“Father, what is Encastry?”

In the rundown dining room lit by a single lamp on a ramshackle table, the question seemed to draw the attention of both of the parents.

“Where did you hear that word?” the father asked through a mouthful of bread.

“In the library,” the young Tristan replied. “What is it?”

“Well,” the father kept his bread on the plate. “It’s kind of like magic, I think.” He chuckled apologetically.

“Like in the fairytales!” the mother added.

“We honestly don’t know much about Encastry,” the father continued. “You should ask someone who does.”

From a young age, Tristan had been drawn to Encastry. He’d read about it in books, learning more about how it worked, raconting the details to his friends and family every day.

“Shiji is an energy that floats around in the air,” he’d tell them, raising his hands to gesture at the air around them. “And it listens to what we think and tells that to the universe!”

Of course they didn’t really understand much of it. But they humoured him. The boy was just 12, still not old enough to be a farmhand. So they let him occupy himself with the teachings of Encastry.

As his father worked in the drying fields, he’d entertain his mother with mediocre displays of Encastry like drawing a circle in the floor of the house without touching the ground, splitting bricks in half with his mind or fixing dented pots and pans.

“That’s amazing sweetie!” his mother would cheer him on, clapping.

But soon, he was able to do such feats as reshaping the earth beneath their feet at a single thought. And this began to draw the attention of the village around him.

“Marcus,” the townsfolk would tell his father one night at the bar. “Do you not see what he is capable of? We spend hours a day ploughing the field and this boy does it in a second! Do you not understand how much time he could save us?”

“He’s a child, gentlemen,” Marcus would reply sternly. “While it’s true that what he does is amazing, I will not let him enter the world of labour before he’s too young to understand it.”

“Marcus, our village is dying,” the townsfolk would plead. “Year after year the droughts get worse. The royals have done nothing to help us. We have no medicine, no clean water. Our people are dying with no hope of recovery. If there is a god, then He has given us a gift in that child! Our people wouldn’t tire anymore, our crops would grow, our riches would explode!”

“You see a boy doing magic and your first thought is to exploit him for profit,” Marcus snapped back. “This is why I don’t want to let him be a part of our world yet. For 12 years I’ve let him enjoy what childhood I could afford, and until he is older, I will not deprive him of that privilege.”

“Would you rather he died, then?” an old woman from a corner of the bar.

“Excuse me?”

“Magic or not, a boy needs food and health. He’s thin as a stick, Marcus. All it would take is one flu and your boy would be gone. You know this.”

For the first time, Marcus was taken aback. The old woman wasn’t wrong. Forget disease, sometimes the only dinner he could afford was bread and rainwater stored from what sparse rainfall they got.

“The farm?” his wife, Talia, looked horrified at dinner that night. “Marcus, the boy barely has enough to eat and you want him to go out in the sun and break his back in the fields?”

“He doesn’t need to break his back, Talia, you’ve seen what the boy can do. This is a blessing. He could be the one to save us from all of our problems!” He argued the case the of the old woman from the bar and Talia had no response.

So it was decided. From the next day, Tristan would begin working in the farmlands surrounding the village, much to the dismay of his mother and the reluctance of his father.

But to Tristan, it was exciting. Every day he worked in the fields, ploughing the land and carving drains. And every day, his Encastry grew stronger. Soon, he was raising stone walls from the ground, locating sources of groundwater and pulling them out of the earth, telekinetically transporting the harvest from soil to seller.

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Within months, the barren, poor lands of his village had transformed into a lush farmland town, with merchants from nearby villages travelling here to purchase produce at lower prices, rundown shacks turning into proper brick-and-mortar houses and clean water flowing through its pipelines. A doctor had set up shop in the middle of the town, greatly boosting the community’s healthcare and even a treasury had to be be built to contain all of the town’s wealth.

The town gained the name Eausuterrain (pronounced os-terrain), meaning “groundwater”.

And, needless to say, Tristan and his family were regarded as the saviours of the village.

Tristan began entertaining the idea of training more townsfolk to use Encastry. But every attempt he made would fail, as no-one in the town seemed to be able to command the land as easily as he did.

But the life of no worries that the town had grown used to came to an end the day a squadron of the Royal Guard marched into the town.

“We’re looking for a blonde boy who can do magic?” the leader of the squadron asked a woman at the market.

“Oh, you must mean Tristan,” she chuckled and raised a finger in the direction of his house. “He’s right over there.”

Marcus, his wife and Tristan were in the middle of lunch when the leader knocked on their door. “This is the Royal Guard, requesting the presence of Tristan.”

Marcus opened the door to find fifteen men in armour arranged outside his porch. The leader stepped forwards. “Good afternoon, sir. In the name of their Royal Majesties King Treville and Queen Lucille, I am here to announce that your son has been invited to enrol as a member of the Royal Guard.”

“The Royal Guard? My son? You must be joking,” Marcus said.

“If I may come in, sir, I can elaborate.”

A moment later, the family found themselves in the presence of a man explaining Tristan’s situation to him.

“The magic your son uses is known as Encastry, a skill that—”

“We’re aware of what Encastry is,” Marcus interrupted. “Especially when Tristan would often tell us about it every time he learned something new.”

“Oh,” the leader said. “Do you know about the Affinity as well?”

Marcus frowned. “No.”

“While Encastry is an art that anyone in the world can master with practice, select few people in the world are born with what we call the Affinity. It simply means that those people can command the world much more easily than those without the Affinity.”

“Oh, so that’s why it was so hard for me to teach this to everyone else,” Tristan remarked.

“I suppose so,” the leader replied. “It is unknown why certain people are born with the Affinity. But it becomes of utmost importance that once someone with the Affinity is identified, they be placed under the Royal Family’s watch, since, as you may imagine, Encasters by themselves are a serious threat if they go rogue, let alone if they have the Affinity.

“When we got wind of a farming community in the driest part of the kingdom prospering, we assumed that someone in the village must have the Affinity. And stories of a blonde boy who could do magic only confirmed this suspicion. So we travelled here as soon as we could.”

“That’s all very informative, but Tristan isn’t a criminal. He’s barely a teenager,” Marcus said.

“We know,” the leader replied. “But if he can manipulate the very earth at this age, then imagine the wonders he could do for the kingdom with proper training.”

“I understand your motives,” Marcus said. “But it was with great reluctance that I even let the village use Tristan’s abilities. The royal family has done nothing to help us while we dried away here, year after year, drought and famine after drought and famine. I’m afraid I won’t allow my son to be taken away by such people who see him as a potential criminal.”

“I suspected you’d say this,” the leader said. “It’s never easy when the Affinity-bearer is a child. But unfortunately, as subjects of Aladeriv royalty, you have no choice in this matter. If your son isn’t a tool, he’s a threat. And if it came to that choice, then the opinions of his family are of no concern to us.”

“What kind of twisted logic is this?” Tristan’s mother, who had remained quiet until now, suddenly spoke up. “He’s just a normal child! You can’t make him choose between being used or being treated like some criminal!”

“Please leave us,” Marcus said. “I’m not about to let you take my son away, and if you intend on forcing us, then you have our entire town to deal with.”

For a moment, the leader of the Royal Guard locked eyes with Marcus. But eventually, he spoke. “There is no need for violence. There are other methods of forcing someone’s hand.” He walked out of the living room. “I will be in the next village for two days, father of Tristan. I expect to hear your agreement to our request by then. If not, we will make this land dry once again.”

And with that ultimatum, he left.

For two days, Marcus did nothing. Though he was resolute in his choice to not give his son up to the Royal Guard, a choice that the entire village applauded him for, he feared what wrath he was about to bring down on this town.

“Sleep,” Talia said as they lay in bed on the night of the second day. “We’ll deal with what they throw at us when the time comes.”

But he couldn’t sleep, though he tried. The leader’s words echoed in his mind.

There is no need for violence. There are other methods of forcing someone’s hand.

What “other methods” were there that were as bad as violence?

About a kilometre away in the next village, the clock hit midnight. The leader of the Royal Guard raised a microphone to his mouth.

“Barricade the town.”