Inheritance

Chapter 1: A Mess

But he just didn't want to do it. His wrist disobeyed him.

He rested his head on his desk instead and his mind drifted to pleasant memories as it always seemed to do when he was troubled. A gentle smile spread across his face.

His mind led him right into the strangling arms of his older brother.

He remembered his older brother being tall and strong; fearless and kind. Nobody could comfort him like his older brother could.

His eyes drifted, however, to a piece of parchment on the floor next to his chair. He looked at that paper every day—it had words on it that he was forced to write every day, after all.

You are not your family, Eory.

Your family was evil at its root and you are good.

You know that you are good, but now you must prove it if you wish to be free.

The fairy drummed his fingers on the desk and glowered.

Since it was the only noise in the room other than the pattering rain overhead, it was an almost deafening sound.

Eory picked up the parchment and ripped it down the middle.

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Eory lost track of the time as his teeth sunk into his arm and little droplets of blood escaped from where they had.

Drip, drip, drip.

He looked at his arm confusedly. He didn't think he had bitten it so hard that it would be dripping.

Drip, drip, drip.

The sound entered his mind and filled it. It seemed to echo loudly and without mercy in his ears; it was suffocatingly close, just like that wet, dusty smell in the air, and those walls that seemed unbearably near to him.

Drip, drip, drip.

Sweat dripped down his forehead as he wondered what this sound was that was invading his privacy.

He sat up on the sofa and his eyes frantically scanned the dirty room for the deafening sound.

His eyes locked onto a hole in the ceiling.

It was leaking rainwater.

He felt sheepish at how frightened he had been of something as silly as rainwater. He was going to find a way to plug it up, but he stopped when his imagination ran away with him as it tended to.

He stared at the water unblinkingly for moments with his mouth agape.

Drip, drip, drip. Pitter, patter...

Thunder crashed in the distance, and when it did, his surroundings flickered as the rain drops became louder and louder in his ears. The ceiling had become a limitless black sky for a moment, the walls had become an open and sandy beach, and the smell of the dusty room had been replaced with the fresh smell of greens when they are wet with water.

Thunder crashed again, and suddenly, his messy room with clothes and drawings of a wrinkled woman strewn about was transformed into a green paradise out by a sea. The moon and stars were reflected like beautiful sapphires in the clear and glassy sea and the pleasing sound of water-on-water blessed his ears.

The suffocating walls were gone, the dank smell had released him from its clutches. Rustling wind filtered through the leaves of the forest of palm trees behind him—the sand beneath his feet felt rough and yet warm and comforting, and the iridescent water in front of him beckoned him into it.

He dipped his hands in and shivered a little at how cool it felt. He had read books about the sea, but it was not the same as experiencing it for himself. He had the vocabulary to describe it, because vocabulary was all he had.

Cold, wet, shining, and somehow... Soft, but if I fell into it from a height, it would be hard. If it were warm, it would be like a warm blanket. He thought to himself in a daze.

There was a sound in his ears that annoyed him greatly which was mixing in with the pitter patter of rain. He blinked rapidly, and, each time he did, his surroundings shifted from that of the beautiful beach to the messy and unfortunate state of his room.

The sound of crackling fire overpowered the sound of rain as the door to his room was revealed in the wall in a shower of green, fiery magic.

In walked Kori, his caretaker, who looked at his disgrace of a room and turned her nose up. "This room is disgusting! I've never seen it like this before!"

The boy—no, the man—said with a miserable look on his face, "it's raining."

Kori looked around his room with her giant, pointed waif ears twitching in annoyance.

Kori was truly stunned at the room's state of affairs. From the beginning, her rules with her charge were very firm and plain; one of them was picking his room up and keeping it spotless. He had adhered to the rule obsessively and abnormally from the young age of six which she had imposed it at. To see it like this was extremely bizarre.

"Yes, it's raining, but why is your room like this?" Kori asked.

The young man was silent in response to his caretaker's question, which was not abnormal for him, but it was when she asked him a direct question. He was staring at the rain dripping from the ceiling with his mouth agape and looked for all the world like he was addled in the head and amused by the simplest things.