The Char Pit
There is a house in Motus that is not seen by most people. It is perfectly visible, yet most people are too absorbed in their busy, insignificant little lives to notice it. Further few would dare venture inside its soporific walls.
The dying house is surrounded by the bussing pointlessness of humanity, a market full of merchants shrieking like Tthalam birds preying on innocent passers-by. The virtual sensory overload from the market -silks sashaying in the wind scented by foreign Silven spices and the gleam of brass lamps in the ever-present sweltering sun- cloaked the house in distractions. The only time the market acknowledged its existence was to throw the smouldered remains of their waste at it, which had earned the house the unaffectionate nickname of the “The Char Pit,” where glowing embers go to die.
The Char Pit looked like a giant had plucked a sprawling stately mansion from the earth and compacted it with the flat of their hand, leaving a shoebox rectangle that towered into the azure blue sky overhead. Its windows were empty eyes, bricks that were once a burnt cinnamon dulled to a brown-orange with scorch marks garishly decorating them. The pillars that hold up the building are sunken now, an emaciated animal waiting for death. The whole structure seems ready to give up, a shadow of something magnificent held together by secrets and strings.
If anyone bothered to enter the nearly derelict building, they would gain easy access through the front door which hung half of its hinges, quietly rotting away. The hallway that it led to was –at first glance- in a similar state of neglect. It was dimly lit, the sounds of the thriving street outside receding the further you go, as if descending underwater. It seemed the hallway had the power to detach you from reality itself, breaking you off into an isolated existence. But isolation was not strictly true.
Odd things stood out the longer someone gazed down those two parallel walls: the way the floor was sparse of the infernal dust that coated the rest of the surfaces, scuffed clean and polished by bare feet. The brilliant purple of the wrapper of a packet of gum is tucked deep into one of the spider web cracks through the wall’s plaster, the colour untouched and undiluted by time. As much as the house tried to silently scream of abandonment, it was a front, albeit a clever one.
The ones who frequented the house were little more than shadows themselves, as unimportant as the Char Pit itself was to the public. They would slip there in the soft blanket of twilight, delighting in the hush that fell over the city as the citizens welcomed the change from the blazing sun with a town-wide sigh of relief. Some would come in clusters, grouped together with fierce determination in their eyes and fear in their hearts, others by themselves with battle-worn skin and a fighter’s courage. Fleet of feet, the raggedy bundle would scramble down the sagging hallway and assemble in the ballroom where the gilt décor was chipped, tarnished, a fading breath of it’ former beauty. The only common feature that connected the gathered would be that none of them had yet bloomed in adulthood. They were children made of bones and skin, pain and anger.
Feral and abandoned children were as cheap as sparrows in Motus, and although their growing numbers were as much as a pest as cockroaches or rats, people choose to turn their heads and ignore them. It really couldn’t be helped in such a large, industrial city with such prejudices: some families who worked from dawn to dusk simply couldn’t produce the money they needed to feed their children and merely told them to leave, knowing that it would be better for them than being put into the hands of the Authorities. Others, finding their offspring endowed with magyk decided to have a shred of sympathy, knowing it would be kinder for them to roam free and wild rather than in the designated areas for Registered Magyk Users. (R.M.Us.)
The Char Pit was one of the few places in Motus where children like that could “safely” earn money, which was why it was one of its best kept secrets. The “safety” it offered was an unspoken agreement that no child would be sold out to the Authorities under its roof but apart from that, the building was a brutal re-edition of a gladiator ring. The children weren’t aware if the fights they partook in were an age-old custom or something much darker, only that every week a box full of cheaply-made coloured wristbands and a single sheet of guidelines would be left in the abandoned ballroom. If those guidelines were followed, money would find its merry way to the lucky winners in the form of small packages left on the cold doorsteps and alleyways where they slept. Mostly the guidelines would be simple, different colours of wristbands pitted against each other in pairs, but other times they could be needlessly complicated, involving whole team battles or a particularly cruel favourite, “Last Man Standing.” It seemed completely random, varying with the wind and water for all the children knew.
Those pathetic children. Minds focused intently on where their next meal would come from and not much else. They never stopped to wonder why they ripped each other apart with seemingly pointless combat, or if it could be part of something bigger, more sinister. They didn’t even notice when certain individuals who’d been constantly winning “disappeared” – or perhaps they chose not to notice that one. It was better off not to notice some things in their lives.
These are not my views. This is what she thought. I am not her, so subsequently I do not share her own views on the world, or the children. Sharing the exact same views on things rarely happens with two different people, though I am not a person either. I am merely the narrator, not thanked and unwanted, impartial to this story but documenting it anyway. Being Time, documenting things is a crucial part of my job, immortalising facts in direct defiance of the universe’s clock. I fancy myself a Prometheus, stealing memories I deem worthy from the crushing expanse of forever and preserving them with me. A sort of rebellion against the theory that, like the Char Pit, everything must come to its end.
Our main character has just entered his own ‘rebelling’ stages as well, thick and flush with youth’s raw spirit. Through the centuries, I’ve found few humans I’ve bothered emphasizing with, and fewer still that I shed tears for when they died. So, it was strange than an obscure street child from Motus caught my attention: in the grand scheme of things –something that I’m very good at looking at- he was not that important. Barely anyone knew his name, or the feats he managed to achieve, or his mind which I found oddly endearing. I suppose some of the challenges he faced were my indirect fault as well, even though it is below my station to admit that.
I suppose I’m being cold and dispassionate to call him a character especially after knowing him but now, hundreds of centuries after these events took place, that’s all people will view him as. It’s impossible to reach through time, to truly connect with someone lost to the past, a shadowy ghost of a memory. I must be cold and dispassionate to deal with this multitude of ghosts I harbour: endless time, ticking onwards.
