Through The Storm
Survivors

-1-

Peytr stood on the hill overlooking the barracks, having his eyes full of the place that was his home for most of his life, a place where he grew to be the man he was today.

He had led his squad in way too many battles for him to remember, during the year that it took for the oranges and purples to execute their massive spell that banished the yellows and the blues out of this realm of existence, he lost more than half the members of his squad.

The men and women whom he lost, were all brother and sisters, as nothing brings a group of people together, as the touch of death on their hearts.

Even the purples, became his, they were his men and women, and the ones who he lost, would always be marked on his soul as failings to save his own.

Today, the peace treaty was signed, and the war was over, all the drafted men and women were let go to resume their lives from before the war, but he knew they would never be the same. They returned to their people as strangers, aliens who happened to carry the faces of past loved ones.

He decided then to end his military career, he couldn’t bear the idea of seeing the savage reds going free with the atrocities they did during the war. Peytr also didn’t feel he had a place in the city anymore, for what need would the city have for a broken man, an ex-soldier?

He would join four of his men and together, they would join one of the refugee villages they passed through during the war, a small place that hugged the mountain at the edge of the nation of the greens, now almost empty as all the green were dead.

Peytr sighed and nodded as he saw the new recruits assembled in the court of the barracks. He gave them a silent salute from the heart, turned, and joined the four men on their long journey to the village that hugged the mountain.

The locals called it “Mountain’s Child,” he hoped it would be his new home.

-2-

Mellie cried softly, no sounds came from her shaking frame, no one should know of her pains, but the tears flowed in torrents, slowly wetting her cotton shirt.

She came back to her village this morning, with all the other orange refugees who escaped when the troops of the Order of Purification stormed the gates of their insignificant village. She thought bitterly, her village was so insignificant they could only be allowed by the city nation of the oranges to send six children every year to the school of Nafoura, the irony was, Mellie used to be one of the six children sent on her year as her father was a retired soldier.

She had only returned to her village after studying in Nafoura for a few weeks when the war came, just started to commune with nature enough to have her own small field of corn, the most friendly and cooperative of plants.

When they escaped the attack, only a third of them came. The others either stood to fight or were already dead on the first assault. Now, a year later, she came back, with only one-fifth of the people who escaped alongside her, the rest fell to the marauding reds, the elements, or just from the anguish nature was screaming in their heads almost all the time.

She lost her father and mother to the war, as well as her two older brothers. Mellie was thankful she was not as powerful with her Vrill, or as sensitive to nature’s calls as some of the others who fell, this was ultimately the main reason she survived.

But for what?

The village laid in ruins, not a soul left alive in the whole place, and to make it worse, the scars to nature were too strong and violent even for someone who was as sensitive to nature as her, which was not much.

The tears flowing were only partially self-pity tears, sadness, and anguish to what happened to the village, most of her tears as the people who came back with her were caused by nature’s screams of agony at the spot of the massacre.

Before the sunset, they all paid their respect to the dead, and to their anguished mother nature, and moved on. They split into groups of threes and fours to seek either the city, which had its own burdens or one of the refugee villages they saw along their pilgrimage back home.

Mellie wiped her tears and approached the group’s leader who decided to head towards the green nation, theorizing this would be the least dangerous area, as all the greens were wiped out, and the marauding gangs left after the war had nothing to gain there.

She turned one last time, before walking fast to join the others, hoping for a reason to live.

-3-

Three years had passed since the end of the war, and Vlad was not happy with his last trade. In fact, he was regretting it with all his heart. Fifty crates of beets seemed like a good enough bargain for just one crate of copper, but that was three weeks ago. Now that three villages on his trade route refused the beets with passion, he started to think he was tricked.

His route had almost a hundred small villages that were not under the domain of any of the big nations’ cities, that was, in Vlad’s way of thinking, a brilliant venture in the long term. These cities always lacked something another faraway village had in plenty, and he used this knowledge to circle between them at least once every three months, then visited one of the big cities with the best the villages could offer. But of course, it was not perfect, the cities dealt with the coin of the land, either the purple Drake or the orange Blossom was the only accepted coinage in those cities, unlike the villages.

The villages had no use for the coin of the big cities, most of them were too far away, or simply wouldn’t accept to trade with the mixed color villages, so, he had to trade goods for goods in the villages.

Four years ago, a business like Vlad’s couldn’t even have existed, as, before the wars, there was nothing like those villages in existence. In fact, all the villages of the pre-war era owed allegiance to one of the big cities, and there were thousands of them all over the land. After the war, the refugees of the devastated villages were many, but most were denied residence in any of the cities they once paid homage to.

Eventually, new villages had risen, made up of those refugees, and as the status of affairs was, the villages grew to have mixed color residents in them, some even allowed marriage between colors, a sacrilege as seen by most Agarthans.

Vlad sighed. He would have to trade the beets in the next village. They were already starting to smell. He might be able to sell them off as animal feed, or even fertilizer primer. He would manage to get rid of them. He always managed situations like this one in the past ten years since he became a trader.

Vlad then smiled and whipped his oxen to go a bit faster, he had fifty crates of beets to unload in the next village.

-4-

Darren walked slowly, dragging his feet, his mind was wandering aimlessly. This was not supposed to happen.

He tried to avoid the looks of the other people as he walked through the town, he would be forced to vacate his rooms by the end of the day if they allowed him to stay till the end of the day. They would then drag him screaming and fighting to the southernmost part of the city, as they did with any of his kind. There, he would live the life of an outcast for the rest of his days.

He couldn’t imagine how did his life go in such a spiral. First, master Dalmatius told him he was a red, which was anything but what he wished for. He wanted to be an orange, one with nature, as he was a poet at heart, and nothing like talking to trees and animals would have inspired a young poet to become one of the greats. But as a red, he could only expect to be fighting in a war, get injured in a war, or get killed in war; this was the nature of the nation of the Red Aura, warlike.

Yet, it was not enough he was a red, things had to be even worse. Yesterday, he joined some men in a hunt, as was expected of a young man of his age, but the hunt didn’t go as planned, a bear viciously attacked the group, killing two of the five men on the spot.

Darren didn’t know what came over him, all he remembered was something primal, violent, and as vicious as the bear coming from inside his body, pulling on his soul, and then he was standing over the slain bear drenched in blood and panting.

The surviving men were more disgusted by him than thankful as they immediately tied him up and led him back to face the ruler of the city, and along the way, they called him names, like “Mutt,” and “Beast,” but what really caused Darren to panic was they called him, “filthy shapeshifter.”

Every generation of reds, some would show the same signs that came over Darren, as instead of calling an animal power to their own through their Vrill, they changed into the animal itself. Those, the reds considered to be less than human and were segregated from the rest of the society, to live among their kind.

Suddenly, Darren stopped his walk of shame and came to a conclusion. He couldn’t stay with the reds as he would never accept to live the miserable life of other shapeshifters. He would escape the city before they tried to take him to that horrible place, “Beast pens,” as they called it.

He walked with purpose, and started to plan his escape; he never wanted to be one of them anyway.

-5-

He looked at the young ones with envy. He wished he could do what they did, run like them, laugh like them, kiss other young ones in stolen moments like them. But, of course, he couldn’t. He was not like them, they were flesh and blood, while he only was a force, a disembodied mind, governed by a very keen and strong will, he was one of the Others.

He smiled, he might envy those young men and women their moments, but he lived all the times at once, he saw the future and the past, as they saw the colors of the flowers surrounding them.

If he could sigh, he would have sighed a very hot and long sigh now.

He seldom entertained the notion of visiting the world of humans, let alone interacting with one of them, but he had to do this today, or the future changes yet again.

His kind knew one constant, and that was life, they willed themselves to live, and they appreciated and valued life above anything else, and if he didn’t make a move today, life might be extinguished from this spot of the universe.

Others of his kind would occasionally toy with the minds of men, driving them insane in the process, but they gave precious gifts in return. They were the voices in the heads of prophets, the harbinger of dark omens to practitioners of the dark arts, the muse behind every great work of art, spoken, written, or visual, these were their precious gifts to all life forms in the universe.

Some called them angels, some called them demons, a lot of people thought they were a figment of their imagination, some even tried to banish them. But only the ones who they deemed useful enough to bond with had any power over his kind, the ones who were offered the ‘Deal.’

Today, he singled a boy, the one called by the others Darren, and he would bond with him, giving part of himself to the boy and taking a part of the boy into him in the process.

Darren would have to make the ‘Deal,’ or all life would be lost. He had to do it today before it was too late.

He decided on a name for the boy to be able to call onto him, he decided that he should call himself, Mr. Black.

-6-

“Hey you,” Darren shouted at the man standing silently at the entrance of the market for more than an hour. “Why are stalling the entrance of the market?”

“Interesting,” said the man. “You think I am stalling?”

“I asked you a question, and I don’t accept the answer to be another question,” Darren spoke in a firm voice, as he resisted his desire to growl.

“Well, I am not stalling. “Did you see anybody slowed down from entering or leaving the market from where I stood?” the man said.

“Yet another question.” Darren was getting furious with the man.

“Humor me for a moment,” the man said with a smile. “You have been standing at the same spot, staring at me for almost an hour, was I stalling the entrance?”

Darren was silent for a moment too long.

“I see.” The man laughed and continued, “But as you see yourself, the protector of this backward village, you decided to occupy your time by harassing an old man, right?”

“Can’t you at least talk without framing every statement as a question?” Darren was growling, a low rumble in the deepest reach of his chest.

“I can, and I will.” The man started to move away, then he turned back all of a sudden and looked intently at Darren and said, “You think that you are happy here, and you enjoy your role as village guardian, even though they hate you for being a red.”

Darren reached to pull the man by his scruff, but his hands landed on nothing. They just went through the still smiling man’s body.

The man laughed, to Darren’s terror.

“Who are you?” Darren squinted in an attempt to see the aura of the ethereal stranger, but when he saw none, he shouted, “What are you?”

“My name is Black, Mr. Black.”

The smile lingered on his face as he said, “And I am here to offer you the Deal of a lifetime.”

He paused for effect. Reading Darren’s face told him the young man was ready to hear what he had to offer, so he said, “I can change your aura from red to orange, as you desire.”

“How do you know that?” Darren whispered in fear.

“Why, I am your best friend.” Black smiled and continued, “Or I will be, once we strike a Deal.”