The Village

It began as a tear in the world, far past the tree line, hanging at the height of a tall man — a slit of wrongness between two baobabs, like a curtain someone had opened with a blade and never bothered to close. Dinga was chasing Ngozi's little brother Obi through the dust when he saw it widen, and he stopped running because the whole village stopped at once, every head turning toward that tear the way sunflowers turn toward light — except what came pouring out of it was not light. It was heat, and a smell like a struck match held too close to the nose, and behind that smell, boots.He had been playing, as children do, in the last ordinary minute before that hatred spilled into his world. That was the thing that would gnaw at him longest in the years after — that in the final unbroken moment of his childhood he'd been laughing, barefoot, chasing a boy two years younger past the cassava rows, while his mother and the other women sat beneath the big mango tree minding the smallest children and calling out, now and then, for somebody to slow down before they broke an ankle. Ordinary. Small. His whole world had been the size of that clearing, and he had been happy inside it without once knowing to be grateful for the fact.Then the tear widened, and the first orc came through it, and behind that one another, and another, faster than his mind could hold a count, and the drums started — except they weren't drums. He understood that later. They were boots and hooves striking packed earth in numbers too large for a single thought to carry.Oyibo the salt trader died first, close enough that Dinga watched it happen.The old man had been nearest the tree line. He turned to run and didn't make three strides before an orc closed the gap behind him — two loping steps, too long for anything built like a man, weight rolling forward off the balls of its feet with a economy that had nothing to do with rage and everything to do with practice. The axe came up and over in a single unbroken arc, no wasted motion, no hesitation at the top of the swing the way a man might hesitate — and the head, a slab of hammered iron, buried itself in the meat of Oyibo's shoulder and did not stop there. Dinga watched the old man come apart into two wet, separate pieces that steamed faintly where the inside of him met open air for the first time. Something in Dinga simply seized, locked, refused. His legs would not move. The stone he'd been holding — he never remembered picking it up — fell from fingers that had forgotten how to be fingers.He would spend years wishing he'd looked away in the half-second he'd had to. He never did. His mother's hand was already closing on his arm, already hauling him from the sight of it, and still his eyes wouldn't let it go, straining back over his own shoulder even as she dragged him — and once he'd seen it, his eyes stopped being able to look away from anything. Every direction he turned that night, some new horror was waiting to carve itself into him.Two of the village's warriors met the orcs head-on. Emeka, who laughed like a drumbeat and had once let Dinga hold his ceremonial spear just to feel the weight of it. Old Papa Uzo, who still walked the perimeter each dusk with a machete he swore he'd blooded on poachers twice his size. They went in shoulder to shoulder, shouting something that might have been a war cry or might have been a prayer, and for one heartbeat Dinga let himself hope, hot and stupid, as Emeka's spear found a gap between an orc's ribs and held there, quivering.Then the orc pivoted on its back foot, unhurried, and backhanded him aside with the flat of its axe like a man swatting a fly off a meal he intended to finish, and three more orcs closed on Papa Uzo before his first swing had even completed its arc. Neither man rose again. It was not a fight. It had never been a fight. It was slaughter wearing the shape of one, briefly, before the shape fell away and showed what it had always been underneath.There were things Dinga saw in the minutes after that he would never say aloud to another living soul — not to Meredith, not to any healer, not even inside his own skull if he could help it, though his skull did not always let him choose. What was done to bodies that had already stopped fighting back. What was done to huts with people still inside them. He would spend the rest of his life trying to seal those particular sights into some deep locked vault of himself, and mostly he would succeed, and sometimes, in the thin space between sleep and waking, the door would drift open anyway, just a crack, just enough.Smoke rolled through all of it, thick and oily, stinking of burning thatch and something underneath the thatch-smell that was worse — sweetish, foul, the smell of a village's cook-fires suddenly fed the wrong fuel. It stung his eyes until the world swam. Children he'd grown up beside were screaming somewhere inside that smoke, voices he knew by heart turned into something raw and unrecognizable, and he couldn't tell anymore which scream belonged to which friend, only that there were fewer of them with each breath he dragged in.An orc's hand swept out of the haze not two feet from his face — wide as a hoe blade, gray-green, fingers splayed to grasp — and the only reason it closed on nothing was his mother's grip, sudden and violent, wrenching him sideways and back."Run."Her voice came broken, barely a voice at all, but her hand didn't match it. Her hand was iron, a strength he wouldn't have believed a woman her size could carry, hauling him through the smoke with a force that felt like it might tear his arm loose at the shoulder, and he didn't care, because some animal part of him understood her grip was the only thing standing between him and everything else.They ran past a hut already caving into flame, past a doorway he refused to let his eyes settle on, and somewhere behind him in the smoke he heard Ngozi — he knew it was Ngozi, a voice he'd have known across a hundred yards of screaming strangers, a girl he'd raced barefoot down by the stream two mornings past — screaming a sound that no longer had words left inside it. His mother's grip didn't slacken. Didn't turn toward it. Only tightened, and dragged him on, and some part of Dinga that was already becoming a different, older person understood that his mother had made a choice in that instant, and would carry the weight of it for whatever life she had left to live.Then, for one heartbeat, her hand went still.Not loose. Still, the way a held breath is still. Dinga looked up because the pulling had stopped, and past her shoulder, through a gap in the drifting smoke lit orange from beneath, he saw his father.Chidi stood between them and the gate, an iron hoe held crosswise in both hands the way you'd hold it to break hard-packed soil — not the way you'd hold it to face down what was coming through that gate. Firelight caught him low and sideways, and Dinga, straining up on his toes against his mother's barring arm, caught only a sliver of his father's face in it. The line of his jaw, set hard against whatever he was feeling. Nothing more. Not the eyes. Not the whole of him. Just that one line of bone and shadow — and it would be the only true fragment of his father's face Dinga would ever again summon on command, for the rest of his life."Go," Chidi said. His voice wasn't loud. Almost gentle, aimed backward over his own shoulder, without once turning to look at them. "I'll hold them off. Y'all get to safety.""Chidi!" His mother's scream cracked the name down the middle, and a whole marriage was folded into that single sound — not only fear, something closer to argument, every quiet fight they'd ever had about what a man owed his family compressed into half a second and thrown across a burning village. Chidi didn't turn back toward them. He turned toward the gate, planted his feet between it and the direction they were running, and raised the hoe.Something in his mother's stillness broke, then, into a different kind of clarity — Dinga would only understand it years later, turning the moment over the way he turned over everything from that day — the understanding, arrived at in less than a second, that Chidi had already made his choice and given the whole of himself to it, and that the only mercy left in her power to grant him was to not let it be wasted. She would not spend her son's life mourning a man still standing. She made her own choice then, as final in its way as his: to carry what he'd bought her as far from that gate as her legs would go.Her hand seized him again, harder than before, and spun him back around, and the world became motion — a hedge gap tearing at his arms, his sandal catching and coming half off his foot — but he looked back once, just once, over his mother's dragging arm, and saw his father standing his ground before that doorway of screaming orange light, small and unarmored and utterly unwilling to move, and something in Dinga broke open at the sight of it that would never fully close again.His mother's breath had gone ragged and high beside his ear, sawing in and out of her like something tearing, and he ran because she ran, because her grip was the only law left in his world — and it was only after a long time, he could not have said how long, time had stopped meaning anything the moment the world tore open, that some small distant part of his mind noticed the ragged breathing beside him had changed rhythm. Had become his own. And that he was no longer being pulled.He was running alone, into a night that had swallowed every fire behind him into a single dull red smear, and he didn't know when that had happened, and he would never know.—"Dinga."The voice came from very far away, and then, all at once, from very close."Dinga."His eyes opened onto darkness that wasn't the darkness of smoke, only the ordinary darkness of a bedroom at some hour deep enough the house had gone silent around it. His chest heaved like he'd run somewhere. His shirt was soaked through and cold against his skin.Alistair Vance stood over the bed, one hand still braced on Dinga's shoulder where he'd gripped it to wake him. He hadn't turned on the overhead light. Only the hallway spilled a wedge of brightness across the carpet, and in it Alistair looked the way he always looked, even at — Dinga's eyes found the clock — 3:47 in the morning: composed, dressed in the loose training clothes he wore for his own predawn drills, as though some instinct in him refused to be caught unprepared for anything, even his adopted son's nightmares."You were shouting," Alistair said. Not unkind. A statement of fact, delivered the way he delivered all of them. "The whole floor could hear you."Dinga said nothing. His heart was still going too fast, and beneath the fear sat the old shame — of having been seen like this, cracked open and loud in the dark, by a man who did not crack."Bad dream," Dinga said finally, voice rough."I gathered that." Alistair's hand lifted away. He didn't sit on the edge of the bed the way Meredith would have. Didn't ask what it was about in a voice built for coaxing it out of him. He simply straightened, and became, in that single motion, exactly what he always was — a man discharging a duty rather than living inside a feeling. "Drink some water. You have the Academy in the morning."He was already at the door, already half-turned to go, when he stopped, hand on the frame."Whatever it was," Alistair said, not looking back, "leave it in the bed when you rise. Ironveil doesn't care what a man dreamed the night before. Only what he does after he wakes."Then the door clicked shut, the hallway light narrowed to a blade, and vanished.Dinga lay a long while in the dark after, staring up at a ceiling he still, after two years, did not think of as his. Somewhere below him the house made its small mechanical sounds, and he watched the darkness for smoke that no longer came, and found its absence was its own kind of haunting — a wound with nothing left inside it but memory, and the boy who had run from it, and the six o'clock hour bearing down regardless of what he had or hadn't survived.