First Love, First War, First Step |√|

An Archivist

The story I'm now penning should have never happened. I never should have been involved in the events that occurred. While I was born two centuries after the Founding of Cineres and one century after the Blemish, no one could forget the knowledge gained.

My story is a series of firsts.

My first day, week, month, year without my mother.

My first day training to be an Archivist.

My first time breaking a Founding Law.

My first and my last love.

My first secret meeting.

My first rebellion.

My first war.

My first moment with the only thing I had left of my love.

I was born to two of the most law-abiding people that you could find at the time. My parents still followed the Laws as if as long as they kept them, the happy bubble that we had been living in wouldn't pop.

They had met in school, and while my mother had been apprenticed to a doctor and my father to an architect at age thirteen, the two of them kept in close contact.

Once their apprenticeships were finished, four years after they had left school, my father had asked my mother to marry him.

Within two years, they had moved into a house of their own, and my mother was pregnant with me. My parents were happy, despite the continued public executions and violence.

I like to think that they were content because of the fact that I was a living, moving example of how much they loved each other. When I was younger, my mother would tell me how they would lie awake at night, feeling me move within her and dreaming of names.

When I was born, my mother took time away from her patients to care for me. My earliest memories are of toddling towards her, giggling her name.

Soon after I turned four, my mother and father decided to have another baby, a little brother for me. Sure enough, she became pregnant, and my four-year-old self was mostly pleased with the idea that there would be someone else for me to play with.

One of my last memories of my mother is her walking me to school, kissing my cheek, and watching me skip into school as she gently rubbed her stomach.

Until I was older, I was not told why my mother had died, along with my little brother. The doctors, her colleagues, had called it hemorrhage, bleeding that they had been unable to stop.

My brother, who was a presence in our lives for barely four months, had not survived either. He was too young and undeveloped to make it without my mother.

My father should have been required to do what all people in his situation were told to do. He should have remarried, taking another woman into his home and his bed.

He didn't though, and to this day, I still don't understand why he broke this one Law. Perhaps my parents weren't the model citizens I had thought them to be.

Regardless of the reasons why he did not find me a new mother, a new person to bear his son, it became the two of us in an increasingly hostile world. After my mother's passing, we moved into my grandparents' former house, the place that had been vacated after they, too, had died.

Father tried to be there for me as often as he could, but as I grew older, it was clear that the resemblance to my deceased mother was too much for him to bear.

For hours he would disappear, working on the expansion projects that never seemed to be completed for use to grow our population.

Those first months, when I realized what was happening, I tried to draw his attention back to me in any way I could. I would cook a meal as soon as I got home from school, only to end up eating alone and never seeing a glimpse of him. I cleaned everything in sight, hoping that he would notice and smile at me like he used to, but that now-rare smile never made an appearance.

It was then that I understood that I had not only lost my mother and unborn brother; I had also lost my father that day.

Left to my own devices, I became withdrawn from my schoolmates, seeking refuge in the few books that were permitted for public consumption. No one seemed to notice my passage through the educational system.

When I turned thirteen, my father seemed surprised to receive notification that I had been assigned an apprenticeship. It was the first meal we had shared in weeks.

"You know what I saw today?" He asked of me, using his fork to push the food he wasn't consuming around his plate. "We got a notice that you're going to start your apprenticeship. They must be mistaken; you're barely ten."

I stared at my own rapidly cooling food as I mumbled, "It isn't a mistake. I'm thirteen."

Not noticing my whispered reply, he continued, "I simply must have a talk with whoever sent that out. There must be a mistake in their system."

"It's not a mistake, Father," I said, looking him in the eye. "I am thirteen now. If you were ever around, you would remember that!"

With those words, I shoved back my chair and fled to my room, where I curled up on my bed and stared numbly at the wall.

My father didn't come with me the next day to see me off to what was going to be my job after four years like most parents did. Instead, he was gone before I had even tumbled out of bed, his precious buildings taking up more space in his life than the only family he had left.

I dressed myself in my customary gray skirt and blouse, taking extra care with braiding back my hair and coiling it into a bun. Then, alone I walked to the Archives, determined to hold my head high and walk a narrow line, no matter what.

My mentor was a stern older woman, who appeared, at every moment, to have eaten an extremely sour pickle. I was not even informed of her name. She told me that she was to be addressed as ma'am and nothing else.

"Your job as an Archivist is more important than I suppose you can comprehend," she had sniffed the first time she laid eyes on me. "You will not only care for the artifacts that are within this building, but you will also be recording our history for the coming generations. Occasionally you will also be called to help one of your fellow citizens with the pieces of our past that are floating around in the community."

"I understand, ma'am," I had replied meekly, clasping my hands together at my stomach to stop myself from trying to snatch the books I had spotted. "What will I be required to do while I'm under your instruction?"

She looked down her nose at me. "In order to give you an appreciation for the work that goes into keeping history, we will be viewing the other occupations that keep our society running."

"Ma'am," I asked, biting my lip to stop myself from showing my excitement, "will I be allowed to read the texts within the Archives? The texts from before Cineres?"

"You're far too young to be trusted to care for such priceless volumes," my mentor answered like she couldn't believe the words that had just come out of my mouth.

Would it be awful of me to mention that the day she died, a mere month later, I wasn't the least bit sorry?

I was assigned to a new mentor, this time, a firm but kind man around my father's age, who went by the name of Luther. While he agreed with my previous mentor's plan to have me learn about each occupation, he allowed me to borrow those books that I longed to read.

Those old pages, smelling of so many different things, became my escape. At night, I would curl up on my bed and greedily devour every word that they had to offer.

I plowed my way through Great Expectations by someone called Dickens, worked through Alcott's Little Women, and gobbled Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Perhaps it was the books about romance and grand love that planted the seeds in my mind, but I soon did something that I should have never even thought of.

I fell in love. Not with someone within two years of me and not even with someone that I knew at the time.

I fell in love with someone five years older than me.