I was running in the woods.
I couldn't remember how I got there or why my hands were full of blood and my whole body ached. Did the Blooms have a part in this? It seemed unlikely. We didn't get on well, but they'd never hurt me like that. However, I knew that I couldn't go home, even though I didn't remember why.
I tried to focus. What was the last thing that I could remember? What was I working on in the bakery?
Something came back to me. An old ladies' charity event. Six cakes. Strawberry, mint and peach.
I asked myself why I was running, instead of doing my job. Nothing came to mind, except that something must have happened because I was covered in blood and my whole body seemed about to shut down. My brain was probably injured as well, otherwise I'd be able to remember things more clearly.
Blood, my blood. It reminded me of something, perhaps a fever dream I'd had. Something spooky, like my blood being cursed or something.
I tried to focus more. I needed to find out if I could remember anything else about the situation I was in.
The only thing that came to mind was this stupid stone I found at the Blooms when I was a little baby. I didn't even remember how I got it - I mean, I couldn't remember even before this whole memory thing happened to me. I guess I was too little. I must have picked it up in the backyard or something.
It was a beautiful stone, about the size of a toddler's hand. I know because I carried it with me everywhere I went. What I liked about it was its color, a beautiful dark purple. It used to make me think of magic. I just always associated that color with magic and power.
It made me feel safe and every single day of my life, for as long as I can remember, I've been carrying it with me. It's always safe in my pocket.
Except today. I forgot about it because I was fighting with the Blooms. And now, for some strange reason, I'm wounded, covered in blood and I can't go home.
The idea that I'll never see the stone again is much more painful than it has any right to be. Well, I'll have to learn to do without my daily dose of luck from now on. I guess this is growing up.
I know I can't run forever, but there's nothing else I feel like I should be doing. The woods can't go on forever either, I suddenly think. I don't know which city I'll find on the other side, but maybe I can stay there.
I'm just fourteen years old and I'm an orphan. The War has left too many kids my age in this condition. I don't expect to find a family who will have me. There are not enough families for all of us. But I know I can be useful. First of all, I am a baker. I can find a job in any bakery. I don't ask for much, I just know I can't go back to Outwoods.
It was getting harder to run. My legs were so pained and heavy that I doubted I could even keep on walking. Not to mention the pain I felt in every other part of my body.
I suddenly noticed something. In the middle of the woods there was a clearing. Why didn't I know about it? It was a big space. I guessed it belonged to somebody. Somebody especially wealthy that needed all this space to build something.
I was only partly right. As I got closer, I noticed that it belonged to somebody indeed. But most of the space was already occupied. There was a gigantic and beautiful garden and, right in the middle of it, a big house. It looked a bit like a castle, especially from afar.
The garden looked well-kept, so somebody must be living there, I thought. I could ask for help. If they didn't want to help me, or worse, if they were some kind of criminal, well...I would have accepted my fate. I had nowhere else to go and no one else to be anyway.270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZKSwhc94l1
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I felt like my whole body was on fire. I kept having strange visions. I think I was sleeping, but I wasn't sure. All that I knew is that I kept having dreams.
In the first dream, a little girl, who couldn't have been more than six years old, was in a public library. She had her hands full of books, as much as she could carry and her eyes were sad. I could tell she wished she could take home more books. I felt her thinking that she wished she could live there. Finally, she decided it was time to go. She stepped out in a stormy and dark night. She barely had any clothes on, she was freezing. I thought she was going home, but then I realized she had nowhere to go. She simply found a comfortable space on the sidewalk, where a little grass was growing so that it was softer, and she huddled there.
However, she couldn't sleep. At first I thought it was because of the cold, but then I felt her excitement. She couldn't wait to read the books.
Just as she was about to open the first book, however, she heard the sound of steps on the sidewalks. She looked up to see a gang of about twelve boys. They looked mean. They had to suffer hunger and cold just like she did, but they were sick of it. They decided to live in a sort of pack to survive and she didn't. She was the odd one out, she needed to be eliminated.
The bigger boy snatched the book from his hands before he could say anything. "You're always reading books, aren't you?" he asked in a mocking tone. "Do you know what is the only thing books are good for? Especially in a night like this. If you weren't so abnormal, you'd know. Books are for burning. If we make a big fire, we won't die freezing". He eyed the books the girl had chosen. They were very big tomes. A lot of paper. It could only mean a bigger fire.
The boys fished matchsticks out of their pockets and set the books on fire.
The girl hated herself for losing the books she had not read yet, she hated herself for letting the other boys ruin a public good, especially since she knew she was going to take the blame for it. She especially hated herself, however, for secretly enjoying the warmth that was spreading from the paper.270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpRwf23L1AZ
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I dreamt of a young boy with hazel eyes and chestnut hair. He had spent his life learning a trade, hoping one day he could be useful to somebody else and earn a living. He had spent his whole life in different shops with different people. So had the other orphans from his town. Nobody cared about them. He didn't think they even had names and if they had, they couldn't remember them. He couldn't remember his own name. He knew his family name because he had looked at the papers that the people from the orphanage had. He was lucky to have a family name, he knew it. Most people didn't have one. He was never treated different from the other kids because of it, though. That was good because he didn't know how he would have felt about it. He liked to shine for his merits, not his birth. He immediately felt ashamed he thought of that. He was just an orphan and even if his family was an important one once, there was nothing left of it. Just him, but he didn't even had a name. When people had to call him, they'd simply shout "You!" in his direction or, in some cases, if there was more than one apprentice in a place, they'd call them by numbers. It hurt him so much he felt humiliated even by thinking about it. He dreamt of having a name and of being free to quit any job where people didn't use it. Sometimes, he thought he would just name himself. He paid a lot of attention to people's names and, if he heard something that he liked and that felt like it could be him, he would have used it. It had never happened. Partly because he didn't find one that he liked yet and mostly because he was ashamed to just claim a name. To ask people to just call him that.
One night, he was out of town. He had to fetch some working stuff for his master. He normally hated eavesdropping, but he couldn't help it. Some local people were at the pub and they were talking about their glory days. He heard his family name and he knew he had to listen.
They were talking about one of their childhood friends. He had his family name and he died during the War. They remembered how he looked. He looked just like him. They said he had a baby who was a young kid now. An orphan.
His father.
James. The most beautiful name he had ever heard.270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQC20sJlUHf
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Then I dreamt of another young boy. I had never seen someone who looked like him before. He was skinny and pale. His blond hair was so light that it was almost white. His eyes weren't the brightest shade of blue I'd ever seen - they were paler than the eyes of the boy who loved books, but they looked especially haunting in his white face with eyebrows so pale that they were almost white.
He was on a ship full of other people. He was looking for his parents. Deep down he knew they were dead. They had died, along with his little brother, just the day before. They had been sick for days and he had seen the people who manned the ship throw their corpses overboard. They weren't the first and they wouldn't be the last - the sickness had affected all the slaves on the ship, including him. He was one of the few who survived. Even though he knew they were dead, he wanted to keep looking for them. He was still feverish from the sickness and maybe his brains didn't work properly or perhaps he was just looking for something to do. Anyway, there was no harm in looking. He tried to pronounce some words in the common tongue of the Kingdoms. They sounded strange. He knew that he had to learn them if he wanted to have a life there. He didn't want to, but he had no choice. He knew a little about the Kingdoms, the crew on the ship was from there. They had escaped on that ship during the War because they didn't want to fight. They found out what nobody else in the Kingdoms knew - there were other countries outside the Corporation of the Kingdoms. They spent some years terrorizing the people of the North Lands, like they called them, and dreaming about the day they could come home with slaves and the power of their discovery.
That day had come.
The boy didn't think of his homeland as the North Lands. He was from a little isle called Ephyre but nobody cared about that. From what he had heard about the Corporation of the Kingdoms, the War had left most people unsatisfied with magic. It was just one more thing he hated about them - magic was a vital part of his family life back home. He hadn't learned much of it, unluckily. That was too bad.
It took them another month to finally reach the shore. By then, almost all of the slaves had died. A lot of the men from the crew had died too, even if only a small part of them had been a victim of the sickness - most of the men died in isles they found along the way, fighting with local people in pubs and drinking themselves to death.
When the ship finally stopped moving, there was only a man from the Kingdoms left and a handful of slaves, including the boy.
The man didn't want the slaves and the glory. He just wanted to go home. He didn't care about the discovery. The way he saw it, if the men from the Kingdoms never knew there were other countries in the world, it was for the better.
He freed the slaves and told them to run away. Their life would be hard, but, after the War, there were plenty of homeless people and orphans roaming the streets anyway.
The boy looked at the city for the very first time. It wasn't Ephyre, but no place was.270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡi9Dcc8m6jf
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The last dream was about a girl. She was sad. She was painting the walls of a big mansion. Her grandfather was very sick. He was dying. The girl had been painting ever since she could remember and she went from place to place to do her job. She was paid for painting walls. She always made elaborate drawings of beautiful exotic places. Some people thought they were real places, that she had seen because she looked like she was from some foreign island. They couldn't be more wrong. She was from an ancient people and her skin was darker than that of most people, but she had always lived in a well known city in the Kingdoms. The countries that formed the Kingdoms were many and most people thought they made up the entire world. They contained people of countless ethnicities. But why did people always think of her as a wanderer or a traveler? She had never seen the exotic places she painted. That was the reason she painted them. She knew she would never be able to see them otherwise. Some of them were inspired by real places, old legends her grandfather told. But the details belonged to her imagination. Now she was painting for a different reason, though. She doubted her grandfather had still long to live. She wanted to paint the places the man had never seen. Because, who knows, maybe one day the girl would be able to travel - she was only twelve and very healthy. The man, however, would not be able to. Lost in her thoughts, she smudged an angle of the painting. She frowned, trying to fix it and asking herself if the people she was working for would be able to tell the difference. She hoped not.
All the people she had worked for in the past had not lost any excuse to call her names, hurt her or humiliate her. They often pretended they couldn't understand what she was saying, even though she had always spoken the common tongue perfectly. The government wouldn't want it any other way. Truth be told, if it weren't for her grandfather, she would have never learned her people's tongue. Nobody ever spoke it anymore.
She knew most orphans worked as apprentices and she was sure most of them received the same treatment from their employers. However, once she heard an old lady say something to her husband. Something she had never forgotten.
"When I am not pleased with the others, I am never sure how I should treat them. A lot of important people died in the War and most of these kids don't know who their parents are. I try to be careful. This one, however...", shooting her a side-eyed glance, "well, I just know her parents were nobody".
Shw knew a lot of people didn't think these kind of thoughts, while others were mean to orphans in general without thinking of their skin color, just because they had no parents to protect them.
However, the old lady wasn't the only one that needed to be careful.
She never told his grandfather about these things, though. She didn't want him to worry for her and, mostly, she didn't want him to ask her to quit her job. Because the man would have pretended he didn't need the money to survive, but the girl knew he did.
Thanks to her grandfather, she knew that her parents weren't exactly nobody, anyway. They were only treated like that because they fought the War on the losing side. But the girl knew there was more to the War than politics. The government didn't tolerate magic very much, so they tried not to let it known, but the War had involved mostly sorcerers. They fought against each other, trying to decide if magic should take over the world. The War was won by the good side, to which her parents belonged, but the government that ruled after that was merely interested in politics and chose some countries that should suffer the consequences. Many cultures were wiped out, including her own. Funnily enough, the cultures where magic was particularly important. There were also other reasons these cultures were picked, but she didn't want to think about that.
Her grandfather told her that her parents were fearless warriors and wonderful sorcerers. They were especially interested in alchemy and they had spent all their lives before the War trying to do what no other alchemist had ever accomplished - turn metals into gold.
The girl dipped the brush into the golden paint. Oh, to be able to change the whole world by turning everything gold. If only real life was as simple as that.270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5UjTharnER
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When I woke up, the strangest thing happened. All the kids270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJGh3qkpsU5
I had dreamed about were looking down on my face with worried eyes.
I still felt drained of energy, but the aching was less than it used to be. I noticed that my hands had been bandaged and that I was lying in a bed.
"I think he's experiencing some form of memory loss", a man with big black almond-shaped eyes said. "He kept asking strange questions in his sleep".
"Always asking questions, even when he's about to die. Just your typical Oliver" joked a man with messy dirty blond hair.
How did he know my name?
"Do you know who you are?" asked me the first man, with a worried look on his face. There was something very charismatic about him, even though I couldn't tell what it it was.
"My name is Oliver Edens, I am fourteen. I work in a bakery. I live with the Blooms". I tried to mention only the things about me I was absolutely sure of.
The girl who loved books frowned and asked in a high pitched voice "Does he know who we are?"
I wanted to say something about my dreams but I didn't want to sound crazy. They probably weren't even accurate and, if they were, that would have been a sort of invasion of their privacy.
I didn't want to tell them that I didn't know who they were either because, judging by the looks on their faces, it meant the world to them that I did.
They must have sensed that something was off though, 'cause the men gave me something strange to drink, that they called potion, and I fell asleep again.270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡS7TsZolxMu
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I didn't know how the Stone worked. I stole it and I didn't disappear. It's true, I experienced some memory loss but apparently nothing that a potion couldn't fix.
It was great knowing everything again, especially who my friends were. They didn't take it very well that I had forgotten them though. They could only tease me about it, however, 'cause it wasn't my fault. Jimmy one of these days said something like: "I can't believe that you had forgotten all about us while we were there, taking turns holding your hand!"
I talked to Chaim about it and it sounds like this was the reason I could see a piece of my friends' lives. It was the same power that I had been calling mind reading before. I wasn't really sure of how it worked, but it seemed to be getting stronger because it never happened to me to be able to do it without focusing and simply by holding someone else's hand.
The strange visions I'd had of my friends left me feeling awkward around them for the next few days. I kept catching glimpse of their past in my memory just by looking at their faces. Should they know that I know? I decided not to tell them. I feel like sharing a part of your life with someone is an experience that people should be able to choose. I hope one day our friendship can progress to the point where we tell each other our secrets, but we're not there yet. After all, they don't know everything about me either.
My friends, Vits and Chaim prepared the potion for Joe without me. I was still healing in my bed, so I missed all the fun. On the day it was supposed to be ready, Chaim visited me in my room.
"The potion's almost ready, Oliver. Don't worry, we'll find another way to find the ingredient. Or perhaps, we can substitute it with another one entirely. That's going to be hard, but Saba is already working on it. She's been translating other books and it looks like there's hope".
Perhaps my memory hadn't come back properly yet, because I couldn't understand. What did he mean? I didn't know there was a missing ingredient.
"Wait, what do you mean?" I had to ask. At the risk of sounding stupid.
Chaim looked at me worriedly. Perhaps he was wondering if my memory came back intact as well.
"The Lion Stone, Oliver. You said the Blooms wouldn't give it to you, so I figured you couldn't retrieve it. Don't worry, I know there was no other way. And I know how hard it can be to ask things of our parents".
"They're not my parents" I replied more sourly than I intended to. I knew he couldn't mean it - he knew that I was an orphan and that my family name was Edens, but I wanted to make sure he remembered they weren't my real parents.
"Yes, of course" he replied softly.
I immediately felt bad. Even the Blooms were my parents, it would have meant nothing. Chaim's parents were nothing like him. I wanted to reassure him, but I couldn't without letting him know that I had read his diary.
"Remember what I said about the Stone" he added. "Don't beat yourself up".
I had completely forgotten about the Stone already. I had completely forgotten that it was the missing ingredient in Joe's potion.
I smiled cockily as I fished the Stone out of my pocket.
"Oh, but don't worry. I got it".270Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqXdqNjyHXB
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After the stone was bathed in the potion, in fact it was the only way to add it without losing it forever which would have been a bummer considering it was one of a kind, we had to decide how to convince Joe to drink the potion.
First of all, it's true - the book had said that the cursed object had to be bathed in the potion, but Joe wasn't an object and any way it was impossible to bathe him in anything: not only he wouldn't have wanted to, he was also too big.
I wanted to be the one who did it. I had created Joe and no matter how much trouble it caused, I still felt proud of him.
I had to be on a ladder to reach his face. Chaim had agreed to help me and now he was holding the ladder to prevent me from falling down.
Joe was sleeping, or so it seemed. I wasn't sure Golems slept. I had no trouble slipping the liquid inside his mouth.
I took a long, last look at his features. I had shaped them very badly and, like every time I looked at him, I didn't know if I felt worse about him or about my skills. I used to be pending towards the first option, but now that my teachers told me that he wasn't supposed to have real feelings, I chose the latter.
Then his eyes opened and he looked at me.
For a second, I had forgotten that my job wasn't done. In order to get rid of him, making him drink the potion wasn't enough - I had to erase the first letter of the word I had written on his forehead when I created him.
EMET.
I didn't know how hard it was going to be now that he was awake, but I still had to try.
"Joe, I'm going to have to turn you off" I said softly.
"Okay" he simply agreed.
He sounded sad. Then, just as I was about to reach over and delete the letter E, he added something.
"I'll miss you, Oliver".
I sighed and did what had to be done. He stayed still and fell asleep with a smile on his face.
I didn't care what my teachers taught about it and I wasn't going to claim that Golems had real feelings or how complex they were, but I just knew that I had talked to the real Joe in the last moments of his life.
I sobbed. I was going to miss him too.
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