Terror flooded me. I stumbled back and ran out of the room. Halfway down the hall, the baby's sudden wail echoed behind me.
I froze. Then I ran back, grabbed him into my arms, and fled again.
I tried escaping down a stairwell, but a fox and a lion came charging up toward me. I hid behind a pillar, barely breathing as they thundered past.
A moment later they stopped in the corridor. A tiger ran up to them, transformed into a woman, and said, "The baby is missing."
The fox turned into the woman with the red hair, furious. "Catch the girl and the baby before the eclipse begins!"
I understood instantly. The baby they wanted… was the one in my arms.
When they ran off, I sprinted away again, holding him tight.
I did not know where I was going. I only realized when I burst into the open arena that I had circled back inside. The stage lay before me. Most of the couples who had been tied to the poles were already piles of ash, just like my parents. Only one couple remained, still burning.
It was the couple from our car… the baby's parents."
Mary stopped speaking. Her voice caught. She lowered her gaze and gently patted the baby's stomach.
He giggled, bright and innocent, and this time she smiled too, though her eyes glistened.
"When I looked at the baby in my arms," she continued softly, "he smiled up at me. A beautiful, trusting smile. He did not even know his parents were burning to ashes."
Her breath shuddered.
"I cried my eyes out. Or maybe I had been crying all along and only noticed it then. I forgot everything—the danger, the screaming crowds, the beasts hunting us—everything except his smile."
She wiped her cheek lightly, as if remembering the tears from long ago.
"It was the moaning beside me… that sound pulled me out of that strange moment of peace and back into the nightmare."
I saw a woman half-naked, her top stripped away, straddling a man and moving up and down. As he gripped her breasts and she rode him, her moans rose louder and louder, echoing through the colosseum.
While I was still trying to understand what I was seeing, I realized it was not only them. All around the arena, scattered across seats and stairways and even the floor, couples were doing the same. Some were completely naked, others still in full clothes, some tangled on the ground, others with the man standing while the woman clung to him. Every pair had their own frantic rhythm, but they all shared two things, the moaning that filled the hall and their eyes fixed on the stage.
Confused, I followed their gaze upward.
Above the stage, Luna was sliding over Sona, covering it little by little until only a sliver of red remained. It looked as if Luna were swallowing Sona whole. And then, while I watched, Sona disappeared entirely. A single moon hung in the sky.
A heartbeat later, the baby's parents burned to ash. The man's skeleton, still clinging to the pole, crumbled. But the ash did not fall. It rose, weightless, drifting upward like smoke without fire.
Then the ash began to glow blue.
All the ash on the stage pulsed with that same eerie light, lifting higher and gathering above the center pole. It swirled into a large cluster, spiraling faster until it formed a glowing blue sphere.
The baby and I stared at it, entranced. The sphere stretched and reshaped itself, feathers forming, wings unfurling. It turned into a massive bird, phoenix, just like the painting I mentioned before, only this one blazed with blue fire instead of red and orange.
The sight of it beneath Luna's cold white glow felt impossible, too beautiful for words. A dream sculpted from light. Everyone who saw it froze, eyes wide, barely breathing.
The bird flapped its wings and breathed out streams of blue flames. The air turned frigid. A biting cold swept through the colosseum, the kind that cut straight to the bone.
It lasted only a few minutes. As soon as Sona began emerging again from behind Luna's edge, the bird faded, ember by ember, until nothing remained.
I kept staring at the sky, hoping it would return, when the fox spotted me. She sprinted toward me through the gaps between the seats. Panicked, I bolted down the stairs and reached the corridor just as she collided with a couple mid-act, tumbling with them down the steps.
I didn't look back. I ran as fast as I could, but soon I found myself cornered. In front of me charged two bears, a lioness, a deer, and two tigers. More clawed steps thundered behind me.
Searching desperately, I noticed an open window. Outside, the drop was the height of five stories, maybe more, the ground covered with trees that made it look like a forest.
Before I had fled with the baby, I had hoped to bring him back to his parents. But seeing them burn… seeing them vanish… I lost that hope. And any will to survive.
If we were going to die, I thought it would be better not to die in the claws of the monsters who killed our parents.
I looked at the baby one last time. He was still smiling.
I wanted that smile to be my final memory. The last image I carried into whatever came next. I smiled back and jumped through the window, holding him close.
Somehow, miraculously, I survived the fall. Only when I lifted my head did I see the huge pile of sand beneath me and an enormous anthill nearby.
The moment I knew I was alive, I checked the baby. He gave a cheerful little chuckle, and hearing it made my heart beat again.
I hugged him tight and ran into the woods, into the pitch black, as fast as I could.
I didn't care about the thorns like knives slicing my clothes and skin. I didn't care about the insects biting me. I didn't care about the blood dripping from my nose or the pain burning in my leg from the fall. I just kept running.
The forest was so dark that everything blurred together, but soon tiny glimmers began floating around me. At first I thought they were insects. Then I realized they were eyes, glowing in the dark. Eyes of the beasts searching for us.
Maybe their senses dulled after turning half human, or maybe the heavy scent of sand and mud on me masked my trail. Whatever the reason, they did not find me, even when I crept past them in the shadows.
After running for what felt like forever, I finally slipped free of the forest.
Under the moonlight, I checked the baby again. He was sleeping peacefully in my arms, as if the horrors behind us had nothing to do with him at all.
Seeing that calm little face, I forgot every ache and wound. I sank to the ground, placed him gently on my lap, and he grabbed my finger again, tiny and warm.
This time, I did not laugh. I did not smile.
I cried silently, until my vision blurred and my memories of mom and dad poured through me all at once. And eventually, I collapsed into darkness.
When I woke up, I was lying in a small bedroom. For a moment, I hoped it had all been a nightmare, something my mind had conjured under too much fear. But when I saw the bandages wrapped around nearly every part of my body, I knew the truth. Last night had been real. Every moment of it.
As I forced myself to sit up, the door opened and a man in his forties stepped inside. When he saw me awake, his eyes filled instantly, and he choked on a small sob. His gaze stayed wet until he confirmed I was truly conscious. Before I could even ask why he was crying, he spoke, perhaps guessing my thoughts.
He told me he found me lying on the road, curled protectively around the baby as if I had died holding him. He pitied the sight of us, two broken bodies in the storm's aftermath, so he brought us to his home. The doctor who treated me had warned him I might never wake up again.
That, he said, was why he cried the moment he saw my eyes open.
Accepting that everything from the night before was real and not a dream was harder than the pain in my limbs. But his honest tears, directed at a stranger he found on the roadside, eased something in me. I felt a small piece of my heart knit together again, enough for hope to slip back in.
The first image that returned to me after that was the baby's smile. Maybe the man sensed it, because he said softly, "The baby is safe." But he did not let me see him until I was fully recovered.
Even after I healed, he first showed me around the building. It was large, filled with many men and women. It looked like a brothel, though he probably thought a girl my age should not know that. So he called it a hotel run by him and his friend. Then he introduced himself as Drake.
Later he placed the baby in my arms and gently asked how the child was related to me. I do not know why, but when I looked at that tiny smiling face, the words slipped out on their own.
"He is my son. Jack."