Bleeding Kyber Chapter 6: 06_ Back to the Beginning

Read chapter 6 of Bleeding Kyber by theRonin_666 on NovelPedia.

The warm smell of garam masala, with the sounds of horns blasting from the main road. The unmistakable sounds of India. His home from past life. When he wasn't a slave in a mine, causing death and still a teenager in college. His eyes opened slowly, blinking at the harsh light, curtains whistling in the wind, Mother was walking from the kitchen. Smell of tea leaves still sticking to her saree as she walked to him, all the while he looked at her like an idiot. For a moment, he thought that this was his life and not a dream he was about to wake from. forgetting about Pytor, the river and monster. the smell of blood and the taste of dead flesh stripped away from his memory for a minute. "Tea?" she asked, not stopping, because she never stopped. "Drink your water after brushing. You'll be late to school if you dawdle around." He watched her move toward the bedroom where his sister was supposed to be getting ready and was almost certainly doing the opposite. The sounds coming from her room confirmed it, a drawer slamming, a muffled giggle, their mother's voice rising in that specific pitch that meant she had found the frog that she brought from the pond behind their colony. Father emerged from the bathroom, already knotting his tie, his spectacles fogged from the steam. He smelled of Lifebuoy soap and Old Spice, a combination that Herald would never encounter again in any galaxy but would remember with aching familiarity for the rest of his lives. "Beta, my tiffin?" "On the counter." A grunt of acknowledgement. The rustle of a lunch bag being inspected. Then the familiar creak of the front door opening, the jingle of scooter keys as he walked, and the distant cough of a Bajaj Chetak refusing to start on the first try. Horns blared from the main road. A vegetable vendor was hawking at the corner, his voice a nasal drone that cut through the morning traffic. Herald, though he was not Herald then, though he had a different name that felt like a borrowed shirt now, stood in the kitchen in his school uniform, collar half-buttoned, hair uncombed, and filled a glass from the steel water jug. The water was cool. It tasted of sweet minerals and home. He drank. And the water turned to silt in his throat, a cough leaving his throat as the surroundings dissolved, into something more intimate and disturbing. The glass was gone. The kitchen was gone. The taste of garam masala became the taste of river mud, thick and foul, flooding his mouth, his lungs. He was underwater. Bodies drifted past him in the flood, limbs trailing, faces slack and eyes that had once accused him in the void now staring at nothing. The red-and-blue light was gone. The power was gone. He was just a boy again, drowning in the dark, and somewhere above him, the dead monster's heart was still floating in the water. You killed us. You opened the gate. You- He screamed, and the scream swallowed water, and the water swallowed him. Herald woke with hot sand in his mouth and a burning sky pressing down on him. He lay there for a long moment, chest heaving, the memory of the river still fresh in his throat. His clothes were stiff with dried flood-silt. His hands were covered with dried blood, some of it his, most of it not. The crystal lay against his chest, dim now, barely pulsing, as exhausted as he was. He was in the desert. The storm had passed. The world was vast and still utterly indifferent. In the distance, perhaps two kilometers away, the mouth of the mining canyon yawned open. A thin plume of dust slowly rose from it, not smoke, but the aftermath of collapse, the settling of a grave with hundreds of bodies buried under it. The river had already begun to recede, leaving behind a scar of mud and debris that glittered faintly in the pale morning light. The mine was silent. Nothing moved at its entrance. Further out, on the horizon, something else moved. A convoy. Three... no, four vehicles, dark shapes against the sand, travelling in formation. They were too far to identify,