Even as a King, Rhonan is not grand. The world bends to his will, but he seeks little. For a boy with no plans, no goals, no ambitions, being given all this power is useless. Maybe others would find something to do with it. Certainly his brother would. Everyone would bend a knee to Tytos, every mare would bear his children. The world would grovel if Tytos could do what Rhonan can.
But Rhonan? The grandest thing he wanted were the horns that now top his head. Massive, red-tinged horns curl over his head and the tip of the horns point forward. Black rings circle the smooth bone. This is his crown. In his world, there are no other creatures with horns (their horns have all been taken away). But there is no need for such things, because his world is peaceful.
Not because Rhonan has any love for peace. He doesn’t love chaos either. He simply doesn’t care. His world is simply eclectic. His home is a valley. Not a kingdom. There are no horses that serve him, that recruit and steal and challenge. Instead, the animals that he rules are experiments. They come to him willingly.
The very first had been a crow. It appeared out of nowhere. He simply thought of a crow, and then one perched on his back. This one he did not experiment on. This one, he kept as an advisor, as a right hand man. To this day, the boy thinks the crow brought him the animals.
At first, it was smaller animals. Mice and rats and bunnies. They laid themselves at his feet, and he found himself wondering what a bunny would be like with the tail of a rat. And it had simply happened. The bunny, to its credit, did not even seem surprised. Though the fluffy cottontail looked rather strange on the rat.
For that matter, the fluffy bunny tail did nothing to help the rat. It could no longer scurry across small branches. The thing kept overheating as well, and Rhonan often found it lounging in a puddle. One day it tried ever so hard to run across a branch despite it’s precarious balance. It didn’t work out for the rat. Rhonan found it smashed on the ground, though he didn’t care. His crow seemed pleased with the meal.
The bunny adapted though. It learned to use the tail for balance, to help it lose heat. The creature became rather nimble, crawling over small objects and leaving larger predators in the dust. And this discovery, that he could make the animals better, led Rhonan to keep trying.
His successes grew, and larger animals started coming. He grew cleverer in the traits he gave. He gave bears the ability to jump and lions the ability to breath underwater. He gave tigers and pigs both wigs, but the tigers just ate the pigs. He had wondered if they the pigs would be faster with wings. They were not. But such was the nature of his experiments. Only some of them worked.
His failures did not deter the animals from coming. His successful experiments served him, should he need anything. But Rhonan required little, and instead they turned the valley into a paradise for him. The elephants built walls around the valley of trees sharpened to spikes with their sword tails. The groundhogs dug him pools with their shovel feet. He lived like a king without asking, and the animals served without complaint.
Until the day the crow died.
Rhonan doesn’t know why. The crow came everywhere with him. The crow was under his protection. No one could harm the bird. He was not food or a toy. And no one disobeyed their King.
Perhaps it was old age. But nothing aged here, not even Rhonan. Years had gone by and he was still a boy, still slightly gangly and strange. Perhaps it was illness. But nothing died of illness here either. Nothing ever became ill. His animals lived and thrived and only died to serve as food. Nothing unnecessary was ever taken, and nothing wasted. Not that he minded death, but the boy was frugal. He enjoyed watching how is experiments played out.
Except his crow. His crow was his friend. The only one he ever really had: in part because it merely cawed and never spoke; in part because no one had ever paid him as much attention as his quiet companion. His crow came everywhere with him. Until one day, when the bird simply fell from the sky.
He will likely never know why. The world took away the greatest gift it had given him.
What he does know is that the animals stopped building. The beavers didn’t cut down any more trees with their saw teeth. His pools, without the their dams, became floods. The elephants tore down the spikes that protected their home. The sky blackened with dragon birds that blotted out the sun.
Then his right horn split in half.
He screamed, truly screamed, as the bone tore apart. It raked against his skin as it fell, puncturing his shoulder. Blood oozed from the leg, warm and sticky and bright red against his gold and white coat. He liked the red truthfully. Far more than the gold and white coat.
Why hadn’t he changed his coat? He could have changed it. This is what he thinks of. Not the cut, not the blood, but the bright color of his coat.
But his coat doesn’t matter. The smell of blood calls to his predators. He had made them lethal, given them the tools to hunt in the sky, the earth, and the sea. As they draw nearer, he desperately tries to grow wings. To fix his horns. To close the wound. To do something. But without the crow, his thoughts are useless. He cannot channel them as he once did, cannot make a thought into reality.
The world is no longer his. He is no longer King. No, instead his experiments have turned. What happens to the boy who creates an impossible world and yet never thought to make himself impossible as well?
Damn him. He’d been too busy playing with his food to eat it and grow strong.
The growls around him echo like thunder. He’d created so many beasts, and they circle him now. They are beautiful, impossible, and deadly. He is already dead. The blood pools beneath his hooves. He looks in every direction, but they already know where he could run. Every path is blocked. Jaguars with spiked backs prowl around him. Bears sit in the trees above him, light enough to linger in the branches.
One of the lions comes with his crow clamped in its mouth. Rhonan lunges forward, trying to snatch his crow from the mouth. With what, he has no idea. He’s not thinking. The bird is not food. That is all he knows, and that is all he cares about. But the lions simply growls, closes his mouth around the bird, and chews.
The lion is the first to go up in flames. Rhonan actually laughs, despite the sound of screeching. It’s not a roar, not an animal noise at all. It’s simply pain. Pure, burning pain. But the lion should have known better. The crow was his. The crow was magic. The crow was everything, and no one can have everything.
Not even him.
The trees are the next to catch. Flames race up branches and down the trunk, lighting the grass below on fire. A breeze picks up, fanning the flames that flow through the valley in rivers now. The animals panic, trumpeting and screaming and roaring in a deafening cacophony. One by one, they catch on fire, until the valley is ablaze. Rhonan stands still as stone in the middle of the valley, his lungs burning, his eyes watering from the smoke or from the death of his crow. He doesn’t know which. Perhaps both.
The flames are everywhere though. The predators are gone, but there’s still no escape.
He’s coughing, his bodying jerking on the ground. On the ground? No. He’s not on the ground. When did he end up on the ground? He opens his eyes, not knowing when he ever closed them. There are trees everywhere, dense brush and vines and smoke. Everywhere there is smoke. This isn’t a valley. No. This is the Jungle. This is his real life. There are no animal experiments; there is no crow (the loss of which he feels like a punch in his gut).
But there is fire.
The sound here is no different than the dream he’s left behind. The animals scream and choke and sputter. He’s on his feet now. His useless child feet with his useless child legs. They are gangly and long but thankfully he’s old enough to some control of himself, but not enough. He trips over vines and bodies again and again. Landing in dirt, on logs, and in thorns.
He doesn’t look at the things he trips over. Doesn’t think about the blood that covers him that is not his own. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, are the dead eyes of the Jungle Sisters, the intestines that spill onto the earth. Someday, these things will come crawling to the surface. In his daydreams, in his nightmares. But right now, he cannot dwell on any of it. Now, he must run.
There are other horses, and he follows them. He has no idea where he’s going now. He’s lost in the thick of the Jungle. So he follows, hoping they know the way. A wall of fire rears up in front of him, cutting him off from the others. He sees the monkeys above him, hears them cry as branches crack and they go tumbling to the earth with the burning wood. But they are running too. They are running in a direction that isn’t barred by fire.
He follows them, eyes and head craned toward the tree tops to see them. But mostly he follows the screeching. His eyes are so watery, so raw and red from the smoke that he can barely see. He falls again, and the monkeys screech louder as if telling him to get up. He gets up. He runs again, breath coming in gasps, lungs ragged.
He keeps running.
The trees thin. There are no other horses to be seen now, just the sound of screams in the distance. The same sound the lion made when it combusted. The same sound of agony. The sound drives him on, because he refuses to scream. Refuses to cry. He has no tears or breath to waste anyway. It has all been taken by the smoke.
The monkeys are gone now, but he sees a mountain. He keeps running, his legs screaming now too, his young muscles protesting the movement. The incline is steep and eventually he cannot run anymore. But still, he presses on as fast as he can. Slowly, the air clears. Slowly, he crests the top.
Below him, the world burns. Not just the Valley. Maybe not just Beqanna.
He finds that he watches it all without much sorrow. He longs for his crow more. Though there’s a flash of Aletheia, the strange girl in the meadow. He wonders if she will survive. Though he thinks no one will. He finds himself almost as upset about this as he is about the crow. She was like him. At least in some ways, in the ways that mattered.
There’s Tytos as well. His mother. He has no idea where they have gone, what has become of them. He does hope if they are dead, they died quickly. He hopes that their screams were not the screams that drove him on. Though if they were, at least they had not died in vain. But he does not cry for them, or for the strange girl (though almost for her), or for the only home he’s ever known. He cries for the crow.
rhonan.