Pólemos
By Bri Herter
Empty mountain dew cans cluttered Blakely Drew’s car as she drove into the sunrise. “I am not afraid to keep on livin,’ I am not afraid to walk this world alone…” she shouted along with My Chemical Romance. This was the morning she’d been waiting her entire life for. Her 18th birthday – the day she could finally be free.
~
“Retreat!” bellowed Serafino Kole as a tree uprooted in front of him. “Zia! We have to move!”
“But they’re-” began Amatzia.
“There’s nothing we can do, come on!” Serafino shouted through the torrential downpour. He grabbed his brother by the arm and yanked him away from the tragedy unfolding before his eyes. The two darted through the field, dodging tree limbs and airborne pieces of earth as they traveled.
Why do the worst storms always have to hit in the middle of a battle? Fino thought to himself as they neared the mountainside.
The brothers soon crossed the threshold of the cave, along with the majority of the other troops. Once inside, it took a moment before anyone could catch their breath. Most of them collapsed on the cold floor in exhaustion, many others began tending to their battle wounds, and some gathered around the mouth of the cave to gaze outside at their world being butchered by the weather yet again. Serafino immediately began building a fire. Once Amatzia was breathing regularly again, he approached his brother with clenched fists.
“First you make me fight in this battle of yours, and then you make me run away from it and leave our friends to die?” he said in an aggressive whisper.
“Running away doesn’t mean we’re not still fighting,” replied Serafino. “Did you want me to leave you out there to die along with the rest?”
“I would prefer it if the rest weren’t dying at all, Fino.”
“You know the Eidia will stop at nothing. We have to keep fighting – we don’t have a choice.”
“We always have a choice,” Zia muttered as he walked away, leaving Fino to stare into his fire alone.
He’ll come around, Fino thought to himself. I’m doing this for him, after all. He’ll be grateful once he’s living in freedom.
The night fell like a blanket stifling a flame, and it didn’t take long for most of the troops to pass out in fatigue. However, it didn’t matter how worn out Serafino was, he would still be laying there, awake and alert, for a few more hours before rest would fall upon him. And even when it did, most nights he wouldn’t even count his sleep as “rest,” seeing how his dreams were just as taxing as his reality.
“Don’t touch me!” shouted Blakely, losing the sense of calm that she had worked so hard to maintain this time.
“You listen to me young lady,” her father shouted over her, gripping her arm with one hand and using the other to hold the door shut. “You will not come into my house and accuse me of things you know nothing about!”
Blakely wrenched her arm out of his grip and tried to open the door to get outside, but that only resulted in getting her hand shut in the door when he slammed it closed again. Pain shot up to her elbow, but she could hardly feel it in comparison to all the hate that was burning through her veins.
“Don’t tell me what I don’t know!” she yelled. “If I didn’t know anything about it, then I would believe what you just said! Except mom has the invoices to prove that you make more than you say you do. If you want to give me no more than five dollars for gas so I can get home, that’s completely fine, just leave it at that – but don’t stand here and lie to my face with your sob story about wishing you could afford more, when we both know you could.”
Judging by the look in his eye, Blakely thought he might hit her. Part of her hoped that he would just so she could press charges about something. But instead, he grabbed her with both arms and shook her while yelling something about it being a sin to not respect your father – she wasn’t totally listening because she was focusing on the fact that he had now taken his hand off of her escape. She used this window of opportunity to reach under her dad’s arms, fling the door open, and jerk herself out of his grip and onto the snowy walkway outside.
“This is what you wanted!” her dad roared as he charged after her. “You and your mom wanted this divorce, so now you have to deal with the consequences! Don’t come back to my house and don’t ask me for any favors ever again!”
“I won’t, I don’t want anything to do with you!” yelled Blakely as she neared her car. Her dad began cursing at her, but thankfully the sound of her engine drowned him out soon enough as she sped out of his driveway.
Serafino awoke abruptly, heart palpitating. Nearly every night he dreamt about this girl named Blakely Drew, and nearly every night he wondered who she was.
~
It was getting late, and Blakely had been driving all day. She pulled into a little motel in the little town of Stanford, Illinois.
“That’s an awful lot of boxes you got in there,” said a man passing by her car in the parking lot as she pulled her backpack from the back seat. “Where ya headed?”
So this is that kind of town, Blakely thought to herself.
“Not sure,” she replied.
“Looks like you’ve got everything ya own with ya. You plannin’ on movin’ to this ‘Not sure’ place?”
“I guess so.”
“What’re you runnin’ from?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, ya sure looks to be on the run, and if ya don’t know what you’re runnin’ to, then you’ve got to know what you’re runnin’ from.”
“Sorry, not to be rude, but I don’t exactly know you and I don’t really think it’s your place to assume that you know me.”
“I didn’t mean no offense, Miss. Just thought I should let ya know that I’ve had experience in runnin,’ and well, I’ve learned that some things are worth stayin’ to fight for.”
Running away doesn’t mean I’m not still fighting, Blakely thought as she took hold of her backpack and headed for the motel door.
~
Morning came, and with it, another overcast sky. The sun had rarely shone in Phylaki` for nearly three years.
“Alright, listen up,” called Fino as he gathered his men. As young as he was, he had been leading the Myalo since the war between them and the Eidia had begun over two years before. The two tribes of Phylaki` had never quite gotten along, but it wasn’t until the Eidia had begun listening to a man named Legion that all hell had broken loose. “Today we’ll head west. That’s the direction that the Eidian reinforcements keep trickling from, so they’ve got to have an encampment somewhere nearby. We’ll move out in five.”
Serafino spied Amatzia at the back of the group, face sullen. At times, Fino felt guilty for dragging Zia into the war. But he knew that he was responsible for his little brother and for making sure he learned the important lessons in life – and Zia had to learn that if he wanted to achieve freedom, he had to fight for it.
“You will never be free,” came a voice. Serafino’s heart pulsed. He’d heard it before. He glanced around – no one else seemed to have heard anything. His eyes caught his brother. Amatzia’s expression had shifted from disdain to fear – had he heard it, too? Fino had never told Zia about the strange things that had happened to him since the war started. The voice, the nightmares, the hallucinations… his job was to protect his brother, and he wasn’t sure how well he could do that if Zia thought he was being looked after by a brother who turned out to be mentally insane. “Never…” perpetuated the voice. An inkling of doubt crossed Fino. What if it was right? What if he spent the rest of his life fighting for something that he could never achieve?
Five minutes had passed. Fino shook off the chill that the voice had sent up his spine and shouted over his men, “Alright, let’s move!”
The Myalo began marching west, as Fino had directed. To no one’s surprise, the moment they set foot out of the cave, it began to rain. Why the weather had preyed on the land of Phylaki` the way it had over the last few years, no one knew for certain. Most blamed it on Legion, as it had most definitely grown more severe after his uprising. Of course, it had already grown gloomy in Phylaki` long before he came along, and it wasn’t unheard of then to experience a tornado or thunderstorm here and there. However, the day the war began, the disasters increased drastically in size and quantity – and Legion was the root of the war.