Nygilvyn

Goresch, 66 years after the Rise

I shouldn't have done it. What was I thinking, spending one of the few coins I had on a fortune teller?

I could blame Eleysa, but that would be unfair. Yes, she was enthusiastic about what the fortune teller had told her. She was fervently waving a sheet full of scribblings in my face, somehow expecting I could make sense of what she wrote and follow the incoherent story she was trying to convey at the same time. I could have smiled and shrugged, happy for her that she found something to excite her now that this business trip turned out to be a lot less interesting than she expected — thank you, Father, for being such a good salesman that you can sell anything to anyone. I could also have chalked her excitement up to her age, though she’s not that much younger than me, or the fact that she’s a girl and has probably thought about love and marriage a lot more than I have.

But I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t even consider the options.

I chose to try it for myself. I know it sounds dumb, sentimental, and right out naive, but at the moment, the pull was irresistible. I had to go see this lady. So I read the sign promising insight into your true love once more, shaking my head at myself for wanting to do this. I stepped inside the bright blue tent, the sounds of the county fair that Eleysa and I had stumbled upon on our way to Goresch dissipating as soon as the flap closed behind me. I took a seat at the crispy white table with nothing on it but a deck of cards, a stack of papers and a small vase filled with pencils. I allowed a woman dressed in deep purple to take my hands, stare into my eyes with her dark brown ones, and utter some spell I couldn’t make heads or tails of. It might even have been real Magic — I've heard rumors about female Mages, and since she gave me just as many chills as a normal Mage would have, I think she might have been legit.

Either way, she shuffled her deck after that, a faint smile on her lips, and had me pull a single card from the fan she made so fluently, that perhaps she was both a Mage and a magician.

She gasped, and I immediately added acting to her growing list of talents. I mean, her performance was stage-worthy.

“So,” she said, her voice constricted, shivering as if a sudden ice-cold draught hit only her. “It's you.”

I'd have asked her what she’d meant if I'd been able to get a word in. I wasn’t sure if she was excited or if she had sort of dreaded this day, to be honest. She fiddled around with her bracelets, underscoring her words with the reverberating tinkling of metal against metal.

“When I made this deck, I planned on making fifty-two cards. I wrote all the messages and meanings out in advance. Developed spells for them. Made bargains with them to show up at exactly the right times for exactly the right people. But when I finished number fifty-two, I had one blank card left. I counted my deck fifteen times to make sure, and there was no doubt about it. Fate asked me to create one more card. So I did. I slept on it, and at the crack of dawn, not even fully awake yet, I made this card.”

I felt an unease creep into my stomach, along with anticipation.

“I have never pulled it. In all my years of doing this. Not for myself, not for a customer.”

My heart was pounding by now. My mind told me I was being fooled, that this was a show to try and extract more money from a silly man looking for love. I wasn’t even looking for love, to be honest. I had other things to do first. But there was something that made me stay. Something that pulled at my soul. This card…

“This card…” She looked at me with silvery tear glistening in her eyes. “Is for you.”

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Only then did she reveal it to me. A drawing of a young woman. Bronze skin. Black curls. Closed eyes. Behind her, seemingly made of light and whispers, wings stretched out. She looked like she’d been hit by one of those extremely rare bouts of benevolent Damagic. Like she was a legend turned reality.

“Don’t take the image too literally,” the fortune teller said. “My cards are meant to be symbolic. Up for individual interpretation.”

“My true love is no fairy, then?” I asked with a grin that must have looked crooked, but she didn’t seem to hear or see me. That didn’t matter. I didn’t really mind her either. All my attention went to the drawn woman, and I took in all of her, as if to brandish the image into my mind. Maybe I could try to draw her on the sheet the fortune teller would provide me with, to keep her close. Though I didn’t think I could ever erase this image from my mind’s eye.

“Having said all that…” She swallowed. “Sorry about the darkness.”

“What darkness?” I asked.

The fortune teller had turned silent and it took several heartbeats for me to notice. Darkness? Oh! The background of the card resembled deep, black smoke.

“Isn't the dark just meant to bring out the light of her wings?”

She blinked, and a faint smile curled her lips. “Perhaps. But…”

She lifted her cards and showed them to me. None of them had a dark background. Not even the ones where she’d played with light, or where some kind of magic made the paint shimmer.

“What does that mean?” I asked. Now that I noticed the darkness, all but whirling behind the beautiful wings, it seemed to grow even darker.

She just shook her head. “Take the card and go. You’ll know.”

“But…”

Eleysa had received a page full of notes, answers and predictions. I was standing there, a single card in my hands and a mind full of questions.

But the woman ushered me out, and all I could do was keep the card close. I tucked it away in my purse, beneath my clothes, close to my chest, and I imagined I could feel the energy coming off it. My card. My secret. I couldn’t even tell Eleysa about it. It somehow felt too… personal. She is still staff, even if we’ve been traveling together for weeks now.

I glance at her, walking beside the cart I’m pushing to warn me about pits and bumps in the road. It’s warm here, a different heat from my hometown by the coast. Luckily, there’s a patch of trees nearby. I’ll be glad to walk in the shade for a while again.

The card is still close to my skin. Eleysa’s given up on asking about it. She’s no longer yapping about what the fortune teller told her, either.

She’s tired.

So am I.

I wouldn’t be surprised if even the fish in the tank I’m taking halfway across the continent are. I’ve covered the glass aquarium with a cloth so the traveling won’t upset them too much — fish aren’t meant to travel by road of course, and it’s been a long one. I stop the cart just to check up on them. We’ve lost three already, and I want to make sure these will make it to our destination. There’s no wind, not even a little breeze, so I didn’t need to tie down the cloth today. I can scan our precious cargo quickly. The water’s clear. The fish are swimming, turning their silvery white bodies toward the light.

Good. They’re fine. Nobody wants to buy fish that have been dead for days, no matter how much treasure is in them, and we have a long way to go still. Goresch is just a stopover. We’ll be there for a few days, before we move—

There’s a rustling in the trees ahead that immediately has me on edge.

“Gil…” Eleysa warns, and my mouth turns dry.

The canopy of the forest in front of us is shaking. The roar of splintering wood and falling trees rolls over us.

“Eleysa, watch out!” I yell. An enormous tree keels over and some force is pulling at the long, bleak grass by the sides of the road. A curse I’ve never said before leaves my lips. Damagic.

Maybe it won’t hit us. It’s so erratic and strange…

No. We’ll be hit.

“Behind the wagon!” I shout at Eleysa and I wrap myself around the front of the tank, to protect it from what must be some kind of supernatural wind. I have to keep the fish safe. My father will kill me if—

The Damagic crashes into me. The glass of the tank shatters and pain bursts out in my hands, my arms, my chest.

The pain in my left eye glows up in bright, piercing white.

Someone screams and I realize it’s me. Water is pouring down the front of my body, cold and biting. “The fish!” I yell, throwing my arms forward as if that will hold the glass together.

A sharp edge tears into my flesh. My vision is blurry when I open my eyes — only the right one, because the left hurts too much.

The lower half of the tank is still intact. Something is floundering against my foot. “Get it,” I yell at Eleysa.

My wrist is bleeding. The front of my clothes has turned a deep red, black at the edges. Or is something else taking away the light?

“Gil!” Eleysa yells.

And then, the screams and the pain tearing me to pieces all fade away into darkness, deepened by the image of wings made of whispers and light.