The Literary Diversions of K.T. Lazarus

The boy awoke in the dark of night and knew immediately that something was amiss. His parents, two outlines in the dark, rose silently from their woven sleep-mat and exchanged a look, awake and alert. His father reached down and took the boy’s chin in his calloused hand. His features—hidden to the eye, but warm and rough in the boy’s fire-sense—said to him: be strong, my son. He drew his two broad, crystal daggers from their sheathes on his hips, and sped away out of the tent without a sound. 

The boy’s mother glanced over at his two younger siblings, still asleep on their mats. The sound of combat rose softly in the distance as she settled next to her eldest child. She spoke no words, she only knelt before him, her eyes two softly glowing blue embers in the absence of light. The look they shared carried more emotion than any words could have done. Then her sapphire eyes flitted to the tent flap, and the soft sniffling and shuffling of some creature moving beyond it. She turned back to the boy and nodded, hugged him tightly, then held out one of her daggers. He took it silently, and watched as she lifted a back corner of the tent and slipped out into the night. 

His fire-sense picked up her warm outline through the fabric as she stealthily slid around the tent, and drove her dagger through the unseen assailant at the flap. The baby awoke with a cry as the dead form fell with a heavy thud onto the sand before the entrance, and the boy gently shushed him until their sister, now awake, picked up the babe and quieted him. The boy concentrated on his mother with the fire-sense, watching as she recoiled from the creature she had killed, twirling to eviscerate another as it attacked from behind. She shifted nimbly from side to side, her limbs a bright red-orange blur in his mind’s eye, delivering kicks, slashes and thrusts with the swiftness of a flickering flame. He flinched as a spray of deep orange spurted from her side, but she simply turned and dispatched the offending creature, then whipped around to face another that had slashed across her hip. They crowded in around her, some with a faint, yellow outline in his fire-sense, others invisible—dark as the night. A single, hot tear fell from his eyes to the coarse sand beneath him as his mother dispatched another three, slowly losing her bright glow as the blood drained out of her. Then she jerked suddenly to a halt on the end of an unseen weapon and slowly, limply, slid to the ground. Her outline faded away, and was gone.

There would be a time for sadness. The boy would stand, solemn, his cheeks burning with the salt of his tears, and hold his sister and brother while his mother’s ashes were committed to the desolate sands. His father would stand beside him, his face a mask of grief and loss as their chieftain assured him that her death was a noble one, freely given in the defense of her children. His father would respond in cold fury that there was no such thing as to die nobly; there was only to die. There would come a time for tears, and for mourning. 

But that time was not now. His mother’s dagger—three full spans of thick, razor-sharp crystal with a long, solid spike set beneath the handle—felt light as a feather in his hand as he rose and stepped between his siblings and the tent flap. Now was the time for violence. Now was the time for death.

When the fiends were certain that the hellish woman was dead, they turned their attention back to the smell of fearful young within the tent. But when they ripped the flap open and crowded inside, they did not see the infant girl cowering in the far corner, nor did they see the screaming baby she held in her arms. They saw only the fiery demon, with eyes blazing as the sun, whose shriek of purest fury boiled their cold blood as it charged into their midst.

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