Celestial Intervention, Book 1: Ania

The Burning Quilt

Kimba darted through the dark, moonlit town, his bare feet splattering in the wet mud, dodging past buildings and sprinting through blind alleyways.  He knew this run-down town like the back of his hand.  Hearing the Cygnus gang giving him chase made his heart pound,  but he was faster, more accustomed to the lifestyle.  He ran into the street, dodging the civilians and swerving the trading booths.  

Being pushed around by the gang since the day he was born and losing the only thing precious to him had finally pushed him off the edge.  He let himself ease to a slower pace, letting the brutes get closer so they wouldn’t lose his trail.  The matches he had stolen when he first started planning out the gangs demise were rubbing against the freshly lifted bag of shinings in his pocket, courtesy of Cygnus.

He came up to an abandoned stone building and burst through the half broken wooden door.  The room was windowless, with a stone stairway leading to the roof.  It was empty save for two large wooden chairs and a few small barrels of oil Kimba had planted that morning.  Setting two barrels aside, he emptied the contents of the others.  The black liquid poured smoothly, hardly leaving any of the small stone floor free of its grasp.

He grabbed the chairs and pushed them into position so that they blocked the door, then grabbed the still filled barrels before taking to the stairs with them clutched together between his arms and naked chest.  The roof was bare, with a large piece of it missing, the hole leading down to the room below.  He let his oil covered feet lead him to the front of the roof and looked out at the town, the light from the moon giving it a surreal setting.  

The buildings around him probably held two or three families in each, each work of stone not much bigger than the one he was standing on, and all equally cracked and worn down.  He looked below him at the worn but operational wagon he had placed at the front of the building, close to the door.  There were cries coming from a few alleys away and he gazed in their direction.  There wasn’t much time now.  Taking one of the remaining barrels, he hurried over to the top of the staircase and emptied the contents on the top step, watching it overflow onto the remaining steps below.  The yells were getting closer,  he knew there had to be half a dozen of them in the least.

Ironically, he had gotten his idea from what the gang had done to him not long ago.  They had taken his quilt.  They took it from his bruised and beaten body and burned half of it right before his astonished eyes and broken expression.  He remembered the overwhelming feeling of physical pain in his gut that came from watching it burn, the despair and steel anger.  The quilt was the last thing he rightfully owned in this world, the only ties he had to his fading sanity.  Sirrah had made it for him.  The only person he had ever known in his life.  

His sister had been a seamstress, one of the best on this small strip of hell they called the Rahn Islands.  She was his escape from it all.  A warm, comforting embrace in a corrupted land of sin.  He remembered her soft storm colored eyes, and her snow colored skin.  The way her long, jet black hair would fall on his face when she held him after he woke from his night terrors.  He longed for the way she would sing beautiful blue songs that whisked him away to the clouds, away from here.

She was the one who had gotten them a home with two other families. Kimba had never seen anything like the sort.  The other families were reclusive and only spoke to each other, but he didn’t mind.  After an entire life on the muddy streets, he finally had a place to call home.  He remembered days spent watching his sister make beautiful pieces of clothing, then helping her carry her pieces of art to the market so they could live another week.

One night she came home with a big white smile on her face, carrying the most beautiful array of silks he had ever seen.  He couldn’t imagine how she could have afforded something of such quality, and had been very excited to watch her work on it, to see what the beautiful outcome would be of such soft and lovely elements.