Ellis was sitting on the side of the road, watching the clouds roll through the sky while waiting to die.

  He sprinted away from the ants, his exhaustion not an obstacle when fear kept his legs moving. Ellis had hit the road quick at the pace he was moving, but he didn’t stop when the scuttling and chittering died. His only goal was to warn the others about ants so close to the village. He couldn’t rest when they might be chasing hi…

  Ellis skidded to a stop the moment that thought entered his brain. He was leading the danger right to his doorstep, what good would a warning do then?

  They were chasing him, not the village. Not yet anyway. He hoped they would stop chasing him, but if there was still a dead ant on his clothes he hadn’t left back at that tree… they would never stop. His legs started cramping, so he had sat down to ponder this while massaging his thighs, the exhaustion back with a vengeance now.

  He thought about climbing a tree to save himself, but knew that would buy him a single second at best. He could find a pool of water to try and wash any possible ant carcasses off, but his legs weren’t cooperating, resigning themselves to the pins and needles crawling up his shins.

  Every thought he had about trying to get such a small, dead thing off him that might not even be there was useless. He crawled to the nearest tree, put his back against it and made himself comfortable.

  And waited to die.

  Ellis had closed his eyes while waiting, many thoughts drifting through his head before he snorted, then laughed at the absurdity of it all. This had been the worst day of his life. Having his trousers ripped off in front of every girl his age by Derek, then getting scolded by each of their father’s for ‘his’ stunt didn’t even equal the day he had had. The memory of him waiting up all night for his father to come home, and the week that followed was a close second… and yet the day Ellis finally got to hold Ada’s hand, turned out to be worse than all the rest.

  A low rumbling sound came from down the road, and Ellis sighed before standing up, ready to face his death on his feet at least. But the low rumbling turned into hooves hitting the ground with rhythmic intensity, shouts and frantic swearing accompanying them.

  Ellis ran back to the road to see soldiers, at least a hundred of them riding their horses so hard he felt the ground shake beneath his feet. The man riding at the front of them rode the hardest. He wore golden armour with a crest of an Ant’s head being skewered by a sword, painted in real, actual purple! Ellis could not believe a nobleman was here, and he seemed every bit the fantasy Ellis had come up with through his youth.

  He had a regal frown and a receding hairline, but Ellis could tell the man must be something special with the ease at which he rode the golden brown horse in between his legs. His eyes had locked onto Ellis the moment he had run out onto the road, assessed the shirtless boy before him with a single glance, before dismissing him entirely.

  The hope that he could live returned, and Ellis started waving his hands frantically as he ran into the middle of the road, begging for help and pointing from where he had come in warning. The golden armoured man riding at the front of the soldiers’ deep voice rang out.

  “Move boy! Get out of the way!”

  Ellis complied and moved to the side of the road, waiting patiently. They got closer and closer, Ellis’s nerves growing more at ease with every hoof beat, until the golden armoured man was right in front of him… and then he was gone. The men behind him followed his lead, riding past Ellis like he wasn’t even there.

  He tried to stop them, jumping towards one of the horses to grab the reins, to tell them of the danger that was right on his village's doorstep. He received a swift kick to the chest, knocking him down to the dirt, dust clogging up his eyes as the retinue continued on.

  He sat back up once they had passed, and saw that every single man of that company had not stopped, slowed down or even sworn at Ellis, besides the man at the front. He could not believe they left a shirtless, wounded boy on the side of the road after he had begged them for help.

  “Gods smite you!” he shouted at their backs, contemplating whether he should run after them or not.

  He decided against it. They had made their stance on helping him crystal clear. He lay back down on the ground, wondering when the ants would show up, and said to the dust cloud surrounding him, “I guess this day can’t get any worse, at least.”

  He waited for the dust to clear, the resignation of death returning to him while he kept his eyes closed. Well, no one could say he hadn’t tried something. He opened his eyes when the dust stopped falling onto his face, and looked towards the sky one last time.

  In the stories his mother had told him, the sky he looked at now was Anwir, hiding the stars from the people below. The clouds he watched roll past were the scars he received from Dumiso, after tricking Dumiso’s wife Evosa into laying with him. Ellis didn’t really care for the story, he had never liked hearing about grown ups betraying their loved ones, nevermind the gods doing the same. He was watching one particular cloud, which looked like a bird, frozen midflight as it floated through the air towards…

  Smoke?

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes, but the black scar running across the sky remained. He got to his feet. That was definitely smoke, and it looked to be in the direction of his village. The festival didn’t have a burning part to it, the black thickness growing bigger and bigger the longer he watched.

  Ellis stopped thinking about their safety as worry crawled up his spine. He started walking towards them, then jogging when the feeling wouldn’t go away. Had those strangers lit one of the houses on fire? No, it looked like half the village was on fire from the amount of smoke rising into the air.

  He started sprinting, any thoughts of caution be damned. He ran the entire five kilometers in twelve minutes, praying the entire way there for their salvation. The closer he got the more he could smell the smoke, spreading out through the trees like a plague.

  But there was something far worse than the smell of smoke beneath it.

  He had smelt horse hair burning before, when one of those soldiers from his youth had cut off some of his horse's tail, lit it on fire and stuffed it beneath one of his sleeping comrades. The sleeping man had stunk for days, that horrible stench lingering on him so badly the village had kicked him out.

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  Ellis smelt the same stench now, wafting through the trees and mixing with the smell of burnt wood, making his nose wrinkle even through all his hard breaths as he rounded the T junction to arrive at his village.

  He stopped sprinting, the world falling out from under him as he walked forward like a mad man. Staring past all the pristine houses, untouched by a single flame, the village was exactly how he had left it…

  Except for the church, which held every person he had ever loved. The sanctified walls the people of Solrise used to worship the gods looked like a ball of fire, the heat so bad Ellis could feel it from the village square.

  The doors looked like they had been sealed with a plank, half broken down the middle like his people had tried everything they could to bust down the doors while the gods laughed at their attempt.

  Ellis did not believe his family had died there, he… he couldn’t see the bodies.. He started calling out, even as desperate tears filled his eyes.

  “Mom! Mother! Delilah!? Please talk to me! Anyone!? Mathias! Isaiah! Derek!”

  But every name, every plea was met with the roar of the fire. He couldn’t wait for the flames to die, so he fetched a bucket of water. He couldn’t get close enough to douse the flames by hand, the heat casting an invisible barrier around the church which he was unable to penetrate. Deciding he was close enough, Ellis aimed the bucket for the windows just above the door, hefted the sloshing water onto his shoulder and threw it as hard as he could.

  The bucket bounced off the top of the door frame, not even close to hitting the window that sat above it. He gave up on the water since he couldn’t fetch the bucket, and started running through every home, searching for someone. Anyone. He started smacking himself as he ran, blinking as hard as he could while he searched.

  But no amount of pain woke him up. Every time he closed his eyes, he would find the church still burning whenever he opened them.

  He called up to the sky while he ran, “Anwir! Please! Please let this be a trick! Make it stop! Tell me this isn’t real! Please please please!”

  The tears came even as he searched, knowing that someone had to have lived. That at least one person must have gotten away. He searched the back of the church, in hopes there was a secret entrance the elders had never told him about that had led everyone to safety.

  But the back of the church was the same as the front: burning. One of the windows was broken, like something large had been tossed through it, but he didn’t see how anyone could have escaped through there. He couldn’t even throw a bucket of water that high.

  He sank to his knees in the dirt, repeating his desperate plea to the worst of the gods. He smacked himself again, hoping he had just gone insane and that enough punishment would snap him out of it. It didn’t, but it did make him aware that a touch of wetness was pressing against his naked shin bone. Like a wild animal he rounded on the wet spot, pressing his finger against it before bringing it up to his eye for a closer inspection.

  It was blood. His mind immediately stopped panicking as the hunter took over, now that he knew there was a trail. He smelt the blood, trying to get a scent as he searched the ground with his eyes, finding uneven footprints like someone had stumbled into the small, sparse forest surrounding his village. He followed them, finding more droplets of blood that became more frequent the further in he went.

  In the distance was a small clearing, with two bodies laying in the center of it. He ran forward, calling out as he found his Ada, lying on the floor with her guts hanging out, weeping silently to herself. She held Delilah in her arms, meat where her little face should have been. He choked back a sob as he broke the treeline of the clearing, and fell to his knees at their side.

  “Ada! Oh, Ada! I'm here! You're going to be okay! I got you! You're going to be okay now!” he cried, gathering both bodies in his arms.

  “Ellis?” she whispered.

  “It's me! I'm here! I'm right here, look at me!”

  She opened her eyes, but stared at the evening’s emerging moonlight rather than him, her tears falling harder as she clutched his arms.

  “I'm sorry… I tried! After Derek threw us through the window, I couldn’t… my ankle… I couldn’t get away…”

  “No, Ada! It's okay! I promise it’s okay! Let’s get you up, can you do that for me? Please do that for me! I need you!”

  Ellis’s tears fell, but he smacked himself and got to work. He tried moving his sister out the way gently at first, but her hands had frozen solid while still gripped onto Ada’s dress. With a shaky breath, he pried the fingers loose, picked up the body and laid her down on the floor, trying with all his might and failing miserably to stare at anything other than her face. He turned back to Ada, still weeping.

  Gathering up her loose intestines with his hands, trying not to damage them despite their slipperiness, he shoved it back into her body, then pressed his hands over the wound with all the strength in his body.

  She kept crying, and Ellis’s temper couldn’t handle it. He was shouting now, his voice a broken thing.

  “Don’t focus on that! Focus on me! You're going to be okay! I promise you're going to be okay! I need you here! Please, I need you!”

  “Ellis…he said… he said he killed you…I love you… I love yo—”

  Ada kept repeating the words, even as they grew quieter and quieter with every passing moment, until her words cut off as the grip she had on his shirt went slack. Her face did not go slack, however. It was frozen in silent despair, her final expression scarring itself into Ellis’s memory.

  He wrapped his arms around her. “I love you too. Please don’t leave me.”

  She did not answer. Ellis rocked back and forth, repeating the phrase over and over. He caressed her hair, he made a thousand promises, he renounced being a hunter and told her about all the things they were going to do together. He spoke long into the night, more and more promises spilling out his mouth with every passing second.

  And for every promise, he was met with her silence.

  The moon was high in the sky by the time Ellis stopped talking. And crying. He laid her body down gently next to his sister, giving both of them a kiss on the forehead before he ran back to the village with a blank expression. He changed into clean clothes, strapped his mother’s knife to his belt before fetching a shovel and the ring from under his bed. Once he had collected all the things he could think of, he ran back to their bodies.

  With the shovel he started digging. And thinking. And hating. It seemed to slither out from his heart, a flame that spread through every vein, taking up every single part of his body from the tip of his toe nails all the way to the tippy top of the hair on his head.

  The why of what had happened tried to scratch at his mind, so he shoved the image of Ada’s dying face into it, smothering the question till it choked to death. He didn’t need a why, only a who.

  And he knew exactly who had done this.

  The sun started to rise as two new headstones decorated the forest. He had gathered up some flowers and placed them at the foot of each one. Placing the ring down at the foot of the largest grave, he stared at the name he had carved into it through hollowed tears.

  “Delilah, be nice to mom ya hear? She didn’t pass over in a good way, she’ll need you to comfort her now. And Ada… Gods Ada. Did you know I got a ring for you on my fifteenth birthday? Didn’t even tell my ma. So… surprise! I was gonna ask you to marry me the day we turned eighteen. I had a whole speech planned already, can you believe that?”

  The wind rustled the leaves around him.

  He shook his head and sighed. “Yeah, you probably did, you could always read me like a book. Goodbye my love. I’m sorry I wasn’t here. Please don’t forgive me.” He rose to his feet and looked at the large footprints leading out of the other side of the clearing. “This will be the last time we see each other, Ada. I’m sorry for that… but Alehemet won’t allow me into heaven when I’m done, after all.”