The Red Ribbon

Bryenok woke up thinking about what kind of worlds and moons he would like to leave for his kids Ewark, Mullkin and Grozetta. He thought of the time he was a kid and would go on trips to Udron’s moons back and forth with his family and friends. They would pack up fun games and gears and get in grandfather’s shuttle, which was rusty and smelled like the odd Irong fruit that grew on the vast plains up north.

Everything was red up on Udron’s moons and being close to one another, we used to spend half the time on one moon and half on the other before heading back to Udron. We would get up early and harvest fruits and leaves and chunky tatuiis that still existed back then, and which today’s kids have no idea that they were great big white maggots full of lovely protein and taste of coconut, that we would later cook for lunch and supper. Then, we would all go off to the valley where we would meet aunt Tanta and aunt Meroua, our twin great-aunts, married, both of them, to great-uncle Parsus.

I always found funny the way my aunts would talk simultaneously, dress the same, have perfectly matching haircuts and hold hands almost all the time.  Aunt Tanta was creepy and would open her one-eye wide when talking to us, and that made us scared, but aunt Meroua was had a kind eye and would always give us extra leaves and sun juice to drink. I loved sun juice as it was sweetly made or Parka fruit, the sweetest of our land and it would fuel our young bodies enough to be hydrated for three moons. Today, that junk faux parka junk they make, wont even last a whole moon.

Every night uncle Parsus would gather all of us at the central circle, which he made of stones and lumion metal and place us all around it from eldest to youngest and tell us about his time serving the Udron soldiers and all his adventures during his training years. Uncle Parsus and his brother Goorun were map-soldiers, and their mission was to explore and register the land and vastness of Udron. He would tell us about the days they had to walk to exhaustion, but it was worth it because the beauty he found was great.

His face was brightened by the Lumion metal that emitted an orange-ish light and that would hit his yellow body lighting it up in an almost ghostly manner. And he would go on full moons up and down as we got older, every family trip to those moons. My favorite story was the one where he got a special map badge to put on his hair, just like all the important soldiers did, in the back of his head, near the neckline. He had to use it so others would know his rank and placement and people would admire and salute him for it, for it meant that his bearer was brave, strong and an explorer.

I was about 5400 moons, a young adult, when uncle Parsus woke me up one morning, in one of his rare visits to Udron, the last one to our cocoon, maybe just a couple of eclipses before he left the family forever, to die at the rising sea sepultorium and gave me that badge, the special map badge, a bit dirty and torn but that made me jump up, salute him and hug my uncle with tears in my eyes. That was a moment I will take forever, along with that badge, until it is my time to rest in the rising sea.

The thought of that badge brought me back to my bed and I went back to thinking about how the world changed since that time, the materials, the leaves and stones and fruits and protein sources, that evolved, disappeared or were modified by us. I thought about the kids and how their experiences were so much different than mine and how supplies were getting shorter and how that impacted the ways we ate and lived.

But one thought didn’t leave my mind that day. The thought of that badge and the feeling that I had nothing like it to pass on to my children. I opened the white oval clay container I kept the badge in and started thinking what I could give them, if anything. Suddenly, one thing came to mind. I should go in an adventure myself, to the South Udron Marketplace, the largest on the planet and find a way to earn a badge-like item myself and split it into three to pass on to them.

I though about facing the enormous Blyke, so big his feet would kill you as you blink the eye, or maybe facing Harvous Bretta, the screamer, who’s voice pitch could damage our 3 vital organs and implode our tails or even waking up Farfella, the wicked, that was said to cast spells on whoever dared to bother her in her sleep. I wasn’t sure if all those stories were true or just made up to scare children but I needed an adventure to earn an object to pass on to my descendants, and off I would go to the mountains.

Five moons later I said goodbye to the children as I left them home alone for the first time, but knowing they were good harvesters, and knew how to make some good sun juice themselves. I then headed south, down to the valley, then along the sepultorium and finally into the mountains, that extended in such vastness that in my account it could stand for a whole planet itself. And the mountains were full of sweet parkas and chunky protein.

It took me seven moons to get to the valley and there I found a beautiful Udronian called Zylah, that would become my guide and good friend. She had been, like my uncle, a soldier and served as a medic during her 3650 moons of service. I met her as I fell exhausted into the valley, rolling over rocks and metal logs, landing into a pile of thick and spinous Jambee fruit which had hard thorns that would opened large wounds on my body. As I rolled, I hit my eye-cage and fell unconscious, what made me not feel the thorns, but made my beat rate high, meaning my thoracic box had been damaged. Luckily I did not damage my food processing system and by the time Zylah found me I was cold and bleeding out all my fluids but well enough to keep breathing. I woke up felling some stings, as she was poking my wounds and filling them with bark and red-fruit mush. The type only the medics know how to make as they are extremely venous.

Zylah smiled at me, told me to rest and gave me food and sun juice. The warmth and coziness of those days almost made me forget my mission, but I had to get to the mountains. Zylah told me she was off to the mountains herself as she needed to get Kula seeds that only grew on the west side of Kavanka mountain and that was the only medicine that could cure her mother, that would soon rest at the sepultorium if she couldn’t make it back in time.

Off we went side by side and I told her that as payment for her care I would go with her to the mountains and help her pick the seeds and then I would go to the Marketplace and earn myself something to pass on to my kids. The marketplace was full of events, vendors, food, refreshing sun juice stations and competitions where the bravest, the strongest or the smartest would win prizes and badges. There is where I would get it.

Night came and we stopped next to the sepultorium. We lit a fire and made our beds out of leaves and plants and talked until we fell asleep. Zynah mentioned she wanted to pay her respect to her dead ancestors tomorrow when we would pass though the rising sea sepultorium and I told her I would like to do the same, for uncle Parsus. The moons went down, and the day begun and after drinking some parka sun juice, off we headed into the rising sea coastline.

It always looked like a sunset at the sepultorium. Was it the light of the suns or was it the reflected light of the moon that would shine into the water, it always looked like a sunset, with the red light of the moons reflecting into the water or with the yellow-orangish light of our sun reflecting same. As we approached the water, we noticed that all the noises of the valley were gone and nothing moved, not even the waters, or the protein filled skinny maggots or the leaves rolling on the ground. It was as if part of the atmosphere of that place was the stillness itself.

If you looked closer to the water, from east to west, you could see the yellow opaque shade from the dead bodies, all one-eye closed, and tails rigid and still. A shivery feeling ran through my body as Zylah and I paid our respects to our ancestors and I particularly asked my uncle to guide me to wherever I needed to go next. It started to rain, and Zylah and I took cover under a tree that night. We would part the next morning to the mountains, finally.

It was still raining when the sun was up, but we got up and started walking. She new her ways well enough being herself from the valley and having relatives in the mountains but those big lumps of black hard soil and sharp rocks were no joke to climb. Any mistake, any step you made wrong, would cause fluid loss and would slow us down. “I wish we had fast legs, like the Jurion people, not these chunky round massive cylinders”, laughed Zynah almost mid-day. We went up the whole mountain and it was about down-moon when we started to see the Lumion metal lights beaming from the marketplace.

We were about to go down when a bunch of kids passed by and made fun of Zynah’s red ribbon, the one she would wear around her neck and that in my opinion made her extremely attractive. She ran towards them but got suddenly tired and fell back as they ran away. She told me she was starting to get these fatigue episodes every time she had to make more physical efforts. I told her I would make her se a medic as soon as we went back. She smiled at me and we touched our eye lids.

We finally got to the marketplace and all kinds of foods were being sold, from great valley maggots, slimy and green, to crispy leaves, colourful fruits and the largest barrel of fresh sun juice I have ever seen. Next to the food alleys, they sold metal objects, some made of Lumion and some made of Keelin, a blend of different metals that when melted to a certain temperature would turn ultra hard and it’s use went from soldier vests to sharp edge knifes and helmets.

And then there was the contests arena. Right in the middle of the market. Large and loud. Contests ranged from screaming, tail fighting and head banging to challenges such as standing in one leg for the longest time, most Sun juice drinking, and the most important of them all, the long path hike to the Uleg mountain to get the Cyper leaf, that only grew on the dense, cold and scary part of that mountain, but that used to make a proportion of six to one deaths per hike, being deaths the six.

I breathed in, out and screamed my name for the challenge as I should if one wanted in. That night we went to the tavern and spent the night talking and hearing tales. One guy came up to me and pushed me saying I would never win the challenge because I was too small and skinny and scared. I stood up to his chest but before I could tell him better, Zynah pushed him back and he fell like a fruit off a tree. He was so mad he threw a metal cup towards me but the cup hit Zynah hard and she passed out.

I took Zynah upstairs to a room and she was so week she could barely talk. She whispered to me very softly “you don’t need to climb mountains when the badge is within you. You are a great Uldronian and father and friend, this kindness is what you have to pass along, not badges.”. She passed away not much after that, in her sleep, and I burst into tears when I was preparing her body for the rising sea. I bathed her into the waters but her red ribbon let go of her neck, so I took it and put it in my pocket.

I watched the sepultorium take her in.

Back home, I had quite an adventure to tell and my kids were excited to hear all about it. I hung my coat and washed my hands and as I was about to go down for supper, I remembered the ribbon inside my coat’s pocket and took it downstairs with me. I took a knife and divided it into three. I gave Ewark, Mullkin and Grozetta one piece each and told them to always keep friends close and be kind, and as a reminder of this, they should keep the ribbon somewhere safe so that from time to time they could honour Zynah and what she stood for.

The End.