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Theocratic-Monarchy: SunSide
19th Day of Month 6, Year 1628 DG
The cart bucks over bumps on a beaten path. Dust kicks up from the dirt below, and the branches of nearby trees reach into the cart and tickle the travelers like wooden fingers.
Salessa notices the light beyond the canopy growing dim. “Nightfall is near.”
“We’re almost home,” Symin responds, pausing the nostalgic tales he and Ray-Mi have been sharing.
“We better be,” Naina responds. “I’ve been inhaling dust for hours.”
“Only been one hour, love,” Ray-Mi counters.
If he calls me “love” again, Naina’s voice appears in Salessa’s consciousness, I’m going to tear those piercings out one at a time.
Salessa turns to her. Have you been listening to their conversation? He’s quite the storyteller.
Don’t do it, Lessi, she warns.
Salessa raises an eyebrow. Don’t do what?
Let your guard down. When Lexona used to—
Stop. Don’t say her name, I remember. I won’t make the same mistakes again.
She turns away from Naina, but can’t escape the lingering truth: the wolf is right. Salessa’s trusting nature has led them to catastrophe in the past. Lexona is a name she never wants to hear again; a reminder of the suffering that follows emotional connection.
At the end of the dirt path, the Mega disembark. The density of the forest won’t allow them to continue by cart. They travel now on narrow, leafy paths between thick trees that widen the further into the forest they go. The trees eventually become more spacious than the hut the twins called home.
The ground rattles, stopping Naina in her tracks. She places a hand on Salessa’s wrist, stopping her as well. Thumping booms echo through the air, as if some behemoth stomps toward them. Symin and Ray-Mi continue walking, unaffected.
“What’s that sound?” Naina questions them.
Symin stops and faces the twins. “It’s a drum.”
Salessa places her other hand on Naina’s fingers. The wolf’s rigid shoulders soften and Salessa leads her forward carefully.
“Let me show you,” Ray-Mi, a few yards ahead, beckons them forth. He pulls the branches of two trees aside, through which they find a clearing. The drums grow louder. More instruments join, and an orange glow pours through the opening.
A fire rages at the center. Hollowed trees, turned into dwellings, trace the circumference of the clearing. Mega flood the area—on the ground by the fire, hovering in the air, and sitting in the trees.
They are laughing and smiling, singing and dancing, embracing and making love. Some are eating, others drinking. Some make music with instruments constructed from branches, pinecones, and animal horns, while others listen in.
They are old and they are young. They are shades of red and blue, green and yellow, purple and orange, teal and maroon, violet and crimson, and colors that the twins have never seen before. Some are clothed, some are not. They are male, they are female, and they are so much more.
Naina and Salessa have never seen such unbridled joy. The Mega are enraptured by their own ecstasy. None of them notices that the group of travelers has walked into their clearing.
“What are they celebrating?” Naina asks Symin.
“Celebrating?” Puzzled lines appear on his forehead. “They aren’t celebrating. They’re just living. Welcome to Nivyan Hollow.”
The radiant joy before them exists in stark contrast with the bleak circumstances to which they’ve grown accustomed.
“Come with me.” Symin breaks them from their trance. “I’d like to introduce you to my family.” He strides toward the fire at the center of the clearing.
Naina hesitates, but, after a quick visual assessment of her surroundings, carefully steps forth, and Salessa follows.
“Where is Ray-Mi?” Salessa wonders as they walk.
Symin laughs. “Paradise.” He points up and the twins look to one of the tree limbs above, where a group eats, drinks, and enjoys the music. At the far end of the limb, up against the trunk of the tree, Ray-Mi and a lime-green Mega kiss and frenetically remove one another’s clothes.
Symin leads the twins to an occupied log by the fire. One of the Mega resting on it is elderly, with pumpkin-colored skin, while the other two appear younger than Symin, perhaps in their early forties. One of the younger Mega is clearly pregnant.
The elderly Mega rises when she sees Symin and opens her arms wide, embracing him. “I hope your journey was fruitful,” she says.
“Indeed it was, Mother.” He gestures toward the twins. “This is Naina, and this is Salessa. They’ve come to help us.”
Symin’s mother throws her hands up to her mouth. “Well, aren’t you both so lovely.”
Naina’s forced smile betrays her discomfort with praise.
“Thank you,” Salessa responds on their behalf.
“My name is Syma. Please come join us.” The twins place their travel bags down and sit on the log next to the two younger Mega.
“This is my sister, Nypa,” Symin introduces the pregnant Mega. “And her wife, Rona.”
The twins nod, and Naina speaks first. “When are you due?”
“Any day now,” Nypa responds with a smile. “Our third.” She gestures to the other end of the clearing. Past the wide bonfire, two children fight over a doll made of twigs and twine. Nypa’s smile drops. “Oh, no. Not again.” She lifts a hand with her palm facing the children and then moves it quickly from side to side. An invisible wall separates the children, and the doll drops to the ground between them, out of reach.
“How long will you be staying this time, mohuway?” Syma asks her son.
“We’re leaving in the morning,” Symin replies. “We can’t waste any time. The others are waiting.”
Syma turns to the twins. “We’ll make room in our tree for you.”
“We don’t want to impose,” Salessa insists.
“We don’t have a choice,” Naina adds nonchalantly. “We don’t know anyone else here.”
Salessa glares at her, but Syma laughs. “Naina is correct. You are our invited guests; we’d be honored to have you stay with us.”
The twins revel in the rhythm of the gathering. Salessa finds herself delighted by Nypa’s tales of Symin’s awkward childhood, and when she looks over to the other end of the log, she sees three unclothed Mega vying for Naina’s attention. The wolf appears to enjoy the competition, a playful smile plastered across her lips.
“I can take your bags to Syma’s tree, if you’d like,” Ray-Mi offers, joining them from the base of the tree where they last saw him.
Salessa nods gratefully. She watches as Ray-Mi hoists the bags onto his shoulders, and confusion forces her eyebrows together. “Why don’t you use the Radiance?”
“No Radiance for me, love. I’m a faerie.”
Salessa’s heart drops into her stomach.
There isn’t enough time to stop Naina. As soon as the word “faerie” passes Ray-Mi’s lips, the wolf leaps from the log, over her admirers. Her clothes tear under her thickening muscles, her teeth elongate and sharpen, and fur erupts around her body. Her eyes fixate on Ray-Mi as her enormous paws land on his chest and lay him flat.
She digs her claws into his skin. Her teeth are inches from his face as he pushes against her throat with his forearms.
“NAINA! STOP!” Salessa yells. The music ceases and all of the Mega look on in horror.
I told you! We can’t trust them, Lessi, Naina conveys. It emerges from her throat as a bark.
Salessa attempts to reason with her. “If he wanted to harm us, he could’ve done it already. We didn’t know what he was.”
I don’t feel safe.
“Let him go, Naina. I’m right here. I will keep you safe.” She steps closer to the growling wolf and kneels next to her. “You don’t have to trust him. Just trust me.”
Naina backs up a few long, unpredictable seconds later. She stops growling and removes her claws from the faerie’s chest. Blood spots cover it. She shifts back and reaches her hand down. He hesitates, but then grasps it, and Naina helps him stand.
“Nearly took my head off, beautiful,” he says with a weak laugh.
“Sorry,” Naina apologizes. “We’ve had bad experiences with faeries.”
He wipes the smiles from his face, and for the first time since they met him, his tone sobers. “Don’t apologize. Why do you think I’m here? I don’t trust them either.”
Symin turns back to the musicians and gestures for them to resume. There’s a moment of hesitation, and some anxious glances, then the atmosphere comes back to life as if nothing ever happened.
Salessa gently puts her hand on her sister’s cheek and runs her thumb softly along her skin to calm her. “Are you alright?” Naina nods. “I’ll get you some new clothes.”
“She doesn’t need clothes here, if she doesn’t want them,” one of her suitors says with a laugh.
Naina smiles and holds eye contact with him. “I’m fine like this.”
The atmosphere doesn’t die down until late into the night, and all but Naina, Salessa, and Ray-Mi return to their tree shelters. They remain quietly by the fire and enjoy the soft starlight, the cool breezes, and the tranquility of the resting forest.
“So this is what it’s like,” Naina says. “Freedom.”
She’s smiling, but Salessa recognizes the sadness sitting on the edge of her lips.
Ray-Mi laughs. “A forced freedom, I suppose. A curse turned blessing.”
“What curse?” Naina asks.
“Red-Lo’s curse,” Salessa answers her. “Right?”
Ray-Mi nods. “Red-Lo decimated nymph and pixie neighborhoods—and Doruh holy sites—to build the Temple Complex. It drove the Mega out here to the Hollow, where their connection to the Radiance was strengthened, but it came at a cost.”
“Ancestral suffering,” Salessa adds.
“Was that when the Revolution began?” Naina asks.
Ray-Mi’s gaze shifts to the flames. “It was. And it’s been eight hundred years of pendulum swings since then: faerie violence, Revolution retaliation, over and over, back and forth. The Uprisings freed the Doruh and set up the Alphocracy, but the faeries came back stronger with new technology, or weapons, or just sheer numbers.”
Salessa lowers her gaze. She knows where this gut-wrenching tale leads. “Those numbers formed the Bravers. Twenty thousand warriors at the onset, more than double that now.”
The faerie turns back to the wolf. “The Radiance was the only edge the Revolution had against numbers like that. Hope died the night their connection to it did.”
“Symin told us about it,” Naina responds. “The Siege of the Castrum.”
Ray-Mi sighs, heavy with disappointment. “That night was like nothing I’d ever seen. The hope was”—he pauses—“indescribable. His surrender was in reach, until we lost contact with our collaborators within the Castrum.”
“Who were the collaborators?” Salessa wonders. “What happened to them?”
“Two Members of the Assembly: a Doruh theocrat named Sonali, and Saila, the Facilitator’s daughter. They saw the ore and accepted that our defeat that night was the will of the Four. We had no chance.”
“We can still use their help,” Naina says. “If we can get back in touch with them—”
“We can’t.” Ray-Mi lowers his gaze to his fidgeting fingers. “We all have bounties on us, and the Facilitator is actively hunting you two. Saila is out of reach and Sonali”—he pauses to take a deep breath—“was executed yesterday.”
“I’m sorry,” Salessa responds.
“Thank you. Symin vowed to keep the fight going, after the defeat during the Siege. I joined him to continue my atonement.”
“Atonement for what?” Naina asks.
Ray-Mi hesitates. “I was a Braver, Naina.”
Salessa hears the low growl bubbling in her sister’s chest. Naina’s fingers dig into the log beneath her and it cracks from her strength. She’s doing everything she can to hold back another outburst. Salessa places her hand on Naina’s shoulder.
“Breathe. It’s alright.”
Naina follows the command.
“I understand the anger toward me. I deserve it. For years, I had convinced myself, as they all do, that my clan was under attack—that the nymphs, pixies, and Doruh were trying to replace us in the social and political structure. I drew so much innocent blood over it, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I defected and joined the Revolution.”
“That was brave of you,” Salessa points out.
Ray-Mi shakes his head. “It was just the right thing to do. Symin agreed to help me atone. He joined the Revolution after Saith abducted and murdered his daughter, and he’s still fighting for her. You never really get over losing a child.”
Salessa feels a stab of empathy.
“The Facilitator took our parents from us,” the wolf responds.
“Is that why you joined the team?” Ray-Mi asks.
The twins exchange a puzzled glance, then Naina replies, “Symin showed up at our door in the middle of the night and asked us to help. We haven’t committed to joining anything beyond that.”
Ray-Mi laughs. “None of us did, at first, but now we’re all invested.”
“Who’s on this team?” Salessa questions.
“Other than me and Symin? There’s Kruga, who was engaged to Symin’s daughter. Then two pixies, Gina and Zakia.”
Something catches Ray-Mi’s eye behind Salessa and Naina. The twins turn around and see Ray-Mi’s lime green paramour standing in the doorway of a tree shelter.
“Do you have to go?” Salessa asks him with a wry smile.
“I do, indeed,” Ray-Mi responds, rising to his feet and looking directly into Naina’s eyes. “It’s conversations like these that build trust.”
Naina nods, slowly. “Good night, Ray-Mi.”
The faerie scurries past them and quickly disappears into the darkness of the forest with the other Mega.
Naina stands as well. “We should sleep.”
Much of what Ray-Mi told them continues to swim in Salessa’s mind. “Is it alright if I sit alone by the fire for a while?”
Naina’s discomfort around their new companions tenses her shoulders again, yet she agrees and heads into Syma’s tree.
As Salessa watches the flames dance into the night air, she’s reminded of the joyful energy she witnessed. Generational joy, born out of a need for survival.
What began with the faerie quest for supremacy and led through centuries of bloodshed and ages of violence, ended in the freedom of the Mega of Nivyan Hollow. The history that caused her parents’ deaths is the same history that bonded these Mega to the Radiance in ways the faeries could never penetrate.
Like a single kernel harvested from a vast cornfield, the good that follows evil can never reconcile the grief born from that evil. Yet, Salessa thinks, it speaks to the resilience of survivors, the unbreakable spirits of those who resist. And it speaks to life’s attempts to find balance amongst chaos.
As the flames frolic freely before her, Salessa is reminded of the duality of every moment. Moments that spill blood on a Braver’s hands but also make him yearn for atonement.