chapter 1 (cont.)
in collaboration with @MokleyLaphicet quietly awaited an answer, but before he could get anything from the girl, the familiar sound of one of the guards trying to open the locked door ringed in his ears. Wait, locked?
"H-How did you get in here?" He hesitantly questioned, furrowing his brows when she enveloped his hand in her own. He was barely given a chance to do anything to get away as he was easily whisked away by Sunny, who pushed through the door that he was always too afraid to go through.
The boy was immediately assaulted by the sounds and sights of the surrounding buildings and shops. Ruby eyes darted from place to place, ears flattened tightly and eyes wide with a mixture of fear and wonder. The next thing he knew, he was pushed against a wall next to Sunny. Unable to hide the fear running through his veins, Laphicet began to tremble, holding his breath as he was told, praying to whoever's out there that the guards wouldn't notice to them.
Even after the footsteps faded away, Laphi kept a hand over his mouth and shut his eyes tightly.
❃
Sunny watched and listened until the footsteps faded deeper into the basement -- a swell of adrenaline told her it was time to go! She caught the tarot-reader's eyes with a grin, grabbed his hand again, rushed out and around the door --
-- straight into the belly of a second guard.
"Hey it's
you!" he bellowed.
Sunny shuffled and dodged his swinging meaty hands, and once again dragging her partner-in-crime behind her she bolted around behind him and sprinted around the white tower. The guard was in hot pursuit.
"Faster, faster!" Sunny shouted with a laugh, gleeful in the chase as if their lives and their freedom weren't in grave danger.
And there, finally she spotted it: the folded wooden ladder that connected to the landing high above, and a stairway that coiled around the outside of the smooth bright tower.
Sunny dropped his hand to take a running leap; she caught hold of the ladder, and her own weight and momentum brought it clattering down. It clicked into place just as the guard came wheezing around the bend.
"Alley-oop!" Sunny leaped onto the newly extended ladder and dragged her new friend up with her to the stairway landing. The guard was close; he closed his hands on the rungs of the ladder, reaching for and just missing Laphicet's heel. Sunny slammed her foot into the old fastener that held the ladder to the landing, and encouraged him to do the same.
Just when the guard might have climbed up with them, the ladder broke loose and sent him crashing to the ground.
Sunny laughed aloud at the way the guard squirmed and rolled under the broken piece of ladder that had fallen on him; she cast a grin at Laphicet and continued up the spiraling stairs.
The moon shone bright above them, a perfect crescent among a shimmer of stars that went on deep into the endless sky. They could see the marsh from here, and the pink dots of sleeping flamingos -- and the crisp lines of the jagged hills, and the subtle moonlit fire of the autumn forest.
Sunny scaled the tower, round and round along the stairs, which ended at an unlocked door. After listening for movement inside, she carefully pushed it open. Her eyes widened, and she stepped into the room high up in the tower.
At the center of the circular room was huge shining sculpture of the solar system; the enormous amber sun was lit up from within, and cast a warm glow on a chaotic mess of strewn parchment and paper.
"Where did the boy go?"A faint voice could be heard in the corner -- a metal thing that looked like a trumpet, connected to a pipe that led into the floor.
"He was with her, they ran toward the top!"Sunny ignored the voices -- instead she gravitated toward a mess of papers all drawn with different constellations she'd never seen before. She was on her knees, sifting through the drawings.
"Well get him back before someone notices!"The voices were coming from the basement.
On the far wall were more papers, but filled with a very different type of information. The names of each of Laphicet's customers were written there, with lists beneath each name:
Wants to be famous
Wants to overthrow the king
Wants to sabotage his competitor
Will do anything for money
Wants he share of the inheritance
Wants his parents dead
There were notes on every single reading Laphicet had ever done.
Many of the names and lists were crossed out. Those were the customers that had stopped coming a long time ago.
"Find another ladder and get up there!"Sunny had found a page that caught her attention, and she sat on the floor to stare at it by the light of the amber sun. It was a map of the sky with the stars connected in peculiar ways, and an image that she was sure was her home.
❃
Laphicet dared to open an eye, only to see Sunny smiling down at him. Barely able to suppress the blood rising to his cheeks, the boy looked away and took a deep breath, attempting to calm his nerves. As the same warmth from before caught his hand once more, the boy found himself being pulled around again, only to see Sunny run right into one of the guards meant to ensure that he stayed in his prison.
It took everything in the boy to be able to keep up with the girl, not even bothering to look back at the guard that was probably right on his tail. Instead, he kept his eyes on Sunny, who maintained a very mischievous attitude; it was charming to say the least.
As Sunny let go of his hand, Laphi immediately slowed down, watching in awe as the girl effortlessly moved to bring the latter down; it was almost like she was use to doing things like this... He followed the girl to the best of his ability, climbing the latter speedily, mostly in fear of getting caught.
Just as the both of them finally reached the stairway that coiled the white tower, Laphicet looked down and unconsciously grabbed hold of the back of Sunny's shirt right when she began kicking at what held the ladder to the stairway. Getting the idea, Laphicet gave the fastener one final kick before the ladder came tumbling backwards with the guard's weight adding momentum to the fall. A small smile, almost smirk, formed on the silver haired boy's face as he held in his laughter to instead follow his...his new friend.
As the two steadily climbed up the stairway, Laphicet honestly wished he could stop and take in the beautiful starry night sky. Just a few quick glances were enough to put butterflies in his stomach. He easily picked out constellations with his finger as well as how the moon, which he expected to look like cheese, bathed the ground in a radiating soft light.
While Sunny checked if anyone occupied the room the staircase ended at, Laphicet took the time to commit the stimuli to memory, assuming it would be the last time he would see it...
A warmer light quickly caught Laphicet's attention as he turned to face the now open door and walked inside after Sunny, quickly gravitating to the miniature sculpture in front of him; he did step on a few of the papers that littered the floor, but it didn't seem to bother him.
Feline ears twitched when the voice of the familiar guard reached him. Despite being worried of what they would do when he eventually had to come back down, Laphicet was too enraptured by the glowing sculpture, walking around it a few times as if expecting to find something different when he came back around.
He continued to do so until he almost bumped into Sunny, who had moved closer to the light to read a specific paper. He wanted to ask what was on it, but instead, he sat beside her and set his deck down, quickly drawing cards and placing them down in a similar fashion that the stars were connected on Sunny's paper.
Only waiting a few seconds, Laphicet's eyes dilated and dulled, as if in a trance and began to flip the cards over to reveal what they were.
The Fool.
The Magician.
The Star.
The Reversed Moon.
And finally...Judgement.
Laphicet stopped there, as the image and words began to form in his head.
"The Whistlehowl will fully reveal itself to you once you've followed the path of the stars and collected the "stars" that you've deemed worthy to carry out your wish. Judgement will...J-Judgement will..." Laphicet began to lose his words as his eyes returned back to normal and he slouched.
"S-Sorry, I got a little distracted...I hope that helped though..." He said before lowering his head in defeat.
"...S-Sorry." He repeated. Sunny had done so much for him, but he couldn't even fully answer her question.
Movement in the corner of her eye drew Sunny's attention away from the trove of constellations, to the tarot-reader who had begun placing cards in a deliberate pattern over the chaos of the papered floor. With intense interest she stepped out of his way and sat cross-legged among the sketched pages to stare at the cards as each was revealed. Only when his steady voice broke the silence did Sunny notice the peculiar look of his eyes -- like a trance, like he was communicating with something profound ... or it was communicating through him. She held her breath.
After he'd finished -- when he'd hung his head and stuttered an apology -- Sunny was quiet for a moment.
Slowly, a grin spread on her face.
"IT'S A MAP!" she shouted suddenly in a burst of unbridled excitement. In a whirlwind of realized answers she descended upon the piles of papers and flung them in the air, searching deeper among them. Finally she waved a single page triumphantly, a big smile on her face and her hands shaking with pure adrenaline, and she shoved the drawing of a constellation at his face.
"The Shambler's Dragon is a map and I can't just go straight to the eye can I?" she talked in a flurry of fast words, barely pausing to think. She flipped the page and stared at it for a split second before she charged across the room where a map of the continent hung on the wall. She held up the constellation against the map.
"I need to go to each point and find something! Only then! Only then!" She stopped and squinted at the page, then the map -- then the page again. Her jaw dropped. She started to bounce giddily.
"This is the first point!" She waved the page in the air, grinning at him.
"Right here! Where we're standing right now! Your reading, this map, this has got to be the first thing I need." With a triumphant laugh she grabbed him in a tight embrace and swung him around among the pages.
"Thank you thank you thank you thank you!"Once she had calmed a little, Sunny stepped back, jamming the paper and a few others into her pocket, and moved away some more of the papers to reveal a small chest full of fruit, biscuits and dried meats. She laughed aloud at their luck, grabbed a canteen out of the chest and gulped down some of the wine before handing it off to him.
"Time to celebrate!"❃
Laphicet had expected to receive some kind of scolding or a look of disappointment. However, he was given quite the opposite, as he looked up after said girl's burst of excitement, his own eyes wide with surprise. He could only stare and attempt to grab the flurrying papers Sunny was haphazardly throwing around.
Some of these papers were filled with familiar names and questions that he just couldn't lie about. Each name brought back a sour memory of the burns and scars his parents had given him, he unconsciously running his free hand over the clothed burn or scar each name pertained to. Slowly placing his small collection of papers down, Laphicet let Sunny's words go in one ear and out the other, flinching back a bit whenever she got too close. It wasn't like any of this would pertain to him when once she was gone. Once she wasn't there to protect him from the fury of the guards still trying to reach the top of the tower. Once she wasn't there to show her anymore of the outside world...
He lowered his gaze for a brief moment, as if he was about to pick up his tarot cards, which were sifted underneath the papers, but before he could do so, Laphicet's body was hoisted up into the air by an overexcited Sunny.
"Wh-Whoa!" The child gasped as he was enveloped in a warm hug, singing a mantra of "thank you"s that warmed the boy's heart.
This lasted only for a few seconds as Sunny finally let him go and moved back to the papers scattered on the floor. Laphicet could only keep quiet as their eyes landed upon a chest of goodies for the both of them. The child slowly sat back down where he stood and watched the girl take a quick swig out of the wine canteen before handing it to him, which he took with shaky hands. He stared at the container with sad eyes before looking back at Sunny.
"D-Does that mean you're gonna leave now?" He asked, mostly because he wanted to gauge how much time he had before he received his punishment. He tried not to show it in his face, but the tears forming in his eyes were a dead giveaway.
"You bet!" Sunny piped with a big grin. She pulled the crumpled page from her pocket again and traced the line of Shambler's Dragon.
"Looks like I gotta head northeast from here, and there'll be something I need somewhere around Occurro. I've only heard of that town, but there are stories of walking buildings and the rivers go in corkscrews! I'd bet it's something amazing."The tarot-reader's tears hadn't gone unnoticed. Neither had the obvious implications that his life here was a prison -- that every move he made had been watched and dictated, that the guards were there not only to keep the riffraff out, but to ensure he never saw the light of day. It was no life for someone as good-hearted and talented as him. That's why she wasn't going to give him the chance to overthink a very important decision -- one that he'd made the moment he stepped out into the moonlight, though he might not have realized it.
Sunny had just stuffed more handfuls of food in her pockets when a clattering and voices sounded outside; the guards had found a ladder, and were making their noisy way up the spiraling stairway to apprehend the trespasser.
"C'mon hurry!" Sunny grabbed his hand again and dragged him quickly to a ladder that stretched up to a trap door in the ceiling. She clambered up, and the trap door opened with a squeak and a bang to admit her to the starlit top of the tower.
The view was stunning and went on forever; the jagged hills in the distance, the reverse waterfalls in the west, the flickering green and blue lights along the horizon to the north, the floating boulders and islands like dark dots in the south. But what she was most interested in was the small herd of impossibly tall beasts that glinted and walked toward them from the marsh; they had stick-legs as tall as the tower itself, with tawny striped fur and graceful necks. A small white light dangled from an antenna on their foreheads, beckoning curious sky-fishes into their waiting mouths. They moved silently and slowly, but with each slow stride they covered an incredible distance.
Sunny went to the edge of the tower, cupped her hands around her mouth and sounded a long, high-pitched howl that echoed across the kingdom. After a moment, a couple of the long-legged beasts responded with the same sound, and the group began to move directly toward the tower.
"Here comes our ride!" Sunny shouted, grinning at the tarot-reader -- and she climbed up on top of the stone wall, precarious on the edge of a very long drop.
The closed trap-door began to rumble and bang; the guards would get it open soon, and they wouldn't be happy.
"If I'm gonna be a great legendary vagrant," Sunny went on, looking out over the moonlit landscape,
"I'm gonna need a coterie. I'll only settle for the best crew -- the very best, most amazing, most legendary people I can possibly find, who will be the greatest asset in the journey for the stars."She looked back and down to him with a smile, just as one of the stilt-striders got close to the tower, its tawny back almost level with the lip of the wall she stood on. Sunny reached down to Laphicet with an open hand, just as the trap-door began to bang and crack loudly.
"So come on! All ya gotta do --" she grinned,
"-- is tell me your name. And hold on tight!"❃
Laphicet sighed before closing his eyes. As he expected, Sunny already had plans to move on from his lonely little tower.
"O-Oh..." The boy's voice cracked, and as a way to hide it, the silver haired boy took a quick gulp of the wine handed over to him. He soon opened his eyes to the sight of Sunny shoving as much food as she could into her pockets. It was then that the boy took the time to pick up his cards and make sure they weren't damaged by Sunny's fit of excitement.
Once he had picked up the Fool card, the sound of heavy footsteps became extremely prominent. Laphicet clutched his tarot cards with one hand as Sunny proceeded to drag him around once again. She still wanted him to escape with her? But, all he did was just slow her down. Not to mention that leaving him there would almost guarantee her safety and survival. So...why?
Laphicet thought of multiple possibilities, but they ultimately drew a blank as he was given a chance to go back outside, and there was no way he was going to pass up on that.
Now standing on the very top of the tower, the child could only gape in awe as they were now even closer to the starry night sky he'd always dreamed about seeing. He barely had the control to tear his eyes away from the sky as he looked along the horizon, only to be greeted with dazzling colored lights, floating boulders, and grassy hills.
It was pretty hard to miss the large striped beasts walking across the marsh and towards them with ease, but when Laphi's eyes fell upon them, a quiet gasp escaped his lips and he moved over to grab hold of Sunny. He moved when she did, giving her a questioning look when she began screeching utter nonsense. A bit too afraid to ask what she was doing, Laphicet kept quiet and watched at the girl's side to see what the howling was all about.
Almost the exact same sound was produced by the striped beasts as they were now heading straight for the tower. Laphicet was now clutching his tarot cards with both hands as his worry was getting the better of him. He didn't have to wait long to hear what Sunny's plan was, and that, coupled with the heavy banging from the guards on the floor below and the idea of his parents hearing all of this happen to him, it only made the child even more nervous for what was to come. And despite the danger she was putting herself in, Sunny continued to smile at him...
She had everything he didn't. A dream. A personality. And a drive to achieve that dream. Her words hit the boy hard, she wanted him to go with her as a part of her very best, most amazing, most legendary group. Despite only just meeting each other, Sunny had so much praise and love to shower him with...she made him feel far more important than anything else on this planet, and Laphicet believed every word of it.
She wanted him to go with her. And the only thing she wanted din return was...his name? That's right...Laphicet hadn't even introduced himself yet.
The trap door shook with intense force, causing Laphicet to jump. Was he willing to leave his parents and join some stranger on an adventure he wasn't sure he was fit for?
With his drive to see the outside world with his own eyes, the child reached out and took the girl's hand tightly.
"L-Laphicet! Laphicet Kyrielight!" He shouted out with all his might. He had made his choice, knowing there was no turning back after this.
The trap door burst open in a shower of splinters.
Sunny yanked Laphicet up onto the wall with her.
The two guards crawled, shouting, out of the trap door.
"Stop right there!"
"Don't move!"
"You're in big trouble!"
With a whoop of joy, Sunny held Laphicet close and together they dropped off the edge --
-- and onto the coarse bony back of a confused stilt-strider.
"Let's go! Go go go!" Sunny shouted.
The stilt strider craned its long neck, huffed loudly in annoyance at the shouts and jabbering of the two guards, and turned with a step away from the tower. From the strider's back the tower seemed to rush away from them, as if the landscape itself were moving under them, as the sweet-scented wind swirled by. The fur they sat on was long and rough and warm, rocking gently from side to side as each impossibly long step took them closer to the herd -- and to the bright Whistlehowl star shining ahead.
Sunny twisted back to thumb her nose at the raging guards, who now looked like nothing more than little flailing monkeys atop the receding tower. It seemed so insignificant now -- though it had been the entirety of Laphicet's world. She cast a grin to the tarot-reader.
"Welcome aboard, Laphicet Kyrielight!"
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