Legends claimed that Eilibir was a fishing village without any fish.
The story told that when magic had breathed through the seven realms with an exhale of wind from the skies above, and Scribes had chased after the power like leaves caught up in the breeze, they documented in their books that Eilibir wasn't so much a fishing village as it was a singing one. Apparently, at the single call from a fisherman, schools of fish would simply leap from the waters straight into the singers' awaiting hands. Without the sound of their voice, however, the creatures would remain hidden in the shadowy depths of the surrounding lakes, never to be seen by the untrained eye or caught by the untrained net.
It was a nice tale, Sebastian supposed, even if it wasn't true.
Sebastian frowned below at the crystalline shore of the Ember Sea, just visible through the trees. Voices called out from below, but no magical beasts jumped from the waters at the sound of them, mostly because Sebastian knew magic belonged to stories alone. Those stories certainly did not belong to his reality, where men below hauled in tangled nets with muttered curses, barely catching one trout, let alone hoards of them. It was to that reality where Sebastian should be, his stomach churning unpleasantly from the motion of the small boats, fighting down his meager breakfast as he pretended to know what he was doing.
Not that he didn't know what to do on a boat. In fact, he did know how to fish. He'd read all about it. Perhaps the correct thing to say was he would be forced to pretend to enjoy it.
Instead, Sebastian sat alone in the small clearing, which he deemed much more enjoyable than being on a fishing boat, even if the only thing he could do was stare at the shadows the evergreen trees casted on the dusty ground. He brushed a hand impatiently through his dark mess of curls, tossing his head back to stare into the sky. It hadn't rained for a good span of days, and he followed the lazy motion of stranded clouds above with fathomless, hazel eyes.
"Cumulus," he muttered. "Perhaps it will rain." If the lower range of those clouds were anything to judge by. Carefully, he moved his books further beneath the protective shade of a rather large blackberry bush, just in case.
He leaned back on his hands, counting the clouds overhead, calculating their position in the skies with what he'd studied of celestial navigation, though with the stars still hidden by the light of day, his game was challenging even for him. His neck tilted further back until it cricked, and he nearly snapped his spine entirely as a voice appeared over his left shoulder.
"Hiding out again, are you?"
It was only because she'd chosen to announce herself that Sebastian could now hear her approach like he hadn't been able to before. Leaves crunched beneath the careful tread of the intruder's booted feet as they shuffled a beat closer and kicked out at his bent elbow. Sebastian collapsed fully backwards, but his heart stuttered to a regular pattern, knowing who it was before he even opened his eyes to stare up at her.
Abel stood above him, one slim eyebrow cocked towards the silvery scar in the middle of her forehead, a half-smirk flickering across her freckled cheeks. Her auburn hair lay tangled down her back. A hunting knife was attached to the strap of leather that wrapped around her back and held her homemade bow of yew. A quiver full of arrows that she'd whittled herself hung from her shoulder.
Sebastian turned back to his view. "I'm not hiding," he said. "I'm studying."
She plopped down beside him, yet even a motion that would have seemed unceremoniously clumsy on anyone else, Abel accomplished with the silent flourish of a hunter trained in the art of sneaking. Her smirk grew as she glanced from him to the ocean below to the encroaching clouds with a dramatic sigh.
"Seems highly enlightening, your studying."
He rolled his eyes. "To the man who knows what he's searching for—"
"Or woman, I hope you mean."
Sebastian inclined his head. "To the man, or woman, well versed in the art of navigation, the skies can teach a great deal about the position of—" he trailed off as Abel's grin became so smug that he was surprised she hadn't actually fallen into the town's latrine. "Oh, bugger off, Abel."
She laughed, her tawny eyes so bright that they seemed almost golden. Like the eyes of the rumored phoenixes he'd seen in a history scroll that had detailed the plants and animals of the western desert realm of Demue. Those beasts were known for their uncanny ability to sense a prey from twenty miles away and lure it in with uncanny precision.
An apt comparison, Sebastian thought.
"You know," Abel began with a sly, pointed look his way, "for all the talk of you being a dangerous heirloom of Soleita, you sure know how to be a complete bore. I'd expect more from you, to be honest."
Sebastian shoved at her, but she slid easily out of reach, tutting her tongue at him. "You're foul," he said.
His gaze snagged on her pink lips for a second before he turned his attention back to his hands and the color of them that had graced him with the village's rumor: An heirloom of Soleita. It referred to the bronze pallor of his skin--a color most often seen on the traitorous islands of Soleita--and growing up in Eilibir where the winters were harsh and the days short, he'd stuck out sharply among his fellow fisherman. Not to mention that, in a way, Abel's comment of him being a bore was spot-on—to the village folk anyways.
In fact, the joke that had been spread by other children throughout his school days claimed that Sebastian's birth parents must have found him such a bore that when they'd come to visit Eilibir, they'd left without him, forgetting about their newborn babe entirely. Even now, at eighteen years of age, it was the most reliable impression Sebastian knew he left on others. After all, he consistently was able to disappear from boats without any of the other fishermen knowing the wiser. He suspected they were more at ease with his absences, anyways. No one wanted the clumsy academic around to scare off the fish.
Anyhow, it explained how he'd gotten his name: Sebastian d'Aximos, the d' noting he had been brought into the Aximos family, not born of it.
Abel nudged his foot with her own. "Imogene will be disappointed if you have nothing to show for a whole day of fishing."
It was his turn to smirk at her. "No, she won't. As far as my ma's concerned--" he pitched his voice to mimic Imogene Aximos's favorite saying--"the sun and moon rise with you, Carissénas."
"You've always been such a humble man, Bash," Abel mocked. "Tossing out Scribal words like that would really be quite arrogant of you." She huffed at him but couldn't keep the grin from her face. "Fine. You've disappointed me, then. I'm so hungry I could scarf down a pile of fresh manure. I only came up here to slum it with you to get some much needed, very late lunch."
"Sorry to disappoint, mi'lady," he drawled in such a way that he knew would cause her pert nose to scrunch upwards in distaste. He grinned to himself when her face did just that. "However, to be fair, wasn't it you who wagered you could catch us some venison before I ever so much as saw a fish?"
She fingered the handle of her yew bow in a lustful gesture that Sebastian was sure half the men in the village wished she would touch them with. "Well, we both failed, it seems."
"So quick to jump to conclusions," Sebastian chided. He reached into the burlap sack at his feet and withdrew a short piece of paper. "I caught some trout with the nets earlier this morning and sold them to Bamber for half a copper each. So, pay up."
Abel snatched the receipt, scanned it over, and then shoved it back into his hands with a most unladylike curse. "By the Scribes, Bash! You've truly been out here for hours, looking at the sky. I'm not sure why that still surprises me after all these years of being your only friend."
Sebastian ignored her emphasis on the word 'only' and shrugged. "I couldn't stand another second on those waters without unloading the innards of my intestines all over the stern--"
"Always the charmer—"
"Besides, I wasn't ready to head back to the house yet."
Abel fell uncharacteristically quiet, lowering her gaze somberly out of respect. The house in question had not been the same since Amos had passed away last year. Amos, Imogene's husband and Sebastian's adoptive father by default, was the one who had loved to fish. It was like his blood breathed water, and if there had ever been a time when fish had leapt for joy at the sound of a fisherman's voice, it would have been Amos's that would have done it.
Sebastian snorted at that ridiculous thought, but his chest tightened with a sudden restlessness at the memory of his father. He pushed himself hastily to his feet, sweeping his sack and two books off the ground and under his arm before offering a hand to Abel. "The sun's setting. We'll break an ankle trying to make it down this hill in the dark."
She slapped his hand away and stood on her own. "Speak for yourself. We both know you'd be the only one of us to end up in the infirmary for tripping over your own feet, but I'll overlook your sleight of speech and come along. Your ma will gut you alive if you don't bring me along to dinner, and I can't afford to feel guilty on your behalf."
He chuckled under his breath and tucked his hand into the worn pocket of his trousers as Abel led the way down the slope towards their village.
The shallow valley was dotted with a collection of wooden huts, painted in faded colors, surrounded by an estuary that flowed directly to a large river on one side and the Ember Sea on the other. Opposite of the river, the barren range of the Daevan Mountains rolled along the Demue desert. For a humble village in terms of wealth and population, Eilibir was a beautiful palette of colors: the deep greens of tall, layered evergreen trees, the lighter greens of the grass that lay speckled with yellow daffodil weeds. The Serac Mountains, the largest mountain range to the east, housed the capital of the Kingdom of Rainier: Halorium. Its highest peak stood blindingly white against the setting of the summer sun. Mystics often said that the last remnants of magic hid within that mountain, and it was this magic that kept snow on it all year around.
Statistically speaking, Sebastian tried to tell people that it was simply the high elevation of Halorium and the low cloud coverage that kept the air cool enough to snow even in the middle of the hottest days.
His factual skepticism didn't make him many friends.
"So, did you really not hunt anything today?" Sebastian asked Abel. He paused on the outskirts of the village and waded into the warm water of the docks to secure his family's boat for the evening.
Abel kicked an abandoned fishing hook. It splashed into the water forlornly. "There are hardly any animals out, which is odd for this time of year. I swear, my brothers are chasing them all away on purpose to spite me."
Sebastian nodded, half-listening as he ran a finger down the bow of the boat. It was gnarly and rough from the years of use. It was in this boat he'd been first abandoned and then found as a baby by Amos. He supposed he'd been lucky. Scribes be damned if he'd been found by a family like Abel's. He doubted they would have allowed him to research and study to his heart's content. Even Amos, who had held the patience of the plants as they awaited spring, had finally dragged Sebastian away from his books at the age of thirteen and forced him into the family trade.
"...thought you should know that I plan on stealing your precious books and hiding them under all my hunter's traps—"
Sebastian secured the knot to the boat and spun to face her sharply. "You wouldn't dare!"
Abel rolled her eyes. "Glad to know you're listening, at least."
He gathered his bait and poles into his sack and shouldered the weight, following Abel who strutted ahead, purposefully ignoring him. Sebastian sighed, shaking his head as if he could rattle his brain enough to rewire it in a way that would make him as good a listener as he was a reader.
As Abel crossed in between the first huts of the village, she dutifully paused and waited for him to catch up, a hand resting lightly on the carefully crafted bow. Not that she would ever use it to shoot a person, but anyone who thought about striking out at Sebastian would think twice after seeing Abel at his side. Nevertheless, her presence never stopped the weary stares.
"Do you ever get the feeling that you don't belong here?" he muttered to Abel as a boy no older than six ran into his home and shut the door as Sebastian approached.
"Only with each one of my heartbeats," Abel said, swinging her bow from her back to cradle it across her chest. "I'm the daughter of the father who only values sons, and I'm not even a daughter he can marry off for a good dowry. I've been told I'm too mouthy." Her teeth shone brightly against her grinning lips.
"I think you mean 'bride price.' A dowry is given by a bride's family to the groom—"
"By the Scribes, Bash," she muttered. "Regardless, I'm as unwanted as you can get."
Sebastian looked sideways at her. "Well, I want you."
Her cheeks flushed; he hoped she wasn't coming down with Fisher's Scurvy. "Someone has to watch your back when your head is buried in a book, I suppose," Abel said, her tone weirdly soft and springy like grass after a morning's dew.
Worried now, Sebastian subtly ran his fingers against the back of her hand—her skin didn't seem feverish.
Monitoring her vitals without Abel being the wiser proved difficult. He couldn't very well place his fingers to the pulse at her neck, but her pupils seemed appropriately dilated and the flush had fallen from her cheeks. So, perhaps all was well. Together they made their way to Imogene's on the outskirts of the village. When they approached, Imogene was bent over, weeding the small vegetable garden on the side of the meager home. Her light, blue eyes and graying hair were the exact opposite of Sebastian's darker features but, despite the odds, they were family.
Imogene glanced up as she heard their approach. "Did you get anything for me today?" she teased in the tone she used whenever she felt spoiled by Sebastian and Abel, who brought her anything from dried meat to a rare pearl from an oyster.
Sebastian walked over to her, picking up her gardening shears, while Abel walked directly into the woodshed to gather the firewood for the stove. "I already sold the fish to Bamber, Ma."
"But we have some leftover rabbit!" Abel called out from the small shed.
"Ah, that sweet girl never lets us down," Imogene said.
She slipped a glove off and coughed delicately into her hand. Sebastian took her by the elbow and helped his mother to her frail feet. "I've told you that you should relax more," he told her under his breath as her cough deepened.
She patted his cheek. "Nonsense. I have the health of a century old lobster." She leveled a steady stare at her son. "Unless you've been denying magic again."
Sebastian sighed, helping his mother into their house where Abel was already fanning the flames in the stove. "Magic isn't real, Ma. Science is. Rest—" he gave her a pointed look—"is real."
She patted his cheek. "So is faith, my son."
Imogene pried herself from Sebastian's arm and walked gingerly towards Abel. The two of them began putting together a stew over a boiling pot of water. The house was small with only two rooms. Sebastian slept on a cot beneath a window in the corner of the main room. A cool breeze ruffled the curtains as he deposited his books among the others stacks around his bed.
"Is our scholarly Bash being a thick-headed prat again?" Abel asked.
She tossed a dull knife at Sebastian who clumsily caught it. The tip nicked his thumb. "Ouch! What was that for?"
"I had faith you would catch that knife even though I'd never seen you do it." She grinned coyly. "Just because you haven't seen it yet, doesn't mean it can't ever be seen." Sebastian rolled his eyes, but Abel had already turned to his mother. "Imogene, tell us one of the fables of old. We could all use a bit of hope, I think."
"Imogene settled into a chair, her dimples crinkling the sides of her thin mouth. "What story would you like this time?"
"One with the magic of the Authors and Scribes!"
Sebastian ran an agitated hand through his tangled hair but took the ladle from Abel to resume her stirring of the stew. "Honestly, you two," he chided. "The idea of magic defies all logic—"
Imogene waved his words off with a cough. It gave Sebastian enough pause to allow his mother to start her tale. "There was a time," she began, "when magic was shared throughout the seven realms in an attempt to unify the lands. Each realm had always existed within one elemental magic that could only be found in its native land. There were limitations that each element presented, such as Merpeople only being able to wield their element--water--in the Ember Sea, but it was the Scribes who could collect knowledge on the seven elemental threads: earth, air, water, fire, light, darkness, and soul. With the help of an Author, Scribes could write these magical threads into books known as Fables of Monverta and disperse magic to those who had not been born of that element."
"See, Bash?" Abel nudged Sebastian with her elbow. "Data. They were researchers. You can relate to that."
Sebastian scowled at her.
"Now, our kingdom, Rainier, had been set apart from the seven elemental realms. A land set apart for humans who held no such connection to the magic of the seven elements except for an unexpected anomaly that arose among the humans centuries ago: the Authors.
"Authors were of human descent, from the ancient royal line of Lady Guinevere Verilibros who had been gifted with all seven elements by her beloved of the Elvish realm of Galandreal--"
Sebastian sighed. "Galandreal is not an Elvish realm--"
His mother spoke over him with another little cough. "Before that gift, the seven elements had been splintered, divided, and tossed about the Earth, threads of each element being found only in certain realms. But an ancient prophecy spoke of one who would arise from all seven and redeem the splintering of Earth. From then on, children born of Lady Guinevere's descendants were brought across the Ember Sea to the islands of Soleita and to the revered Elementi Academy. It was while there that Authors were taught to wield the different elemental threads, learning from those who had been born to a land where each branch of elemental magic lived, such as Earth from the Elves and Fire from the dragon shifters of the Demue Desert, to watch for the one who would be the redeemer.
"But, because of their power, Scribes were assigned to work along Authors, to document the Author's usage of such a gift. In fact, legend claims that each Scribe's first act was to inscribe a warning to their Author into their Fables of Monverta:
Authors held a mind for control,
And bade the others halfway whole."
"And, for nearly three centuries, the elements were at peace." Imogene paused, and if Sebastian hadn't heard the story so often, he would have been hanging on the suspense of it.
It didn't stop Abel, however, who blurted out, "Too much power comes at a cost."
Imogene inclined her head. "It was the Soleitian priestesses who first rebelled, jealous of the Authors and the gift they had been given, rejected by their own prophecy. All four islands of Soleita closed their borders soon after that, cutting Rainier off from the magic of the elements. Authors began to be captured and murdered. Our current ruler, Queen Davina, is rumored to come from Guinevere Verilibros's genealogy and even attempted to gain acceptance to the Soleitian Elementi Academy. As we know, Queen Davina is widely accepted to be Earth's prophesied redeemer, the saviour who would reunite all the elements across the seven realms. Regardless, the academy rejected her, and she fought against Soleita throughout The Great Purge of twenty years ago in her attempt to preserve Rainier's connection to the elements--"
Sebastian rolled his eyes at that, for there was no historical proof that Rainier's queen had fought against magic during The Purge, but he swallowed his retorts and continued to stir the boiling stew. Two against one were not odds he was willing to bet on, especially against women such as Imogene and Abel.
"Some claim the curse of blood magic began during the Purge. Others say it had always been there, but the Scribal warning had kept Authors from it. Regardless, it was blood magic that wiped the elements from the realms, thus effectively ending the Purge. As to who performed the blood rite, one can only guess. It's a deadly and rare type of elemental magic bred from the Abyss, for to use blood magic, you had to willingly give a part of your soul over to it."
Sebastian couldn't contain himself any longer. "You can't give a part of your soul. It would be easier to give a part of your brain than your soul. All you would need was a sharp scalpel and a strong alcohol as a pain reducer, but you can't give your soul. It's not tangible. You can't pluck it up in your fingers—"
Imogene coughed again, to cut him off he imagined, but Sebastian's skepticism refused to be ignored. "Besides, if magic had existed, why does no one remember it? It's all legends and fables now!"
His words broke through the peace that had settled between the three of them, and then Imogene coughed again. Over and Over. Wet, hearty coughs that shook her bony shoulders. She dropped to her knees, hands braced against her chest. The heavy, tin spoon clattered into the pot as Sebastian fell to his mother's side.
"Abel," he cried, "go gather some bark and ginger root--"
A splatter of red splashed across Imogene's lips and chin as she heaved and choked. It was so shocking that Sebastian could only stare at it until he heard the front door slam against the wall. Abel dropped down by his side, holding a wet cloth to his mother's face.
"She's burning up, Bash."
Panic suffocated him, but he somehow placed a hand to the base of his mother's neck, supporting her head as she continued to cough, and cough, and cough. Her skin felt like fire, and his fingertips prickled unpleasantly with the onset of numbness. His brain whirled, working through what he understood of the human body, about how a lack of air could cause a person's lips to turn blue--"Ma," he said, brushing her hair out of her face, "breathe."
She did breathe, sucking down a rattling breath that sounded painful enough to wrench her eyes open. For a moment, they stared at each other. Despite it all, the lines of her face were calm.
"My son--" her fingers brushed his cheek--"You couldn't have stopped this, Carissénas."
Her hand fell back to her side like a puppet master had cut her strings. He heard Abel scream as a wave of wind blew the door inward, crashing against the wall again. With a great clatter of sound, the shutters of the windows smashed into the sideboards of the house. Sebastien cried out as the force of it pushed him backwards. He scrambled for his mother, his hair whipping wildly around his eyes, but then froze at the sight of her. The wind had lifted Imogene's body a span off the floor, the tips of her graying hair just brushing the worn, wooden planks. Sebastian froze, his brain unsure what to do as she hung there, suspended before him.
Finally, he broke against the shock that held him there and reached for Imogene's arm. The room deflated, and movement returned with a lurch. Imogene's body fell back across Sebastian's lap, as gracefully as a melted snowflake falling from the highest peak of Rainier.