Sometimes he remembered bits and pieces of his childhood. Quick flashes of what used to be, before the haze of adolescence drowned most of his memory in shadow. The imposing figure of his father looming at the head of the staircase, more interested in business endeavors than a son he might never see grow to adulthood. His sister, almost a decade his senior, marching down a long row of weaving looms like a commander inspecting their troupes to the click-click-click of the shuttles passed back and forth over fine silk. His mother, dainty in body and regal in her fury, stalking the corridors of their home ordering around servants; the heavy scent of flowers in her wake.
In the light of the setting sun his shirt looked as if an animal had torn it apart. He hardly remembered touching it. He remembered the sudden bang of anger. His continued failing of closing the all too tiny buttons. It had been such a small, simple task. An every-day task.
“Ad’iq is about to set the table.”
His mother’s voice, echoing over from the door, was enough to make him jump. He spun around, wings spreading. Standing just a handspan higher than five feet, his mother still cut an imperious figure as she strode into the room.
“Mother.” For two, three seconds he held her gaze before lifting his chin. “I am almost done.”
“Good. We shouldn’t leave Kyran and your sister waiting.” It was always Kyran. Never your father. Never even just my husband.
His mother’s dark eyes scanned the floor, taking in the fragments of the vase he had broken earlier. She chose to ignore them. “He is meeting with important people later. We are getting a new shipment of workers from the docks. And someone suggested a new design for a loom—there is a lot to do.” Wordlessly she plucked the remains of his shirts from his hands and handed him another one. “We should have eaten by then.”
Pharan made no reply. He was about to turn, to get dressed, but hesitated when his mother continued to linger in the door frame. For a long moment they looked at each other until his mother produced a small bundle from the pocket of her emerald robes.
“I had this made for you, recently.” She opened the bundle to reveal a dagger. The weapon’s blade was wickedly curved, the hilt fashioned from carved ivory. “I meant to give it to you before you leave, but I felt why not give it to you while you can still… appreciate it’s design.”
She took his hand to close his fingers firmly around the weapon, crouching slightly to being herself on eye level with him. “You know Kyran doesn’t want to talk about these matters, so you shouldn’t tell him—but I had your name engraved on the blade. Our name.”
He looked down on the weapon.
“If you are lost, it will remind you about home.”
As often as he tried, and failed, to remember details of his childhood, Pharan recalled fragments of his time alone in the wild he would rather have forgotten. There had been a period, a few weeks, between the time his father had led him into the mountains and the time his instincts took over for good, his mind would lapse back into its old conscious state in infrequent intervals. There were nights when he remembered how he stalked through the forest; hunting. Mornings when he woke up, the taste of blood in his mouth and the smell of rot in his nose. Although he remembered little, he knew he had not been a good hunter even then.
For a while he wandered. His father had dropped him off far away from any settlement, but isolation only lasted so long. Eventually he ran into other people. Small villages. Non-avriel. Few reacted kindly to the young man demanding food and shelter and for some time he switched between travelling from place to place, doing odd jobs along the way. He had been away from Athart for two years when he ran into a small group of Avriel. After long months of barely surviving, living from one day to the next, the company of his fellow outcasts gave him new confidence. It all started well, but his fate changed quickly. Encouraged by their growing numbers, the group grew bolder by the week, getting into one quarrel after the other as they moved among villages. One day they attempted to stay at a small tavern when they got into an argument. The man behind the counter didn’t want to serve them. The locals didn’t want them about. Insults were exchanged, and things turned violent. One Avriel was killed, the others managed to get away. Pharan, hardly a fighter, decent or otherwise, did not.
To cover the damage done people tried to random him back to Athart—to no avail. Instead it was a Half-Eídisi that took interest in him. Jaene Tuon was an Empath who, among other topics, studied the Avriel condition. For a couple of years she had, more or less successfully, examined and interviewed young Avriel roaming the area around the Hotlands. Unlike them, Pharan was willing to cooperate. For one, he had little choice—the villagers had, after failing to sell him back to his parents, decided to sell him to Jaene instead. More importantly though, he had seen what she was capable off, how her powers would cut of the rage and anger when he couldn’t. It took however four arcs of traveling together of helping Jaene in her various studies, before she was finally willing to teach him.
Night had fallen with the suddenness common to tropical climates and the air was still crisp with the chill of the recent storm. At the door of a tiny hut in the middle of nowhere Pharan hesitated a long moment in the dark before he pushed inside.
“Took you a while.” At the far end of the room Jaene looked up from the local song bird she was dissecting for no other reason than because she could.
“Worried I wouldn’t return?”, he asked as he shrugged out of his travel cloak.
“No.” The Half-Eídisi wiped her hands clean with a stained piece of cloth, holding out one expectantly. “I knew I could find you. I was just curious. Has been a while we were so close to your mountains. Home.”
Pharan remained silent. About some things you couldn’t lie to Jaene. Without a word he handed her the tallow candle he had pulled from the pockets of his cloak before retreating to the reed mat which served him as a bed most nights. He started to sort through his other acquisitions. Food, mostly. Meat, sun dried and wrapped in wax cloth. Salt. Some herbs. A book written in Common, the spine fragile from use. A pair of boots newer than his, but not new. He set them aside.
By the table Jaene rose to stretch and switch into a cleaner shirt. He looked down his hands, fingers brushing alone the pale scars grazing his wrists. After two years the old wounds had shifted from an angry red to an accusing pink. “Your acquaintance stopped by while I was gone?”
“He did.” By the time he looked up the woman had joined him on the floor of the small cod, legs crossed. “But they had already done away with her.”
Done away. There was only one way to do away with a young Avriel you couldn’t sell back to their parents. Pharan looked to the side momentarily, then at the candle she planted between them. “Is the candle important?”
“It’s useful for keeping track of time.” Picking up the tallow stick again, she used a knife to nick the side in regular intervals. The cuts were straight and meticulously set. Like all cuts she made. “Sure you still want to do it? Your bird-friends will not approve of this.”
He bristled lightly at the notion of his bird-friends, but pursed his lips when he saw her smile ever so faintly. “Do you care if your colleagues approve of the things you do?”
“No.” She put the candle back down. “But that’s not quite the same.”
“What do you know,” he said, leaning forward. “Not everyone wants to spend his days wondering where his next meal comes from, owning only what’s necessary and sometimes not even that while chasing lofty goals.”
Jaena snorted. “Careful, I don’t judge you for what you want, either. You are the one dreaming of a soft bed. Fabrics that feel like wind on your skin and slaves to do your every bidding, while you look down on, well, everyone else I guess.” The woman chuckled. “You could have gone home. But you don’t want to. You worry what they will say. You believe they cast you out here to learn, to proof yourself and that they will question how someone with as little talent as you managed to survive were more promising people failed.” She eyed him. “I don’t think that’s how it works. They would take you back no matter what you did out here. What is your father again? A draper? A clothes merchant? You could be that.” Now it was Jaene who leaned forward. “But that’s not who you want to be.”
He met her eyes. When he spoke, his voice was levelled. “It will benefit you, too.”
The amused expression on her face faded, replaced by something more solemn. “Not the point I wanted to make.” She cocked her head to the side. “You ought to be more afraid.”
“Maybe I am afraid.”
His companion snorted again. “No. You aren’t afraid. You think having no emotions at all is better than having no emotions at all… but you are wrong.”
“That’s not--”
“Don’t lie to me,” Jaene said, leaning forward. “Be glad I already made up my mind.”
Pharan made no reply, looking away.
Silence spread between them. Outside it started to rain again, a soft whisper drowning out the noises of the jungle. Finally, Jaene leaned to the side to fish a twig out of the hearth to light the candle with. “We already talked about this, so I will keep it short. In the next hours I will take a piece of my Empathy spark and weave it into your pattern. You won’t have to do anything.” A pause. “And now… focus.”
Following his initiation, Jaene continued to teach him the basics of what he needed to know. Never too much, making sure he would need to come back to her to learn more, but enough to understand the spark and magic, how to use his powers. A warning or two, too.
The two of them continued to travel together for a few more arcs, but the periods during which they actually saw each other grew shorter. They had separated before, when Jaene was working on a paper or meeting with clients, but what started as a few trials at a time grew into a cycle and more. By the time Pharan told her he would travel to Athart with a group of Avriel he had met, Jaene did not protest—after all, she could find him, if she wanted to.
The celebrations that followed his return to Athart where short but exciting. His mother had passed in the years of his absence, but his father was alive and so was his sister. Once the initial joy of the reunion was over, Pharan attended the local University, to do his basic schooling. He was a decent student, but the urging of his spark, the magic’s drive to grow and his resulting actions, did not go entirely unnoticed.
The study was small and cold. Half a trial had passed since a stern looking member of the faculty had led him into the cramped chamber at the far end of the university and he had seen no one since. Sometimes he would hear footsteps in the hallway, but none ever seemed to come close.
By the time the door did open and Pharan turned—wings bristling with youthful indignation at the unexpected wait—it was a stranger who stepped into the room. The young Avriel froze.
“I am afraid your instructor has business to attend elsewhere.” The man, shorter than even Pharan and with dark, black and brown wings, stepped towards the heavy desk sitting in the corner. He didn’t sit down. “I hoped you might be able to answer some of my questions in the meantime.”
Fingertips resting against the polished wood surface, the man motioned him closer. After a heartbeat, Pharan obliged.
“Do you know your results on your last exam?” A beat. “Place twenty-two of eighty isn’t bad. That said… hardly good enough to warrant a recommendation from your teacher.” The stranger’s long fingers tap-tap-tapped against the desktop before him. “Any reason you can think of why he would give you one anyway?”
Pharan’s wings spread lightly, hinting his irritation. He swallowed a sharp reply, paused. “I wouldn’t know. He mentioned once I reminded him of his son,” he said finally.
“A child, not yet returned home… a father doubting tradition… I could see that,” the man said with a thin smile. “Do you also happen to resemble the son of your…”, he flipped through the small leather-bound book he had produced from the pocket of his robe, “… history teacher? Or that of your math instructor? She only has nephews I believe…”
Pharan lifted his chin, gaze hard.
“Don’t get me wrong—that was a neat little trick. The move of a coward, but not entirely without… talent. Takes a while to figure out what they want, eh? To play to their fancies. I almost admire the patience that went into that ploy.” The book closed with a sharp snap. “However… trying the same move three times in a row was stupid.” He looked up, lips pursing. “You do not look stupid. Well… not that stupid, anyway.”
Across the desk, Pharan’s jaw set. The sudden flash of anger however was not quite enough to hide the pang of shame and worry that had flickered over his face.
“Don’t want to come up with some quick excuses and explanations? Curious. Also something I would… work on. The question is… what do I do with you, now?” The man gently rapped the spine of the book against the edge of the desktop. “You arrived in Althart together with ambassador Ryvern?”
The sudden change of topic caught Pharan of guard. “Last Saun,” he said slowly. “We had met on the borders of the Hotlands. He was interested in practicing his Atvian and we were travelling the same direction.”
“Is he good?”
“Considerably better than I am…”
“I had no idea,” the man murmured. “He was returning from a meeting in Nashaki?”
“That’s what he said…”, Pharan agreed, now frowning.
The stranger made a humming sound. “Alright.” The book was slipped back into his robe. “I recently talked to some people… you don’t need to know who… but next arc, when you are done with your studies, you will apply for a position as Ryvern’s aide. It will be granted. Your little tricks will proof helpful in his endeavors. In the meantime, we will meet every other trial or so, to make sure you don’t give away the secrets of your trade quite as easily.” The older Avriel met his gaze. “In return, I will not tell everyone about what you have been up to here. How does that sound?”
A year later, Pharan began to work for ambassador Ryvern. Two or three time his mysterious benefactor made him contact Jaene—but beside his inquire she never cared to visit Athart. He could have said he was upset about her refusal even though it led to the one or other tension between him and the people he was working for. For a while, anyway.
