Chapters of Fate, Book One: Alec

Chapter Two

They left early the next morning, stopping only to say farewell to Alice. She had pulled him close to her, trying not to cry. "You're a good young man," she'd said bravely. "Be safe."

Alec hated leaving Alice. When Rosseau had been occupied with his duties, Alice had taken care of Alec up until he was sent to Touren for school. Where Rosseau was the greatest dad he could have asked for, Alice was the greatest mom. She had selflessly taken care of him, feeding him and playing with him whenever she had a spare moment. Her husband, Edward, had wrestled playfully with him when he returned from his assignments as a castle courier. Alice had been a great light in his young life.

That light was suffering now. Alice was fraught with worry. Edward had been gone for days longer than he should have been, having been sent to Touren to deliver to the priest a correspondence between himself and the high priest of Tour. Between her missing husband and the missing children in Touren, Alice was struggling to keep a smile on her face. And now Alec was leaving, too. It seemed singularly cruel to him, to abandon Alice like this.

As they left the city gates, Alec made a silent promise: he would find Edward, and he would return her to Alice. Monsters or no.

The journey to Touren had two parts: first, they had to make their way north, to the banks of the Serket Channel that divided the kingdom's territory in half. On the southwest bank of the channel was the entrance to the Passage, an underground tunnel system had been constructed, allowing people to make their way from Tour to Touren without braving the rapid waters of the Serket. Alec had made the journey through those tunnels multiple times, every time he went to and from Touren to school. They were a great place to practice his skill, but he still wasn't entirely fond of them.

Once they made it through the tunnels, the journey to Touren was an easy trek through flat grasslands. When the weather was nice, the children of Touren played amidst the soft grasses when they weren't in school. Alec himself had run across those grassesas a child, laughing with his classmates as they raced along. The memory made him smile.

It took two hours for Alec and Rosseau to make it to the southwestern bank. The Serket Channel was roaring, as Alec had known it would. Such was the pace of the channel that only massive, well-traveled merchant boats could navigate it's waters. It made the Passage all the more vital to the people of Tour.

Before they descended, Alec took a moment to stand at the banks of the Serket, gazing over the land in front of him. It felt odd to be returning to Touren, not as a student but as a young man searching for his missing classmates. As worried as he was about Wallace and Max, he couldn't entirely suppress the feeling of excitement at his newfound role.

"Son," Rossea called from the tunnel entrance, "we must move on. I hope to be in Touren by the noon hour."

With one last glance at the water, Alec turned and hurried over to where his dad stood. Together, they descended the stone steps into a tunnel dimly lit by braziers, made entirely of dug-out earth and rock. There were two guards assigned to keep the dismal tunnels partolled and the braziers lit, and both of them were making rounds as Alec and Rosseau made their way through, gazes solemn and grim. It wasn't pleasant, keeping the Passage, but it was their sworn duty, and they were obedient in it.

Despite the presence of the guards, the Passage still served as home to monsters, as did any location where humans themselves did not live. Alec and Rosseau had made it halfway through the passage when the first creatures struck.

Rosseau was the first one to notice: leaking from a small crevice in the nearby rocks was a thick, purple goo. Next to it, a grotesquely enlarged beetle, roughly the size of a small, hunched-over child, was crouched staring at the two of them, pincers glinting in the dim brazier light. By this point, Alec had also seen them, and as he reached for his knives, the ball of purple slime suddenly launched forth, going straight towards Rosseau. Undoubtedly, the creature had assumed it was taking them unawares.