He closed his eyes and began praying that something, or someone for that matter, would save him. He wanted his followers to come in and say they’ve been looking everywhere for him; he wanted his parents to come in with the Arcadian militia, arresting everyone who had done this to him, and then his parents take him in their arms and say how happy they were that he was okay. If this was a dream, he wanted to wake up.

Aiden took in another breath.

He opened his eyes again to find himself in the same room. He did it again, and again, and several times more before coming to terms with the situation at hand.

As the darkness continued to approach, Aiden looked up and watched, horrified, as the lights began flickering out one at a time. It was a long, threatening flicker, lasting at least twenty seconds for each of the four light bulbs. “No, no please!” he begged, unaware that he had stopped holding his breath. Two lights were gone now, and Aiden wanted to jump to his feet and go into the light, but that was unpractical. As the final light went out, Aiden was plunged into blackness, but he could see the outline of five figures that Aiden assumed were skeletons. With that assumption, Aiden slipped off the bed and hit his head on the floor, blacking out.

When he came to, he was still in that room, but the lights that apparently had existed around the edge were lit, making the room glow brightly and less threatening. He could finally see where his handcuff chains led – into a hole in the wall. He swung his legs around the table repeatedly, allowing him to walk to the walls with plenty of slack still. The double doors were locked; there were no windows; no matter how high he jumped, he couldn’t reach the ventilation system’s cover. He screamed, he cried, he banged on the walls. Aiden wanted someone to hear him.

But he stopped and thought to himself, “What if they saw me?” He curled up against the wall, realizing that he couldn’t be seen because he knew everyone would see him. He’d be seen as an animal. A monster. A freak of nature. An abomination. Despite still seeing the stitches, he would still be seen like that regardless. His father would shun him because he couldn’t get out of this. His mother would side with her husband.

Aiden had to go missing; be found months later after concocting a story of being tortured, mutilated, and then come back as the “brave prisoner” who survived. That was Aiden’s solution: he had to survive what he was going to be put up against. His parents would organize a search party, definitely. The militia would be organized too; his father had that power in Eagleshaw. If he so desired it, he could stage a massacre against everyone living in the capital city on the grounds of “possible treason against the King.”

Aiden had to disappear.

“If you’re going to send me anywhere, send me somewhere where people won’t know me,” he shouted to the walls. “If you’re going to punish me, put me in isolation. Put me somewhere where I am alone, where I can’t escape. Where people’s judgmental eyes are not to see me.”

“I’m sorry, Aiden,” came Danielle’s disembodied voice, “but you don’t get any input on what we do with you.”

The lights switched off again, casting Aiden in darkness. He swished his arms around, looking for something to distinguish where he was. After crawling around for what seemed like an eternity, he found the hospital bed bolts and clung to that. The lights did eventually come back on, but Aiden hadn’t noticed because he had fallen into a deep sleep.

~ ~ ~

Aiden awoke to the ground shaking beneath his fingertips.

He attempted to sit up, but found it a little difficult, seeing as his hands and legs had been bound together. He finally was able to sit up, slowly, finding himself in a wooden crate. Holes had been cut in the top of the box and a small slit had been cut into one of the sides. The crate wasn’t very big – just a little bigger than his steamer trunks that he had previously had been packing up at school.

School. Aiden hadn’t even thought about it, but now it plagued his head. What happened to everything back at his school? What happened to all his belongings? How long has it been? Aiden suddenly found himself yearning for the trees whose tops had been flattened by the autumn and winter winds; he yearned for his dorm room that was meant only for him but could’ve fit at least two other people; he yearned for, of all things, his lectures where he had some of the best naps he’d ever had.

But Aiden wasn’t scared anymore. Being scared made him even more exhausted. How long had it been?

Only a month had completely passed when Aiden was last on the school grounds. After passing out, Aiden slept for the night and then was finally transported to a hospital on the east side of the archipelago under the pseudonym “Tobias Callahan”. Numerous surgeries had taken place over one week in the middle of the night, the staff keeping Aiden sedated. He was awake during the day, but the extent of Danielle hallucinogenic aerosol, which he breathed for a combined two weeks, had lasting effects, resulting in Aiden’s brain unable to create new memories until the effects had completely worn off. After the surgeries, Aiden was kept in isolation while his stitches healed, but a problem with Aiden and the antibiotics had occurred. The problem resulted in another surgery to remove a small portion of infected flesh on his back and redone.

But now Aiden was being shipped, quite literally, on one of the relatively newest and most impractical methods of transport: ocean-going vessels, specifically meaning vessels that sailed on the water, using the water and air currents, along with another form of forced movement. The paddle ship was a thin, long thing with two exposed paddle-wheels on either side, its hull painted in black and its upper decks painted a soft grey. Its decks were covered with deck chairs and docking equipment, with dark grey smoke billowing out of its two black-tipped yellow funnels placed curiously close together. Its three-masts stood high and tall over the funnels, dressed in the white sails that made the ship sail ever faster, and colorful bunting that added to the lure of the sea.

The ship was a new combination of passenger and cargo, cashing in on the passengers who had never sailed so close to the sea before. People who sailed found that the sea was rough, much like the erratic wind currents, but when the sea was flat, the ship glided, almost like two dancers in a waltz, over the deep blue calm.

But Aiden was in the forward cargo hold, and the sea was being unpleasant. He felt the metal floor shake from not only the turning paddle-wheels, but also as ship’s bow attempting to cut through the rough sea. The vessel suddenly lurched left, making Aiden’s box slide a few inches before the chains, which had been wrapped around the box a few times, kept the crate resting close to its originally unloaded spot. His shackles were gone, but now the ropes were digging into Aiden’s wrists. As much as he pulled and tugged on the ropes, he was unable to break free from them.

Days passed. His meals arrived via one of the crewmembers, which usually consisted of baked beans and an apple, but the only thing that was fresh was the bread. He had no need to ration food, for Aiden found that he indeed got three meals a day, but it was almost always leftovers or scraps left by the crew. Being trapped in the box meant Aiden’s lack of exercise further distanced himself from his original image of a thin, strong-looking, serious and unhappy blonde child.

Finally, after a week of sailing, he was unloaded at the quayside, watching curiously as the holes in his crate revealed a city cast in golden lights underneath a blackened sky.

He was told to cover himself up by a man dressed in black; the crate was needed elsewhere. Ropes on his legs cut, Aiden threw on a blanket and was quickly thrown into the back of an open wagon stacked with goods. Aiden was told simple instructions. Following their departure from the docks, Aiden was shot with a sedative, which paralyzed his muscles enough to stop him from running. His hands remained tied together. He wasn’t told where he was going.

What he saw, when he peered from under his coverings, was a city with wide streets and tropical tree-lined sidewalks that had been greatly wrecked by the Great War. Its streetlights curved like growing plants, but many had been damaged and cast sections of the street in darkness. For the buildings that weren’t wrecked, their plain facades accented by thin, elaborate balconies around second-, third-, and even fourth-floor doors stood almost gracefully amidst the damage caused by the Arcadian Empire, the Sandwall Plains, and United Republic of Direwall.

The ship had sailed from Eagleshaw’s seaport and had traveled west towards Antham, the city existing on the edges of the ocean and the desert region of the Sandwall Plains. But the city neither existed in the Sandwall Plains nor the Arcadian Empire, but existed in the thin strip of lush lands that was encompassed by the United Republic. Direwall and Antham, the two “Free Cities of the Western World”, sat comfortably in the “Strip of Paradise”.

The air chilled and blew lightly. A single lantern, slowly burning a small candle away, hung above the driver’s head. Its horse huffed as it pulled its wagon over the now-unpaved path out of Antham. The horse’s driver urged the creature to continue.

When the wagon had stopped moving, Aiden found that the city, the trees, any sign of civilization, was gone. Underneath a blackened sky, Aiden Whitebell saw nothing more than flatlands, and the outstretch of a star-filled sky.