Chapter 32 [Rori]

Rori had spent a lot of time in the dark. He had vague memories of having parents, but it had been a long time since he’d last seen them. He wasn’t sure if they’d died or just wandered off. Perhaps, since he’d been able to feed himself, catching sewer rats and lizards or feeding off of human scraps, they’d decided he didn’t need them anymore or perhaps they had simply lost interest in being parents.

He hadn’t ventured out of the sewers often. He understood that the surface world was dangerous and he recognized when it changed for the worse. The human race that had populated the surface world had deviated from their normal habits.

Before, they had always gone about their business rather quickly. If he did wander too close to them, they were usually blissfully unobservant of his presence, too busy maintaining the order of their own world. If they entered the sewers, he could lie down quietly and they would move past without a second glance.

Then one day the maintenance stopped. The machines they used to move from place to place were abandoned. They no longer carried lights or equipment when they moved about in the shadows. Nor did they speak their complex languages to one another.

One day, the extremely noisy surface went quiet. He didn’t know why it had happened. They were still moving, but they weren’t the same.

Food scraps stopped coming in their normal frequencies. The humans seemed to have stopped littering or throwing things in bins, but they hadn’t cleaned up. It was as though they’d lost interest in food and vehicles at the same time, showing no signs of picking back up their old habits.

When the prey had even started to become somewhat scarce, Rori had ventured closer and closer to the human residences. Besides behaving strangely, they’d changed physically as well. They began to resemble dead things, their bodies giving off the powerful odor of rot.

They shuffled about in an aimless way. Instead of having their eyes clear, skating over Rori as though he were nothing more than debris, they now turned their heads at his movement. They sniffed and chuffed like animals, their mouths hanging open stupidly. Their unfocused, graying eyes hardly blinking as they attempted to focus on him.

Rori must not have smelled enough like food. They chased him, but quickly gave up on the idea of taking a bite out of him when he failed to bleed under the gnashing of their teeth.

Even so, it was terrifying. The way they lunged at him without speaking. The way they gave chase just because he was something other that was moving. And there were a lot of them.

He hid in the sewers. Hiding in places they didn’t even seem capable of finding anymore.

But something found him.



Rori had seen dogs. He was aware of the odd little surface creatures that made barking noises and followed the humans around on leashes. When the humans changed, he didn’t see them walking on leashes anymore.

If dogs found their way into the sewers, it was because they were hungry and looking to take Rori’s prey. He didn’t like eating something he knew the humans were attached to. They were something that had more intelligence than the rats, so instead of hunting them, he’d scare them away which easy enough. They didn’t usually come in large numbers.

Until one day, they did.

They weren’t like the normal dogs the humans had raised. They more or less all looked the same, bulky bodies with long muzzles and tails and pointed ears.

Instead of being frightened off by his alienness, they gave persistent chase. They howled, filling the sewers with ungodly amounts of noise and came in an overwhelming flood. They’d circled him, driving him into a dead end and bit at him mercilessly.

It didn’t feel right to fight back. He didn’t want to kill them. He just wanted them to give up on him and go away the way the humans did.

They didn’t. Instead, they had bowed away from the first voice Rori had heard in a long time.

When human-like hands had touched him, they weren’t the bloodless, rotting limbs of the surface people now. They were warm and full of life.

When he had dared to look at the creature that had turned away the dogs and touched him with gentleness, he saw a face that was kind. She met his eyes without flinching. Her lips pulled into a smile that he’d only ever seen in passing and had never been directed toward him.

She wanted him to leave the sewer. She guided him up to the surface and into the daylight where he had rarely ever dared to go. She led him toward others that looked human – the way the humans had used to look, but none of them gazed at him with the same level of warmth.

They all smelled like dogs and recoiled from him, but not her. She fed him and cleaned him. She showed him all the warmth and kindness he remembered from his original mother.

She introduced him to the people. She encouraged him to learn. She encouraged him to play with others that were closer to him in size and age. She showed him a world of things he’d never known.

Mila became his second mother. She had taken him from the dark and brought him into the light and he was so grateful to her for it.



Mila was different from the others. Most of the new beings he was introduced to were called werewolves or lycans. They could, at will, turn into those dogs that had chased him through the sewers. He wasn’t sure how much he liked that.

They didn’t seem to like him very much either. Only a few of those that had attacked him came to apologize. Those ones had all been young and some of them had parents that were kindly toward Mila. They had encouraged the children to be kind to him in turn.

The ones that didn’t apologize clearly had parents that weren’t keen on either himself or Mila. While Mila resembled them much more than Rori, she couldn’t become a dog. She was what they called a mermaid, a creature originally from the oceans that Rori could hardly imagine.

Beside her were two males that were kind, both clearly aiming for her heart. It was hard for Rori not to be biased on this. The one male was a free spirit, he wandered off more than others and was clearly far more of an outsider than Mila.

Though Rori had been frightened of the dogs at first, the other male was one of them. He was a leader of these wolfdogs. He regarded all of his fellows as family and while he was wooing Mila, he viewed Rori as family as well.

Rori liked this wolf-man a great deal, but it was Mila’s decision in the end. He decided he didn’t mind which male she chose. Just as long as she remained his mother. The woman that had brought him into the light.