by Jennifer Loring
girl lived in a tower, and she slumbered as if in death, and no one knew much more of the story than that.
Castles, perched upon hilltops overlooking the cities, once dotted the countryside. Hundreds and even thousands of people lived in them, and so complete were the castles unto themselves that no one ever had to leave. But over the years they began to disappear, demolished long before the cities, and like the people themselves became just another myth.
Scattered pockets of humans roamed the countryside, the stronger ones mostly, who could walk long distances and use tools or weapons. The attacks usually came at night. The rest lived in trash heaps, the largest relic collection of the race from which they descended, on the outskirts of the cities. Ravaged by weather and time and their own self-destruction, the history of those long-lost people proved too fragmented to bother piecing together. The true story lay within the cities, vast tombs where no living soul dared go. But the wind blew the city’s refuse west, toward the dump, and he had collected enough scraps to learn that it was those very people who brought the stars down upon themselves, and burned the whole world with them.
Some found strange solace in bringing new life into the world, and they named their children after things they heard about in stories but rarely, if ever, saw. So his parents called him River, though they’d never encountered more than a few thin, iridescent streams of what passed for water.
River, like most people, felt unsafe if he stayed in one place for too long, so he decided to search for castles.
Was she a princess? He didn’t know, but in the legends young girls in castles were always princesses, and the men who found them always princes. So if he could find her, he reasoned, he’d become a prince, and the girl would of course be the most beautiful girl in the world.
River walked from his cardboard hovel in the shadow of the dead city, toward the clump of ashen trees that bordered the camp. Most people tried to pretend that the city, an enormous dark phantom on the horizon, didn’t exist, but he found it hard to ignore the jagged skyscrapers jutting from the earth like broken teeth. A place that held all the memories of who they were and where they came from, a repository of all the knowledge lost to them. Haunted now, people said, so many trapped there when the stars fell from the sky. Lost souls wandering for eternity through the maze of streets and debris, waiting for the living to come so they could follow them out. A long time ago, after the Starfall, some people journeyed back to the city to find those they had left behind. They never returned, to no one’s surprise. But this happened nearly a century before River’s birth, and the city no longer possessed anything that one truly wished to discover.
The tree trunks had blanched in death, the branches bare and gnarled like arthritic fingers. After the Starfall, people said, it snowed nearly every day during the three years of darkness. Decades later it still snowed once in a while, and people worried that the perpetual night would return. So far it hadn’t, though the air never did warm up very much.
“River!” a girl’s voice cried out behind him. His sister, Rainbow. Those beautiful, fabled things never appeared in the chemical red sky, and anyway, rain made the skin burn. “Where are you going?”
“I’m just looking for…food.”
“In there?” Rainbow pointed with her left arm, for her right was only six inches long. “The witch lives in there!”
Rainbow only knew the word from the stories River told her. No one had ever heard of a witch before, and the greatest threat the woods had to offer were not witches but the flesheaters who lay in wait amongst the trees. No one really noticed if someone went missing anyway. Death was as common as rats.
Not long ago, in his scavenges of the rubble heaps that were once houses, River discovered a book. A handful of people still remembered how to read and, if they could find the tools, passed this knowledge on to subsequent generations. After decades of being used as fuel to burn for heat, like anything made of paper was, few books remained. But he could tell that this one was special just by looking at its green leather cover, its gold-trimmed pages. Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, said the words on the cover. There he learned of the sleeping girl in the citadel, and because everyone sought the history of the world before the Starfall but none dared enter the dead city, he shared the tales with them. They knew so very little of what came before--of the city and its purpose; of the building on the opposite horizon with its dome-shaped structure and giant towers, and the explosions that periodically ripped through it to set the sky ablaze. Or of the people who once lived here, rumored to have left only their shadows behind on the other side of the city.
Only shadows…like those of the naked trees that stretched across a suggestion on a path. River entered the wood.
