Chapter 2: Pyromancer
“Whaauuuhhh whaauuuuhhh” The tight pain in my chest it burns. Is this what breathing for the first time is like? God being reborn sucks! I never want to die again. And why am I crying so much.
“Aris look it’s a boy!” At this loud noise ringing in my ear I finally open my eyes to see a giant head inches away from me. It’s a man’s head with red eyes and red-orange hair. His lips flap about and more ringing echoes in my ears. “Honey what should we name him?”
“Shut up and give me my baby!” A different noise reaches my ears than the low pitched one form the man. Almost immediately after the noise stops coming from the other side I feel movement and an exchange of pressure on my body before my eyes begin resting on women’s face. She has green eyes and red hair. She smiles at me so sweetly I almost think she will eat me. Does she think I am ice-cream? “Deadra.”
“Aris what did you say?”
“I will name him Deadra Freyfire.”
“Deadra? Deadra Freyfire. I love it!”
“Hehe so Deadra what do you think?”
The only word I can really pick up form these people is Deadra. Is that a name for something? Does it mean ice-cream? Do they think I am a Deadra? I am not a Deadra I must clear up this misconception! “Guh! Guah googoo.” Dam my vocal cords don’t work.
“Oh Feolra I think he likes it!”
…
Since that day I learned many things. Such as the language and that my new name is Deadra Freyfire. Right now I am sitting on the flat elevated rock we use as the kitchen table. This table is sounded by several chairs and is the same room as or living room and attached to the kitchen. Right now mother Aris is cooking lunch.
“HMMMM hm HMMM hMM HM” She love humming lullabies to me, and for some reason my three year old self really enjoys it! I think it has something to do with the chemicals of the brain but it seams although I retain memories I still have emotions and feeling equivalent to that of someone my age. I really dread going through puberty again. Now for my favorite part of this new world.
“Mommy make fire!”
Without skipping a beat she leaves the boiling pot of stew behind and turns to me. Reaching her hand out in front of my face by a few feet she twists her palm upwards. The back of her hand glows red and an instant later a small bright orange flame with red tips ignite above her hand. The floating ball of fire swivels and turns stretching its little red limbs into the sky. The shadows of the flame dance and flicker around the brick structure of our humble home. The light illuminates my mother and I’s olive skin and orange red hair.
I giggle and clap with pleasure. “Heheh my turn!” I stick my hand in the air and pull energy from my body into the focal point of my hand. The birth mark of our people in the shape of a single candle flame grows a dim red as the pour surges through my soul and into this world. Heat wells up inside of me and I become hotter and hotter until… nothing. Absolutely nothing happens. Developing a pouting face I cross my tiny little arms in front of me angrily. Due to my sorrow the birth mark on my right hand glows a tinge of blue.
Mother’s hand glows a light yellow before patting my head gentle and smiling. “Don’t be sad Deadra, you can’t use fire until after you go through the ceremony at the age of ten. The only thing you can do is keep your body warm and if you’re really talented maybe even heat up objects around you. Now why don’t you go play with your brother Bois?”
Getting my almost hourly attempt to do magic I uncross my arms and scurry off the table to my small bedroom.
After a few hours of running around and wrestling with my older brother bois Night fall descends and our families nightly ritual begins. Our father Feolra comes home with fresh meat and vegetables he caught and gathered from the hunting trip. Setting everything in the kitchen he kisses Aris.
“How is everything going at home today?”
“Great, why don’t you gather the children and we can eat.”
Father rushes over to us and jokingly chases us about the house making silly noises and growls.
Bois takes off without warning while laughing “Deadra run!” I do as he commands and we separate in opposite directions. Using a small trick I picked up over time I manually heat up the muscles in my legs to help me move ever so slightly faster. It is kind of a cheat way of skipping the warm up before a work out.
Moments later we are all sitting at the table eating the stew mother cooked after she got home from work. Mother glances over at Bois. “So do you remember anything I taught you in class today?”
With a mouth full of delicious beef stew Bois reassures her with a “Hmmm” sound.
“Oh and what do you remember?”
“Some reading stuff and things about Xeodra!”
“Now please tell us a bit more, and how about tonight you try reading your little brother a bed time story?”
Putting his finger to his lips in thought he makes a small humming noise. His mark glows purple before dropping his hand and shaking his head. “Ok! Xeodra was a great hero that help founded our civilization and fought some really big monster!”
Obviously my brother summarized quite a lot. Normally my parents read to use every night and I usually crawl on their laps to read along. It didn’t take me long to teach my self to read, and when father is out hunting and mother is teaching all the kids in the village I am at home reading every book I can get my hands on. Witch only consist of some geography, a few encyclopedias of monsters, and a collection of short stories on Xeodra the legendary hero who could move mountain and fly in the air. He could summon other worldly monsters and had the power of the gods. He was basically an indestructible being who saved many small towns and eventually saved the whole world from some evil god or something. I think it is all just made up or over exaggerated but there is no proof for either side since history gets easily lost or exaggerated in this world.
Laughing at my brother’s small summery Aris looks at Feolra next. “So what monster did you collect for tomorrow’s dinner?”
“Oh it was quite good! Today we caught a pack of quad-wolves...”
Our dinner continued on like this as father told the story of his great adventures outside the city walls. After dinner mother brings Bois and I to the river on the side of the village. The river separates the village from the forest of red trees. On the other three sides of our small village are ten foot tall stone and brick walls that separate us from the Great Plains to the south and the mountain range to the north. However since we live in the mountains it all just looks like giant hills in every direction.
Mother washes me up in the river always heating the water before pouring it on me. Bois is old enough to clean himself so he plays around on the shallow part of the river. Even though our species of Pyromancer are natural swimmers with are light and agile bodies he still stays away from the center. This river is huge! It’s almost thirty feet across and Suzaku knows how deep it is.
On the way home I look over my mother’s shoulder toward the village. There are many houses made of red and brown rock melded together most likely by our races strong fire magic. The windows seem to be home made and remind me of a dyed glass. The houses all vary greatly in shape and structure but mostly stay about the same size.
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She puts me and Bois to bed praying to our god Suzaku. “We thank you for the gifts you gave us. May the fire in our souls forever burn thangs to your blessing.” Kissing each of us on our birth marks, which are symbols of Suzaku she leaves the room blowing out the candle and leaving us in the dark.
Brother quickly falls asleep on the top bunk above me. Before I sleep I heat up the blankets around me making them feel like they came out of the drier from my previous world. Wrapped up in the freshly warm blankets I quickly fade into dream land.
“Bois! Deadra! Wake up and eat breakfast!”
Bois hops off the top bunk and lightly lands on the ground while I race in front of him out of bed. He quickly over takes me and reaches the kitchen table before me.
“Slow down you two!” Mother attempts to scorn us but I’m not falling for it through her giant smile and slightly yellow glowing hand. We have thinly sliced quad-wolf meat sizzling on our places like bacon. The scent of smoked meat wafts into my nose.
“Alright Bois lets go to class now. Deadra be a good boy and don’t leave the house.” Aris kisses my forehead as she takes Bois by the hand and leaves the house. Now I am all alone and stuck in the house. I begin my regiment of training.
Since I am still to young to begin anything to hard I simply do as many sit ups and pushups as I can while forcibly heating up the muscles I use with my infantile fire magic. Or better called heat magic since I can’t produce a flame yet. After that I climb any and everything in the house. I also lug around the monstrously sized books around. Ok they are normal sized books but I am three years old! I rinse and repeat everything until I am dead tired and then begin some meditation.
I climb up on one of our stone chairs and cross my legs placing my hands in my lap and close my eyes. No one else in this world seems to meditate; I guess it is something from my previous life. While I meditate I try to pull heat and energy from the world around me and individually heat up each of my muscles, bones, tendons, and skin. Slowly rolling the heat within my body around and increasing it slightly. Each day I notice I can control it better and heat myself more and more. My goal right now is to create fire before I take the ceremonial test. Just think what my parents faces would be like if I could do that! Bois would be so proud of me to! And when I am old enough to run around the village and meet other kids I could show off or somehow become their leader!
“Crunch”
The sound of footsteps slip through the front door distracting me from my meditation.
“Mom, Bois your home!”
Mother and Bois walk in the door, but unusually don’t close it behind them like usual. Another little boy my brothers age appears behind Bois, and shortly thereafter a women holding a small baby with blonde hair.
Mother bends down looking at me and in a cutesy voice says “Deadra, we brought you a friend to play with today, their name is Lucarus” she smiles and points at the boy in the other woman’s arms. He looks to be about the same age as me.
“Lucarus, go play with Deadra.” The woman then sets her child down and he runs toward me. She then starts an idle conversation with my mother Aris.
The blond boy looks up at me with his blue eyes. He looks like he is about to speak but I make a movement to jump from the chair first. “Hello, my name is Deadra Freyfire, I am three years old. What about you?” I hold out my hand to give him a hand shake but he looks unsure of what to do.
“I... am Lucarus Fulbreath. Ummm I also three!” He holds old three fingers with a toothy smile. He has light orange almost blonde short messy hair. Half his teeth are missing and he has snot running down his nose.
“Hmmm” I don’t have any friends outside of my family. This could be a good opportunity. I always wanted to have a childhood friend. Alright it’s decided. “That’s so cool! Do you want to be friends? We could play lots of games!”
The boy looks at me with a startled look then a light shines in his eyes. His birthmark begins to glow yellow. “Yeah!” this is the only word that comes from his mouth.
Over the next few years I shall train, I mean play with my new minion, I mean friend Lucarus! Yes this will be great!
Lucarus shoves his finger up his nose and pulls a large brown nugget from it. Eyeballing the nugget he makes a snap decision. Opening his tiny mouth wide he inserts the disastrous object into an irretrievable place.
“Hey you know eating your boogiers will give you bad karma!”
“What’s kama?”
“When you do something bad you get bad karma, when you do something good you get good karma.”
“Really?”
Deciding I really needed to hammer this in thought of a plan. “Ugh yeah really!” I slowly walked over to the book shelf as Lucarus followed me. “And I bet since you ate that just now you will have bad karma, In fact.” I position him in front of the bookshelf. “Something bad might happen to you soon.” Looking up I see the vicariously sitting book that I barely placed on the shelf earlier. “I can’t say for sure but if you gather up to much bad karma bad things will happen like” I shrug my shoulders “something falling form the sky and hitting you on the head.” I place my hand on the bookshelf forcing all my weight on it in as unnoticeable fashion as I could.
“I don’t be-Ouch!” after a moment of shaking my self the book dislodges and lands squarely on his head. This monstrously large for a three year old book causes a slight bump to form and tears to swell in his eyes. “Huff, sniffle… How do fix Kama?”
“Well since something bad already happened its already fixed, but If you want to negate future bad karma you need to get good karma!”
“How I get good kama!”
“You do something good or nice for someone, Like go complement our parents or even me, or if you want a lot of good karma you need to train really hard and get strong!”
Balling his fists up in front of him and shaking his head he makes a hmph noise. “How I know what good o bad Kama?”
“First of all it’s called Karma, secondly I will tell you anytime something is good or bad Karma, I am not the one making these rules so never get mad at me, I am a simple messenger from Suzaku who is here to help you learn properly and avoid receiving bad karma.”
From that day fourth Lucarus would mysteriously get hit or in trouble whenever he did something I deemed as ‘bad karma’ invoking. However whenever he did something like training or that made me happy in some way he would mysteriously find small treats or other positive things from the world around him when I said something gave him good karma. And that is the story of how I turned an innocent little boy into a training maniac who fears all Karma related things.