Beginnings and Ends

It was seventeen years today she came in.

Her child is now at an age higher than she would ever reach. The child was the stars and the mother chained to the earth. I remember the event like a fairy tale told to me over and over at bedtime to scare children into sleep which worked in its own twisted way. Her short life reminds me of the Devil of the Woods. She was diseased by the evil female spirit that was a child forced onto her at such a young age without a chance of survival. No young girl could ever beat such a wicked and ancient being, but she tried. She screamed in the face of the looming monster and never backed down. I had taken her to a battleground where she would face down an army.

As I carted her there she told me of a young man promising her everything: salvation and a chance to save her family. He had left her a day after she let him into her bed. There was no money, no glory. She did it for her family, a family she could never return to because of the shame it brought. He had ruined her life with one night and a promise he would never follow through with. I held her hand as she screamed out that her name was Zora to me, as she wept for a twin brother who made it two days into the world before he lost to the same game she was now playing. She wanted her child to have a better life and for it to be a fresh start for both of them. I never once told her that there was no chance of surviving here or today. I could tell she knew, but she held on for her little girl long enough for her to take her mother's place in the world. As she slipped out of the world, her daughter came in the way she left it.

An unearthly scream ripped through the ward as the child mourned her mother's loss and was left alone, scared and vulnerable. Her scream shattered every light in the room, the windows cracked and collapsed in onto the ward and the staff screamed with pain, gripping their heads and falling to the ground. The apprentice next to me who had ran for the wheelchair was crying, curled up into a ball. "Make it stop," she sobbed out, "Please, just make it stop." But I didn't understand what was wrong with everyone; my team had all fallen to the ground at a mere child crying.

I scooped up the girl, cradling her in my arms. "There, there." I whispered, trying to sooth her. I stroked her face with the back of my finger, let her grab onto it to anchor herself. Her face softened as she took me in, her tiny fists waving up at my mousy hair that had shifted over my shoulder as I bent my head towards her. She began to giggle as I tilted my head back and forth and she grappled for it. The laughter soothed me down to the core and I felt at peace. I could not have told you at that time what that meant, but now it is obvious to me. She had a magic of destruction and healing within her sound.

"Aliki, where are you?" I called from the kitchen.

"Here, Mama. I just got in from the market, I thought I would check on the flowers before I came back in."

"Honestly, they're not going to sprout legs and walk off. You don't have to check up on them like they are your children."

Aliki shrugged the comment off, as if to say I did not understand. "I sold a few of your medicines whilst I was there. Celyn bought some more for his mother again, she doesn't seem to be improving at all." She looked concerned as she removed a box of plump, red strawberries out of her satchel. She had done it again, used her money to treat me even though she had earned it and was never meant for me. Before I could object, she interjected "Don't worry, I bought a new leather saddle for Zora. Her old one has been rubbing her back so it was needed and I felt bad spending so much on myself but not getting you a single thing."

"Speaking of Zora, have they gotten rid of that stallion that keeps running at her in our fields?"

"They got rid of him a while ago." She paused to look out of the window then suddenly jumped "I'm sorry, I completely forgot to tell you!" I smiled at my adopted daughter and wondered how I'd been gifted with such a unique young woman. Considering she only just decided to give me this information now, I decided to give her some of my own. "You know, that Hollis boy's mother is not ill. She may be in another world half the time, but she is certainly not ill." She gaped at me slightly. Shaking herself a bit, she strutted off towards the door, leaving me with an eye roll as the door shut her out.

With that, I continued chopping the peppers and mushrooms. I pushed the remaining ingredients into the copper pot on the stove. In a few hours' time, we would have a broth at the dining table together. Looking out onto the meadows and fields which sprawled out and away from our cottage at the edge of Eden Plains town.

If I looked out, I would see a young mare and girl galloping across the fields, their white manes riding the wind they created, fanning around them. If you did not know Aliki, you would think that she was the damsel who needed the knight in shining armour atop the white stallion to come save her. She did not. She was the knight with the white mare who had come to save us.

As she moved through the fields, I moved into my rooms where my desk and clock sat waiting for me. I had added family trees to my collection of posters and models. Family trees as complicated as the meaning of life, you could spend your life studying these and never understand them. I was not studying the families themselves though, more so the movement of magic from the very roots to the leaves at the ends of branches.

My main reasons for them was to see if the magic had leaked out into peasant families or to those looked down upon by the descendants of the Blood Borns who were the birth of magic. A loose end of sorts had appeared in the Dusk bloodlines. From Iris Dusk, one of Blood Borns to King Atticus I, there had been no interruptions with a fairly simple tree in terms of royalty. That was until you come to Atticus II, the previous king of The Dusk Lands and brother to now Queen Regent Leocandra standing as ruler until the princess becomes of age. The problem I had with this wasn't the passing on of the crown, that part was actually quite respectful to the subject of the court, but the circumstances of the past king's death. He was a king with a reputation involving many women and half the world's alcohol supplies. The chances of him having no children are zero to none. There was also the problem of the fact that no one seemed to investigate his death properly, it was shrouded in mystery and covered up by his sister with the help of her husband, Eli. If there was any place to start, it would be by looking into Atticus to see whether he is one of the latest in a long line of magic being passed onto the common folk of the lands.

My motives also contained reasons slightly less selfless than before I had met Zora; I now had Aliki.

She was a strange girl that I had grown fond of as if she were my own daughter. In the years of living with and caring for her, I had still not come to understand what had happened in that ward when she was born. Yes, I knew it was some form of magic, what seemed to be a new arcane art, yet I could not grasp exactly what it was she possessed. Since then, she rarely showed signs of it.

There were the small things that raised suspicion with me, such as when she walked past the town 'choir' (which was barely a group of singers, never mind a choir) and their tone deafness seemed to hide away until Aliki had walked just out of earshot of them. There was also a few times when she would cry as a young child, frightened by nightmares of death and scaled creatures with talons that prowled in the night, where her lamp next to the bed would slowly crack through the night and I would find oil leaking down her bedside table.

The only way to calm her in the night was to sing lullabies. I sang of Casimir Eden, of the music and culture he brought to his people in the beginning to sooth them and bring joy to the land of Eden. And so she would sing along with me. What she never saw was that the cracks along the lamp would leak tears and seal the scars along its body until the oil was once again sealed.

I started to realise over the years that she was almost a stranger to me. Although her living past has always been a part of my life, her heritage is unknown to me. I never truly knew who Zora was. I did not even have a surname for her. For all I know, Zora could have been the source of these strange powers that Aliki had hidden inside of her.

But I would never know, and that is not the point. The point is helping her. The point is unraveling the tangled mess that the gods were throwing at us. Starting with tomorrow, I would be tugging on the end of the chord of this mess in the marketplace as they are full of gossip and it is easy to pick up on rumours there. Anyway, it couldn't hurt to show my face in town for once.