I guided my miserable donkey with my few meager belongings toward the fiery oasis of sorrow. I gazed upon the ribbon-like moon bridges that spiraled down from the clouds, landing behind the city's intact but useless walls. Moon Giants, just as bright as the twisted path they walked upon, trudged skywards. They were like dust motes from this distance, but my donkey still slowed his pace, turned his head away. I urged him toward the burning city; I knew the residents' loss would be my profit and the Giants were leaving. It would be relatively safe now that they'd eaten their fill. I was a scrawny man, not worth eating in the first place.

"Come on, you dumb donkey, the fire burnt itself out." I tugged at his reins. A change of the wind and the stench of smoke overwhelmed him. The stubborn animal dug his chipped hooves into the dirt. He would move no more. His wet eyes glowered at me, daring me to try. I wasn't strong on the best of days; emaciated as I was now, it would be a contest I'd lose.

I tethered him to a tree and teetered the rest of the distance to the city's gate. If I'd been less hungry, I'd have heeded the dumb donkey's advice, but it'd been days since I'd eaten real food. I wasn't desperate because I felt hungry, the opposite. The pain was gone, instead I felt light and weightless and spots frequently swam in my vision. If I didn't eat soon, I would never have the pleasure of feeling hungry again. In the chaos of the fire, there had to be unattended food or luxuries I could sell for food if I survived to the next town.

Even before I was close enough to make out the myriad screams as words, I could tell they were not the shouts of fear of fire. The fire was only a symptom, not the cause of their misery. The tendrils of the receding moon bridges were squirming worms in the water. I was the fish that staggered unevenly ever closer. I hesitated outside the city walls until the last of the snaking moon beams glinted out of existence in the cloud, taking the last lingering Moon Giant with it.­

I squeezed my way through the crumpled city gate. I noticed the large cog mechanism for the gate's opening and closing was smashed. On the road in front of the gate was a maze of frantic carts, an array of disorderly hoof prints and piles of skeletons. Yellow-white bones stacked neatly without a spot of blood or muscle. Picked clean.

They had tried to evacuate when the threat from the sky had arrived. The gates were designed to open slowly and close quickly. Gates usually keep the enemy out. Gates were obvious targets. They'd been destroyed, the entire city's population had become a captive meal for the Giants. That explained why I wasn't smelling burning flesh, ignited hair. The remains were all tidy. The Giants didn't have a taste for coin, and I plucked up plentiful coin that had spilled amid the forest of femurs, eye sockets of skulls or hidden underneath humeruses. I did my best to not think of how these were people less than a day ago. I wasn't stealing; they didn't need this coin anymore and I did. The Moon Giants had wiped out entire families. If I didn't step in and get the gold, then it would go to the Arcanacracy's treasury.

Further from the gate I did encounter corpses and near-corpses. The dying that had been hurt either fighting the Giants, or by the panicked trample to avoid them. Many people had been injured and pinned beneath the collapsed wooden beams and overturned carts. A young man reached out to me, his skin on his arm bubbled from the heat. A shop stall had fallen onto him, pinning him to the ground. I wouldn't be able to lift it, my vision still swaying in dizzying loops from left to right. The heat made the dizziness worse. I kept walking, his wailing at my back. My dad would have stopped to help him, but my dad wasn't here.

The bakers' stone ovens were made to withstand heat and so were still intact. Ironic, as the building attached to it was half-collapsed, shattered wooden beams sticking up at violent angles. I opened one of the many oven doors by its small iron knob. Inside sat a loaf of bread, still warm. I yanked it from the stone enclosure and tore into it. Eating. I was eating. A sad state of affairs when this was a special occasion, dining with the dying cries of the wounded around me. But eating was eating, and I made it through half the loaf before the feeling of my stomach returned. I finished it before said stomach went from hunger pangs to content. I emptied my flask, knowing the bread would soak up the water and fill the remaining want.

My vision stabilized. I reassessed my treasure hunting ambition as I shoved extra loaves into a sack. From what I knew, Giants didn't torch things, but it was hard to keep the thatched roofs from catching fire when homes were being torn apart. The roofs were a series of torches by which I could find my way. As I ventured deeper into the city, more survivors noticed me. People pinned beneath thrown carriages or collapsed stone walls kept grabbing at me, crying at me, shouting at me.

Eating had restored my humanity and despite my greedy motivations for stepping foot into the city, I found the cries of the wounded undeniable now. I stopped to help the ones I could. If they were pinned, I did my best to lift the debris, though my scrawny arms failed often. If they were wounded, I soothed their pain with the herbal drinks and lotions I'd often mixed from the medicinal plants I'd gathered earlier while vainly foraging for food. I had thought the herbs useless because they were inedible, but seeing the relief wash over the faces of those I aided made me reconsider. After the medicine ran out, I folded any cloth or bandages they had over the wounds.

Some wanted to hold onto me. Incoherent, injured beyond repair... I had to unlatch them, sometimes getting firmer when they wouldn't stop sobbing. People begged me to find their wives, kids, husbands, parents, dogs and everything in between. So many potential searches that were likely to have ended in vain. If their loved one had still been around, they would have been an unidentifiable pile of bones. I had extricated myself from these as well, promising to search with no intention to.

I lifted coin in small purses between helping the wounded. Coin had been left out everywhere in the streets. I didn't enter the houses, in case they caught fire and collapsed on me. The greedy side of me fantasized about jewels and silver dishes. The practical part stayed away. It would have felt more like stealing to have snuck into an unattended home.

I turned back for the city gates when I had gathered enough coin to make my bag heavy. I thought that if my coin purse were ever to sag this much, I would feel inversely light and free. That's not how I felt at all. The smoke made it hard to breath and my limbs were heavy.

An infant wailed. I swore, invoking the chill and the snow and everything that is death and magicless in the world. The coins only felt heavy, the baby actually would be. I could hardly do another pass through the town holding a swaddled infant up asking 'is this yours?' to the traumatized people of the city. The parents were probably dead. That meant if I found it and then chose to abandon it, I would be a murderer.

What was I going to do with an infant? I walked on, telling myself it had been my imagination. I hurried away from that hated, guilt inducing sound toward the normal screams and cries of the adult injured. I even relieved my conscious when I redirected a few kids into groups, but didn't take any of them myself. Kids were smart. Kids could travel; I had. I'd tried to walk away.

An infant's howl, no, the infant's howl somehow still cut through all of the other commotion. My heart was trapped in a tight net. The ropes of this net bit so hard into my essence that I knew if I tried to pull against it anymore the ropes would split my heart open, pulping it like a mishandled strawberry.

I stalked back toward the sound, seething with anger even as the tension lessened. The ropes fell away as I drew closer. With the guilt out of the way, I heeded the noise more carefully. It felt wrong somehow. Those cries were too loud to be a baby, but what else could that wet wailing noise be?

The noise piped out of a pile of rubble. The massive stone bricks were stacked awkwardly, leaving a dark void beneath them. Or... at least, the void should have been black. Like all the others around it, a pit to hide whatever nastiness had been destroyed beneath its collapse. But... somehow... the bottom of the bricks were lighter than the tops, licked only by the star light and flames. The underside had been... white, as if facing toward a moon uncluttered by clouds.

The crying died down. Scared it would stop, I jolted forward, grabbing the stones and yanking them off. I shouldn't have been able to do it, with how skinny and weak I was. But I didn't consider my own emaciation. I only thought of hearing the cries fade to weak whimpers. The stones made thudding noises as they hit the ground around me. I was breathless from the exertion. My head began to spin again, but I had to get this baby out before it went quiet. I had to at least try or my heart would never be warm again. If it was going to die, it had to die after I tried to rescue it, not before. Not before...

Light shone through the few cracks between the bricks, brighter now. I should have realized what it was from those beams of moonlight earlier. But I thought of a baby, only of a baby. When I lifted the last stone to reveal a Moon Giant I staggered back in shock.

I had never seen a Moon Giant like this; well, I'd never seen any Moon Giant before that night. The baby was almost too normal looking. It was... a baby. I kept telling myself this to work up the courage to inspect it closer. Only a baby. More elven than human, with its drooping pointed ears and its large, angled eyes. But... not an elf. Too big. Way too big. The size of an elven toddler, but the soft downy hair and awkward, jerking movements hinted it was only a baby.

I scooped it up in my arms. It was like carrying an older child. Its crying settled down, and I ran my hand across the feathery hair on the top of its head. Each individual strand glowed as I captured the fuzzy strands between my fingers. It gaped up at me in orange-eyed surprise. Its mouth opened to coo. No teeth, just soft gums. It motioned, wanting to bite me, nibble me. Suckle, I realized as I staggered away from the pile of stones and jammed my thumb between its lips. This, of course, meant I only had one arm for carrying, which with all of the exertion before, began to ache.

As its oversized, chubby fingers wrapped around my own hand to hold the thumb steady, the baby was comforted. I had been so focused on saving this baby, I realized I heard no other crying infants. Did the Moon Giants favor babies? Were they all eaten already?

As I walked through the streets, people would scream in fresh terror at seeing the baby's luminescence beaming around a corner. When we came into view, the same people would fall silent in confusion.

I was stopped right before the gate where a small crowd had gathered.

"Is that..?" A chubby man began, holding a rag over a forehead wound to catch the blood.

"Is that one of them?" A decrepit old lady asked, uninjured but her face caked with dirt from hiding.

"Revenge!" Yelled a surviving guard, his eyes glittered beneath his dented metal helmet. "Let's kill it."

I tucked it close to my chest and shook my head. To save this child from death beneath the stones, only to hand it over to a mob to be killed in a more terrible way, would leave my heart no less destroyed.

"No!"

"You're going to take care of it?" One man, his beard scorched away, screamed at me. "After what it's done to us? After what its people always do to us?"

"He doesn't know! He didn't live here. He didn't witness the eating..." A woman's tremulous voice; the words like an accusation. She held a small doll in her hands, worrying it.

I felt them closing in. The baby, unaware, kept sucking on my thumb happily. It even had the cheek to gurgle with contentment. My heart kicked up into a panic. They weren't going to kill the baby; they were ready to tear me limb from limb. Think, Azark, think...

"I—" My voice faltered. If only I knew how to speak well to a crowd. If I could find the right words, they'd be as effective as a magic spell. But I wasn't a sorcerer. I was just a common ungifted. Wait, that's it. "I am not going to take care of it. But... you realize... a live Moon Giant..." I jostled the baby a little, and it cooed. "Is worth nothing to us, but a small fortune to a sorcerer."

They advanced.

"A-And," I continued. "If we kill this baby now it'll suffer for a second. But a sorcerer..."

"A sorcerer could make it last for years." A second woman said, clutching her own broken arm as she smiled. My stomach was churning, but I nodded. "Day in, day out, torment..."

"Exactly!" I said. "Exactly the thing! So it's important, I think..." I said, moving toward the maze of upturned carriages. I stepped lightly, navigating the uneven terrain through the miserable wraps on my feet. I was grateful for how thin and flimsy they were, for they let me feel the ground so I would not trip. "...that will be the best way to get revenge. Only over years could this monster's suffering ever come close to what they have caused you in such little time." I finished sympathetically. The group murmured among themselves.

"But even if that is so..." The guard from before came to the front. I felt the hard side of a carriage behind me with my free hand. There was enough clearance for me to fit under as I had explored it with my fingers, keeping my eyes on the guard and the group around him. "...then you should give it to me to sell, and I will share the profit with the people of this town."

I ducked. The movement had been so quick I surprised myself, not to mention the injured mob. The guard snatched at me. The metal plating of his gauntlet tore at the strap of my belt. It broke and my coin purse landed like a rotten apple on the ground. I had no time to grab for it, but instead slid beneath the carriage. Their grasping hands were unable to reach me. Since I had navigated it so recently, I knew I could make it through much faster than they could. The baby began to wail as I bumped and squeezed her in order to fit through the tight passage. She blared our location for all to know. By the time I had got through the town gate (holding her above my head so we both fit through at the same time), I heard the thudding and cursing as some of the group tried to follow me through the carriages. I hurried away from them and to my donkey. Slicing its tether free from the tree, I ran into the night away from the ember city.

(( A/N: Enjoying the story?  Consider purchasing the paperback edition at my CreateSpace website: https://www.createspace.com/5621397 or the kindle version over at: https://amzn.com/B01FSPZK42  I will also leave the finished manuscript up here for people who can't afford to buy books right now. 

I  am no longer active on Wattpad. You can find my new fiction on Medium, where I also go by Synia Sidhe. I also have a facebook page where I post updates and artwork for the series, just search Synia Sidhe. I will log in here every month or so to check messages. Enjoy the novel and hope to hear from you soon! ))