“You know he’s cursed, don’t you?” the bulky youngster said, yanking the ginger girl away by her wavy hair.
He went by the name Barken the Teeny, but don’t be fooled by this moniker for he was anything but small. Even the most blind man on Earth could recognise such a fat person as Barken now was and, probably, always would remain.
Foremost, he was known for his protruding belly, which was as round as the full moon hidden behind grey skies, and that greasy, wet shoulder-length hair smelled as awful as deep-fried fish in the height of summer.
The nameless boy, scared witless yet braver than he ought to be, would’ve thought the other had just gulped down a basin full of water had he not known better by the way Barken’s belly moved like a water-filled balloon. Of course, he didn't say that out loud.
Now, you may wonder who Barken the Teeny is and ignore the main character but don’t be so hasty.
Truthfully, the only thing that makes Barken valuable to this peculiar tale is his deeply skewed perception of morale and profoundly ingrained animosity towards the, well, mystic.
You see, he came from a rich family in Mazheven and believed himself to be superior to anyone who was not the slightest human or, rather, typically human.
For these mundane People of the Past, everything was either black or white, and anyone in the middle was viewed as a traitor – or an outcast.
Mazheven, however, and some nearby settlements were in the minority in Aderbaal, even though Mazheven was the worst of them all. It was a true disgrace to the rest of the humans in Aderbaal who valued the Teachings of the Past and Present, to be associated with such lowly humans.
Barken the Teeny and his meek friends loathed the nameless boy, not so much for what he was known for, but rather because he taught the girls in their village how to read and write in the Written Language.
What is the Written Language, you say? There’s nothing to it, really, it’s just a tongue known by all in Aderbaal and beyond.
Hah! Even the ogres in Sál know the Written Language, but not those snobbish people from Mazheven, no, they despise anything that was created by the deities and druids in Sawoldor!
As if teaching something as harmless as reading would curse the girls in the village and force the youth to marry outside of their good-for-nothing community! Then again, maybe they indeed should and come to their senses at last!
This purported aversion to magic was obviously a fabrication. The wealthy only wanted to, well, stay wealthy, and they did everything in their power to wear out the enslaved poor, who readily wed off their daughters in return for a few arable acres.
In such a bleak place, to speak and write the Written Language was as great and as macabre as the slain of the innocent during unjust battles, such as the most recent Alfen Wars.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with this forlorn language of the Ancient Druids was denounced a witch or wizard. Such peculiar – even perilous thoughts –were only entertained in settlements like Mazheven and decried by the other kingdoms in Fayr.
Thus, only Mazheven, which did not regard the deities in Sawoldor as gods and goddesses like the rest of Fayr, ignored the Written Language.
These ignorant villagers shuddered at the mere thought of such morbid beings, for they called the deities and druids so, who were passing through Mazheven on their way to Isaldor since The Forgotten Forest was the only way through Aderbaal to reach its capital.
The girl with ginger hair and worn-out brown shoes backed up and dropped her head. Her rosy cheek flared up into a deeper shape of red, and her sluggish breath evaporated into the brisk air.
She stood there, motionless, and watched as Barken and the others punched the nameless boy. Her name was Miranda and most of the youth considered her the fairies girl in Mazheven.
Barken fancied her, even the nameless boy knew that, but he could not turn away a spirit who desired to learn the Tongue of Druids out of caution for someone like Barken.
She ran for the hills; to her sweet home where she was safe and sound, while Barken knocked him to the hard and frozen ground in the midst of the Forgotten Forest.
Tomorrow morning, as the sun awakened from its slumber, Miranda would forget ever being here and go about her life as usual. But he wouldn’t.
He struggled to understand why it was so wrong to allow someone else to enjoy reading the Teachings of the Past and Present. The Written Language was a gift for all races, not just for the druids and deities in Sawoldor – nevertheless, it was considered an abomination!
You might be wondering at this point in this unusual tale, who this nameless boy is and why Barken the Teeny dubbed him cursed.
First of all, it wasn’t just Barken who called him that. The entire village called him cursed and wanted nothing to do with him.
With his curly black hair and grey eyes, he was anything but ordinary in this fair village where no soul had ever been born with such features.
He was different, they all knew, and they hated him for standing out like a sore thumb. And then there were these stories too, if he could call them that, about him and how he came to be…
They said his own mother cursed him when she bit the dust giving birth to him. The thing was no one had ever died giving birth in this settlement before.
Thus, rumours soon spread about how he killed his mother and she in return, as a means of vengeance, cast a terrible curse on him.
This was why the villagers didn’t name him – of course, they didn’t! Why would they when they hardly could look into his hooded grey eyes without shuddering with fright?
He might have starved or been frozen to death on the fateful day of his birth if his grandmother, for she wanted him to call her that, had not pitied him and taken him under her wing.
Mind you, she looked nothing like how a grandmother should look like. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
Many of the rumours were about him being a bastard from the capital of Aderbaal, Isaldor. No one knew for sure, of course.
He tried many times to ask his grandmother whether the rumours about him were true, but she kept her silence. Well, she just ignored him that is.
To be fair, she did that quite a bit. What else would you expect from someone, who didn’t even bother naming him?
Sometimes, for he could not help it, he wondered why she even wanted to take care of him when she visibly didn’t act like she wanted him around.
That old hag even told him it was a secret she would take to the grave, as if he had no right to know the truth about his roots!
Then again, could it possibly be that she feared something? Something that was hidden in the past and should never be revealed to the outside world – a secret so valuable that it was worth her life?
His grandmother, in addition to being as lovely as the fair girls of Mazheven, was a peculiar lady. He had never been able to figure out what went through her mind at any given moment.
Her brilliant wits were, you see, very much hidden behind the veil of infantile youth, earthly desires, and pompous ignorance. She bewitched men and women alike for their fortune and was called all kinds of slurs due to the nature of her job.
People in Mazheven called her Anastacia, but the nameless boy knew that she went by other names in other parts of Aderbaal. No one, however, knew her real name, and that was a fact!
But he knew her real name. After all, they had lived under the same roof for over a decade and she owed him at least to know that much.
It wasn’t a secret actually, her name that is, but she once told him that she preferred to keep it to herself. He was not sure about what that meant or why it was a secret in the first place.
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Then again, he didn't have a name of his own…
He clenched his jaw as one of the boys, a tall sidekick who was only half as smart as he was tall, smacked him right in the pit of his stomach.
Startled by the sudden attack, he snapped back to reality as the beatings grew more intense. The brute force as well as the savagery surprised him more than he wanted to admit at the time.
He was nothing more than a sack of rice meant to be trampled to death and choked out of air. In his head, he beat the scumbags to a pulp and gave them a lesson.
But the truth was different. The truth hurt.
There was nothing he could do but concede to the beatings and pray for a miracle. There was no question in his mind that Berkan the Teeny wanted him dead – this time for good.
The bulky kid punched him so hard that he jerked and collapsed on both knees. A pain he had never felt before woke up every fibre of his body; like thousands of bolts striking him at once.
The punch deafened him. Everything faded out into the background and left his mind foggy and utterly muddled.
Barken grinned before retreating and motioning for the other boys to continue where they left all the while observing the macabre spectacle.
Deep, bleeding wounds riddled his frail skin, painting his dirty garments crimson and as dark as the depths of the Sea of Gam’atron.
He raised his hands in vain to cover his head. There were too many of them for him to defend himself with his bare hands.
He curled up like a newborn, his bloodshot and slashed eyes welling up with tears. His stifled groans left his organs in despair, and soon enough, a helpless whimper escaped through his gritted teeth.
The pain increased and grew worse in a matter of minutes, but he did not fight back and resisted the urge to repay the favour.
The taste of metal slithered onto his tongue through his cut and parted lips, leaving a bitter taste in his throat.
He shut his swollen eyes.
A thousand questions plagued his mind, none of which he could answer. Why did they hate him?
The thrashing broke off. He reopened his eyes, not sure what to expect or why the beatings stopped this suddenly. But he was about to find out.
Barken waved a book he bought from the local bookstore. It was one of the oldest scripts written in the Tongue of Druids. He spent all his savings to buy it.
“You think reading this trash makes you special, huh?”
The nameless boy knew he shouldn't respond, he knew better than that, so why did he anyway?
There was no turning back now. Barken the Teeny would finally make a name for himself by killing him in all of Aderbaal and beyond.
This was the end of him, indeed. Still, for the first time in forever, he felt at peace with himself for standing up to his bullies and not letting them relish in his misery.
“Isn't that what you're thinking? That I’m special. You know I'm nothing like you or your equally dim-witted friends… and that scares the living daylights out of you!”
Barken charged towards him as soon as he finished his strained speech. The fat kid trampled on his already ravaged face with his meaty foot, twisting and turning it until he moaned to the cadence of the gushing nosebleed.
The stocky fella then picked up the mud-stained book he threw away on the spur of the moment and tore the pages out one by one while snorting sardonically.
The nameless boy trailed the bits of parchment scatter and melt away in the bitterly cold high winds with his misty eyes, while Barken and his friends burst out into eldritch guffaws.
The plaintive birds perched on the naked treetops flew up to the cloudless sky, squawking louder than his warbling heart. The ripped pages faded away with the callous windblasts, never to be seen again in Mazheven.
A shadow, a darker-than-dark shape, shrouded his view then. His heart skipped a beat as he shifted his gaze upwards. It was a huge rock.
Shutting his eyes with a grimace, he held his breath as the rock drew nearer and was about to turn his brain to goo!
This life, which he clung to in hopes that one day everything would change for the better, would no longer come true – because he was about to meet his end.
“Aye, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, lad.”
The unfamiliar voice jolted him back to the real world. It was strident and thick, as deep and resonating as the Sea of Gam’atron.
He discerned a blackish figure standing among the boys, playing with a rock of his own, a much smaller one, making it bounce up and down in a rhythmic bounce.
The stranger was covered in a black cloak from top to toe. A hood hid his face as if he were some kind of wanted bandit afraid of being discovered.
“Beat it, yeah?” Barken said, inching closer to the nameless boy with the rock clutched tightly in his sweaty palms. “He’s cursed and not our friend, all right! Ne’er-do-wells like this deserve worse!”
The stranger, this peculiar person who appeared out of the blue, snatched away the huge rock from Barken so fast – so prompt and in one sweep move – that his whole crew exchanged perplexed looks with one another and backed away.
They were, much to the nameless boy’s surprise, frightened out of their wits. He gulped down as well, not particularly fearful of the stranger, but rather surprised that anyone had the guts to give him a helping hand.
To see the figure better, he tried to lift his head off the muddy ground and tirelessly, even stubbornly to a certain extent, adjusted himself from where he lay like the undead.
Barken glared at his friends out of the corner of his sky-blue eyes, uncharitable and ruthless, when the nameless boy managed to catch a glimpse of him.
Then he shifted his dismal attention to the strange man, who appeared out of nowhere and without even making a single sound.
Had he not known better, he’d say that the man sneaked up on them like a breath of breeze, seeping carefully in among them without their knowledge.
The hooded stranger then cocked his head and eyed Barken down. It was impossible to know or see, of course it was, but he was beyond a shadow of a doubt that the odd figure grinned from ear to ear right then and there.
Barken, as drippy and wimpy as ever, a nervous wreck indeed, desperately glanced at his shuddering friends with a pleading look, as they all as if one single entity, stepped back and dropped their heads in a futile attempt to become invisible.
They wouldn’t meet Barken’s desperate eyes. The bulky youngster then made all sorts of faces, rising and arching his bushy eyebrows, twisting and turning his plump lips in great pains to get through to his antsy sidekicks and forcefully make them confront the stranger.
But this time around, his fruitless attempts had no bearing or weight at all. The boys refused to be his puppets and enrage the stranger.
The man cleared his throat, perhaps to both intimidate Barken who instantly broke off, but also to scare the other boys away, who traipsed sideways in an odd beeline and ran off with their tails between their legs.
They almost trampled one another to a mash of potatoes, or worse, a rotten stew made of human flesh.
Barken, as was quite reasonable and very much in line with human nature, tried to join the others as quickly as he could.
But the stranger stopped him dead in his tracks and threateningly raised the rock above his shoulder so that Barken’s face hardened at the drop of a hat and he lost all colour and vigour in his full cheeks.
The fat kid gulped hard and backed away while looking over his shoulder, trying to find another way out of the forest to no avail. The nameless boy could hear him swear under his breath, relentlessly gritting his teeth and promising the heavens that he would kill the others as soon as he got out of the Forgotten Forest.
It was at that very moment, just as the cursed boy locked eyes with Barken, that the strange man did something rather unexpected.
The man, you see, threw away the rock as far away as he could and then took a slow yet considerate step forwards. Barken, in a cold sweat, broke into a run at a breakneck speed, blatantly scared out of his wits and perhaps thinking the unthinkable, and gradually disappeared out of sight and reach.
The cursed boy was now all alone with the dark-attired man and his heart was in his mouth.
The stranger observed him without doing or saying a single utterance for a very long time.
A bone-chilling silence settled upon them and the flailing birds huddled together and snapped their necks in time with his hammering heart, which was ready to rip out of his chest.
The stranger squatted down beside him without warning, quite unexpectedly, and let his arms hang loosely from his kneecaps.
He looked like a bandit prowling the woods to mug the affluent, yet there was something odd about him. This aura, this dark circular orbit around him, was as thick and crisp as snow and as black as coal.
The cursed boy gulped hard.
For a few seconds, the man just watched him as if he had done so many times before. Unsettled by his piercing stare, the nameless boy tried to push himself up despite his aching body that had no strength left to carry him.
The man studied him with keen eyes, neither helping nor deterring him, like he was some sort of sharp sword that one day would bring the hooded man a fortune worth years of sweat and blood – a mere tool for a greater purpose.
He tilted his head to the right, his arms swayed to the high winds like he was dead inside and devoid of a soul – a mere puppet at his master’s mercy. This was indeed what he was.
The boy finally, as was dead easy to foresee, gave up all attempts to get up on his feet.
Many thoughts ran through his mind, but only one of them remained. Who was this person? It was blatantly obvious at this point that the man did not intend to help him, yet he was not here to hurt him, either.
“Thank- thank you, sir! If it weren’t—”
“Don’t thank me yet,” the man said, nodding towards the forest trail leading to the village. “How do you know I won’t hurt you just like those boys?”
He didn’t know what to say. It almost felt like the man could read his thoughts.
“I must be truly cursed then, sir. Since everyone wants me dead…”
“It’s not a curse.”
“Huh?”
“It’s punishment for the sins of your father.”
He grimaced, blinking repeatedly to digest what he was hearing. “My- my father—?”
This was the first time someone mentioned his father without him being the one who inquired about him first.
He felt a pang of ache in his heart and failed to stand up and follow the stranger, who rose to his feet and was about to turn around and leave him for good.
The nameless boy’s arms, however, were paralyzed and bitterly numb. They would not move no matter how hard he tried.
The pain he forgot in his fright hit him like daggers all over his face and body. He groaned and let his body hit the rough ground anew, which had turned cold from the impending night.
“Please, sir! Don’t- don’t go! Don’t leave me—”
The man stopped dead in his tracks and stayed idle with his back turned towards him for a short while as if he were contemplating what to do.
He then dropped his head and turned to face his desperate and careworn face, teeming with deep scars and bleeding scratches.
“I’ve watched over you for years. Actually, ever since the day you were brought into this wicked world. I was afraid our encounter would change my mind somehow.
“But now that we’ve finally met I see that you’d die either way – whether it is by my sword or someone else’s. I guess that’s your fate and the payment for cheating death. It’s too late for regret now… for either of us.
“You must play your part in this deadly scheme. You’ve already played the hardest part. The time has finally come. Tell the witch you live with that Johen never forgets betrayals and that he knows what she did.”