by Jeremy Marr
“At long last,” Coleena thought, “the time has come.” She was sitting in the grass, peering around a large boulder. She was watching as he made his way down the path towards both her and the tiny village of WillSeeFirst. She did not know if he had read the note she left or not, but either way now it would not matter now that he was within shouting range. “Deep in thought as usual,” she murmured to herself. She waited with the same patience as the piece of earth in boulder form sitting in front of her. “My time is almost near,” she sang in her mind. “Two segments of the over nine-hundred year old prophecy have already come true,” she mused as she reached up and caressed the lightning bolt birthmark on her left upper cheek. “The necessary tasks had been started almost thirty years ago, and by next week the entire prophecy shall be fulfilled.” Though she called the lightning bolt a birthmark, it really did not appear until she was in her fifth year of life.
“But what else could it be, other then a late blooming birth mark? It is an odd one, though,” her mother used to say every day while arranging her daughter’s hair in a way that would cover it. Her mother was always into what others may think of things, never daring to be different or unique. It seemed odd, to young Coleena, that her mother should care so much because of where they lived. They never saw anyone else but the family of the OneWhoMustRemember. And after the day that Jago was taken from her, they did not even do that. That family’s food bringer came three times a day with a plate overflowing of meats, cheeses and bread, but the boy who delivered it never even once glanced at her. He walked up with his eyes down on his feet, and after handing the plate over to the son-bringer of the OneWhoMustRemember, he walked back with his eyes still at the ground in front of him.
The bolt told all who knew to listen about how close the foretelling was to coming alive. She smiled a long, thin smile, wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed as she said the prophecy in her mind:
When the OneWhoRemembers
Names himself thrice
To the OneTrueDaughter,
When the OneWhoRemembers
Pledges his heart and love
To the OneTrueDaughter,
When the OneWhoRemembers
Breaks the long held Cycle,
And takes the next in line’s life
For the OneTrueDaughter,
She will BE the OneTrueMother.
The OneTrueMother
Will give up her body for Darkness,
But will keep her mind.
The OneTrueMother
Will live with Him
And keep Him safe until such time
As He can take care of Himself.
The OneTrueMother
Will have been given, at birth, the gift of BosBreath.
Simply speak and your commands will be followed.
The OneTrueMother
Will live forever in His shadow,
With power as only the OneTrueMother
Shall possess.
The OneTrueMother
Will be the Giver of Life to the Hand of Darkness,
Father of the Faithful, and Finder of the Lost.
“The OneTrueMother,” she whispered, “I will be the OneTrueMother, soon.”
When the man walking down the path was within a dozen paces, she stood up, moved out from behind the waist high boulder, and took a few steps forward. His head was still bent towards the ground as he approached her, unaware of her presence at all. He was mumbling something to himself, waving and shaking his hands the whole time his feet kept marching, one-step after another down the twisting path from his home away from home up in the mountain itself. The last thirty years had been very harsh on his body, she noted now, as well as every time she spied on him during his visits to his family's house. He was becoming almost stick-like an appearance. What was left of his hair had been distributed throughout his entire head which made him look much older than the forty something years that he was.
“Well hello there Jago,” she called out, “what a pleasant surprise.”
He stopped walking at the same time his head snapped up. She could almost feel his eyes locking onto her. His face went lax, and tilted slightly to his left. His eyes seemed to glaze over as they spread wide and bugged out slightly in surprise.
“What brings you down from the cave today?” she asked him.
“I am here to fix a few problems with Jago's mother,” he said calmly. “Do you realize…”
“No, no, no,” she said, while walking the rest of the way to him. “You will forget about Jago and his mother. You will forget both your reason for coming, and your answering of my question. The reason you came here is now lost to you,” she said, while directing the currents of her breath towards the center of his face.
He simply stopped talking the very moment her breath penetrated his nose. He looked dumbfounded and confused. Through what looked to be a thick haze, or fog, he muttered, “I, ah, I was just, ahhhh.” He then stopped talking altogether and simply stared at her. He was hers.
She had seen that look on his face plenty of times on other people she spoke to. BosBreath was the most wonderful gift given to her by her mother; without anyone, including her mother, ever knowing. She had grown up without ever telling her mother. She always thought she had a talent getting others to do as she wanted. After her mother died, when she was free to experiment, she proved it to herself repeatedly.
She used to walk along the farmlands along the outskirts of WillSeeFirst, until some male, for whatever reason, came along. She would hail him over and start up a conversation. After learning how important in the land he was, she would make up her mind if he would be expendable enough to experiment with. If they were someone of value, they were sent home with instructions of forgetting her altogether. If they were common soldiers, farmers or tradesmen, she practiced the art of using BosBreath. Generally, they were instructed to sneak to a farm and bring a boy, who looked to be ten years old or younger, to her house that evening. She did not care who the child was, but the approximate age was important. She would command the man to forget her and their conversation should he be caught by the patrolling soldiers; though if that did happen, his punishment from the Soldiers of Darkness would be death on the spot, and anything he said would be forgotten the moment he was dead anyway. She would pass the two-hour walk back to her house dreaming up different scenarios of what she thought the moment would be like when the right time came to set the prophecy into motion.
Sometime that night she would receive a knock on her door and the man would return to her with a male child. She would command the child to sit still and the man was then ordered to dig a deep grave in the meadow behind her house. She had no fear that anybody would see the man bringing the child to her, once out of the general vicinity of the nearest town, or the act of digging the grave, either. The only ones around for miles and miles lived in the house across the street, where the OneWhoMustRemember, and his family, lived.
The wife of the OneWhoMustRemember had not been out of her house in years now, and her son was so controlled by his mother that he rarely ventured out of his house as well.
Coleena would wait in her house with the child while the man was getting practice with his shovel out in the meadow. When she grew bored of the child’s company, she would instruct the boy not to move or speak and she would go check how deep the grave was. When she deemed it was deep enough, she had the man come back to her house. Coleena would then instruct the man to take the child to the fresh grave and kill him. She would look at the boy and tell him he was going to die for her happiness, and that alone should make him happy as well.
She always made a special point to ease the child’s mind by sending her special breath riding unseen behind these words, “Forget all that has happened. You will forget what I said, and what you hear. You will remember a good feeling within you, and you will remember that it will make me very happy that you are going into the Eternal Darkness. You will foll
ow this man, and do as he commands, for I have given the orders he follows.” She would radiate a warm smile at the boy and wait for his eyes to relax and glaze over. More often then not, the boy’s face would grow a smile, which was, from then on, permanently splashed across it. Those words, in reality, turned the poor boy’s mind to melted putty. He would be nothing more then a walking, breathing, good-time feeling, mindless husk of nothingness, trapped in a small boy’s body. She would then send the two of them out with the final words of, “Forget the words spoken, but remember the actions to take, and the emotions behind them.” She never had to give a lot of time for the task to be completed. On more then one occasion, the man picked up the child and ran to the crater that he had dug instead of wasting time on the smaller steps of the young. She would walk down to the gravesite and inspect the man’s work. She would then have the man lie down next to the boy and say these six little words: “I want you to die now.”
She was always very pleased with herself as she filled in the grave; that her words could have enough power that they could actually command somebody to die.
“So much power,” she used to tell herself. “A gift, such as no other, you possess. You will be the OneTrueMother, yet,” she remembered telling herself over and over throughout the years.
Tonight was going to be the test of all tests. Tonight, Jago would be instructed on how to finish what he started well over a quarter century ago. He had to make sure the only heir to his title of “OneWhoMustRemember” would fall to his death off the cliffs by the Cave of Remembrance before his tenth birthday. At age ten, the lad would go to the OneWhoPlaces, and then it would be too late. The title would be his. Killing the boy, in the manor that was written, would break the cycle and signal the prophecy to start, and it MUST be done before his tenth birthday.
“You look tired,” she said, just to help him finish his sentence. The way he just stopped talking was a little eerie, even for her. She reached her hand up and laid it to rest on his shoulder. “Have you been getting enough sleep?” she asked.
“Tired,” he repeated. “Not much sleep to be had,” he said, as he smiled and nodded.
“This is going to be all too easy,” she said in her mind. “Come with me, my promised,” she whispered in his ear. “My bed is big enough for you.” She raised her hand from his shoulder and placed it on the back of his balding head. Stifling the urge to gag, she ran her fingers through the strands of hair remaining. “Forget about your problems and your troubles. Let them all run down and off you like dew on your cave walls. You are here with me now,” she cooed. “Come, oh great and powerful OneWhoMustRemember, I want to go home, and you,” she swirled her hand around his whole head, “will take me there.”
She saw his eyes rise to hers, and for a minute, when he did not speak, she thought he was lost again. Then he said, “I will do as you ask Coleena. We have the rest of our lives to do everything you want. Just speak and know that it will be done.”
She noticed that just before they began moving for her house, his head did a funny jerk and his hand went up and swatted at something by his ear. “How peculiar,” she noted to herself. As they started coming up on the first houses the path led them to, she saw him waver slightly as he started to angle himself towards the house on the left. It was his house. She stopped walking and grinned when he, as well, took not one more step forward. As she slowly drew in a lung full of air, his head snapped over to her with an unconscious yearning for her speech.
“Sweet heart, my house is over here,” she spoke while gently turning his head to the house on the right.
She noticed the odd way his head tilted again, but without another word, he turned his feet to point at the same direction she had just pivoted his head, and waited for her to step first before following. As they neared the door, she glanced at Jago who once again had stopped walking. A confused look was painted on his tilted face and he was swatting at his ear again.
“What’s the matter, love?” she asked.
As he closed his eyes and breathed her words in, she started to feel better. Never before had any man she directly spoke an order to have any relapses. She was used to giving orders and having them followed without hesitation, and without needing to give them twice. Failure was never in the equation. She had even allowed one unfortunate soul to stand in the center of her house, with his eyes shut, for six whole days and nights. He did so without saying as much as one word, without moving at all, even to sleep, or opening his eyes. No matter how hard she tested and taunted him with words or her touch, he was a living statue. All on one command, issued only once: “Forget all words, forget all movement, forget all thought. Stand here and forget sight until a new command is given. Start now.”
Jago inhaled, preparing to answer Coleena’s question, when a young boy’s voice rang out into the still night. Jago's head swiveled toward where the house was back off to his left. Her eyes started to slit as a look of madness flashed upon her face. “How dare him!” she screamed in her mind. “I will not allow this of anyone. Time to nip it in the bud, and now,” she thought, as she forced herself to calm down. “Sometimes you need to be firm to show love,” she had heard her mother’s voice repeat over and over anytime she was punished as a child. She reached her hand around to the unexposed side of his turned head and rested one finger against his check. She turned his head back towards her own, and leaned in close enough to him that she could feel his breath making contact with her skin. “You will no longer act without my direct consent, unless I so choose to tell you to do so. From this moment forth, you are mine, forever. You will do what you need to do to stay alive, anything more than that will displease me greatly; unless I command it.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes,” was Jago's one word response.
“Wonderful,” she said, while mentally calming herself down. “You will forget the words were spoken, but you will obey them until death takes you into the Eternal Darkness.” She gave him a small moment to fully register her words, and with her finger still on his cheek, she put on a happy smile. “Don't worry Jago,” she said in a voice that purred like a mountain lion. “Your father can't stop us from being with each other now.”
She saw the effects of her breath on his face and was once again pleased. She made a show of taking another breath and almost lost a few buttons on her dress from the deep inhale. She noted how his jaw trembled; how he clung to her every word. Oh, how he was going to make all her dreams involving the OneTrueMother come true. She lovingly cupped his cheeks in both of her hands and softly said, “It’s you and me, all alone in this world, and the time for us to be together has finally come. Take me inside, Jago, take me inside.” Her last words were spoken directly into his nose. She could feel him relax under her touch and as she inhaled, the boy's voice cried out again.
She held her breath and waited to see Jago’s reaction. As she hoped, he remained in the same position he was in, seemingly holding his own breath, waiting for her to speak again. She did just that.
“Jago, dear,” she whispered while still cupping his face in her hands. “I’m afraid to say there is a little problem I need to take care of straightaway. You will not move at all until told to. You will look where you are looking right now, and no place else. You will forget these words, as well as the time that has passed while you cannot see my face, but not the commands issued.
“Is that understood?”
“I am yours forever,” was his whispered response.
Coleena released Jago’s face and walked behind him, facing the house that was not hers. All sweetness and fanfare dissolved as liquid lava of anger bubbled and overflowed from her entire being. As she gazed at the structure that held the object of her extreme unhappiness, she balled her hands into fists and started her march towards the house. She did not really know if her gift worked on women as well as men, but at this particular moment, one way or another, this thorn w
as going to be plucked out of her side like an eye off a potato. Without breaking stride when she reached Jago's house, she threw open the door, framed in the center of the outside wall, and stepped inside. It opened into a small, one room living quarter.
“Good thing food is brought here already prepared,” Coleena thought. “There certainly isn’t room in here for a stove of any kind.” She really did not know why the thought popped into her head, and she easily chased it away as her eyes gave the interior of the house a once over. To her immediate right was a small, hay-filled blanket on the floor. A much larger bed was placed into the opposite right wall corner, as though the beds themselves were trying to lay as far apart as possible from each other. A window was centered in the opposing wall from the door, with a small table and two chairs in the third corner towards the upper left of her. Coleena saw that directly in front of her, in the center of the room, sat the mistress of the house on a third chair.
"Whaaa?" the woman sitting in the chair started to ask as she tried to gather her enormous bulk into a standing position. The chair groaned and creaked loudly in protest to the uneven distribution of the woman’s gross weight, and Coleena heard a small gasp of fright coming from under the chair. Within two steps, Coleena closed the small gap of space between her and the large woman, still trying to stand.
“Odeesma," Coleena said as the other woman finally managed to get her weight balanced underneath her feet. It was now time to see what affect, if any, her speech had on members of the same sex. "I want you to go to that bed and lay down until I give you further instructions,” Coleena said while pointing over to the small cot in the closest corner to her right. “You will waste no more of my time today.” She could feel the tension drain out of her shoulders as Odeesma took the first step in the direction of her pointed finger without so much as muttering one word about the sudden interruption in whatever she had been doing before Coleena’s arrival. As the mass of flesh moved away from the chair, she saw what had made that frightened gasp to the chair’s groan of displeasure to Odeesma standing up. Lying with his back on the floor, Jago’s son Kyle had two legs of the chair sandwiching his neck, with the cross member of those legs pressing ever so slightly on his throat. The other two chair legs and cross member created a bridge from one side of his upper abdomen to the other.
Coleena glanced over her right shoulder to where Odeesma was. Even lying on her side in a fetal position, her girth was overflowing the small cot. She could not understand how someone could treat a child of this importance in such a manor. A shiver of disgust almost, but not quite, escaped from the backside of Coleena's neck as she envisioned that bulk of weight sitting on the flimsy chair. The terror the boy must have felt being trapped underneath it, never knowing if this round of punishment would be the one to finally end his life by suffocation, coupled with being squashed, if the chair had come to accept more torture from Odeesma’s weight then it could handle. Coleena pacified the urge to snarl and lunge at the one who may have ended her chances of capturing all the glory of becoming the OneTrueMother, at any time.
Instead, she turned back towards the boy. He had remained under the chair. He looked unsure as to how to act to the new situation of having her walk in and take charge like she did. All without as much as one word of protest from his mother.
“Move the chair and rise,” Coleena commanded.
Kyle picked the chair up off his body and set it beside him. He then bent one knee and placed that foot firmly on the ground. He sat up quickly enough, keeping his back curled forward, so the momentum rolled him up on the foot planted on the floor. As Kyle straightened both of his legs and rose into a standing position, Coleena felt the weight of his stare as he locked eyes with her.
“Why were you under that chair, boy,” Coleena asked.
“Mama said I lied to her,” Kyle said in a monotone voice. “I told her Papa was coming home today. It's now afternoon, and he's not here yet. As my punishment, I was to remain under the chair until he did come, no matter how long it took.”
Coleena could not help it; she had to grin. The thought of Kyle dying under his mother's weight because Jago was held up over at her house would mean she, herself, would have been the core reason the almost thousand year old prophecy did not come to pass in her lifetime. She sighed mentally, relieved that she arrived in time. Movement in the waking world snapped her back to reality, and she focused on Kyle. He was still watching her intently. His head was cocked to one side and his mouth was parted thin. She caught the flicker of his tongue as the tip of it snuck out at the corner of his mouth and was retracted quickly.
Her smile became a grin as she saw a young Jago standing before her. The smile faded quickly when her eyes met the boys again. There was something there, just on the inside of those eyes, which made her want to shriek and run to anywhere but where she was. Even more disturbing was the fact that she could not tell why the boy’s eyes unsettled her to that degree. She stared deeper into them, trying to put her finger on it. In a flash, his eyes shifted slightly before looking like Mountain Tiger eyes; steady, calculating, and menacing.
“You have great power,” Kyle broke the silence by saying. “I can see...”
“Enough,” Coleena interrupted. “You will look at your feet and will not speak again until spoken to.
“Do you understand?” she asked.
“Yes,” the boy replied, as he lowered his gaze to the ground, the disturbing look in his eyes already gone.
“I have so much riding on the events within the near future and you will not interfere with any of it. Until the door to my house closes, you will remain standing where you are, looking where you are.
“You do understand?"
“Yes,” Kyle said
“When you hear my door close, you will walk outside of your house and shut the door. You will sit right there and wait for your father. When he comes, he is going to lead you to the Cliff of Offering, and he is going to throw you off it to end the Cycle of Light. Your death will signal the prophecy of the Coming. I will be the OneTrueMother all because of you Kyle," she smiled at the boy again and patted his cheek. "It will all start with your death.” She paused for a second and then took in another lungful of air. Her speech slowed down and her words floated from her lips like a sweet scent would float away from a flower. “I want to be the OneTrueMother, Brendon-Kyle, and you need to die to make that happen. I need you to die Brendon-Kyle.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes,” was Kyle's reply.
“I am going to be there to watch it happen and I'm going to be very proud of the way you accept your fate to make my life what it should be.
You do accept your fate, do you not, Kyle?”
“Yes, Coleena,” Kyle replied again.
“It will make you happy to know I am the OneTrueMother, Kyle. You will go to the cliff willingly and you will accept your fate, for I am now commanding it.
“You understand the odors given, Brendon-Kyle?”
“I do,” Kyle said while nodding his head.
“That is very well. You will forget my words. You will forget I was here at all. You will last remember being under the chair, with your mother on top of you. Then you will remember where you are now standing, and where you are looking. Naught else in between those two points will you ever remember. You will hear nothing until my house door closes and then you will do as the orders instructed you to do.”
She waited for a moment and watched the boy. He neither moved, nor spoke. She turned her back on him and walked toward the open door. Pausing there for a second, she peered over to her own house and saw that Jago was still there, looking at the outside wall the way she had left him. Turning her head back away from the door, she then walked to the foot of the small cot that was doing its best to contain Odeesma’s weight; unfortunately, that battle was a lost cause.
She looked down at Jago's son-bringer and said, “You will not rememb
er me being here this evening. You will remember sitting on the chair, and you will remember falling asleep on this cot of your own accord. Everything else is lost to you. You will remember, as your own thoughts, that you deserve a better baby, without Brendon-Jago or Brendon-Kyle around to spoil the upbringing. You should have had all that you expected, and more, out of life, instead of what you were given. A new baby boy would fix that. You see it all too well. You will sleep now and remember nothing except the emotions and the instructions given this evening.” After speaking, she saw Odeesma’s eyes flutter shut and heard the large woman’s breathing slow down and became shallow. As Coleena walked back to the door, she glanced over at Kyle. He was still standing where he was previously, and he was still looking at the ground by his feet. Thoughts of how Jago had almost slipped from her control not once, but twice invaded her mind. She then felt the need to make sure all things seemed as they were. Coleena walked back to the boy and stared at him for a mere moment. She slowly brought her right hand around to her left side and she held it there for a second. She got no reaction from the boy, so she then backhanded the boy hard on his cheek. His head jerked around to the side from the impact before returning to the same spot it was before the slap moved it. Nothing registered on his face; neither pain nor surprise existed in his world now. She bent her neck down until it was inches from his ear. “There is a fire in the house and you are going to be burnt until you die,” she whispered. Again, her actions did not register on his face. “Your mother is angry with you and is picking a chair for your punishment,” she spit out. Coleena got nothing at all in return from the boy. She now felt more secure in her gift again. With all things in order, she walked out of the door and made her way back to house, where Jago was still waiting for her.
“Things certainly are shaping up,” she thought as she stepped back in front of the OneWhoMustRemember. The thought of it all playing out, and what it would all mean, made her smile. She saw the way Jago’s mind went from hibernation into consciousness, just as she directed. “Just like a little puppy, only not as cute.”
She took a breath and saw him quiver in delight. “Come inside, Jago, we must talk about things, you and I,” she said slowly. The smile was still dancing on her lips as she turned around and walked to the door of her house. She opened it and walked through. Her smile grew a little bigger when she heard the door close by Jago’s hand, after he had followed her through.
CHAPTER NINE
OBLIGATIONS TO MEET
