“Althea!” a deep, familiar voice called out to me into the darkness. “Althea! Get it together!”
I tried to listen to him, turning my way to his voice, but as soon as I did, a wash of pain, sorrow, and most of all, burning rage filled me. I didn’t want to feel those things, so I turned away from the voice, deeper into the darkness; deeper into a place where none of that could get to me.
“Althea!” he called out once more, but this time, his voice had faded slightly. I was getting away. “You’ll destroy everything…”
* * *
I felt something stand on my chest. It felt heavy, yet somehow warm… so I ignored it and continued drifting in the darkness…
“Ow!” I exclaimed when a painful sting hit my eyebrow.
I rolled to the side and covered my face to soften the pain, and the thing that was on top of me rolled over with me. More stings continued to fall on my hands, and even on my lower lip. I couldn’t just lay here and allow myself to be attacked like this, so I pushed my hands down and shoved away the thing that was attacking me, before finally opening my eyes and throwing a glare.
“Bok-Bok,” Cinnamon softly replied as she was forced to take a few steps back and away from my face.
“Why can’t you wake me up with kindness…? Like mom used to do when I was a child,” I said as I pulled myself up from the bed.
Cinnamon tilted her head to the side, acting as if she couldn’t understand what I said, but by now, I was fairly certain that she knew exactly what I said and chose simply to ignore me. Why do I know that? Because I’ve called out to her whenever she walks determined to steal someone’s food and seen her stop to look at me as if asking me what I wanted.
Not only that but… as I looked into one of her golden eyes, I remembered the kind of dangerous beast that she was.
One time, as I was trying to control my magic and learn a few spells, I caught her wandering near the woods behind our house. I was about to call her to get back and away from whatever danger was lurking in the bushes, only to get scared when a fox popped out and went straight for her.
I was sure that she was going to die then and there, but before the fox even landed on the ground, she flapped her wings, caught the fox with her feet, pulled it to the ground, and—in one of the most unexpected things I’d ever seen—shot a torrent of fire from her beak! Burning the whole fur off the fox as it scrambled to get up and run back into the woods.
It was quite the scary thing to see… at first because I thought I wouldn’t be able to save her from the fox, but later because I realized that Cinnamon was strong… maybe even stronger than the roosters that look after their hens, since I didn’t know that hens like her could also do magic like that.
I leaned in closer to Cinnamon, who was standing on top of my bed and looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Could it be that you’re actually a master magician…? Just the right kind of magician to train me…?”
Again, Cinnamon just looked at me confusedly for a moment, before she softly walked to the edge of the bed and hopped off in one loud thud. She walked to the closed door and looked at it for a moment, before pecking it three times as if knocking on the door and then looked back at me.
“Right,” I replied with a nod. It was time for breakfast, and she wouldn’t miss it no matter what. I stood up, arranged my loose clothes, and went to the door, but stopped myself as soon as my hand was about to open the door to look down at the chicken. “You better not try to steal my breakfast. I’ll prepare something for you too—something for chickens—so don’t get ahead of yourself.”
“Bok,” she let out, but… I wasn’t sure if she was saying yes or telling me that she didn’t care.
I looked at her for a moment longer, and then opened the door. She calmly walked, took a few of her shorts steps and stopped to look up to me. It seemed like she had listened, so I nodded and followed after her as we made our way to the living room.
Mom was already in the kitchen, cooking her own breakfast. She no longer made it for me, since as a grown woman—or soon to be—I had to know how to do things for myself, so if I wanted to eat, I had to make it myself.
“Good morning, Althy,” Mom said with a soft smile. “You woke up earlier today.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to stay sleeping…” I said as I threw a glance at Cinnamon, before looking back at mom.
There were new wrinkles in her face, and I could already spot a couple of gray hairs in her blonde-brown hair. She had gotten older over the past few years ever since dad and big brother were drafted. They had yet to return from the frontlines, but we still got a few letters from them, letting us know that, while there were a few scary things happening with Holy Knights and Demon Generals blowing up battlefields, they were still spared from going face to face or even close to those things, so they were just there to defend supplies and things like that from anyone that wanted to do anything suspicious.
It was good to know those things… but both me and mom would prefer it if they were here. I missed them both so much, and I wondered if they would even recognize me by the time they came back.
Mom said that people in the nearby town were talking about me; about how I was turning out to be even prettier than mom ever was, so I couldn’t be sure if dad and big brother would be happy to know that or if they would rather keep me locked up so nobody got any weird ideas with me…
“Ow!” I exclaimed, moving my leg to the side and away from Cinnamon’s pecks. I looked down at her with my eyebrows furrowed. “Calm down! I’ll give you something to eat right away, okay!?”
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Mom chuckled, picked up the few things that she prepared and moved over to the table, giving me plenty of room to make something for myself and the chicken.
As a chicken—and a fierce one at that—she could eat almost anything. We didn’t have everything that we wished to have, but I could get her a few grains, some vegetables, and a few cut fruits. Just enough to make her happy. Thought… what she liked the most was meat… She would chirp whenever we had some, but such luxuries were rare if I didn’t go out and hunt them, so she’d have to be content with what I gave her.
After a couple of minutes of cutting things up, and avoiding a few pecks pointed at my knees, I finally set down a plate with what she liked. She didn’t even look at it for a second, before her beak gorged on everything there was.
I chuckled and cooked my own things. It was just a few eggs that the chickens gifted me, with a couple of fruits, some bread and a simple soup.
As I sat down to eat, the door to our house was suddenly flung open, and both me and mom turned to look over at what happened.
“Yaaahooo! Althea! Miss Eleanor!” a girl from the nearby town exclaimed, letting herself in with one hand raised and a wide smile on her face. “Are you up? Good! Come on, we have to train!”
She was a girl I met not too long ago in the town, Celeste. We were about the same age, and like me, she also wanted to become a knight. Though, I still didn’t know for what reasons she wanted that, since for me, I just wanted to ensure that dad and my brother were okay.
Celeste had short brown hair, a wheat-like skin color like my mom, and bright blue eyes that seemed to sparkle. I was taller than her by about a head, but I was just tall like that. As I looked at her up and down, I noticed that she was ready to go out, with her thick leather armor pieces, boots, and short sword strapped on the side of her hips.
“I’ll be ready in a moment,” I replied, and continued eating my breakfast.
“Hmm…” Mom pondered as she looked at me thoughtfully.
“What is it?” I asked, since it was pretty obvious that she wanted to say something.
“I’m not sure if it’s okay for you girls to be doing things like that…” she said, throwing a glance at our guest as she just stood to the side with a smile. “Those dangerous things should be left to others.”
“But mom,” I argued back, “You know how strong my magic is, I should do something for the good of the community now that my dad and brother aren’t around—Besides…” I pouted as I glanced to the side. “You don’t want to teach me magic…”
I learned soon after dad and brother left why they were so scared of her sometimes. A few bandits thought that now that it was just the two of us, that they could do whatever they wanted, so they tried to attack us in the middle of the night, only for mom to come out surrounded by flames, lightning and beams of magic to tear them apart with a maniacal laughter. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I should be scared of bandits or my mom…
“You don’t need to learn those things. Only trouble comes for those that have that kind of talent…” she said without looking at me. “You already know enough to defend yourself.”
“But, what if—”
“Althea!” Celeste interrupted, “Come on, already! The sun is going to go down by the time you’re done here!”
I looked out the window and the sun had come out not too long ago… But I understood what she wanted, so I hurried with my food and went over to change out of my sleeping clothes and into something more fit for exploring.
* * *
“Check this S up!” Celeste confidently said as she opened her hand to a large boulder in the middle of a clearing, some distance away from my house where people couldn't easily find us.
A small fireball formed in her palm and I looked on with expectation. After a few seconds, an uneven ball formed, and with a drop of sweat trickling down the side of her face, the ball was fired forward. I looked at it fly in the air from side to side in a rather erratic trajectory until it hit the boulder, exploding with a small sparkle of fire that only left a tiny back mark on the rock.
“What do you think of that?!” she said with a wide smile directed my way.
“It was… good? I think?” I replied with a slight tilt of my head.
“‘Good?!’ Just that?! I want to see you try something even close to what I did!” she exclaimed pointing a finger at the place of impact.
“I could try…” I said and followed her actions by lifting my open left hand at the rock.
I closed my eyes and focused on the flow of magic within my body… There was a lot—at least what I thought was a lot—and just imagined an orange fireball forming in my hand… With the warmth, the burning, its wild nature, and the power to destroy. Once I felt like something like that was formed, I finally pushed my hand forward and opened my eyes.
A ball of fire flew in a straight line through the air and hit the rock, exploding into something many times bigger than what Celeste did, and sending a few pieces of rocks flying into the air.
“What the hell!?” she shouted, her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide, “Where did you learn to do that?!”
“I… well… I guess I just learned from the best…?” I replied with a wry smile.
“Awh, you…” she said with a smile, slapping my shoulder.
The best was, of course, my mom, but she didn’t need to know that.
“However! Magic is just one of the smaller aspects of being a Holy Knight!” she continued, pulling the sword from her hip and pointing it forward at the rock, “Masters of weapons! That’s what a Holy Knight really is!”
I reached for the axe that I’d strapped on my back. I didn’t have a sword, and neither me or mom had the money to buy one, so I brought the woodcutting axe to practice until I was able to get my hands on a real sword. I leaned the axe on my shoulder, just like dad used to do with his sword, and looked at Celeste.
She furrowed her eyebrows as she looked at the way I was holding the axe. “That’s no proper way for a knight to stand…”
“It’s the way that I know how it should be done,” I replied with a shrug.
She looked at me for a while longer and then shrugged as well. “Well, whatever, it doesn’t matter. What matters… is strength!”
With a powerful vertical swing of her sword, she cut the air, causing even the grass under us to sway. Now, that was something that I was impressed by every time I saw her practice with the sword. She was particularly strong, despite not looking nearly as big as my brother or dad were. By now, I wasn’t even sure if either of them were as physically strong as she was.
“Soon, Althea, soon… I’ll be old enough to join the Holy Knights, and finally be…” she said with a determined look forward, “Finally be… the proper wife of a prince! Argh, if only I wasn’t an only child… I could’ve been gone already!”
That last bit was something that I learned recently through her. Apparently, the Empire only drafts the oldest child and head of the house whenever they need more people. Celeste was the only daughter of a single mom, so unless her mom allowed it, she couldn’t go with the soldiers and knights. In my case, if I had been the older one with my brother, I would’ve gone instead of him…
As I thought about those things, she raised the weapon to the side once more and with a scream, ran at full speed to the boulder. Soon enough, she was right in front of it, and with another powerful swing, she attacked. A loud clink resounded inside the forest, but the boulder remained in place, only losing a few small rocks.
She continued her assault of the rock, and after a few minutes, she was already heaving and sweating. “How—how about that?!”
I softly clapped with a smile on my face. It was nice whenever I saw her go all out like that. It made me feel inspired to try my best as well, so I took hold of the axe over my shoulder and prepared myself to do something similar to her—maybe without all the shouting.
Then, without warning, I heard footsteps getting closer from the side of the forest, close to where we were standing. Both me and Celeste tensed up and prepared to see who had come to find us here.