On the night Elwin turned 11, he was awoken from sleep by an amazing dream.
He was a dragon of the sea amidst a tempestuous storm, and he reached out to touch a figure in luminescent blue and white with his claws. The sea rose in swirling, spouting vortexes, and he felt brilliant energy coursing through his veins and his hands and his eyes and – a loud bang and cacophony pulled him out of the dream and –
In fact, it was not a dream, because at that moment, Elwin awoke to find streams and rivulets of water rushing all around him and his bed, knocking over flower vases, the books on his desk, and the antaric lamp by his bedside, rushing as if a great waterfall had been loosened in his very room. He had never felt such a power before. His mother Anna burst open the door, and saw the great phenomena unfolding before her eyes.
She exclaimed, “Elwin! You are of your first coming-of-age!”
Grogginess was washed clean from Elwin’s eyes. His subconscious continued to rush the water around him with enormous power.
“Okay, close your eyes, reach into your mind and look for that yoke of control. For you, it might be behind a waterfall or some way out shore,” exclaimed his mother.
Elwin searched his mind for that rattling yoke, and found himself on a shore by a beach at sunset, the waves that came in rhythm scattering the sunlight like gold. The waves seemed to begin at a singular source some way off into the water, so he dipped his toes and waded out to sea.
There it was, pulsing the water in a steady beat.
He found the yoke of his Maht easily, and in his mind’s eye he gently held the bar with both of his hands, and kept it steady and steady and steady.
Slowly, the swirl of the water in his room began to subside, and began to fall to the floor in great splashes that shook the bed. The moisture dampened the rugs and the wooden floor, but it quickly turned to steam and vanished into the air.
“Congratulations, Elwin!” Anna rushed to her son and hugged him tight, tears streaming from her eyes, smiling deeply. She parted his tangerine colored hair and looked at him closely.
“Praise DEIA AETERNITAS, and the FOUNDER MANASURA, for gifting my son the power of Water,” she exclaimed, as she hugged him tight again.
Just like his father predicted from Elwin’s love of the sea, Elwin’s Maht, or First Element, was indeed water, and this would define him and his deeds in the world in which they lived. A noble Element of fluid and grace, and just like the FOUNDER that had established its Art, water symbolized adaptability, intelligence, and love of knowledge, an Element that granted its wielders a vast realm of opportunities in whichever trade they wanted to master. Many a people in the 17 republics used the Art of Water for noteworthy purposes. How his father Carl would have wished to have witnessed this very moment of truth!
Elwin hugged his mother and his pillow and cried a sigh of happiness and relief. It was a brief moment of joy, a moment seldom found for the family.
Andre, his younger brother and a toddler now, waddled into the room to join in on them, and babbled, “Whoosh whoosh water! Hooray!”
Elwin brought Andre close and hugged him tight, too.
It had been more than four years after his father was lost in the largest expedition the Republics had organized to date. The days since were brutal to bear, and it felt to Elwin that a piece of his heart had broken off and disappeared forever. When news arrived, it was disbelief which at first took him, for what in the world could have taken his father, who had fought against the Marlin King and prevailed? But truth was not something he could sway, and denial eventually surrendered to raw pain. The scars etched into his heart never fully healed, and day after day Elwin would wake up in the middle of the night in vivid visage of that very moment he saw his father for the last time, his voice always hoarse the next morning after crying for his father not to go.
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But the nightmares gradually subsided, and what remained was a dull, throbbing pain at the back of his mind, always coiled and ready to spring like a venomous snake at reminders of his worst memory.
And in the midst of their grief, yet another disaster struck. Whether from his broken heart or a curse from the divinities, Elwin’s eyes were afflicted with a disease no physician or healer could identify. Anna spared no expense in searching for a cure for her son’s illness, drawing from Carl’s pension at the Institute of Atomionic Philosophy, which for reasons unknown did not deplete as quickly as she had expected. Together they visited every existing hospital in their home republic, every specialist and doctor, every nurse and healer, searching far and wide for medications and therapies unavailable to the everyman; but their year of efforts proved fruitless. Anna, with dwindling pension and waning wealth, eventually agreed at Elwin’s behest to sell their family ship, the ship which he and his father took out to sea, the very ship which had witnessed the Marlin King. Elwin wept just as much on the day that he sold their ship as the day his father was taken from him, the last relic and memory of his father wrested away from him by way of fate. Elwin made a burning promise to himself that when he raised the family up again, when he made back the denaros, he would track their beloved ship down to the ends of the world and buy it back.
But in the end, no cure for his eyes could be found. On the night of his ninth birthday, the disease took his left eye, and a part of the face around it. But by miraculous fortune, it spared his right and disappeared thereafter, leaving him at a tender age to hide his left eye and side of the head with an eyewrap. It made Elwin the subject of many pointed fingers at school and in the streets.
Even though the challenges would have crippled most families, they endured, and moved ever forward with fiery resilience.
His mother Anna, with her Maht of Earth, resourcefully rebuilt the two-story house she and Carl had once made into an Inn named ‘The Marlin’, designating the second floor as accommodations for guests, converting the spacious living room on the first floor to a late-night eatery and pub, and repurposing the attic to a third floor for their own privacy. Despite his inexperience, Elwin pored over every book he could find for the relevant craft, improvising tools that were beyond their means to procure, even drawing up the floor plans himself with rules of trigonometry he read from his father’s books, all while his remaining eye burned with purpose. At first, The Marlin did not bring in much customers, and for the first two years, his family was never far from hand-to-mouth. But the city council opened a new junction and tramrail next to The Marlin, which connected the busy harbors and the inland railroads that brought peoples from all over the Republics and even beyond sea from the Empire of Jin, and from then on they didn’t have to worry about existential needs.
But of course, success always accompanied doldrums in one way or another. After news of Carl’s passing reached the shore, his rivals in the Guild of Explorers and in the Academy of Experimental Philosophy slandered his name and public image with gleeful abandon. It did not end there. Some in the governments of the Republics, whose funding had been taken away and allocated to Carl's endeavor, cited the thirteen thousand lives that were lost in the expedition as if it was Carl's sole fault, vilifying him, warning of the dangers of trusting charlatans such as he. All of them were eager to step on his father to raise themselves a little higher, in turn burdening all of the bereaved with memories they should not have had to bear.
There were defenders of his father’s legacy as well, but after years of battling his rivals with no results to show, compounded with the creeping recognition that the failure of the expedition meant the absence of new discoveries for a long time to come, his fervent allies shrank in number and withdrew their support. For months on end, it was all too easy to open the morning newspaper to see yet another disparaging article written about his father, but none were more scathing than that article which criticized Carl for abandoning his family and children for a pointless foray into something that needs not knowing. Elwin clenched his teeth, because he knew his father wouldn’t have embarked without a lofty purpose. But he had to carry on.
Such were his days ever since.
So it was a break in the gloom for Elwin to have received his Maht – signifying his coming of age. But he had no idea of what further challenges awaited him in the wider world, for water also carried a less savory reputation.