A Perfect World - Chapter 4 (Patreon)

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Griffin breathed out slowly, having just told Sixth much of her background and how she’d been in such a dire situation when he’d first found her.

It was… harder than she’d expected. The pain from that time was still fresh in her mind.

He nodded thoughtfully, walking in-step beside her.

“You didn’t tell me why you left the orphanage, though?”

Griffin stopped, causing him to halt as well.

“I… have a dream.”

Sixth looked her in the eyes while waiting for her to continue.

She raised the stick in her hand - the same one she’d used during their spar yesterday - to point at his chest.

“I want to earn a title.”

Her expression was serious as she rested the tip against his chest.

“I want to become a lord.”

Sixth looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

Griffin continued.

“I want my own land, and…”

She took a step forward, pressing her ‘weapon’ to his heart.

“…my own knights.”

Removing her stick from his chest, she placed it on his shoulder.

“Sixth.”

After speaking his name, she remained silent, staring imploringly into his eyes.

When she didn’t continue on her own, he replied.

“Yes?”

Hearing him speak, she smiled softly. The sunlight danced in her silver hair as she tapped the stick against his shoulder.

“Become my knight.”

For a single moment, if someone were to look at her from a distance, she would have appeared not as a grimy orphan, but as a princess bestowing her favor upon one of her trusted servants.

The air stilled as she waited for his reply, as if the world was holding its breath alongside her.

However, Sixth shook his head.

“No.”

Griffin’s face remained serene, but her disappointment was palpable.

“I see.”

He looked downwards at his wrapped feet, dirty from their travels.

“I don’t have what it takes to become a knight. But… an advisor, perhaps? That’s something I could be persuaded to do.”

Griffin furrowed her brows at him, but the atmosphere around her lightened considerably.

“You wouldn’t rather be a knight?”

He shook his head emphatically,

“No way! I’m ashamed to admit it, but…”

One of his hands went to rub at the back of his neck embarrassedly.

“…the sight of blood terrifies me! I’m afraid I’ll faint straight away!”

Griffin giggled.

“It hasn’t been a problem so far, though…?”

Sixth put his hands on his hips and snorted.

“Oh, I was just putting up a strong front. Boys don’t want to look weak in front of girls, you know?”

She looked at him searchingly.

“Uh huh…”

Well, if he didn’t want to, then she couldn’t force him.

“Hey, Sixth.”

He stilled when he heard the gravity in her tone.

Her blue eyes stared into his brown ones.

“Thank you. For… what you did. I would’ve… I would’ve died, if you hadn’t found me.”

She removed the stick from his shoulder and replaced it with one of her hands. Her voice shook a little.

“I mean it.”

One corner of his boyish face turned up in a grin.

“I was happy to, though you would’ve been fine without my help.”

His voice was warm.

Releasing him, she picked up her stick again. His reassurance sounded ridiculous no matter how she thought about it.

Feeling suddenly uncomfortable, Griffin change the topic.

“Anyway, we should get moving. The daylight won’t last forever.”

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After a tiring day of walking, they found themselves in the middle of a thick forest.

The greenery had returned to the extent where they could hardly see more than a few yards ahead of them. If it had been summer, it would’ve been impossible to traverse.

After sparring, Sixth not managing to score a single victory, they made their camp in the nook of an enormous tree. It was so massive that they’d managed to start a fire in the hollow where the branches first split from the trunk.

“This is amazing.” Griffin said, looking down from where they were perched fifteen feet above the ground.

It had been her idea to rest here for the night. Sixth had hesitantly agreed, and had helped her cut a few strips of leather from their pig-hide, which they’d tied between the large branches. That way, even if they moved around in their sleep, it would be difficult for them to fall down.

“It’s definitely interesting.” Sixth said, cracking open a seed with a rock. They’d stumbled across a stash of nuts around midday, hidden in a hollow trunk. Some animal had undoubtedly stuffed them there at some point, to eat during the winter. Griffin had hardly been able to believe their luck, but Sixth’s reaction had been more subdued.

‘After all, there’s no way she’d just die of hunger in the middle of nowhere…”

They ate in companionable silence, roasting nuts over their fire high above the ground. Neither was sure what kind of tree it was, but it was a kind of hardwood that didn’t catch fire easily, especially since it was still alive.

“So.” Griffin said, picking a nut from the top of a flat stone they were using as a stovetop and putting it into her mouth.

Sixth nodded his head sagely.

“So, indeed.”

The silver haired girl eyed him with an unamusedly.

“Yesterday, you promised me the rest of your story.”

Sixth stared thoughtfully at the surrounding woods, the trees’ shadows growing longer as the sun made its journey past the horizon.

“I didn’t use the word ‘promise’, exactly…”

Just when Griffin was about to become upset with him for going back on his word, he waved one hand placatingly at her

“Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt.”

He then scooted backwards on his perch, shrouding half his face in darkness.

“I just hope you don’t regret your request…”

Before she could ask him what he meant by that, he continued speaking.

“I was devastated by my mother’s disappearance. Of course, I looked for her. However, the more I searched, the clearer it became that she’d entirely vanished.”

Griffin looked suspiciously at the older boy.

“I find it hard to believe that no-one heard her screaming when it happened or didn’t see the person who took her.”

He nodded morosely at her.

“I thought the same thing. But, as I said, this matter had been strange since the beginning.”

The sun had completely set. The only part of him that wasn’t completely covered in shadow were his two eyes, gleaming from the light of the fire.

“I only realized it later, since I was too preoccupied at the time – after my mother’s initial cry, there were no sounds of struggle or anything similar.”

“How loud was her scream?” Griffin asked, making eye contact with her companion.

“Loud. It was the kind that left your ears ringing.”

He sighed and rubbed his face with one hand.

“I was half-asleep when I heard it. But, when I did, I knew for sure that something was wrong.”

The memory of the event made him tug his cloak tighter around his shoulders.

“It made my spine tingle…”

Griffin’s clenched and unclenched her hands where she held them close to the fire.

“It must’ve been scary.”

Sixth nodded emphatically, unashamed to admit his own fear.

“When I’d arrived downstairs, I was… relieved to see that my mother, and whatever it was that had frightened her so, wasn’t there.”

He chuckled dryly at his admission.

“What happened then? Did anyone help you look for her?” Griffin asked, prodding him to continue his story.

“Of course.” He said, leaning with his back against a forked branch.

“I already told you about our neighbor, the perfumer. His name was mister Lively, by the way. There was also Ms. Shanter’s husband – the lady was one of mother’s old friends. And Cale, a man who helped us when father was away. There were others as well…”

Sixth shifted around awkwardly.

“A lot of men, really. My mother had a good appearance, and was she still young… well, you know what I’m saying.”

Clearing his throat, he continued.

“The search party split into two – the men went into the woods to look for her there, while the rest of us searched the town.”

Griffin could already guess the result.

“You didn’t find her.”

Sixth shook his head.

“We kept looking, but as the months passed and she remained lost, they stopped searching. Eventually, I was the only one still trying.”

Thinking of something, Griffin interrupted him.

“Did you consider that they, I mean the villagers, may have had something to do with it? The fact that nobody had heard anything is too strange…”

A sudden gust of wind caused the fire to blaze, illuminating Sixth’s features, looking pensively ahead.

“Suspecting my own neighbors – isn’t that a little too much?”

He looked at her seriously, his expression almost disappointed. Then he cracked a melancholic smile.

“I’m joking. That was what I’d thought as well.”

He wriggled in his seat, trying to make himself comfortable as best he could.

“They thought I didn’t notice, but it was too obvious to miss – how the men constantly ogled Mother. It was possible they’d conspired together to… to kidnap her.”

Sixth let out a long sigh.

“So, I started snooping around their homes while they were away. However, it quickly became clear that, if they were keeping her somewhere, then it wasn’t somewhere obvious.”

A cold wind had started blowing, carrying the scent of rain with it. Sixth halted for a moment. After taking a few dry sticks from his sack and adding them to the fire, he spoke again.

“Cale was the most suspect of all of them – he constantly buzzed around her like a fly. I thought for sure that, if anyone in the village had been involved, he would’ve been one of them.”

Sixth grimaced, looking pale in the light of the fire.

“Unfortunately, shortly after I started tailing him, something strange started happening around my house…”

Putting his palms together in front of his face, he exhaled slowly.

“One night, while I was asleep, I had a nightmare. You may know the kind I’m talking about – the type where, in your dream, you’re in your bed. Or wherever it is that you fell asleep, and you can’t move.”

He looked up at her, but when he saw the confused expression on her face, he knew that she didn’t understand.

“Oh, you never had that? It’s called sleep paralysis. Anyway, that was the case at that time.”

Griffin tried to think if she’d experienced anything like that, but in the end she could only shake her head.

Sixth went on with is tale.

“I dreamt I was laying in my bed, and I was feeling inexplicably frightened…”

Griffin’s eyebrows furrowed. She didn’t see how this dream had anything to do with his investigation, but she let him continue.

“I couldn’t move my body at all – not even my eyes. But that wasn’t what frightened me. What frightened me, I suddenly realized, was that something was watching me.”

He made a claw with one hand and lightly scraped his nails across the back of his neck.

“You know the feeling, right? When you can tell someone’s staring at you. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.”

Sixth’s voice sounded hoarse.

“At first I couldn’t see anything – just my room, illuminated by the light of the full moon. In the dream, I had left my curtains undrawn, so I could see the outside clearly. Dark clouds were roiling in the distance, and fine water droplets misted against the window glass.”

He exhaled slowly while looking her in the eye.

“I couldn’t figure out what was wrong – there seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary in my room. The nightmare continued like that, with me laying frozen while a persistent gaze bore into the back of my neck. Eventually it faded into blackness, and I awoke early the next morning, feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all.”

He hesitated for a moment.

“It was almost as if…”

Griffin, unable to contain her growing drowsiness, let out a long yawn. Noticing that he’d stopped talking due to her, she spoke.

“Sorry. I’m just feeling a bit sleepy.”

Sixth nodded in understanding.

“It’s been a long day, hasn’t it? We should get some rest. I can continue tomorrow, if you want.”

She wanted to hear the rest of his story, but she probably wouldn’t be able to stay awake until the end.

“Yeah.”

After securing themselves as best they could (they certainly couldn’t be too cautious in this situation), and wrapping themselves tightly in their animal hides, the two of them drifted off to sleep.

Or, at least, they tried. It had really started pouring now, so they were both quickly soaked to the bone despite the leafy roof above their heads. The fact that they had knobbly, rock-hard branches against their backs didn’t help much either.

There was also the obvious fact that, if they shifted around too much during the night, they’d fall down and break their necks.

Tomorrow was going to be a long day.

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The sun rose the next day, the silver rays shining through a gap in the clouds. 

Unsurprisingly, both the little wanderers had long since between awake. Or maybe would be more accurate to say that they’d never really fallen asleep in the first place.

Griffin looked fresh as a daisy, evidently adept at functioning on next to no rest, but you certainly couldn’t say the same for Sixth.

The boy in question was looking at his companion morosely.

“Can’t you at least pretend to be tired?”

The girl smiled brightly at him in return.

“Why would I do that?”

The question made one of his eyebrows twitch.

“Hah... We’re going to stop somewhere around midday, and I’m going to take a nap.”

Griffin tapped a finger against her lips in thought before replying.

“I’m getting a feeling… that we should keep moving today.”

Sixth looked at her from underneath his eyebrows.

“I’m getting a funny feeling myself. I blame the nuts. Who knows how long those things were there before we found them?”

As reward for his sharp remark, he got a knuckle in his ribs.

“Ow, ow! Stop!”

He tried to slap at her hands, but the move proved to be ineffective. After a few moments of futile struggling, he finally relented.

“Okay, okay! Fine! We can keep going!”

He lifted up his shirt to check his side, only to see that it was completely red. This witch really didn’t have any mercy at all.

“What happened to that quiet person I picked up a few months ago…?”

A balled fist shoved under his nose made him quickly shut his mouth.

‘This bitch… she got cocky after winning a few spars.’

He swore revenge inwardly while silently rubbing his sore ribs.

Griffin looked down at his hunched form with eyebrows slightly furrowed.

“Why does your face look like that?”

Sixth’s expression turned sorrowful.

“You have a problem with my looks, now? I can’t help it – I was born this way.”

She picked up her training ‘weapon’, nicked all over after their many spars, and held it threateningly at her side.

“You’re trying to act funny.”

He raised his own stick in a hurry and held it diagonally in front of himself.

“Maybe I’m just a little doubtful about chasing this and that ‘feeling’. Fortune telling isn’t exactly an empirical science, you know.”

His caution turned out to be warranted, as his companion suddenly launched a few rapid thrusts towards his torso.

“Now you’re trying to act smart.”

Sixth looked wronged as he tried to stop her from smacking him with a piece of solid wood. He had enough bruises as it was.

“Am I trying to act funny or smart? Make up your mind, please.”

The corners of her mouth turned upwards a little as she probed his defenses. The difference between them had already become such that Sixth couldn’t afford to even retaliate lest she use the opening against him.

Eventually the tip of her weapon, striking from below like a serpent, slipped underneath his guard and struck his nose with a ‘whop’.

“Shit!”

Sixth fell backwards with a pained cry, his hands going to his nose and tears welling in his eyes. With his blurry sight, he saw his opponent standing with her sword close to her chest. She looked stoic like that, but he could sense the smugness rolling off her in waves.

He couldn’t help but feel a little depressed as he added this loss to the total tally. There didn’t seem to be much hope for things ever shifting in his favor – she was improving at a much faster pace than he was.

‘Seriously, how broken can a person be?’

After letting out what felt like the thousandth sigh that morning, he grabbed onto the stick she pointed in his direction and let himself be pulled to his feet.

Griffin flicked her hair over her shoulder before addressing his earlier comment.

“You already said you believed me. Was that a lie?”

While awaiting his answer, she tapped her stick testily against the ground.

His eyes couldn’t help but be drawn towards that devilish instrument in her hand.

“No, I didn’t lie…”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“Then what’s the problem?”

He looked at her hesitantly, unsure of whether he should tell her the truth or not.

‘I’m something of a fortune-teller myself…’

If she believed him, it would give his ‘advice’ a lot more weight. Frankly, he had no idea what he was going to do, or even what he was supposed to do about… everything.

‘What a bothersome situation…’

Griffin had walked closer to him while he was thinking, and was now practically looming over him with weapon in hand.

“Say it, or I’ll make you.”

“If you start hitting me again, I really won’t say anything.”

He didn’t break eye-contact as she stared him down, her face close enough that their noses were almost touching.

‘It’s been such a short time, yet she got taller…’

Suddenly, he reached towards her face with one hand and started pulling her cheek.

“What am I going to do with you?”

She snapped at his hand in response, but he pulled it away just in time.

Before she could launch a counter-attack, he said something unbelievable.

“I know the future.”

Griffin was caught off-guard by that declaration. At first, she assumed that he was just talking nonsense, but the look on his face told her otherwise.

“Are you serious?”

Sixth nodded in response to her question.

She thought about it for a little bit, but then she shook her head from side to side.

“No, if you knew the future… then you’d have been able to figure out what happened to your mother.”

He put his hands on his hips and looked at her. After a second or two, he let out a groan while rolling his eyes upwards.

“I knew this was going to happen.”

He then waved one hand from side to side, trying to give an explanation that would satisfy her.

“It’s not that specific, and I only know some stuff. Most of it is related to you.”

He twirled his index finger in a circle before pointing at her chest.

Griffin furrowed her eyebrows.

“What?”

Sixth opened and closed his hands like he was trying to clutch at something invisible.

“Yes, you. It’s because of what you’re doing – what you’re going to do. It’s going to be one big mess.”

His hands drew together in a twisting motion, like he was trying to choke the life out of someone.

“I’m starting to regret not sending you to meet your maker when I had the chance…!”

He realized he’d made a mistake when he looked at her face. Clearly, she didn’t think that what he’d just said was funny in the least.

“Maybe you should’ve done that, then.”

She delivered that statement with all the warmth of an undertaker shutting the weathered doors of an ancient crypt. After turning her back towards him, she walked away briskly.

Sixth scrambled to fix his mistake.

“Look, I didn’t really mean it. I just have a bad sense of humor, that’s all! There’s no way I could’ve done you any harm…”

When that didn’t help, he hurriedly picked up his things and scurried after her.

“I won’t say anything like that again. Can you slow down, please?”

His voice was insistent as he delivered his plea towards her back.

The only answer he received was overwhelming silence.

Sixth couldn’t help but curse his big fat mouth as he struggled to keep up with her.

‘Why did I let the cat out of the bag in the first place? And I even said something like that… Ugh, could today get any worse?’

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