“Wait your turn, Whisper,” Dreamer complained, trying to elbow his mate away from the warmth of the fire.
“How long’s it gonna take, Ms. Tara?” Doti asked from beside Whisper. Every one of them was cold to the bone.
The children had gathered around her to have their robes smartened. Today was a significant day and Tara was happy for them. The day when those who had come of age for the Initiation would dress in their best clothes and journey to the City Square.
Tara remembered what it was like for her as well. She was so optimistic and sure that she’d become a disciple of a noble. What a shame. No one had chosen her and that was how she met Moss. She had prevented him and Old Wen, and even Rihal from telling the children about the selection by the nobles in Vorthe. It would do the boys no good to raise their hopes only to have them dashed if no one chooses them.
“Just be patient you all, it won’t take much time,” Tara said as she heated up a flat piece of metal with fire coming from her hands.
They all held their hands out to reach for the little warmth coming from her fire. Well, most of them. Jerome sat beside her, smiling as he watched his friends. He wasn’t shivering like the rest of them. Almost like he could resist the cold without external heat.
“Why are you smiling, Jerome, aren’t you cold?” she asked. This phenomenon wasn’t strange anymore. She knew how sturdy Jerome was compared to the rest of the children in the orphanage, and she wished that like Jerome, they had had the opportunity to be given names — real names — backed with power. Not the nicknames they came up with to give them an identity. Tara abhorred calling them numbers. Why would someone call children numbers, that’s not an identity, it’s slavery — slavery of the mind.
Jerome’s smile brightened but he quickly pursed his lips to restrain himself. Was he excited about Mehn Agrh’ur?
“You’re hiding something, ain’t you?” Doti said. Then he pointed to Jerome accusingly and looked at her, “Ms. Tara he’s hiding something.”
“I’m not hiding anything,” Jerome said, opening his hands wide for them to see but failing to keep the smile off his face. This just made him all the more suspicious.
“Tsu!” Whisper sneezed.
Tara glanced at him and quickly said, “Ok, Dreamer, let him get some warmth. We don’t want Whisper getting ill, do we?” She quickly held Whisper’s hands, warming them up by blowing hot air on them.
Life at the orphanage was a struggle for the children. But with lots of friends — siblings really — though they were dirt poor and lacked resources that most children needed, they lived happily, nonetheless.
Tara had seen what a little cold could do to these children — dirt. Having nothing to heal them but her flames to warm them up. Thanks to Jerome who came up with a way to make them soap to keep them clean, many of the children would have died from diseases before they turned 12. She still found it hard to believe he did that with wood ash and oil, he had made soap — and made one of her pots unusable in the process. Even now she felt like smacking him on the head, but the soap had more than made up for it. Did Rihal teach him how to make it? She knew they had been spending a lot of time together. They had a sort of master-disciple relationship. Just as she had with Old Wen many years ago.
Jerome had explained that soap could keep them clean enough to not fall sick easily. However that worked, she had no idea. And he refused to explain beyond that. The boy was as stubborn as a mule. Perhaps he was still angry at her for selling his soap — soap that put food in his belly and had kept him off the streets for a sixday. He had made more and she went ahead and sold them too — unrepentantly so. Well most of them. The soap was too good to sell everything.
The four boys had been up before dawn, preparing for the journey to the City Square where they would sense the essence of the world for the first time. Tara looked them over once again as pride surged through her. Her boys were adolescents now. Though, they were all twelve years old, they didn’t look like it due to the lack of proper nutrition all these years. But that would soon change, she hoped.
Tara quickly finished smartening their robes, helping them look presentable.
“Well, how do we look?” they asked Moss who walked out of one of the rooms in the orphanage, looking like he’d been run over by a mob.
“Well…” he dragged out the word not wanting to discourage the children but having nothing good to say about their robes.
Tara didn’t blame him. The boys wore rough, cheap robes that hung loosely on them. The gray color of the robes made them look like prisoners heading to the guillotine.
Jerome snorted. “Well, what?... say it.”
“Splendid,” Tara said, applauding, as she gave Moss a scary glare. “The boys have been preparing for Mehn Agrh’ur for four moons, Moss. The least you could do is encourage them.”
“You look…good?” Moss said, bobbing his head up and down. His compliment also sounded more like a question than a statement.
“Right,” Jerome murmured to himself, clearly not convinced. He was not loud enough but she heard him.
“How did you get the robes, by the way?” Moss asked.
“We worked for it,” Doti said proudly, grinning from ear to ear.
“Yeah, by cleaning shit,” Moss said with a smirk.
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“We cleaned the drainpipe carrying sewage out of Farryn, Moss!” Jerome barked at him. “Our job was to clear the gutter, not to also clean out the drain pipe that was clogged. The guards asked us to unclog it and I, genius that I am,” he puffed up his skinny chest, “asked them for more pay. Hrmph! What productive thing did you do this last tenday, Moss — besides using the soap that I made?”
Tara had to hold back Moss to stop him from hitting Jerome. She heard him spit out a series of curses that shouldn’t be said in front of children.
“Jerome, apologize,” she said but the child in question huffed and looked away in anger. Tara sighed. “That was too much, Jerome. You shouldn’t have said it. And you too,” she turned to Moss. “They have been working very, very hard to make today worth it. And you just spit on their hard work like it was nothing.”
Moss stormed out of the Orphanage in anger at that. Tara looked at Jerome, not knowing what to say to him. The boy was too intelligent for his own good. They all stood for a while in uncomfortable silence before Jerome walked up to a wall.
Tara watched him carefully retrieve the sandals he had woven from the scraps of cloth and leather he collected in the slums from inside a hole in the wall. She had seen him stashing leather straps and the likes for a few moons now but didn’t know what they were for. So this was what he had been up to. She smiled. She was going to miss him, but that would be for the best.
The sandals were a hodgepodge of colors and sizes, with uneven stitching and frayed edges, but they were the best he could make with the limited resources he had.
“Here,” he handed his friends a pair, each smiling brilliantly.
Despite their imperfections, Tara could sense their elation. It was a first-time experience for them as they had never owned shoes before, and the joy of having something to cover their feet was written all over their faces.
“How...when did you make these?” Doti asked, amazed.
“I've been at it for a while now,” Jerome responded with a grin and added, “…secretly.”
The others mumbled their thanks as they excitedly put on their new sandals.
“Before you go, I want to wish you well. May the Sovereign’s light bring you good fortunes and shine a light on those that wish you misfortune so you would know to avoid them,” Tara prayed. Vortheans weren’t religious but the Sovereign was the closest thing to a god she knew. And if there was a god, she prayed he — or she — was watching over her boys during Mehn Agrh’ur.
~~~
Leaving the slums to see the other parts of the city was a dream come true for Jerome. He chatted with his friends as they hurried along to leave the slums for the first time in their lives. He was quite excited to see what was on the other side of the dirt-ridden, flea-contaminated part of the city he had always known. And from the looks of it, his friends were eager too. They pointed at places where they brought mischief to bear, shouting greetings at the homeless and elderly in the slums while those they greeted hurled curses at them.
As soon as they stepped out of the slums, a breathtaking panorama of the city was unveiled before them, arresting their attention with every passing moment. The bustling activity, grandeur, and beauty of the cityscape left them in awe.
Jerome gaped, unable to stop himself. It was as if he had entered a different realm altogether, one he had only heard of in tales. The Victorian Architecture he was seeing for the first time was quite unbelievable to him. The people of Farryn took things a step further making them into gigantic edifices. Imposing structures that loomed over them, casting shadows on the streets. The colorful facades of the buildings shone brilliantly in the early morning sun, their intricate designs and patterns mesmerizing him.
Jerome wondered if all these buildings could be homes. They were more like manor houses but fit more tightly together, with little to no space between them. And they were tall. Some reaching as high as fifteen stories. By the standards of Earth, these were tiny edifices. But Vorthe as he knew it, was still in their developing stages. The highest he assumed their structures would be was five stories.
They all couldn’t help but gape at the shops lining the streets, offering an array of merchandise, from dazzling garments to gleaming weaponry. The story buildings all had a store in front of it. The streets were wide, and carriages glided smoothly along the well-laid-out paths, the rhythmic clops of horses’ hooves resounding in the air. It was a dazzling spectacle that left them spellbound, the sheer grandeur of it all nearly overwhelming their senses.
“Why couldn’t we see the rest of the city in the slums?” Dreamer asked after they all calmed down a bit. The structures around them were too imposing to not be seen from the slums — some of which were at least 150 feet tall.
“That’s because there’s a visual formation around the slums preventing those within from seeing what’s outside of it. It’s a brilliant idea if you ask me.” Jerome chipped in.
His friends didn’t know what to say because they couldn’t wrap their tiny brains around it, so they just looked at him in silence.
Dreamer finally asked again, “What’s a…visual formation?”
“Think of it as a...an illusion, created to prevent us from seeing what’s outside the slums.” And to make them go around in circles if they aren’t expected outside the slums.
Their Jaws nearly touched the floor.
“Someone can do that!” Whisper said in a low voice. “Maybe it ain’t just someone, but a lot of someones!”
Jerome chuckled at the play with words. Doti and Dreamer bobbed their heads up and down in amazement. Jerome was equally amazed, not at the achievement of creating an illusion around the slums, but at the pure and innocent nature of his friends, who could not fathom the idea of being offended by the fact that they were kept from seeing the rest of the city.
Ah, Jerome sighed to himself. How nice it’ll be to be a child again. I sometimes forget that I’m a child and my friends are children. “Let’s hurry up so we can get to the City Square on time,” he said.
Reluctantly, they tore their gazes away from the grandeur of the cityscape and begrudgingly made their way through the bustling throng of people, determined to reach their destination at the square.
“Don’t you think it was quite easy to reach this part of the city today? Why was it impossible before?” Doti asked.
“Yes. I thought it would take us more time but it seems it wasn’t just a visual formation preventing us from reaching this part of the city,” Jerome said as they walked. He couldn’t be sure if it was something as simple as making them walk around in circles that prevented them from crossing the formation. If that was all, he would have sensed it. Or would he? He didn’t know what people in this world were capable of, or what sacred artists were capable of for that matter.
“Hmm. That smells nice,” Doti said. The smell hit Jerome too and his stomach growled. All of their stomachs growled.
“Smells better than potato soup,” Dreamer said rubbing his stomach. “Maybe we should—”
“Let’s not get distracted. This is not the slums, remember?” Jerome cut him off. He increased his pace, walking ahead and the rest caught up with him a moment later. It was probably going to be a long trek to the City Square. They had to hurry.