THE FALLEN

Maybe it's the quiet, maybe it's his curiosity of the Old World, but Kyt can’t deny that he prefers the company of the dead. They don’t speak or judge him for his ‘childish obsession’ with The Fallen. Instead, invisible, mute ghosts wander the empty corridors. Giant metal spires with glassless windows jut into the sky like moss-riddled monoliths. Kyt walks amongst the debris, his deer hide shoes scuff atop the thick layer of dust coating the cracked cement floor.

He hasn’t been in this building yet. There are dozens he still has to explore and rummage through for Old World trinkets that he can either use, collect, or trade. It’s tricky trying to find the right object, the perfect artifact that isn’t destroyed beyond repair, to the point nobody wants it. Not even Kyt—whose hut is brimming with The Fallen’s forgotten trinkets—will bring stuff home because it is unidentifiable and unrecognizable.

Though that could also be the allure of why he hoards what he does.

Some would call him a thief, others a scavenger, but Kyt knows in his heart he is simply a collector, an admirer. Not enough villagers care about the Old World. It’s named the Old World for a reason. But for Kyt, it is far more exciting and interesting than the New World.

The Fallen couldn’t stop climate change, they couldn’t control pollution or their dire need for power and wealth, so they succumbed to their greed. They took from the earth for too long, so the gods have taken it back. Reclaimed The Fallen’s cities and towns and lives, so now all that remains are ghosts. Memories. Artifacts.

Kyt swears he can feel them. Can hear the voices of The Fallen as he strolls down a long corridor. Jagged shards of glass cling to the edges of window frames. Each point glistens in the fading daylight.

He’s lost track of time again. The Wardens manning Roa’s gates will be expecting him soon. Nightfall isn’t safe for humans, not anymore now that animals have adapted, changed.

And truly, he doesn’t want to anger Elder Trik. Again.

“Just one more room,” Kyt says like he has a hundred times before. This time, however, he means it.

Slipping through a threshold, the door long gone, Kyt takes in the small hovel. And even though the living space is quaint, it is still bigger than his hut back home. Tables and chairs fill the room. Some of the seats have a soft padding, ruined by age and animal claws. Fractals of glass crunch beneath his feet as he moves toward a closed door. No labels or signs mark what’s within, yet it’s not like he could read it even if one were to be there. Old Tongue is incomprehensible, though Kyt supposes if someone grew up learning to speak it, it may be easy for them. To New World, Old Tongue means nothing. Is nothing.

The hinges grind together as if relinquishing a groan and Kyt surveys the room. The window on the left wall illuminates everything in orange-gold. A deteriorated cot has crumpled to the floor, the wooden frame cracked down the middle. Faded butterflies and flowers decorate the mildew-ridden blanket half strewn on the floor. Mold collects on the walls and roof in splotches of black. A layer of thin paper covering the wall curls downward from the ceiling, revealing the brown and yellow stains of water damage. Kyt’s eyes stop on a glimmer in the corner by the bed.

Eagerly, he saunters over, drops into a crouch, and brushes aside the dust and moss trying to claim the item. A long chain wends its way below the bed, the heart-shaped pendant grips his attention like a vise. It’s beautiful and like nothing he has ever seen before.

“Is this silver?” Kyt asks even though nobody is around to answer.

Lifting the necklace with him, Kyt gets off of the floor and heads back into the main part of the hut. Not once does he take his eyes away from the coruscating heart and the swinging chain, dirty with clumps of dust.

It is enchanting. Alluring. Enamoring.

It’s the sort of artifact he hopes to find each time he escapes to this abandoned, Old World city.

Kyt heads back the way he came, fisting the chain and heart so tight the metal nips at his palm. Motes of dust and pollen float through shafts of golden light that pour in from the windows. They swirl, churn in the wake of his brisk pace, as he moves into a tight stairwell.

Here, the air is damp, moist. Lingering droplets of water from yesterday’s storm fall from the hole in the roof high, high above. Mounds of grass and lichen cling to the hole’s edges. Dangling roots and vines writhe like snakes alongside ruined black wires whose ends are nothing more than fraying metal.

Descending four floors, Kyt returns to the ground. The bottom of the stairway likely isn’t its original end. Half of the last step is swallowed by dirt and grass which have crawled inside from the gaping hole in the wall.

Humidity hangs in the air, makes it heavy in Kyt’s lungs and chest as he clambers out of the ruins and into an open pathway. Some type of flat, sun-blanched rock carves its way through the Old World kingdom in a grid-like structure. It heads in even, straight lines in both directions, no matter what side of the tower somebody stands on. How anyone was able to find their way through this colossal empire, Kyt has no idea.

Each time he heads into the ruins, he barely finds his way out. Sometimes it’s on purpose. Some days he wanders deep into the heart of The Fallen’s home and begins spiraling outward, climbing into whatever spires he chooses. Those times, he never leaves the ruins quickly.

Unlike Roa, there are no rules in this village. There’s nobody to tell Kyt what to do, what to eat, and how to act. There is nothing here that makes him second-guess or feel bad about himself. In this dilapidated kingdom, Kyt is just…Kyt.

Exactly how he likes it. How he always wants it.

Sadly though, Elder Trik will lose his mind if Kyt doesn’t return, so Kyt glances in each direction, trying to notice any familiar sites. His gaze settles on the distant tree line atop the grassy hills surrounding the Old World ruins. This morning, he sprinted down those steep declines to get here, and now, in the blink of an eye, he needs to go back to reality. He needs to go back to the last place he wants to be.

His home.

Roa.

Kyt treks through the shadows cast by each sharp, crumbling tower. Stalks of emerald sprout from fissures in the wide, flat stone path leading out of the city, out of the empire that he can only imagine as it once was.

He’ll never see The Fallen’s way of life. He’ll never get to see a person from Old World—not until he’s dead anyway—and that’s also assuming the gods have allowed The Fallen into the Afterlife. There’s a good chance Kala’s wrath over how they treated the world incited Her to eradicate them completely. Though maybe, if She was truly so angry, She would’ve felled Old World kingdoms as well.

Who knows, maybe Kyt will be lucky after he dies and get to meet an Old Worlder. Maybe he can learn their language, their way of life, and hear how different Old World was compared to New World. He wonders if he’d feel at home there…in Old World.

The sun begins to vanish behind the horizon as Kyt crests the hill. A click sounds and the pendant in his palm shudders, breaks. Panic seizes Kyt as he unfurls his fingers, scared of seeing the damage he’s done.

But when his fingers splay and his palm faces the sky, he realizes the necklace isn’t broken at all. A minuscule hinge is on the left side of the heart, so he slips his nail into the seam on the right and lifts.

The pendant opens like a door and Kyt’s heart freezes for a singular breath.

Kyt’s staring face-to-face with a corpse. An Old Worlder.

A picture of a boy with pale green eyes, ice-blonde hair, and a smattering of freckles across his nose, sits inside the locket. The image isn’t worn, isn’t yellowed and muddied with age like everything else from Old World.

The boy is eerily perfect, familiar.

He shares Kyt’s features, which he himself has only glimpsed on the surface of water.

“Who are you?” Kyt manages to say around the lump in his throat. Tears prick the corners of his eyes, mutely trickle down his cheeks. “You’re more beautiful than I ever could’ve imagined.”

Wind rustles the leaves at his back, pinches at his cheeks with the warning of encroaching night.

Kyt swiftly closes the locket and slips it into a fold in his animal-skin tunic. He spins on his heels, ready to run back to Roa, but only so he can hide his newfound trinket from the others. And so he can go to bed and return to the ruins tomorrow.