I could not move. I could feel my body, acutely aware of the pine needles poking into my arms, of the cold air prickling against my exposed calf, of the sharp rock poking me in the back. I tried to move my head to look around, but I was frozen, forced to look at what I wished was starry sky. It was not starry. It was not even the sky. Instead, the silhouette of a face with widened white eyes stared at me.
I couldn’t see his – if it was in fact a he – features in detail, but I knew them by heart. I knew that dark purple veins ran away from his eyes. I knew that his lips were pale and lined with blood. I even knew that there was deep gash that ran from his neck to the end of his right shoulder that bleed unrelentingly dark, burgundy blood. I did not know who or what he was, only that he haunted me constantly. When I was a child, I was afraid of his horrific figure, floating inches above my face. I knew better than that now. I had seen his face in my nightmares far too often to be afraid of him anymore. The real fear came with the paralysis that accompanied this demon of a man.
Think, I told myself. Focus. I had to hone in my senses to be able to face the fear of being unable to move. The feeling of being trapped while being in the open clung to me like damp clothes.
And then, as if the voice of an angel spoke over me.
“Jade, I’m right here, just turn your head and look at me.”
It was a warm voice, welcoming and inviting like a summer’s sunset. An image of sun kissed brown curls and the ocean flickered through my memory. They were there, the images, but briefly. Too briefly for me to be able to grab onto.
The jaw of the bleeding man above me opened as if to speak, or cry out in dying pain. I waited for a noise of any kind to escape those pleading lips, but not a sound came. Instead, a wreath of horrible dark vines began to slowly crawl out of the dark hole that was once a gaping mouth. The vines were covered in thorns that dug into and clung to my skin as the vines squirmed over me, wet and moist.
Now, it was my mouth agape in a scream of pain. I still couldn’t move. The vines tightened around me, the thorns digging deeper into my flesh. The thick, clear, sticky liquid that covered them burned the surface of my skin as the slow moving plants moved up my neck and toward my open mouth.
I wanted to scream, “NO! GET OFF ME! LEAVE!” But the only sound I seemed capable of making was the pain induced scream that echoed through the empty forest.
Where was that voice? That comforting voice I had heard moments before.
“Jade, to your right. Look at me.”
And there it was, as if on cue. Speaking to me in the whispered tongue of an angel.
I just need to move my head…
Please just let me move my head…
I will move my head…
And suddenly everything erupted into flames. They weren’t normal flames though. They were flames kissed by Death himself, tattooed with a black film that danced just as the flames did. They were hotter, darker, and much more dangerous.
The vines recoiled, becoming ash instantly and the bleeding man shook and feel to the ground as what was inside him died. The flames didn’t touch me, but their hot energy empowered me. I turned my head to glimpse a child. A child with brown curls, and eyes…eyes like…
My mind trailed off, feeling the power of the flames surge. I breathed in deep and the flames dropped a moment, letting me glimpse the boys finally tailored clothing. When I breathed out, the flames leapt up, reaching for the branches of the pines and acacia that stood much higher than my head, and the boy was consumed by them, disappearing.
But the voice remained.
“No, Darling, not like this.”
I sat up. Drenched in sweat as if I had actually been in that fire myself. I had to take several shaky breaths and check the four corners of my room, to make sure the bloody man had not accompanied me back to reality.
This dream had terrorized me since I was only four years old. At eighteen, I should have been used to it. I should have become accustom to the paralysis, to the stinging of the vine, to the hauntingly real feeling it left me with each time I woke up. But I wasn’t used to it. I could never get passed the child in rich clothing being wrapped in flames. Flames that were my making.
On shaky legs I stood, my white nightgown billowing to the floor and tickling my ankles. I ran my fingers through my dark hair, brushing it out of my face. Raising my arms above my head and stretched as I yawned. I had chores to tend to. Absinth, my horse, needed bathing and brushing. The laundry would need to be washed and hung out to dry. And of course I had my studies. Ma would hang me out with the laundry if I didn’t keep up with them.
I gulped, thinking of her. Today marked a year since she had vanished in the night. The first night of the harvest season, hours before my seventeenth birthday, she just disappeared. I had lived in our little cottage for a year without her, braving excavations into the Great Barrier Forrest to search for her as often as I could. Even now, I couldn’t shake the idea that she was still alive somewhere.
The Great Barrier is a dangerous place, filled with magic both dark and light, both equally dangerous. It’s the protective barrier of Edan built by the great mages of old, the Custodes. It’s thousands of miles wide and hundreds of miles deep. Any man, giant, or creature that has ever tried to cross it’s threshold without the company of a Custode has either vanished or turned up dead later. The forest encloses Edan, circling around the outermost districts of Villam and a bit of the fourth district, Artifex. My little cottage, though, just so happens to be placed very near the Great Barrier. In fact, there’s a path that leads from my front door straight into the forest.
Living so near to the Great Barrier Forest has it’s dangers, but I had never been afraid. No one from the other side had ever been able to pass through. Occasionally an enchanted bear with antlers would stumble into my front yard, or a griffin would circle far above my cottage in the sky, but nothing had ever threatened Ma and I’s existence, other than Ma herself.
Ma had been a little mad. Not so mad that she couldn’t care for me or our homestead, but mad enough to whisper to unseen things in the corner of the room, or talk to daisies like they’re people, or wander off into the forest in search of a cursed crown.
It’s for this reason that I believed her to be alive. She wandered relentlessly. When I woke up on my birthday, I believed she had simply wandered into the forest for a stroll. But she never returned. For all I know she could still be out there, wandering.
I dress. A simple blue cotton gown, and my navy cloak. Both of these Ma and I had made together. We were seamstresses by trade. It was the only thing keeping me afloat now. I traded clothing and patchwork for candles and bread. I sold a few items of clothing in the market on the fifth and sixth day of the week. I made just enough to keep ingredients in the pantry.
When I wasn’t tending to my chores, or selling at the market, I was in Great Barrier, looking for my Ma. I laced my boot and walked down the hall to the bathing room. There was no one to get ready for, but still I washed my face with some water from the rusting tin, and brushed my unruly dark hair up into a bun. I paused for a moment and looked at myself. The only time I really saw my father was when I saw him in myself. My round face resembled his. My thick lips and small nose were his also. My blue eyes were shaped and colored just as his were. The only thing of Ma that I inherited were her curls.
I shuffled into the kitchen and cut myself a piece of bread. Shoving it into my mouth in a rather unladylike way, skipped over to the door and grabbed my gloves on the way out. Slipping my fingers into them, I started toward the stables.
My black mare, Absinth waited for me there, whining as she watched me approach. I knew she must be lonely, as I had to sell our other mare to pay for fabrics. Her nose puffed little pillars of steam into the cold morning air as I patter her neck.
“Hey there, little lady. Have a good night?”
Absinth stomped her hoof into the semi-frozen ground.
“Hungry are we?” I said with a slight smile. I dig into her feed bag and grab the metal scoop Ma had had specially forged. Traded a nice winter coat for it, she had. Why she did this simply for a feed scoop I was never made to understand.
“Subvolo,” I said as I pulled my hand out of the bag. The feed scoop instantly began to float in the air. Motioning with my fingers I guided the scoop over to Absinth’s trough and dumped it.
Absinth neighed her appreciation as I guided the scoop back to the bag.
Curly hair wasn’t the only thing I had inherited from my mother. I supposed I had also inherited her magic.
Growing up however, she had never let me use it. She forced me to study it, telling me it would be pertinent for me to know magic in the future. I always tried to get away with using little spells here and there, I had once even brewed a growing potion in my room for months, secretly keeping it hidden under my bed. I was determined to be five foot three inches by the time I was eleven. Ma, of course, found it and confiscated it immediately.
Without Ma around however, I began using little enchantments to help me out around the house. I bewitched a broom to help me sweep, I found a spell in an old book that, when used at sunset, allowed the tomatoes in the garden to harvest themselves. I hadn’t done any major magic, but that’s not to say it didn’t interest me.
As I walked over to the well, I thought of the Libro Cantus. It was the most powerful book of spells I owned. Ma never let me open it for my studies, though I had begged her on several occasions. In it I would certainly find some interesting forms of Enchantment. The magic of enchantment was convenient, but it was also rather easy for me. Most mages could only use one form of magic, and Enchantment was not the one I wanted to master. Something inside me had always levitated toward Elementation, the magic of the elements, specifically that of fire magic. But Ma had forbidden this. Even though it came so naturally to me that I could hardly control it at times, especially those when I felt overly emotional, I was proscribed from using such a form of magic.
“There’s a balance in magic, Jade,” Ma told me every time I asked if I could simply ignite the flame that seemed to sleep inside me, “and once ya tip the scales it’s near impossible to tip ‘em back.”
With Ma gone now, it was more tempting than ever to give into the magic that called to me. I had only managed to refrain from use by reminding myself how disappointed she would be were I to act on my instinct.
“Subvolo,” I said once I had filled the bucket in the well with water. It levitated and followed me back toward the stables.
ns 15.158.61.12da2
