He struggled to see what was going on, his chin on the table, his feet barely touching the floor.
He was six years old today, and his dad was baking him a cake.
It was gonna be the best cake, better than anyone else at school had ever had.
"When it'll be done, dad!"
His father smiled down at him, opening his mouth to speak-
-And Willowrose awoke in his room under the rafters, the smell of medicine and smoke billowing up from downstairs.
With a groan, he pulled himself out of his cot and struggled down the ladder, something difficult to do when half asleep, and with one arm over your face.
"What did you do," he groaned, pushing his way into the workshop, staggering over and throwing open a window.
"It just exploded," his father's voice came, from somewhere in the cloud, "I think it's fine though if I can just-"
"For the sake of the gods, I thought you'd set the whole place alight."
With one hand he tried to fan the smoke out of the window, the other still over his face, before giving up and moving over to see what his dad had done.
"If I can just isolate out the compoud that made it explode, I'm pretty sure I can-"
Around him, the dream started to fade, and Willowrose awoke. Again.
There was no smoke this time, no grogginess, only irritation at being unsure if he was now awake for sure, and at being forced to relive old memories.
For a minute he lay there, staring at the ceiling with unblinking eyes, wondering where sleep had gone, and then he got up.
With a sigh, he rubbed at his grainy eyes, feeling a headache coming on. Outside of his tiny window, it was yet another morning. Hadn't failed him yet.
He glanced around his room, at the piles of scattered books and drawings. He had everything up here, from medical texts to bits and pieces he'd acquired from the monks who lived on the edge of the village.
He wasn't sure what monks did, but they seemed to mostly live quietly, write books and drink beer. They were always rather cagey when he asked, but it seemed like a good life if you could get it.
His ma said they were a cult, but a cult to what, she wouldn't elaborate. Adults were weird like that sometimes. It was probably a sex thing.
Maybe he should sneak up there one night. Cults were meant to burn things right? He'd read that in an old book somewhere.
Sometimes they did set bonfires outside their complex, but they also invited the whole village when they did, and put on a real good spread, so it probably wasn't anything sinister.
Maybe that was how they get you.
With a sigh, he walked down the ladder, not even bothering to turn around or hold on, years of practice had made him complacent.
His father was sitting at the kitchen table, his ma standing by the stove, cooking breakfast. Willowrose helped himself to a flatbread and a pile of bacon as he passed.
"Hey you," he winced as his father spoke, "you wanna help me in the shop today?"
Willowrose hung by the door, his bread halfway into his mouth, eyes tightly shut, "not today dad, sorry."
He didn't listen for a response, as he left.
-
Everything seemed to lurch around him as he awoke, the creak of settling timbers, the roll of the floor, the-
-
He was in his bedroom again, staring up at the ceiling, but he was pretty sure it was real this time. The walls were bare, his books and scrolls stacked on their shelf in the corner, dusty.
The sun streaming in through the tiny window declared that it was almost mid-morning, and the sinking floating feeling that had accompanied his previous awakenings was starting to fade.
He pressed one hand to his forehead, checking for fever. He was sweaty enough, his bedding crumpled and scattered from disturbed sleep.
His forehead felt ok though, and he didn't feel nauseous, just gritty and exhausted.
With a sigh, he gathered up his bedding and threw it down the hatch to the floor below. Grumbled as he picked out some clean clothes. He would wash up in the stream. He didn't feel like setting up the steam room and bath, especially with such nice weather.
The kitchen was empty, as it had been every morning for the past two years. His father didn't come to breakfast anymore.
It had been a scandal when his ma left, people out here didn't do that. Once you were partnered, it was for life. You stuck together, no matter how bad it got.
But she'd left anyway, and two years on people still talked about it. A part of him still hated her for it, but there was also a grudging respect.
He knew where she lived, she sent letters sometimes, but he left them unopened and hadn't seen or spoken to her since she left, and wasn't sure he ever would again.
He stood for a moment with his hand on the door, washing under one arm, and then he let himself out.
-
One of his shirts had a rip in it, and he was sitting in the sun, stitching it up, when the shadow of his father fell over him.
Willowrose didn't look up, continuing to sew. Small, neat stitches.
He had started blowing out the shoulders in his shirts lately, a consequence of the job he had got at the lumber mill. He would need new shirts soon.
He got another five or six stitches in before his father deigned to speak. "I needed your help in the shop today."
Willowrose knew how this would go. He wouldn't answer, he would continue his sewing, and eventually, the man would go away. They would repeat the dance tomorrow, and then again the day after, until one day, life would shatter the cycle.
He wanted to scream, to initiate confrontation, instead he kept stitching, to the tok, tok, tok of the water clock they had installed behind the house many years before.
He paused between stitches, staring down at his work, a momentary break, and then he continued to sew.
His father loomed over him as he worked, tok, tok, tok, and then he was in the sun again, and the shadow of his father was gone.
-
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He had looked around the house this morning, as he came downstairs, and decided he was tired of it. He didn't spend much time inside anymore, but coming down from his room, the tracked-in dust and filth finally struck him.
His father found him a couple of hours later, on his hands and knees in the kitchen, scrubbing the slate floor.
No words were spoken, but he could feel the sneer, the judgement. He was supposed to be a prodigy, he was the future, when his father was too old to tend the shop, to visit the sick and needy, he would be the one to take over.
And here he was, scrubbing the floor like… Like a servant.
Like his mother.
Willowrose suspected that that last one was part of the reason his mother had left, and frankly, he didn't blame her. He missed the days when they had baked cakes together, the two of them. The days where he had been excited to wake up in the morning that he had failed to sleep, excited to see what new thing they were going to do today, who they were going to help.
He continued to scrub, as that shadow loomed over him, silent because all those words had already been spoken many times before.
At the end of the day, as he sat in the clean kitchen, watching the sun stream in through windows which had maybe never before known a cloth, he stared at the clean stove and the two empty chairs, and sighed.
He missed being a kid. He missed his dad. He was tired of this endless cycle of silence and judgement.
He leant back, letting the chair balance on two legs, one foot on the edge of the table and arms behind his head. What was he going to do with himself, what future did he have here?
The job at the lumber mill wasn't what he wanted. Endless days of moving things around, handing tools about, watching logs go in and planks come out. It had been good for his physique, he couldn't deny that, and it put food on the table, but he didn't fit in there.
If he was being honest with himself, he didn't want to fit in there.
Eyes closed, what else. He was no good at art, he had liked it when he was a kid, and had taken painting lessons from the monks, but he had no talent for it. Old Mudhoof at the school had told him that, when he asked to have his drawings on the walls. Everyone else got their drawings pinned up on the wall, so why not him?
His ma had said they were too good, he used too many colours, it wasn't fair on the other kids, but Mudhoof had told him the truth. They were bad, and he was talentless.
And that was ok, he didn't need art to be fulfilled. He had no magic talent either, it wasn't much different.
His father still hoped he would step up and help in the shop. Still wanted him to take up doctoring. Neither of them had any talent for magic, but you didn't need magic to make people better.
His father was a genius, a once-in-a-generation genius. Willowrose knew that, as much as he knew that he himself was not.
He stared out of the window. He had always wanted to travel, wanted to be somebody, wanted to fight dragons and monsters, to be the first one to step foot in the centre of the Forest. But he would die before he got anywhere near the Deep, he had never even held a sword or a gun.
With a clunk he set the chair back on its feet, leaning against the table with the side of his face against the wood. He stared across the expanse of wood, admiring how the evening sun made the grain and scars look like a standing map.
The army recruiter had come through town a week before. He hadn't considered it then, hadn't even paid them any attention, but maybe it was better than this shit. He was old enough to join up, if he lied a bit.
He was a year off, but he'd heard that they never checked. Most kids weren't even in the system til they hit age anyway. Too many deaths, it wasn't worth it. Name 'em at six, get them registered at fifteen, if you could spare them for the day-long trip to the city.
He stared across the map of the table, imagining it, a strange weight in his stomach as he considered really, actually leaving.
There was a noise from the other room, his father coming home from his rounds, and with a sigh Willowrose stood up, rubbing the side of his face.
He would just have to do better. Maybe he would help with the shop tomorrow.
-
He didn't help with the shop that day, or the next, and the cycle continued through spring and into summer.
Sometimes he caught a glance of his father, passing by him in the village, or through the kitchen at night, but they were like strangers, living in the same house. He was a striking man and stood out amongst the villagers. His skin was a dark mahogany, almost literally. If you looked close you could see the grain of the wood, and it gave him a severe expression even at the best of times. Like a puppet come to life.
Willowrose had asked him about it many times when he was young but had never received a straight answer. That was just how he wanted to look, so it was how he looked.
It was a strange rebellion, for such a conservative man. Everything else his father did was by the book. He agreed with all the opinions of the old folks in the village who had never been further than their front doors, his views seemed a hundred years out of date. He went to bed at night exactly on time and arose at the same time every day.
He would work the shop until midday struck true, and then do his rounds, checking on the sick people in the village, all the little old men and women.
Their village had no Changer, no magic, nobody to fix little injuries or do adjustments. For that, you had to go all the way to the big city, several hours away.
They had had one once, but they had gone to earth many years back, and magic didn't seem to run in the veins of the villagers.
It was like a place trapped in time.
Willowrose cast an eye up to the roof of their house as he left. Two stories high, with walls of small bricks, and a steep, slate roof. His parents had built it themselves by hand, using clay from the local quarry and slates from the mountain, split by hand.
If you did it yourself, stuff lasted longer, that was what everyone said anyway, and twenty years in the slates were only now starting to show signs of wear. They had done everything themselves, with only some help from the others in the village. It had taken them months of hard work, and was supposed to be proof of their dedication to each other.
Funny how that had turned out.
This was how most of the houses here had been built, the whole place was a relic.
The village was set deep into the forest, and their main export was lumber, which made the strange brick structures all the more incongruous. There were no villages past them, as far as anyone knew. They were the last one before you hit the Deeps, and nobody went out there if they could help it.
When he was a child, a huge, cat-like beast had burst out from the forest. It had taken out two loggers, before his father and several others had managed to take it down, armed with a spear probably a thousand years old, and logging axes. They had taken it down with no more losses, but that was attributed to his father's ministrations. The memorials of the two loggers were mounted on the wall of the Pig, along with hundreds of others, a whole genealogy.
Some people could point to names on that wall and list all the links in the chain that led back to them, hundreds and hundreds of years of names. Willowrose knew his family was there too, his grandparents and great grandparents and great great great…
He refused to look at it, refused to engage. If his children ever needed to know their history, they could look it up in the book. He wanted no part of it.
The Pig, or The Pig and Pipe, as the sign proclaimed, was the heart of the town. Three stories high and made of daub and wood, it was by far the biggest thing in the village and a different style from all the other buildings.
Supposedly it had been built by an immigrant, over a hundred years back. There had been a lot of complaints at the time, but all those involved were dead now, and The Pig was the heart of the village now, and that was all there was to it.
Next to The Pig was a general store, run by old Whiskertouch. Then there was his father's shop, dispensing medicine and advice. There was the bakers, filling the streets with the smell of fresh bread. And that was it for shopping. Oh, there was a farm on the edge of the village, the woman who owned it would bring vegetables to town on Fridays. If you needed wax or meat, you had to order it from her.
He considered if there was anything else. Some of the old women knitted and would do you a hat or gloves if you asked, but that was it.
Hands in his pockets, he took the bridge over the stream which ran through the centre of the village, underneath The Pig and towards the City. Right now, in mid-summer, it was only ankle deep, a permanent paddling pool lined with smooth flat rocks. A part of him wanted to wade across, but he was too old for that.
He would pick up breakfast with the lumber workers, as he usually did, and see if they needed hands today. He thought he'd heard talk of starting on one of the Giants today, one of the old trees, rather than the new growth that was their normal trade.
Taking it down would create a gap in the canopy, helping promote new growth later on, but it wasn't easy work. Some of those trees were twenty paces across or more, and it would be the work of weeks to get it on the ground.
He looked forward to seeing what they would do with it. The last one to come down had been years back, and he hadn't been old enough to appreciate it at the time.
Standing in the middle of the bridge, he frowned. Was this going to be his life? Excited to see a tree cut down, growing old here, living his life day by day until he became just another name on the wall.
"Hey, Willowrose!"
He turned around at the shout, roused out of his melancholy, and raised an eyebrow at his friend. Barkstem had been his best friend for longer than he could remember. They had bunked off school together, and taken their punishments together, bonding over shared mischief.
He hadn't even heard her approach. Barkstem was sitting on the back of the cart her family used for deliveries or pickups, her father owned the general store.
"What's up?"
"I'm going into the City," she grinned, standing up in the seat and waving him over, one hand still on the reins, "It's Dragon Day! You wanna come with me, see a dragon?"
Willowrose hesitated. He had meant to try and get some work in at the lumber yard today, maybe help his dad in the shop.
"C'mon!" she patted the seat, sitting back down with a thump, "When are you ever gonna have another chance to see a dragon!"
She stuck her tongue out at him when he hesitated, "c'mon man, my ma won't let me go alone."
With an exaggerated sigh, Willowrose strolled over to the cart, easily hauling himself up into the seat, "well when you put it that way, how could I say no!"