An Heir

Part One- Awakenings and Beginnings

“Wake up.” His cold head was moist as it touched my hand, I sighed and woke up, shivering to try and boost my body heat. Sthyss had his eyes fixed on me unblinking, it meant I had slept too long. I looked between the cracks in the wall, and not to my surprise there was a dark cloud looming over the hovel. The hovel was our home. It was where we lived, but since I couldn’t hunt like the snakes did, I was forced to find things like food in more conventional ways.

“Are the little ones okay?” I asked, he flipped his head slightly which served for a shrug,

“They are not our concern once they hatch, it was coincidence that they returned here.” I nodded and seeking out my stash of food, confirmed that it was running low; I had only a half loaf of bread. Seeing my distaste into entering the city to get more, Sthyss had on several occasions sought me to simply use that ‘other way’ that I sometimes used, but I wasn’t sure if could do it, things went wrong sometimes, but if I wanted food and started out now I could get back before it rained. “Are you going to go now?” He asked me.

“Yes, I will need food before the week is out though.” I put it simply, snakes needed very little in the way of food, so they had trouble understanding the concept of the amount that I ate, although it wasn’t near the amount the orphanage had given me, it was what I needed to survive, and also what I could afford to steal.

“I will come with you.” He slithered up my arm and there was a comfortable feeling to the movement of his scales across my skin. I had clothes of course, and I had a special shirt and trousers for going into the city so that I didn’t draw attention, the snakes had taught me that camouflage was good, it stopped you from being eaten, and while I wasn’t concerned with becoming a Falcon's dinner, I needed to blend in so that shopkeepers paid me less attention.

Once I had my other clothes on I began walking, Vassa, another of the snakes, a glistening green grass snake, curled briefly around my ankle and then off again it was a sort of sign of respect from what Sthyss had told me. I left my home of six years and began walking the beaten road into the city.

It was a flat road, but as Sthyss said, it had once been hilly and full of green, now it was cold, hard and grey. The city came into sight quickly. It sprawled, the toxic gas it gave off smelt foul, it smelt of people and of cars and a cloud of grey smoke covered it like a blanket.

After leaving the orphanage that I'd been abandoned in, I’d wandered for a few days, unsure of where to go, untiI eventually I'd found the crumbling house that provided just enough shelter for me, an eight year-old at the time, to curl up and out of the way. The snakes had started arriving in the days after, they would find their way to me and curl under the warmest part of my body and draw the heat, I didn’t mind too much because they gave me company, and they taught me to do things with my ‘other way’ that I hadn’t thought of.

I walked through the street that I knew would lead me to the market that held all the food I could get my hands on, Sthyss tightened around my arm as he saw a woman come out of an alley ahead of us, she was one of those ‘different people’ the ones that Sthyss was always saying I was like. But I was nothing like them; they had better clothes and looked important.

“Watch her.” He hissed quietly and I did as he said. She obviously hadn’t seen me and I watched from behind a car as she pulled a long stick out of her strange coat and disappeared right in the middle of the street, I walked over quietly, in case she was still there and stood where she had been standing, it was like she had been thinking about somewhere and then just vanished to the place she was thinking of.

I stored the memory away at Sthyss’ prompting, if he thought it was important then I always kept it in my head for later. I carried on walking towards the market and Sthyss tightened hard around my arm when we passed around the corner of the street, “There’s another one there.” He told me silently. I looked and found her immediately, she had her hair pulled back like the woman who had run the orphanage did, she was wearing…. What was the word? Tartan, right; tartan, I had read about it in a shop window, but I was getting distracted; I watched her briefly as she moved away and I began drifting between stalls, picking at what I needed and stuffing it in my pockets before returning to my corner and shoving it all in my bag.