Traditional Science Fiction always seems to want to relate to the real world and make some kind of a point about something. That’s great and I love it and I love writing it, BUT, what’s great about Fantasy stories is that they often seem to pull me away from our world rather than towards it. That can be very refreshing.
This is a story like that.
Note: As you can tell from the title, there is some intensity in this one. I hope, anyway!
Second Note: I also changed the title last minute, but this is the story I planned to send all along.
Paint in the Color of Life and Death
by Owen Wiseman
Siambe comes from a tiny village, deep into the Outlands, that has no real conception of art. Her people are farmers, hunters, and gatherers, scratching out a life and always a bad day or a bare season away from death. Those among them with more oppress those with less to protect their own position, and few give a thought to what lies a week’s walk or a year’s ride from their home. Imagination is in short supply, and those with too much are distrusted as shiftless and lazy.
And yet Siambe has art in her very soul. At age one she is scratching simple combinations of shapes into the dirt outside her family’s hut. A line with a half-circle for the sunset. Two curved lines placed side by side to mark a bend in a river. Five years later the abstract shapes have become detailed renderings. Form and Shade and Perspective all flow from her hands as water flows up from the village’s lone well.
By age ten she has discovered paints, using rocks to grind ashes from their fires and coloring them with dirt, or minced leaves, or even her own blood for the reds. She grows her fingernails long, and uses a grindstone to file them to different thicknesses, so that she can make a variety of line widths. Everywhere she goes people look sideways at the multi-hued stains on her fingertips, but she doesn’t care. All she can think of is her next creation.
Her father had died on a hunt when she was still a baby, leaving her rather homely and unmarrigeable mother to scratch out a meager existence for the two of them, in the porous wooden hut that still seems haunted by his ghost. Her mother at first tolerates Siambe’s scratchings, amused by her daughter’s imagination. However, as she grows older, and shows no interest in gathering berries or sewing or anything beyond a few basic chores, her mother’s frustration grows. She beats Siambe with sticks and fists, but Siambe will not be moved. She only lives for her creation. When her mother realizes the fruitlessness of the beatings, they stop, and she retreats to simply ignoring her daughter, leaving her to her own devices. This suits Siambe just fine.
By age fifteen, Siambe’s art has come to life. She creates masterpieces with the flick of a wrist. She often draws with both hands simultaneously now, describing perfect circles and curves, bodies in eternal motion, faces straining to speak, all the panoply of life and death she sees around her and feels deep within her heart.
The village still pities her when it does not resent her. For a long while that had seemed a dim thing compared to the light shining inside her, but as she grows older, she finds herself longing for acceptance from someone, anyone. The dullness in the eyes that look at her hurt more with each passing day, her mother’s dullness most of all.
And then, one day, almost without realizing it, she is afraid. Afraid of those stares. Afraid even more of being ignored. As she walks around the village, her heart pounds. Every eye on her feels like a stone strapped to her back. She finds solace in her art, but she is aware for the first time of needing that solace, of the possibility of it’s removal, of the hole in her heart that no one else seems even to have in their own chest.
She desires to rid herself of this fear. And so in the days leading up to her sixteenth birthday, Siambe makes up a large batch of paints in every hue she knows of. On her birthday eve, she takes her paints down to the village square. She has already walked the square earlier in the day and scouted her location, a wall of a barn owned by one of the village’s kinder inhabitants. The wall is sheltered from the usual direction of the wind to prevent her work from being weathered, but is still fully visible from the village square. She knows that she should knock on the barn owner’s door and ask permission, but she is so frightened of his eyes and his answer that she does not.
Instead, she returns to that wall just after dusk and works all night. To reach the wall’s high parts she uses a stump that she has hauled in from the forest nearby and stashed under a wagon. She paints from memory, from imagination, and from the magic that dwells inside her heart.
When dawn comes, it breaks over the greatest work she had ever done. The wall is covered with faces, one for each of the villagers, breath-taking portraits of undeniable beauty all smiling down at her while she lays on the grass at their feet, exhausted. The villagers rise one-by-one for their daily activities, come to the village green, see her masterwork, and are captivated. The berries go ungathered that day in the village of Donn. The deer go unhunted. The cows go unmilked. The old stare at it, dumbfounded. The young laugh and point, picking out their own faces and those of family and friends.
From that day forward, Siambe’s star begins to rise. No longer do the villagers give her strange stares. No longer do they look through her. They still whisper to each other when she passes, but now the dullness is gone. Within a week, one of the other villagers asks her to paint a wall of their house. She makes them a beautiful forest scene, with animals and a rising sun, and they pay her for her efforts. Another commission follows the next week, and another after that, until her art dots the entire village, making beautiful what once had been mere function.
Yet this moment of peace and bliss is not to stay. One night, Siambe rises late, impelled by the magic now growing inside her. She gets her paints and returns to her mural. When she created it, she had painted every villager except herself. Now she adds herself at the edge of the composition. But she is not alone. Next to her, squatted on its haunches at her side, she paints a wolfhound, large and slavering and scary. This creation feels different to her somehow, more real than the others, and more urgent.
It still comes as a shock to her the next day when, while she walks in the forest, the exact wolfhound from her painting steps out from behind a tree mere paces in front of her. It does not growl or stamp its foot, but approaches slowly, head and tail down, and nuzzles her hand. Siambe feels a great peace, then, for she knows this creature is hers. She knows it will follow her wherever she goes, will protect her with its life, will be her companion until the day of its death.
Siambe gives no thought then to what trouble such a creature might bring. She is still at heart an artist, and not at all like the others of her village. Her imagination is too strong to live in the ordinary world. The fact that she painted this creature before she ever met it does not register as strange to her. Yet it is this one encounter that sets into motion the events that will change everything.
That night she has the dream for the first time.
* * *
She follows the wolf through the thick brush and brambles. She can only see its haunches, always receding into the brush, just a few inches in front of her face. The plants scratch and scrape her but she remains silent, gritting her teeth and pushing onward. There is blood on her hands. She can hear noises up ahead, growing closer, coming from a clearing she knows will soon appear. There is something terrible there, waiting for her. Something she must do.
And then she floats in blackness, paralyzed but not unpleasantly so, with an infinity of shining white stars in every direction that seem close enough to reach out and touch. There is a man in front of her, with a long, grey beard and a purple robe with silver stars and moons printed on it. He stares at her as if he recognizes her. He opens his mouth.
“I am not yet permitted to help you. You will be tested, girl, as are we all.”
* * *
She wakes to the sound of her mother’s screams. The woman entered Siambe’s sleeping hutch and saw the wolfhound and deduced that her daughter--who just finally became worthy of that title--was about to be devoured. So she starts screaming and waving her arms and trying to scare the beast away. The wolfhound, much to its credit, just cocks its head sideways at this strange human and gives her what can only be called a bemused expression.
Siambe rises, pats the animal on the head, and assures her hysterical mother of her safety. She promises to feed it and clean up after it, and somehow her matter-of-factness manages to mollify her mother, or at least silence her.
Taking the animal out into the village, however, is another story, for many of the villagers remember what her mother does not know. They remember that she painted the wolfhound into her art before it appeared at her side. This thought has also by this time occurred to Siambe. She remembers how that bit of creation had felt different than the others. More urgent, somehow, and more real. She wonders if she could use that conjurative power again, and a voice deep inside whispers that she can.
The tide of opinion in the village starts to turn against her once more. Her wolfhound unnerves people, and its sudden appearance even more so. The loudest voices of complaint are the Abbast Brothers, four boys all at least a few years older than she. She goes out to paint one evening, and when she walks across the village green, she sees two of them slopping tar across her painting of the village’s faces.
They see her watching them and scowl at her. Her wolfhound growls, but then she sees other faces in the darkness, faces of the Abbast brothers’ friends, attached to bodies holding weapons, waiting to strike if she protests, and so she pats her hound’s head and stills him. She watches as the Abbast brothers tar the entire wall, obliterating her art, then she goes home and crawls into her bedding. There she pulses with fury, impossible rage at their act of destruction, undeniable white-hot anger at their opposition to the only thing she has ever cared about.
And so, late that night, she arises and begins to paint. She summons the power within her once more, that fierce urgency and realness with which she had painted her wolfhound, and she starts to daub paint onto the floor of her room. Her mind knows in some corner what she is going to paint, but she allows herself to paint it anyway, because she still cannot quite believe in her own gifts.
When she returns to her full senses, looks down in horror, and realizes she has painted the Abbast farm, one of the village’s proudest, ravaged by fire and burning still. She looks down at the vivid reality of what she has created and knows that what she has made will come to pass. She wonders if her drawing itself has made the fire, or merely predicted it, and prays it is the latter. Then she falls, onto her back on her bedding, accompanied by the whine of her wolfhound, and slips into a deep slumber, and another dream
* * *
The brambles slide underneath her as she follows the wolf. Her hands bleed from the brambles’ thorns. The pain is distant, insulated by the fear from touching her. She hears the voices closer now. She has almost reached the border between the brambles and the clearing. The wolf leads her there. She can hear now that the voices are calling her name. Ordering her towards them.
And then she lays with her back in the sand, on a perfect beach she has never seen before. She sits up. She is not paralyzed, but is able to move only slowly and with great concentration. The grey-bearded mage is there in his purple robes, standing beside her. He offers her a fist-sized beach rock, perfectly smooth and egg-shaped. She examines the rock. It throbs in time with the beating of her heart. She looks up at the mage.
“There are hearts of air, and there are hearts of stone. Ask yourself, which is yours?”
* * *
She wakes again to the sound of screams, this time from outside her family’s hut, and to the smell of burning wafting in. She knows in an instant what has happened. These are no cookfires. This is a burning farm. Fear and regret and shame hit her, and she vomits over the side of her sleeping mat and onto the ground.
Then she sees the painting of the burning farm, and she realizes the evidence of her treachery is still writ large beneath her. She leaps up. The wolfhound raises his head from slumbering on her bed’s far side to make sure she is not leaving without him. She grinds her heels into the dirt, obliterating her deadly, beautiful slashes of paint, covering over the evidence of her responsibility for what she will surely find when she ventures beyond the door of her home.
But the damage is done. Stomping the painting does not put out the fire. When she finally does venture outside, the men of the village are all gathered around and fighting the blaze, with the women standing in a long bucket-line that leads from the creek to the circle of men. Siambe can tell in one glance that it will do no good. The farm is going to burn to the ground.
It does exactly that, through that long day, and smolders all through the night. Fifty three head of cattle have been lost, burned and inedible, along with the village’s only working arrow lathe. The season’s hunt is in danger. The fact that there were no human casualties seems a small thing in comparison to that, especially in the eyes of the elders.
It does not take long after that before the Abbast Brothers start speaking her name in connection with their destroyed farm. The idea spreads through the village, until her name burns on every tongue once more, along with that hated word, Omaj. “Witch”, in the common tongue. It is a charge that carries the sentence of death.
Rumors become accusations become charges, until she is hauled before the council of elders and formally put under suspicion. The Abbast Brothers speak against her character, against her strangeness, even against her wolfhound, with silver tongues, until the elders seem ready to burn her on the spot. But then Siambe’s mother stands to speak in her defense. And it is at that moment that Siambe sees, for the first time, how deeply her mother loves her. The young girl has been so absorbed in her creation that she has missed it up until that very second. Her mother’s dullness and retreat from her was never rejection, never hatred, never indifference. It was fear. Fear of loving something so much that may turn out to be rotten.
And so now her loving mother stands before the elders and defends her daughter passionately. She says that Siambe was at home the entire night. That no one has any proof of any omaj power. That she is a sweet girl who would never hurt anyone, and never make any trouble at all if those of the village who hated her would just leave her alone to make her art in silence and solitude.
Siambe’s heart breaks with those words. To make a liar of the only person she was sure loved her seems the cruelest fate imaginable. She wants to rise and proclaim herself guilty. She wants to prostrate herself before the elders and the Abbast Brothers and admit her shame, beg their forgiveness, and ask for a righteous punishment. She wants to admit herself an omaj and offer herself up to be burned, just as she burned the farm from under her enemies. Yet Siambe is afraid, and does no such thing.
The elders find her innocent, and release her to her mother’s custody. The Abbast Brothers are unsatisfied, and give her glowering looks whenever they pass her on the green, but they cannot strike against her without incurring charges themselves. Thus the village returns to a sort of stasis. The Abbast Brothers begin the long work of rebuilding their farm. Arrows are somehow made and the hunt is carried out. For a season, nothing terrible happens.
Yet Siambe’s fear only grows. And now a new feeling on top of it: Shame. The shame that only a good person who has done a bad thing can feel. And then more fear. Fear of the shame never departing. This is the worst of all. Any burden can be borne for a short time, but even a modest load is a mountain when it must be carried forever.
So Siambe resolves to use her powers for good. She will pour so much favor on those she knows and loves that the secret sin she had committed will be but a drop of water next to a vast ocean. She summons her powers and draws the village’s men returning from their hunt with record game, and so they do, and the village has a feast to write stories about. She paints mothers giving births to healthy children and so they do. She paints a merchant coming to town with stores aplenty, and three days later one appears with loaded wagons looking to sell cheap. She paints a mass wedding with happy couples, and two dozen engagements are announced within the month that follows. The village grows prosperous and happy, and the Abbast Brothers seemingly forget about her. She is free to paint and live her life without their interference.
Thinking herself magnanimous and benevolent, she even draws one of the Abbas Brothers, Nikai, receiving a commission from the governor of their lands, the night before his representative arrives to deliver it. The matriarch of the Abbas family stands on their newly rebuilt porch, beaming with pride as her grandson receives the governor’s shining pin on his lapel.
It seems as if Siambe has found her place. She knows she can help her village with these powers, and she is happy knowing how blessed they will be thanks to her efforts. Such small dreams for such large power. Yet Siambe is naive. She knows nothing of magic, really, and certainly nothing of politics or power or life or even the people who have surrounded her for all her days in this one, tiny village.
And so she is shocked beyond all recognition when the village’s elders sweep down the road towards her family’s tiny house one morning, led by none other than Nikai Abbast. The leader wears his pin of commission--the one Siambe magicked up for him--on his breast, shining in the fresh sunlight. He and the men behind him have very determined expressions on their faces, and her wolfhound growls as soon as their footsteps start to crunch in its ears.
Her mother goes outside and speaks to them. Siambe crouches at the corner of the house, with one eye peeked out to keep them in view. Nikai Abbast points at her and speaks angrily, and she sees her mother start to argue, but her face is resigned already, and Siambe feels a pang of fear in her guts. The men stride up to her, and grab her wolfhound with rough hands and snap a muzzle on him, and bind his paws so he cannot scratch them. The hound looks at her with wide, terrified eyes as they drag him away. The men speak their pretense--the hound is dangerous or some such--but she cannot hear them clearly. Siambe screams and tries to run after them, but her mother holds her still and clutches her daughter to her chest and cries her own silent tears for the lot that life has given them.
But Siambe is not crying. She is not sad. Not crestfallen. Not heartbroken. Siambe is enraged. She gave that man the life of his dreams and now he has taken away her greatest gift and her loving companion. This will not stand. She pulls away from her mother’s arms and retreats to her room and bars the door and ignores her mother’s entreaties to come out. Instead she grabs her paints and organizes them on the floor. She stretches her fingers and cracks her knuckles. She can feel the white hot fire of her power protruding from her heart like the tip of a sword just run through a man’s chest. It has never felt this way before. Never this immediate. Never this powerful.
She paints, with quick slashes and sure lines. She can feel the power dripping from her fingers and running down with the paint onto the ground. She draws her wolfhound, running free through wild woods with no one to stop him, his muscles bunching and lengthening, both paws up off the forest floor, mouth open and fur ruffling through the displaced air of his passing.
She lays the last line, and the effect is instantaneous. She hears a series of loud barks from down the road, followed closely by the baritone shouts of soldiers. Siambe smiles. She can almost feel the wind through her hair, as if her mind and the hound’s mind were one. Her companion is free.
But her rage is not yet spent. Far from it. The power protrudes even further from her heart now, threatening to burst it at the seams, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. A small part of Siambe’s mind watches in horror. Another small part screams to stop, that this is not the person she is, that this is going to destroy everything she has ever known. The voice of reason comes, however, far too late.
Siambe scatters the dirt on her floor, mixing it around and smoothing it until the paint is diffused and the surface is mostly brown again. Her fingers flit to the paints, then back to the floor once more. Her slashes come fast and furious now. She hardly knows what she is making, but she knows it will be her greatest work. Even the first mural she painted, of the faces of her village, will pale in comparison to the perfection of this.
As night falls, she sits back and sees what she has done. On her floor is a painting of the village’s green, perfect down to the smallest blade of grass. And on the green, staked out between four poles with his stomach split open and his insides on the outside, is Nikai Abbast. The shining pin of his commission now pierces his tongue, caught on his teeth and hanging limply out of his mouth. Never before in the world has there been such a simultaneously terrifying and beautiful thing.
Siambe can feel her hound, out in the forest and waiting for her. She wants to go join him. But she is supernaturally tired from the burst of power she just released. The spike of it in her heart is an ember now, not glowing hot but waiting there to burst once more into flame. She slips into a fitful slumber and into the dream once more.
* * *
The voices are close now. Her fingers are covered with blood. Her hair is matted with burrs and stickers. Her face is almost in the wolfhound’s fur now, they crawl so close together. Her heart pounds with pure, unadulterated fear. She can hear the screams.
She is deep under the water. She looks up and she can see a whole ocean above her. She cannot breathe but finds she doesn’t need to. Fish swim by her head and look at her with large, round eyes. The mage is beside her in his purple cloak. There is a bubble of air around his head, and his hair appears to be dry.
“Your powers are strong, but all power has limits. Yours are at hand.”
* * *
She wakes to a pounding on the door and the sound of men shouting. Dawn streams through her room’s lone window. She leaps to her feet, just as the door bursts open, and several of the Abbast Brothers burst in, covered with sweat and spattered with blood. They stop short, across the room from her. They stare at the floor. At her feet is her final painting, still shining and realistic and perfect, a mirror of the macabre tableau on the village green from which she knows these men have come.
The Abbast Brothers look back up from the painting to her, and now she sees that their anger has been replaced by fear. These men are far from soft. They face down charging wounded game, they kill wolves who threaten their sheep, and they defend the village from the bandits that sometimes maraud through the area. But now they look up at her and she sees genuine terror in their eyes.
Siambe is terrified herself, but she manages to hide it for the moment. She waits for the men to charge across the room and grab her, but they don’t come. They wait. No one speaks. Then, almost without realizing she was going to do so, Siambe charges at the window and leaps out and through. She rolls to her feet and runs for the treeline and enters the trees, waiting at every moment for rough Abbast hands to grab her.
But then she stops, and realizes she is alone. No one is chasing her. Perhaps their fear is so great that they have decided to let her leave. Her wolfhound pops out of the trees ahead of her, its tongue wagging, and pads over to nuzzle her thigh. She scratches its head. The wave of terror starts to recede just slightly. She can never go back to her village again, but the world is before her feet, and she feels a pang of hope at the prospect. All she needs to do is paint a picture of herself finding some coin.
Then she hears her mother’s scream from behind her, just as it always sounded in the dreams. It’s a scream of pain, high and piercing and sustained, and it takes her breath away. Her stupidity in leaving with thinking of her mother sends a pang of guilt shooting through her. She turns back to look through the trees as the scream comes again. She jerks as it cuts off into sobbing. The call comes, in the Abbast Brothers’ baritone. Omaj. Omaj! Omaj! They demand that she surrender herself at the village green to their justice, or her mother will suffer in her place.
The screams and the footsteps recede, away from her house and back towards the village green, leaving her alone in the forest. She is frozen, paralyzed with fear and anxiety and impossible regret. She has killed her mother, every bit as much as the hated Abbast Brothers. It is her painting and her power that has set all this in motion.
Yet as much as she wants to turn and follow her mother’s receding screams, she cannot move her feet. The fear is too much. She knows with impossible certainty that if she allows her mother to die in her place, she will never forgive herself, yet she remains still.
Her wolfhound sits before her, alert but resting on its haunches, waiting for her signal. The forest around them is unnaturally silent. Even the wind holds its breath. Each heartbeat seems to last a day. A single breath blows a season by with its exhalation. Her mother’s scream pierces her torpor and crashes against her ears.
And then she is moving. The world snaps back into motion and brilliance and sharpness like a swimmer coming up out of the water into the air. Siambe has a vision of her paints, back at her family’s hut, and knows she dare not go back for them. Instead she goes to the edge of a nearby creek, to a flat rock where she had gone as a girl to be alone. She finds a sharp stone and gouges her wrist, then uses her flowing blood to paint on the rock beneath her feet.
As she reaches for the power, however, she finds nothing there. It is not a question of concentration, or of being too panicked. She reaches just as she had always reached, but finds nothing. She paints a quick portrait of her mother, sitting by a riverbank and enjoying a cup of tea, but even as she paints it she knows it has no magic in it. She finishes the last stroke and sits back forlornly, now trying to staunch the bleeding in her wrist, knowing that she will be unable to do so. She knows this because in her dreams it had been bleeding as she followed her wolfhound through the brush towards her own death. It isn’t the brambles that will cut her after all, but this rock and her own rage.
She follows the sound of the screams. She picks up her skirts and runs back towards the village, hiding as best she can even though she knows she will not be seen. She heads directly for the patch of brush from the dream and indeed arrives there unnoticed. She drops to her knees, and her wolfhound goes in front, just as she had known he would.
As Siambe crawls, she keeps recognizing little moments and images from her dreams. An oddly bent bramble here, a jutting stump there. Then she hears a fresh scream from her mother, not just a noise this time but begging with words and tone and fear. One of the Abbast Brothers screams again their demand for her surrender.
She nearly bumps her wolfhound’s rear when they reach the edge of the brambles. She peeks around the hound to see her mother, tied to a stripped tree trunk three paces off the ground, while allies of the Abbast Brothers pile dry wood around her feet. Her mother is crying and wailing, though without much hope.
Siambe pulls her head back into the brambles. She wants to cry but is beyond tears. She has a vision of herself burning on that pole in her mother’s place, and a shudder goes through her body. Yet she knows that she deserves it for what she has done. She killed a man, and for what? For being mean to her? For taking away her giant wolfdog that she had magicked out of nowhere? She had not truly meant to kill him, but her hands had made the painting and thus she had done it. She had burned his family’s farm and then taken his life for those petty crimes. She deserves that pole.
She pats her wolfhound one last time. It seems strange to her now that there was a time in her life when he wasn’t with her, though of course for most of her life, he hadn’t been. She shoos him away, silently, but he doesn’t move. She shoves him away, into the tangle of brambles, but still he returns. She kicks at him with her foot, tears she could not shed before now tumbling from her eyes, and growls at him from the back of her throat. He gives her a sad look, then turns and runs off through the brambles.
Before she can hesitate, Siambe stands, turns, and exits the tangle onto the village green. She strides proudly, thrusting her shoulders out at each step, eyes fixed forward. She only gets a few paces, however, before she is noticed and grabbed, then passed from rough hand to rough hand until she is standing before the trio of remaining Abbast Brothers. They throw her to the ground and begin to beat her, with such ferocity that she wonders if she will be spared the agony of the fire altogether. She does not weep from the pain, and begs them to stop in an almost abstract way. Her mind is already leaving her body.
Then a growl from the edge of the green. The Abbast Brothers leap up, and then she can see that her wolfhound has come back for her. All three brothers grab bows and nock arrows. Her wolfhound advances a few steps. The other villagers who have gathered to watch the execution shy away from the beast.
The Abbast Brothers count off and loose their arrows as one. All three are excellent marksmen, and all three arrows speed unerringly towards the wolfhound’s body. Then, mere feet from the hound, the arrows hit something invisible with an audible clank, and fall harmlessly to the ground. A collective gasp escapes the crowd. The brothers start to draw fresh arrows, but then stop and stand agog as the wolfhound begins to change.
Its legs lengthen. It’s hips invert. Its ears shrink and its eyes lose their yellow tint in favor of a storm-washed grey. It lifts itself up onto its hind legs, just as its fur fuses into cloth, and takes on a deep purple hue, with stars and moons embroidered on it. In moments, the wolfhound has become the mage from Siambe’s dreams.
“Stop beating her,” orders the mage, “or I’ll kill you.”
The Abbast Brothers drop their bows. Their mouths work like three caught fish, but they cannot spit out a word.
Siambe leaps up and races to her mother. She tears at the ropes holding her to the pole, but her hands are shaking and her fingers are clumsy. She growls in frustration. The mage raises his hand, and suddenly the ropes drop away without being untied, though a moment before they had not been even a little slack.
Siambe gets up and approaches the mage. He smiles at her, a kind smile that warms her heart. The kind of smile she had always longed to receive and had so few times.
“Congratulations, you passed,” he says quietly to her before raising his voice to address the crowd. “My name is Redmoon, emissary of the Aesif, and all of you are safe now! There is no reason for alarm!”
He turns back to her as a buzz rises among the onlookers.
“I-- I what?” she says. “I passed?”
“I told you!” says the mage, laughing, “I came into your dream and said you would be tested!”
“This-- this was my test?” she asks. “And I passed? How can I have passed? I killed a man!”
Redmoon laughs uproariously, slapping his knee and chortling at her. He raises fingers to his lips and emits a loud whistle. A moment later, Nikai Abbast comes strolling out of one of the houses that line the green, alive and definitely not disemboweled as she had imagined him.
Another gasp from the crowd as they see who it is. Nikai walks up
“Allow me to more fully introduce myself,” says the mage. “I am Redmoon, Master of Illusion and Emissary of the Aesif, and I have been sent here because we Aesif who are charged to do such things have discovered that your powers are beginning to awaken.”
“How did you get Nikai Abbast to help in testing me?” she asks. “He hates me and my entire family! He’d never do anything to help me!”
One of Nikai’s brothers is angry, and grabs at his brother’s jacket. He seems to be asking the same question that Siambe just asked of Redmoon.
“Every man has a price,” says the mage.
Nikai pulls a small, brass set of musical pipes from his jacket. He plays a simple tune, then stops and stows the pipes.
Moments later, the clear sky begins to darken. Wisps of clouds spring up and join together, and soon the sky roils with them. Inside of a few dozen breaths, Siambe can feels the first of the raindrops fall on her face. Redmoon has his mouth open, trying to catch drops on his tongue. He gazes down at her.
“Your village will never be hungry again”, he says with a smile. “No more drought, ever. You will come with me to the Citadel to hone your powers, secure in the knowledge that everyone you know and love will be well-fed.
“Or he’ll use it to abuse everyone else and they’ll eventually kill him for it,” she says under her breath.
“Yes,” Redmoon replies evenly. “But there is magic in the world and people are going to use it.”
The entire village is crowding out under the rain to see the marvel. Nikai displays the pipes for all to see. The rain pours down on them now but no one seems to notice. Siambe embraces her mother, and as she does, something occurs to her.
“But I felt the power!” she says. “While I was painting him dead, I felt the magic going through me! How is that possible?”
“Because I stopped it,” he says. “You cast your magic according to your gifts, and I simply used my gifts to block its effects. You have great powers, my dear, unique powers that will prove of great value to you and to the world. But you are not a god, nor ever will be. There will always be forces that exceed your own, just as there are always forces that exceed mine.”
“Why is this the test, then?” she asks. “This seems like a lot of trouble to go to, especially for something that has nothing to do with magic. It doesn’t even tell you exactly how powerful I am!
Redmoon smiles an inscrutable smile.
“The process of becoming a mage is one of error,” he says. “Errors of spell and errors of self. That is why you will be restricted to the Citadel for several years at least, so that your mistakes do not cause such damage as they might have done here. However, making mistakes is not important. What matters is what comes after. A Heart of Air makes a big show of owning her small mistakes, and runs the moment she makes a big one. Hearts of stone brook no small criticism from fools, but do not run when the moment of their fate arrives. We, the Aesif, can accept only Hearts of Stone. Welcome, Sister.”