What was the name of the place?
He couldn’t remember, no matter how hard he tried. The sounds on his tongue were close to the word, but they were drowned in quiet sobs and childish pleas. Though it was as much a part of him as his mind and soul, the stench of death was overwhelming, overpowering. It was his whole scent, whether or not he chose to smother it in the fine aromas of Momma’s perfume. Yet, here, it was echoed by the moist walls, mold and grout saturated by its pungent odor. He spent hours, eyes clenched into slits, gently rocking himself, and singing remembered lullabyes. His meager voice cracked and knotted, but he continued to hum, as though it was the only bane to the presence of that black necropolis.
Even with his palms pressed into his ears, the laughter of the dead mocked him. There were a thousand past victims of the Gaol, sneering at him, pointing at the deformed child where he tried to hide himself in a corner no lighter than the rest. Laughter spilled from the cracks in the walls and lapped at the edges of his toes, tickled his earlobes, pulled tears down his cheeks. He hated the shadows and the dark. He hated this place.
Up, he glanced, to a slat of light pouring in from a distant wall, far beyond the reach of his fragile arm. The shackles bound him at the base of his palms. They had been made for frames more fully developed – rather than wringing him at the palms, they dug into his knuckles. Even then, none of it – not his bondage, not the chill in his spine, not even the stale urine seeping through the seat of his nightgown – could equal the cruelty of being so lonely. He missed Ferore. He missed new friends, like Angilena, bold Ahmed, Lamai, and the elf-woman, Aeri. But moreso, he missed his mother.
.. "Sleep, and you'll dream pleasant things," The child whispered, but he choked upon the words. Talons – things that looked like some strange union between pointed bone and paper-thin flesh – toussled through his hair. .. Pleasant things? The irony of the line stabbed at him. He dreamed nothing pleasant. He dreamed of his sister, wrought with fever, screaming, groping for him, calling him terrible names he’d never thought she knew. And he dreamed of his mother, wrists slit, shedding tears of blood, and damning him like she never would have. Damning him!
Dreams were never pleasant. Lullabyes lied.
The boys had invaded his garden. They had taken his flowers needlessly, had trampled beds of his more favorite blossoms. They treaded ill upon the soil. It was everything Phlynn could do to keep from leaping at them, right then, but he hesitated, no matter how his heart screamed at him. Instead, denying it, he stepped forward, raising his milky face to the moonlight, while under the rims of precious spectacles, he stared upon them.
“Did you find the flowers you wanted?” The younger child teased, folding knifelike hands before him. The two culprits turned and gasped, faces frozen. They half expected to see the broad shoulders of Calasheid, one of Naria's more dreaded watchmen. But the voice was so much more tender, and it was when they gazed upon Phlynn that they could breathe and let their shoulders drop. The red-haired boy did not let them explain themselves.
“I hope you did,” He murmured, narrowing gentle eyes as he raised a vicious fingertip into the gaze of the stars. “Because those?…” He canted his head, lips flat. The little boy's voice was hollow and empty. They'd never heard a child speak so surely.
“Those are the flowers I’m going to give to your Mommies and Daddies to put on your graves.”
Mychael and Jesse were dead before they even had a chance to mutter, or to turn, or to drop the plucked blossoms. Boyish screams were cut off at the throat, a glimmer of moonlight catching the arc of nails as jagged sneers were hacked into their necks. Shrieks for help became gurgled prayers. Lifeless bodies crumpled and fell, one atop the other, into puddles of murky, thick ichor. They hugged one another there, arms loose, fingers unfeeling - neither of them died with a smile. Surprise and horror were one in the gaze of murdered children.
A breath was taken in. The air was heavy with the musk of split bodies, the last passage of wastes. Phlynn could ignore all that - to the approaching child, they stank only of blood, and as he bent, as he simply sliced away still-warm fingers from the stalks of claimed flowers, he kept reminding himself that their blood was not any he would savor. They had done terrible things - Phlynn had reprimanded them as kindly as he could. To drink in their wake would have been to suckle pure sewage.
“That’s what you get,” He told them, cradling withered blossoms, cupping them up to his mouth and nose. The boy stood amidst the carnage, moon-washed, basking beneath blinking stars. He inhaled the majesty of the tulips, repeating to the dead boys words of their very own creation. Words they had said when they killed Jaeval.
"That's ... what you get," But he wouldn't laugh like they had. Phlynn Marion Johnford could never be that cold.
But he began to giggle. Who ever said , though, that Cries-To-Flowers couldn't?