Genavalle
an excerpt

Kubor had guided Alice through a nature walk for the rest of the night. The trail was relatively tamed, not as difficult to traverse as some of the trails Kubor had led Alice through at memorable occasions, but after five hours of nonstop walking, Alice’s thighs were burning in protest and she finally had to signal to Kubor that she had to take a break.

“How much farther?” Alice asked after she’d finished drinking heavily from her water bottle. Glancing at the sky, it was a lighter shade of midnight blue, and Alice consulted her watch to see that it as about 4 in the morning. Kubor didn’t even seem to be the least bit tired, but he sat down beside Alice nonetheless.

It piqued Alice’s curiosity. How come she, who was supposedly a sprite, be so tired from something as mundane as walking? That was weird, wasn’t it? She should be tired.

Of course, it wasn’t just that Alice was trying to find excuses, picking at threads that might dislodge the argument that she was not human. It wasn’t that at all. At least, that was what Alice tried to convince herself of, a task at which she failed miserably.

The grass was wet with dew, and her only source of illumination was the moon up in the sky and the embers flying away from Kubor’s tobacco. Kubor and Alice had barely exchanged more than five words to each other since they had started walking through the forest, but it wasn’t because they were ignoring each other. Granted, the silence between them was never comfortable, but it was livable. It was the silence between two people who knew each other well enough to pretend when the other wasn’t there.

Alice’s pack was cutting into her shoulder, so she set it down on the ground as soon as she sat down. The water had regained some of her stamina, but she knew she was too weary to go on.

Alice had her head on Kubor’s lap, and Kubor informed her that he planned to wake her up as the sun rose. Alice merely nodded sleepily. She planned to take every second of sleep allotted to her.

She much detested clichés, but it seems the old adage about sleep feeling as if it only was a second long proved to be not so much a myth as Alice previously suspected it was. She could swear that she had only blinked before she was being ushered awake by Kubor, who was determinedly trying to wake her up so that she could see something, something apparently important. Alice rubbed her eyes and gave out a jawbreaking yawn.

“Hurry and open your eyes Alice, if you don’t want to miss it!” Kubor hissed impatiently. He was pointing avidly at the moon, a silver gibbon shape in a sky that was rapidly turning orange.

“What am I suppose to be seeing, Kubor?” Alice asked snippily, with no small amount of annoyance in her tone.

“You’re just about to see how we’re going to get to Arayat, not that it’s a pressing matter but you do remember what this whole trip was for, yes?”

Alice scowled but didn’t reply, her eyes now intently focused on the moon. There still wasn’t anything remotely interesting happening.

Alice squinted her eyes, because Kubor had let out an exclamation of surprise that what he woke her up for should be appearing sometime soon. Alice continued staring at the moon, but a movement at the corner of her eye caused her to look east. A small sliver that vaguely looked like a silver worm at this distance was, no other word for it, flying towards the moon in slithering motions. Alice gasped. This was something unordinary, even by her standards.

“What is that?” she asked breathlessly.

“That,” said Kubor, “is our ride to Arayat.”

“But it looks like it’s headed straight to the moon!”

“It is, but it passes the Kingdom of Arayat on its way up.”

Alice continued gaping at the snake-like creature making its way to the moon. It was harder to make out now, as the sun had risen enough above the horizon to properly obscure the moon from the morning sky.

“Arayat is in the sky?”

“Yes.”

“How come I can’t see it?”

“No one can see it from the ground. It’s the reason it’s up there in the first place, to not be seen.”

“Umm, what exactly is it?” Alice asked.

“It’s the Moon Eater.”

“How come I haven’t seen it before?”

“It’s only visible to creatures like me…actually I should be saying like us, you realize, but I’m not. Anyway, you can’t see it because the Moon Eater is only visible in the sky at dawn and dusk.”

“How is it going to help us get to Arayat? Are you suggesting we hop on it and hop off come the spot where it passes Arayat the closest?

“You got it in one.”

Alice sighed. Well, her life never made sense anyway. It was too late for it to start doing so now just because it became weird, even by her standards.

Her standards needed serious readjustment.

The creature had gone from the sky.