Humpty
an excerpt

Humpty

Prologue

She was sitting on the floor of an earthen hut, legs crossed, eyes closed. Her hair was the color of molten silver, with a few strands of a deep sepia running through it. The winter coat of a doe long past was threaded to resemble a dress on her body, and the only complicated thing that adorned her was a silver necklace with ebony, ivy vines etched in it, like Celtic knot work.
The front flaps of the tent moved and pounded against the body of the tent ferociously, the driving force of the wind behind it.
Her eyes flicked open. Startling amber pockets were all through them, like a child with freckles, except they were on her pupils.
The drums began pounding a moment later. The singer’s voice echoed out from the village amphitheater.
Quickly she ran over to the washbasin in the corner of her tent. She tied her hair in a knot and quickly threw a cloak over her shoulders. The tent flaps spread apart like an eagle stretching his wings, and she flew over the dirt path.
The stringed instruments began playing. The song had begun.
The stars overhead were polished with the same wax that made the moon beam out from the heavens. Good. She would be able to see far tonight.
The rich, ember flames from the center of the amphitheater flowed with the music. The drum beat, the singer sang, and the flames danced. Wildly.
All throughout the stone circlet people in robes and cloaks began taking their places around the hot, writhing tendrils of the all consuming monster. Smoke poured out, and soon, an old, hunchbacked man leaning on a crook walked down to the pulpit.
“Let the meeting begin.”
The singers on the other side of the village joined in harmony, and the amphitheater was quiet except for the crackling fire. As the woman took a seat on the chiseled stone benches, the same old man spoke again.
“Ah, yes. Wonderful, wonderful. I see that we’re all here, now, why don’t we begin to--”
A dark-skinned man with a grizzly beard interrupted him. “Old man, why have you called us here at this time of night? The musicians had just begun their song, and the festival has already started!”
The old man nodded. “I would not have called you all here, Kaos son of Beligar, if I did not think that the matter that we are about to discuss was not important. Now,” he said, eyes twinkling over his staff, leaning forward, “let us begin.”
A log tumbled down spraying up ash and sparks, startling a few of the closer villagers. The music had stopped, the singer’s melancholy voice had ceased to pour over the nightscape, and the only noise now was the eerie chirping of the crickets and the constant crinkling sound of the bonfire.
The woman was still the whole time, not moving a muscle, waiting for the old man to say what he was going to say.
He moved towards his audience and began. “We have been sent yet another message from Balla. This time, our ‘beloved’ king wants us to produce more corn to fill his tables. I say to you, how can we accomplish such a thing? Our farmers spend endless hours toiling over the crusty and root-scraggled earth with sweat on their brows trying to grow enough for our village of Kréiapol and the royal city. We cannot spare much more, unless you want our own food snatched from beneath our very noses!” The old man pound the sturdy bottom of his staff against the stone floor.
The crickets quieted. The noise seemed as if it were stolen away from the very atmosphere. The rowdy man stood up, and swallowed. “No. We cannot stand for our food being taken off of our tables. We must grow enough to suffice the king’s needs and the only way we can do that is to expand our fields.”
“What are you suggesting?” a stern woman asked.
“Morgance, you know what I’m talking about,” Kaos shot back.
She shook her head no. “Like I’ve said before, I will not stand for the forests being cut down!”
He sighed. “It is the only way!”
The old man decided to intervene this. He could tell that nothing good would come of Kaos and Morgance arguing and bickering over something like this. “Listen here, we have already been through the matter of expanding into the forests, and you two know that the council is divided evenly on this. We cannot dispute this any longer, I am growing older each day. You are sucking the very life out of me! Now, there is a solution, perhaps another crop?”
“Anwell, I have heard of something new,” a young man piped.
The woman in the back shadows grew nervous. She knew what was coming, she had foreseen it.
“Well tell us, then!” Anwell smiled.
“The pirates of the Caones have brought over a new crop from a distant land. It is said that it grows twice as fast, twice as well, and produces twice the crop that our old plants have! I think that it may be nice to give it a try.”
The council seemed uncomfortable. Everyone knew about this crop. The pirates of the Caones were traveling all over the world, and just about anyplace you could find them. They were like a shepherd dog guarding his flocks, endlessly circling the oblivious sheep.
But this crop, it seemed too good to be true. If it had come from a distant land, who knows what it would be like.
“I would not accept that crop if I were dying and it were the only remedy that could reverse my sickness! Just cut down a few trees, it won’t hurt anyone!” Kaos reiterated.
Morgance was now furious. She rushed over to Kaos and glared straight into his face. “We WILL NOT cut down the trees! Do you know what is happening around our ‘great’ country, Kaos? The king is cutting things down. He destroying things so he can lavish in pools of gold, eat rich food and get fat! Machines are being built to take the place of men, and they are doing a mighty fine job of doing it! Did you hear about Luendon, down at the base of the great mountains? It was leveled to its very foundations because the king ordered it. For what? No one knows! He does what he pleases on a simple whim and no one can see the true intent behind his mad machinations!
This whole time, Kaos began to try and interrupt Morgance, but failed many times. Anger was boiling inside of him, and it was almost ready to overflow it’s pot. “You are not loyal to our country! How dare you talk about King Desmond in such a fashion?”
“We all talk about how our king is so just, how charitable and generous he is towards the public, but does anyone else in this council besides me see beyond his acts toward the people? The land is the country too, and it cannot be used like a piece of scrap parchment!”
“You think that the king is just ‘using’ the land?” Kaos’ tone rose.
“That’s exactly my point, yes!”
“I will not go to this crop from the East! Be loyal to this crop that we have grown for generations and generations that have passed!”
“I will not! This crop is promising enough, and your fat excuse for a citizen of Aeonaire is about to wither!”
“At least I’m not some old, cranky, bottle-nosed gardener!”
“WHAT?!”
Everyone stood up now and began arguing. The madness was growing and growing, like a storm cloud shedding lightening. Everyone was yelling, screaming, and poking each other in the chest, but two people alone were sitting patiently, waiting for the anger to be washed away.
The woman in the back, and the old man, Anwell. He stood up and hobbled over to the woman in the shadows.
“They’ve done it again,” she said.
“I know, Oracle, but be patient. This always happens at every council meeting. It’s just that Morgance and Kaos have opposite personalities. They’re so different that they can’t accept each other’s views. That’s about the only thing that they have in common with each other. Someone always has to intervene,” he wheezed, then coughed a bit.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, child. Just a little cough I picked up this afternoon..”
The girl called Oracle rubbed her head, fingering her hair. “They give me a headache.”
“I know, but remember, tonight is also the full moon. You always have headaches on these night. And you remember what else happens on these nights, correct?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Of course I do, it’s been the same for twenty-two years. The pain will be gone by tomorrow morning. It just grows and grows up to that point...” her voice trailed off.
He grabbed her chin, reeling her lost eyes towards his. “Your mother was the same way, and I know that you hate what you do, but you must know that your mother would be proud. You are much better at it than she was.”
She pulled away.
“Ah, well, I have to go quiet them. Perhaps we can come to a solution, or persuade one of them to reluctantly take on the other’s view. Cheer up, we won’t have to stay up much longer.”
He straightened the cloak on his back that was the hide of a deer long past, and then hobbled down to the center circle to calm the bickering council members.
“Everyone quiet down!”
Nobody paid any attention to him. They kept trying to prove their point, win this tug-of-war about meaningless things. The volume rose and rose, each person trying to make the other hear their voices over the others’ rising voices.
“EVERYONE QUIET DOWN!” Anwell screamed, voice cracking under the strain.
Everyone was shocked that the old man could muster that kind of attention so quickly. They quit bickering immediately.
“Thank you,” he said politely, acting as if nothing had happened. “Now, let’s get back onto track. What are we going to do?”
“Of course, we’re going to cut down the forests,” Kaos said, stubborn as ever.
Morgance stepped up with a straight back. “No, we’re going to try the crop!”
“Why don’t we take a vote?” the old man suggested.
Everyone muttered to one another, and it seemed that the majority thought it was a good idea.
But no one had noticed Oracle in the shadows. While Anwell was trying to calm them down, she was gazing up at the polished stars gleaming with fascination.
As if on cue, she slumped down onto the chiseled stone benches when everyone silenced. The whites of her eyes showed, and then her eyelids slumped down heavily. A tingling sensation shot through every part of her body, and she smiled inside remembering the familiar feeling. She could feel her heart beating softly and slowly, she could hear her brain thinking, she could taste the air, and she could see her breathing.
The first time Oracle had fallen into this strange, foreign state, she had been scared. At the time, she was ten years of age, and she had just lost her mother in an accident. It was frightening to be able to have her senses rearranged and seeing all of these things happening to herself as she transcended into another place. She was amazingly petrified when her senses resumed their normal state, and looked around at her surroundings.
She was having a vision.
Oracle was named rightly so, her namesake suggested that she was a seer, a mystic that looked into the past and predicted what would happen in the future. People all across the land of Aeonaire believed that seers and soothsayers were phony, rattling crazy people trying to make a fortune off of gullible travelers and passersby.
Oracle was the real thing. She and her mother, and her whole family, generations past, had the ability to slip into a subconscious, dream-like world. Oracle had heard the tales about her family, the persecution endured, and how they had to go into hiding once the world modernized into a ‘civil’ society, as they now called it.
The girl loved the feeling the second time she went through it, and she always associated it with her mother, and that made her smile. She continued to welcome these visions and thought about her mother with every passing one that she fell into.
This vision was different, though. Once she regained her senses, she stood up in the dream-world, and looked around. Everything was different than what it used to be like! It was terrifying, there was a haze throughout the sky and the sun did not give any warmth or show it’s happy face.
The clouds were casting ghastly shadows of figures, and the land was bloated. The trees had corroded and were gnarled and twisted like they were on the tops of the mountains because of the altitude. But Oracle was not on a mountain, she realized. She began to cry. She was standing on the remains of her village, Kréiapol.

* * * * *

Back in conscious reality, the town council was circled around the snapping and popping bonfire. Anwell the Old was on a raised platform, with everyone below him. No one said a word.
Anwell scanned the scope, resting his eyes on Kaos and Morgance who were scowling at each other in disgust. He rolled his eyes, then cleared his throat. “It seems that we have two options, fellow people. We can either try out this crop that the pirates in the Caones have brought from the far away east, or we can cut down our ancient forest, many years wiser and older than me, or anyone that I know, so that we can have room for more fields,” he paused, flicking his eyes from person to person, attempting to gather a glint of where their allegiances lay. “Now for the vote. As you all know, the rules are simple: only one vote, stay true to your own opinion, blah, blah, blah. So, who stands by trying the new crop?”
Each person true to the opinions raised their hands, and she looked pleased with herself. Anwell raised his eyebrows, then thanked them. “Who stands by clearing the forests and expanding our fields?”
The same happened with Kaos as it did with Morgance.
Anwell wetted his lips, and said, “Huh. It doesn’t surprise me that we have a tie, but how could we have a tie when we have every single member here. Who did not vote?”
The puzzled old man looked around for a third time, trying to find who abstained from the decision, and he found everyone but... Oracle.
Oh no, he thought to himself, where could she be?
Wheeling, he quickly found the girl in an awkward position, arms sagging over the bench in the top row.
He sped up the stairs as fast as his creaking joints would allow, and knelt over her. Resting the back side of his hand against her pale cheek, he announced, “She’s having a vision! Someone, help me carry her down to the fire to get warmth of the fire. Visions suck the warmth out of the air around a person, so we must keep her body at a normal temperature, otherwise she’ll freeze because of the cold!”

* * * * *

Oracle knelt over the soil. She rubbed her fingers in it, and shivered. She knew how visions worked. She hoped that someone had discovered her body and taken her down to the fire.
The soil was odd, it was more different than she had ever seen. It was moldable, like clay, and it was not brown, it was green. It was like a mixture between black and green, it looked burnt, almost.
Her tears fell into the topsoil, and dissolved into the clay-like soil that had once been fertile and full of wonderful plants. What could have happened to her beautiful village? Surely it had not been... burned...
Shuddering at the thought of it, Oracle pulled herself up and slowly walked over to a foundation of an old house. It was charred down to the stone that had been laid down hundreds of years earlier.
She didn’t even know what time she was in. All she knew was that something horrible had happened.
Looking around, she couldn’t find the forest. What had happened? Her eyes were dry, even though the tears kept coming.
There was a horrible, sickening feeling that the decision the council was making had something to do with this in her stomach. She felt like she wanted to puke. But she couldn’t. She had to find out what had happened and why it did this. Only through that could she begin to help her village.
Oracle thought about the past times she had visions. She saw the future, but she could control things. It was like she were a goddess, omnipotent, omniscient, she could do what she pleased, while trying to figure out what she was about to see. She felt full of energy and was driven by some unknown force.
The landscape was always unfamiliar, it was a distorted version of reality. She would meet creatures that could talk, creatures that could think, and that had the ability to reason. She would never meet anything she had seen in her real life, never. It was like she was in a dream, but she could do anything. It was like a dream in which she was awake, deciding what to do next, not just watching the story.
This was the first time she had actually seen something that she recognized from her real life. She recognized her village, although it wasn’t the exact same one she knew.
Oracle slowly walked down the path into the center of the village, and found the center amphitheater still intact, but it was charred, as well.
Things started getting weird from here on. Oracle began seeing things like she had in her past visions. There were animals of a strange sort that had never been around her in real life. They were fluffy, like sheep, but they were a dark red-orange, the color of rust. They had an extra joint in each leg and could run extra fast. Their tails were striped and curled around and around like a pig’s, but they were five feet long each, and wherever the animals moved, their tail would always snake in the grass behind them.
She startled one, and the whole flock began to stampede away from her. Oracle ran up to the top of the hill when they disappeared, and found them running down the other side. They prepared themselves like a horse does when it’s going to jump, and then they leaped into the air and floated away into the nasty, brown sky.
Puzzled, Oracle began to walk down the other side of the hill. At the bottom was a cliff that began to drop off. Just like that! She edged her way to the brink and peered over the precipice.
There was nothing! It was an endless cliff! There weren’t even clouds down there, just brown!
Then she heard voices. She spun around and saw three men carrying bodies down to a huge cart fashioned out of a rose-colored wood, attached to creatures that somewhat resembled gigantic birds.
The men were carrying bodies down from the top of the and just tossing them into the cart! Were the bodies dead? Oracle moved closer to find out.
She peeped over the side of the cart. They were not only dead, she knew them! They were the villagers from Kréiapol!
Two men tossed another body into the wagon. This one was a completely familiar face. It was Anwell the Old.
Anwell was the head of the council in Kréiapol, but he was more than that to Oracle. Anwell was like a father to her. He took her under his wing after his mother died. He raised her from the young, naive girl she was, to the beautiful woman she had become. Anwell loved her, and she loved him. They were like father and daughter. To see him like this, with coal-like marks all over his body, tattered and torn clothing, no staff was... painful, to say the least.
She squeezed her eyes shut and moaned, and began to weep. One of the bird creatures twisted it’s neck around to stare at Oracle with black, cloudy eyes. It looked like it was mocking her. She stomped over to it and yelled, “You think this is funny?! I know these people! I love them!”
The bird snickered and coughed. “Child, you are alone. This is not your world, you cannot do anything to save them. They have passed, and you should do well to forget about them. They are gone -- forever!”
The bird was mocking her! “Ugh!” she kicked him, or her, right where the shin would be, and it’s eyes crossed and made a noise like metal scraping against metal.
Oracle’s hands shot up to her ears to block the noise out. It was deafening.
“HEY, SHUT YOUR ANIMAL UP!” she screamed over the cries to the men carrying the bodies. They looked up to her, and then walked back up the hill to grab more dead villagers.
Infuriated, she stormed up the hill to the villagers. She caught a glimmer of a crest on their outfits, but ignored it.
“Hey, what’s the deal?”
One man looked up and dropped the front end of a body, the head letting out a nasty pop and sputter as it landed. “You kicked the bird, what do you expect? Now get away, we’re busy!”
Shocked, she walked up to the man. Smiling then, she asked, “What’s going on here?”
“It’s none of your business,” the man said flatly.
“Please tell me,” she said.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to vacate the premises. We’re on official business here.”
Slowly, a vine made out of the nasty clay grew out of the ground and twisted around the man’s legs. His eyes bulged, and he screamed. “What are you doing?”
The clay snake wrapped around his throat. The other men backpedaled, trying to not get involved, for fear of ending in the same fate as their co-worker.
“Tell me what you’re doing,” she said.
“Fine... fine,” he managed to spit out. “We’re... we’re--trying--to--cough--look, we’re just--cough--following orders... we were told--cough--to haul these--cough--bodies away--cough.”
“Who told you to do this?”
The man hacked and hacked. “I--I--we...” he let out one final sigh, then his eyes rolled into his head and he fell to the ground. The clay snake dissolved and molded back into the nasty earth.
The two men looked at each other, then ran the other direction towards the remains of Kréiapol. Oracle ran the other way.
She had killed someone! She had killed a man! What was she going to do? She had never killed anyone before...
Oracle felt sick. She ran to the edge past the bird licking it’s leg, and she saw rocks. No, they weren’t rocks, they were boulders. No... they were too large to even be boulders. They were islands.
Everywhere she looked, there were floating islands in the sky. The haze drifted around them, and the eerie shadows from the clouds cast a dark image around them. Coupled with the sound of the wagon behind her clinking around because of the bored birds, she felt like something horrible was going to happen.
A gust of wind nearly sent her tumbling over the brink, but she leaped and soared through the sky, through a brown cloud, and landed on a floating isle. She looked at her hands and arms. They were covered in a nasty, gritty slime from the clouds! What were they made of?
In this dream-world, she could do things that she could never fathom doing in real life. That bit of the clay and animating it to act like a strangling snake, the humongous leap she had just taken through the grimy clouds, they were all things that she could do in her visions that could never happen in her real life. She was like a goddess.
She flicked some of the slime off and pulled her molten silver hair back over her head and tied it into a knot again.
There was a path of the floating stones in the air, drifting slowly back and forth, like they were balloons bound to the ground, always trying to go up and away.
She scanned the isle that she was on, and decided nothing was worth exploring, so she jumped to the next isle, and the next, and the next, until she found a monstrous one, the size of the village-site. It was so large, the haze blanketed it so she could not even see the ledge, how far down it went, nor how far to her right or left it stretched.
Something pulled her towards it, like a magnet. She did not know what it was, but she was filled with the urge to go to it. She jumped, then floated up, as if she were weightless. She found herself at the top, and something else that was unexpected.
A monster was resting at the top. It was large -- no, not large, huge -- and it filled the top of the island. it was so huge that the sepia haze blocked the rest of it from view.
“Hello?” it boomed, rattling the entire isle.
Oracle fell to the ground in shock.
“Hi...” she said sheepishly, trying to regain her confidence.
“Ah, yes. I’ve been expecting you. Oracle, isn’t it?”
She was puzzled. Where was this thing’s head? Where was it talking from? “Yes.”
“Good. You’re probably wondering why your village was burned, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Well, sit down, Oracle, we have a lot to talk about.”
The monster shrunk, until it was the same size as Oracle herself. It stood up on two legs, and walked towards her. It had two legs that were like a goat’s, gray in color, and the top of it’s body was furry too. It’s head was was huge, and it resembled a lion’s, but without the main. The monster’s fangs curled up from it’s bottom jaw and out, and it had many buns in its hair running down to it’s back.
“I am here to tell you what may come to pass if something is not done...”

* * * * *

She gasped as the icy fingers of the real world weaved into her nostrils, and then the sudden warmth of the fire repelled the cold away. She had a splitting headache, and when she regained her vision, the light from the fire only made it worse.
A crunching behind her made her get on her elbows to see.
“You’re awake,” Anwell said. “You’ve been gone for about three hours. I dismissed the council about an hour ago, because we couldn’t wait any longer. Plus, I was growing tired of Kaos’ complaints,” he chuckled.
She jumped up. “Whatever you do, do not try the new crop from the Caones.”
“Wha--” he began, but Oracle had run off, quickly out of the town, and disappeared into the darkness of the night.