The Privileged Legacy: Wanted

The Privileged Legacy: Wanted Ch.1

[One Year Ago: The Forest]

           I wake up with a start, heart thudding and my every sense alert for danger. Danger: what a glamorous word, yet what a terrifying reality. The paranoia that I have come to expect now fades as the wolf howls in the distance, farther away than I’d thought. It won’t bother me.

           I raise myself stiffly off the hard ground and gradually note my surroundings. The darkness enveloping the earth is the kind that I have come to recognize as the darkness that precedes dawn. Already, it is a softer gray rather than pitch-black, which means that the sun will be rising soon. The past months living off the land has taught me the signs of nature – how to tell time by the sun, direction by the stars, paths by the trails.

           Groggily, I sit on the hard earth for a moment, though the chill air doesn’t do much to encourage a leisurely pace. I love this. Despite the discomfort, despite the cold and the paranoia that accompanies living in the woods, this is where I belong.

I love the smell of earth in my nostrils when I wake up in the morning. I love that my hair can be a tangled mess of knots, leaves, and dirt because no one sees me and no one cares what I look like. I love the dew on my cheeks, the sun on my face, the way the trees lean protectively over me and shelter me from the light, except for beautiful sunny patches. But most of all, I love the freedom that running on the needle-strewn forest floor brings.

I get up painfully and stretch, every joint of my body protesting loudly. I roll my shoulders, feeling the smooth muscles slip smoothly over the blades of my back as I reach down and begin packing camp. Out of all the Assignments, Traveler had been the most decent one, though it still was a horribly limited existence. I can’t imagine following my Assigning for the rest of my life. Will I be sleeping on frost-bitten ground at fifty? Swinging through trees, scaling mountains, exploring uncharted waters until I die? Somehow, this doesn’t make sense. I’ll eventually run out of places to travel, and then what?

 Besides, as much as I love being outdoors, and even being allowed to travel The Beyond, it still gets incredibly lonely; I hadn’t liked any of the other Perfects who had chosen Traveler for their Assigning – not that there had been many of them. So I wake up every morning alone, surrounded by a wilderness that distrusts me and my presence, no matter how stealthily I try to travel. I haven’t heard a birdsong in two days, and there is an unnatural stillness in the woods. The wolf’s chilling cry, the first sign of life in days, isn’t a reassuring one. For the past month, I have been trying to shake off the prickling feeling that this silence is because of me, almost as though a protest to my presence…

           I scowl as I roll my mat compactly into my traveling pack and hoist it onto my shoulders. I have always dreaded the Assigning and now here I stand – Privileged, Perfect, of Noble-blood rank. And for what? For what purpose? What do these labels give me?

           Choice, I answer myself. These labels give me the right to choose my Assignment. But the intense dissatisfaction doesn’t ease.

Servants do not have Assignments – they have Callings. They follow their Calling to serve others, usually with the children following their parents’ footsteps. There is a distinct difference between them and someone like me – while Servants live to serve others, Perfects exist only to please themselves. Sometimes I wonder whether it would be better being a Servant, after all. But that is a dangerous thought. Something I would only think here, in the privacy of the too-silent woods, far away from humans.

My thoughts inevitably turn to my destination and I sigh as I think of the enormous distance I have to cover if I am to reach Jerusalem by this evening for the Fire Festival. I have been putting off my return for weeks, dreading the day I would have to make my appearance – it is my one-year anniversary being a Graduate. It’s been a whole year since my Assigning and now, I am expected to travel to the city I detest so much.