Chapter 11: A Gift Given “…where is he?” Patience was not the easiest thing in the world. It took real effort and practice and (annoyingly enough) patience to have patience. Years of watching pots boil, managing a garden, and reading books so old and dusty you had to be careful opening them had done a…

Chapter 10: A New Gift Iron-vine root smelled almost exactly like blood. Not just blood, but fresh blood, metallic and earthy like it was just spilled onto the ground. It… it wasn’t his favorite smell. It brought back memories, one particular memory actually, and nothing about it was something Ken liked to think of. He…

Chapter 9: Three Years Still A thousand days. Or something like it. All of it was enough to smear together, one day blending into the next, in a long quiet period with no sharp edges to it. The him that had been carried into this place, the tiny terrified twelve-year-old, was long-gone. In that boy’s…

8: A New Life His new world had a rhythm to it, a different steady beat. Ken wasn’t sure how else to describe it but it just made everything feel so much more right than the fear and hunger he was used to. It was like breathing different air, almost. Literally, even. A whole different…

Chapter 7: What Is Inside? The world had stopped moving. The only sound Ken could make out was a soft, steady shhhh-pop… shhhh-pop and a quiet, peaceful bubbling from the tea on the stove. Both of them were a million miles away from the constant quiet ringing in his own ears, something he always dealt…

Chapter 6: An Old Face Moving. The world was rocking back and forth, a gentle steady motion that felt like being in a cradle, something this life had never given him. Being held. His eyes were heavy, too heavy to open, the world too hazy for him to even think. a dream-thing floating in his…

Chapter 5: Free or Not? C’mon. There was apparently a thing called runner’s high. He remembered people talking about it before, way back when he lived in a world where people talked about stuff that wasmore than just about fighting, food and fixing things. He even remembered looking it up on the internet, just because……

Chapter 4: Run, Boy, Run The world was a single point. A sharp, red-wet point. Sound had gone, all of it, swallowed to nothing in the endless gray of the sky, the village and the ground.  All Ken could hear was the tearing of his own breath as air forced its way in and out,…

Chapter Three: A Rocky End The next day crawled by, the world the same gray smear that blended into the next. No books to read, nothing to watch, just simple work to do; going root-hunting for Sora and stripping what little scrap he could for salvage. It kept him busy, sure, but it was boring…

Chapter 2: Some Kind Scraps  That Wall. Always the Wall. Ken kept staring at the impossible black line cutting his world in half, a silent judgment sitting on the horizon. Wind picked up with that low mournful sound it always made when it moved through the scrap-fields, kicking up dust that wasn’t really dust at…