Legacy Chapter 7 – No Dreams

I don’t dream. I don’t revisit my memories. This is a blackness I’ve floated through before, dark and empty. When I wake my head will ache, my perception will spin and nothing will seem right for days. They think it’s so simple, striking us over the skull. That it doesn’t hurt us, only puts us out of their way for a while. They’re wrong.
It’s damaging. It’s always damaging. It was damaging when my father did it to me. 

When I wake, no one is with me. The skies are darkening from blue to black, the flowers seem purple in the waning light. I’m exactly where I was when my vision went dark, face-down in the dirt, smelling pollen and tasting the faint coppery edge of blood from a split lip. There’s sand between my teeth, and a deep ache in my bones from lying splayed out on the ground for so long.
Everyone else has left the fields by now, and several of the guards and workers would have had to pass me on their way back to the shacks. No one even cared enough to move me.
I don’t even bother getting up. I’m too tired, too worn down, and there isn’t any damn point in it.
They took him. The last thing I had to cling to, a day after they took my dignity . . . the second to last thing I had to cling to. 
This is it. This must be it. The bottom Lochan spoke of. The bottom beneath every other bottom. I don’t care if I’m not some whore, suffering a wasting disease in a brothel, or flayed and beaten in a city square. For me, there is no further to fall. 
I had a family, once. A mother and a father. I lost them. I tried to remake my family, with a woman I couldn’t seem to get to love me. I had a son with her. I lost both of them. Then, for a while, I at least had hope I could mend that family back together. When that was extinguished, I always told myself . . . I still had my pride. And when I at last gave up on that, I had Ahsan.
It’s fairly clear where he was taken. And the manor may as well have been past the gates of death, as reachable as it was for me.
My claws dig into the dirt, of their own accord. Why was I ever proud, I think to myself? Why have I ever imagined myself to be worth anything? I am, and have always been, nothing. My life’s a testament to that very fact. Everyone around me has been trying to make it clear to me, from the time I was born.  I’ve just stubbornly refused to accept it until now.
I couldn’t be a good son, couldn’t be a good husband, or father. I promised to protect Ahsan, and I was barely able to lift a fist to defend him, the moment that promise was tested.
If I lie here long enough, I wonder, maybe the ground will simply swallow me up. And I’ll become part of the flowers, just like every other indentured worker who’s died here. 
I don’t have it in me to push on, anymore. Everything feels insurmountable, and impossible. 
I barely notice the sound of hoof beats, until they’re stopping near me. I don’t care who it is, I don’t care why they’re here, and I haven’t the strength to lift my head besides. Maybe I’m already dying.
The crunch of claws against earth nears me, and then a shadow falls over me, and I smell the scent of the Aardwolf. My fur prickles as he reaches out for me, but when his paw settles on my forehead, brushing over the sticky, bloody fur, it’s gentle. 
“I’ve been searching the fields for you,” he says, his normally deep voice strangely hoarse. “Put up a fight, did you, jackal?”
His tone isn’t accusatory, isn’t stern. He sounds more . . . sad.
I don’t turn my muzzle towards him, and he doesn’t force me to. Instead, I hear him shift to settle down beside me, and we share a long silence. I have nothing to say to the man, even if I am strangely comforted by his arrival. I’m not even certain why. Perhaps simply because I know now that someone was looking for me.
“How did we get here?” He asks, clearly not requiring a response. He’s asking the question to the sky, to the pinpricks of stars beginning to appear overhead.
“I don’t know if I believe in Gods,” he says at length, after another long silence. “Or rather, I don’t know if I want to believe in them. It’s hard to accept we all came from nothing, but it’s even harder to accept that anything would make a world this beautiful, and ask so many people to live such horrible lives in it. And what . . . be content watching the luckier peoples around us, making the most of all that beauty? Ruling, conquering, making us all suffer, and reaping the rewards of it? Life was made easier for them to begin with, so we’re supposed to congratulate them on their successes, on their victories? Because they were born with the right pelt, or to the right family. The right caste. We help them defend their riches, keep their slaves, clean their homes and suck their cocks, because they already have the power. How is that right?”
“You tell me, ‘Master’,” I say, my voice rough as gravel when it at last comes. I slowly turn my head, my skull aching with the minor movement. “If it galls you so much,” I let out my breath in a long shudder, “you shouldn’t . . . have become one of their guards.”
That genuinely sad tone creeps back into his voice. “I earnestly thought I could protect some of you,” he murmurs.
There’s a stab of guilt in my chest I can’t ignore, so I turn my eyes away and mumble back, “You tried.”
I honestly think he did. 
“I tried to get work at the brothel my sister belonged to,” he admits, a heaviness in his tone. “It would have killed me to see what she suffered, each and every day. To serve the people who kept her, and be part of that insidious place. But I would have done it, because it was the only way I could protect her anymore.”
“Why didn’t you?” I ask.
“They wouldn’t hire me,” he replies simply. “They knew we were siblings. They feared we’d collaborate. I came here because this plantation is the closest place to her that I could find work. And I told myself I’d do what good I could here.”
That silence descends again. I hear him open his muzzle once or twice, and I can see the shadow of his throat bob as he swallows.
“She died yesterday evening,” he says at length. “I am glad . . . I was close enough to her that I could be with her, when it happened. For that alone, working here has been worth it.”
I recognize the defiant way he’s holding his head up, the stiff posture of his shoulders, the pride there. I knew what that was once. I don’t commiserate with him on his loss, because I know he doesn’t want it.
“They took Ahsan,” I say instead. I suspect he already knows, and his lack of any response confirms it.
“That’s what the Clans do,” he says, an edge to his voice. “They take. They steal, and murder, and rape, and no one stops them because they don’t want to lose anything more to them.”
“You’re the one who told me to work within the system,” I growl up at him. He doesn’t even know the consequences his advice had on me.
His gray blue eyes finally flick down to mine. “If you want to live, you should. That fact hasn’t changed.”
I’m silent a beat. “What if I don’t care about living, anymore?” I finally ask.
He uncrosses his arms slowly, and lowers a hand down to me. “Then you’re in good company.”
I only hesitate a moment longer, before I clasp his paw in mine, and the big Aardwolf slowly helps me to my unsteady feet. My vision spins and for a white hot moment, everything hurts. But Lochan is there, hooking an arm beneath my shoulder as I find my bearings.
“Maybe I do believe in the Gods,” he says after we’ve stood there, staring at the stars for a long while. “It’s hard to feel like someone, or something, hasn’t conspired to bring all of these events together at once.”
“You don’t know the whole of it,” I say. “But help me search the flowers in that row for something, and I’ll tell you more.”