by Tony Johnson
“No, I understand,” Kari said, no longer crying.
“Good,” her father watched her for a minute as she contemplated everything he had told her. “I’m sorry I didn’t discuss this with you before we left this morning. You know I’ll never make you do something you don’t want to do, Kari. You don’t have to hunt if you don’t want to. We can sit here for the rest of the day and talk if that’s what you want. As long as we’re together, I’ll be happy.”
As soon as he said that, a squirrel hopped across the ground and scurried up the front of a tree facing them. Kari reached down and picked up the bow and arrow in a flash. Her reaction speed had always been extraordinary. For fear of not scaring the prey, her father did not say a word. All he could do was watch as his daughter soundlessly lifted into a crouched position and aimed at the upwards moving squirrel.
She was too young to pull back the bowstring like he could, but she could pull it back far enough. She inhaled, held her breath, and released the arrow. He followed the arrow with his eyes, seeing that it had stuck into the tree. The squirrel’s feet and arms let go of the bark and hung limp from its lifeless body. The arrow has gone right through its back.
“I’ve got my dinner for tonight,” Kari said with dry eyes as she handed her father the bow back.
Chapter 18
That was the first and last time Kari hunted with her father. He was murdered on duty as a warrior shortly after Kari’s first foray into hunting.
Kari never found out who the man was that murdered her father or what exactly happened on that dark night. All she knew was that many other warriors were killed by the same man. She didn’t even know if the murderer was still alive, if he had been captured, or if he had been killed. Occasionally she would have nightmares that the faceless man was stalking her. Kari would dream that she was firing arrows at him, but even though the arrows entered into his body, none of them hurt him or slowed him down. The man kept coming after her, until she was cornered. He would then violently kill her, causing Kari to wake up in a cold sweat.
The questions in Kari’s mind were never abandoned. It seemed that as time went on, the answers she desperately longed for slipped farther and farther away. She wanted nothing more than to put an end to the frustrating mystery surrounding her father’s death. The one thing Kari did know was that if she found out the murderer was still alive, reality would be different from her nightmares. She would stop at nothing to exact vengeance against the murderer.
After her father’s death, Kari’s mother did not provide for herself or her daughter. She would stare absently at blank walls, had no appetite, and apparently did not think Kari had one either because she did not cook any meals. Kari took her father’s bow and arrows and got her own food in the woods once their gold ran out.
Kari would sneak out of the city, usually by hiding in the backs of empty wagons, heading out to the farmlands to collect the harvest that would be brought back into the city. From the fields, she walked alone to the woods. She knew it was risky being alone, but she felt at peace in the Whitebark Woods. One of her final memories of her father had been him proudly looking down at her as he reached up and pulled the arrow out of the tree and handed her the squirrel.
Kari went hungry some days when she couldn’t find any game, but when she did see an animal, she did not miss. Kari tried to feed her mother, but she did not eat anything. She had no motivation and barely said more than two words to Kari. It wasn’t long before Kari knew she needed to seek out help for her mom.
One day instead of taking a right towards the forest, she took a left and headed further into the city. She had only been to her aunt and uncle’s house a handful of times, but she remembered what it looked like. Who could forget such a magnificent place? Kari waited outside in the bitter cold of the winter until late at night, when her aunt and uncle finally came home. After sitting by the fireplace and warming up, she told them about her mother’s depression.
Her mother’s sister and brother-in-law decided to take Kari and her mother into their large house. They spent their own gold on the best doctors, trying to find someone who could heal Kari’s mom, but nothing worked. She progressively deteriorated, which was something Kari thought had already happened so much that it was impossible to continue. Her once amazingly beautiful mother had grown into someone beyond recognition. Her mother’s skin grew loose and her face grew small and skinny with her cheekbones pronounced.
Every time Kari hunted, she would come home and walk into her mother’s bedroom. She knew her mother was looking at her, but her mother’s emotion was no different than when she was staring at the blank wall of the bedroom. Kari would hold up her game in the air, hoping it might bring a smile to her mom’s face, the same way her father had smiled down at her when he handed her that squirrel. But her mother’s smile was gone.
Kari would cry herself to sleep at night, feeling like she was a failure as a daughter for not being able to nurse her mother back to health. She would have given anything for her mother to stop suffering. One night just past Kari’s eighth name day, her mother’s breathing was scarily shallow as Kari held her hand. She watched her mother, wondering whether or not each breath would be her last.
And then finally, one of them was. Her mother died as Kari held her hand. Kari climbed into the bed and lay next to her mother. She nestled her head in between the feather stuffed mattress and her mom’s skinny stomach. Kari cried for the rest of the night.
In less than six months, she had lost her father and mother. Actually, she lost her mother the moment her father was killed.
Kari remembered what one of the many doctors had said. He had been the only one who had made the right diagnosis. “Husbands and wives are connected in marriage. Sometimes when one leaves and that connection is broken, the other loses his or herself because in truth, half of them is already gone.” Kari found that was the easiest explanation to comprehend. Her mother’s heart was irreparably broken. She was lost without her husband, and she fell into depression and gave up her motivation to live.
Kari wondered why she, as the daughter, wasn’t enough to be her mom’s motivation. Maybe she knows I can take care of myself, Kari always figured. Whatever the reason was, Kari always knew her mom loved her deeply.
The half-Human, half-Elf was like her warrior father, self-reliant and strong. Plus, she had her mother’s beauty. She had inherited the best qualities of two great parents. Kari wanted to carry on those qualities in honor and memory of them.
She kept a silver locket around her neck with her mother’s picture inside. On the inside was a small oval drawing of her parents holding her as a baby. A second picture was on the opposite side of the locket. It was a drawing of her mother early in her adult life, around the time her father fell in love with her, when she was at the peak of her beauty.
Kari wanted to remember her mother by that picture and the good memories she had of her, not by the way her mother looked lying sick and motionless in that bed. The locket became a part of Kari. She didn’t even take it off when she went to sleep at night. Her father’s bow and arrows were not so easily carried around. Her aunt and uncle didn’t allow weapons in their home, and Kari feared they might ask her to abandon them along with the rest of her family’s unwanted belongings. She begged and begged until her aunt and uncle finally gave in. They saw the importance of her father’s bow in Kari’s eyes. The locket, bow, quiver, and arrows were the only things Kari took from her old house.
Her aunt and uncle were wealthy and belonged to a higher social class of people. They lived in a tall stone house near the center of the city with decorative furnishings. They were both incredibly intelligent. Years ago, when they were first married, they pooled their money together and bought a high end tailor shop. They were very successful in inventing new types of expensive clothes. They provided the royalty with a lot of the clothes that were worn to public events. The business made an abundant return on their investment. The couple could have retired already, but
they continued working in their shop because they took pride in the work that they loved.
Kari was taken along to all of their high class gatherings. She was obedient and spoke properly like a woman, as they had taught her too, while dressed in the beautiful attire they designed for her. Those things Kari didn’t mind. It was fun when they let her pick out her own dresses and shoes. Like any girl, Kari enjoyed being treated like a princess. The actual party was what she despised.
She loved her aunt and uncle, but they were extremely boring. And so were all of their high class friends. They exchanged polite courtesies, but never talked about anything beyond the weather, their business plans, and fashion styles. Some stories Kari heard repeatedly at every gathering as if the person could not remember having told it before.
The whole night was nodding and smiling; so much so that after a couple hours, Kari’s cheeks felt like they wanted to be fixed in that false happy position. She wondered how awkward and fake her smile must have looked.
The food was nothing she had ever eaten before. They ate foods like snails, sour grapes, fish eggs, and other things Kari couldn’t even begin to guess what or who they came out of. All of the foods were an acquired taste that she could not acquire, no matter how often she tried them. She ate most of the foods she didn’t like because otherwise she would go hungry. Her aunt and uncle did not cook much food at home. If they weren’t at a party, they would go out to a fancy restaurant to eat, where the food was only slightly more palatable.
Kari thought these parties might be a good chance to meet other children since her aunt and uncle didn’t have any, but the kids were just as boring as their parents. Have they been brainwashed into only talking about the same topics as their parents? Kari always wondered. Some of them were even spoiled and condescending towards her, since they knew her parents’ story and felt she didn’t belong in their social class.
One time Kari punched a boy in the nose when all evening he called her derogatory names, making her feel like the low class trash that he thought she was. She felt the nose give in and heard the snap as the boy cried out in pain. He ran to his mother and buried his face in her yellow dress, staining it with the blood gushing out of his nostrils.
Kari smiled until she looked up and saw her aunt briskly walking towards her, with a face full of horror and disgust. Kari had introduced two things to that party that these types of people rarely saw: bad manners and blood.
She knew her aunt would have ran at her and spanked her if it wasn’t for trying to look proper in front of all of her high class friends. That was the only time Kari was thankful she was among them. However, the delay in consequence was only temporarily postponed. When she got home, she was punished. Her rear end was sore for three straight days. Kari complained to her aunt and uncle about how she was never again going to attend a party, but they refused that statement.
“A proper lady enjoys conversation.”
“I don’t want to be a proper lady. I hate these boring people, and I can tell they don’t like me either.” That is what Kari had wanted to say, but she didn’t come up with those words until an hour after she argued with them. It seemed like that’s how it always worked; she always thought of something intelligent to say after the argument ended.
Under the light of a full moon, Kari grabbed her bow and quiver, put the locket around her neck, and ran away into Whitebark. She was confident enough in her skills that she could hunt animals and survive on her own.
It wasn’t two days before a party of hunters found her, told her it was no place for a little girl, and then brought her back into the city to the warriors. Kari wanted to become a warrior like her father, but they didn’t allow girls into their ranks (which was something Kari thought was one of the stupidest rules ever created). Her aunt and uncle picked her up from the warriors and gave her another licking for worrying them. This spanking hurt ten times worse than the last.
Kari was forced to continue attending the parties, where she continued to hate the conversation, the company, the food, and the awkward forced smiles. She wished she could run away not just to a certain place, but to a certain time, when her father and mother were in their old house.
There, the conversation was interesting. The thought of the food she used to eat made her mouth water. There may not have been as many different tastes, but the taste of one good food was better than a hundred nasty ones. She missed chicken, fish, venison, steak, and her favorite – hamburgers. Those were the good foods.
In the social class she used to live in, stains from grease and barbeque dressings found their way onto people’s shirts but the clothing could unashamedly be worn again later in the week, unlike one of her aunt and uncle’s dresses. If that got a stain, it was deemed unworthy. It was given to a member of the “lower class,” or it was given to a fire.
Kari longed to sit at the dinner table with her father again, to hear him tell stories from his day. Whenever he was called to go out of town on a mission, he would come back and tell tales of the monsters he fought, rare animals he saw, and the sights of nature that captivated him. His descriptions painted pictures in her head. Someday she would travel to those parts of Element like he did. She wanted to visit those beautiful places and experience everything for herself. He always brought back some sort of souvenir from each new location. She would carry it around for weeks on end and show it off to all her friends, repeating her father’s stories of adventure.
Sometimes her mother and father would invite fellow warriors over to their house along with their wives and children. Kari loved playing with those kinds of kids, chasing each other, roughhousing, reenacting famous battles of legends, and dressing up as the heroes and villains to play the parts. That was the life she loved; the life that had been ripped away from her without any notice or warning.
Kari was twenty-three now. She moved out of her aunt and uncle’s house as soon as she got her first job. She had been as happy to leave as they were to see her go. The two sides didn’t hate each other, in fact deep down they respected each other, but they knew she was never truly happy with them as she was with her own parents. Her aunt and uncle used their connections to get her a job at a restaurant.
In the afternoons Kari was a waiter. She enjoyed serving people. But mornings were her favorite part of the job. She was paid to go to the woods and hunt game for dinners the following nights. Getting paid to hunt. I love it!
Kari didn’t make much gold, but that was okay with her. Getting by on the basic essentials was all she needed. There was something liberating about living that way. People she met wondered why someone with such a beautiful face and perfectly shaped body spent her time getting dirt under her fingernails and sweating in the heat of a kitchen. She told them how happy she was with what she was doing.
The snotty boys she had grown up with at the high class parties saw how beautiful she had become and began to frequently visit the restaurant just to flirt with her. She thought some of them turned out pretty good looking as well (except for the one with the crooked nose), but she knew what they were like on the inside. Looks change faster than personalities.
Kari had dated a couple of nice boys her age, but she never fully gave herself into any of the relationships. She was doing everything she wanted to do in life, except for one thing: she still wanted to travel and see the places her father told her stories about. All the boys she had been with wanted to settle down in Celestial and start a family. That would tie her down and keep her from what she really wanted to do.
Kari was not ready for marriage. She never allowed herself to fall head over heels in love with any of the boys because of that fact. She knew what she wanted and was patient and saved what little extra gold she made and stored it aside. She hoped she could find an honorable man who wanted to travel before children. That was all she needed to fulfill her dreams. It wasn’t much to ask for, but why was it so hard to find that guy?
With her bow slung over her shoulder, a quiver full of arrows, and
her silver locket attached to a necklace hidden away in the crevice between her breasts, Kari sat in the stands of the Warriors’ Jousting Tournament. While thinking of what possibilities her future held, she was staring at the handsome Stephen Brightflame.
I can see him being the one I could travel the world with before settling down to start a family.
After the championship match ended, Kari was planning to go hunting in the woods. It was going to be a good day for remembering her father. She thought back to how they sat in these same stands years ago cheering for Celestial. Later Kari would reminisce about the happy memories with her father as she did what he loved to do - hunt in the woods.
When she looked up and saw the flaming boulder crash into the stands near her, Kari knew she wouldn’t be firing arrows at animals today; she would be shooting monsters.
Chapter 19
The first flaming boulder looked like it was coming down in slow motion. Kari knew it was going to hit near her and that there was no way to stop it. All she could do was follow it with her eyes and hope it missed her. It smashed into the row of stands not more than twenty feet from where she was.
Bodies were sent flying on impact if they hadn’t been crushed. The air was filled with horrified screams as people instantly caught on fire. Added to those screams were the cries from spectators who couldn’t remove their eyes from the suffering people. Kari remembered screaming too, but she also remembered gasping and covering her mouth.
