The Day the Whole World Went Away
The first time he’d heard the voice was the night the world was swallowed by fire.
Cailen had been seven at the time, standing outside of his home beneath the night sky. Behind him, the lights rose and danced, their cruel display of joviality roaring over the screams of those crying for help, the shadows they cast of their victims a mockery of the lives swallowed in their callous hunger. The fires and their destruction should have been his everything, should have been every moment of his life, every nightmare and every dream wrapped up into one. They should have been every future and every memory all joining into this now, playing out in one single instant as all that which would, and will, and now never could happen came together in a chaos of light and heat. His everything and more was what they stole as their red tongues ravaged the land, swallowing buildings, goods, and lives in their ceaseless feast. But despite the heat that reached for him, despite the malicious whispers from hissing flames as helpless rain pattered down upon the inferno, Cailen had been unable to turn his face away from the sky.
He’d thought he heard it there – a gentle whisper. He did not think it was speaking to him, did not feel that the voice had meant for his attention, he simply wanted to know who had uttered it. Who, in the dark beyond, had sighed a word that managed to reach him? So he stood with eyes transfixed on the sky, searching through the narrowing void as choking smoke blotted it from sight.
Hoofbeats had come then, pounding out from places where the fire had not yet consumed. Shouts from strangers and hands too strong for his own pap’s wrenched under his arms, pulling him onto horseback. Then he was off, carried away from the only life he knew before he’d even realized it was ended.
Cailen would never learn enough of what happened that night to truly understand the depths of his tears. He would never fully grasp the mourning that his heart encouraged in the days that followed. In time he would forget the faces of his family, their images replaced by those of the strangers he would grow to see as kin, and he would never be able to summon up a recollection of what his home had looked like, or the layout of where his best friend lived, or even the name of the small town now lost to flame. But Cailen would never forget the sound of that whisper, as clear as glacial water and as sharp as chipped obsidian.
The memory of it rested dormant in his mind, waiting but never lost, until the day he heard it once more and everything would change again.
