The Spark Read online

  “Ah, you have them both I see. That’s double on your account, my friend.”

  “More like triple!” He said demandingly, “I had to go through the jungles of Matta Shimbib just to get here. I expect to be well paid and my employer is not the type to be patient, so let’s get on with- agh!”

  I heard the metal of a blade pierce the wagon-driver’s flesh, and then a loud scream echoed through the air. I continued to listen to the other new voices, and they too were malevolent goblins. We were somewhere far to the north of Rïdeneer; too far, especially if we were in a goblin’s cavern. If only I could cut through the sack somehow, I would try to save George and myself from sharing the same fate of those vile creatures killed by their own kind. I heard a blade unsheathe and cut the sack that held George. The higher goblin, who killed the wagon driver, laughed and taunted him with wicked words.

  “You see how he sneers? This is how people like you die! Show me your respect, neko scum!”

  “I have no respect for you. You’re nothing but a coward and a slave to your superiors, Spike!”

  I heard a blunt whacking noise, probably from the backside of a goblin’s hand against George’s cheek. I had been silently crying the entire trip. After several minutes of traveling north across Crosscc Plains we climbed the ancient stairs leading to the jungle of Matta Shimbib. I could hear the endless bickering from the goblins about the jungle climate; I blindly discovered where we were. When I heard the bell tower in the distance, my assumptions were confirmed. We were just outside the gates of the southern city of Shi Shii, Shimbia.

  It was blistering cold outside the city; the area around me must have been covered in snow judging by the sound of the wind and the frost forming around my body, beneath the sack. I remained silent and tried my very best not to move an inch. The sky opened up to allow snowfall; I could feel cool flakes slowly melt through the sack and drip down on my dry, shivering skin. The goblin continued to talk down to George, despite the goblins in these lands being small and weak. They were always known to have very large mouths but seemed to speak from their asses.

  “You’re a thorn in my side, George! You always have been! Too long the beast has wanted to have your head; too long you cheated death to continue on your pointless quest to escape your foes. Too long has it been for you to be alive! My master will decide your fate now!”

  “No!”

  I screamed at the top of my lungs, stopping the chattering of the goblins. It felt like I stopped time itself. Only the sound of the blizzard wind could be heard, along with the city’s bustling activity. I could hear faint whispers in scratchy voices as I sat there curled up in the sack next to George. Goosebumps covered my skin and my eyes began to water with the fear of death. I didn’t think that I could stand for much more of this. Something had to be done, and quickly. If they were going to kill us, I wished that they’d hurry up and do it. With my family more than likely dead in Rïdeneer, what else did I have to live for? But no matter how I rationalized giving up, I had to stay alive because the only person George had to love was me.

  “Somebody shut the other one up,” shouted Spike, “but don’t kill her; we need them both fresh and unharmed for the master’s ultimate agenda.”

  After a cackle or two, a goblin jumped up on the wagon and punched me in the back of the head without the least bit of qualm. It was weak, of course, coming from a small, scrawny being not even half my size. Nevertheless, it made me want to hit him back ten times harder. I was relieved to hear him say that he didn’t want us to be killed, just yet. Even though all we had was each other, I believed for a moment that I had to have some more time to plan out my life with George, if we could escape.

  Neither one of us was going to die at this time, but this beast— this master, those gremlins spoke of— who exactly was he, and what did he want with us? More troublingly, what did he want with me? George was the one with many enemies, not I. I had never even heard of this beast, and I certainly wouldn’t have had any business with murdering curs such as these goblins.

  “Get her out of there and bind them both together! It’s time for them to meet the master; the destroyer of life!”

  As soon as Spike had spoken, I was swiftly cut loose from the bag. My limbs ached tremendously from being dragged earlier. As I had predicted, it was Shi Shii, Shimbia. But why were goblins bringing us here of all places? These creatures were viewed as evil beings to religious capitals such as this. Goblins were primitive creatures, and for them to even step near a city was taboo to them.

  I remained silent as these hideous wrinkled beings closed in on me and used a rope to tie us by the wrists. I really wished that my forefather would come crashing in on these creatures and begin casting spells against the scum. As we were dragged off through the gates, I could only hope that someone would save us from this nightmare, somehow, even if it was one of my preppy adversaries from school.

  As we were dragged through the opened gates along the snow covered roads, we saw that the all-human civilians who lived there were dressed in filthy, torn rags and as thin as broomsticks. This dreary sight was contradictory to the stories that my parents had told. Most were practically without a roof over their heads, having to make due in the streets under the shop’s front steps. Euphoria was not present within these tortured people and neither was valor against the green skins who cruelly slid us across the rough stones in front of them. For within their quivering eyes, I could see the fear that was running through my own blood. I was helpless. George was helpless, but composed, and what could a bunch of starving, coinless people do to a bunch of goblin thugs wielding plenty of solid sharp weapons? We were on our own out here. I was in my night gown and George in a pair of cotton pants. Neither of us spoke a word, as we didn’t want to raise the goblin’s boney hands to fall down upon our faces like blunt maces.

  As the goblins became harsher, throwing us to the ground and picking us back up again, the people around the city started to scream louder; panicked that the goblins might kill us and go after them. The buildings seemed to be closing in on us with each foot we were dragged. George finally spoke to me, shouting over the panicking commoners and the sadistic cackling of goblins.

  “I know what this place is!” He exclaimed, “It is the south city of Shimbia; the capital! This is Shi Shii, a place where no one should ever be if they value their life and their purse! I was once a scavenger here and I hated it!”

  “Why are they taking us here, George?”

  “It’s probably because you’ve been protecting me. These goblins don’t care for people who stand in their way.”

  “Shut your mouths before I bind them too!”

  I was petrified of seeing this beast, and my body began to bleed from being dragged across the coarse ground. George didn’t seem to care about the pain he was enduring, but seemed to be far more concerned about me. He had probably been face to face with situations a hundred times worse than this before he met me. I was beginning to think that George was once a man who wasn’t very good at paying off his debts with the wrong kind of business people. I didn’t think he was hated for being a neko, as the goblins didn’t have any religious beliefs to think that he was a demon, so he obviously had unfinished business with them for which he had to pay.

  The goblins lugging us jerked us back as they came to an impulsive halt. With a sudden salute of respect toward a man standing amongst the shadows of the buildings, Spike and the other goblins put their hands together and bowed their heads to the finer being. The goblin leader was first to fall to his knees. The shaky goblin cleared his throat before he spoke to the tall, grotesque creature. All of us looked up to see the tall being step out of the darkness. He had purple skin, long ears, and three claws on the end of each hand. The being stood on a pair of clawed talons, which were covered in what seemed like human blood. The beastly, demonic man gawked at us with frightening, dark, evil eyes; a scowl; and an intimidating yellow-t
oothed sneer.

  “You’d better explain why they’ve scrapes on them, real quick Spike! Master’ll eat your worthless brains from your skull like a bowl o’ soup. Now, tell me!”

  “We weren’t as careful with them as we should have been! I’m sorry!”

  “That’s okay.”

  The creature swiped his sword from the sheath and cut a flesh wound into Spike’s belly. With a laugh, the monstrous being walked towards us, and picked us up by the rope binding our hands.

  “Oh, it seems I wasn’t as careful as I should’ve been! Hahaha!”

  My skin cringed when Spike fell on the snowy rocks. As I dangled off the ground in this monster’s claws, holding George’s hand, vomit made its way to the recesses of my mouth. So how exactly did I feel, you might be wondering? Well, I can’t tell you that yet. Things were about to get much, much worse.

  After Spike fell to the snowy bricks, the savage thing holding George and I took us to a suspicious-looking wall of a nearby building. He raised his free arm and chanted some magickal words. The wall began to glow an eerie, green color, and a sinister stairwell, without torches, appeared right before us. We were taken down the stairs to an underground dwelling occupied by several more of these lavender skinned demons. They were abominable creatures with evil intentions. When we reached the bottom, I discovered that we were in the bowels of hell.

  Upon the walls and the ceiling, there was a greenish-yellow slime, and a stench that filled my nose, causing me to gag. The tall monster dropped us down in the middle of a room filled with bloodthirsty monsters. George sat next to me facing the opposite way. He seemed to be unaffected by the chaos. He looked to his right and I looked in that direction as well. To this day, I wished that I hadn’t.

  I saw a hideous, demonic monstrosity beyond the shadows, sitting on a throne made of stone spikes, metal blades, and the bloody body parts of his victims to cushion his bottom. This demonic being seemed similar to the others around me, but he was different, much, much different. Having skin darker than black and eyes like the darkest of burgundy blood, this monster gazed directly upon me and George. It had teeth like daggers, brown and rotten to the very roots. Behind his large, pointed ears was a pair of humongous, bowing horns. Merely gazing upon their intimidating mass made my eyes burn. The beast’s body was broad and muscular; about the width of six feet and the height of twelve feet, if he stood from his blood-soaked throne. Death and despair were calling my name. I was beyond helpless; laying there on the dank ground with scrapes and bruises all over my petrified body.

  I wanted to run, but the demon sitting in front of me kept me where I was simply by staring into my eyes and hypnotically forcing me to stare back at his terrible face. I cannot fully describe to you how I couldn’t speak or even breathe. I could not do anything but hold my breath and keep my eyes on this dark figure searching my soul for any weakness that my trepidation might have highlighted. Two of the lesser lavender-skinned creatures spoke, interrupting the thing on the throne, letting me breathe and rest my burning eyes.

  “My Lord,” he said in a weak whimper for one so stout in stature, “those goblins let their flesh become scratched. Shall I kill them all as punishment for their disobedience?”

  As I tried to catch my breath, I realized that George was having the same trouble moving as I was. When a deep shout reverberated through the room— much like a roar that penetrated our ears and made the entire area shake— I immediately gasped and grabbed on to George’s arm in panic. We slouched back in fear, listening to the behemoth’s raving as he stood from the throne.

  “I would have every last one of you dead for interrupting my concentration on these two! Fine! Go ahead and kill the poor mercenaries; why should anyone care for a bunch of goblins to die anyway?” He slowly calmed himself and sat back on his throne. “We need allegiance to no one but the wisest we can find to aid my cause.”

  When he yelled like that, I could not sit as still as George. I shivered throughout my body and nearly fainted from the intensity of his awesome volume. As the terror within me began to simmer down, I wondered what the beast meant by concentration. Was he trying to brainwash us, kill us, or corrupt us in some way? I pondered on it for a moment and came to accept that whatever it was, he had failed, and I was thankful for it. As I looked into his cat-like eyes, George seemed to want to say something to me. He leaned his forehead against mine and closed his eyes. He was unable to speak for some reason, as though the demon was controlling his tongue. I felt darkness inside of him, and this darkness was not ordinary. Something about him was not right at all.

  My dear George; invaded by a strange evil, probably caused by the demon’s ominous stare. After a moment of tense silence, the beast leaped from his throne and dashed, with a spiteful expression in our direction. He took his mighty arm and whacked us so rapidly and brutally, that the next pain we felt was our bodies smacking against the wall and dropping to the floor like swatted flies. The monstrosity marched toward us and roared in our faces, succeeding in intimidating us as well as flinging black tar from his jaw. The following words the monster uttered caused my skin to crawl, and my bones to clatter with the echoes of his abominable voice.

  “Sui Bane Ozborn, do you know who you are? Do you know what you were born to do? It is not something anybody can do, only you, Sui.”

  “What?”

  “Leave it to the wizard to keep things hidden from you!” he snarled, clenching his teeth in impatience, “I must inform you that you shall never accomplish the destiny set out for you, once I crush you and dismantle every single bone in your body! As a matter of fact, I’ll even equate your suffering with this neko’s I so proudly cre-”

  “Nooooo!”

  George shouted at the top of his lungs, turning his gaze to me with a splinter of dread upon his pale visage. As I saw the beast’s wicked and sour smile below his two hammering fists about to come down on us, I leaned in for a kiss, even if it was just for a second. But because George was in such a panicked state, I had no time.

  To my surprise, George and I wound up on the head of a gargoyle statue, hanging from the wall above the demon’s head. The beast smashed his fists into the stone floor, causing it to crater where we had once been. Trying to keep balance on the statue’s narrow back, I held on to George’s level shoulders for dear life, attempting to keep my hyperventilating under control. Without any warning at all, the stone gargoyle overlooking the dark chambers magickally sprung to life and flew away with us on top of its back. Up the stairwell from where we had entered, the gargoyle carried us high into the night sky. A split second before we made our way out, I saw a long, green mane and a lengthy, green beard; it was Äbaka, my forefather, the immortal wizard who I could always count on in times of danger. When I was little, he found me stuck in a well that I had fallen into while playing with my friends. While my father tried to get me out using the bucket and chain, all my forefather had to do was raise me up using nothing but the power of levitation. Another time, I was lost in the Nameless Forest, trying my best to escape. It was pouring down rain, and all of a sudden, a manticore showed up, ready to eat me. Just when I was about to kneel down and cry, Äbaka was there to shun the beast with a powerful light spell to scare it away. After the beast was gone, he stood over me with an umbrella, ready to take me home. I was almost certain that he would succeed in defeating whatever that dark horror was and all of the dreadful minions with him.

  The night sky seemed to be clearing. The stars, the moon, and the neighboring planet were much clearer for the eye to look upon. George held on to my leg in case I fell, proving that I could trust him just as well as Äbaka, in times of turmoil. The gargoyle appeared to be heading south, in the direction of Rïdeneer. However, I had an eerie intuition that the jungle below us was going to be our landing point. The gargoyle was slowly sinking from the sky, in the direction of the northern, snow-topped trees.

  “Sui, this thing is head
ed for the jungle; we must jump off now before we crash into a tree! The worst that can happen is a broken limb or two!”

  Despite the undesired broken limbs, I trusted George with my life and I grabbed his hand as we took a leap of faith into the tall, grass fields together. We could feel the falling rush flow through our bodies and the sensation of the cold, winter winds vibrating all the way through our nerves. By the time I saw the ground under me, I had lost consciousness. Pain drilled through the entirety of my body for a fraction of a second. I had slept like a rock for several hours, when I was awakened by George’s deep voice. I felt like a cracked stone.

  “Sui, don’t get up,” he said in a mellow voice, “your arm is broken. You must lay here for a while until I can get you some healing herbs. That is, unless you want me to help you maneuver through these harsh jungles?”

  When he told me my arm was broken, I immediately felt the searing pain throughout the left limb. I thought that my bones were shattered within, but George informed me that it was merely a large fracture in my humerus. Even to this day, I still cringe at the memory of that throbbing pain in my arm.

  “I need flowers or plants to ease the pain,” I said, “guide me until we can find some. That is, if you know these jungles by heart.”

  The smile upon George’s face made me numb to the pain. The stars above my head began to fade, as the sun slowly came up over the trees on our way through the perilous jungle of Matta Shimbib.

  Green. The jungle was covered with green and brown, but mostly green several shades to be precise. So thick with it that the snow above the ground seemed insignificant compared to the jades heavily present around us. Valor was obviously one of George’s strong points, jumping high from the sky to the merciless ground. If anything, it was in his nature to take risks. As I strolled through the thick forest with my arm supported by George, who held it in place, I began to feel a presence around us. This presence was neither friendly nor pleasant to be around.