The hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands, the million billion trillion people that flowed around a singular child, a fawn in the midst of indifferent predators, blank faces, or—more repugnant—ignorant faces, men and women, young and old, people of an assimilated culture raging with helplessness more stupendously weak than the child that as such was ignored, left alone, eyes yet growing wide with realization that there was no soft hand to anchor the self to, no smile to greet, no leg to wrap one’s arms around, no maternal voice to sweeten one’s ears, no tens or hundreds of points of comfort that barricaded off that swell of pure emotion a child was painfully capable of.

Fear.

The child could not remember where he was. He could not fathom where his mother and father were, nor could he hope to find them, said the tears that rolled down his cheeks and dripped onto the old cobblestone uneven beneath his small feet. The swelling tears blurred his vision and his courage; the tight-lipped frown that began to burst into a cry melted the parrying sound of the thousand striding feet surrounding him; the trembling heart turned his limbs into fragile things, rubber for muscle and glass for bone.

He wailed, yet no soul answered him. Their hearts were steely, sharpened by the city, hardened by their enemies and conditioned by their colleagues against selflessness, something that each and every one to some degree longed for but in the sight of any other it was an intangible, impossible state of being, something that someone else was supposed to attain.

Suddenly another child appeared, surfacing from the sea of age, clutching a slim and tender hand that could be traced up the arm to a woman who kept her hazel gaze forward and brown lips sealed. This boy had let his eyes wander as his legs strained to keep pace with his maker, and they no sooner locked onto his kin as his hand reached out to this little lost one.

They embraced, and both children stumbled forward with the gait of their leader. The slim metal rings on the other’s fingers sparkled with the late afternoon light, tiny inset globules of multi-faceted colored glass shimmering and then biting into his own hand as the other gripped harder against the friction of bodies that threatened to pull them apart.

The jeweled boy smiled, teeth like little pearls lined inside his lips, his dark olive skin creasing at his eyelids with the slight grin. His deep black hair stood loosely spiked, and the strands bounced with every step they made. He wore a loose-fitted blazing bright azure satin dress with gold stitching around the collar, a thin amber scarf wrapped but once about his neck. His left ear was pierced with a small dangling gold earring, inlaid with a diamond-shaped jade stone. It bounced crazily, and, walking with this jeweled child, the lost one became fascinated with the colors that shone from him.

Here was a light that shone to him, spoke to him, held on to him, against the rough cloth cloaks of the people around them, dirty, unkempt, a herd of moving organisms, like the North Star on a cold and lonely night when all around was not a soul and it was all that could be done to pray for a cloudless sky, to find the way home with that little twinkle in the deep black.

The jeweled one looked back and grinned again. Over the sound of the crowd he spoke aloud, almost shouting, though in a language the lost one was only slightly familiar with.

Welcome, friend! Does the light of the two suns illuminate you?

The translation was rough, but he knew the greeting fairly well. He smiled, briefly, consolingly, and made to reply to him, but almost immediately was swallowed in the shadow of a large and wide man with his attention above the small children and his intention to throw his stride through their frail grasp. The lost one looked up at this man with eyes that neared on the boundaries of fear, but were brimming with a trembling hope that this man with large, beaked nose, with eyes darkened by large, protruding brows, a peculiar tattoo of a slack link of chain that ran from the eyelid to the earlobe, that this man might look down and not down upon these children and move around them and not in between. Yet this hope was futile, and the large cloaked man did walk into their clutched hands, and he did break them apart as a blade of grass bends to the wind.

The lost one stumbled again, losing the energy that had kept him moving with the other child and his mother, crying out loud at the quick severity of his severed connection. The large man continued on in the opposite direction, and the lost one slowed considerably in his, losing sight of his companion ahead, the blue of the other’s dress fading into the various appendages of the crowd.

And then he looked down at his hand.