A Sketchy Tale

“Alright Timoteo, we’re taking you out,” said Felix Sombrero, whipping out the skeleton key that opened all the cell doors in the underground dungeon area.

“Oh joy,” came Timoteo’s monotone.

“Felix, wait,” said Lithuania. There was a shuffling, scraping sound coming from down the tunnels.

“You don’t have to drag us!” came a woman’s voice.

“Be gentle with her!” came a man’s voice.

“Sergeant Sombrero,” said a broad-shouldered soldier, appearing at the entryway to the dungeons, gripping a frail-looking woman with his right hand, and a lanky man with his left. “I found these two lurking outside, near the southwest tower. They say they’re from nilbmah.”

“Nibmah?” said Lithuania.

“nilbmah,” corrected winfry, “With a lower-case ‘n,’” he said. isa shot winfry a that-was-unnecessary glance.

Lithuania’s stare went from curious to aggressive. “Outside of Nilbmah we use capitals, you hear me?” she barked. “Were they armed?” she asked the soldier. Felix Sombrero didn’t even think of taking the lead. No other officer came remotely close to Lithuania in terms of rank.

“No, just a satchel with some cooking supplies,” said the soldier, “and that grimey old book.” Lithuania looked at the prisoner’s hands. He was clutching an ugly, ancient-looking book as if it were a secret-laden diary. Lithuania snatched the book and flipped through it. It was nothing. Just a stupid book on mythology and folklore. She shoved it back into the prisoner’s hands.

“Tell me your names.”

 “She’s isa,” said winfry pointing to isa.

“And he’s winfry,” said isa pointing to winfry.

“Isa and Winfry. Well. If you’re from Nilbmah, how did you cross over into Luscious Locks?”

“It’s really a long story,” said Winfry, squirming uncomfortably in the muscular soldier’s grip. “Things aren’t exactly going down very well over in Nilbmah.”

“Bring them here,” said Lithuania to the soldier, indicating a nearby cell with two stools and a cot. Isa and Winfry sat on the cot, while Lithuania and Felix sat on the stools. Lithuania’s face was impassive. “Explain.”

Winfry was a nervous wreck. As if making it through the woods of Luscious Locks hadn’t been enough, dealing with monsters every night, and Isa’s moods during the day, and the annoying habits of the librem every other minute, and the stress of knowing he was a fugitive in his homeland—now he had to deal with a bitch, just when he thought he could take a break. “Could we maybe just—just rest, for a bit?” Winfry pleaded. “We’ve hardly slept, and we’ve faced monsters, and crazy weather, and—”

“Explain,” demanded Lithuania, coldly.

Winfry sighed. “I’m a writer,” he stammered, nervously. “Isa too. She is my—my sister. We wrote negatively of nilbmah’s current regime, and are now fugitives.” Isa clutched the tiny quilaire hanging around her neck, and suddenly Winfry was calm. He could feel her inside him. Her breath hovering in his mind, telling him to stay cool… to not share too much… To stay on guard. “I was captured by the government, and placed in a secure government facility for questioning. Isa rescued me.”

“From a secure government facility,” interrupted Lithuania, scathingly.

“Y—Yes. I’m not quite sure how—” he turned to Isa, “I’m not quite sure how you did it, but,” he turned back to Lithuania, “But she had a gun and she just barged in. She was really good. She rescued me, and we started to flee… and—”

“From a secure, government facility,” repeated Lithuania, incredulously.

“Tell her about the dark man,” came Isa’s voice in his head. “She’ll want to know.”

“Yes. And, we saw an open window, at the end of the hallway,” continued Winfry. “And we were just about to cross the hallway where the open window was, when, all of a sudden, this… I don’t know, this creature… It was so strange. It seemed like its stomach was a miniature black hole that was sucking out all the moonlight from the hall. Neither of us could tell what it looked like other than it was about the size of a tall human. As we crossed the hall it shouted out in this very strange, very raspy voice, ‘Surrender yourselves,’” Winfry’s eyes dropped to the floor. “‘There is no hope of escape,’” he continued, imitating the creature almost comically. “Of course we would have made a run for it anyways, but it was strange—in case I haven’t said that enough, it was strange. Neither of us could move. Maybe it was the shock of it all but I suspect that the creature was doing something. I don’t know what and I don’t know how, and it sounds crazy, I know, but something prevented us from moving.” Lithuania suddenly remembered how she felt back in the ditch at the forest’s edge, the Monolith breathing heavily above her. She hadn’t even seen the Monolith’s rider, but she just felt that the rider and Winfry’s “creature” were one and the same.

“But then,” Winfry continued, “All the security finally realized where we had gone, and they burst into the room, and that must have distracted the creature because our paralysis let up. We then shot at the creature, which at least stunned it, giving us time to jump through the window. And the security must have been surprised by it all too because they gave us a tremendous head start and we were able to hijack a car and head to Nighline before anyone could stop us.”

Lithuania sat there, arms crossed, expression blank. Isa and Winfry were lying. No doubt about it. The way he tapped his foot continuously, and quivered his eyes. The way Isa kept fiddling around with her necklace. They were clearly hiding something. But what? And why? Perhaps there was some truth to their story, but there was definitely a lot missing. No ordinary couple could just wander from Nighline into Luscious Locks. And no ordinary couple could break from a high security government facility, no matter how shoddy the security in Nilbmah might be. And by Jove, could the girl not stop messing around with her necklace?

Lithuania decided to take a softer approach. Maybe she could coax the truth out of them. “I’m afraid your story leaves me with more questions than we will have time for,” she said, her tone softer than it had previously been. “So let’s get started. Why on Coralende did you come to LusciousLocks? I mean, it’s the last place I’d flee to.”

“Well to be fair, we didn’t know it would be like this when left,” said Isa. “And unless I’m mistaken, neither did anyone else until they entered this inferno,” she said, hoping Lithuania would agree. Lithuania nodded.

“Besides, we clearly had to leave Nilbmah, and we clearly couldn’t take any government-run transportation,” said Winfry.

“And since neither of us knows how to operate a boat, we had to run for it in a car,” said Isa.

“And since transportation is so centralized, cars are a rarity. And roads outside Nilbmah citadel are a complete anomaly,” said Winfry.

“The road to Nighline is actually the longest road in Nilbmah, and Nighline is right on the Nilbmahian-LusciousLockian border,” said Isa.

“So we decided to take our chances with the unknown of LusciousLocks rather than the known insanity of Nilbmah,” finished Winfry.

By Jove, these two were liars. They were also annoyingly cute. Lithuania was initially peeved by how Winfry and Isa finished each other’s sentences, but at the sight of it, she couldn’t help but turn a thought to what she might have been with Marco.

“I guess that’s reasonable enough,” Lithuania lied. “Now, about this creature… You say it paralyzed you. Did it ever make you feel as if your whole body was on fire?”

Felix glanced at Lithuania, wondering what she was getting at.

“Umm not really, just paralyzed,” said Winfry.

“Yeah, me neither,” said Isa.

“But you did say the hand was black, right?” Lithuania asked. She had such a clear image of the creature in her head… though she didn’t know where the image was coming from. Was she remembering the Monolith’s rider? Was she remembering something no one else could? 

“Ahh… actually, I don’t think we said that, but yes, the hand was black, like charcoal actually,” said Winfry.

“How did you know that without us telling you? Have you seen something like it here? Has it attacked you too?” Isa splurged.

The question hit Lithuania a little off guard. She wasn’t expecting her prisoners to question her. She held back a retort, and kindly said, “No... No. It was just a guess. But it certainly sounds like Assmachestan all over again, in Nilbmah.”

“Really?” said Winfry, incredulously. He was beginning to appreciate Lithuania’s more conversational tone. “You think that Assmachestan, the long-forgotten-nation-of-maid’s-tales Assmachestan, is responsible for all this?”

Lithuania looked Winfry straight in the eyes. “Yes,” she said. “But we can talk about that later. You said the creature had paralyzed you. How were you able to escape so easily then? Why didn’t it just paralyze you again? And why didn’t it chase you to Nighline?”

“Well, I don’t really know why it didn’t give us more trouble, but we were already very close to the window and we must have hit it with at least a few bullets,” said Winfry. “Isa’s aim is actually quite good. And to be completely honest, no one in Nilbmah citadel thinks about Nighline. It’s practically on another planet.”

“And who knows, maybe it wanted us to get away,” said Isa.

“Why would it want you to get away?” Lithuania asked. Isa's face was blank. And Lithuania was growing tired. These two weren't fessing up. They didn't even seem to know anything of value. If anything, they were clueless.

“Sergeant Sombrero,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Take these two to the cell and lock them up.”

“They’re in a cell,” Felix said simply.

“The other cell,” she snapped. Felix nodded, and led the two prisoners out. Lithuania had no idea what these two new strangers would play in the grand scheme of things, but she felt there was something to them.

And she still had a lot to figure out. 

The Night

It was long and painfully pent up. That’s how winfry remembered the trip. Neither he nor isa spoke save giving directions, but when you’re on the only road from nilbmah citadel to nighline there aren’t too many directions unless they’re warnings about deer crossing the road. The head lights were they only light in the night and they had long since become insensitive to the monotone rush of the vehicle traveling at 85 miles per hour. This dulling of physical sensations let the paranoia of the chase crash them on edge. The illusion of tracking headlights in the rear-view mirror was much more than a motif of the trip. Were they being followed? What if they were? Was that creature following them? Could it freeze the car like it froze them? Could they break from the road if need be without four-wheel drive? Should they have stayed in the city? How much longer till the border? It would have been easier once they started to talk but the activation energy was too high. Not even the radio was on.

They stopped once before nighline when isa absolutely couldn’t wait any longer for a bathroom and asked winfry to pull over. winfry got out of the car to stretch his legs and watch as isa disappeared into the brush on the side of the road. A chorus of chirps and burps had replaced the artificial drone of the car and at this moment in the middle of the night middle of nowhere nilmbah, winfry realized, for the first time fully realized, the absolute extent of his dependence on isa, and hers on him. They had hardly known each other 4 months. Were they really up for this? They might as well marry each other with the commitment the situation demanded. Shotgun weddings never ended well. Maybe that’s why there was a lump in winfry’s throat when isa came back prematurely to ask if they had any napkins and a band-aid to wrap around a cut she received on her finger from a briar patch.

When they finally reached nighline, it was apparent they would have to rest there before adventuring off into the woods of LusciousLocks. They stayed at the englewood estate, which isa still owned. Even as late as it was, isa played the gracious hostess and gave winfry the tour of the house: the by then dusty living room with an ostentatious grand piano that isa pretended she couldn’t play, the ergonomic and efficient kitchen where they dropped off the remains of their baguette and brunj paste, the long and lonely unused dinning room, the grand carpeted marble staircase, the nursery turned science lab combination art studio, the library study with an alpha-male beast of a desk, luscious leather sofa chairs and flights upon flights of books, and of course isa’s old room. isa still wasn’t able to enter her brother’s room and who show’s guests their parents’ bedroom – that’s just awkward.

The exhaustion of the night’s ordeal kept winfry and isa from having the energy to set up a bed on a sofa so they both collapsed, clothes still on, onto isa’s childhood twin bed that still had the unicorn princess sheets. It was the first time they slept with each other.

“Um, isa,” yawn, “where do you,” another yawn, “keep extra sheets? So I can set up the couch.”

“Oh I don’t remember.” yawn, “especial while I’m this tired. How about we just lie down for a minute to regain some energy before we go searching for sheets?”

It took a minute or so for winfry to inch from sitting on the bed to lying beside isa. It took two seconds for him to join isa in dreamland.

Just before dawn, winfry rolled over in his sleep on top of isa, the quilaire pressed in between their bodies. With their limbs wrapped together, it began to grow. The oval clenched as the handle expanded in between their stomachs. winfry and isa remained asleep, but it appeared that their subconscious were, at that moment, quite conscious.

When the sunrays slipped by the curtains and woke them, they were both naked and the sheets were thrown across the floor. In spite of himself it took a few seconds for winfry to tear his gaze from isa’s perfectly pale curves. After that though, his eyes were hooked by the floor as he cautiously selected his clothes from a haphazard pile amongst isa’s cardigan and under-things. He was utterly aware that isa watched him from the side of the bed. What was her gaze saying? Was she ashamed? Disappointed? Hurt? Confused? Violated? His peripheral vision must have been waning because he could have sworn he saw a smile in the corner of his eye as he donned his briefs. Once dressed, winfry carefully examined the fairy-tale figurines on the top of her chest-of-drawers, while isa put on her clothes. He persisted in his examination until the air of awkwardness became so suffocating that he couldn’t resist sitting down with isa on the bed.

“Did we…”

“What…”

“You know…”

“Umm…”

“I can’t…”

“What… Me neither…”

“We should get breakfast.”

“ok”

The Revelation

winfry felt like the only way to melt the ice between isa and himself would be to prostrate himself in front of isa crying a million apologies while bemoaning his horrid personality, but he knew such pusillanimity wouldn’t help anyone. So after going over it in his mind for thirty minutes, winfry walked to the corner of the concrete cell and tapped isa on the shoulder. She didn’t look up. winfry expected this.

“isa, I’d like to say thank you. Thank you so much for everything you did for me in the woods. I would have been dead many times over without you. I owe you at least seven lives and the only repayment I’ve given you is a headache. I am so sorry for how selfishly I have been acting and most importantly, I’m sorry for hurting you and letting you down. I will do everything in my power to prevent this from happening again.” winfry delivered his whole apology to the auburn back of isa’s head, which was what winfry continued to stare at for a stretched out 2 minutes afterwards.

“Thank you winfry,” isa began without moving, “but I need to be mad at you for a bit longer still.” winfry's slouch sunk three centimeters as he turned away.

…

winfry felt fingers run across the top of his shoulders as isa sat down beside him and he knew how much of a three-month couple they were .


“Yes?” Lithuania had entered their cell and sat down on the bench, lips pursed.

“As you probably already know, we weren’t completely honest with you before. We weren’t sure how much you would believe or how much we could trust you. But since you seem to also have had some contact with the mysterious black figure and we don’t have too much choice about trusting you, we have decided to let you know the truth.”

“We were able to survive the woods because isa, believe it or not, can do magic. She can do all sorts of things like slow time and bend the elements. We also think the book I have is magical but of a more frivolous sort. It mostly just spits out annoying comments. So far we haven’t found anything useful in the book.”

“And the reason we came to LusciousLocks is because I had visions of us meeting someone, you in fact, in a dark woods, which we assumed to be LusciousLocks. That’s the truth, the confounded and crazy truth, but the truth nonetheless. We offer our assistance with any of your operations but we understand we are your prisoners and await your verdict.”

When the duet finished, Lithuania was starring through the concrete floor with her eyebrows furrowed to help her frontal lobe process this surprising information. Finally, she looked up, twitched her lips and …

The Inferno

Marco opened his eyes.

There was a stillness in the air. An almost unnatural stillness. He had heard—or maybe dreamt—an elephant’s trumpet. A harmless sound, usually. But he was propped on his elbow, heart beating fast, palms sweaty.

Insane, insane, you’re going insane, he muttered to himself. He figured he was experiencing something like menopause, and felt a sudden stab of pity for middle-aged women everywhere. Why the hell is it so hot? he wondered, rising to his feet. The woods were spacious, but the heat and darkness made him feel like he was cramped in a shoe box. And the silence…

Marco yelled. His voice echoed through the woods… bounced off the trees… faded in the distance. He just needed to hear something. Anything. He was beginning to feel dead. Maybe he was dead. Maybe this was purgatory. Or hell. In any case, his senses were under-stimulated. It reminded him of that ancient AssMachenstani method of torture he had learned about, where soldiers were locked inside a zero-gravity chamber and deprived of all sight, sound or touch, forced to float in nothingness for days. 

Marco shrugged. His present condition was too similar for him to think of such torture without an uncomfortable empathic reaction.

He turned to stare at his “bed,” a crevice between two massive tree roots. Whatever had seemed comforting about it was gone. And then he thought of Lithuania again, and his insides tightened. He felt guilty. She had been driving the damned chopper, but he felt guilty.

Guilty for her death?

No. Not quite. Marco couldn’t quite place a finger on it. But he felt wrong, and what was making him feel wrong was the fact that Lithuania was dead. He was responsible… for something. Not her death—he knew better than to blame himself for a helicopter crash. But he was responsible for something. For not expressing something. For not sharing something with Lithuania.

That was it. He was responsible for never telling Lithuania how he felt. Chicken shit, he thought to himself, kicking at the dirt. He had never let her in; never told her what he thought of her; never told her how he felt. It was a feeling similar to that of cutting a movie right before the climax—of turning off the TV right before the murderer was revealed. A sense of incompleteness—of things left unresolved. It was a strange comparison, but that was more or less how Marco felt. Not to mention, the grief.

An uncomfortable feeling bubbled in Marco’s chest. He pushed it aside and blinked several times, walking in no particular direction. The heat was driving him crazy. The flashlight on his helmet had long since burned out. He was now navigating the darkness by virtue of his unnaturally enlarged pupils. And then he heard a rustling sound.

“Who’s there!” he called. He was too frazzled to feel panic. It was more like impatience, or anger. He pulled a blade from his belt and held it by his waist, standing completely still.

A crackling sound.

Marco’s eyes scanned the darkness, straining to penetrate the dark recesses between the trees. Suddenly, something sparkled, like a tiny, orange firefly, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Then there were two sparks. Then three. Slowly, the lights multiplied, coming, going, floating. It was beautiful—until one of the lights landed on Marco’s sleeve, leaving a singe mark.

Marco backed away from the light show, holding his knife up before him. He had seen enough crazy things since arriving at LusciousLocks to know that something, even something beautiful, was more likely dangerous than not. The entire forest was now aglow. If these things were flammable, he wouldn’t want to stick around much longer.

“You don’t want to be here,” said a woman’s voice. To Marco’s left emerged a woman from the darkness, dressed in something resembling black mist; Marco couldn’t tell if it was fabric, or some sort of controlled gas, but it moved with such an uncanny airiness, and it blended so easily with the darkness, that it could only be supernatural. Her raven hair was pulled back into a long ponytail, throwing her sharp chiseled features into high relief. Her angular eyebrows and coal-black eyes gave her expression an almost frightening severity, while her lips—full, glistening, and slightly ajar—endowed her severity with a disarming hint of sensuality.  

“Who are—”

“Shut up. Get out. Go back to the City,” she said. Tiny sparks of flame were floating all around her. “We reveal ourselves tonight. You must be underground. Do you not obey the Common Mind?” Her voice was menacing.

Marco had no idea what she was talking about. The Common Mind? “I have a mission of my own,” he lied, furrowing his brow and feigning indignation. This woman clearly was not friendly. Marco turned his back to her and began walking away from the floating sparks, hoping the woman would just forget about him.

“You aren’t connected,” the woman said, her voice suddenly one of shock. Marco stopped and turned, gripping his knife tight. The woman’s eyes were wide—and suddenly, they were glowing bright red. “WHO ARE YOU?” she yelled, specks of orange light bursting from her fingertips and hair.

“I’m here to help your country,” Marco said, struggling to convey serenity. He couldn’t let this supernatural woman know he felt threatened.

“Don’t toy with me, idiot!” she roared. “You are Foggistani!” She raised her hands into the sky, shooting a stream of sparkling lights that soared into the air, then spiraled and darted straight for Marco. In a split second, Marco’s brain decided between fight or flight. He charged at the woman, brandishing his dagger as thousands of tiny flames clung to his body and set him aflame. He screamed, just as his knife plunged smoothly into the woman’s chest. They both crashed down upon the forest floor, a mess of fire and blood—and suddenly Marco’s body was no longer burning.

He jumped to his feet, brushed himself off, and looked at the bleeding woman on the floor. The hilt of Marco’s knife was protruding from below her left breast. He had pierced her heart.

“Fool,” she growled, gurgling blood. The sparks all around them were vanishing. “You can’t kill us.” She gasped—she was on her last dying breath. “We are AssMachenstan!” she roared, and suddenly her body exploded in a swirl of embers that spread like wildfire.

Crap, Marco thought, dashing wildly for the forest edge as the world around him turned bright white. The fire was spreading as if the forest were drenched in gasoline. “WE ARE ASSMACHENSTAN!” he heard the woman’s voice echoing all around him. Already trees were crashing down—the ancient, famed forests of LusciousLocks had, in a matter of seconds, turned into a raging inferno. Marco ran so fast he could have sworn he was flying—weaving his way through columns of torched trees and pillars of swirling flame.

And suddenly he was at the forest edge, collapsing down a steep hill of dry, red earth, sputtering dirt. He tumbled, rolled—fell flat on his face. He pushed himself up and looked behind him, heart racing. It was the most horrifying forest fire he had ever witnessed. The world around him was cast under a vicious red glow, and from the woods came the unearthly sound of wailing—screeching—death; an eerie chorus of high-pitched, dying creatures, shrieking at their sudden demise.

Marco took several steps backwards, his eyes so absorbed with the fiery horror that it took him several minutes to realize his ears were picking up on a distant chanting. Cheering. The voice of a multitude, clamoring in unison, “We are… We are…” We are what? Marco couldn’t quite distinguish what they were saying. He looked away from the woods and towards the world behind him—down the portion of the hill he hadn’t rolled down. In the distance was Green City, the capital of LusciousLocks, drenched in bright lights. The city looked alive—excited—almost festive. And everyone in it seemed to be chanting something…

It wasn’t until a jet of fiery light shot into the sky and began painting letters in the black clouds above that Marco understood what they were saying. The people of Green City… the roaring voice in the woods… and the letters in the sky all said one thing:

“WE ARE ASSMACHENSTAN”