FATELESS: A Boy’s Bonds

Farewells

 

“You can’t stay here.”

Zakarot crossed his arms, looking like a pillar of shadow as he stared down at me.

Though embarrassing to admit, I jumped. I hated when he did that, appearing out of thin air like…well, a ghost. Quickly scrambling to catch hold of my composure, I glared up at my spiritual partner.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

With a great sigh, as if reluctant to continue, Zakarot motioned toward the bedroom door. The one through which Mother had just departed. “We’re running out of time. The plan was always to leave after your exam was finished. Every second we spend here is another second we’re putting your family in danger.”

I knew that.

Of course I knew that.

The entire point of these lessons was so that I could take the fight to the Apostles before they attacked Flykra Village. Zakarot had some sort of plan, a means of besting the Demiurge and its followers, and I knew that I’d eventually have to leave.

But…

“Now?” I asked incredulously, damning the spirit’s poor timing. “I can’t leave after saying all of that to my mother. What am I supposed to tell them? I’ve never even left Flykra before, so I wouldn’t even know how to survive on my own–”

“You aren’t on your own, Zavis. As for your parents, you can tell them whatever you want. But if you’re asking for my advice? Leave a note. Include just enough information so that they don’t come after you and leave it at that. With any luck, you’ll be able to return here someday.”

Sitting on my bed, swishing his words around and trying to arrange my jumbled thoughts, I thought back to my mother. Her smile. She’d promised to train me, to be a better mother. Wouldn’t she blame herself if I left?

She would, just as she still blamed herself for Iris’ death.

And what about Father? Lara?

They would be devastated.

It would be like they’d lost me for a second time. Only this time, I probably wouldn’t be coming back. Not anytime soon, at the very least. Yet the practical side of my brain screamed at me to stop being ridiculous. Being devastated was better than being dead, I told myself.

It may not seem like it at the time, but to someone who’d seen what death was like, I had to admit that everything was preferable to joining that awful vortex in the sky. As long as my family was alive, there was hope. I could keep going.

And I now knew, unequivocally and perhaps for the first time in my life, that I wasn’t alone. The next step was making sure it stayed that way.

Letting a long sigh slip through my lips, I looked back at the bedroom door. “I can’t just walk out there and leave.”

Zakarot shook his head.

“Enoch made a show upon entering the village. We can expect the chief to summon your parents for an explanation, and that’s when you’ll leave. By the time they return, we’ll hopefully be long gone.” I opened my mouth to interject, and the spirit began to answer my question before it was fully formed. “Your siblings will be out of the house.”

As always, he had a plan for everything. I supposed that was a simple enough matter when you can see the future. Now wasn’t a great time for this. I was still reeling from the conversation with Mother.

Though I’d dreamed of leaving Flykra in the past, though I knew that I’d have to leave in the future, I now found myself hesitant. The farthest away from home I’d ever been was two weeks ago–when Anika Beckett chased me through the woods.

Surviving outside of this village, in distant lands with no one but Zakarot at my side, seemed like a death sentence. My stomach felt like it was tying itself knots just at the thought of abandoning my family. Was I in over my head? Was this a mistake?

Perhaps I should have taken my chances and told the family everything.

But what good would that have done?

My mother was a powerful magic-user, a famous adventurer, and still found herself outmatched by the Apostle. If she couldn’t win, there was no hope for any of us. The only path to victory, the only way to protect my home, was to keep the Apostle from ever reaching it.

Realizing something, I frowned and glanced back at Zakarot. “It’s my understanding that your future knowledge doesn’t extend to whichever new future we’re creating, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Then, how do you know the Apostles won’t come to Flykra anyway? You said that I’ve changed my family’s fate, so wouldn’t it make sense for the Apostles to take them out? Or use them against me.”

Zakarot shook his head. “That makes sense, but it won’t happen. We’ll be making far greater deviations than anything you’ve done in Flykra Village. If you think of them as ripples in a pond, then it would be impossible to stop all of the ripples from forming. The best strategy would be to stop whatever’s causing the ripples to form.”

I made a noncommittal noise and nodded.

In other words, saving Flykra Village meant placing a target on my own back. The goal was to make me enough of a nuisance to stop the enemies before they could find where the ripples began. We were staking everything on them making the practical decision, to go after the source of the ripples rather than the ripples themselves.

But I didn’t find his plan particularly convincing.

There were too many holes, too many inconsistencies. Zakarot was keeping things from me. The spirit knew more than he let on, and I had no choice but to be strung along. It was like I’d traded being chained to fate for being chained to this enigmatic ghost.

I gazed up at the ceiling, something I’d been doing a lot recently, and wondered how the others would react. Most of the villagers would be indifferent, or even relieved. Though most of my family would be devastated, Abel would likely laugh it off and proceed like usual.

For a moment, my brother’s lifeless face flashed into mind, causing me to wince.

At the end of the day, none of that mattered.

As long as they were safe.

Finally, after much deliberation, I spoke. “I’m going to need supplies.”

Something akin to a whisper, perhaps a barely suppressed chuckle, emerged from the spirit’s hood. “Leave that to me.”

~~~

At the peak of dawn, on the following morning, a knock came from our front door. The village chief’s burly grandson had come with a message for my parents, just as Zakarot predicted. I strained to listen in on their conversation from my slightly parted bedroom door.

From what I could hear, the boy’s message was short and to the point. The chief wanted my parents to come to his home and ease the villagers’ anxieties regarding the Anika Beckett situation as well as Professor Enoch’s arrival.

Mother and Father engaged in a hushed conversation immediately after the door closed, and I leapt back into bed at the sound of approaching footsteps. I quickly covered myself in blankets and pretended to be resting.

In reality, I had been preparing to run away. The plan still made me uneasy, but I’d come to terms with my decision now. A leather pack was hidden beneath a pile of dirty clothes in the corner of the room.

There weren’t many survival essentials in my bedroom, so I’d taken to filling it with various odds and ends. Clean clothes, my journal, writing supplies, a box of matches, and several unfinished novels.

The mattress beneath me shook as someone beat on his door, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. I couldn’t believe that Father’s knocking used to upset me. Now, my heart ached knowing that it could be the last time I’d hear it.

“Come in!” I called out, projecting my voice louder than usual.

My parents entered without another word. Father was the first one through the doorway, his familiar grin beaming down at me–though I could tell that it was strained. The man was obviously nervous about being called to the chief’s home, like a child afraid of being scolded by their teacher.

Mother, on the other hand, gave a soft smile when she met my eyes.

Guilt stabbed at my chest.

We’d just begun mending our relationship, and now I was going to leave. Just like she did. I knew that she would blame herself. Feigning ignorance, I merely returned her smile and watched as Father came to kneel beside me.

“Your mother and I have some business to take care of,” he said.

Asking questions would just make my parents suspicious, so I nodded. Despite being a curious person, I’d never cared much about my family’s errands, something I now regretted.

Father mimicked the nod, reaching out to ruffle my hair. I grimaced as his large hand nearly tore my head from my shoulders. “Go ahead and rest while we’re gone. Your brother’s home if you need help.”

“Uh-huh,” I replied, rolling my eyes. Abel wouldn’t stick around after they left, but today my brother’s irresponsibility would be of great help.

Frowning, Father stood up and allowed his wife to take his place.

Mother bent close to me, our foreheads practically touching.

She brushed the white hair from in-front of her eyes and stared down at me, still smiling. “We’ll be back soon.” I nodded again, taken by surprise when she began gently running her fingers through my hair. “Remember our talk, Zavis. You’re safe here.”

But you aren’t.

I wanted to say that, to try one more time. But I knew that it would be futile. My eyes began to burn, the image of my room wavering. Cursing myself internally, I looked away and hit my expression. “I…”

I’d already told her the truth. She didn’t believe me. There was no point in trying…

But wasn’t that where my problems first started?

Sure, I’d told my mother, but not Father. He wasn’t a particularly bright man but maybe it was worth a shot. Maybe if I told them everything, from Zakarot to the Demiurge, they would believe me.

This was my last chance.

“Zavis?” Mother asked, her brows narrowing in concern.

Shaking the thoughts from my mind, I smiled.

It was a tight, diluted smile full of effort. We were already past the point of return. Those kinds of thoughts wouldn’t do anyone good, they would only serve to hurt me. Just like knowing the truth would only hurt them.

Both parents stared at me for a while, and then glanced back at each other. Father shrugged with a dumb look on his face, amusing his wife. Mother looked back at me before reluctantly pulling back. I felt like the warmth of the room was retreating with her, and I desperately wanted to grab ahold of my mother.

I wanted to bury my face in her shoulder like a babe and cling to what remained of my life, for the sparse time we had left.

My mother had a habit of overthinking things, just like me. She was suspicious of me, but these suspicions were likely disregarded as products of her own faults. Mother probably thought that I was behaving this way because of her, whether because of our earlier conversation or her recent change in demeanor.

I would let her believe that.

We remained this way for some time, parents and son sitting in silence. I shifted uncomfortably beneath their scrutinizing gazes, waiting for one of their voices to split through the stony silence. As fate would have it, or perhaps not, I didn’t have to wait long.

Father slapped his thigh and grinned. “Alright, we should get going!”

He started toward the door, motioning for Mother to follow. She looked back at me, hesitant to leave my side, sensing that something was wrong. But in spite of her concerns, she stood and trailed after Father.

Then, her eyes shifted questionably toward the pile of clothes placed on my floor. It was a strange sight to see in my typically well-maintained room, especially since there was no way I’d worn so many of those clothes while bedridden.

If she were to inspect the pile further, she would find that the clothes were clean, simply taken from my wardrobe and deposited on top of the pack beneath. Mother frowned, turning toward me with knitted brows.

Sweat beaded across my brow, dripping down onto the bridge of my nose. I clenched my jaw, frantically writing a plethora of excuses in my mind.

“I’ll take care of your laundry when we return,” she said.

And with that, Mother turned back toward the doorway. Father craned his neck to look at the pile, then winked at me for some reason. I could barely understand my father at the best of times, and so I didn’t put much thought into it.

Sitting on my bed, breathing sighs of relief, I watched my parents’ backs. My father's was large, covered in a heavy brown jacket and matching slacks. He’d worn that jacket for as long as I could remember, a gift from one of the grandparents I’d never been able to meet.

Mother’s smaller back was shrouded in a white coat that stretched down to her knees. A collar of pale fur wrapped around her pale neck and meshed perfectly with her snow-colored hair.

I committed their backs to memory, painting a picture in my head.

“Wait…” My lips moved before I could stop them a single word.

My lips moved before I could stop them, a single word slipping out as a whisper. It was quite, barely audible. Nonetheless, Mother held out a hand to stop Father, and they both looked back.

I cursed my mother’s freakishly good hearing. Both adults stared at me with expectant expressions, waiting for me to continue. I drew in a shaky breath, and released it.

“Stay safe,” I said.

Father smiled, and left the room. Mother stared back at me with a frown.

“See you soon,” she said, before following her husband through the doorway. My bedroom door squeaked as she closed it behind her.

I watched as my parents vanished behind the familiar wooden door, like a curtain closing on a part of my life. I couldn’t help but think that it felt like I was losing a part of myself, one I only recently began to appreciate.

A part that I’d always taken for granted.

My eyes continued to bore into the door long after they were gone, long after I heard their footsteps cross the hallway and the front door open and close.

Soon after, I heard another door open.

Someone followed after my parents, and left the house behind them. Waiting to ensure that my parents hadn’t simply forgotten something, as my father was wont to do, I strained my ears for any other sounds.

Nothing.

Silence filled our home like a mist.

My bedroom door’s incessant squeaking made me wince, but no-one was home to investigate. I left my room, tip-toeing through the dimly lit hallway. Abel’s door was directly across from mine, wide open and granting me a good look inside.

It wasn’t often that I saw the inside of my brother’s room, and couldn’t bring myself to regret it.

The room was a complete pigsty, a far-cry from the other rooms in the house. Noxious fumes wafted from within, pelting me like some kind of gaseous weapon. It was an odor of sweat and gods know what else, the stereotypical domain of a teenage boy.

But more importantly, the room was empty. Abel was gone, and the coast was clear.

‘Let’s get a move on.’

I nodded and stepped away from my elder brother’s room, scrunching my nose as I passed by. My gaze turned toward the last door in the hall-way, a room that I hadn’t been inside since I was a child.

Heeding the spirit’s advice, I quickly made my way toward the door and pushed it open.

The forbidden domain of my parents’ bedroom was revealed before me.

All of the bedrooms had an identical layout, each room a simple square paneled with wood and sporting a single window. My parents’ room was the second longest in the home–after Abel’s–and cleaned in an orderly way wholly opposite to the eldest child’s. There was only one difference between this room and the others: a small closet located in the corner.

This closet was my designation, the spot where the spirit claimed I would find what we needed. It didn’t escape me that looking into my parents’ closet was quite a breach of privacy.

A part of me was afraid of what I would find, but there was no need to dig through their drawers. I had a target, and knew exactly where it was.

Warily walking into the room, I tip-toed over to the closet’s double doors and yanked them open. It was immediately obvious who this closet belonged to. A rack of clothes hung in-front of me; my vision was filled by grays, whites, and dark blues. My mother’s signature colors, for whatever reason.

‘Focus. Down there.'

I nodded, focusing, and knelt down. Reaching a hand into the closet’s dark depths, my fingers groped blindly and eventually brushed against a cool surface. I gripped it with both hands, the object sliding out easily from within the wall of familiar winter-colored clothing.

“Here it is,” I mumbled, more to myself than the spirit.

It was a chest, covered in brown leather, its surface cracked and worn. The leather was peeling in places, revealing the dark wood beneath. My eyes widened upon noticing something etched into the wood beneath the chest’s outer layer. Runes.

Just like the ones Professor Enoch used on his own equipment. The elaborate script was still illegible to me, like a mass of scribbles written by a child. But I knew that they were focuses for magical power.

Though my mother was a magic-user, I’d never considered that she had something like this stored across the hall.

Zakarot had touched upon runes during our lessons, though he insisted that I had absolutely no talent for them. Runes were apparently taught to humans by the elves, and they could be compared to lightning rods.

Magical power was drawn to them, though this would ordinarily be useless. ‘Scriptors’, as they were called, were talented in arranging runes in a specific way to mimic the effects of spells.

In essence, they took on the brunt of the ley-lines’ power instead of the magic-user. The drawback of this method is that physical objects are generally less durable than the human soul.

A magic-user could heal from backlash to a certain point, while a leather chest would simply fall apart if pushed past its limit. This meant that runes were inefficient unless one had the resources to subset the cost, or the materials to resist the aspects’ power.

“Can I even open this?” I asked, inspecting the script with a frown.

‘You don’t have a talent for Scripting, but any magic-user can activate a simple script. You have a neutral affinity so you should be able to activate scripts of any aspect. No need to use magic to open this, though.’

“Why not?”

‘The runes aren’t active. Just open the lid.’

Upon hearing his words, I realized that these runes weren’t glowing, whereas Enoch’s had glowed a faint copper color belonging to the earth aspect. My hand found the chest’s cold metal clasp, and I gently lifted it up.

The leather bound lid immediately gave way, releasing a long sigh as if relieved to be opened for the first time in years. When I opened it further, the top of the lid slammed into the wooden floor with a soft thud.

A stale odor flooded out of the leather chest. The chest’s contents were covered by a thick white blanket that looked as worn as its container. I brushed my fingers across its soft surface before carefully removing it from the chest, noticing that it wasn’t a blanket at all.

It looked long enough to cover my body from head to toe, and a large hood fell down from one side of the garment. At its center, a worn golden embellishment fastened everything together, this too inscribed with runes.

It was a cloak, and clearly made of finer material than I’d ever seen in Flykra Village. As I traced the fabric’s lining, I found more runes covering the inside of the cloak, a complicated network of mystery symbols. Was this something from my mother’s home?

Thinking that the heavy cloak would be useful while on the road, I set it aside and went back to the chest.

The second possession of Mother’s that caught my attention was made of glittering metal, and cool to the touch. Turning it in my hands, I realized that it was a simple compass, the needle spinning around the inside seeking north.

Slipping the compass into the cloak’s folds, I continued.

Aside from the compass, I found a hefty sack full of crowns, a lockpick, and two glass bottles. I lifted one of the bottles and held it up to the nearby window, a clear liquid swashed inside of it.

“Alcohol?” I asked.

‘Hm? Ooh! Keep that, Keep that!’

My eyes widened at the spirit’s obvious excitement. “What is it?”

‘Cordelian elixir. It’ll heal most of your wounds. And you’ll have a lot of them...’

Ignoring that last part, I stared at the bottle in awe. “I’ve never heard of something like that.”

‘Rare. It’s made by the empire’s First House, so you’ll only find it in the hands of top nobles.’

I gave the bottles one last thoughtful look before placing them beside the compass. Even if I didn’t need them to heal my wounds, they could probably be sold for a hefty sum.

Though I doubted that was needed considering the sack of crowns Mother had been keeping away. I didn’t have time to count them, but the glistening gold within made my heartbeat quicken.

Zakarot insisted that I take the lockpicking set, claiming that it would be useful later.

Sighing, I bent over the chest and looked for anything else that remained within. There was only one object left, sitting on the chest’s bottom. I first thought it was a crown that had fallen from the sack, and began to return it to its kin before noticing that there was no crown etched into the coin’s surface.

Instead, there was an image of a snarling beast.

“A wolf,” I muttered, turning it in the light. I placed it in the sack anyway.

Once finished sorting through the chest, I firmly dropped the clasp and slid it back into the depths of his parents’ closet. Wrapping my haul within the cloak, I ran back to my bedroom and grabbed my leather pack.

I carefully placed the items into the pack, making a special note of the Cordelian Elixirs, and sealed its opening. Fortunately, none of the items were especially heavy. A pang of guilt stabbed at my heart but I ignored it.

I was stealing from my mother, but I needed these items more than her.

After strapping the overstuffed pack onto my pack, I left my room and turned toward the ajar door across the hallway.

‘What are you doing?’

Ignoring my passenger, I returned to my brother’s quarters. Groaning, I looked over the sea of laundry blanketing the wooden floor, wondering whether the discarded clothes were dirty or clean. With careful movements, I crossed the room by hopping between tiny islands of wood paneling.

Abel’s bed wasn’t made, its covers balled up and thrown onto the mattress. He obviously expected Mother or Lara to clean up after him, and they would. Which made the state of his room all the more concerning. How long did it take that boy to turn it into a mess?

I slowly navigated my way to the dresser placed beside his bed, or more specifically, the object leaning against it. Abel’s sword sat unattended, sealed within an ordinary leather scabbard.

‘Do you even know how to use a sword?’

“Do you expect me to leave without a weapon?”

‘You are the weapon, Zavis. We just need to train you.’

Shaking my head, I reached toward my brother’s sword. Father had tried to teach me basic swordsmanship when I was younger, but I’d never wielded anything more than a wooden training blade. Still, I’d feel a lot better having a sword on my belt than otherwise.

Sometimes just having a weapon was enough to deter wrongdoers.

Just as my pale fingers brushed against the cool leather, a voice broke through the silent room.

“What are you doing?”

I nearly jumped out of my socks, spinning around to find the person I least wanted to see. A miniature version of Father glared down at me, caramel hair parted and brown eyes narrowed.

Abel had returned.