No More Than Pen and Ink

The Author/Text/Reader Relationship

By Marlin on Tuesday, August 24, 2010

In the first semester of my freshman year I was enrolled in ENG 112 “Critical Approaches to Literature” a class which was designed to be the foundation of the literature major at Geneva College (and was also required of writing majors). In the class we explored different schools of criticism (and had to write papers attempting to use some of them). We started with a whirlwind historical survey that covered the great thinkers on literature and then we launched into the real study of the theories of Literary Criticism we would have to imitate: New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction and the various forms of “Special Interest Criticism” (Marxist, Feminist, Cultural and Gender Studies). This class was my first C partially because of an ideological struggle that I had with the theories and my timidity at going beyond mere description of what the texts plainly said (after all, I was a freshman and these were great writers like Nathanial Hawthorne and Walt Whitman). I got over the timidity after this class, realizing that I would have to make assertions (no matter how ridiculous or obvious to me) and ‘back them up’ with textual support (however tenuous) to get good grades (and none of my professors ever called me on BS).

For those of you who don’t know what these theories of criticsim are I will give you a brief summary (albeit filtered through my own perceptions). New Criticism seeks to explore the form divorced from context and the author, looking at nothing other than the work in question and the techniques it employs, seeking to divine truth from the form of the work. Structuralism is an application (I struggled really hard not to add ‘mis-‘ to the beginning of ‘application there, but managed not to. And then negated that success by writing this parenthetical, ah well) of Sassure’s linguistic theory that words are merely signs of what is signified and treats the text as an encoded artifact to which the reader applies binary oppositions that create the meaning for the reader (such as Good/Evil, Light/Dark, Man/Woman) again, it is focused on the form (though in this case of meaning) and what the reader gets out of the text. Deconstruction takes structuralism and tries to show that the opposite of any binary pairing is equally valid (so Truth=Lies, Hate=Love and Evil=Good). And the Special Interest Criticisms try to show how various groups are repressed through the work. None of these systems of understanding literature (or any form of art) care about the author and all try to impose their own ideas onto the text.

In my notes I have sketches of the author-text-reader triangle for each of these forms (the triangle is just a way of visualizing how these views relate the different elements, drawn as a triangle with the privileged party at the top) they all have the reader or the text at the top. For New Criticism the triangle has the Text at the top and in my notes I have written in big ostentations script the words “The Text Knows More Than Its Creator” and across the page in distinction I have the triangle as I used to see it with the Author on the top and the words “The Author Owns Your Mind” and in smaller print “and the text”. At the time I was struggling to understand the relationship between the artist and the reader and the art. As a creator and someone who has always had great respect for the creator of works (and as a Christian who believes in an absolute creator) I found it difficult accept that the author had no role other than as a vehicle of blind production of platforms for the exposition of other people’s ideas. The author could not be ignored. At the time I may have over-reacted and gone too far in de-emphasizing the role the reader plays in the creative act.

Since that class, which opened my mind to the world of literary criticism and the intellectual reader-games that the elite play with texts, I have come to what I think is a somewhat more mature understanding of how art works. The author creates the text, which is infused with the way that he thinks and views the world, the text then takes that view to the reader who then interprets the text in light of his own view of the world. This is inherent in the way our minds work. And it is a beautiful, interactive (almost collaborative) process that mirrors the absolute work of art that is God’s creation: God created and we are right now engaging with and interpreting his work in a cycle of incomplete understanding until the day all truth will be revealed. I think that it is the duty of the intelligent truth-seeker to use the text to get at the truth of what the author was trying to say. But I also think that it is the duty of the reader to seek out the truth in any text even when the author was aiming at lies, and that there will, by the grace of God, be truth hidden in any creative work beyond what the author intended. So nowadays I draw the triangle as a straight line with the text between the author and the reader (with God at the top), or I flip it so that the text is on the bottom and both the author and the reader are on top–and then I remove the line between author and reader.

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My Relation to Media

By Marlin on Thursday, August 19, 2010

This post came about in part because of this this post by Rosemary.

I was thinking about my life and how I spend my time. At the moment I am unemployed and searching for a job while I write. I have a lot of free time. Which I should spend doing more writing–one of the reasons I started posting here is that I am trying to make reasons to spend more time writing. The free time that I have is taken up almost exclusively by various different story media. I read a lot of books, I watch a lot of TV and movies, I play video games, and I read comics (both web-comics and graphic novels). Looking at that list one would generally think that these are all ways to pass the time and entertain myself. But they have another thing in common as well. They are all ways that story can be experienced. They each have different limitations and strengths, and each have stories that can be best told through them, but many of them come under attack for being less worthy or not artistic (as opposed to older forms such as novels). I can see an argument for not liking some of the media based on preference, but dismissing an entire medium as not worthy or inherently not artistic is a very arrogant thing to do. I would know, I used to do it all the time.

I started out as a book kid, always reading, devouring anything that I could get my hands on, stories of all kinds. I read the standard books intended for my age, plus classics, fantasy, mystery and science fiction intended for adults, and even books intended for girls (including but not limited to selections from the American Girl series.) I didn’t think about why I took to these stories so quickly, or what inspired me to devour such a broad selection. But looking back on it I know that I did it to experience the wonder and joys of things outside myself, it was part escapism, part exploration, and part education. I wanted to learn, to experience, to discover new places and ideas. Books provided a great way to do that. And story is a natural framework for that exploration. From this initial immersion in books I gained a love of all things bookish, of stories in general, and a desire to be able to produce that same kind of experience for others.

As I was growing up with books my mom would often watch Mystery TV shows based on books, and BBC productions of Jane Austen novels and such. Also I was of an age that I experienced the adaptation of the Lord of the Rings novels (which were quite foundational to my youth) into movies. I was initially quite distrusting of this media: it was interesting to experience your favorite stories as moving pictures with all the details of image and setting fleshed out, but it was often unsatisfying. The pictures weren’t MY pictures and the adaptations always left out stuff that was important. It seemed to me that these were just not as good as books. As I matured and experienced more stories that were originally created for that medium I realized that it wasn’t that the medium was inferior, but that the medium required more attention to pacing and generally a shorter, more immediate plot. But it was very strong as a story communication tool because it was detailed, visual and created a more comprehensive sensory experience. You could react emotionally not just to the situation and how you imagined it, but also to the emotions the actors were displaying, the visual setting and the music. I came to accept the Lord of the Rings movies as adaptation and realized that it was very good for what it was (which was not the books.) And when I got to college and my free time and attention span were curtailed I dove headlong into the world of cinema and television series (often neglecting my old print world) and while I desired a level of quality that Hollywood does not often meet, I enjoyed a different perspective on story and again experienced many new ideas, characters and places.

At this point I think it would be worthwhile to mention my experience with cartoons. In my last year of high school I had friends online who talked a lot about different anime (Japanese animated TV serieses) initially I just thought the art style looked stupid and it was odd and foreign and therefor couldn’t be very good. After all I was seeing bits and pieces of the Pokemon and Naruto, which looked very juvenile and were generally poorly voice acted and translated. However the debate got so heated between some of my friends online that I decided it would be best if I experienced what this branch of media had to offer. I got some suggestions from my friends who were into that kind of stuff and I went out and watched Ghost in the Shell (which was excellent and deep), Bleach (which was pretty good at first but fell into poor execution particularly in filler story-lines), Fullmetal Alchemist (which was brilliant), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (which is either really deep and artistic or just very confused). They were very different from anything I had experienced before. But there was good story in there, there were things worth watching. And the foreign viewpoint was very refreshing. I was shocked to discover that there was art here. Even cheaply (when compared to Disney studios, us Americans are spoiled when it comes to animation) animated cartoons in different languages could tell worthwhile stories. If that was the case then anything could be worthwhile. I have had far less edifying experience with American cartoons, Disney animated movies tend to be almost worthwhile and Avatar: The Last Airbender was very surprisingly excellent. But given the state of American television animation it is no surprise that all television animation is seen as not worthwhile as art.

At college I also had the pleasure of experiencing and participating in theater (on a college level, but still not bad). As a bookish person I always had a high respect for plays, I had read Shakespeare and others. They were older and therefore definitely a respectable medium. But I didn’t fully understand what went in to it as a medium until I practiced my lines and character and then got up on stage and felt the audience reacting. Theater is beautiful because the experience isn’t the same twice and the audience contributes to the performance. The limitations are quite obvious, staging and effects somewhat limit what can and cannot be done and there can be difficulty in getting enough people together as both actors and audience to make it worthwhile. But the strengths are also very pronounced: it is an active and current moment of story living and breathing before you, which can create an astoundingly powerful experience if handled correctly.

I had always been dismissive of comic books and graphic novels when I was a kid and through high-school. What I saw of them were very juvenile and didn’t try to be anything other than mindless entertainment. To say nothing of the stupid costumes every comic-book hero seemed required to wear. Based on those interactions I rejected the graphic novel medium as nothing more than comic books dressed up for adults, made to look more mature. Picture books were for kids who didn’t have the mental capacity and attention span to read real stories. I read webcomics, but I never thought of them as particularly artistic (even if Megatokyo is a fascinating exploration of the relationship between reality and imagination and Girl Genius is just a very good story) mostly they were just a way to pass the time and get to a quick punchline. Then I saw a movie trailer for the Watchmen movie and thought it looked interesting. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that the graphic novel it was based on it had apparently won and award for best novel. . . and it was in comic form. So I picked up a copy and read it. And was blown away. This was a real novel, I could not deny the form. It WAS a novel. It just happened to be graphic. It was mature, artistic and deeply evocative of human condition and a particular era. After that I dove into Niel Gaiman’s Sandman Graphic novels which are just as good if not better than Watchmen.

I will admit that video games for me started as a fun way to pass the time. To play at being a cyborg space marine, to solve puzzles, and lead Briton armies against those dastardly Franks. I passed Age of Empires (an RTS) off as expanding my historical knowledge (which it really did), Myst as expanding my critical thinking and puzzle solving skills (which it did) and Halo as just being about the challenge of surviving (balancing ammunition and shields while using available cover to remove threats which would deplete my health) but I really was just playing them for fun. But as I experienced a wider range of video games: Bioshock, Portal, Mass Effect. I began to realize that even video games were a viable medium for story (and art) in an interactive way. Some of these games crossed the boundary between waste of time and worth-while story. Largely this isn’t the case, and many game developers aren’t reaching for the heights that they could. But there is definitely potential there, I just hope more people take advantage of it.

Anyway, this has turning into a quite long post, and each of the sections could easily be expanded at a later time into whole posts if not essays of their own. Basically, I would urge everyone to not reject something because of the way it looks. Explore it and see if there is actually any value in it before you reject it. Story is a very flexible thing, it can show up in many forms.

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Reflections on Narrative Voice (Or Making the Best of What You’ve Got)

By Marlin on Wednesday, August 18, 2010

During my senior year of college (first semester, so about a year ago) I took a class on Narrative Voice and Character, it was an interesting class to say the least–made somewhat more so because the professor had never taught a creative writing class before and was still caught up in Bahktinian dialogics as the only framework for writing novels. The class itself focused much on how to write a novel, since those are the largest pieces of narrative and tend to have a lot of character. For this class we used a little out-of-print book titled “Thirteen Types of Narrative” (and somewhat dubiously subtitled “A practical guide on how to tell a story”) This book starts with an outline of a “situation to be made the basis of a series of exercises in narrative method, each demonstrating a different technique.” Okay, I can understand that particular way to teach narrative technique, show people how to tell the same story different ways. What really ended up bothering me about this book was the amount of information we were given in the “situation” I didn’t have enough information to make the characters based on the outline alone (without making stuff up) and I was given too much information to make them MY characters. We were told that the scene revolves around an American soldier named Peter Ellison (all of which is completely irrelevant to the scene–other than the American part) and that he is in England (stationed on duty) and has gone up a cathedral tower to take some pictures (for his uncle who used to live in the village and gave Peter the camera) we are given a detailed synopsis of the weather before we get to the important fact that he encounters a fat man (who thankfully does not have a name) who is distressed and intends to commit suicide. We are told quite frequently throughout the outline what Peter is thinking and feeling and (as you probably could have guessed) in the end Peter drops his camera over the edge of the cathedral tower with an attached note and tries to stall the fat guy until help arrives. The outline ends with help arriving.

The book then continues in 14 chapters (one for each ‘type’ of narrative and one conclusion) in which is gives a description of each type along with examples from literature and the authors own envisioning of the initial situation. For class we were tasked with writing journal entries which included writing segments or whole portions of the outline in draft form in various narrative forms from different perspectives.

The Thirteen Types of Narrative according to the book are, 1. Third Person Past 2. Third Person Present 3. First Person Past (As If Spoken) 4. First Person Past (As If Written) 5. First Person Past (Spoken) In Third or First Person Framework 6. All Dialogue 7. In the Form of a Play 8. Catechetical 9. Epistolary 10. In the Form of a Diary (how this is different then First Person Past (As If Written) I’m not sure. 11. Documentary 12. Stream of Consciousness and 13. Series of First Person Narratives in Third Person Framework.

While I still think it is generally rather silly to try and focus in on a single element like Narrative Voice, and I had a strong problem with the way that the outline was set up the class was rather useful to me. First, I originally went into the class thinking that a story could only have one narrative form that would work for it, but quickly realized that this was not strictly true. A story told in a different way is a different story. Choosing narrative framework and viewpoint are highly important to the overall shape and meaning of the story. So now I like to explore other possible viewpoints on stories that I am writing just to see what they could have to say. The other thing I learned is how to force myself to write within someone else’s framework. . . and how to make my own freedoms. In one entry I managed to have the fat man succeed in committing suicide (because the outline only ever said that help arrives, it does not necessitate, though much of the book assumes, that the help be effective. I also wrote Peter as a secretly arrogant jerk who is only seems to be the noble hero that the outline forced him to be. I learned how to have fun within constraints (which interestingly enough helped me later to write my resume.) I also was forced to write a whole lot of stuff in a relatively short period of time.

I still hated that stupid outlined situation. And that book.

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Thoughts On Christianity in Fiction

By Marlin on Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Yesterday I was reading Smoke and Mirrors a collection of “Short Fictions and Illusions” by Neil Gaiman and I came across a story titled “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” which is in Gaiman’s words from the prologue of the collection:

“a story about a boy a lot like I was once and his relationship with fiction.”

The story centers around the character, a twelve year old boy named Richard and his obsession with the Elric of Melnibone stories by Michael Moorcock, which I admittedly know next to nothing about, save that they were pulp Sword and Sorcery stories from the ’60s and ’70s. But this quote about the philosophy of writing, particularly as it referenced C. S. Lewis really caught my attention.

“Richard had, however, finally given up (with, it must be admitted, a little regret) his belief in Narnia. From the age of six–for half his life–he had believed devoutly in all things Narnian; until, last year, rereading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon. . .

This having occurred to him, Richard found correspondences everywhere, too many to be simple coincidence.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him (. . .) Richard was young, and innocent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.”

I remembered a quote I read in my last semester at Geneva College during my philosophy class about C.S. Lewis. In his essay “Christianity and Culture” Lewis attempts to come to a logical reason why it is acceptable if not necessary and good for a Christians such as himself to engage in creating culture (which in his context means writing stories and essays). He comes to an argument that states that he can, and even goes so far as to say that having some Christians among the ranks of those producing ‘culture’ (as he discusses the issue in the essay) is necessary and good. As part of his discussion he says that:

“In order to avoid misunderstanding, I must add that when I speak of ‘resisting the abuse of culture’ I do not mean that a Christian should take money for supplying one thing (culture) and use the opportunity thus gained to supply a quite different thing (homiletics and apologetics). That is stealing. The mere presence of Christians in the ranks of the culture-sellers will inevitably provide an antidote.”

I agree whole-heartedly with this statement. And it is one of the reasons that I generally frown on what I see as the tendency of fantasy authors who are Christians to both merely target a Christian audience and insist on following in Lewis’s steps by writing allegories of Christ’s death in fantasy. Mind you, since they are setting out to sell, as Lewis says “homiletics and apologetics” they are not necessarily “stealing”, but are they accomplishing as much as they could? I would say no. They certainly are not accomplishing what Lewis saw as good about Christian culture creators.

Lewis was not trying to defraud his readers or slip anything by them. But it could easily be claimed that that was his goal as Gaiman points out. Lewis’s use of strong allegorical elements in the Narnia books is an interesting balance. The Narnia books live on today in part because of these elements and the way that Christian readers have latched onto them, but at the same time they turn some people away. They are what they are because and in spite of the allegorical elements. When I started reading the Narnia books I felt in some ways that the allegorical elements were like a secret code, you could love the books if you weren’t a Christian, but if you were you felt a special connection to them because they were about more, and they were saying something to you that others might not get.

I am a Christian, I tell stories. My goal is not to hide my Christianity, nor is it to preach it through my stories. But I think that Christian art should be so much more than allegory (which the Narnia books were but everyone seems to forget because of the allegorical elements). A story written by a Christian cannot help but be Christian as it is reflecting a Christian perspective on the world and therefore allegory is not a necessary (and even possibly in this day and age a not particularly helpful tool). God created so much more of creation than just the culminating moment of catholic redemption that is Jesus’s death on the cross, he created all of creation and the whole scope of history, writing about any aspect of that can be glorifying to God. Christian art is about where the attribution lies, not the subject matter.

That said. There will always be something beneath the surface of a story. It is in the nature of fiction.

Anyway. This post is probably somewhat disjointed and I feel like it might be trying to say two different things at the same time. Which means that it is about on par with some of my hastily written papers for college. But I just wanted to get some of my thoughts out on paper. I do not claim to have proved anything or accomplished anything really useful in this post. Other than to quote some cool people.

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Thoughts on Characterization

By Marlin on Tuesday, August 17, 2010

I know that this is the first time that I have used this site for anything other than posting portions of stories. But I originally intended it to be a much more comprehensive collection of my thoughts and ideas when I started it. I had a thought about how I tend to write characters and started to squeeze it into a facebook status, but it was not to be contained in such an abbreviated format. So here are my current thoughts on character, with some behind the scenes information about Without a Name (which hopefully you can expect more of soon).

Character has always been something of a struggle for me, whether I am trying to tell a story or play a role-playing game. One of the problems is inherent in the way that I write (or play) much of the time. I don’t do a lot of preparation and tend to just jump in where I see the action happening and explore what happens as it ‘happens’ on page (or in game). Which tends to work out pretty well for me as I think faster than I write and can usually keep ahead of myself and that helps to maintain my energy level and interest in what I am writing and I am constantly surprising myself with little gems of information. But it means that I don’t always (read almost never) come up with backstory for my characters unless the character actively ends up exploring their own past. This means my characters are often without a proper framework through which to explore the world save for my own experiences and gut instincts as to how ‘they’ would act.

I often find that it is difficult to flesh out my characters history when I try and so I tend to focus on the character at the moment, attitudes and opinions divorced from past experience. (How important can the details of an unremarkable past really be–I say tongue-in-cheek.) However, as a result my characters are all filtered through my own experiences without a lens of their own to help me focus them, this often leads to my characters feeling very similar even if they have different roles and attitudes. (Mind you, usually they won’t all act the same though they did in one of the stories I wrote, Wingless, because all the characters were, before the story began, essentially boring teenagers in a generally normal world that I didn’t care about and still don’t really know how to deal with.) On top of that my characters all apparently tend to sound like me. (Or so I have been told, I have trouble seeing this particular problem because I’m perfectly comfortable with my idiosyncrasies of vocabulary and word choice and so they don’t register as out of the ordinary to me.)

I have recently been working on Wingless but the lack of characterization kept showing up in problems with the dialog and with the very structure of the plot. So I have set that aside until I can figure out what to do about it. But it got me thinking about my other stories and I evaluated Without a Name with that in mind. And I think I avoided much of problem that has made Wingless so difficult for me.

For Without a Name I came up with a situation for the main character before I came up with anything else. Which is somewhat unusual, but I think that it was very useful to me as I have been writing it. I had this image of a young girl covered in dirt and sitting under a table in a nicely furnished house where everyone pretended she wasn’t there. I knew that this girl was somehow very powerful, so I jotted down a quick scene where a man was tasked with finding this important girl named Underfoot, this later became the prologue. And when I was searching for something to write about in the last two weeks of NaNoWriMo 2008 I found that scene and remembered the image and it exploded into this story. Underfoot channels and amplifies all of my insecurity and reliance on other people, but she has her own reasons and experiences for me to draw on and I hope that makes her at least somewhat relateable as a character.

The other problem that I have with character voice through dialog are compounded by the fact that the majority of the draft that has been posted here so far was written in the course of one week. But this problem is much easier to overcome than actual lack of character and I hope to solve that in later drafts by taking more care with my word choice in dialog and developing more voices.

I hope that this piece has at least been interesting. I must say that I had forgotten how much I rely on parentheticals when I am writing without turning on my ‘formal’ academic style. (Mind you I have lots of parentheticals even then, they are just usually switched to comma parenthesis rather than full parenthesis.)

Stories

Fragile Flowers

By Marlin on Thursday, May 28, 2009

The soft ruby-red petals tumbled slowly, end-over-end, through the smog-filled air toward the grimy cobblestones of the back alley. The petals seemed to hang suspended in the air—perhaps by a slight current, or by some trick of the dim light that contrasted bright red against the dull grays and browns of the surrounding city. But this balance was quickly disturbed as the petals were caught in the wake of a slump-shouldered man in a dull grey work-coat who passed by, and the petals were thrown spinning to the ground. The splash of red was quickly swallowed by the wet brown mire that covered the street. Only two lonely petals remained clinging to the slender thorny stem in the hands of the young woman who had been holding the single flower out to the countless somber gray-clad citizens that passed, with downcast faces, by her perch near the entrance of a small alleyway.

They did not reject her. They did not treat her with pity. They did not even treat her with contempt. They merely passed by her as if she were not there. Adam was not able to understand them: in this dirty, drab, and gray world, in the midst of this bustling city where the sky was swallowed by smog and soot and the ground was swallowed in filthy mud mixed with ashes, there was a spot of color, a spot of illumination, that promised something better then the dismal surroundings and they were unable to recognize it. They brushed it aside as if it were nothing. As if it did not exist. But it did. He had caught sight of the color before the roses fell, and had paused, amazed, on the other side of the street.

A large wagon filled with rolls of black sheet-iron rolled between Adam and the girl, spitting forth a trail of fumes and coal dust as it passed. When it had passed Adam caught sight of the girl once more. A large man in an official-looking coat had accosted her, grabbed her by the elbow, and was shaking her harshly. It was hard to make out over the grumbling of the city, but Adam could hear the man’s voice raised in anger. He rushed forward, dodging around a soot-covered trolley and ducking under the heads of an emaciated pair of work-horses that looked well past their days of hard labor. He didn’t know what drove him to be so reckless–though even this unusually spirited display of energy didn’t arouse much of a reaction in the crowd. A few heads turned, but they looked away again when they saw the high-collared jacket of the man threatening the girl.

“. . . permit to sell.” The officer shook the girl even harder. Adam could not help but fear for the roses that hung in a basket from her other arm. The basket was swinging wildly from the forceful shaking, the roses were trembling on the edge of destruction.

“I wasn’t selling them, sir,” the girl said, her gentle voice surprisingly calm. “I was giving them away.”

This simple statement froze Adam where he was, standing on the curb not three feet away from the two. She was giving such beauty away?

“You aren’t allowed to distribute plant-life on the street-corner.” The officer continued, pushing quickly through the words as if he was steamrolling objections that she was not making. Indeed, the girl seemed unperturbed by the shaking and shouting. “I’m going to have to take you in.”

She caught the stem of another rose between two of her slender fingers as he finished talking and she held it out to the officer. “Please take this. It would make me happy to see more color in this city.”

The backhand blow came suddenly, knocking the girl to the ground, but she clung tenaciously to the basket of precious roses. This time she did react. Her eyes were full of tears as she looked up at the officer. “God, please smile upon this miserable man. His heart is torn and he cannot see the beauty before him.”

The officer raised his hand to strike at the girl again. But Adam stepped between them, raising a hand towards the officer.

The officer was almost as surprised with this as Adam was himself. “What are you doing?” the officer asked, his voice threateningly low.

“Don’t hurt her.” Adam begged, earnestly. He didn’t know why it was so important to him.

The officer merely glared at Adam and struck him in the stomach with the club he carried tied around his wrist. “You’re on the wrong side of the law, mate.”

As Adam doubled over, gasping, he saw the basket of roses spin past his field of vision, spreading beautiful flowers over the roadway.

It should have been beautiful despite the sadness of such a loss. But the roses were almost instantly trampled into the mud by passing vehicles. The beauty they had brought was momentary, destroyed in a moment. How could the world be so cruel? He felt a steel-toed boot smash into his ribs, the club strike across his back, a heel grinding against the back of his hand. And then it was over, the officer grew bored, or decided that it was enough. The pain lingered, along with the despair at the casual destruction of such beauty.

“Where did they come from?” Adam asked as he knelt in the mud at the side of the road and cupped a crushed, mud-drenched rose in his hands. He didn’t pay any heed to the spray of mud thrown by the passing traffic even as it splattered over his clothing. “How could he throw them away like that?”

The girl crouched next to him, straightening her almost too-clean apron as she touched his arm. “I doesn’t matter.” The pressure on his elbow seemed to indicate that he should stand.

He stood slowly, accidentally smearing mud across the petals of the rose. The beautiful red color would never be the same, the stem was smashed, the perfect bud rumpled. He turned to face the girl. Her eyes seemed to glow with warmth and happiness. How could someone be happy after that? He almost wanted to shout at her, to berate her for not being upset about the loss of such beauty. But perhaps she was better off in her made-up world. He coughed, wincing at the pain in his chest.

She looked so certain of herself. Maybe she had other reasons.

Her face turned towards the opening of the alley, her head raised in reverence. The narrow passageway passed between two soot-covered half-abandoned apartment buildings, neither of which had a single window that was not soot-covered, boarded over, or smashed-out. It was a familiar sight to anyone who lived in the city. But the usual stacks of garbage and debris were conspicuously missing. At the end of the alleyway a small triangular-roofed chapel with bright stained-glass windows was jammed between the two buildings, a couple tall, straight trees rose behind it, casting a dark green shadow over the building. But the most striking part of this alien image was the thriving rosebush that grew beneath the stained-glass windows.

Adam stepped towards the chapel. As soon as he passed between the buildings it was almost as if the outside world had been cut off. The sounds of the street and the far-away machinery died to a muffled grumble. The air seemed cleaner here. A shaft of light that had somehow made its way through the soot and smog of the city caught the glass of the windows and struck the thriving rosebush with its glorious light. Adam bent over the bush, almost unable to summon the courage to touch it. But curiosity got the better of him and he brushed his fingers against the flower heads.

“How can this place exist?” He said, half to himself, his voice low with reverance.

He had seen a vision. How could he continue to live his life the same as before? How could he go back to his workshop and continue making mundane mechanical parts? He had taken a rose with him and it captured his attention in every spare moment. Adam was seized with an outlandish idea. He was consumed with a feverish energy. He took his tools home with him and worked long days and nights in his small attic room. Heating glass, blowing it out. He was lucky enough to have no immediate neighbors to disrupt his work.

But he did not spend all his time working. He took regular breaks to visit the back-alley chapel. He would spend his time examining the roses and the stained-glass windows and talking with the girl, Mary. She truly was amazing. Intelligent, perceptive, beautiful, even wise. Able to converse with him easily and always leading him to the answers that he needed, even if she never outright told him. He told her all about the frustrations of his life. They talked about humanity and the city until he finally found himself coming to some sort of understanding about what life really meant.

His work became that much more important to him. He would use it to bring the changes they talked about. The city would not be able to ignore him. They would learn to live a real life instead of this half-existence of suffering and pain.

She never told him, though he continued to ask, where the chapel had come from. Or where she had been before she came to the chapel. It struck Adam as odd that no-one other than the two of them ever came to the chapel or showed it any interest. He guessed that the people of the city had stopped looking for beauty and so did not see it.

He never told Mary what he was doing. He wanted to keep it a secret from her. But perhaps some part of him thought she might stop him if she knew. If she knew what he was going to do.

He finished his project. After staring at his completed creation for a while he rushed to the chapel to bring Mary and show her what he had made. In his hurry he completely forgot to grab his coat and left the door unlocked behind him.

The streets were cold, but he could barely feel it in the rush of excitement that washed over him. He bumped into a slouched old woman in his hurry, provoking a cold stare, but even this did not reach him, he merely tipped his hat and continued on. He rushed around the corner and down the alley, pushing the chapel doors open hastily. Mary was kneeling at the front of the church. Her head bowed over the alter and her hands clasped before her. Adam stopped in the doorway, panting slightly. He folded his hands and waited, bowing his own head as he did so. He knew that Mary would rise soon, knowing he was here. Mary rose and turned towards him. Her face lit up at the expression on his face.

“You look so happy, Adam.” She said, running down the aisle towards him. “What is it?” She touched his shoulder.

“I have finished my work.” His face shone with a fevered light as he clasped her hands in his. And then his exuberance welled up again. “Come, come see it!”

She smiled warmly at him and fetched a warm red cloak to ward against the chill of the streets.

They returned more slowly than Adam had come, Mary asked a few questions about what he had been working on, but all he would answer was that it was pretty and that he had started making it when he first met her. As they climbed the steps to Adam’s apartment his heart raced with anticipation. Mary was almost as impatient as he was to see what he had wrought. Her face glowed with excitement and her movements were all touched with quickness.

Adam paused at the door, reaching for his coat-pocket for the key. Forgetting that he had left the coat behind and forgotten to lock the door. He chuckled a little at his mistake, but then paused again with his hand on the door-knob, glancing back at Mary to see her expression.

He turned the knob and the door swung open with a little push. Mary’s face lit up with amazement, her eyes widening and a smile sweeping her face. Adam basked in the glow from her presence for a moment before he led her into the center of the room.

The once drab room had been transformed into a colorful and sparkling garden of flowers. Emerald green translucent vines climbed over the walls and stretched across the ceiling, flower-stems of sparkling green glass grew from the edges of the room at different heights. There was no furniture and only enough open space enough in the center for Adam’s bedding, his tools, a warm-burning oil lamp and the two of them. Throughout the rest of the room glass roses bloomed from every surface, brilliant red glass sculpted lovingly, they refracted the light and seemed to glow from within. They seemed almost to have a life of their own.

“Beautiful,” Mary whispered as she turned about, looking at the complex weaving of glass vines and roses across the ceiling.

“Indeed it is.” A sarcastic voice cut through the moment.

Adam and Mary turned again toward the door they had just entered. Framed in the doorway stood the same officer who had given Mary so much trouble those long months ago. “What are you doing here?” Adam asked, fear competing with anger in his voice. His hand reached for the nearest weapon, a hammer that lay on a box of tools nearby, but Mary’s hand stopped him, her fingers entwined in his, stopping him from defending himself. He looked her in the eye, pleading with her. But she only shook her head.

“So this is what you have been doing while you neglected your duties.” The officer said, tapping his stick against the palm of his hand. “Well, enough of that.” The stick swung quickly through the air and caught one of the glass roses in the bud, shattering it and sending shards of glass spinning, glittering, through the garden of roses.

Adam winced and tensed, willing to throw his life away to defend his creation. But Mary’s grasp held him back. Her other hand touched his shoulder. “It will be all right.” She whispered. “It isn’t worth it.”

All those months. All that work, gone in an instant. The stick swung again, this time severing six flowers in one swing. How could he? The officer moved into the room, his thick leather boots crunched glass beneath their soles as he trod on the glass flowers. The stick swung again. Adam fell to his knees and buried his head in his free hand, holding tighter to Mary’s hand. He felt her arm around his shoulder as she comforted him.

“Don’t give him reason to kill you.” She pleaded with him, softly. But he barely heard her, all he could focus on was the sound of glass breaking. Of his effort being destroyed, the beauty he had crafted in this desolate world was being smashed out of existence. What had taken him months to build was being destroyed in a moment. Glass shattered, and fell, it seemed to go on forever. The officer smashing the garden as the two of them huddled in the center of the room.

When it was over the officer left them in the middle of a pile of crushed glass. Adam reached down and scooped up a handful of the broken fragments, his leathery hands resisted their sharp edges. A single tear fell from his face and was cut by a sharp edge. “The only beautiful thing I ever made is gone.” He said, lifelessly.

Mary moved around in front of him and raised his head to meet her eye. Her face was streaming with tears, but her eyes glowed with an inner light. “Never say that.” She said plucking a intact rose-bud from the mess of glass around them and holding it out to him. “It lives on, in your mind, in my mind, in his mind: in the past. What is unmade can be remade, but what is made lasts forever.”

He choked on a sob and grabbed her in a tight hug.

Stories

The Lake

By Marlin on Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Part I

I will not pass judgment on my father. He appeared late one night at my mother’s door, cold, hungry and soaked through, as if he had walked out of the lake. It was not surprising that the villagers would not take him in and no surprise that my mother did. He did not stay long, only a few months. When he left, he promised my mother that he would come back before winter.

He never returned.

The circumstance of my birth, combined with my mother’s reputation for sorcery, convinced the villagers that I was the son of the demon and bearer of infernal powers.

In every other respect I seemed to be a normal child. I had no reason to suppose that the villagers’ hasty conclusions might be nearer the truth than I thought, until my tenth year. At first there was little to show that I was unusual, nothing more than a coincidental dream.

In the dream, I ran through the forest, playing keep-away with my dog, Rags. Rags had been my dog since I was seven. He was not a noble dog. He was a mutt and a particularly patchy one at that. But he was my mutt and he didn’t care what the villagers thought of me.

I managed to pry the stick from his mouth and we tumbled to the ground, laughing and barking exuberantly. Suddenly, we were silenced by the echoing howl of a wolf. Rags paused, ears perked and nose twitching. The wolf howled again. This time Rags answered, not in greeting but with a hunting cry as he tore off into the suddenly night-dark forest.

The wolf’s cry came again, calling Rags, calling me. As he ran through the night, the dog and I became tangled together until I could no longer tell what part of my thought was mine and what part was his. I saw the forest in different shades and I heard the wolf’s cry as if it were right next to me. I knew where the cry was coming from. I could smell the wolf; her terrible, musky, yet alluring scent. I saw the eyes, glowing in the darkness. The she-wolf greeted me as she stepped out of the forest and I woke.

I dismissed it at first as a chance nightmare but when it came again, I began to worry. There was only one thing that I could do. I told my mother. She did not think it was anything to worry about; she thought it nothing more then a childish dream. When I kept trying to convince her that something was going to happen to Rags she gave me a rope and told me to tie him up.

After a week it seemed that all trouble had passed, I began to doubt the truth of the dream. Why had I thought that it told the future?

Rags looked at me so reproachfully that morning that I relented and untied him. He immediately forgave me for tying him up and began wagging his tail and barking at me to follow him. He picked up a stick, ready to play. I took it and we fought for it until he broke away and ran towards the forest. I followed. We were deep in the forest before I realized that we were walking in the dream. The light fell just as it had before and Rags was moving towards me like he had in the dream. This was it. My laughter was strained this time, waiting for the next sound.

The cry of a wolf sounded, mournful in the distance.

Rags sat up, scenting the changing wind and listening to the last echoing notes of the howl. It sounded again, he answered with the same hunting call.

“No!” I shouted and I felt a release of power. Something in me reached out and held rags in place. I stood, trembling at the change I had worked. Rags looked at me reproachfully. A moment later, I heard the wolf again, this time much closer. Rags turned: the first thing I saw were the eyes. The she-wolf stepped out of the forest, grey and black mottled together in the filtered green light, golden eyes aglow.

I was trembling. I had changed the actions foretold by the dream.

The wolf looked at me for a moment and then turned to Rags, who gave a pleading whine as he strained against the bonds that held him. When the wolf moved, it was with frightening speed, towards me. I felt the magic that held Rags relax. He leapt in front of the wolf, prepared to die defending me. The wolf did not hesitate, she knocked him aside. Rags pulled himself back to his feet, despite obvious pain. He jumped again and caught the she-wolf by the back leg. Enraged, she whirled and tore out his throat with one quick motion. Rags fell without a sound and lay limp.

The wolf turned again towards me and leapt, muzzle still wet with Rags’ blood. I do not know exactly what happened next; I pulled away as the scene was swallowed by a blinding flash of light. I picked myself up from the ground, thinking that it must have been another dream. But there was Rags’ torn body and the unmarred corpse of a grey wolf.

Looking back I can see the choice, I can see where I went wrong; Rags was not slain in the dream.

One of the villagers found me where I had collapsed from the shock of using my magic for the first time. I do not know whether he acted out of fear or pity, but he carried me to my mother. Rumor of the incident spread quickly and the tale grew in the telling. The villagers soon believed that I had sacrificed my dog and a hunting wolf to the devil and received even more dark power.

Before my reputation for dark magic was confirmed in the sacrifice of my dog, most of the villagers had been willing to talk to me, though they all tried to avoid me to some extent. They had always done what I wanted; whether from fear or from some power of persuasion, I do not know. Now they began to think that I was able to convince them to do whatever I wanted. They decided to have no part in my dark schemes: they tried to avoid me as much as possible. I managed to convince even myself that I did not want them to notice me in the first place. I began to take more interest in their lives, watching their comings and goings.

I think that I saw more than they would have guessed, certainly more than they would have been comfortable with. I could look at them and see the relationships; the rivalries, the worries. I could see their lives in part just by looking at them. I saw what no one else did. I took these snippets of life for granted; as I walked through the village, I saw the whole story. It bolstered me in my separation and made me realize how human they were, even in their fear of my power.

My powers of prediction went deeper than my dreams, which were difficult to understand at best. I know now that the dreams were only to tell me that a choice was coming, they were not to tell me what would be best, or to warn me of what would happen if I failed. They were to show me one possible course; the rest was up to me.

Part II

A few years passed; it was fall and I watched the village from my perch in an old oak that grew in the square. Fain, one of the village hunters was leaving; he was to travel to one of the two nearby fort-cities.

Our lord had requested a scout who was familiar with the border and the terrain on both sides. Fain accepted the summons and prepared to leave, even though he would be leaving a young daughter behind. Two young men would travel with him to the castle. The young men were trying to hurry Fain. They were eager to be going, it seemed, but he was reluctant.

Fain made a somewhat hasty, but heartfelt goodbye to his daughter and left the village. Dunwyn sat on the porch where he had left her. Fain only looked back once and winced when he saw her crying.

I jumped down from the tree and approached her, placing a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at me, frightened by my presence. I did what I could to calm her. “Don’t worry. You will see your father again. “

I do not know why, but she trusted me, she trusted the forked tongue of the father of lies. I knew it was true, but I did not think of every possible meaning. Maybe my words changed nothing and I only spoke truth. I did not speak to her again until her father returned. He came home alone; none of the men who had gone with him survived. The soldiers were all dead; only he had escaped the barbarian raiders.

The patrol had been ambushed and totally destroyed. He alone had survived. Somehow, the raiders had not noticed him, they did not touch him but he was forced to watch as they brutally slaughtered the entire party. Fain was greeted by his joyful daughter, who told him of my prediction. Fain felt that he owed me his life, and he feared me for it.

The rumor spread, this time little exaggerated; I was an abomination in their eyes and all I had done was tell the truth as I saw it. But Dunwyn trusted me, I had told her true and she had seen her father come home again. She did not consider my prophesy as the others had. Where they saw me slay an entire patrol of trained soldiers with a word, she saw me protecting her father. And she loved me for it. She became the only friend I had. Dunwyn became closer to me then even my mother. I spent much of my time with Dunwyn after that, we talked and played games and the others left us alone. Even her father did not keep her from being with me; he felt both indebted and cursed by me.

I do not truly know what I was to Dunwyn, only that she seemed content to be with me, even though the other villagers shunned her for it.

It was the late in the day, we were alone in a secluded part of the forest, glorying in the reborn splendor of spring, birds and small animals filled the forest around us with chattering. I attempted to explain what I heard the animals saying; to share the joy they took in their simple lives the same way that they shared it with me, but the words were hard to come by. Dunwyn looked up at me with dreamy eyes as I struggled for words, her chin resting on folded hands as she lay on the tree-branch. “Can you teach me to hear them?”

I was somewhat surprised at her question. Could I teach her what I knew? I almost said that I did not know before I realized that that would not be true. I did know. I could give her a part of my knowledge, but at what price?

She looked up at me, sensing a part of my thought. “What are you afraid of?”

I dropped my gaze for a moment. “I am afraid of what I am. . . of what I might become. O”

She remained silent for a moment, her usual cheerful countenance faded and her bright blue eyes radiated concern. “I do not know what you will become, but I cannot see it as something to fear,” she said. “As to what you are,” she grinned. “You are my friend; there is nothing to fear in that.”

I smiled, but my worry did not completely leave me. “I will try to teach you, though it will be hard.”

And it was hard. She did not learn quickly but it was impossible to be frustrated at her, she tried so hard and enjoyed her progress so much.

It took a few years, but in the end she was able to speak with almost any kind of animal. The animals loved her for it and she soon acquired quite a following among the woodland creatures. Then she suddenly stopped coming. At first, I feared that her father was keeping her in. Then I had the dream.

It was not the same as the first. It did not seem to be directing my magic, just asking for a choice, and not even one that I would have hesitated at making. All it did was tell me that now was the time to make it.

Dunwyn was dying, lying on her bed, pale and fevered. Her father was talking in the background. “First he thrusts me into the battle and forces me to watch as my friends are slain only to leave me alive and steal my daughter from me. Now he has decided to take her from me completely.”

The next day I rose and went to Dunwyn’s house. Fain opened the door, looking worn and tired; he went cold when he saw me.

“You,” he snarled.

I could see the hate and anger welling up in him, and it hurt me like nothing I had ever felt before. I saw myself through his eyes: a monster intent on destroying his soul.

“Go away.” He said. “Go away and leave us alone.”

When I told my mother she began stuffing various dried herbs in her cloth bag.

“You cannot help me here.” She gave me a shrewd look. “He would not let you near her. It’s not your fault and this time there is nothing you can do about it.”

It took a week but in the end my mother brought Dunwyn back to health. She was able to leave the house but she was no longer allowed to speak with me.

Fain would not even speak with me himself, afraid that I would talk his daughter away from him. I was bitter. I even hated him for taking my only friend away from me. My hatred receded with the first messenger she sent, a small grey squirrel.

Part III

The next months were difficult for me. I was plagued with strange dreams, waking and sleeping, but they did not seem true dreams. If it were not for their strength I would have discounted them as nothing more then normal nightmares and worries.

The dreams were muddled and confused, terrible and sorrowful images swirled together into a frighteningly chaotic vision, all the more fearful for its ambiguity.

I feared that they were foretelling dreams, but I could not understand them.

In every way I could make out they seemed to be foretelling the destruction of our village, the burning, the images of my mother, Dunwyn and other villagers dying in terrible ways. I could not bear them, but I could not rid myself of them.

I grew weak from lack of sleep.

After a month the village was still there and I was forced to reconsider what the dreams were telling me.

If they were like the previous dreams, they were a signpost, warning me of a coming choice and giving me a glimpse of what lay down the path, but only showing one possible way.

I woke early after a repetition of the same dream; I recognized it now in many guises.

Our stick-and-stone house was cold as it always was in the early morning. The only light came from the small fire, where my mother was preparing some strange draught. I was not aware of any noise I had made, yet she looked up at me over the fire.

“Good morning” she said, gently. Her eyes caught the light of the fire, flashing golden and shimmering in the reflected light. She seemed alive as I had never seen her before. “I know you are awake. I have a task for you; to take your mind off the dream.”

“How can I? It is a choice that I do not understand.”

“So you cannot see all the ways ahead. You are not God nor are you the Devil. Does that not comfort you?”

I had never thought of it like that. I had expected to know what was ahead and what way I should choose. I could only nod.

“There are some things in this life that no one can know; you cannot change the course of time.” She paused. “I need some more Dragonheart. Run to the lake and fetch some.”

I slid out of bed and pulled on my cloak as I left. My mother had taught me something of herb-lore; I was familiar with many of the local herbs, and many of their uses. There was true knowledge behind much of the show that my mother used to keep her reputation as a herb-witch.

There was little to distract me from my worries as I made my way through the village. I would often go around the village to avoid the fearful stares, but this early in the morning there would be few people. There was another, darker reason that led me through the village; I feared that it would vanish before I could see it again.

The village was all that I knew; it was all that I loved.

The dream had come to me as a warning; if it was shown to me there must be something I could do to stop it. But would I know it when the time came?

A low fog had overflowed the confines of the lake during the night, shrouding everything, blurring distinctions, softening the world. The mist calmed me. it made me feel like I was truly at home. Nobody could tell who I was from a distance. Nobody else purposefully walked in it, the villagers feared the fog that came from the lake. It changed things it touched, strange creatures were said to come from the fog, and voices. Things also disappeared in the fog, animals, crops, even young children sometimes, but I knew it would not harm me.

The villagers said that may father had come from the lake, it was my beginning, and I felt somehow, my destiny.

I had never been all the way to the lake in this kind of weather before. I had felt the pull before, but I had resisted it.

At the waters edge the mist seemed to open upwards, and outwards. I could see the shore on either side where the forest crept down to the waterline. The water of the lake seemed to ripple with a life of its own, making everything dance in its reflection.

I searched for the peculiar wildflower known as Dragonheart.

It was a long-stemmed flower with thin leaves, blooming in both the spring and the fall in varying shades of bright red or blue. The only place I had ever found Dragonheart was by the shores of the Lake, either a short ways into the water or the forest. I made a careful search, making sure to collect some of the other plants and herbs that my mother would use in her potions. It took me a while but I found the plant I was looking for; a cluster of Dragonheart grew from water, showing clearly bright blue against the moving grayness of the fog.

I waded out to pick the flowers, as I did so I noticed movement in the lake beneath me. I looked down and saw the ghostly image of a lady in a white robe watching me.

Her pale face was turned towards me. Piercing crystal blue eyes holding me in my place as her hair swirled about in the current of the lake.

She nodded once before she vanished back into the depths of the lake.

Part IV

During the next twelve years I was haunted by two dreams, one told of the destruction of the village, the other showed me the pale face in the lake. I could not escape either dream. One was a horror that must be averted at any cost. The other I did not know; the lake was calling me, calling me to free me from the village. But I did not know what it was calling me.

I saw our village burn many times in those years. I saw it so often that I no longer knew what it meant. It was only a vision, cluttered with meaning I could not make out.

In those years I did little magic. I kept a conversation with Dunwyn even though we were not allowed to be together.

I spent much time talking in those years, talking with Dunwyn through the animals around the village.

It was shortly after my twenty-first birthday that I had the dream for the last time. A dragon swept out of the swirling images of death—a terrible serpentine beast with spear-blade scales, dagger-teeth and a spiked mace at its tail. It landed in a shower of sparks and shattered into a thousand pieces. Some of the sparks caught in the thatched roofs of the village and in that fearsome flickering light I saw the lifeless shards rise from the ground, raiders springing up from the shattered dragon.

They ran through the village burning and slaying. I saw little before my vision clouded, but I had seen enough.

I thought I would awake, but I found myself facing two moons, staring at me from starless sky, two bright orbs, lifeless eyes fixed upon me.

In two moons time. It will happen in two moons. If I tried to warn the villagers they would only mock me, they did not trust me, why should they believe me when it mattered most?

I had no reason to know what I did. So I must make a reason.

“I am going for a journey into the wild.” I told my mother the next morning. “I will bring what herbs I find.”

She looked at me oddly, “Do what you must.”

I had made my choice, I would do all that I could to make the villagers believe me. I would leave for a time, and I would return before the time was up. I would report that I had seen the raiders and that they were coming here. I would probably be blamed for bringing them to the village, but they would do what they could to prepare.

On reflection this was not the best choice, it would require perfect timing, I did not think it out fully at the time, but I knew I had to act to save the village. Looking back on it I see that while it was not the best choice, but it was a right choice.

I left the village, equipped for a long journey into the wild. I sent a sparrow to Dunwyn before I left asking her to do what she could while I was gone.

I wandered many days, staying close to the village. I relied on the birds to bring me news of any group of soldiers coming towards us. I do not know how it happened, the raiders must have passed by in the dark of night, for the birds brought me no warning.

They were past me before I received word of their coming. The first sign I saw was a dark smudge over the village. At first I did not know it for what it was. The village was on fire!

I ran fast, I arrived before it was over, but not long. The last of the village men were fighting but there was little hope left. There were too many raiders.

I could have fled at that point, and I almost did. What could I do to help them? What could I do against a hundred men? But I did not want to let them die alone.

I could not leave the villagers who hated me, I could not leave my mother, who loved even though she rarely showed it, but most of all I could not leave Dunwyn, my only friend in the world.

By the time I entered the village there was not much to aid. The raiders had no more resistance and were running through the village taking what they wanted and destroying everything else. They took no notice of my slender robed figure as I made my way through the wreckage.

Dunwyn was in the central square with the other prisoners, cradling her father’s head in her lap. Tears were streaming down her face, but she seemed unhurt. She looked up as I approached, shrinking from me in fear. She did not recognize me for a moment. But when she did she leaned forward. “There is nothing left,” she whispered. “Nothing.”

“I failed.” I was miserable at myself.

Dunwyn’s father opened his eyes. They were misted over, but he saw me.

“You.” He hissed. “You have brought this upon us.”

Dunwyn looked down at him. “No father, he was trying to stop them, he was trying to warn you.” She brushed his hair back from his eyes. “You would not listen to talk of dreams and foretelling but you might have believed his true sight.”

He looked back at me. “You still believe his lies?”

“No, father, I believe his truth.”

Fain sat up, the blood matting his hair made him look older, frailer.

I felt pity for him as I spoke. “I might be able to create a distraction that will give you time to leave here. I do not know how much time, but I will do what I can.”

Dunwyn nodded as I stepped away. “You will know when to act.” I almost choked on the next words. “Whatever happens, don’t come back.”

I moved to the center of the square, in front of the prisoners. I do not know if it was my magic that had obscured their vision, or if it was just the fact that they did not expect to see me, but they saw me now.

They came running towards me, inhuman it seemed in their speed. My anger at them, at what they had done to the village swept over me, burning through me like white fire. They stopped. One of them asked me a question, but I could not understand his words.

When I did not answer he reached for his sword. My hand leapt out, knocking the blade from his grasp before it was fully drawn. Four of them grabbed me, trying to pull me to the ground by sheer weight. I lashed out with my hands and feet.

I do not remember it clearly, everything was moving. I think I may have killed one of the men barehanded before I made my choice.

I had power, and I would use it.

With that thought the world exploded in white flame, bursting outwards and throwing the raiders away from me, killing them instantly. The cleansing fire swept through the village, burning all in its path and clearing the village.

When it was over I stood shakily. There was little to be seen but bodies, scorched and burnt. I looked around to see if the villagers were still there, they were gone, fled towards the lake. They had escaped. With that thought I collapsed from exhaustion, the magic that had flowed through me was too much. I was so tired.

I awoke to the gentle lapping of the water as it pulled at me. I was floating across the waters of the lake. How I had gotten there I do not know, but I was safe. It was not long after I awoke that I ran up against dry ground. I lay there for a while before I rose. I was on the shore of an island. I could not see anything more then ten feet out into the water, everything vanished into the mists. I turned, A crystal city rose from the island, white towers and graceful walls.

The lady I had seen in the lake stood there. She looked at me and smiled. “Welcome home, lost one.”

So I came to my true home; the home of my father. Here I face another choice, different from any other. Should I stay here with the last of my kind, immortal and powerful on our little isle?

Do I stay here and learn how to control the magic that is my heritage?

Or do go back to the mainland and live my life out as a mortal?

Now that I have written this down I can see what I should do. I must learn to control my magic. But I will not close the door that will allow me to return to a normal life.

THE END