Kei

  My first memory, and I am a girl running through a forest with leaves the color of flame, with sheets of fire and the howls of spectral wolves in my wake. Dry trees are catching alight in a roaring wind like strings of firecrackers, impossibly fast, but I am faster still.

  Terror fills and empties me as I dash forward, and something else has taken over. I know my feet are pounding quicker than my racing heart, and my body feels first like it’s on fire, then like lightning coursing through me. It hurts, but I’m already beyond caring.

  She’s come to take me, and he said to run.

  If she gets me this time, I will go back to my glass prison, floating there asleep and yet not asleep, until she empties me of everything that questions her, or even thinks on its own.

  This time there will be no father, and there will be no escape.

  The forest road is empty, little more than a track, and it should be dark now, but the fire is giving far too much light. If it catches me now, I’ll burn like a Roman candle and I know it.

  I can’t stop running with her behind me, even if it kills me. I’m past fear, somehow, yet I know I’d rather be dead than in her hands.

  He won’t come for me again. I’ve already lost him.

  I dart sideways, snapping a heavy branch in my way like a twig and lurch down a gully. I’ll bruise later, maybe, but I don’t feel the blow now. I rush down the rocky crevasse towards a tiny creek, and instinctively slow my blurring steps just enough to soften their impact and the noise of my flight.

  I feel a cold wind inside me, coming from the roadway I just left, and I know her hounds are near. I don’t understand them, but they’re dangerous. Unpredictable. Unfathomable.

  Almost exactly like me. Except I’m flesh.

  I’m slipping along the creek, but the part of my mind which hasn’t gone completely silent realizes they’ll find me soon. Even if I know better than to try to shake them from my scent in the stream, anything fleeing fire will run to water.

  And I can hear the roar of water, just ahead.

  I reach a break in the trees. My stream has reached a river. And not far ahead, a tiny waterfall gushes over the edge of a cliff, and into the Pacific Ocean.

  The ocean is my only road, now.

  An hour ago, it would have killed me. I was never strong enough with father around. Love and safety weaken me. Peace weakens me. My soul must be on fire to make me this strong, this fast, this aware.

  One last run.

  If she’s killed him, then once I’m able to feel anything, I may never feel at all. Ever again.

  I hit the left bank of the river and am running fast now. It’s over a mile, but as I am now, that’s measured in seconds. Less than a minute, anyway.

  The wind is howling around the trees, and I know if I stay whatever it is rising inside me will draw in everything.

  The fire, the stormwinds, the hounds, her weapons and soldiers. Even her.

  All pulled into a cyclone none of them can stop.

  My feet are pounding down the last steps towards the precipice. My new running shoes are shreds, but my feet are already stronger than steel-toed boots, and I’ll be in water soon. I gather myself for a last running leap.

  “Kei!” A voice like thunder rips through the air, and I see her on the far bank, clad in the colors of night, elegant body armor and a cloak whipping around her in my storm, with the mask of a hunting falcon over her face.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  She rips off her mask. “Kei, come back!” Her voice, even shouting far louder than a human could manage, is somehow musical and compelling. “I have your… father! You can be together. Safe!” Her long dark hair glistens in the firelight and her face is indescribably beautiful and terrible. For all her words, rage radiates from her. “Just come back!”

  If my dad is still alive, escaping this woman is what he would have given his life for. Odds are, he already has. I can see a long blade in her right hand, behind her body and pointed down, and it gleams with something far more frightening than blood or reflected fire. Something unnatural.

  The more she unlocks, the more powerful she becomes.

  I refuse to be her final key.

  She is still shouting, and I know her words are powerful, but my mind has already blocked them out. Another time, and she might have shaken me. Not today.

  My firewinds are lighting up all the woods around us, and the fall is no longer a choice, but my only road. A vast wave of sparks and glowing ash flow over us, muting her voice. The river behind us glows in the sunset and the conflagration. Like a current of blood and fire.

  The dark waterfall rushes towards the sea. Even if I clear the rocks, I’ll be swimming for miles to get clear of the flames, and further still to escape her hounds.

  I turn to the edge, and leap.

  ***

  When I float ashore, a day and a half later, everything is gone. I remember fire and fear and the face of my father. And a woman who frightens me more than anything alive.

  With time, I barely remember my name.

  But nothing else.

  The sea calls once more, for there is no other path.

  ***

  It’s night when I plunge through the last wave. Lights ahead blind me, and my strength collapses. Somehow my body knows to give no more, and that it has nothing else to offer.

  I’m suddenly upright, sand beneath my toes, a beach only meters away, and water up to my chest. And a shadow behind me lunges through the water.

  An instinct moves me faster than fear or thought, and I leap upward, just enough to bring my knees to my chest and then to force my torn feet down at the shape passing beneath me.

  They hit just above the fin.

  I don’t think about what that means, but my body realizes it has purchase, and I jump again, towards the shore ahead. I fall short, and I feel the water surging with more than the tide behind it, and keep stumbling forward. Instinct guides me less than clumsiness, now, and with water above my knees I am too slow, but I take two more steps and leap again.

  Jaws crash close, but just behind my toes. I land several feet further forward, with my hands touching dry land, or rather, water-logged beach sands, and I can hear shouting. But I am on my stomach in water, and the next bite clamps down on my right leg with force enough to shear it away.

  I feel the distant pain, but my leg is still there, just with a monster clinging fast.

  And I discover there is a bit of pain and power left in me still. A mix of rage and terror and blinding energy flashes through me, and my left leg digs impossibly deep into the silty depths, my foot hits some ancient stone or piling, and they combine their power with that of my onrushing tormentor.

  We slide ashore, my bleeding leg tearing free of its mouth as it gapes in shock. Cries are arising all around us.

  A massive white shark is outstretched on the sand, halfway out of the water, and now desperately trying to return to the ocean before it breathes its last. I glimpse blood and lines of shattered teeth in its jaws, one above, one below.

  It chewed down to my bone, and broke teeth on my femur. Tired as my bones feel, they still hold my only remaining strength.

  “What the--?” a man shouts. He is charging up, heedless of the deadly shark now thrashing on the beach. “Kid, hold still.” He’s tanned, muscular and has a t-shirt in his hand. He stoops down to tie a tourniquet off on my leg. He can’t see the blood is already slowing. He calls out over his shoulder. “Mary, call 911!” My vision is blurring, but I can see ‘Muscle Beach’ is striving mightily to cut off circulation to my leg. It’s not the right call for me, exactly, but it’s nice that he cares.

  And I know I can take a bit of punishment. I’m starting to feel the pain, now, but consciousness is going fast, and taking discomfort with it. Whatever was keeping me alive is now spent.

  The shark is doing better than I am. With a final spasm it twists almost back to the water, and then rolls over as the beach’s edge crumbles, and makes it safely back into the ocean. I wonder how long it was following me, and the scent of blood.

  A coincidence, of course. Except it never is.

  The man hasn’t stopped talking. “Just hang on, kid. We’ll get you to the hospital.” He and some friends have turned towels and the poles from a pair of beach umbrellas into a stretcher and have me in the air. I’m covered in more towels, one wrapped around my right leg, and more bind me to the whole makeshift design.

  I can’t complain, even if I had breath. But I feel like a caterpillar in a cocoon, or better still, like a baby in a papoose.

  And if it were up to me, I’d probably be bleeding out unconscious on that beach, so papoose it was. Until they figured out more about me, at which point I’d get a straightjacket.

  Whatever I’d just done, I was sure it was more than a little crazy.

  I drop in and out of awareness. City lights fill my fading vision by the time we hit the parking lot, and an ambulance found us while the men and women with me debate between fitting me in a backseat or the bed of a truck. Beyond the concerned voices and gentle hands, the City of Angels glitters, clad in the endless wealth and technology of the North American Superboom.

  But my world is fading sight and distant pain. I lose track of the conversation and consciousness before they transfer me to the EMTs.

  I surface again as someone pulls away the remnants of bandages and towels from my leg as my new stretcher wheels through the white walls of a hospital. “You said she was bitten by a great white?!”

  I feel vaguely offended through what I guess are massive doses of painkillers. I’m not claiming anything, and ‘eaten by a great white shark’ would be at the bottom of my bucket list if it were on it at all, since you wouldn’t be around to take bragging rights. Besides, it wasn’t as if I didn’t have a few teeth marks. Not to mention the teeth.

  “It’s already up on YouTube,” someone answers. “Started blowing up before she got here. We’ll have to notify the site it’s a minor.”

  I’m pretty sure the bite wasn’t minor, even if I still had both halves of my femur. But I’m not a medical professional, and I’m losing the thread of this conversation.

  The ceiling tiles above me blur, and then gray into oblivion.

  Patreon page. The first 10 chapters are already up there, even for free subscribers, and you can also see the art which didn't upload to Royal Road.