The Long Lost

by Rebecca Woods

I released the memory like a caged bird.

  I am standing in the cold mud by the side of a wide misty river. Sharp reeds pierce my clothes and I am cold, very cold. The only thing keeping me upright is the thick stick I am digging into the mud to keep me upright. I notice in my memory that there are thick marks gouged into the stick. My fingers find them and explore the whorls.

  A jolt in my stomach and the sense of something light in the air tells me I am not alone. Khalashaya is now standing next to me, his expression inscrutable.

  The singing starts as the sky above darkens quickly, stars and far off worlds suddenly shining bright like a kaleidoscope of luminescence.

  Words, distinct and yet unrecognisable to me, yet familiar because this is a dream I have been having my entire life. If I try, if I really strain hard to hear over the general hum, I can almost sing along.

  A hand grips my arm, cold and callous, Khalashaya is there with me. Having him there in such an intimate setting after what has happened makes me feel strange. He looks down at me and the stick, then feels and touches the strange markings on it. He looks at me with a dawning realisation on his moonlit, wasted face.

  He disappears.

  I am back in my room, even more confused than before and praying to The Lord that Khalashaya tells me what he has discovered.

  Khalashaya looked at me and smiled.

  "It seems you know more than you even realise Auriana".

  I sat down on the bed. He stood there, in a state of shock, almost in a trance but still with that strange half smile on his face.

  He was suddenly there in front of me with his arms around me. I was reminded of my father’s last embrace before I had left for the library that fateful morning.

  "Come with me, let us find out what Gleema Leeh knows before it is too late and she dies."

  We exited the room and made our way across the bridge to the room where the prisoner was being held.

  She looked terrible, her black hair plastered against her wan face, which was paler than I had ever seen it. I was reminded of the dying Herena and hoped desperately that I could at least save this woman from oblivion.

  “What have you done to her?” I said, my fear coming out in my tone.

  “We did nothing, she started struggling to breathe a few minutes ago”. Raven’s voice hit my ears but I did not fully take the words in.

  Gleema Leeh’s eyes found mine and she fought against her metal restraints. Two Falaira, Raven and Larcen stood on either side of her with fixed expressions on their faces.

  "Keep her restrained," said the Queen quietly but firmly.

  Khalashaya spoke to me inside my mind, clearly understanding the question inside it.

  "Larcen and Raven are creating a protective layer in the air so that no magic can harm the Queen."

  The Queen was positioned in front of the prisoner and looked strained.

  "Auriana!" Said the prisoner quickly, as if afraid she would not be permitted to speak".

  "Khalashaya and Prenaslavka" said the Queen, eyeing both Khalashaya and his mother, who stood behind the Queen with a nauseated expression on her beautiful face that was so like her son's.

  They both came to stand beside her.

  "Keep this quiet, no one in this settlement is to know that Gleema Leeh is here and what she really is."

  Khalashaya nodded, Prenaslavka did the same. I could sense the questions in their minds. So, it seems, could the Queen.

  "Do not question me, I will explain all. Just ensure that no one outside this immediate circle learns of this".

  The Queen then out a hand on Khalashaya's arm and he jolted in shock.

  He looked the Queen in the eye, no expression on his face.

  He nodded quickly.

  Gleema Leeh suddenly struggled violently against her restraints, she looked desperate.

  "Enough!" Commanded the Queen.

  Gleema Leeh looked at me and her struggles subsided.

  She opened her mouth to speak.

  "Answer only the questions that are put to you Gleema. My sentries are positioned to stop you from communicating in any other way."

  The Queen took a deep breath as Gleema Leeh seemed to process this command.

  "Is that understood?" Was it my imagination or did I sense a tone of sorrow in the Queen’s voice? It was as if she did not want to question her like this, as if she felt for the woman.

  Gleema Leeh looked at me, then back at the Queen. She seemed to smile if only for a split second. Then her expression was desperate as before.

  "I...understand" she rasped, the words seeming to cost her vital energy.

  "Why are you in our city?"

  "I am afraid." She started coughing and did not stop for over a minute. She took a deep breath after the last cough and I was suddenly terrified it would be her last.

  She opened her mouth to speak again.

  "I wanted to find Auriana. I focused on her and followed her dreams."

  She looked at me.

  "I am sorry. I have placed you in danger in a bid to find protection. But I am no longer able to hide what...what I am."

  Khalashaya muttered some words and the prisoner screamed in pain. I heard myself shouting at him to stop whatever he was doing. Clearly he was following the unspoken orders he had been given.

  He turned to me. "Auriana, we have to be very careful what is said here".

  "So hurting her is going to make her cooperative?"

  “I am not trying to hurt her.”

  We stared each other down, my eyes meeting his green ones and seeing a wild determination there.

  "Let us continue” said the Queen.

  I focused back on the prisoner but I was furious with Khalashaya, why had he hurt her, even accidentally?

  Also, I was surprised they were trying to restrict what Gleema Leeh was saying. Surely we wanted to know everything we could about the Molecha, how many there were, how to kill the Eurikaya, so many questions. Why were they being so cagey?

  If she really was dying, about to leave this world forever, why would they not take the opportunity to find out everything while they still could?

  "How did you find us? Can the other Gleema do the same?"

  Khalashaya was stern when asking the question but not unkind. He clearly did not enjoy questioning Gleema Leeh and I could feel that he felt badly about her predicament. However, this was overridden by his desire to protect his tribe, he would do whatever it took to keep us all safe. I was including myself in this.

  He turned then and looked at me quickly, a sheen of sweat on his brow and determination in his eyes.

  Gleema Leeh coughed again. Why would she not answer the question. Surely she understood that this was our biggest concern.

  I could feel the Queen's anger mixed with fear. Suddenly she was there, letting it out.

  "Is my settlement in danger?! Why have you come to find Auriana? What threatens her?"

  "You." said the prisoner, spitting the word out as if it tasted of something terrible.

  More coughing.

  The Queen looked at Khalashaya who nodded back.

  Gleema Leeh convulsed once more, screaming in agony. She was failing fast. I could see that she was not long for this world, oblivion was upon her. I could not bear the thought. We had many more sunsets to paint together, her and I.

  Then she stopped, sagging against her restraints.

  “Stop this!” I shouted, I would not stand by and watch this. This was not something I was prepared to accept.

  Everyone turned and looked at me and there was a terrible silence.

  “I am not trying to hurt her, I am removing the Eurikaya from her”. Khalashaya’s eyes had a terrible blackness in them as he said this and I wanted so badly to believe this would not end how I feared it would.

  Gleema Leeh’s eyes widened on hearing these words and fear shone out of them. She started to struggle but sagged back in her chair as her feeble strength gave out. She looked at me and used what looked like her last st
rength to shake her head from side to side. The unspoken message telling me to resist this, to not let them use magic on her.

  A voice sounded in my head, it was Gleema Leeh. She had got past Raven and Larcen. I suppressed the jump I wanted to do on hearing her voice in my head.

  “They cannot remove what is part of me”.

  “It is Eurikaya” I said back, “It is what is tormenting you right now”.

  She looked at me, pain in her eyes.

  “Is it not?” I reiterated.

  She coughed and I felt panic rising inside me.

  I grabbed Khalashaya, desperate to make him stop whatever he was doing to her.

  “Leave her, leave her!”

  He ignored me and looked straight ahead, carrying on with his unseen, mental task.

  Khalashaya was asking her another question but she was staring directly at me.

  "You can store...you can save". Her voice crackled and then faded. I felt something powerful touch my mind and then try and open itself right there and then.

  I was no longer in the room, I was in a forest looking at a handsome Falaira holding a stick, the stick tugged at my memory. I knew I had to close this down and find it again later.

  I concentrated on the Queen and Gleema Leeh and found myself back there, staring at Gleema Leeh.

  Whatever she had given me had been the last act of Gleema Leeh's life. She was dead, her eyes still open and her hair over her face. I saw the bubble around her dematerialise and felt myself go forward to the body. I touched her face and then her chest to make sure she had actually died. I still hoped, despite the strong evidence to the contrary, that she was just unconscious.

  Sorrow welled up inside me at her horrible end. She had been blameless, killed for something she could not help. Whatever Khalashaya had done had ripped her out of her body along with the Eurikaya. I closed her eyes, filled with emotions that I could tell were potentially dangerous. Burning started building up behind my eyes and my heart felt as it if it were about to burst out of my chest.

  Pushing her hair out from her face, I closed Gleema Leeh’s eyes and turned to look at the Queen. Right at that moment I could have killed her and felt nothing but righteous, beautiful justice. Khalashaya too.

  The Queen and Khalashaya both looked shocked as they looked at me, how could they be shocked? In the quest to rid themselves of their problem, they had killed one of the only friends I had ever had. My head pounded as I felt my heart beat loudly and painfully, in sharp contrast to the corpse in the chair. She was dead. They had killed her.

  Khalashaya was looking at me strangely. I did not care, he probably knew that Gleema Leeh had given me something. Let them kill me for it. They had murdered an innocent woman already, what did one more matter to them?

  I turned again to the Queen and saw that Larcen and Raven looked horrified at what had happened, Larcen fighting back tears. This gave me strength and I realised I could now trust myself to speak.

  "She was my friend, we ate together, painted landscapes of this world. She fed and clothed us when we were prisoners and she did not have to. She was innocent."

  Anger boiled inside me at what they had done.

  The Queen opened her mouth and then closed it.

  "It is done."

  She cast a look over at the corpse.

  "I am sorry for this”, she touched my arm and it was like I rose above my own body and floated up to the ceiling in a red fiery haze. Suddenly, I had thrown her arm off me as the grief overtook me.

  Khalashaya was there instantly by my side, murmuring something in my ear and trying to move me. With one flick of my finger, he was on the other side of the room on the floor and I was standing there with a ring of protection around me that I had cast instinctively. This was the first time I had used magic defensively outside my training and it was against him.

  Prenaslavka moved towards me, sorrow in her face. They could be as sorry as they liked, it would not bring my friend back from Oblivion.

  “Auriana…” she began. “Come”. She wanted to move me as well, take me out of the room where they had killed her.

  Then I was screaming and in that fiery, painful minute that eviscerated me from the inside, I screamed for my mother and father - both killed in horrific ways and for the dead woman in front of me that had been killed for being different from the people around her.

  “Murderers!” I screamed at them all. “You are no better than the Gleema!’

  My heart beat fast, far too quickly to be healthy. Then I was on the floor and the floorboards were meeting my face. I was taken.

  Adjustment

  Back beside the river, I found myself again. Why did I visit this place so often? The dream was far more frequent these days than it had ever been and was so unlike any other dream. I knew that it was not a real realm in which I spent my night, unlike other narratives created by my brain while I slept.

  When I woke up in my bed, it was night. Not just late but the sort of night that, back when navigating the rooftops and alleyways of Zafiya, had seemed like a night that would never end; as if the light needed to show me my way home was unable to penetrate the thick cloudy darkness. I was alone in my bed and it took me a few seconds to fully ascertain what the awful feeling inside me was.

  She was gone, I had not even known her very long, just a few weeks. We had bonded with each other in a way I had never experienced. I had spent time talking with her about so many things, lost myself in her paintings of her homeland and the city. She had been an incredibly complex and yet soft and kind person I had seen as a salve on my scarred trust and memories.

  Now she lay dead somewhere in this city. I did not know what they would do with her corpse, perhaps she had been buried already. I was used to death, had I not killed many times? Had I not conducted myself in the full knowledge that I was ending the life of another human being when I released the women from pain back in Zafiya? However, being used to death did not make the grief inside me burn my stomach and chest less.

  Then my eyes were burning and my face was wet, the salt trickling into my mouth.

  I got up and looked out of the window, my gaze soared above the trees and went straight to the stars. Maybe I did not believe in Oblivion anymore; the guilt of this ripped at me but it was swallowed in the feeling of immense comfort I got from thinking that, perhaps, Gleema Leeh had found some peace in death.

  Ericl

  When I woke up, the suns were setting, I had to check I was in fact looking at sunset and not sunrise because I could not believe I had slept for an entire day. I was up and dressed before my brain had time to acknowledge what it was I was doing. Whoever had laid me in my bed had removed my dress, I felt the old familiar shame deep down inside me that reminded me of the past humiliation and horror.

  I drew my tunic around myself and left my room. I felt the warm evening air on my face as I did so. No one was outside my door, which was incredibly surprising considering that I was someone who had almost threatened the Queen.

  I found myself out in the open air; the forest below me looking like an alien darkening mass. I remembered again at how high we were and how the forest stretched as far as I could see. I thought then that if I were to fall from this bridge, it would take me a long time to fall to the ground like a stone, all the while knowing that I would not survive the fall.

  Leaning against a tree, I looked out over the darkening forest and wondered what I was going to do. Whatever it was, what had happened with Gleema Leeh had created steel inside me. No longer was I going to stand there passively while people, innocent people, died to serve the purpose of another. No way was I going to let anyone else die like the Gleema at Glen Fair and Gleema Leeh just now.

  I had to sit down where I was as I remembered what the Queen had told us underground; Gleema Leeh was a creature that was both Eurikaya and Falaira. A creature that supposedly housed the vilest of both races, a creature said to have been the reason the Falaira population split into two and saw half of their r
ace escape to a far off star for survival.

  Yet Gleema Leeh had been compassionate, friendly, she had taken pleasure in my training successes. None of this made sense; how could she be a creature as evil as the black thing that had killed my father, Geebani and the Gleema woman? It did not seem possible that such a person could house such evil inside her.

  The Eurikaya felt more than evil, more than wrong. They were an abomination, something that rankled deep inside of me, something that reacted with the part of me that had always been magical to make me abhor even the thought of them.

  I found myself dangling my legs over the edge of the bridge once I was sure I had a secure seat. Below me, in the darkness of the trees, orb like lights shone; the phosphorus pools they cast meeting on some occasions and making the trees they were in seem even more black and claw like in contrast.

  My head ached, no doubt because of my prolonged magic induced sleep. This made me remember that I had been given something in the final seconds of Gleema Leeh’s life. She had passed something from her mind to mine.

  I left the tree and looked for somewhere I could practice my magic without the possibility of being disturbed. There was a bridge leading to some steps I had not been up yet, the steps lead to a thick tree but there seemed to be nothing but wooden flooring behind it. This would hide me from view while still giving me a lookout over the forest in case Gleema Leeh had inadvertently told her captors how to find us.

  I leapt up the steps quickly, the fluttering in my stomach a sixth sense that I would be seen if I tarried longer.

  I ducked behind the tree when I got to the top, my assumptions about the secluded and empty nature of the area had been correct.

  The suns were setting over a far off horizon and stars came out to wave them goodbye, twinkling seas and birds sang strange songs to be each other across their many homes. The forest felt and smelt alive and vibrant. A place I would love to explore in any other circumstance, despite its dark and gloomy appearance. I wanted to believe that one day I would, that maybe Khalashaya and I would walk through the moonlit forest hand in hand when this danger had passed.

  The city seemed to spread far across the forest. I could see more phosphorous lights twinkling in the twilight far away. Looking around me, I could see Falaira through windows, on bridges and on the ground just going about their magical lives with no idea what I had seen and experienced the day before. I still felt the reverberations of my encounter with the Orb, supposedly the source of our power. I was also intrigued as to what lay beyond it, what secrets the Queen was protecting.