3. Esther
ESTHER
Anguished screams encircle me, causing a high-pitched ringing in my ears. The heavy pounding of horse hooves, mighty soldiers, and greers trampling through my village freezes me in place. Everything swirls in an array of madness.
The red moon is covered by clouds and rain. Flashes of lightning streak the dour sky, illuminating against the magic being used to bring my people to their knees.
Children gasp beside me as foreign soldiers in terrifying black armor pierce their chests one by one. We are dragged out of our homes as our parents futilely try to protect us.
Slaughter.
This is my village and the formidable omni greers end.
Most likely because we are the only greers able to utilize all six elements.
Fire. Water. Air. Earth. Metal. Spirit. As children, we are bound to our elders to suppress our magic until we can control each element fully, or it will consume us to our end.
A tiny child could never control that magnitude of power, and now I realize I would never have the chance.
“Link,” my shaky five-year-old voice squeaks.
“Link.” I don’t know if it’s bravery or desperation that tugs such a word from my lips.
But I feel the blossom and awakening of my invisible chains unfurl within me, seeking to connect with a nearby greer and replicate their element unbeknownst to them.
My magic might understand itself instinctually, but I do not.
Where are the gods now? Where is Felia whom we should worship? Are they too frightened to protect us or too ignorant to feign interest?
These soldiers have come for my people, my family… and for me. Smoke billows from ghastly flames that flicker across armed men as my parents fight off soldiers to desperately try to reach me in time. It’s all distorted into a chaotic swirl of colors as tears blur my vision.
“Link.” A mere whisper as the child beside me screams, and I close my eyes, my little body shaking.
When they reopen, the soldier pushes the child back onto the ground, dead, a small bubble rising in my throat. I’m next, and yet I can’t find the courage to look away. I played with that small child so many times, who now lies unmoving.
We are considered the mightiest breed of greers, and yet, like this, we are so easily eradicated on a night where no outsiders will ever save us.
With all the elements surrounding me and the smell of burning flesh and death, screams that are not my own rise in my throat.
For the first time, I understand gut-wrenching fear.
Three days later. Chains drag behind me.
My ankles and wrists are bloody from the metal rubbing too tightly.
“Abomination,” they call me. Foreign men say that with red hair and porcelain skin like mine, coming from such a prestigious clan, surely I would fetch a high price at a beasts’ auction, filling their pockets enough to flee from their own kingdom.
I can no longer cry and feel empty inside as my body works mechanically, dragging slowly step by step.
I can feel myself wilting from within. My elders, whom I was bound to and who suppressed my magic, are now dead.
Slowly that magic begins to leak out and devour me whole.
How do they not know I won’t survive more than a week?
My clothes have been torn, and I feel dirty. The men who slaughtered my family look at me with disgust. Thoughts that I can’t hear but sense are impure. I am a monster. These men fear me yet drag me from my home in hopes of gold.
Until, by chance, Master Kain would soon pass through in a carriage and intercept them. He would kill the men and take me in. He will tell me the Fates had ushered him that way, but I’d never much believed in them.
Five years old, and this was my lasting memory. This was my haunting dream that consumed me every night.
My head hits the pillow as I’m shaken, and my eyes burst open, startled by my own liberating gasp.
“You’re okay.” Blaze’s voice reaches me first, but then I feel his broad hand on my lower back. Sweat beads on my face as I search for his blue eyes among the dark. “You’re okay,” he repeats.
I bring my hand to my forehead, internally cursing myself. “I thought all the ale we drank last night would help my sleep,” I say quietly.
“We should request more of your sleeping serum. How long have you been off it?”
I sigh and look up at the wooden framework, watching a spider weave its web as I try to stabilize my erratic breathing. It’s the same dream that haunts me.
“I don’t like the serum. It makes me groggy.
Shows me other things I don’t want to see when I close my eyes,” I admit, more so to myself.
Images of monsters and creatures try to break into my dreams when I take the serum.
I don’t know what’s real or not when I close my eyes.
At least without it, the nightmares mostly remain the same.
I sit up fully, noticing that I’m saturated in sweat as I throw the blanket off and raise my knees to my chest. I hate this weakness of mine that seems to be constantly fueling a vengeance I don’t entirely understand.
I keep the tears in check. No one knows who killed my clan that night; it’s taboo to even mention the existence of my kind, let alone delve into what happened.
The only whispers I’ve ever heard of my kind are in celebration of their fall.
Blaze shuffles beneath the half-thrown blanket, cradling me in his arms like he has done since we were children. His heat radiates against my body; and him having been away for yet another month makes it more apparent that we’re not children anymore.
I push away from him, and when he goes to follow, I give him a pointed look.
I want to be alone right now.
I slip back into the same cream shirt and pants, noticing the slight smell of ale that surely should be washed out. I slip my leather boots on and tie them, ignoring his stare.
I leave, still wobbly, the ale lingering as I creep outside. The sun has barely risen, the almost full moon still on display. I think about the red full moon on the night my people were slaughtered and keep walking, trying to push the screams away.
The marking at my throat burns, but I actively force Grimace back down, unwilling to risk anyone seeing him. However, he can always sense when I’m bothered by something.
Lights flicker farther up the wall where soldiers keep watch as I begin to walk along the canal.
I look up to the grand castle and city of Caldom Kingdom.
Here on the outskirts is different, smelling of piss and grime.
Yet I know, more than anyone, the luxuries we’re bestowed under Master Kain’s watch—at least here, we’re treated as humans.
I’ve heard stories of others struggling on different continents where their rulers are greedy and less giving to their people.
The dreams are getting more intense again. There was a time that I found peace in my teens as I tried to forget that I had a former life. However, in the past year, they beckon as if something else is trying to grab my attention, and I now live with this impending sense of change and doom.
If I weren’t bound once again by my master when he saved me, I most likely would’ve died.
I was blessed to find someone who knew what I was immediately and brought another five elemental masters into his kingdom to bind me.
I only know the name of one, his cousin Dahlia.
The others, evidently Master Kains most trusted friends, but it always makes me uneasy knowing the limits that confine me for my own protection are in others’ hands.
I don’t recall their faces, but I do know they each come from different continents.
I don’t know their loyalty to Master Kain either, but whatever it is, none have whispered of my existence.
If they had, I’d be hunted by now. But those bindings as I approach my twentieth birthday is beginning to feel suffocating.
A horse whinnies in the distance, and when I look up, I notice Barbados with his horse who kicks up irritably and refuses to come closer. He tries to calm it with little success. All living creatures and beasts of good nature blessed by Neina grow uneasy by my unstable Felia-blessed magic.
Realizing the horse won’t come closer, he jumps off and sets it free. It immediately runs back in the direction of the stables, and I can’t help but give him an awkward smile and salute.
“Please don’t tell me you slept here all night after drinking too much ale?”
“Please, do you really think Blaze would let me?”
The commander goes stiff at the mention of Blaze, and I’ve often wondered why the two don’t like one another, but Blaze has never indulged me.
“The king has summoned you.”
“This early? For training?”
“Not training—he’ll explain everything,” Barbados says. He knows about my training, but I’ve never been quite sure whether he knows I’m an omni greer and not just a water greer. He scrunches his nose. “Pray to Neina, you smell like piss and ale.”
“The ale is me. The piss, I’m not so sure where that came from,” I state dryly, but the humor is lost on him. Silence settles between us as we walk through the city, the people of Caldom Kingdom slowly rising.
“Do you remember what day it is?” he asks quietly as we walk down narrow cobbled streets.
Of course. The week immediately before my birthday every year. “It’s their anniversary.” Perhaps that’s why Master Kain has requested me so early.
“Yes.”
Today is a day of mourning, the anniversary of when his only daughter died at the tender age of four. His wife passed a few weeks later because of an illness that moved quickly through the kingdom. Commoners, soldiers, greers, and even the wealthy were no exception as death swept through.
Time is always made on this day every year to pray to Neina that the plague never returns and Felia never has a hold over illness within these walls again.