Cyo

Cyo was planning on drinking so much blood.

Until just now, of course, when it turned out that to bring an entire being to life, Joaquin only needed to prick his thumb. There was blood, yes, but more than that, there was talking. Pledging. Promising.

Cyo is coming to a realisation. It’s really about the promises, isn’t it? It’s about the bond between you and something, whatever that thing might be.

Cyo doesn’t give up on the brambles, but there aren’t many left, and they disappear as the days pass, sinking into the ground and becoming one with the earth. Blood doesn’t seem to revive them. It’s as though they’ve accepted their emptiness.

But Cyo refuses to forget. They hold on to the key tightly. It is a promise. A promise to remember a friend that is gone.

That friend was big, and didn’t have any blood of their own, so they drank oceans of it. In comparison, Cyo is just a little guy, really.

So instead of drinking blood, they make promises to the key, and the fragments of stone, and the brambles beneath the earth. They make promises to their memory of the Palace, and to all creatures like it, lonely and strange and misunderstood.

They bless these promises with what blood they have.

It is enough.

Not enough to bring their friend back, but enough for… something else.

The Palace saw the creature in Cyo, of Cyo, and reached out. Now the world does the same, and the creature reaches back.

The agreement is thus: be a friend to the outsiders.

The creature knows exactly what to do.

There is a story. Not many know it, because it is only told by those to whom none will listen: the misfits, the wanderers, the cursed, the persecuted and the abandoned. If you took the time to speak with them though, and if you chose to hear their tales, you might learn it too.

It can begin in many ways.

A traveller lies injured, far from any road, watching powerlessly as their life trickles away. A hungry urchin clutches a stolen loaf of bread, waiting as the cries of the guard grow ever closer. A child in the workhouse looks out between the bars on the window, watching the birds dancing across the horizon, wishing they were free to fly away too.

That is when it appears.

A monster, rising from the gloom of those twilit hours between night and day. Lambent eyes flashing in the shadows, towering frame adorned in charms and coarse fur cut through by scars running in eldritch patterns. Great black claws, fangs glinting in its maw and breath reeking of blood. Look beyond this fearsome appearance however and you will see in its slow regard a sympathy—no, an empathy—that is all too human.

This encounter always happens the same way. A single fixed point in all the stories. A moment of… fate.

And then they end as many ways as they begin.

The beast carries the traveller along secret paths to a faraway land, to the tender care of a tailor’s cottage. The cries of the guards fall silent, and when the urchin emerges there is no trace of their hunters. The child awakens to find a key under their pillow, one that will open any lock that dares stand between them and their freedom.

Listen to any one of them alone and perhaps it would be easy to attribute it to the deranged ravings of an outsider. Together, though, their words are not so easily ignored. And, if you did take the time to hear this story, and if you too were a friend to the ones who told it, perhaps one day you might open your door and find the strangest thing.

A pie. A cherry pie.

Just lying there.

Written by Conor W.