Chapter 1: After the Fall
The house had never been this quiet.
No humming from the kitchen. No shoes tapping down the hallway. No clinking of dishes or rustling of clean sheets. Just silence: big and cold, like the kind you find at the bottom of a pool.
Ari lived there alone now.
Her parents had gone into the ground in clothes too fancy for sleeping. The grown-ups had cried and patted her head. And after that, the helpers packed their bags and left, one by one. Some said they were sorry. Some didn't say anything at all.
Now it was just Ari. And the silence.
She didn't know how to cook. But she knew where the freezer was. So she ate some ice cubes which was crunchy, cold, sometimes sweet if she dropped it in juice , and leftover cake from the big funeral she wasn't allowed to touch during the service. There was candies too;Lots of it,the kind her mother always said "not now" to. Now was all the time there was.
That morning, she wandered outside barefoot in her green cotton nightgown.
The grass was wet. The sky was too bright. Everything was hot and still, like even the birds had decided to take a nap.
She dragged a plastic chair into the garden and sat under the sun, sipping melted ice water from a teacup, watching a ladybug crawl up on her knee.
Then suddenly something crashed not far away.
It wasn't thunder. It wasn't a car. It was like the sky had dropped something important.
Ari stared toward the sound.
She waited, hesitated a little bit still nothing moved
So she stood up, left her teacup behind, and walked towards the direction of the sound. There he was.....
She found him half-curled in a shallow crater, arms limp, back rising and falling slowly. The grass around him was scorched and bent. The earth was cracked. The smell wasn't smoke, nor fire but was old.
He didn't look human.
His skin was pale, almost grey. His body was tall and lean, dressed in strange dark clothes that shimmered faintly in the light. There were markings on his skin jagged up and sharp like old runes ,and black horns curled from his head like a crown snapped in two.
As Ari stepped closer he still didn't move
She tilted her head, then poked his arm with a stick.
One glowing red eye slid open.
She gasped. Then smiled awkwardly "ohhhh"
"You're awake!"
The boy groaned, shifting slightly. His voice cracked like stone. "Where… am I?"
"In my yard," Ari said. "You fell. From the sky, I think. Or somewhere very high up. You made a really big hole in the roses."
He winced as he tried to sit up, then gave up.
She leaned forward again. "Are you magic?"
He didn't answer.
"Do you have a name?" she asked.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then said"…Ace."
She smiled. "Ace," she repeated. "That sounds cool. I was going to name you something like Mooncrash, but I guess Ace is fine."
He blinked slowly. "You were… going to name me?"
She nodded. "I name everything I find. But I guess if you already have a name, that's okay."
He watched her like he was trying to decide if she was real or not.
Ari tilted her head. "Do you want some ice?"
"…Ice?"
"I have lots. I live here alone. I eat ice and sweets mostly. I can bring you a blanket too. You look very tired."
Ace didn't speak.
"Can you walk?"
He closed his eyes. "No."
"That's okay," she said, standing. "I'll bring something. Don't disappear, okay?"
"I can't," he muttered. "Even if I wanted to."
Ari smiled, barefoot on the scorched grass and said "Good."
As she turned and skipped back toward the house back to the freezer, to fetch a bowl of ice for the strange boy who fell from the sky.
And Ace, demon of ages long forgotten as a myth, watched her go ,too weak to move, too old to care, and too confused to understand what kind of creature had just spoken to him like he was someone worth saving.