Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 115
115
The firewood was stacked so high in Kiana's arms that she had to lean to the side just to see where she was going. The splintery edges snagged at her dress and dug painfully into her aching arms, but she didn't mind. There was a lot of work to be done still, and work (besides the fact that it was vitally important) was a good way to keep her mind distracted from all the thoughts -
(It was your fault you weren't paying attention you shouldn't have put those scissors right there it's your fault -)
- she didn't want to think about.
She nearly tripped over a particularly long set of legs and hastily blurted out on apology, but the Wolf simply looked straight ahead, shifting his gaze only when Kiana repeated herself. He was an older Wolf, with flecks of white around his muzzle and the tips of his ears. He looked at her for a few seconds with an expression that was worse than blank. It was empty, vacant, missing, hollow, every word you could think of to describe an absence where none should exist.
As Kiana thought about this, the Wolf simply turned his gaze back to where it was, staring straight ahead at nothing at all.
She left in a great hurry after that, nearly dropping all the wood in her haste to get away from that empty stare.
Kiana had begun to categorise the Wolves into three distinct groups. There were the 'ghosts', the ones who would walk around aimlessly with blankets draped around their shoulders, or sit by the fires, or lie down in out-of-the-way places and just stare straight ahead at nothing at all, their eyes glassy and unfocussed. You could try to talk to them, and if you were lucky, they might look at you for a while, but they'd never say anything back. They just stared. Kiana liked to think they were re-evaluating their lives, but she honestly couldn't be sure. It was just as possible they were slowly going insane. Maybe the shock of coming so close to death was just too much, or maybe the grief of losing so many loved ones - brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters - was too overwhelming. Maybe the only way for them to cope was to not cope at all.
And then there were the nice ones. They, too, would sometimes stare off at nothing, but unlike the ghosts, they could actually hold a conversation. They could ask for things. They could even say 'please' and 'thank you'. A miracle by itself, in her humble opinion. The one they called 'Ivio' was a nice one. Even though his feet were covered in awful cuts, he still took it upon himself to help out around the basecamp wherever he could (when Mother wasn't yelling at him to get off his feet, that was).
Kiana squeezed her way through a ring of Wolves and dumped her burden by the fire, liking the satisfying sound the logs made as they clattered and rolled over the ground. She brushed the wood dust off her hands and cracked her back with a grimace, reluctant to leave the warmth of the flames, but knowing full well she couldn't afford to stand still for too long, lest the thoughts -
(You killed so many tonight so many and they know you were the one they saw you blow that horn.)
- start to intrude again.
Kiana looked around and immediately spotted Ivio by the cooking area, talking to Cindy. With Michael gone, she had become the impromptu master chef of the basecamp, and she quite clearly had no idea how to deal with this gigantic, shaggy stranger suddenly invading her safe haven of salts, meats, spices and vegetables. His head kept jerking sideways and his shoulders tensed and untensed at irregular intervals, pulling his hands up in front of his chest like a gigantic furry praying mantis. His fingers curled and uncurled, but not in unison, and his ears flicked in random directions. Even the muscles in his face kept twitching, giving him a rather unstable expression at even the best of times.
He said something and Cindy looked around her little area with a frown on her face, finally coming to settle on a large, wickedly sharp butcher's cleaver, the kind with the extra-long blade. She picked it up, blew a bit of snow off the edge, and handed it to Ivio (handle first, of course).
The moment this happened all the Wolves in the immediate area tensed up. They gasped in unison, they turned their faces and covered their eyes. Some even began to rise, as if determined to snatch the knife away. Stuff like this happened all the time wherever Ivio was concerned, but it was something Kiana simply couldn't understand. Compared to most of the others, Ivio was a total sweetheart.
He inspected the blade (perhaps looking at his own twitchy reflection), grabbed a cutting board and went to work on a pair of potatoes, chopping them up so finely that Cindy had to hasten to peel another pair before he could reduce the current batch to a lump of mush. Ivio seized his latest victims (one of which was still only halfway peeled) and went to work with even more speed and enthusiasm than before, chopping them up so forcefully that bits of potato flew through the air. Poor Cindy simply couldn't keep up, and had no choice but to laugh when she saw that his face was covered with sticky bits of chopped up potato chunks.
Those were the nice ones.
But then, of course, there were also -
"Hey! Hey, you! Rat bitch!"
... the not so nice ones.
Kiana reluctantly put a smile on her face and turned to the one who had shouted at her. "Yes? Can I help you with anything?"
He was a Wolf of medium build, dark grey fur, with ugly gashes across his face, chest, and forearms. Apparently he had refused treatment. "Yeah, you can help me by dropping dead! Ugly rat bitch!"
Kiana planted her hands on her hips in an unconscious imitation of her mother, and in a voice that swelled with authority she never knew she had, she said: "While my appearance is a subjective matter, I can assure you I am not a rat, and neither am I a bitch. Now if you want something, you can ask me nicely and I will do everything in my power to help. If you can't, or won't, I advise you to keep your mouth shut before your friends shut it for you."
The grey Wolf looked around at his compatriots as if seeing them for the first time that night. A fair few were glaring daggers at him and baring their teeth. Most, if not all of them, had splints, stitches, and bandages on various parts of their bodies.
The grey Wolf snorted at them and spat a yellow glob of phlegm into the fire, where it hissed like a dying snake. "You think I'm scared of you lot? You turn-tail yellow-bellied back-rolling weasels!" He fixed Kiana with a look that was, in a way, exactly the opposite of the ghosts'. It was terribly aware, and almost seemed to push at her like a physical force. "You do realise this won't last forever, right? The moment my people come to their senses, it's over for you."
"Really?" Kiana looked around at all the Wolves who had so readily come to her aid. "It looks to me like they've already come to their senses. Can't say the same for you, though."
The grey Wolf chuckled and spat another gob into the fire. "Just a matter of time, Foxy," he said, grinning from ear to ear. "Just a matter of time, and then we'll see who's really insane."
"I couldn't agree more." And with a rather haughty swish of her tail, Kiana moved away from this particular group with her head held high, trying her very best not to let her knees shake or her gait falter in any way. Any signs of fear, even small ones, wouldn't do her or her family any favours this night. She had to -
"Hey! I'm not done talking to you, rat bitch!"
She felt his hand clamp down on her wrist, felt the sharp sting of his claws against her skin. He jerked her around and Kiana nearly tripped right into him, into all those horrid gashes across his chest and neck.
"Don't you walk away from me!" he screamed, showering her upturned face in spittle. "Don't you dare treat me like I'm nothing!"
Did she really dismiss him as a Wolf of 'medium' build? He wasn't nearly as big as Ander or Sorrin, but even a 'medium' Wolf was more than capable of ripping her limb from limb, and suddenly Kiana was scared. She tried to pull free, but his fingers were like iron cuffs around her wrist and her heels simply dug useless furrows in the ground, not getting any purchase at all.
"You think this changes anything!? You think this undoes anything!?" he raved, his eyes shaking wildly in their sockets. "You can take your medicine, your wrappings, your food, your fires, and you can -"
A Wolf grabbed him from behind and locked his arm around his throat, choking him so hard that his tongue shot out of his mouth in a gargle of spit. A second Wolf fell in beside the first and wrenched one of his arms behind his back, snarling like an animal. Together, they dragged him backwards, yanking Kiana along with them until the deranged Wolf finally let go and she stumbled back, massaging her wrist and breathing in quick, short gasps, her heart racing so fast she could barely differentiate the individual beats.
They dragged him all the way back to a log and forced him to sit down, but the Wolf was still trying to break free, whipping his head from side to side and kicking with both legs (at least until two more Wolves came and pinned them down), screaming at the top of his lungs.
"Let go of me, you back-rollers! Let go of me! This doesn't change what they did! No amount of food can bring us back, don't you understand!? They can patch us up, but everyone is still dead! We're all dead, and they killed us! Why can't you see!? Why can't you seeeee!?"
"Are you all right, Kleine-Kai?" one of the Wolves asked, but Kiana was so stunned that she didn't even realise the Wolf was talking to her until he repeated himself. "Kleine-Kai?"
"Huh? I..." Kiana couldn't help but stare at the Wolf with the dark grey fur and the cuts across his body, struggling so violently that no less than four Wolves were needed to hold him down, still screaming about how they were all dead and that nothing could bring them back, screaming that nothing had changed, that nothing could ever change, that the snow had frozen everything in place forever.
His words terrified her far more than the dull ache in her wrist. Terrified her in ways she could not yet fully understand.
"I'm all right..." she lied, shivering despite her close proximity to the fire.
"They're dead... they're all dead..." The grey Wolf had stopped struggling, and it was with a heavy heart that Kiana realised he was on the verge of tears. "How can you be like this when they're all dead?"
Unable to watch another second of this, Kiana hurried away as fast as she could without actually running, moving from fire to fire, avoiding eye-contact at all costs. She did not want to see another pair of eyes like those, brimming with an emotion she never even knew existed in this world, a terrible emotion she hoped to never experience for herself. An amalgamation of sorrow and insanity.
Hey guys. This will be the first of a series of notes explaining the Great Editorial Hack 'n Slash of 2017. Because so many of the subchapters got chopped up and moved around, I will only be discussing sections that are completely over and done with, so as to avoid spoilers. That being said, I'd like to start with the previous subchapters, in which Banno puts down a false trail for Ander to follow.
Normally I like to write events in chronological order. In other words, I tell them as they happen, A to B to C, and the previous subchapters were no exception. Originally, I told Banno's POV first, as he executed his plan. THEN I followed up with Ander following the trail. I thought this would create a nice bit of dramatic irony (when the audience knows something a character does not). Dramatic irony is a technique I've used successfully over the course of this story, and while I was writing it, I kept imagining the reader going, "No, Ander! No! It's a trick! Don't go that way! Nooooo! Aaaaargh!!"
But here's the thing. 'Writing Mode' and 'Reading Mode' are two completely different things. When you write something, you do it letter by letter, word for word, and that can make it difficult to see the forest for the trees. Only when you sit back and try to look at your work through the eyes of a reader, and NOT a writer, can you begin to see what your audience sees, and the moment I did that I realised I did not like what I had written at all, and for one simple reason.
It made Ander look stupid.
I hated that. It's probably the one thing I hate the most in any piece of fiction ever written by anyone ever, when characters behave in stupid ways, and it's something I try to avoid like the plague. Even a character like Ivio, who has more than a few screws loose, isn't stupid (at least not as much as most seem to think he is.)
That all changed when I switched around the order of the subchapters, putting Ander's pursuit first, THEN following up with Banno's trickery. All the events were basically the same, but the perception of those events from a reader's perspective was completely different.
Before, when the reader knew about the false trail, it made Ander look foolish. But, by switching it around, I put Ander and the reader on the same level, with the same amount of information to go off of. The way I figured was, if the reader failed to notice the false trail, then they would have no right to be mad at Ander for failing to see the same thing. Instead of going, "Ander, you moron! You're going the wrong way!" they would instead go, "Oh no! We went the wrong way! How could I not see that?"
Sometimes the solution to a problem is to approach it from a different angle. Kinda cliché, but true.
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