The fire

"Where is Enyar, what are you doing in his bed?" Hewin shouted to the face of the man that has just woken up.

"What? Who is that supposed to be? I don't know any Enyar," the scared man cried back nervously looking around as the fire was getting stronger.

Flesha and Reji were up and about, taking their stashed money from under the straw floor. They saw Hewin and shook him.

"Let's go, no time to waste here!" Flesha, the taller human of the two, with big eyes and a braided beard, insisted.

"Go on, I need to find Enyar first," Hewin explained but his two friends looked completely baffled.

"Who is Enyar?" they asked in unison. <No, I am from the Void>, the sentence was ringing in Hewin's head since he woke up. He shook his head and ushered his friends out of the burning building. Soon, he was alone in the dormitory, the flames now licking the roof.

"Enyar!" he was shouting repeatedly to no avail. Hewin looked under the bunk bed where he had found Enyar in his dream. Nothing. Then something took him by the fur on the backside of his neck and dragged him outside.

"You are one stupid cat!" Ver Shaet noted as the roof of the dormitory collapsed.

"Then why did you bother to go in?" Hewin asked, annoyance leaking from his tone.

But Ver Shaet only smiled: "I love my pets, especially when they can mine in the dark."

<Of course>, Hewin realized, <I am basically an expensive walking pickaxe.>

At that moment, he noticed that it wasn't only a solitary fire. The whole mining colony was burning! Ver Shaet gathered the slaves and led them to one of the wells, where one of the overseers already organized groups for fire control. Some were pumping water into buckets, others were running the buckets to pour them over the flames.

When Hewin's group joined them, he asked: "Has anyone seen Enyar? He looks like me but his fur is silver." Some of the slaves raised eyebrows, but most of them did not react.

"Has the smoke gone up your head or what?" Ver Shaet remarked and looked nervously at Hewin: "You are the only cat in here, you know that right?"

Hewin grabbed his own ears and wanted to scream. <What is happening, where is Enyar, why is everyone acting crazy? For the last six years, Enyar was sleeping in the lower bunk bed. I worked the day shifts in the depths, Enyar the night ones. Before the mine, Enyar lived on the Ashen hill with his parents Falyar and Vamika, only a half-hour walk from my house in the valley. Now he is missing and everyone is acting like he does not exist. What the hell am I supposed to do!> Hewin despaired.

Then the fallen star exploded. With a thunderous crack, massive chunks of the gigantic black stone half-submerged in the ground were thrown to the air. At that moment, slaves and overseers started to shout and ran in all directions. Hewin, Flesha, Reji, Ver Shaet, and several others sprinted towards the collapsed wooden wall near the forest when the first stones fell. With a loud thud, they were raining down everywhere, crushing people in the process. One of the stones landed near Hewin. The impact caused him to stumble and fall. When he got up again, he saw something terrible in front of him. The stone apparently landed and rolled a couple of meters. It crushed and smeared several bodies on the ground. Most of the remains were beyond recognition but the distinctive red-haired head of Reji separated from his body was lying in the grass, eyes looking to the night above.

Flesha noticed it too and started to crawl to Reji's head while sobbing. Ver Shaet froze in motion looking in the direction where the fallen star was moments before. He took his sword from the sheath. Hewin followed his gaze and froze too. From the depths, a shadowy figure emerged and floated effortlessly in the air. The thing slowly moved away. But before disappearing from the view, it made a pulsating roar, and a shockwave followed, knocking everyone standing to the ground. The black stones from the fallen star turned into dust when the wave touched them. Everywhere, the dust rose to the air, and as an impenetrable fog followed the dark figure on the horizon.

Ver Shaet spat, and ran away. Hewin tried to speak to Flesha, but he was in deep sorrow and didn't want to separate from Reji's head. It seemed pointless to run as the disaster reached its end and all the surviving overseers were gone, probably running somewhere far from this place. So Hewin just sat next to Flesha and held him close. <No, I am from the Void>, Enyar's voice told him again and again. Hewin was free, after all these years. Yet he felt nothing positive at the realization.