3Dedicated to my Emo Prince ... you sick sonofa-
Merry birthday!
The stars are in the ground
Two brothers rush through narrow streets and back-alleys of a golden brown tanned city. Where the buildings all look like short stout mounds of sand made on the beach by an unskilled child with a bucket. Even the orange gold burning sky above goes along with the color scheme of the dry kingdom.
In contrast to their surroundings the boys have shock-white long dreaded hair, clashing with their dark tanned skin. And both are dressed in dark violet draping attire with hoods shielding their sweating heads.
One brother begins to stumble and falls behind as he coughs and wheezes, the second hooded brother runs back to him.
The brother continues to cough heavily and slouches back against the wall of the shadowy garbage-infested alley. "Hell. They had to raid our hide-out just when I got "the cough"" he mutters, hacking and coughing till blood spurts out and runs down the corner of his dried-up pink lips.
"Put your arm over mine! We can still outrun them!" declared the other brother frantically, taking his brother's arm in his hands, but the brother sharply retracts it from him.
"No, we'll ... both be ... caught that way ..." he says simply through sharp inhales, as he removes his hood and bows his head as he attempts to catch his breath.
"Then you hide and I'll lead them away!" says the brother, taking the brother's arm again and forcing him down amongst the garbage.
The earth shook with pounding steps, and the brother quickly turns toward the quake.
"I'll lead them the other way." he says, fear keeping his voice low, as he charges off toward the pounding footsteps.
The brother left behind let out another array of ragged coughs then mutters. "Idiot ... what are you trying to prove little brother?" he questions just before his red, sweating face, and throbbing lungs, let the fever take over and he lays down snuggly surrounded by trash.
The brother runs toward the quaking, and he feels his bones rattling beneath his skin, then he sees the black silver swarm of the guards coming right at him, he freezes up for an instant, then sprints down an adjacent alleyway with them right at his heels.
A guard's arm reaches out and snags the end of his dark violet cloak and jerks him back on to the ground in a sprawled heap with his violet cloth blanketed over him.
"Didn't think it would be that easy to catch you ..." one guard snickered proudly, as they surround the boy.
"Careful, he'll try to pull something ..." another warns.
Finally a guard whips off the violet cloth and the young boy is revealed sprawled on his hands and knees with his face bowed low.
"No thief tricks?" one jeers, kicking him in the side, forcing him to double over and have a coughing fit.
All of the guards back off at once. "Idiots, remember he's got the cough ... I knew this was too easy ..."
"We have to bring him back to the castle."
"I'm not touching him!" remarks another.
So with a thick white cloth masked over his mouth and nose, and a guard at each side of the younger brother, each at a safe length away and holding a rope firmly in their hand connected to the iron collar around the boy's throat they walk him like a spectacle to the castle dungeon.
The ropes are cut from the collar and the younger brother is thrown into a dark windowless stone room with his face still masked and his wrists and ankles still bound together, amongst the rest of the convicted folk.
"OOh, fresh-meat!" one dirty crook gushes as he bends down and inspects the bound up criminal lying on the ground. But then he looks closely and from the slight light glaring from beneath the door he notices the color of the boy's hair. "White Hair?!"
A gasp resides inside the cell. "Whad you say?" The dark pit of a cell becomes whisper quiet, as whispers overtake it.
"Whitehair the thief? Impossible! How did he get caught?" demands a crook taking a step forward.
But the younger brother hauls himself into a sitting position and everyone backs up at once, and the boy rests himself against the corner of the stone cell.
"Whitehair, what are you doing here?"
"Are you here to take over the castle?"
"Will you kill the king?"
"We'll help in anyway we can."
The younger brother's eyes are round and unblinking, then he lets out a few rough coughs and the cell falls back into silence.
"The cough ..." is all that is said, and the criminals keep their distance, allowing the boy to close his eyes and rest.
A week later
The cell door slams open, and the criminals sitting on the floor let out a groan from the glare of direct light, and the damning rush of fresh air.
The guards swat away the criminals that crawl toward them like salamanders with their round iron clubs.
"Where is Whitehair?" they demand in a painfully loud roar, that echoes through the cell a few hundred times then escapes down the stone hallway into the beyond.
The younger brother's boney arms and legs shiver as he attempts to make himself smaller in his isolated corner.
The guards find him and smack him upside the head before retying ropes to his iron collar then hauling him out of the cell like a bleeding sack.
Out in the hall with a line of mounted candles on the wall, they reconnect some chains to the collar round his neck, and apply a second thicker white cloth over his current mouth-mask cloth.
"Hell, the legendary White haired thief looks nothing like I imagined." exclaimed one of the guards.
"Yeah, I expected him to be bigger."
"and less pathetic."
"He's got white hair and that's good enough for me ..." remarked another passively, as he kept the boy on his feet by straining the chains on his collar.
Then a tinted voice echoed a question from afar. "Have you considered that is because he's not in fact White Hair?"
The younger brother's entire body perked up as his eyebrows rose in anticipation, but his new found strength seemed to dwindle back down as a tall man in a velvet red robe approached.
"Captain Sesume, we were pursuing him from his hide-out, no other thief would have such an extensive array of stolen goods, and that is the stuff he didn't already sell. It's too much of a coincidence that there should be another white haired person at that exact moment." explained one of the guards.
The Captain did not take heed this man's words as he walked up to the boy who gazed up at him through locks of filthy dreads that have lost their pure white vividness, and dark underlined eyes that squinted up like the candle lights were too strong.
Reaching inside his robe the Captain takes out a ring of keys; all the guard's eyes bulge at this. "Captain, don't!"
Captain Sesume ignores them, undoes the shackles and rips the white clothes covering the boy's mouth. The younger brother begins to collapse to the floor, but the Captain wraps his arm around him and applies a deep kiss to his chapped lips.
End chapter 1