“I’m sure you can imagine that, at some point, I thought to do something about it all. And you’d be right.

  Somewhere along my fifth year with Farren, I grew a sense of defiance, and Ariadna was the one to come up with the simple concept that nourished that rebellion: we would run away. Just go, leave and not come back.

  It sounded so easy when she first said it.

  But we had nothing, and knew only a bit more than that about the ways of the world. How could we possibly survive on that? Where would we go? How would we sustain ourselves, and a child besides? How would we find safety in a world so eager to eat us raw?

  But the idea, once sparked, began to spread, and there wasn’t a thing we could have done to extinguish the fire once it ignited in our hearts. The moment those words came out of Ariadna’s mouth was the moment that sealed our fates.

  “We could build a shelter in the woods,” we said. “Work hard now to earn some coin. Keep it a secret; they’ll never know. We could find passage—anywhere, acquire provisions just to get us started, and then settle down far away. We could live off the land. We could plant and harvest food; we have the knowledge. We could sell things, trinkets, anything we’re able to make ourselves. It couldn’t be worse than this! We could do it. We can do it.”

  And that was it. That was the plan.

  Yes. Don’t make that face. It was a bad plan. I know that now, but we didn’t know it then.

  So I showed her how to make reed baskets, something my sister Kippy once taught me when I was a girl. I’d made them, back in the farm, to keep around the house and to hold any items that needed…well, holding. I don’t know. The things were rather useless, if I’m being honest with you, but reeds are free. We could pick them from the grasses almost anywhere in Renlym, and so that became our solution to the issue of money.

  Ariadna, friendly and warm as she was, had a few more acquaintances in town than I did. She’d become close with the shop-owner’s wife, a woman whose husband’s job was to trade for all sorts of manufactured products from the city to sell at a nasty little marked-up price among the farmers in desperate need of such things. Her name was Labine, and she was a sly person, left in charge of the business more often than not because of her husband’s traveling. She helped us.

  For nothing more than split coppers, which was frankly their worth, she began buying our baskets and selling them to her customers as ‘produce bowls’ and ‘economical containers’ and ‘versatile vessels for any use within the home’.

  So, for well over a year, Ariadna, Lili, and I made them, our fingers skinny and fast with furtiveness. Anytime we could, whenever those pigs left us to ourselves and we had the chance, we would put our time to use collecting the thick grasses and weaving them into small—or medium-sized or big—baskets, bowls, concave plates: all varieties of the same rutting thing but Labine insisted that she could sell them for different purposes and get more money for them that way. Who knows.

  We’d hide our finished crafts somewhere our husbands wouldn’t find them, the food cabinets, usually, and wait for Ariadna’s next run to town when she would routinely trade a heavy sack of our products for a very light pouch of coppers.

  And…

  My apologies. I won’t cry. I just need a moment.

  It’s just… Ah, those times.

  I couldn’t explain to you the joy it brought us to collect those pitiful payments. We’d sometimes sit around and just giggle over our little coins, I remember, for each copper, no matter how small, represented a step closer to freedom, and that is indeed a sad thing to recall.”

  Leroh looked out the window of the moving coach with horrified numbness as they made their way through the streets of the Sun capital.

  Mantis brought them to the outside perimeter roughly circling the city and began to travel through it, following the curve of it rather than piercing the poorer area to reach the servant-inhabited heart of the capital.

  Decades later, some of the evidence from the Sun God’s initial overtaking of the city still showed. Empty plots of land stood out like pulled teeth between houses of stone which still displayed ancient scorch marks and were left bare of the parts that couldn’t withstand fire as well as stone. Doors and roofs were a rare sight, only present in the few rebuilt structures and put together carelessly out of discarded materials and inadequate lumber which was, by now, falling apart.

  The characteristic devastation left behind after that first ever Sun attack was too reminiscent of his most recent raid.

  Leroh’s eyes became cloudy with tears. He blinked them away.

  They rode ceaselessly for the remainder of the morning and early afternoon through the thin edge of slums reserved for the unsworn, seeming to do nothing but go up and down the same filthy streets. At one point, Mantis turned the coach around and started taking them back in the direction they’d come. Then, when she reached the place where she’d started, she spun the carriage around and did it all over again.

  What was she doing?

  Leroh poked his upper torso out of the window to look at her, intending to question her behavior. Mantis had her hands on her lap with the horses’ reins tightly clutched in two fists. Her shoulders were squared and her posture was stiff as she looked around, making eye contact with any who would look at her. Her hood was down.

  Leroh retreated back into the carriage and wiped the moisture from the palms of his hands on his green tunic with an abrupt change of heart. Whatever it was she was doing was intentional, and he’d not be the one to ask her for an explanation, he decided.

  His stomach was unsettled, aching with twists and jabs of acute pain. He was overly aware of his own throat as he tried to resist the urge to vomit, and his armpits and hands were sweating profusely.

  He was living a nightmare turned reality, and it just wouldn't end.

  In his mind kept flashing the horrifying image of Mother falling into the Sun’s moat of molten fire. Or Tem, or Kird. Leroh couldn’t help imagining their skin, muscle, and bone sizzling, liquefying into a sludge of invaluable nourishment for the Sun to absorb, their unique thoughts and recollections condensed into a life-giving delicacy just for him.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  And with terrible shame, Leroh kept finding his mind also drifting to the question which, in the deepest corner of his spirit, mortified him most: What would happen to him if they failed now? Would the Sun take him, and his sister, next?

  Had Leroh foolishly spat in the face of his own good luck when he chose to follow the monster he’d accidentally evaded back to its lair in his stubborn attempt at bravery? And would his own flesh meet the same fate—dissolve in the Sun’s magma to be converted into fuel in his veins, too?

  If so, he wouldn’t be able to say he hadn’t earned it.

  Outside, their slow-moving coach was regularly overpassed by carts and wagons headed for the inner city brimming with goods of every kind, abundances the likes of which Leroh had never seen: furs and whole carcasses, sacks and casks of food and drink, worked wood and metal parts and anything and everything his humble mind could conceptualize.

  Leroh strained to see what each passing vehicle transported, and lost track almost immediately for the sheer amount of things being brought in from outside, in quantities he would have believed impossible. Lines of carts carrying identical barrels of what appeared to be the same product passed them, eight, nine, ten cartloads. Eleven. It was all just one delivery?

  But the neverending parade of foodstuffs and wares coming in failed to distract Leroh completely from what was beyond the cobblestoned path of the streets. The free folk lived in squalor, in worse conditions than anything he’d ever seen or even heard of before.

  He’d known of the Sun capital, known of the Sun God himself, but Leroh had never cared to ask about his own kind and how they fared in close proximity to the ruler of Yriaa.

  The smell was overwhelming. Waste polluted the ground and amassed in piles by the sides of the road. Nondescript offal, droppings, rotting food, and other heaps of miscellaneous garbage were all left ignored out in the open, cluttering everything, from the street to the entrances of homes. And it was fresh.

  Those amounts of waste could not have been produced solely by the sparse residents of the unsworn area of the city, Leroh knew. In addition to the multitude of incinerated buildings never restored in the first place, as in Okedam, many standing dwellings were derelict and near crumbling with disuse. Families fallen to the Sun or gone extinct for a lack of offspring and those lucky and able to run away had left their homes empty behind them. Leroh estimated that only a quarter or less of the original inhabitants of the lowly outskirts of the capital remained, and yet the area was packed with new waste like an overpopulated sty after feeding time.

  It was the refuse of the Sun servants.

  As Leroh watched, two things occurred in close proximity: A one-horse cart overflowing with food scraps—vegetable and fruit peels, bones with dangling bits of meat still on them, guts, and half-eaten leftovers—drove out from the inner city and stopped dead in the middle of the road. The driver jumped down from his seat carrying a big shovel and stepped around the cart to scrape out the filth onto the ground beneath his feet.

  Not ten paces away from him, a man in rags was shoveling older waste from the street onto a wheelbarrow. When it was full, which didn’t take more than a dozen full-dumps of his shovel, the pauper grabbed the handles of his pushcart and wheeled it away without even glancing at the Sunman behind him contributing to the dismal state of his place of residence.

  The next thing that caught Leroh’s eye was the opening of a door just past the scene he’d been observing. From the entrance to a large house of blackened stone came a group of men in livery. They wore various sizes of smiles of contentment, and some were still adjusting their clothing, buttoning buttons and lacing laces. Behind them, the older woman in charge of the brothel was saying something to them animatedly, overly so, but they only dismissed her with hand gestures and laughter as they made their way through the somewhat clean-middle of the street, walking with utter disregard for the passing vehicles, down and away.

  Not far from the whorehouse another similar establishment had its doors open with very thin women posing outside, sitting on the porch or standing beside each other with their hands on their own bodies. Their lips and cheeks were dabbed with red cosmetics to bring life to their cadaverous faces, and their charcoal-lined eyes of dark brown and hazel and caramel and blue blinked slowly as though with exhaustion as they trailed their chests absentmindedly with limp hands. The gesture was meant to seduce, Leroh knew, but the women did not look good. Their bodies were bony, emaciated, their skin was pallid and sweat-slick, their eyes glossy and absent, shuttered with heavy lids over discolored patches of bluish skin and rimmed with sickly red.

  It was with horror that Leroh realized how many such places peppered just the street they were on alone. There were another three in immediate sight, adorned with the same manner of young girls on display outside, and often near them were occupied buildings with no clear purpose and a strange, dark atmosphere. Through broken windows and shutterless holes in walls Leroh could see people inside, sitting around, idle and dozing off in the middle of the day.

  “It’s yorrow,” the siren whispered to Leroh.

  He turned to her, surprised. She’d never addressed him directly before. “What?”

  “You were looking at the prostitutes and the drug houses. That’s why they’re like that. Yorrow.”

  “What is that?” Teela asked in a little voice.

  “It’s a substance they consume, extracted from an algae that grows in the river. We harvest it.”

  “I’ve never heard of that before,” Leroh said warily.

  “You’re fortunate, then.” Yilenn was looking outside with a deep crease in her brow. “The Sun is clever for making it accessible to these people. It kills the mind—and the body, too. The crown has been purchasing it in large quantities from us for a long time, and now I can see who it was always intended for. Eventually, these people will come to him—swear—to keep feeding their addiction with the money of his monthly allowances, or they’ll be delivered to him as they are now, unsworn, when they die. Either way, he’ll have them sooner rather than later, this way. A clever idea.”

  “Delivered to him?” Teela asked, eyes wide.

  “They don’t burn their dead here. It’s forbidden. When these people’s bodies give out from the yorrow, they’ll be given to the Sun. That’s why he allows unclaimed folk to live in his city in the first place; they still serve him, like this. Everyone serves him.”

  After a few breaths of quiet during which Leroh tried to process the disturbing new information, his sister asked, “How do you know all this?”

  “Everyone knows about our yorrow—and to stay clear of it. Well…maybe not you. They wouldn’t have talked much of these things in a town like yours, I suppose. But it’s common knowledge.”

  With a sudden lurch forward, the carriage came to a halt. Mantis jumped off the driver’s seat and came to open the door beside Yilenn. Her orange-flecked eyes were piercing. “Why are you talking to the children about drugs and prostitutes and the wickedness of the Sun reign?”

  A silence. The siren raised her red eyebrows and regarded Mantis with wide eyes. “They should know about the Sun. They’re here, in his realm.”

  “Yes, she’s right,” Teela added with a quick nod, her dark gaze on Mantis.

  The amber-haired woman only looked from Yilenn to Teela and then back. She breathed deeply and pinched her red lips.

  “I don’t like it. Stop talking about this. Follow me.” She gestured with her head to her right and turned to walk away.

  Teela called after her, “Where are we going? We can’t leave the horses—”

  “Be quiet and come,” Mantis said as she walked.

  After a long moment of indecision and shared glances of incredulity, Leroh, Teela, and Yilenn exited the illusion of safety of the carriage and raced to follow Mantis, who’d pulled her hood back up to cover her face and stopped walking by an old, abandoned house. Hanging from the door handle was a piece of torn rag stained red with a few drops of blood.