Aden had come a long way. This was the path, he thought. The road to memory. Somehow, some way, Aden knew how to drive. Abel let him borrow his old pickup truck that could barely even brake. He had remembered, when the white dog gazed at his eyes during the family’s ritual. There was a flash in it. Some kind of map. The next step. That was all he had to go on as he left the family and the yellow house. As he left the forest. He was now in Laguna, as the signs read. And he knew nothing but the map in his head. Just a map. And a vision. A cave. Inside it, a temple. Abel had given him enough food for the travel. And clothes, too. Along with his final promise. “Continue the path,” Abel had said. “You will reach the promise.” Those were the last words. That was the end of Aden’s time in the forest. He had left the sanctuary. And now the path had led him elsewhere. Beyond. Specifically, the Kadlum. His guide was nothing but a dog. Soundless and strict. The white, r

“So,” Alice said. Her arms crossed protectively around her as she stood in the orange-kissed, over-natured room of sad quiet and ill meditation. Everyone looked at her and waited. In the messed-up silence, she was the beacon of either mercy, or death. She was lady justice if lady justice had a gun and pointed wherever she liked. “He’s really lost his frickin’ brain, huh?”“How many times do I have to tell you?” Ramu said. Her voice was like an old, crackling radio sitting dignifiedly inside the room. She was in that phase for old women where everything they said had to be carefully listened to. She grunted. Her sound of peace and thinking was an ugly and unwelcome hum in the otherwise tranquil space. “No twenty-year-old could react to poison like that,” she said. “Unless the guy’s been sleeping all his life.”Thirty minutes ago, Aden ate the fruit everyone thought would kill him. Now

“Matthew Palad,” Miko spoke; his voice being the prime resonance that was guiding the reflections inside the minds of the three others that were with him. He stood before Alice, Aden, and Lyle within the walls of a softly-lit claustrophobia that called itself a room. Villa Urrutia had a few sequestered spaces hidden that ran secretly alongside the walls and corridors—undecorated and left with nothing but faint radiances from the ceiling that weakly glowed and held onto the tense, peach walls. Their only purpose was to isolate the Kadlum’s ‘higher circle’ for a moment, from the rest of the listening world, where they could talk about the most esoteric matters that only those closest to a surviving, fallen god are supposed to know and understand. Before, that was Dante, Alice, Miko, and Lyle. Now it was just Alice, Miko, Lyle, and Aden—who had just recently, and so dramatically, joined the gang… and now its heads. Even the rest of the K

“Wait, what?” Lyle wheezed through his words, his voice chiming with shock and disbelief, as his confused eyes shot to Miko, to the body, then to Miko again. He walked towards Miko and the body again, now leaning forward to take a better look at the strangled, motionless man. “You gotta be kidding me… You gotta be kidding me…”Miko looked up, turned his head towards Lyle, whose face was painted with realization and denial. His eyes crawled across the shrubbery around them as he tried to anticipate what could be ahead. “Our guys never saw this one…” whispered Miko.“It could just be one guy, man,” debated Lyle, his hands on his hips as he raised an eyebrow and waited for Miko to answer. “The birang never showed this to me, either. This place is clean. That settlement is clean,” Lyle said. He was sure.“Guess we’re about to find out…” Aden’s voi

There was endless cracking. The sound of the total fire eating everything and everyone around him. Aden was on his back as he swayed his head from left to right, frantically, at the red devourment around him. His mind snapped lost. And his eyes shot everywhere. His heart tried to thump and pace as fast as the fire crackled and seized control of all that moved and all that stood still around him.The soldiers, now victims, ran past him helplessly with their faces void of any hope that should have been left. But no. Only fire. Only flames were with them, now. Their unforeseen killers infinitely embracing them like permanent cloaks gradually digging deep into their skin. He watched them first from yellow, then slightly with red, then into a final, figure of black. Freezing, unmoving figures of what once was a human body now turned to ash.Everything scorched and blackened around him. The trees were now dancing spikes of orange, and the air was now an unbreathable companio