Excerpt -- Legend of John Kire

Excerpt -- Legend of John Kire

Still young and womanless, the four of us took our extremes in figuring out what we would do with our lives. We spent a lot of our time exploring what was left unseen on Hells, and we eventually had felt as though we had seen everything. But upon returning to Malevolence, we had gotten word of a young boy who manipulated not only shadow, but pain.

The four of us went to see him inside a prison, as he was sentenced to prison for putting an adult into a trance and having that adult scream obscenities at the top of his lungs. Apparently this teenage boy had the power to put people under trances, something which we had never heard of before.

We had Flint enter the jail first, as all rushed away when he entered. Criminals hated Flint, as he was free to burn them as he saw fit and torch them to death, if he so pleased in his own dungeon castle. We could tell which cell was the right one, because for some odd reason the guards did not want to get anywhere near that boy’s cell. To be fair, there were quite a few guards around the boy’s cell, but none of them would touch the bars as they would with the other prisoners. As we got closer, we could see that some of the nearby prisoners were in deep states of anxiety. One prisoner was ramming his head against a wall. Another prisoner was muttering things to himself in what appeared to be intense fear, and another prisoner still was curled on the floor, crying as though his most loved one had perished. All of us, including Flint, were probably in states of pure shock. But as we got closer, it got better. One guard was locked inside the room with the boy, and was merely sitting across from him.

“What’s going on here?” Flint asked one of the nearby guards. “Speak.”

“He just…walked in there on his own,” the guard said, “We told the fucker to stay away from the boy, but he just…went in there on his own. Been sitting there ever since.”

“And you didn’t go get him?” Flint asked, angrily, but the guard shook his head.

The boy seemed as though he could have been relatively tall if he stood up. He had jet black hair which fell over his head and face like a bunch of string; completely un-watched and random, though he appeared to trim it as he saw fit. He wore nothing more than a thick-collared black shirt and the jeans of the time, and none of it seemed out of place.

Flint looked back to the boy sitting on his sole chair across from the guard, sitting in a chair of his own. A prisoner behind them was curled up as the other prisoner was, on the floor, but that guard appeared to be paying close attention to absolute silence. His eyes were fixed on this teenager’s, until the most unlikely happened.

The guard began to quake. He shook ever so slightly as this boy remained perfectly still. The guard got up and rushed to the wall behind him and began to scream the air out of his body. He got up and rushed around the prison cell as if looking for a way out, but there was no way out and no guard moved to open the cell door. Flint took a step close as the guard began to rain from his eyes; he cried, yes, he cried, and he continued to yell before he fell to his knees in front of the boy and began to plead and apologize for anything and everything. He was begging the boy to make it all stop, to make it go away, though he never laid a hand on the boy. He seemed socially awkward, the teenager, as he simply blinked and looked at the guard oddly before he stood up and the guard shuffled to the back wall. Things seemed to get quieter as the boy hovered closer and closer to the guard.

The guard slid down to the ground and began to shout louder and louder as the boy hunched over him, and the four of us swallowed down what pride we had left as the guard continued to scream until he fell unconscious. As the boy turned his strange eyes to us, we all took steps back away from the bars. Flint even jumped back from surprise. With some level of confidence, the boy stood up straighter and said, simply,

“He’s hurting. Anybody gonna help him?”

He watched our every action. He watched me stare with a shake, Flint swallow and try to act tough. He saw Placeus begin to twiddle his fingers and he saw Reynald shake his head and turn away. It was when he saw these that he began to laugh lowly, until it rose to a loud laugh; a laugh that told us all that he knew. He knew we could do absolutely nothing to help the guard, and that we could do absolutely nothing to stop him.

Flint ordered the guards to let him go, because we knew nobody could execute the boy. We feared that we could not willingly cast a spell to kill him, and that anybody that got close to that cell would surely be caught into his trance of fear. I went there one night to listen to what the boy had to say, despite warnings that he might try to use me to escape. My reasoning was that if he wanted to escape, he would, and that he will, but not that night.

Being not too much older than he, I spoke as though I were his friend, instead of a captor or an older brother.

“Hey. How goes it?” I asked, nonchalantly as I approached his now unguarded cell.

“Boring.” He said, honestly, as he sat in the chair in his cell, not looking toward me, but looking instead toward the side wall.

“Boring, is it?” I tried to make conversation. “Well, imprisonment is a punishment, you know. It can’t be fun.”

“When the guards were here, it was fun.” The boy snickered a little. “I remember you.”

He apparently did not speak very much. His conversation skills were limited.

“Oh, do you?”

“Yeah.” He turned to look at me, then, with those weird, odd eyes. “I scared you, too. You and your friends.”

I tried to change the subject.

“I heard you can move pain.”

“No, no I cannot.” The boy shook his head and slammed his hand against the chair. “How many people are gonna screw that up before they get it right?”

He was upset.

“Get what right?” I asked.

“I don’t move pain, all right? I don’t move fear and I don’t do stupid things like that.” He was either insane or just an angry individual. “Idiots would try to do that. No, I don’t move pain or sad or mad or anything. You can’t do that. It’s impossible.”

I smiled.

“What’s your name?”

“John.” He said, simply. “What’s yours?”

“Cullen.” I knew his name, and could therefore ask the question. “What do you do, then, John?”

“I tell people what to do. And then I move them.” John shrugged. “People make feelings on their own, and people are things I can move. I can’t touch feelings or emotions, so I move people. As far as I can remember, I could hear people and what they really meant or felt. I could…move those things.”

“Ah.” I said, without much else. I couldn’t understand what he meant. Simply tell people what to do? Move them?

“Nobody else can, even when I tell them how it’s done, they don’t understand. People are idiots. People need to pay more attention.”

He sounded frustrated that he was alone in his power. He sounded frustrated that he tried to teach it and nobody could learn.

“Well, how can you do what you do, John?” I asked.

He turned to me again and smiled.

“You ask the dead to help you.” He raised his hand and nodded. “Or you force them to help you, instead.”

The next day, John escaped from prison. He had apparently not unlocked the bars at all, broken through the cell in any way, nor had he dug a way out. There was no way to break out of the Malevolence prison, as they used to bind your body to the place, so the only way to leave was to die.

To this day, some people actually believe he died. You know what? They would be the smart ones.