The Clancy Chronicles

Chapter 1

Efrain looked up at the sky, brush in hand, the piercing glare of the setting sun prickling at his clay coloured skin and baking his flesh like fire.

The murmur of passer-byers in the neighbourhood almost trumped the soft muttering in his mind as he massaged his temples. Angry yells were faint from behind the walls, inside his house. He wished they would shut up.

Fifteen, had he turned today. So many years since he had been brought into this cursed world. His brother, too, although he had long since been taken by the all-consuming rot of neglect. They hadn't wanted twins. A locked, empty room that stank of decay. The neighbours had never even known that there had been two. That was before they moved.

Turning back to his painting canvas, Efrain dipped his brush in a rich blue. Blue, a serene, beautiful, complex colour. The moment the soft bristles made contact with the white void of creative opportunity, Efrain knew exactly what he wished to depict. He allowed himself to dissolve into the canvas, getting lost in the swirls and patterns. Endless hues of calm stability and glimmering joy mingled and brought forth a depiction of freedom and discovery.

Before him stood a ship, tall and proud; steadfast as the once quiescent shades of blue turned into tempestuous tsunamis that thundered against the hull. Strength and power. Efrain longed to plant his feet on the deck, feel the rough wood of the wheel beneath his scarred hands as he commanded that beast of a ship through hurricanes, into the abyss.

He looked over his shoulder. That blazing summer sun had long since set and his parents and siblings had to have left the world for sleep hours earlier. Failing to illuminate the world within which his consciousness now dwelled, the golden glow of his lamp seemed dimmer than it had. Shadows grew longer and his breaths shorter as he grabbed his slightly damp painting and rushed inside. He wanted almost anything other than to return to his house, but longed to escape the clutches of night.

Stumbling groggily towards the kitchen as he sped past her up the first flight of stairs, Anissa (the third born and fourth eldest) was indeed not asleep. She eyed him wearily, and as Efrain met the first step of the second flight, the distant grinding of coffee beans played on his eardrums. He entered his room, narrowly missing the corner of his desk, and threw the light switch on his wall. Fluorescent bulbs whirred to life on his walls and basked the dark red room in a harsh white glow as he rested the painting on the painstakingly patterned wall.

His eyelids fought for control before he had climbed up to his bed, and as he lay down, he felt darkness clouding his vision almost instantaneously. He allowed his eyes to close for a moment, blocking out the buzzing lights which he left burning, and his warm duvet became uncomfortable and cold as death. The deep red of the inside of his eyelids darkened until nothing enclosed him and the world was missing from its place around him.

"Help..." a small voice squeaked from behind him. Efrain turned around in the darkness, and around him resisted an invisible body of water. It sloshed when he moved and slowed him when he went, but his hand did not take it. It froze his heart and entered his lungs so he cried, he sobbed and wailed. Not a single soul seemed to hear his cries. Not a single soul lived in the dark void around him.

Not a single soul existed.

Efrain was alone. And with him was a child, though he could only hear its snivels. A child that needed protecting, but a child that he could not find. The child ran from him and he wailed. The child screamed. The water shouted. The universe wept. And he was alone. Forever, would he be alone.