String Lights

Part II: Slaughtered (Chapter 4)

According to the social hierarchy of Chronicles, butchers were considered to have the lowliest profession.

To many, this was due to the fact that they dealt with blood and animals, which therefore classified them as the Unclean members of society. However, the reason I tended to avoid crossing paths with butchers was much different. What bothered me most about them was not the work they did, but what it involved.

They were, by the way I saw it, the only people on the continent who harmed a greater number of lives than the dictator.

Drew Erebus, unlike butchers, claimed the highest position in Chronicle hierarchy, but was in a way no different from those we middle-class citizens looked down upon. While butchers took the lives of animals for meat, Drew Erebus did the same with humans—for his own separate reasons.

He killed because he simply enjoyed watching death.

With hundreds of rebels and fighters, obstacles and hindrances getting in the way of his rule, there were plenty of targets through which Erebus could satisfy his needs.

But he was still hungry. Hungry for death. Throughout this whole time, from the moment he shattered the harmony in our country, he had looked at my people with nothing more than the gaze of the butcher looking at his prey.

And under the dictator's hatred and malice, Chronicles was about to be slaughtered.

･･･⛧･･･

"Hey! Haven, you there?"

The news came to me in the form of a person. It was early afternoon, though dark outside as always. I had been hanging laundry on our front porch when a pair of rapid footsteps approached, kicking up a thick layer of dust. Coughing wildly into my elbow, I looked around for the source of the sudden ruckus. The blurry outline of a person ran past me, streaking across the deck and stopping at the door.

"Mrs. Haven, it's me! Mrs. Haven?" It was the voice and figure of Laura Grant, my best friend and next-door neighbor, calling for my mother to ask about my whereabouts. She knocked harder on the door, completely unaware that I was standing right next to her. At the noise, Lia's head popped out of the open first-floor window.

"Oh. Hi, Lia." Laura backed up from the door. "Do you know where Adeline is?"

"Right here, you idiot," I called to her, making her whirl around instantly. "I can't believe you didn't see me. How can you have lived your whole life in this darkness and still have such horrible eyesight?"

"Not my whole life," she answered: the same retort she always used. "I lived in Chronicles when there was light! Unlike you," she added nastily.

Laura was the youngest of seven children. She had been born before the Ereban occupation, so she had—though I always insisted this didn't count—gotten to live, at least for a few months, in a world where night and day were easily distinguishable.

"Never mind that," I said. "I can't believe you asked Lia for Adeline. I told you I didn't go by that name anymore. Gosh, I knew your vision was terrible, but your memory . . ."

Laura merely laughed. As friends of fifteen years, we had grown up on the same street even as kids, and bickered and fought until the point where we became inseparable, as close as two people could be. Even now, it was considered perfectly normal that we said a minimum of ten insults to each other per day.

"'Adeline' was the only term your sister would recognize," said Laura. "But you do know, Haven, that I'll eventually have to call you by something other than your surname. . . ."

"It'll come to me one day." I walked away and proceeded to finishing my task of hanging laundry, wanting to move on to another topic. "Cut to the chase. What did you run over here for when it's so early? What else did you hear that you have to tell me?"