by Colin Taber
Sef became my closest friend, and, for me at least, part of the family. He had great patience. Not only did he watch over me, but he also talked and played, telling me stories of his adventures in Fletland.
Few families in Newbank could afford such a luxury, but it did keep me safe. Meanwhile, around us, the abductions not only continued, but worsened.
My burly swordsman never again had to raise a blade to defend me – well, not back then. In my early years I thought it was because I was unique, you know, like most children.
I was special!
The adults around me reinforced the notion by the way they watched me grow. I thought they were looking for something, some telltale sign of my hidden glory beginning to bloom. There wasn't any. Later, I realised that they were just watching my all too ordinary progress into womanhood.
With its arrival the adults began treating me differently, like some kind of precious jewel. Only Sef didn’t. Secretly we joked that the biggest threat to me came from my overprotective mother and her countless rules.
My father, an observant and warm-hearted man, asked me to be patient with her overbearing ways. He explained that my grandmother's dying wish was for my mother to take good care of her yet-to-be-born children. He said it plainly, telling me for the first time that Grandma Vilma had died in the riots that saw the Inquisition forced from Ossard, during the dark days known as The Burnings.
That moment had been a turning point for the city.
The expulsion of the Black Fleet marked the beginning of a new age of prosperity for Ossard, even for its marginalised Flets. Gradually the era faded, growing corrupt and wrong. That was when the child stealing had begun.
They never found the bodies, not even their clothes. Rumours abounded to blame everything and everyone. Occasionally, unfortunates would be set upon by accusing mobs, yet the kidnappings continued. It seemed that nothing could stop them.
The only thing the missing children did leave behind were their heartbroken parents, parents who carried unseen but deep wounds. Such hurts don’t heal, instead they’re re-opened by memories as if cut afresh every day. Left untreated they only spoil.
A city is the sum of its souls – when some begin to turn, all stand endangered.
It begged my maturing mind to ask what kind of city could allow such a thing? Perhaps a city too distracted by its own success.
Who cared if Flet children were being stolen from the slums? Not the Heletians ruling Ossard. In the city of Merchant Princes, anyone with the power to help was too busy doing business. In truth, it would take the theft of one of their own before they'd even notice the problem.
In many ways the city was as lost as its stolen children. And as the years passed and I began journeying through my teens, I felt lost too.
-
As my seventeenth birthday neared, my days revolved around little else than my mother grooming me for marriage. I didn't know to whom. Nothing had been arranged, but whatever the future brought, a pairing would have more to do with influence and wealth than love. I didn't care much for the notion.
The rude realisation that I’d soon have my own household and eventually children left me cold. I wasn’t ready for it. I could only hope for a kind man with a good heart, with whom my feelings might change and grow.
In truth, I think my real fear was of becoming like my mother.
Meanwhile, the abductions continued, three or four a season and always of children under twelve. It was a tragedy, but it meant that I was well and truly safe, and that meant that Sef was no longer required.
We all seemed to come to that realisation at the same time, both Sef and I, and my parents. It left me numb.
Surprisingly, Mother insisted on keeping him on. We were too used to having him around and wealthy enough to afford it.
As it turned out, he was as relieved as me that he was being retained – if now on broader duties. I can still picture him standing in our sitting room, anxious, as my father gave him the news. It left him with a huge grin and trying to blink back tears. Seeing the big man so vulnerable made me giggle. He went a deep red at the sound, but then burst out laughing. Even my parents had joined in.
I was so happy. We all were.
If we hadn’t offered the work, I think he would’ve returned to Fletland, but I knew he didn’t want to go. He was afraid of that place, haunted by memories of bloody battles he’d fought, and adventures that hadn’t always ended well.
Soon enough, he gave me another chance to giggle at him. This time it wasn’t because of held back tears, but my approaching coming-of-age. He began to get awkward around me, just like my father. It was very endearing.
-
Mother spent her days teaching me the skills of a lady; etiquette; how to manage a household; and how to master various crafts.
It was a bore.
In the afternoons, she’d send me to my loft bedroom with stitching to complete or some other enthralling task.
I’d often end up sitting at my window lost in the caress of the summer breeze. Once there, it’d not take long before I’d let my thoughts escape the monotony of my work to seek the freedom of lazy dreams.
Being from amongst the wealthiest of Flet families, I was destined to marry a Heletian to help Father’s business bridge Ossard’s cultural divide. The thought frightened me. Unlike the blue-eyed and blonde Flets, the Heletians with their dark hair and eyes matched to olive skin seemed so different and stubbornly traditional.
My mother sensed my apprehension, so she started adding a lotus-based concoction to my meals. It was reputed to induce thoughts of motherhood, love, and even lust. I didn’t notice any change, well, not at first...
Finally, and much to my mother’s relief, I began to look at the idea of a husband, my husband, with a fresh and hot-blooded heart. He became the focus of my dreams, shameful things, as my mother strengthened the dosage so that the fantasies crossed increasingly into the waking day from the sleeping night.
It threatened to become an obsession.
I could see him, handsome and wealthy, but at the same time gentle and loving – a Heletian merchant prince.
He would be my hero, standing alongside me through the travails of life, living for me as I did for him. Together, as best friends, partners, and lovers – nothing less than a true couple. We would be inseparable...
Soon enough, bored with my mother’s lessons, the daydreams became an escape. More and more, when I wasn’t lost in a lotus inspired haze or taking lessons, I sought them out at my bedroom’s loft window, most especially at the end of the day.
In contrast, in the waking morning, when the grip of the lotus ran at its weakest ebb, my head often grew heavy with pain. At such times I felt trapped by a destiny promising comfort, but no excitement, where I could see a lingering lifetime only to be mercifully ended by the hand of Death.
Such bleak moods only fed my hunger for lotus.
I dreamt of a sacred union, of two souls joined by all things honourable in a partnership heralded by angels. It would be so beautiful that even the gods would weep. In time, with the passing of many happy seasons, children and prosperity would strengthen our most important gift to each other – our love...
I knew it was just a fantasy, but I couldn’t get enough of it.
I was being enslaved.
To my surprise, a respite surfaced in the strangest place; my sleep.
It began a little over a week out from my coming-of-age. At first it was just an image, like a glimpse of a distant land. It wasn’t until after its first few visits that I realised how much I needed it – something to counter my growing dependence on the lotus.
Every night this new dream came stronger and longer. It pushed aside stubborn scenes of handsome husbands, breathless kisses, and naked, sweat-covered shame. It ran like a vision, as if I flew free with the birds, seeing me glide high above a green and beautiful land.
Without the passion and lust of the lotus dreams it might sound like a bore, but it s
tirred something deep within. It gave a sense of life, hope, and liberation: It was of freedom.
Within its sleeping caress, I dove down into steep mountain valleys and soared up by rugged, snow-dusted peaks. Eventually, that landscape gave way to a rock-lined sound where the sea spilled in. Behind that coast rolled green hills that grew in height and grandeur, and not much farther back, a shadowed canyon cradled in their midst.
A sanctuary.
The canyon was warm, lush with life, and full of water’s song. Little streams trickled down tier after tier of the canyon’s moss-covered sides, falling lazily to its mist-shrouded and fern-forested bottom.
But the lotus always fought to reassert itself...
And out from that mist-veiled fern forest stepped my naked husband, his olive skin glistening, while the curve of his muscles caught the overhead sun. With a cock of his eye and a strong hand, he beckoned me, demanding that I come and make love to him...
Even my sanctuary could be violated.
My mother kept increasing the dosage, determined that I fall for the first man presented to me. She knew I could be rebellious and feared my initial reluctance. She wanted me nice and agreeable.
Amidst all this my headaches continued. At first I thought it was the lotus causing them, yet in the end I realised that the stronger doses actually worked to quell their pain.
After our courting, when finally he came to propose, the question would be asked with flowers – red roses.
I’d always said; the first man bold enough to give me such a gift of scandalously coloured blooms would be welcome to my hand, for surely anyone so daring would have already won my heart!
Such daydreams were best had sitting at my bedroom window oblivious to the household and the crowded streets below. It was on one such afternoon that I found myself settled in and looking out at the maze of moss-covered rooftops, the whole vista still damp from a long morning of showers.
The soft green ridges reminded me of the rolling hills of my dream sanctuary as the afternoon sun peeked between clouds to highlight them with passing shafts of gold. Beyond that living mosaic climbed the sides of the steep valley we lived in; the Cassaro, Ossard’s cradle, and whose exhausted silver mines had given the city life.
The ancient range made the surrounding Northcountry difficult to farm. All about us, its granite pushed through the thin soil to loom rugged and stark.
The Northcountry was a treeless place.
The pine forests that had once veiled so many of its hills and mountain slopes had succumbed to a blight over a century past, and its few survivors long since been felled. The city’s symbol, its famed rose-tree, was also gone. Thickets of it had once lined the gullies and riverbanks along the valley-floor, but the same blight had also stolen it away.
Such a history saw the present slopes and valley-floor given over to pasture and crops, or where too boggy or steep, abandoned to herbal brush and a hardy oleander. The latter had spread without invitation many years ago, growing its long branches full of thin and poisonous leaves. The shrub’s one blessing came in its bright pink blooms, while pretty, they were also deadly. It was certainly no rose-tree.
But all that lay to the sides of my view and the inland depths behind, in the distance spread something else; the Northern Sea.
The port crowded the far side of the city. There, the sea’s deep blue drew a dark line between the mossed roofline of Ossard and the cloud-streaked sky above. In one place, partially hidden by a set of church towers, it glittered golden as it reflected the late afternoon sun.
A soft breeze tugged at my blonde hair, soothing in its caress. The sun also worked to seduce me as it set my pale skin aglow with its warm and sweet kiss. And all of it combined to make me sleepy.
I'd come here to daydream and endure a headache that had struck me earlier in the day. Its lancing pain had faded, but a muffled buzzing in my ears warned that it hadn’t finished with me yet. The aches had haunted me for weeks now, at first soft and barely noticed in the morning, but recently they’d worsened to grow rough and breathtaking. My mother had been concerned at the news, overly so, but she’d always been prone to fretting.
I closed my eyes to let the sun comfort me.
A mistake.
With the distraction of my vision gone, I became aware of just how wrong things felt.
The buzz in my head gained clarity as it cleared into a chorus of whispered voices. I couldn't make sense of them, there were too many.
Was I imagining them?
While I couldn’t understand them, the longer I listened the more certain I became. Soft and busy, like the hum of a distant crowd, it came from nowhere, yet everywhere.
What was happening to me?
And then, as if that question was the key to unlocking a door, images flashed through my mind in glaring white and blinding blue, all against a void of the deepest black. They were of flames, leaping sparks and billowing smoke, and at the heart of it loomed a forest of stakes with people bound to them. Those poor souls struggled against their bonds and screamed, but the inferno feasted on them nonetheless. In a stark moment of horror, I realised that the elementals fuelling it planned on doing so for eternity.
I was watching a witch burning, something from the past that the poor souls had been unable to escape even in death. It was of Ossard’s riots, or more correctly, of the incident that had triggered them; The Burnings.
The vision left me shaken, but also different.
The tang of blood came to my tongue – my own!
Why was I bleeding?
The voices declared, “Magic!”
What?
They chorused again, “The coming of magic!”
No, not for me!
And my breath caught as I shivered.
I didn’t want it, not to be burdened by the Witches' Kiss!
And then my headache subsided, the pressure binding it suddenly released.
My mind cleared only for it to succumb to a new sensation, it eerie, like a flow of iced water cascading into my core. Its brutal chill came as such a shock that I cried out as my eyes sprang open.
And the vista before me held such clarity it was as if every other time I’d looked out of my window it had only been for a glance.
Now I could see everything.
Everything!
Across the city, wherever I looked, I could see people walking, talking, working, loving, and so much more. It was as if I stood out there with every one of them. I discovered, to a degree, I could even sample their feelings and thoughts.
I turned in wonder from the city to watch the chores of a lone fishing boat crew far out in the sound. I took all of it in effortlessly and in beguiling detail, as three men cleared their nets while seven seagulls circled above them.
I could see everything!
That’s when I noticed the sparks.
They rained down past my window to flare with an intensity that hurt to watch. It left me in no doubt, I wasn't supposed to see them, no one was; they were black.
Only one kind of spark could hold such a hue. I knew that from Sef’s tales; they were of the celestial.
Magic!
The sparks stretched off in a narrow trail as they headed across the street towards Newbank’s slums. I leaned forward in my chair, mesmerised. About me, the air grew cool and expectant.
It was magic, but not of me.
Someone else was casting.
The wind sounded, it heavy with the whipping of cloth. A moment later, a tall and ragged form with arms outstretched glided past. The robed caster followed the extending trail of sparks, their brilliance fading with his passage.
I supposed him to be a forbidden cultist or perhaps an outlawed mage.
The dark figure coasted on until he began descending towards a faraway alley lined with rundown tenements. Several balconies jutted out from those grimy three level buildings, all but one of them empty.
A boy with only a few years behind him and a crop of messy red hair stood the
re looking up. Surprisingly, the child could see him, but even at his tender age he sensed something was wrong.
I watched with growing fear.
The alleyway grew dark with the cultist's arrival, the light sapped away by some damning spell. The figure wore a hood, but I could tell by the strong jaw and a solid frame that it was a man, probably Heletian.
He landed.
This was no persecuted cabalist, a scholar of magic, instead it was a man who’d sold his soul to the diabolical, seeking favour in return.
Without a word, he offered his hand.
I held my breath.
The child looked up to the cultist, and then reached out to take it.
My vision, so strangely clear, marked the boy in the spoiled colours of death. I knew his fate, as though I’d be there when his blood was drained.
Under the weight of that feeling, the paralysing fear that had taken me finally released its grip. I stood and screamed, “Get away from him!”
The cultist’s head snapped about, even though he was surely too distant to hear. His eyes sparkled coldly. He wasn’t afraid, not of a Flet girl standing at a window too many streets away.
As if entranced, the child took his hand.
The cultist grinned.
It set me to tears.
The cultist and boy began to drift up, the two hand-in-hand. They followed a rising path of flaring sparks that trailed off towards the heart of the city.
I heard a scream and looked back to the balcony. The boy's mother, oblivious to her son above, looked to the street below.
With a thick voice, I yelled, “He’s above you! He’s taking him!” but she couldn’t hear me. I was just too far away.
She rushed for the stairs.
My excellent vision faded, returning to the mundane. Sobbing, I dropped my tear soaked face into my hands.
Caught in my own grief, I didn't hear the hurried footfalls on the stairs leading to my room. The door burst open behind me. My mother charged in, Sef, of course, was right behind her. They’d heard my yelling.
She ran to me looking for any sign of what was wrong. Finally, as only a mother can, she took me into her arms.
