GEKOOOOOOS!!

I thought about my mother a lot back then. Maybe I thought about her more than I should.

I missed her as if she was the sun itself vanished from the sky on a bright summer morning. She’d been there the entirety of my early childhood. I suppose our first buyer must have thought it cruel to separate us, but I highly doubt that; he didn’t consider much else to be too cruel for us, especially not my mother.

I spent a lot of nights without her when I was young. She never spoke about the blood. She would only pull me into her arms in the small hours of dawn, and ask me if it was okay if she cried. I never said no; after all, she never said no when I asked, unless we were in front of the master.

Most nights, we would return to our little hut on the edge of the property together where we slept and where we ate. After the head of the house was asleep, she would recline against the side of our meager fireplace, repairing the small tears in her apron—the one with the stain on it. She'd told me it was just spilled wine; I wasn’t sure I believed her, even then.

On those nights, a much younger me would clamber up onto her legs, eager for even the smallest taste of her vibrant words. Curling up against her chest had always been my favorite place to be, warm and safe from the outside world.

“Amma?” I’d ask, “Can you talk tonight?”

Her soft brown eyes would smile down at me, smudged with hurt and quiet love. She would set aside her sewing, and she would pull me in close. Her laugh was many years older than her face, the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes teasing me as she ruffled my hair.

“What are you looking for tonight, Mirre?” She would ask me—using the term of endearment I loosely remembered from the northern island we had called our home before the ships came. Her voice was gentle as her hands as she’d hold my face, forehead pressed against hers in the only time we were allowed to rest.

And more often than not, my answer would be, “Can you tell me a story?”

She would laugh again and prop me upright on her leg, her curls tangling in my small horns for a moment as she’d lean down to whisper to me.

“Yes, but what kind, Jakkon?”

It always ended up being about the island; about how my father had died, and about the siblings I never got to meet. She told me it was important to remember these things, no matter how sad, to teach us a special lesson. She told me she could never be as sad as that day, so every morning forward would look ten times as bright.

Mirre, she called me, she told me it was also the word for blood money—what a man would pay when he murdered his brother. It was a. Ironic definition, to mean two very contradictory things. She said she called me this even with the negative connotation because every tragedy left behind a treasure for another to find, and I was the payment she’d kept for enduring that tragedy.

We lived many years in that estate. Those firelit stories are the kindest memory I have from that era of my life. Many are of my mother shielding me from the whip our masters used to punish mistakes, or the bruises she would find stinging on my cheeks when I shouted at them for hurting her. The memory I hate the most, however, came on the coldest winter I can remember.

It was the type of winter where the snow turned the sky grey, and the air itself white, like a particularly nasty cloud of fog that bit your skin red until you could get back inside.

The Master had just returned from a business trip that day. In the cold, my mother, due to her rigorous work, had grown weak; he summoned her that evening when the ravenous blizzard was thickest. She ruffled my hair and told me not to worry as I clung to her skirt for dear life by the fire. She promised me she’d tell me another story when she got back

The next time I saw her, there was a hole the size of my fist caved into the side of her skull. I couldn’t look away from the red stain in the carpet creeping outward from her corpse like a blooming flower.

I don’t know what they did with her body; after all, slaves don’t get to be buried.

I made my lethal decision that first sleepless night after they’d taken her away, and that was the night I dug my own grave. If my mother’s body wasn’t going to be buried, then neither would her memory, nor the crimes of the man who’d murdered her. Mirre can be paid many different ways after all; if someone won’t pay for a death in coin, blood for blood still makes an equivalent exchange.

Mother always told me some wounds can hurt worse than flesh. Every person has a switch, and I chose to spill the blood of his pride in wine.

Later in the night, I spent hours of preparation on exactly that. I stood in his sitting room, next to the rack of bottles, holding a particularly expensive-looking one in my right hand. He always used it to show off to guests. I’d tried the stuff before, testing for poison; I hadn’t much liked it. But right then, all I cared to taste was the hot red iron he owed me, and maybe the fire in my chest could be a good enough substitute; especially if it made him angry enough to get rid of me just like they did to her. Maybe I'd find her out there, just beyond the fog.

And so I went to work smashing every single bottle but three onto the floor. I spent hours of my life furiously kicking shards of glass and making sure I’d thoroughly stained everything in that goddamn perfect sitting room. I kept one for myself to make sure he knew I'd done it, one for my mother, to shatter at his feet when he found me, and one more for his face.

It felt nice, pleasant even to spite the terrible taste; I knew I'd ruined myself the moment I began to have fun with it. I can't tell you how long I would spend there, flooding my head with dreamy visions like cotton candy and wool, as if I were one of the baby goats my mother would wrap in a blanket for their first night of life.

I suppose it's a given I don't remember much else; what I do remember, however, was the spike of pain bursting through my skull like lightning, and the haziness of being shoved onto a cart and chained to a wall.

I never saw the estate again.

In the seven blurry years that followed, I passed hands more than a dozen times like a broken doll that didn't hold much more than sentimental value. I stole, I shouted, I did things I knew my mother wouldn’t have been proud of, and I did it all in some desperate hopeless attempt at escape. Sometimes, I wished they'd get bored of me and just throw me out to rot.

Even so, the market became a sort of home to me. By the time I was thirteen, I remember nothing much more than tending the goats in the field as if I were one of them. I remember a whip on my back my mother could no longer protect me from. I remember hot blood soaking into my torn shirt, agony like I'd never dreamed, fire catching my flesh like knives and flowers blooming in my open wounds.

Fourteen was the year I met the man whom I would belong to for the rest of the seasons.

I became his pack mule, his door mat, his personal assistant. He tried to sell me off, but I screamed every time he put me on stage. I just screamed louder when he hit me. After that, I think it was the muzzle that put people off, or maybe it was the handcuffs.

But either way, that's how I sat that day, in a large cage—like an oversized dog kennel—with a few others to be humiliated.

By all means, it was an ordinary day in the market—cold, loud, caked in sweat and dirt, quietly watching patrons trade things like foreign fruits, spices, or the occasional creature. Every time cattle or birds were traded I noticed scared eyes, like mine, searching for help. This part of the market was mostly for animals.

The thing unusual about this day, however, was the rumbling; it came around two hours past noon, when the stones around us began to warm for the hottest hour of the day—which, on that day in particular, would have been only mildly more pleasant than being dipped headfirst into a frozen lake.

Next came the shouting. It was distant at first, but as it grew closer, those inside the cages and out began to shift.

I’d only managed to turn my head halfway before an intensely loud crash and a whoop came from behind me. A fruit that almost looked like a cross between a tomato and a melon had hit the man who owned me square in the face. He reeled back with a yell and I had to stifle a frightened giggle in response. Following the fruit, a massive vine thick in diameter as my torso slammed into him and dragged him out of my sight.

Chaos ensued.

Cattle cried out, birds flapped furiously against the bars of their cages, and others like me seemed panicked, confused, and excited all at once. Fruit splattered everywhere, flung through the air by wildly thrashing tree branches and the hands of strangers.

The chaos grew louder and louder by the second, nobody knew who was in danger and who wasn’t, whether a fight had broken out, whether we were being rescued or killed; all we knew was that we were in the thick of it, trapped in chains. In that moment, I remember closing my eyes. I didn’t want to die looking at my predator.

Soon enough however, they came for us with a disastrous screeching of metal. The shouting faded into the distance a little, and my vision turned red as sunlight refracted through my skin.

I braced for pain; yet there was nothing, only the sudden motion of my cellmates scrambling, and the heavy fragrance of lilacs settling over me like a cloud of smoke, stifling me.

I opened one eye.

In front of me, would stand a girl, no older than fifteen, grinning as wide as I’d ever seen someone grin, stained in splotches of paint and fruit pulp. She threw her hands above her head, excitement lacing every inch of her voice, “Hiya, friend!”

The flinch was involuntary.

Vines, thick with budding lilacs and lilies covered the inside of the cage, ripping the chains out of their anchors, and flooding the inside with flowers and brilliant green. Shattered pieces of iron bar scattered the floor at her feet, the door itself bent open in a wide diamond. The girl in front of me held a little green stone in one hand, faintly pulsing with dim light, and wore a bright purple dress the color of the flowers decorating her tight black mane of curls. Her skin was dark, much darker than was common this far north, and it would be a crime to describe her as anything other than dazzlingly pretty, backed by sunlight and still mostly smiling, though now she looked more puzzled than anything.

At once, I realized I was staring at my savior.

She put her hands on her hips, “Well? Are you okay there? Aren’t you going to run? I busted the door off for you, silly!”

I could only stare at her for the longest time, her bright smile like a heavy weight on my chest. I tried to speak, but the muzzle locked out most of the noise, so instead of, ‘Is this real?’ like I’d intended, all that came out was: “Mmnsh shmrr—”

I stopped, suddenly remembering my predicament, and stared back up at her, making as much noise as my locked mouth could, clawing at the muzzle with my cuffed hands and pointing to the clamps holding it securely onto my horns. Her eyes widened in an instant and before I could even comprehend what was happening, she'd grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the safety of the cage and into the bright insanity outside. I wasn't ready, and for a moment I considered turning around and bolting back into my prison where it was safer.

Instead, I held my ground, trembling, and for a moment, I felt like that baby goat again, unsteady on my hooves and facing a new world I knew nothing about. The girl holding my hand whirled around, a mass of colors, shouting, bright lights, and chaos stampeding behind her. She grinned, like the sun folding over leaves and turning the petals of every flower in the vicinity toward her face. I felt like a grubby stain in the dirt next to her; almost in spite of my feelings, there was a bounce in her step as she led me into a lazier spot of the raging storm that had become of the destroyed market.

As we stopped, a girl in red bolted past, hopping up nimbly through branches of a tree that grew to reach her altitude. Her flared pants looked to be made entirely of petals, her face sharper than my savior's, but alight with the same chaotic joy. Her long black curls were looser than the other, held out of her face by two braids and the thorny rose branches that stuck out of her head like a bristling crown of hostility, “Found yourself a new friend, Ev?”

Ev—whom I assumed must be the girl holding my hand—smiled, “If he wants to be! Where’s Ma?”

The girl in red sprang off the tree, catching herself with a vine that unfurled from her fingers, "A few streets east! Now, I'm going to go chase down some of those jackasses with the whips before they get away!”

I watched her go in wonder, staring like someone who'd never seen a mage a day in his life. I was pretty sure my mouth would have been hanging open if not for the iron clamping it shut.

“C'mon! We're gonna go get that ugly thing off your face!” The purple girl squeezed my hand reassuringly and took off running at a pace I struggled to keep up with, still attached to her by the palm.

We passed streets in a blur of colors like a dazzling hurricane of objects I couldn’t even begin to recognize if I’d tried.

All the way through the winding alleyways, my new friend chattered about her excitement and spiraled off rhetorical questions as if I were her new favorite thing in the world. It made all the insanity around us disappear as I thought up answers to her questions I couldn’t answer. It was like a gate had been opened and I were seeing a whole new world—one with glittering golden light and a road paved in polished silver and inlaid with amethysts cut in the shape of stars as if the night sky itself were smiling at me.

I’d chased vain mirages of freedom before, earning myself fragmentary peace in the dissociation. This was the first time it felt real, like I had a chance to be someone other than a dog under someone’s heel. The giddiness was too good to be true; I felt like an animal that was about to be put down.

I snapped out of it when she led me up to a woman dressed entirely in blue, ferns trailing down her plaited hair. I almost thought I was looking at a goddess of blessings.

I didn’t notice my savior had begun speaking with her until the eyes of the older woman were on me, a deep shade of onyx black that scanned my face gently as the moon on a winter evening. After a moment of study, her tender hands descended toward me; I couldn’t even muster the resistance to flinch, so I just closed my eyes and waited.

“It’s alright, little one,” she whispered, a voice as soft and smooth as the delicate petals of the lilies my mother had loved. Her icy fingers trailed the exposed side of my face, chilling my skin as she slipped her nails beneath the muzzle. I kept my eyes closed. The metal squirmed over my face for a moment in a disturbing motion like a pulsating earthworm before a soft click cleared the pressure and weight from the root of my horns.

For a moment, I fumbled to find my voice as I gasped a weak, “Thank you-”

“You’re very welcome.”

I only managed a small nod, rubbing the red indent in my cheek as the purple girl grabbed my other hand, shaking it vigorously, “Hi again! My name is Eveny! What’s yours? No, no, hold on! Wait! Let me guess!”

I blinked as she paced back and forth, thinking intensely.

“Okay, I give up! I can’t think of anything other than snails. What’s your name, for real this time?”

For a second, all I could do was open and close my mouth like a bewildered fish, “I- snails?”

“Yeah! They’re adorable! Wait, your name’s not really snails though, is it?”

“N-no, sorry, it’s Jakkon. Uh, you can call me Jak if you like…”

The smile she rewarded me with almost knocked me off my feet. I’d never had anyone smile at me like that before. My mother’s smiles had always been softly warm, like a blanket; in comparison, *this* was a whole fireball. I cleared my throat in an attempt to regain my composure, “It’s lovely to meet you, miss.”

Her face twisted out of the smile, “Blegh, please don’t call me miss. You’re free to do what you want now! And it’s nice to meet you too, Jak!”

“You saved me…”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess I did! Did I look cool?”

I couldn’t help laughing, “Yeah! You did! Thanks… by the way.”

“No problem! Happy to help!”

Her mother, watching the freed people take fruit from the trees she’d grown, glanced back for a moment, “You don’t belong in a cage, Jakkon,”

Eveny realized suddenly what was happening and frowned, “She’s right though! You’re not an animal!”

I don’t know if either of them knew what they’d done to me, standing there breathlessly.

I followed them until they boarded their cart to return home. Eveny and Rose didn’t seem to notice me waiting behind it as their mother surveyed it for damage.

Her head lifted as she noticed me, “Aren’t you going to go home, little Satyr?”

I simply shook my head.

“Why not? Don’t you have anyone to go with? Friends? What about parents?”

“I… uhm… neither of those, miss. I came to… to ask if you…” I looked down at my shuffling hooves, too scared of the answer to finish my question.

She gave me one anyway: “You may come with us if you wish. We live in a small town in the east of Vynduris called Lover’s Crossing. I’m sure we can find a home for you there.”

I’d never been happier to accept an offer in my life.

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