The Fire Queen

Chapter 8

I used to enjoy being by myself out in the wilderness of the Northlands, but after returning from the capital city all I ever felt when I went off on my own was lonely. It had never occurred to me before how alone I was. I'd spent so much time either training, reading or paying close attention to the projects that were being undertaken to develop the settlement that I had not made any meaningful relationships with any of the other residents of the settlement. Strangely, the more alone I felt the more I wanted to be alone and the more I sought out solitude. The people in the settlement were almost like strangers to me, but that did nothing to lessen the horror of returning to the settlement and finding them all massacred.

Looking back, I can still remember the events of that day with perfect clarity. Lucy, Anbu and I had been gone from the settlement for three weeks. We had pushed further into the Northlands than we ever had before; after reaching the northernmost Okwari village we kept travelling for another week until we reached Lake Huron, the lake that fed the river Amur, the primary water source for the entire kingdom. We stayed at the lake for three days, and it was there that I was finally able to achieve some inner peace having spent weeks being tormented by my confusion about my feelings for Uraia.

I wasn't able to tell from a distance that something had happened at the settlement. When I was returning and the settlement first came into view it looked like everything was normal, but the closer I got the more I was able to see that something wasn't right. I became worried and had Lucy speed up, and soon it became clear to me that some kind of disaster had befallen the settlement. The full scale of the massacre that had occurred revealed itself to me when I entered the settlement. The structures were all burned and destroyed, and the people had all been killed. I walked through the settlement in a state of shock and only saw more of the same. The rotten smell of death was thick, and the ashes that had been left behind by the fires were being kicked up and blown about by the wind. There was nothing left, nothing but silence. In my disbelief I was unable to process my surroundings. I walked around the settlement in a daze trying to make sense of what I was looking at until it struck me that there was something specific that I should have been doing. My father! I ran to where our dwelling was and found it a charred ruin like everything else. I removed the burnt timbers from the inside of the stone walls but found no body inside. Manically I went back outside and started checking the bodies on the floor to see if one of them was him. Most of the bodies were caked in coagulated blood from having been run through with a sword or a spear; many had arrows sticking out of them, some were decapitated, some were burnt beyond recognition. I checked body after body after body in search of him until eventually I couldn't take looking closely at dead bodies anymore and stopped.

I found a rock and sat on it and let the full horror of what I had returned to wash over me. Everybody from the settlement was dead, all eight hundred of them. This was the queen's doing. Only the kingdom had the manpower to do something like this, but why? Try as I might with the few thoughts that I was able to stitch together I couldn't begin to fathom why they would do this.

I lost track of time sitting on that rock. The horror of everything around me was too much; the grief, the devastation, the disbelief, the anger, all of these emotions were more than I could bear and they kept me sitting on that rock with no apprehension of the passing of time. Anbu and Lucy didn't leave my side the whole time that I sat there. I could feel their presence and nothing else until, after an indeterminate amount of time, I heard Uraia's voice.

"Alegra! Alegra!"

It was when I felt her arms around me that I was jolted out of my daze.

"Are you alright? Are you alright?" She rushed over to me and asked frantically.

"They're dead, they're all dead, everybody's dead," I remember saying before I succumbed to tears and screams and needed to be wrapped in Uraia's arms again.

Once I was reasonably composed Uraia put me on the back of Lucy and led us away from the settlement. She took me to her father's village and put me down in one of the huts to rest.

"No, please, don't leave me alone!" I said to her after she'd put me down, clinging to her arm.

"I'm not going anywhere."

I fell asleep in Uraia's arms and slept for over a day. When I awoke Anbu was there next to me but Uraia was gone. For some reason I was scared to leave the hut and stayed inside until Uraia came in to check on me. I went outside with her and she brought food for us both. While we ate she told me that she explained the situation to her father and that he had gotten together men from all of the villages and they had gone to the settlement and buried the bodies and dealt with the destruction that had been left behind from the massacre.

"The queen did it; I don't know why she did it, but it was her, I'm sure of it," I said to Uraia.

"My father told me about the military campaigns against our people when the kingdom was expanding northward, and he told me that one of the tactics they used to use was to encircle a village in a wide diameter and then move in and attack; from what I saw at the settlement it looks like they did the same thing, so you're probably right."

I vowed then and there that somehow I would find a way to exact vengeance upon the queen one day for what she done to us.

I stayed on at the village for a few weeks. Everybody was nice to me and the chief told me that I could stay and make the village my new home. I appreciated his kindness and that of everybody in the village but I couldn't stay. My place wasn't among the Okwari; I needed to find a place for myself. That place, I believed, was with Uraia and the bandits. I didn't ask Uraia if it was okay for me to come with her; when she left the village to return to the capital city I followed her from a distance with Lucy and Anbu and when I caught up with her I simply said to her "I'm coming with you."