Thursday, August 25, 2005

   Chapter 1: First Memories
(I left out a foreshadowing here in the beginning and also at the end of the chapter. If you are interested in reading them, please pm me and I'll send it to you.)
“It’s time to practice archery,” a small, gentle voice twittered in Pen’s ear. The small boy closed the picture book with a slam and got to his feet. In the process, he came face-to-face with an elf-girl a year older than himself. She had golden hair that went to her waist, tied back with a red ribbon, and big, dark pink eyes. She was dressed in short, baggy pants and a t-shirt, over which a light armor vest covering her chest was pulled tight. Her feet were bare. In her hands she held two bows, the longer that she handed him once he had put the book back into the shelf he had been sitting against.
“Thanks,” he said. The girl smiled and ran out of the huge library of the Archives. Pen took a moment to adjust his own practicing armor before he followed.
The library was the oldest building of the Archives’ campus, and the most well known. What many of the elves living in Nydia did not know about the Archives was the system built behind it. Not only was it a historical archive as the name said, but it had become, over many generations, a hospital, a gathering place, a school, and an orphanage. Pen had lived all of his short life—seven years—in the care of the elvish wisemen and wisewomen of the Archives. The elf girl, who everyone called her Tory, was also one of the few kids who didn’t have a real home and had to live in the orphanage.
Archery and swordsmanship was taught in large field in front of the library. The rest of the class, consisting both of orphans and kids of the nearby village, was already gathered between the large-leafed trees. Pen took a place beside Tory.
In the group of young, pale-featured, longhaired elf-children, he stood out like red on gray.
Pen was not like the other kids. Basically all elves had light colored eyes and hair; both got lighter with age. Hair was always grown long since it was painful for them to cut it off. But Pen had black hair that got slightly lighter gray in the dark, and it was cut short by his own hand. His ears were barely pointed and he liked swords over bows, the opposite of most elves’ opinions.
As if his hair wasn’t already enough to set him apart from the others, his most strange feature was his eyes. They looked like black pits, and even the white was missing in them. Nearly invisible eyebrows did not help the fact that it didn’t look like he had eyes at all. They didn’t sparkle when light hit them—the darkness absorbed it.
The elves believed that his strange eyes were the cause of magic of some sort. Pen no longer let it bother him. He accepted that he was different.
“We’re going to practice shooting in the forest,” explained the archery wiseman who taught them. Instead of the practice armor of the children, he wore a plain cream-colored surcoat that covered chain mail. His bow was sleek and nearly as tall as himself.
It made Pen take a moment to look at his own little bow. All the elf-children were taught how to make theirs. He had searched for weeks in the forest until he had found wood of a quality that met his standards. He did his best to carve it, and he succeeded in smoothing out all the knots. In his opinion, his bow was the best over all of the class.
“Will you be my partner?” Tory asked him suddenly. Pen noticed that the wiseman had stopped talking and pinched his leg as punishment for not paying attention.
“Huh?”
“We’ve got to shoot as many dribs as we can with five arrows each. We can’t use an arrow again after it’s been shot. We need partners to go in the forest, so will you be my partner?”
“I’ll be your partner,” squawked a cocky nine-year-old from the village. He took Tory by the arm and dragged her away. Pen looked on until they disappeared in the nearby greenery that was the forest. There was no one left to partner up to.
“I guess you’re all alone, kiddo,” said the wiseman. He handed Pen five arrows and went off to the forest after his students.
The dark-haired boy ran between the trees as quickly as a rabbit. It felt good to be out of the sunlight and in the shadow where he belonged. The woods were full of the voices of the students as they went around, looking for signs of dribs. They were to Nydia what mice were to Earth—pests that were very numerous. They looked very much like birds with fur instead of feathers; their wings were like a bat’s. He knew a good place to find dribs.
Pen fitted his first arrow when he saw the leaves twitch above. Once the long rat’s tail of a drib dangled under the perch, he aimed and shot. With a squeal, the ugly creature fell to the ground a few feet from where Pen was standing. He picked it up and continued on to the place where he had last seen a colony of dribs.
It seemed that he was not the only one who knew of the colony. Tory and the village boy were there, too, looking up into the sky hopefully. When the older boy spotted Pen between the trees, he started laughing.
“The early bird gets the worm!” he bragged, holding up two dead dribs with arrows sticking out of them. Tory didn’t have any kills yet.
“Don’t be that way,” she whined at him, looking at Pen hopefully. He felt nothing from her pitiful gaze. Instead, he notched another arrow and aimed for a drib high up over her head. His arrow was sent flying with so much force behind it that it went all the way through the worthless life. But before he could pick it up, the village boy did.
“Thanks for the help,” he said, smiling an evil smile.
“Give it back. I shot it,” Pen ordered calmly. There was impatience stirring in him.
“You want it back? You’ll have to take it from my cold dead hands!”
Pen, who was short-tempered, dropped his bow, arrows, and drib to the ground. Fights between boys were common in Nydia, but Pen had never been in one. Here was his chance.
The village boy was slow and clumsy, but strong. Pen was strong too, but his waist and upper body was skinny and he lacked height. But Pen had the advantage of a sword at his side—the Archives supplied it to all of their kids. The other boy had only a dagger to keep him company. And Pen knew his swords; practicing with them was one of his favorite pastimes.
Pen drew the sword and the village boy his dagger. There was a time where Pen thought he remembered Tory’s voice begging him not to fight, but the feel of the blade drove him into auto-mode. He ran up to the older boy and knocked the dagger out of his hand by spinning around with his sword vertically before him. In mid-turn, when his back was to the boy, he flipped his sword horizontally. The next moment, the older boy lay on the ground in his own blood. Pen’s sword, having driven through both weak armor and flesh, stuck out of his chest.
He felt only a spark of pride as he pulled the blade out of the older boy, the life meaning nothing to him. Tory was screaming her lungs out, her face ruined by tears and fear. He didn’t seem to hear her; his mind was still on the great feeling of the sword as he turned away.
But even before he could put the sword back in its sheath, the archery wiseman came running to Tory’s side. When he saw the dead boy and Pen with the bloody blade in his hands, he reached for a red stone that hung from a chain around his neck. He stared into its depth for a minute—calling home for more wisepeople, Pen knew.
“Did you do this?” he asked with a shaky voice.
“Yes,” Pen answered, without regrets. The man then knelt down beside Tory and forced her to look into his eyes. He was using elvish magic to watch what the girl had just seen. After a minute, he straightened up again.
“Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.
“I taught myself.”
“I see. Well, you seem to have some skill, but you can’t just kill people because you don’t like them...”
“He took my kill and said that I would have to get it back from his cold dead hands.”
“Now, is that a good reason to kill someone?”
“What is a good reason then?”
“That’s not the point...”
The poor wiseman did not know what to say to the seven-year-old murderer.
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