Dimokre Chronicles Book 1: Crossed Paths

Chapter 33 - To Trust the Fire Within

A few miles further down the tunnel, a bright stream of light drifted down from a grate. Kael stumbled under it, sloshing through the sewage to bask in the light. He looked up through the grate. He didn't see any people or buildings through the iron bars. He climbed up the ladder and pushed on the grate and slid it off.

Gravity felt so strong without the sludge holding his weight. It felt like the earth called him to lay on the ground. His chest heaved as he panted. Every muscle ached, and his wounds stung. The sunlight blanketed him with heat.

After his fairy healed him enough and the sunlight strengthened him enough, he sat himself up, his feet dangling into the opened grate above the sewer. Kael took a moment to look around, and his jaw clenched at what he saw.

The old kingdom looked like a battlefield with how barren and empty it was. The iron houses once beautifully forged and carved with images of dancing foxes and fire were picked apart. All that was left were sharp, rusty parts of the walls that had been anchored into the ground by the firefoxes who built them. The rest of the houses must have been torn down by devils for parts or weapons, and the parts still in the ground were too time-consuming for them to bother taking out.

A shabby, wooden blacksmith's shack stood in the center of one of the middle streets. Kael ventured into it cautiously. Old, rusty tools on high shelves and a desk held up in the air by metal chains to make room for all of the buckets and things below on the ground floor. There were two furnaces on either side made of stone and pots resting on top of them. It was clearly a basic workshop for devils to melt what they had torn down and stolen.

Kael wiped his eyes as he walked around, past the jags of metal sticking up from the ground where the houses' walls used to be. He walked past the charred areas where the gardens were. Large tree stumps and a branch or two with fungi growing over it graced the grounds. One or two of the stumps had huge cracks breaking apart the trunk's rings. The wildflowers were gone. All that was left of the ruby rose bushes was holes in the ground. All the water from the lakes were drained, leaving behind gaping pits in the ground with fish bones and sand resting on the bottom. The stone paths were chipped apart from age with no one to take care of it; the devils must've not wanted ordinary stone. Only a small section of one street was taken, and that was for the furnaces in the blacksmith's shack they left behind. Weeds grew relentlessly where they could, but it looked like the devils had salted the earth.

Kael's heart ached and burned with anger, examining what was left of his homeland. Everywhere he looked, he could see the death of his father's love for his homeland. He strolled past the houses into the palace's courtyard. The beautiful, silver fountain holding the fox statue that spat out water from its mouth that always glistened in the sunlight was now covered with mildew and rust. The six fountains surrounding the large one and the circular, stone path around that were long past working now, and some of the fountains were raided for silver and parts.

Kael's fox ears drooped down. He touched the main fountain's walls gently. He loved his home. Kael had been homesick for so long after the firefox kingdom was taken over and everyone fled. Now he could see how much his home had to go through without him. How it suffered just as much as Kael's family did. His knees buckled, and he fell on the ground. Tears fell from his eyes as his heart poured its feelings out.

Kael's knees pressed a stone down a few inches, but he didn't notice until a cylinder stone hut rose up from the ground underneath the main water fountain. The remnants of the fox statue now rested proudly on the hut structure.

Kael gaped at it, tense on his knees. The noises finished, and yet he eyed it still. When Kael stood up, he tripped on the loose tile. He caught himself, and that's when he realized some of the stones were a darker shade than the rest, including the one he pressed and tripped over.