direction, the door on its trunk silently taunting him, waiting for him to walk through it. But as he stared up to the branches, he noticed something that hadn’t been there before. Three large bones dangled from the claw-like limbs. One broken—a reminder of what Maryska had done, and could do again. Maryska must have left them behind as a gift, or perhaps more of a torment to give him hope, only to find the realization of failure.
Reaching up toward the branches, Anton plucked the two femurs and tibia like precious fruit. He clutched them to his chest and hurried to his cottage. Once inside, he set them gently on the floor next to the table where he’d carved his trinkets.
Roka appeared beside him, waiting eagerly. “Remember how your orb danced with Nahli’s above the two of you?”
“Yes.” He didn’t know where Roka was going with this, and he tried not to grow impatient or agitated with having to stand there and waste crucial moments.
“Perhaps the orb can find the remainder of her bones,” Roka suggested.
“Her orb is gone.” Did he not realize that when Nahli had vanished, so had her orb? He didn’t, because he’d run off and hid inside a cottage.
“It is not gone, only dimmed inside of her. Same as yours is when not lighted. It’s inside of you, awaiting its moment to shine.”
“How do you know this?” Anton crept closer, growing skeptical, and partially suspicious.
Roka’s shoulders slumped, and he eased forward. “I do not know how I know. It is only something I feel, the same as how I knew something was not right when Maryska arrived.”
“Well, it’s something at least.”
Cradling the top of his skull in both hands, Anton tried to think. While he searched for Nahli’s bones in the fog, he had lit the orb, and nothing had happened besides it hovering above him and giving off light.
Closing his flames, he wished for and spoke the word, “light,” before opening them to look at the familiar orb.
“Try talking to it,” Roka murmured, scooting backward as if he was giving Anton and the orb space to connect.
Anton felt ridiculous staring at the sphere while determining what to say. “Do you remember Nahli?”
The flickering black flame inside stilled. Perhaps it was listening. “You danced with her orb in the garden ... or orbited her light. It’s a part of her, the way you’re a part of me, correct?” He chose to believe what he was saying, because he had nothing else in that moment to believe in.
The dark flame blazed again, forming its own lullaby, but this time it expanded.
“I think you may have seen her orb disappear in front of you, just as Nahli’s body vanished from me.” Then Anton pleaded, “Will you help me find her bones, so I can piece her back together? Then perhaps you and her orb can dance together once more?”
Inside the orb, the flame pulsated, darkening the white layers, consuming it until only the shadows existed. Anton’s flames widened and shifted to Roka, who only cocked his head at the sphere.
After several moments, the orb elevated from Anton’s hand. He watched it abruptly pass out the door, leaving Anton to rush after the orb, following its flight. Through the garden, toward a meager hill, where the sphere flashed a brief pearly white. Anton dug where the orb floated, the ball of flame pulsing continuously with flashes when his hand wrapped around a small phalange.
It must be Nahli’s. He prayed it was hers, and for this place to have mercy on him.
Anton placed the bone in his trouser pocket as the orb looped around to the other side, where yet more bones lay, protruding from the dirt. A burst of white came again, before fading away. He sifted through smooth remains until his hand latched onto a radius, and the orb drummed a quickening beat of ivory.
“Let me help,” Roka said, jutting forward.
Anton handed him the piece of Nahli’s arm, and fished from his pocket what would be her pinky toe, placing it gently in Roka’s free palm.
The meerkat darted off to take the bones inside the cottage, adding them to the growing collection. Turning around to continue the task, Anton found his orb floating next to a broader and taller hill, flickering with a soft pale light, calling to him.
This happened over and over with the sphere. After two bones were retrieved, Anton would pass them to Roka, who would bring them into the cottage. Then he and the orb would move on to endure more.
Two hundred and six bones made up Nahli’s skeleton. Breathing heavily, his palm on his sternum, he’d found two hundred and five with the orb’s help. There was only one left to uncover—the most important—her skull. The one piece that could tell him she was all right.
A buzz and sizzle came from the orb as it flew and dipped, back and forth, side to side, then circled the dusty remains around the Bone Valley. They hadn’t come this far not to find her.
Hovering on all fours, Roka patted Anton’s foot. “Do not fret, Anton.”
If the meerkat was taller, he assumed Roka would have been patting Anton’s shoulder to comfort him. He didn’t feel comforted, though—he was restless, as if he needed to keep moving.
When the orb zoomed off in the direction where he and Nahli had first entered the woods with the beast, Anton chased after the light. The orb glimmered once as it stalled in front of the most massive mountain of bones in the valley.
The mountain climbed high into the sky, filled with a generous collection of human remains. Anton worried he wouldn’t be able to sift through them all, and it was just his luck that this was the place where her skull would be.
“I don’t know how I’ll find her,” he whispered, lowering his chin in defeat. The impossibility became overpowering.
“The pity must end,” Roka said with finality. “You will find her.”
Something in his words put Anton back into action, gathered strength, and helped to clear the rest of his doubts. With a firm pressure of his hands against the remains, Anton started to climb toward the top where the orb dangled in midair, waiting for him.
His hands trembled as he went skyward, then slid, climbed, then slid again. Bones clanked and clattered to the bottom of the mountain, spilling on top of him, beside him, and below him as they tumbled downward. For a moment, he thought he could feel whatever life was in her calling to him, but it was only his wishful thinking.
Tasha, Pav, and Yeva passed through his thoughts, and he pretended his siblings were there with him, cheering him on in the way they always used to do for each other. Tasha with her book in hand, Pav with a smirk on his face, and Yeva with her palms clasped together.
Anton’s feet slipped when he reached the section he needed to unbury, but he held his grip, constantly shifting his footing as he stripped bone after bone away. A hole formed for him to push his way through and crawl inside.
He combed and dug in a depth that seemed to be never-ending—tibia, fibula, sternum, phalanges, skull, skull, skull—not her skull. Is she even here?
When he was about to turn away and explore a hole in another part of the bone mountain, he spotted another skull. Did he dare to hope? Tension from his shoulders lessened when his gaze landed on the left chipped tooth set in her lower jaw. The orb blinked and illuminated. Shooting his hand forward, he gripped the skull tightly in his palm, not wanting to release it.
“Nahli?” he asked.
A mixture of his heavy breathing, and the clatter of bones beneath his feet were the only sounds that could be heard. But it was undeniably her.
“Roka!” he yelled. “Roka!”
Shuffling upward, he crawled out from the hole he was buried in. Roka came running. “Did you find her?”
Despite her still not being put together, Anton smiled and held up the last piece of Nahli as he scaled his way back to the ground. “I have her.” He exhaled.
“Let us rebuild her then,” Roka said.
As Anton’s feet struck the pebbles, he sighed in relief, but he wasn’t done. The orb followed them as they headed for the cottage. Anton stretched out his hand, and the sphere spiraled downward into his palm.
“Thank you.” The orb was a part of him that never gave up.
“Off,” he murmured. At that, the orb turned back to white as the dark flame grew smaller, before the sphere disappeared.
“I still wonder why you don’t have an orb,” Anton said.
Roka angled his head over his shoulder. “I do not know. Perhaps I do, but I cannot summon one. Nahli had tried to let me hold hers, but it failed as well.”
Anton quickened his pace while Roka barreled ahead. He reached the cottage, the door already partially open from Roka’s to and fro delivery sprints. Nahli’s pile of bones rested on the floor, the way she’d been the day in the garden. Shifting his arm forward to her skeletal fragments, Anton planned to start at her toes—like déjà vu.
With his tiny hand, Roka bent forward to help, and Anton reached to clasp his wrist. “I have this, dear friend.” Anton murmured. “I’d like to be the one to rebuild her.”
Before all this happened with Nahli, Anton wasn’t sure how he felt about Roka, but that’s what he had become—a friend. He’d helped him not only physically by bringing Nahli’s bones to the cottage, but he was there in support with the words that helped Anton not give up.
Nodding his small skull in understanding, Roka sat back on his hind legs to watch. The first thing Anton grabbed was the broken femur, and he hoped Nahli wouldn’t feel this, but he had to set it. With one swift movement from the strength of his hands, a loud pop reverberated through the cottage.
Once again Roka nodded, as if telling Anton it had to be done. Otherwise, Nahli would have suffered more greatly.
After placing the femur on the floor, he started to build her. It took him much longer than he would have liked to piece her together. Secretly, he was afraid at first that when he connected her bones, they wouldn’t fuse. But they did, like magic.
Time seemed to stand still when he picked up her skull and cradled it in between his hands. He placed it on top of her cervical vertebrae, making her now complete. Only, she needed something before he awoke her.
Anton quickened his movements toward the bedroom. “We need to find her clothing.” He grasped the first thing he could find, a gray dress with a black rose. The head of the flower took up the entirety of the back as a large stem with thorns hit the hem, pearl buttons lining the front.
Using hurried motions, he undid the buttons and placed the dress on Nahli’s body, then clasped the front.
“Awake, my queen.” He whispered the same words he had the first time she’d awoken, except this time, he meant them. But she didn’t stir.
“Kiss her awake,” Roka suggested.
Anton shot him a glare, because he knew it was idiocy and lunacy to think a kiss could awaken her. That only worked in the stories Tasha read. And he didn’t even have lips. But still, he leaned forward to press his teeth against hers in the only way he would be able to kiss.
Before his teeth touched Nahli’s, a loud inhale came from her, and two bright flames lit inside her eye sockets.
Then she collapsed.
This time, Anton caught her in his arms before she hit the floor and became broken pieces once more. He’d been impatient at waiting for his words to work, but they’d only come late, was all.
Holding Nahli tight, he murmured against the side of her skull, “Welcome back.”
