• He was huddled into the corner he'd been shoved into, whimpering as something dripped and splattered near him. It was dark...darker than the night that blanketed everything. He could hear voices, speaking that new language he had been taught. Voices that were harsh and cruel.

    He could smell smoke and something else on the air that he couldn't identify. He could hear the fire crackling...but it wasn't the fire in their fire pit...it was outside of the house. He should move; he should help them put it out before it burned down the forest. They needed the forest.... And-he could hear it begin to cry. Why was no one helping it? Why weren't those voices helping it?

    The voices were closer. A shoe, thick and heavy and dark, appeared in the slit beneath the cupboard he'd been shoved hurriedly into. It stood there for many minutes, and the talking continued above it, a deep, harsh, almost grating voice.

    "...Fates...here...?"

    He couldn't understand everything, only bits and pieces, but that sentence-what he understood of it came in crystal clear, stuck in his mind. Stayed there.

    The men talked more...and then there was a thump as something was thrown to the ground. And hand rolled into his vision, fingers peeked under where he was crouched. Rings...the glint of gold on nails and wrist.

    His mother...it was his mother. He reached out slender fingers to grasp hers and then jerked them back. They were cold. She was cold. So cold-didn't she want to be warmed? Wasn't the fire he heard and smelled everywhere warming her?

    The body was picked up. He saw stubby, dirty, bloodied hands pick it up. Tried to grasp the fingers as they slipped out of the crack, as they disappeared. The voices faded...faded as the other sounds increased greatly. The forest cried. Others cried. He could hear their voices as they screamed and wailed.

    But he stayed where he was told to, until the noises faded...until even the sound was silent.

    Only then did he stumble out of his hiding place, through the house that was burning around him. A stray beam was falling. He could hear it, and he could look up and see it. It was falling toward him, and he was too tired to care if it hit him or not....

    A streaking blur caught him, picked him up and carried him out of the house as it collapsed with a sigh. He was screaming, hitting and kicking and biting this thing that held him.

    It actually chuckled before setting him on the ground and turning him around toward him. "Cabal, stop that. You are too old to act like a toddler."

    He looked up into the admonishing eyes of his father and managed a smile, tiny but there on the pale face. "Father...what is...?"

    Fingers laid lightly on his lips. "Humans. We trusted them. They brought their weapons here." His black eyes reflected the fire and blackness all around them. "We trusted them and they betrayed us."

    The eyes looked back down at the young boy, and a hand slowly rose, covered in fresh blood. It glided through his hair, made black locks shine with the blood. His father's blood. From the wound in his stomach.

    The man's eyes noticed where the wide ones of the boy were. "Ah...this. Yes, this was their little gift to me."

    The hand ran down the face of the child, leaving a smear of red on the pale features, traced the ear and left the blood marring the skin to the sharp tip. "But this-this is my Goddess's gift. Do you remember our Goddess, Cabal?"

    Cabal nodded wordlessly, hands clutching at his father as he stumbled to one knee, then lay the other down. He was panting, the blood shining thickly on his shirt. "She has not forgotten us. You yet live my son. Unscarred, unmarked by this."

    "Father, hold on, I'll get the healer."

    "All dead. They're all dead."

    Cabal's eyes widened and trailed out around them. Everywhere blackened bodies lay, finger stretched up to the sky as if begging for intervention, bodies curled around each other to give protection that did not protect. He could see frozen screams on faces. All laid out where they had died, killed by strange human weapons. Humans....

    "I will kill them, father! I'll kill all of them!"

    He turned at the silence that met him to see his father sprawled out obscenely, eyes gazing expressionlessly at the sky. Hands limp at his sides and the wound-it bled only a little. He was....

    Cabal stood looked at the dead body of his father for a long while before he turned and looked around him. The stench of death. That's what this was. He breathed of it deeply and stepped past his father's corpse to look at each still face, each imprisoned body. He stared at the wilted land, the dead land. It made no sound. There was no sound. The world was deaf as it continued to spin, as the smoke filled the air and blotted out the heaven's lights.

    The humans had done this. The humans had destroyed his people-his family-his life. They had destroyed his life. He was dead. They would be dead too. And afterwards he would join them and everything would be okay. The Goddess had taught that life was found in death. He would find the life lost here in the humans' deaths.

    The portal beckoned before him. The portal they had opened for the humans. The portal that would lead to life and death.

    As he walked into it, he heard someone crying, crying and crying and crying with no answer as the world burned around him and bled black.