by Stanzin
Chapter 2.1
Lesley's Diary ~ June, 1909
I’ve an absurd mind to call you Kitty, but I won’t. I couldn’t take you seriously if I did. No idiotic cutesy names.
What DO I call you though? Not Diary. One spelling mistake and you’d only ever remind me of milk and moos.
Hmmm…
Hmmm…
Actually, I don’t think I’ll call you any one thing. It’s not like you’ll last anyway. Hah! You’d shiver if you knew what I did to your predecessors! You’d lose your…ink? Shall I scare you with the terrible tales of their demise?
I think I will. You’ll do a better job if you know the consequences of failure.
I BURNED the one before you. It had started to get dusty and fire is pretty. It was a good death, I think.
And the one before that didn’t die well at all. AT ALL! Wasn’t the poor thing’s fault, but what’s a girl to do when a snivelling snot nosed brat throws up because it can’t take a tickle? For all I know, that poor diary could even be alive, rotting away somewhere with half-digested carrot cake streaked all over it.
Ugh.
I’d go on, but I what I really want to do right now is rage about Mother and Father.
Unfortunately, writing on paper isn’t a good way to rage, but it’s not proper for the likes of me to scream… so I’m going to have to settle for a good rant.
And I can’t get too specific either, even though I’m writing in code, because this is too important to be put down on paper.
How do I start this?
Calmly, to begin with.
I’m lousy at narration.
So there is a patch of land in Helika someone’s being slowly buying up. It’s freaked Father out because no one is supposed to buy that land.
There’s no reason anyone could WANT to buy it. It’s up in the mountains, ridiculously inaccessible, nothing grows there, it gets snowed in in winter, Mother said its ugly in the summer…
And yet someone’s been buying it up.
No one knows it…, and no one CAN know it, but it’s actually our land. Not that we have a title on it to wave around. We own it unofficially. It’s like how Mother won’t let Father touch her hookah set, though it was a wedding gift to both of them.
Father’s supposed to find out immediately if anyone tried to buy it, and he didn’t, because someone set up a clever Enchantment of Expectance at the Land Registrar’s office over there. In other words, the Registrar was never aware that the land had been bought by someone else, because he wasn’t expecting anyone to buy it. He missed it even though it was in the books and everything.
And if the Registrar didn’t know, no one else knew either, not even Father.
And that’s scary, because sometimes I think Father knows everything. It’s scary because its been happening for ten YEARS, and Father didn’t know a thing.
Even scarier: we don’t know WHO’s buying it. It’s all been done by a number of mysterious merchant houses whose owners we can’t track.
Sigh. This would be a whole lot more exciting and romantic if they hadn’t told me my part in it. But we’ll get to that.
Did I just write down a ‘sigh’?
So what’s exciting about a patch of land that’s too ugly for words?
Mother says there is a cradle there.
Sorry, Cradle, with a capital ‘C’.
Yes, THAT kind of Cradle. That’s what I heard anyway. I’d just got back from Runecraft class, and I heard Father shout. Father never shouts. And then Mother shouted, and I heard my name, so of course I listened in.
It wasn’t very clear, but I caught something about lost bloodlines, and ancient duties, opening of Cradles and Truebloods.
I’d never heard the word before. Trueblood. I don’t think anyone has, but Mother and Father say I am one – the first Trueblood in three thousand years, actually, which sounds nice.
Only, apparently the whole point of becoming a Trueblood is to ‘open Cradles’.
What’s in those Cradles?
Oh, nothing much, the usual – a little bit of dirt, some ancient rock poetry, a demon god yadda yadda.
What kind of demon god are we talking about, you ask?
Sentinels!
Let me explain Sentinels to you: Sentinels are toxic, disease-bringing, all-destroying demons that tried to take over the world about five to seven thousand years ago.
They didn’t succeed, thanks to the Seraphic Mage-Kings, who learned how to tap into the planet’s own magic, and juuuust about held the Sentinels off.
The Seraphs just about managed to lock the Sentinels away in Cradles around the world.
Everything would have been groovy, but the Seraphs started all dying from their battle wounds. So before they all kicked the bucket, the Seraphs put this whole thousands-of-years-long baby-making-plan together to make Truebloods.
How do you make Truebloods? (You’re asking a lot of questions, aren’t you?)
You first enchant a peculiar sort of power into many people’s blood (call it the True Power). Then you tell those people to go make lots of babies, but only with each other. When those babies grow up, they make more babies, but again, only with each other. Over hundreds of generations, Trueblooded-ness potentiates inside these people, until you get someone completely Trueblooded.
It turns out Mother is more than halfway True, and Father is more than halfway true, so when they had me, I came out as True as can be.
Don’t I feel special? Yay! (not really)
The Seraphs made Truebloods because they were all dying out, and SOMEONE needed to be able to contain Sentinels if they ever became a nuisance again. Truebloods can contain Sentinels inside their own magic.
In theory, anyway.
The first Trueblood was born three thousand years ago. He or she tried to capture a Sentinel. It didn’t work out.
You need more than blood to contain a Sentinel. You need Will. A massively powerful Will.
The Sentinel got free. Lots of people died. Even more people died trying to fight it and seal it back into the cradle. Almost all the partially-Trueblooded were wiped out.
It took them three thousand years to make the next one – me.
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?
Of all the cradles hidden away around the world, Father and Mother were told about just one by Grandmother and Grandfather. It’s the one in the land that has been so suspiciously bought up.
Father thinks someone knows a Sentinel is sleeping in the area, and they’re looking for it.
Which, I admit, is worrying. Apparently, no one else but us is supposed to know about that particular cradle.
We have two advantages over whoever’s looking for Sentinels there. First, we know the exact location of the cradle. Second, we have an actual Trueblood – yours truly!
All I got to do is go there, open up a Cradle, talk to a demon god (though no pressure, Father says the demon god’s going to do most of the talking, which is great, because I’m a Mother says I’m a terrible conversationist).
What happens if my Will isn’t strong enough and a demonic Sentinel overcomes me? No idea there, but it’s probably a safe bet to say that it’s something not nice? Lots of people dying again?
What happens if it DOES accept me? Weeeeell… no one knows that either, but there are a few ‘educated’ guesses.
I could wield the Sentinel to become an all-powerful Queen and rule the world. I’ll admit the idea does have a nice ring to it.
Or The Sentinel and I could end up annihilating each other.
I think I’ll cackle!
…
…
No, that didn’t sound anything like cackle. Note to self: Find someone to teach me proper cackling.
Either of those things though, is a million times better than someone else finding the Sentinel. I MUST get there first.
Again, no pressure.
So I asked them why weren’t there other Truebloods out there,
and why it had to be me?
It turns out there MIGHT be other Truebloods out there – there were a lot of bloodlines being potentiated even after that first Trueblood debacle.
Unfortunately, all those precious bloodlines got scattered in the Reflective and Observant wars.
Well, scattered or hidden. The bad part is, every bloodline only knew the location of its own secret cradle. The one in Helika is our secret.
Actually, it’s mine.
Wow, I suddenly feel very territorial.
You would too, if you thought you owned a demon-god.
This is sounding better by the minute. Who knew perspective could matter this much?
I’m off to Helika next week, on a perfectly innocent little vacation with not an entirely innocent secret detour.
This isn’t vague at all, is it?
I’ve a feeling that if I left you around, the universe will make sure, through some hilarious series of events, that you wind up in the hands of someone you shouldn’t.
Because the universe is out to get me.
No, really! It literally is out to get me!
AAAAAAIIIIEEEEE!
Writing down a scream just isn’t satisfying.
It also looks stupid. I’m not doing that again.
Anyway, thanks for letting me rant. This is actually a nice way of ordering my thoughts. I’ll try it again later.
Not with you though.
Sorry, but if you were found, I’d be in bigger trouble than when I got Mrs. Delnaz to wear that shawl with suggestive pictures on it.
I think you’re going to have to die after all. Sorry. You helped a lot.
And so, dear brief diary, it’s goodbye. It’s been surreal.
I promise to keep your successor.
How do I kill you?
