The Great

Taran Brunner: I slowly opened my eyes only to be greeted by a giant lemur standing at the foot of my bed. I immediately sprang to my feet and the lemur looked at me with a perplexed stare. Its giant ears flopped over its head and it had something wrapped up in its tail. I cautiously walked behind it and grabbed the object held in its tail—a velvet scroll. I opened up the scroll and read the message inside.

Dear Taran,

Hi, this is Melissa. Sorry for the giant lemur by the way, his name is Bobo, and my father gave him to me as a gift when I was young. He’s good at delivering messages and makes a pretty good sandwich when I need him to. Anyways, Mena wanted me to ask you if you wanted to come meet with her later in the afternoon. Just write something on a piece of paper and give Bobo a treat—he’ll bring me your letter. Do it soon or he’s going to start eating your furniture.

—Melissa.

Huh…. Mena wants to meet with me? I felt a little pang of excitement ring out in my chest while also being overcome with confusion. While I had liked Mena for a while, we had never really talked. We weren’t very close and there was nothing she could possibly want to see me for. But I wasn’t going to complain. I grabbed a spare napkin from the dinner table and wrote my reply.

Dear Melissa,

Tell her I’ll come. Thanks.

From Taran

That should be good… I held out the letter in front of Bobo but he just stared at it, refusing to take it. He shook his head and held out his other hand. I sighed, “listen man, I don’t have any treats. I don’t even know what Lemurs eat! Please just take the letter.” He shook his head. “Do you understand me? I swear you can understand me..You’re just trying to piss me off aren’t you?” Bobo smiled and flapped his ears around. “Bobo come on, help a brother out. This letter is important, it’s going to a girl. Just take it one time, please.” Bobo shook his head and jumped on top of the dresser. He smiled again and jumped up and down, dangling what appeared to be my student ID liquor card in front of me. “When did..Bobo you can’t have that! Bobo!” He began to race around the room jumping on the bed, cabinets, floor, and curtains while occasionally banging his head and breaking a mirror or two. I vaulted over my bed and jumped up to the ceiling in order to reach Bobo, but the little shit was surprisingly agile and fast…I flipped upside down and launched off of the ceiling as I nose dived to the ground—reaching for Bobo. He jumped over me and jumped off my back while I pushed off of the ground and landed on my dorm wall. I pushed off the wall and summoned my sword mid-air, and I hurled the sword in front of Bobo as it stuck to the wall and blocked off his escape route. He hit his head on the sword and he fell backwards–dropping my ID.

“Bobo! Bobo! Melissa’s not going to be happy if you die so don’t be dead. Wake up you little shit.” Bobo shook his head a bit and finally sat up. I sighed. I grabbed my sword and de-summoned it and walked to the kitchen. The pantry was mostly empty except for some apples, bananas, and a singular cluster of grapes. I grabbed the Banana and handed it to Bobo. “You like this right? I don’t know, do you? Is this like, monkey racist, I doubt all of you like bananas ... .Whatever, here, happy?” Bobo took the banana and nodded and he hopped his way over to the door. He swung it open and made his way outside. Melissa’s going to have some explaining to do..

It was weird though, but the fact that a giant lemur had just swung into my bedroom wasn’t the weird part, or the fact that an extremely beautiful girl had just asked me to see via her friend wasn’t either, but the circumstances surrounding the whole situation were weird. First of all, as far as I knew, Melissa’s family wasn’t particularly wealthy. Lemurs and messenger animals like pigeons and doves were considered something of a luxury to most people. My family owned a couple but even we were hesitant to get anything other than a messenger bird. So the fact that Melissa suddenly used and mentioned she had a messenger lemur was a little strange. Secondly, today was the weekend and we had no classes so there was no reason Melissa couldn’t have just talked to me in person. Even if she were to say that she was busy because of hospital work, underage hospital care takers weren’t allowed to work more than 40 hours a week, or work on weekends, so she wasn’t too busy to talk today either. Lastly, it wasn’t like Melissa to request a meeting with such little detail. There was no mention of a specific time, date, or reason. “Later in the afternoon,” wasn’t a very Melissa-like thing to say. The letter also seemed to emphasize that they wanted me to definitely, without fail, respond—since it gave me instructions on how to respond and urged me to do it quickly. The letter wasn’t from Melissa, or Mena, but that made everything all the more interesting. If someone really did want to trick me into meeting them, why? I wasn’t going to dodge or duck anybody.

And plus, if this really was Mena, maybe I’d get to see her…

Bobo swung by my room later in the afternoon and tossed a new letter at my face. It told me to come to the east Eden garden and maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me, but this time Bobo looked a little more suspicious. I made my way to the garden and found myself quickly surrounded by thick, green trees, and leafy emerald bushes. Bird chirps echoed through the forest while the sound of running water flowed off in the distance. I took a deep breath and tensed my body. I knew I wasn’t here for a date and the location seemed to make that much more apparent. The east side park was perfectly secluded, separated by a river from the rest of campus. Its high canopy and thick foliage created a perfect screen for suspicious activity—usually activities which involved…love— and all of the ambient sound created a very abusable element of surprise. I twitched my fingers, looking, hearing, sensing any change in sound, or pressure. A twig snapped to my left. I hurled my sword at the sound and the mass of steel and purple lighting ripped through the foliage and revealed a hooded figure. My sword pinned him by the cloak to a tree and he shed his cloak and stretched out his hand. It was as if some type of force had violently pulled and pushed a huge line of trees towards my face. A ripping force of energy came straight at me as I deflected it with my blade and I incinerated all of the incoming trees and debris with only one swing of my blade. The hooded figure stretched out his hand again and I was pulled into his grasp. He grabbed my throat and tried to lift me up, but he was far weaker than I was. I smashed his arm and I heard it crack as my straight right hand connected with his face. He was blasted back into the forest as I dashed in front of him and rammed the hilt of my sword into his eyes. He fell backwards with blood spewing out of his eyes and nostrils as he smiled up at me.

My nose wrinkled.

It was Ren, of house Novak.

He spoke with a soft laugh, “you—your face is hilarious you know that? It’s like you’ve just smelt a fucking farmer who’s been out in the fields.” I put my foot on his chest.

“I have a lot more respect for literal horse shit than you, you royal family free-rider.” Ren laughed.

“Like you yourself aren’t from the same world. Brunner’s, an old and noble family right? Me and you are the same, we come from the right world, the clean world. Frankly the only world where things really matter or are any correct.” I sliced Ren’s left cheek.

“I’ve never liked you and your rambling about classes, or royalty, or this and that. You think you're better than everyone but in my eyes you’re not better than anyone at anything. You just hurt people, like Lila’s sister.” Ren scoffed.

“That monkey needed to learn a lesson, having the nerve to call me foolish, refusing to follow my orders, the commoners have lost their sense of respect, you know that. She should be grateful I gave her my—“ I stabbed my blade straight into the center of Ren’s chest. His eyes filled with panic and pain as I looked him in the eyes.

My heart filled with deep, dark, rage, “you shouldn’t have said that. I’m gonna kill you now.” I pushed my blade deeper, and deeper, and deeper into Ren’s chest as he gasped for air. A smile crept across my face, “there, there, beg, go on, beg for your life. Maybe I’ll spare you if you beg hard enough. If you tell me why you lured me out here with that fake letter, maybe I’ll consider sparing you even more.”

He began to speak, “now…NOW!”

A red streak of lightning flashed by me as I felt an immensely powerful strike hit me square on the chin. I was blasted into the earth as I felt myself start to blackout. A group of what appeared to be soldiers came out of the foliage and stood over Ren. They were all dressed in purple and white, with chest plates made of what seemed like ivory colored steel. Their royal purple pants were lined with crystal white embroidery, and each soldier wore a series of long ribbons around their necks like scarves. The ribbon colors differed from soldier to soldier which made me think they signified rank. The purple and golden robes were globally recognized for being the colors of one country–The Nation of Raga.

The soldiers began speaking in a language I couldn’t understand but as I listened closely I recognized one voice. It was hard for me to put my finger on it…I was blacking out. But I had seen red lightning…red..red lightning… One of the soldiers reached down and grabbed my student ID. He put it in one of his pockets and the familiar voice spoke out, “that will get us into the tunnel network reserved for students of royal lineage. We would’ve had one already if this piece of shit Ren didn’t get his tunnel-privileges suspended earlier in the year. Also, the tunnels are nationally secured so don’t even think about trying to force your way in.”

One of the soldiers stepped over me and spoke in a thick, heavily accented voice, “very well, lead the way, chaos will help mask our presence.” As they made their way towards Eden I heard a giant horn go off in the distance. Black billows of smoke arose from several mountain posts as more horns bellowed into the air.

Black signal smokes, horns, chaos…

It all meant one thing.

Taegan was at war.