“Why are you here?”
My eyes whirl in my head, the world a blur around me. I try to breathe, but my chest is frozen. Rivulets of black, veins containing black putrescence run wild beneath my skin like ice. Each shuddering breath I manage to choke in through my clenched teeth is agony. Simple movements are made impossible, every minor shift cutting up my insides as the black veins beneath my skin refuse to move with the rest of my body.
The sky above me shines down a with blue vibrancy, indifferent to my suffering. Broken rocks dig into my back, the pain of their stabbing into my back lesser than the agony of movement. Tears streak my face, mixing with the sweat standing out across my skin. I shake. Am I awake, dead? Like a sick rabbit my chest pumps with shallow breaths barely enough to keep me conscious.
I stare at the line in my vision that shows my healing energy. All the lines are broken, their colors muted and erratic. My eyes focus through the fire in my mind on where the green one should be, but it is gone now, only the number fluttering: 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0. I am going to die here.
A meaty slap makes me turn my head. The pain is gone. I crouch at the corner of my house, the smell of dry dirt assaulting me. I flinch as the next blow lands, the sound drowning out the constant buzz of the cicadas. My hands, dainty, the small fingers of a child, dig into the chipping maroon paint of our home.
My dad kneels on the pebbly drive running up to the house, wiping his face with a rag. Constable Fragrass, a potbellied man with frizzy brown hair stands over my dad, sweat lining the collar of his pressed woolen shirt. The Constable wipes his own face with a handkerchief handed to him by one of his deputies as his lungs work like bellows.
Constable Fragrass spits his chew in my dad's golden hair before swearing at him in the pidgin that marks the upper class: a mix of elvish and Castinian. My dad cleans his face and pushes himself back to his knees. He grins up at the Constable, his smile serene, lacking the venom I know exists deep in his soul.
“Bastard,” The Constable swears, stepping forward and knocking my father into the dirt with a blow across his chin. He hisses, rubbing his red knuckles as he turns away to walk back down the drive. On their way out, one of the deputies grabs the hammer leaning against the cart and lays into one of the back wheels until it shatters.
They disappear down the road a few minutes later.
“Daddy,” I yell, running out from behind the house. “Are you okay?”
He lays in the drive, staring up at the summer sky. He is the biggest man I have ever known, powerful arms built from decades of back-breaking labor, his sweat poured into the prosperity of the orchard around us. He drags his rag across his bloodied face, showing me a radiant smile when he has finished. “Hello, Snowpear. Where is your mother?”
“She went to the creek with Halford,” I say.
“That's right, that's right.” He sighs, his eyes landing on me. He holds up his hand. “Help me up, baby.”
I pull on his arm, but my dad is a monster of a man. Still, he makes enough of a show to let me think that I am helping as he drags himself to his feet. With his steady arm around my shoulders, he leads us back to the porch, falling into his wooden rocker with a grunt. “Get me some tea, won't you.”
He didn't even need to tell me to grab the good glass. For as long as I have been alive, my family has owned a single pair of cups made from real glass. When I bring back his tea, the glass in my hand sparkling like a crystal in the afternoon light, Dad holds it to his cheek and tries to reassure me again.
I look out to the drive again. The dirt still stirs in the air, a loose cloud that refuses to settle. In the middle of the drive, I can see a patch of blood, the earth already having drunk up the moisture, leaving a discolored puddle of brown behind. Dad sighs as he takes a sip of his tea, patting me on the back. “Thank you for that, baby girl.”
“How can he do that to you?” I ask. My dad clicks his tongue before taking another sip of tea. “That asshole--”
“Hey.”
“That asshole can’t come here and hurt you like that! We should tell Lord Timmian about this. Lord Timmian likes us; he won’t let the Constable get away with this.” I can feel my small fists shaking at my side while I look down at the dirt.
“The reason that Lord Timmian likes us, is because we don’t make his life more difficult than it needs to be. It’s not worth messing up a good relationship with the Lord to deal with Dale.” My dad rocks in his chair, looking out at the yard. “Not much harm done.”
“So, you’re going to do nothing?” I look at him; I just cannot understand it. My dad is the biggest man I have ever seen. If he wanted to, he could have knocked the Constable and his two men into the dirt. “I’ll remember this, and when I’m growed, I’ll thrash him good, beat him over the head with a log on his way home from church.”
My dad whistles but can’t help but chuckle a bit. “That’s some temper you got there, baby girl. No, you won’t do anything to Dale. This’ll just be another day, and we will move past it. You don’t deal with men like that.”
“That isn’t fair,” I whine.
My dad considers me for a time, sipping his tea. He motions to the chair in front of him, and I hop up into the seat. “No, it isn’t fair. Things aren’t generally fair, baby girl. One man sees his business dying in his hands, and so he walks out of his house and puts the hurt on someone that this world hasn’t crushed yet. It ain’t fair that man can vent his anger with his fists while people like us have to suck it up and take it. As long as he doesn’t put a worker out of commission or kill anyone, no one is going to do or say a thing about it.
“I’ll tell you this baby girl, and hopefully it will save you some years of hate and sadness. Things like that will eat you up, they hollow you out, turn you into the kind of person that those on high think we are, just beasts that only know how to use their fists to change things. People aren’t going to like you, Charlie. They aren’t going to see the beautiful girl that I do. They will see where you came from, they will judge you for what you know or how you speak, and those little things will be enough for them to dismiss you. That’s the world, baby girl, and you can’t spend your time trying to fight the world.”
“So, you really are gonna do nothing?” Tears sting my eyes, but I am too angry to let them fall.
“When did I say that?” He sets his glass aside. I never sense any of the anger I know must be somewhere deep inside of him. He never lets me see that, ever. “I’m going to do what I can do, what I’ve always done. I am going to make this the best damned orchard in the county. I am going to pull this family out of the mud with my own two hands. I don’t suffer fools like the Constable. I put my hands and, more importantly, my mind towards what is in my power.
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“Besides, Dale is a dumbass. Since his daddy passed and he got the money, the man can’t help but spend his tithe on frivolous shit. I don’t have to lift a finger.” He looks out across the yard, watching the wind play with the leaves on the orchard.
He was right. Two years later, Lord Timmian confiscated the Fragrass lot for failing to meet quota three seasons in a row. My dad bought out the land from the Lord, almost doubling the size of our orchard. Constable Fragrass was found in a ditch a few months later. Someone had beat him to death. Given how many people the man had abused over the years, no one looked that hard for whoever did the deed. He died with a bottle in his hand.
I feel a tremble, a pulse of pain that shakes the tears free from my eyes. My dad turns into a tunnel in front of me, falling back faster than I can reach out for him. I shudder, my hand contorting like a claw, unable to relax my fingers. The dirt in the air pulls me back to the real world where jagged rocks stab into my back. I can’t see out of my left eye anymore. Half-blind, I stare up at the naked sky, the rays of morning light sprinkling down, the sunny face of the world painfully beautiful.
I see my arm out of the corner of my eye, laying oddly on the rock next to me. I try to relax my fingers, but the black veins squirming beneath the surface of my skin are like metal rods. A whine croaks out of my throat, all I can manage as time speeds by in the sky overhead–0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0.
Bali is there then, her sobbing face looming out of the top of my vision. Her tears fall on my face, mixing with my own. Despite the darkness of night falling all around me, I can still see her face so clearly, every line that grief and helplessness etches on her features. Another person steps out from the dark behind her, eyes looking down at me with pity. The other person is me, not as I am now, but as I was then. Bali murmurs, and I am the elf girl dying of poison in the forest. I stare up at my own form, myself before I got caught up in the madness that dropped me off the cliff, but only sputtering gurgles escape my throat.
“Why are you here?” Bali asks me. “Why did you have to come here? Don’t you understand how weak you are?”
I do. With my whole being I feel my own weakness, with every sporadic beat of my heart, pushing poison and coagulated blood through my veins, I feel it. Bali strokes my head, but I can only look at the girl behind her, staring at me with an innocence I dropped somewhere along the way. My legs start shaking despite the pain. I try to will myself to stay still, to minimize the stabbing pain from inside my own veins, but my body does not obey me.
“Why are you here?” Bali cries.
“Why are you here?”
I am in the dark. I spin, my feet scrapping against black sand that stretches into the void around me. The echo of the question bounces all around me. I try to speak, choking, but managing to pull a few words out of my hoarse throat. My heart beats, and it comes like a hammer blow. My legs collapse, knees digging into the compact sand beneath me. Despite the dark, I can see my hands; my whole body is illuminated by a light without origin.
“Why are you here?” the question comes again.
The sound is directionless, somehow bouncing off the ground around me while giving the impression that the emptiness I see in every direction is an infinite expanse. “I don’t know,” I cry. The pain remains, a thudding inside my body.
“You have no purpose?” The voice is feminine, strong and commanding. Its scorn is worse than my mother’s. I wilt, broken and hurting. “You came here did you not? You are alive Charline Devardem. Are you simply a puppet, set to dance by the hands of another?”
“I can’t believe he did that to me,” I cry. I see my hands shaking in front of my face, the black veins running under my skin. “He killed me. Kendon killed me.” With the color drained from my skin, I look just like that girl in the forest. Kendon had been part of that trial too hadn’t he, the competition on the Green Mountain?
“Is that a why? Is that a purpose?”
The dark presses down upon me, and I stare back with wide eyes. “I’m here because I am weak,” I say. The words are truer than anything I have ever said before. The dark retreats away from me as I say the words. A pinprick of light forms out of the heavens above me, and the loose outline of black sand dunes pock the vacant space around me.
I kneel at the base of one of the dunes, black sand rising so high that it hurts to look towards the top. A man, his back strong and wide, crawls up the sand, each handful of dirt an agony for him. His blonde hair falls in waves around him, and the smile on his face sparks envy in my heart. Despite the agitation, despite the pain of the climb, Halford cannot help but enjoy it. Standing at the top of the dune, a solitary figure stares down at the two of us, a wild mane of crimson floating in the air around him. His eyes are like dark suns, a red so deep and hot that they could set the world ablaze.
“I just wanted to be like you,” I say to the man standing at the top of the dune of black sand. “I just wanted to want something as much as the two of you do. How can you live so freely? Why can’t I love something the same way that you do?”
Halford never hears me, his eyes locked on the figure at the top of the dune, ambition and glee spurring him on. The shadow at the top never looks away from me, his eyes vacant of emotion, his face a featureless void.
A hand grasps my shoulder; a face leans in to whisper in my ear, its voice all promises and dark intentions. It is the woman from before. “You are weak,” it whispers to me.
“That is why I am here,” I say, watching my brother scrape and tear to crawl up the rising mountain in front of me. “I was weak, chasing my brother, no direction. I was weak, thinking that I had a purpose. I was weak, letting someone be stronger than me. I was weak, and I never knew what I wanted.”
“What do you want now?” the voice asks, silk in my ear.
“I want to be there.” I point at the figure at the top of the dune, looking down on the world of empty darkness and rolling sand like a god, power so grand that it doesn’t need to be spoken. “I want what it takes to get there.”
“Take it then,” the voice whispers. Hands turn my head to the left and I see Kendon and Coriander climbing the stairs of a crumbling castle, a glowing orb at the top. My hand stretches out, plucking the orb out of the world. The two stand, confused, and scream as the stairs collapse beneath them. “It belongs to you,” the voice whispers to me. “Everything belongs to you. You just have to take it. You just have to protect it.”
I look down at the glowing orb in my hand, and as I do, the world shifts again. I stand at the top of a ledge hewn from obsidian stone, watching black dust tumble down past me. Kendon and Coriander lay at the bottom of the cliff I overlook, desperation and horror painted on their dead faces. Others lay next to them, the murderers from the dungeon; I know that it is them despite never having seen their faces. Constable Fragrass lay there as well next to the body of Forsin Al’Ruino. Despite their dead eyes and vacant stares, their faces are all turned up towards me, looking at the orb I hold in my hand.
Dancing inside the crystal sphere is the destiny of these people. I feel it try to break away from my grasp, but my hand is like a vice, unshakable. The futures I have taken away belong to me now. They are mine, and looking down at Kendon and Coriander, I feel a warmth and peace spreading through my chest more pleasurable than I have ever known. These two tried to steal my future, but now I hold theirs in my grasp. It belongs to me.
“Why are you here?” the voice whispers in my ear.
“Because I was weak,” I say, staring at the swirl of possibility in my hand. The orb in my hand captures all of my attention; it is impossible to turn away. “This is their future isn’t it, their dreams.”
“Yes.”
“I could crush it,” I say. My fingers squeeze the orb, cracks spread across its surface like spiderwebs. Those down below scream watching their hopes and dreams pressured in my hand. “Or, I could keep it for myself. This is what they tried to steal from me isn’t it. Why shouldn’t I take it from them?”
“That is the purview of the powerful.”
“I am weak,” I say. “But I don’t always have to be.”
The voice laughs and I feel it retreat away from me. “Keep running, Little Emperor. Nurture your envy. The world belongs to you.”
The orb is gone. I stare at the claw that my hand has clenched into, lying awkwardly on a rock, the craggy surface of the cliff rising behind it. The sun bakes my skin and pain throbs in my head. Despite that, I try to flex my hand, the movement agony and still impossible.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch a spec of green in the top of my vision: 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2.