Falling Skies

"Why is it," her long fingers gently rub the herbal paste along the gashes running across his back. He hides a wince as the dull agony is resurrected by the stinging goo.

He focuses on the sound of her voice, and trusts it to carry him away from the pain, the burden of life that continues solely to deliver death. Her voice is a refuge for his mind that is wounded worse than his physique.

"That everytime I see you, you are covered in wounds?"

It's raining heavily outside. The low hiss along the muddy ground and soft pounding against the hovel's wooden roof fill the room while she awaits an answer. Knowing none would come. But that was their ritual. He would drag himself to her doorsteps, bleeding and broken, and she would pull him in to patch him up.

Only today he breaks the silence, their ritual, and says,

"Because you are the only one who cares for the wounds and not the inflicters."

A rebel, then, she concludes. No one else would take him in, not without investigating into the origin of injuries. And in some matters lies just don't fly. That's the only explanation.

The king has gone mad and the kingdom madder supporting his extravagance and eccentricities when they could hardly scrape enough to feed their young twice.

She wondered how long before the Men of Valor- the King's cruel enforcers- would track the rebel to her abode on the hillsides. (Why haven't they already? Must have their hands full, crushing resistance cropping up everywhere.)

What kind of punishment awaited her when discovered, she mused. Would she get to face the local priest? Tried in the Count's Court? Or will she be raped before being murdered? Buried in a shallow grave to be dug out and gnawed by beasts.

Her stomach clenched unbidden even as her mind recounted the possibilities with indifference, remembering the first time it had happened. The men who had tore through her, slapped and choked her. Her skin crawled remembering their hard hands twisting her young frail arms painfully, pushing up her legs, tearing off her dress, all the while she screamed next to her corpses of her family, their warm blood soaking into her flaxen tresses.

"There," she said finally. Her voice despite herself soft and pained. "All done."

The rebel twists his neck to catch her eye. She slids further to side away from his sight, hiding the look of faint terror that may have crawled out from the pits of her hellish past till she regained composure.

"You are bothered. By my visits?" The first part is a statement. He must have picked up on the pain in her voice. A bright fella, this one is.

"No," she answers smoothly. A bald faced lie. He does bother her. Just not the way he suspects.

She walks around to face him and kneels to tend the wounds on his chest and arms.

He looks at her carefully, reading her face. He has sensed the lack of sincerity in her reply. He should know, he is a master of lies.

"I need you," he finally says, the word wrenched out by a desperation that swallowed him suddenly. It's a plea and a prayer; a confession and a resignation.

She looks up at him and holds his gaze. She sees his white face slack with fatigue but a struggle burning in the brown of his eyes.

His lips part and close, the Adam's apple bobs in futility. But she hears the words he's unable to conjure, unspool the emotions cluttering him.

"I know," she says simply, her voice back to its smooth sooth.

And they fall silent, listening to each other breathe. His shallow and quick; her even and deep.

The rain washes the landscape relentlessly outside, thunder rolls imperious and to the rhythm of soft scrapes as she dips her fingers into the wooden bowl of green goo, he begins to nod off.

"What's your name?" Her beautiful voice twinkles through fog of lifetimes worth of fatigue.

"Xiu," he mutters. "Previously, Son of Galdor and Lia. Now, the Orphan of Man. Born on 15th Winter and reborn on 32nd Summer..."

He speaks some more but his words slur into a meaningless sludge. Nothing could be salvaged from it.

But what she did discover confirmed her doubts. He is a boy of 17, an orphan drafted by rebel leaders to keep alive a savage, dwindling struggle for survival.

A rueful smile caresses her lips and her eyes soften remembering she was almost his age when the caravan smuggling her nobel family was attacked by rebels; when she was dragged out and butchered.

Even a decade later death and destruction continue to rampage. Collateral damage keeps piling up, and soon the world will tilt under the burden of corpses. The golden crowns sitting precarious even now would tumble to brown feet of downtrodden and earth would become the sky and an inferno would boil naked underneath.