Kashvi looked down at her arm, it was a nasty gash but not worth telling Devon about. He would insist they stopped to treat it. They couldn't afford to stop; they were in a bad neck of the woods, literally.
Kashvi had figured the tall pine trees would have offered some relieving shelter. Yeah, her and the hundreds of stray dogs it seemed. The woods had been a mistake.
Then again, the alternative was the road, and any idiot knew to avoid the road. However tempting tarmac may have been under your feet, it had long since relinquished being a symbol of civilisation. The worst things happened on the road.
It had been over ten years since the world went to hell. The bombs had gone off, ravaging the land. Before the bombs there had been panic, panic made somebody press the button. After the bombs there was more panic, then there was grief.
No one had quite gotten over the grief. Everyone's reality was blown to smithereens in a matter of moments. That was all it took to take everything you ever cared about away. That was all it took for the walls to come crumbling down, the walls between what you thought you knew and what you thought existed only in fairytales. The original Grimm ones, none of that Disney shit for the world now.
It had begun slowly, strange sightings, men with flashing eyes, women with fangs and fire in their fingers, then came the deluge. Magic was real, oh so very real and it was raining over the burnt land like a second wave of acid rain, eroding your reality and paving the way for the new era.
The witches had risen in power, giant forests sprung up overnight in the north, filled with creatures you thought you would never see outside of storybooks.
Bands of werewolves began killing the only remaining humans, as if one wave of mindless destruction wasn't enough. But dogs weren't the only extinction threat, no, that had come from the witches, or rather what they created.
The Chimeras, born from magical experimentation on werewolves, designed to be the 'dogs of war' for the witches' army against anyone that would oppose them. Didn't quite work out that way, Mary Shelley obviously hadn't been on any of the witches' reading lists at school and soon enough Frankenstein's monsters reared their ugly heads and tore out the throats of their masters.
Yeah, the world had gone to shit. What was left of it was split into territories, viciously fought over and protected, as if anything was worth protecting anymore. Forests to the north, wastelands to the south. There were human territories, wolf territories, witch territories and no-man's lands, where the Chimeras ruled.
But what did you do if you didn't fit into any of these territories? What did you do if you were a young human boy and girl, but the inked marks on the backs of your necks showed you held the spark, the spark of witches?
What did you do if you fled witch territory, fled slavery and your rightful place in their hierarchy because they feared your power, that you might upset those on top?
But not before they cursed you. They maimed your sparks, stunting your powers, binding them so tightly that even to utter the words of a spell now caused you physical pain.
What if as a parting gift they lashed a whip of flame across the boy's eyes knowing no one could survive out in the wilderness without sight. Where would you go? Where would you run?
Devon and Kashvi had been running for almost one year. They still had basic powers, enough to light a fire on a cold night, enough to sense something drawing close in the dark, enough to fight them off.
Well, the machete helped with that. Kashvi had found it buried in the chest of a rogue Chimera in the first month of trekking. She had told Devon she had found it lying on the side of the road. Devon really hated Chimeras.
Devon never once complained about not being able to see, never once got angry at Kashvi for forgetting to warn him about a fallen log or a tree blocking his path. At first Kashvi had thought maybe he was just worried she would leave him. But pretty soon it became the unspoken, obvious truth, the one reality in this world they could count on, Kashvi was never leaving Devon.
They had grown up together as humans in a sleepy town where nothing much happened. They had been part of the same caravan that fled that town and travelled unknowingly into witch territory.
They had even been marked together. Kashvi had screamed as they had held her down and the needle jabbed into her neck, marking her forever as not fully human, no longer the same as the rest of her family, no longer a part of her own world.
Devon had yelled out, dumb threats at the guy that was hurting her. Then the needle was turned on him and Kashvi found herself yelling the same impotent threats. They became apprentices to the same coven run by a beguiling woman named Ginger.
Apprentices, such a pretty euphemism for slaves. This was all before the curse of course, Kashvi felt the pain inside her, like a phantom limb where her power had been amputated. The power that her coven had deemed such a threat.
Devon hadn't needed to escape with her, but of course he did anyway. He didn't need to push her out of the way of the spell and take the full lashing brunt of it, but of course he did anyway.
They were brother and sister now, and god help anyone who tried to hurt Devon on Kashvi’s watch.
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