Chapter 6 The Kingdom of Valor
The Kingdom of Valor
The sun climbed its way toward its peak as we continued deeper into the hills, the trees thinning to reveal the slopping terrain of the Warrior King’s domain.
The air had shifted subtly—cleaner, crisper, charged with tension that made my back straighten.
Even the birds in the trees had fallen silent.
We trudged along a worn dirt path carved into the hillside, wide enough for two but just barely.
The Carls bounced a few steps ahead of us, seemingly full of limitless energy, occasionally pointing out strange plants with names I couldn’t pronounce.
I moved up, wanting to learn more about the strange little twins.
“So,” I said casually, picking my way around a root that had no business being in the middle of my path, “what’s the deal with you two anyway?”
Carl-One looked at me over his shoulder. “We’re twins!”
My eye twitched. “Yes, I know that. Why are you on this journey as well? And why help me?”
“That’s what Flisters do,” Carl-Two said with an emphatic nod. “We help. We encourage. We…bring snacks.”
He pulled a suspiciously glittery muffin from the pouch slung over his hips and offered it to me. I declined with a polite grimace.
“If you can’t remember, how do you even know what to do?”
Carl-One glanced at Carl-Two. “We don’t. But no one else volunteered, and we thought it would be an exciting adventure. Besides, Tarran asked us to.”
“Tarran did?” My brows lifted. “She didn’t really strike me as someone who wanted to do this in the first place.”
“Oh, she’s more involved than she lets on,” Carl-Two whispered conspiratorially. “She knows more than she says.”
Carl-One elbowed him. “Stop that. She doesn’t remember everything, just like us.”
“Wait, what do you mean?” I slowed my pace a little, drawing closer. “She doesn’t remember what?”
“She used to be different,” Carl-Two said, glancing behind us to make sure Tarran couldn’t hear. “Before the forgetting. She still gets flashes sometimes, bad ones.”
“Bad how?” I asked, suddenly concerned. It was true that Tarran sometimes seemed a bit off, but I just assumed it was the way she had been written. She was a character in a book, after all.
Carl-One hesitated. “She doesn’t talk about it, but some nights, she wakes up screaming. Then, she paints. She always paints after.”
“She said she didn’t remember much about the others before me,” I said. “But that’s not normal, is it? What is it here that makes people forget?”
Carl-Two looked at me seriously. “Foreverland takes things from people. It gives things too, but not always what you want.”
“And Tarran?” I asked, glancing to where she walked in silence. Her head was tilted back, the rays of sun on her face, light sparkling off the golden streaks in her hair. “What did it take from her?”
Carl-One’s smile faded. “She always helps the ones who fall from the sky. Every time. And every time one of them loses, it costs her something. Even though she can’t remember, losses like that leave a stain on one’s soul.”
“You two seem okay,” I commented. A bit weird, and way too energetic, but mentally, they seemed much more sound than Tarran.
They both shrugged, their mouths forming a thin line that looked comical on their nearly identical faces. “If you say so,” Carl-Two replied.
“She doesn’t have to help, does she? Can’t someone else do it?”
Carl-One blinked, as if he’d never considered the question. And maybe he hadn’t. If they had, maybe he just couldn’t remember it. “Someone has to, and so, she does.”
My chest tightened, a mix of guilt and something else I didn’t want to name.
It was ridiculous that I’d be feeling guilty for a book character.
She’d been written this way, and that wasn’t really my problem.
But it didn’t change the fact that these characters felt so real, so human, I couldn’t separate the fact from the fiction.
The hills grew steeper, the soil beneath our feet turning from soft ground to cracked stone. The land was changing. No longer playful and whimsical, it was now sharp, angular, hard. It was like entering another place altogether.
“How much further?” I asked Tarran, worriedly glancing at the sky. We’d been walking all day, but we weren’t behind the walls of a kingdom yet, and I didn’t want to know what a night terror was truly like.
“Each kingdom is only a day’s walk from the next. We’ll be there before nightfall,” Taran told me, and my eyebrows shot up in surprise. Seeing my surprise, she said, “It’s a book. You can’t have chapters and chapters of travel time. It’d be too boring.”
It made sense, but the fact that a book character was telling me about the book they lived in was really starting to weird me out.
Eventually, we reached a rise in the path, and the Kingdom of Valor revealed itself in the distance.
Nestled in a wide, shallow valley, it looked nothing like the other parts of Foreverland I had seen so far.
Towering stone columns jutted up like the ribs of an ancient fallen creature.
Banners flapped in the wind, deep crimson and gold, bearing an emblem that looked like a sword piercing a mountain.
Soldiers, at least a dozen, trained in rows beneath a slate-gray sky, their synchronized movements rhythmic and sharp.
It was all so…serious, and honestly, it made my stomach twist into little knotted pretzels. How was I going to be expected to fight anyone and win? Especially when I wasn’t a trained soldier.
Tarran stopped beside me at the crest of the hill, the Carls pulling up right behind us. “This is it.”
“Still time to turn around?” I offered feebly.
Carl-One clutched my arm. “Nope. You’ve got this.”
“We’re with you!” Carl-Two added, giving me a toothy but encouraging smile.
I glanced at Tarran, and she met my eyes, something unreadable flickering in their depths. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.
With a deep breath, I squared my shoulders, and together, we stepped forward toward the massive gates of the Kingdom of Valor.