The Unmaker

The night is dark when little Dahlia trips into an open sewer on her way home. Her firefly cage shatters, she loses her light. Her bloody fingers trace the dried walls. There are hundreds of abandoned sewer tunnels all across the Old District, and while she couldn’t say she was completely unfamiliar with some of them, the fact is the night is dark—she can’t see a thing, and she doesn’t want to call for help.

She knows she shouldn’t have gone out alone looking for the pocket watch her father made for her eighth birthday, but if she goes home without it, her father would be mad at her. She would be mad at herself, too. It was the first thing anyone made for her with her in mind; even if she has to spend the entire night scouring the Old District alone, she has to find it.

So she takes a step forward–

“Eeek!”

Something is crawling along the tunnel. Lots of little somethings. She panics and pushes herself up against the curved wall, trying to get away from the squirming line of shadows—it is of no use. There are too many ants, trying to skitter past her toes, and all she can do is hold her breaths.

Eventually, the ants pass and she is alone again. She breathes. Her heart refuses to settle. If she stays in the dark any longer she feels her chest is going to burst, and she’d seen an open, bloody chest before, from one of her father’s patients. She doesn’t want that to happen to her.

She has to find a way out.

Plucking a bloodberry candy out of her pocket, she skirts along the left wall of the tunnel and starts walking forward. Sugar keeps her mind moving, adrenaline keeps her legs moving. Vaguely she remembers the various exits to the sewers all across the Old District, and when she fell in she was only a few hundred metres from the closest one—on the streets above, she’d have to turn left, left, left, and then right. It shouldn’t be all too different down here, she thought. As long as she kept going she’d surely stumble upon an exit eventually.

Ten minutes pass. She finds nothing, she finishes her first piece of candy, her fingers start to hurt.

Twenty minutes pass. She finds nothing, she finishes her second piece of candy, her legs start to tire.

Thirty minutes pass. She finds nothing, she finishes her third piece of candy, her mind starts to wander.

She only has one piece of candy left.

If she runs out of candy, will she just die down here?

“...”

No, no, no. She doesn’t want to think about it. She claps her cheeks together and puckers her lips, trying to remember the sensation of sugar on her tongue. It isn’t of much use. The lingering taste had already faded, replaced with the stale, dank, dusty air of the tunnels.

She is about to pop her last piece of candy into her mouth when she hears quiet sniffling, just around the corner.

Driven half by curiosity and half by dread, she pokes her head around the corner and waves her hand around. She grabs a tuft of hair. A little boy yelps and tells her to stop. She apologises, trips over a pebble, and then falls on her rear—now the two of them are eye-level, though neither one of them can see the other without a firefly cage between them.

“... Are you also lost, like me?” the boy asks, and her ears perk. He sounds a fair bit younger than her. “I fell in here on my way home, and I can’t… I can’t find my way out.

“Can you help me?”

She doesn’t say anything at first, because she doesn’t recognise his voice. So strange. But then she shakes her head and he starts panicking, hands swishing about the dark in search of her.

She grabs his hands by pure intuition alone and holds them still.

“I can’t help you… either,” she whispers, trying to muster courage into her voice; she feels she’s doing a great job before the younger boy. “I’m also… um, lost.”

“Oh.”

“Is anyone… um, looking for you?” she says sheepishly. “I don’t… wanna call out for papa or mama. They’ll get mad at me. Can you call your papa and mama instead?”

The boy’s hands shake.

“I can’t call them.”

“Oh.”

“...”

“...”

“... Do we really have to go back?” he says, and she hears him sitting against the wall, curling up in a ball. “I don’t… wanna go home.

“It’s not fun.

“I’m bad at everything I do.

“I don’t know what I even want to do.”

Then he starts crying. He starts unloading everything on her. He tells her he has no talent, no proper ambition—he wants to be a chef and study how to cook in the General School, but his knife skills are bad and so he keeps on cutting himself. His friends and family are telling him to drop out and walk a different path instead, so he doesn’t really want to go home. “They’ll look at me weird,” he says. “Everyone’s going to study in the same field and I’m the only one walking a different path.

“Hey.

“What do you think I should do?

“Should I just sit here and die, or should I get up and walk?”

The entire time, little Dahlia had been wondering why he was being so pessimistic, but when he says that she gets a bit irritated.

She grabs him by the collar and lifts him onto his feet, her own arms trembling in fear.

“... If you can’t make a decisive choice, then take both options and deal with the consequences later!” she says, doing her best impression of her father’s voice. “If you… um… if you clench your fists, you aren’t making anything with them! So you can’t clench your fists! And if you make a watch that can be unwound, that means you’re going to keep going back and you’re not moving forward! That means you’re not confident in your skills! And I believe in you! You have potential to be great no matter what, so the path you make with your own two hands will be the path that is best for you. That’s why… that’s why…

“That’s why we have to go!

“Now!

“Here! Eat this!

“I’ll make a path for us out of here for sure!

She shoves her last piece of candy into his hand and leads him by the arm, pulling him along the tunnel. Her face is burning hot. She didn’t know what to say to comfort the little boy, so she just regurgitated every last quote she could remember her father saying—half of them didn’t even make sense in this situation.

She’s embarrassed.

She’s anxious to turn around and see what the little boy’s face might look like, hearing those words coming from her mouth.

So she keeps on walking, keeps on dragging him along, for ten minutes and then twenty and then thirty–

And then she spots a column of firefly light spilling down an open chute in the ceiling.

There is a ladder there.

“... You know your way home, right!” she asks, breathless, not even as a question, as she lets go of the little boy’s hand to begin scrambling up the ladder. “Go home! Make your own path! Do whatever you want! But don’t clench your fists, or… um… the black bug will come and get you at night!

“Bye!”

The little boy tries to say something, but she flies up the ladder so fast she doesn’t get to hear him.

It is only when she returns home, and her father and mother start sobbing over her hour-long disappearance, that she realises she never got the little boy’s name.

“...”

She would’ve liked to tell him her name.

- Scene from Northern Old District past