Laranth

They told the world that the Allerian Magic Association was there for them. They told us that we didn’t feel, that we were strong, that we would never cry. They forced these lies into our heart until we believed it. They told us that we didn’t belong and that the AMA was the only place for us magical folk. They bullied us around until they made our hearts hard and cold, unfeeling and just souls behind unmovable masks of stone.

We were exactly what they said we were, statues without hearts, following every will and whim—or at least that’s what they thought. Behind their backs, however, and sometimes even in front of their noses, hidden by our spells, we made friendships and sometimes even lovers. We associated with each other until we knew everyone and we were all one big huge family. This was how Alex, Jared and I met.

We had glimpsed each other in the hall ways and arranged a meeting since most of us made a point of knowing everyone in the association. We were nine, ten and twelve then and not fully grown into our powers so we met in an empty wardrobe named by us the “Meeting Wardrobe.”

I introduced myself as Allenda first. Then Jared introduced himself and Alex introduced himself. They were not new comers since most of us were taken when we were babes and we had seen each other a few times when we were two and three. But we, as shy scared children, had not grown comfortable enough in the association to talk to anybody at all for many years. And then we were kept separate for a couple of more years.

I shook out my long red hair out of its protective net where none of the regular soldiers could see it. It was forbidden for any of us to wear are hair long because many soldiers claimed that we had no need of beauty and that it would get in the way. Of course many of us did not listen so most of us, even the males, did have long hair without the knowledge of the commanders and so on. Then I started to explain how I had come to be in the Allerian Magic Association. I explained it like this:

“One day, when I was two and a half, my ma was trying to catch my doggy, Mascot, when she slipped. She was carrying my baby brother in her stomach so I was so scared that she might get a miscarriage that I did my first work of magic without the guidance of my ma. I called out to anything near to help her and the limbs of a willow caught her before she hurt herself or the baby.

“I was so tired that I sat down hard on the ground and only noticed then that my ma’s husband had been watching and was now staring at me in outrage and pure loathing and horror. I was in real trouble. I knew that. My ma had warned me never to do magic in front of another or I’d be sent to the AMA. I didn’t understand that until then. The loathing in my ma’s husband was terrifying but I also understood that I had just saved my baby brother and no matter who his father was, I was sure that he would never be like him.

“I slowly stood up and formally bowed to my ma. Then I bowed to my brother inside her belly and then turned around to the man that was soon going to be my doomed and just stared at him. I didn’t bow and he was even more terrified at me now. I guess he must’ve seen the intelligence in my eyes that my mother always said was part of my magic. It always seemed, and seems, uncanny for those without unexplainable powers and abilities.

“Maybe that power is the reason why I remember everything after my first accompanied magic working.” I was done with my tale.

After that they tried their best to call up any information about how they came to be in the association. They couldn’t remember so I extracted their memories from them without them knowing and examined them. Alex was given away by his mother after he had started making things float in the air. Jared’s memory, however, was so strange that I tucked it somewhere in the back of my brain to examine later. I decided not to tell Alex about his because I knew that he might try to seek revenge for what had been done to him for only doing the simplest kind of magic.

After that meeting, however, we became fast friends and even made secret tunnels leading to each others’ cupboard sized rooms. We sneaked in and out of the tunnels leading to each others’ rooms and to an underground room every night and talked and played games. It was a happy life after the forced drills and magic practice and sometimes even whippings.

All this ended in eleven short years when the F’lentes attacked. It was in the new moon, Jared’s birthday although I did not tell him it was for fear of his anger and questions. The alarm bells rang a little bit before dawn and Jared rushed into my room. I was awake and was kneeling beside a conjured birthday cake, wishing luck for my friend for his birthday when he came and I hurried to vanish the cake before he questioned me.

He was too excited to notice. “Allenda,” he almost yelled. “Allenda, I was offered freedom if I kept the F’lentes from invading by myself.”

I stared at him in silent horror and despair. Before I could gather my thoughts together he was gone. I rushed out of the room to find that Alex was sprinting toward me in his too small pajamas. He had to swerve around me to avoid crashing into me. When he finally regained control of his feet and stopped I was trying to hold back tears of despair. For the first time in five years that was hard to do.

“Allenda, what is wrong?” asked Alex, worried.

“Jared,” I gasped against the flow of tears trying to overwhelm me. “He’s going to kill his people.”

Alex stood there for a moment than asked softly, “Why is that suddenly bothering you…and how do you know that—.” He sighed. “Never mind that last question. Just answer the first one for me.”

“Run with me,” I requested and started to run. Alex followed me. “I think that is a rescue party for him. He’s going to kill the people who are trying to save him!”

That was enough to set Alex running. Captivity had made him value freedom enough that even the mention of a rescue party made him forget everything else. I sped up and caught up with him. I could’ve gone faster and passed him but I knew that I would have to save my energy for any fights ahead.

When we finally reached the gates we were too late. Jared was in the middle of the fray and behind him, nearly blocking the gates, were many bodies that belonged to Jared’s long lost family. The very sight made me finally lose the losing battle and I started weeping silently.

When I looked up at Jared again I saw that there was only one F’lente left. I recognized her immediately; it was Jared’s mother. Her hands were empty and extended in a plea. I cried out to Jared but before I could do anything, he was chopping away at his mother. The prospect of freedom was too great for him to think of anything else, I realized as I watched his mother tell him something and then sinking down on the ground, dead.

Before Jared could react, a small girl had sprung out of hiding among the bodies and plunged a knife into his leg. The wound itself wouldn’t have killed him except that so many cuts were now arrayed in his body that he fell down of loss of blood. Alex and I rushed over to Jared, who was trying to breathe. He was crying.

“She was my mam,” he gasped. “I killed her and she was my mam.” He almost choked in his own sobs. “The girl, she’s my sister, Yalla. I killed her mother and she killed her brother.”

“You are not going to die,” Alex almost pleaded, grasping Jared’s hand, tears finally overflowing.

Jared laughed softly as I shook my head in silent, anguished disagreement. Nothing could be done to save him. Jared looked at me, “You knew. Somehow you knew since we met. She told me something else, Allenda. She told me my name.”

“I know it,” I said gently when I saw that he was going to tell me his secret name. “You don’t have to say it aloud.”

“No,” Jared replied. “I want to…have to say it for the first and last time.” I felt cold, not the cold of a soldier but a cold that did not numb; it hurt. In the possession of a F’lente’s secret name, a person with enough power could raise the person whose name it belongs, from the dead. “Laranth. Remember it, please. Promise me,” He whispered, gasping.

“I—,” Alex started to say, confused.

“Promise,” he nearly screamed. We promised. Then he silently closed his eyes and the wrinkles of pain smoothed away from his face. From his back there was a gruesome sound of flesh ripping and suddenly Alex fully understood Jared’s identity for on Jared’s back tore his wings from its immaturity. They were now mature and lying on the ground. Jared looked like an angel from a lost religion that had been dominant before the continents had united.

Suddenly, before we could stop her, the girl, Yalla, who had been standing beside her father’s and mother’s bodies guarding and listening to the whole conversation with tears in her eyes, leaped forward to Jared, Laranth’s body and started to scream. It wasn’t a blood curling scream of revenge but the anguished cry of a broken heart. She threw herself to her brother’s body and hugged him, crying and wailing.

Alex tried to get her off of him but her grip was like iron and she wailed even harder when he tried to comfort her. I just watched. The cold was growing inside me like a weed, strangling my lungs and my mind and then finally my heart.

Cold as stone but hurting like stone could never hurt, I stood up abruptly. I went to Yalla and laid my hand on her shoulder. I mind-spoke to her, Yalla, I called. Yalla, you want revenge? She looked at me then and the look on her face told me all I needed to know. Come with me.

She took my hand as Alex looked on with a strange expression in his face that I had never seen before. I moved like a robot, without thinking, without needing to. I passed the gate, and entered the Association. I found my way with only shear memorization done by my muscles since my mind wasn’t working.

When my mind started to work again, I was in front of the president’s office. Instead of just turning the doorknob and going in that way, I called to the wood of the door and commanded the dead wood to move out of my way. It did so immediately, springing off its hinges and nearly hitting Alex’s head. I entered with Yalla clutching my hand and Alex behind me.

In front of me, startled out of his annual ceremony of kissing and screwing his secretary, the president of the Allerian Magical Society had his shirt half unbuttoned and his secretary was even farther along. He seemed oblivious that there had just been a battle going on in front of his gates.

“Get out!” he yelled at me and Alex, his already hideous face turning purple.

I laughed softly, my voice as cold and sharp as a piece of ice. “You can’t control me.”

The president grabbed his pain inflictor. It was like a remote control for the collars that rested around all of the magical soldiers’ necks. It inflicted to any normal magical soldier enough pain to make them lose control of their magic and lie on the floor, screaming. He now pointed it at us, laughing triumphantly. Did I ever tell you that I was not a normal magic worker? No one, not even Alex and Jared, ever knew that whenever he pointed that contraption at me I never felt anything but a comforting vibration, like a massage against my neck.

I heard Alex scream in horrible pain. I slowly drew my magic into me and prepared to get my revenge. As I did this, I watched the president in amusement at his slowly more despairing clicks at the control. I ripped the collar off of my neck just to see how the president would react to this new im-possible phenomenon. I think he might’ve fainted if I had given him a chance.

I threw pure magic at him, burning some things, making other things grow or wither. He was just simply swamped with so much magic that he had only time enough to scream one last time before he was consumed with the dark blue colored power and burned to ashes.

Suddenly my coldness broke in a rush of emotion as Alex’s cries stopped and he gulped up as much breath as he could in thirty minutes. I was relieved, sad, worried, angry and confused all at the same time if it was even considered to be possible. I turned to Alex, still clutching Yalla’s hand as she wept in relief that it was all over. I ignored the weeping secretary.

“I can give you back the memories that you had forgotten about and then you can seek out your mother and maybe get revenge if you want,” I said, thoroughly tired of revenge. “I’ll just go back home maybe and see if my ma’s husband is still there. Hopefully I will not be thoroughly disgusted of revenge by then and I can extract some revenge from the mother fucker.” Before I was even finished, Alex was shake his head so hard that I wondered if his brains would become scrambled eggs before he was done. I almost laughed at my own foolishness and chided myself at using up so much energy after so much pain. Everyone knew that being sad and aggrieved would lower their magic resources. I sighed breathlessly.

“Allenda,” Alex finally said, “I’ve lived so long without knowing that I don’t care anymore. Anyway, you’re all I have after…you’re all I have. I can’t lose you too. I want to help you and I want to meet your mother who understood so much about you and your magic and I want to help care for the spitting image of…the girl for at least a little while and help her out as best as I can. You also have a lot to explain.”

“You don’t know how far away my home is! It’s too far and hard,” I complained.

“Try me,” Alex responded.

“Half a year journey on horse to the other end of Pangaea.”

Before he could respond, a small voice interrupted him. “Alx, thewa merts il?” Alex just looked at her, confused once again. “Thewa merts il!” exclaimed Yalla, exasperated.

“She’s asking you if you knew her brother,” I translated blandly.

“See? That’s what I mean. I never knew you could understand the language of the F’lentes. Can you repeat that sentence again, Allenda?”

“She asked if you knew her brother,” I repeated for him obediently.

The moment he heard the question he blanched. He almost started to cry again. He just managed not to but he yelled at Yalla instead. “Are you heartless? Don’t you have any respect? You cried once and that’s it. Now you want to know how he was?!”

While he had his screaming fit, I was talking to Yalla; “Qante meerit linte fellsnet. Qally nally faltt menwas tlekta ciarotews. Thwoieroa afjawo nefajudsfo jirifjelhrit sdak fewir. Desij ferio fere delfrovn eb xec, roi vsasd? Sskri asedef late toe oid feh eri nas digirban gertijil. As defe dif wer hiji eo a.”

Yalla started to giggle and then finally roared out loud with laughter that came from the belly and burst out from the throat. She did not sound like a little girl. She sounded more like a hippopotamus. Maybe that was why Alex was so surprised that he stopped yelling for almost a whole minute. When he started again he was even more infuriated but I ignored him and continued to tell her a story of Jared’s childhood that I had taken from his mind that first day we had met.

Almost half an hour later, Alex had finally exhausted his voice and I was nearing the end of my tale. When I had finally finished, Alex just looked at me for a while then commented blandly, “You’ll have to explain that too after we leave this gods forsaken place.” He turned around and started to walk off in the opposite direction.

I couldn’t think. I could only stare at his retreating back as I tried to keep a firm hand on my consciousness. Yalla immediately understood what was happening to me and gripped my hand as if her fingers were steel and she helped me keep upright. As I finally realized that my grip had started to slip Yalla knew as well.

“Alex!” she yelled, gasping slightly at my weight. “Help,” she said, her clear common tongue was probably taken from my now unguarded mind. I was too busy trying to keep awake to feel worried about the sudden exposure of my thoughts and memories.

Alex came running, asking what had happened in his now hoarse voice. I laughed silently at as much as my foolishness as his. “I used too much in my anger,” I managed to whisper and when I felt his arms finally taking me onto his shoulders I slipped into the blessed darkness of unconsciousness after the almost deadly struggle with my magic.