Rebirth

by Darkbringer

  “How can you be certain of that?” I asked.

  “Because,” mother took a small sip of her tea, “that’s when I’m going to kill him.”

  “Kill him!” I dropped my cup in shock, but it just hovered in midair and waited for me to take it once more.

  Mother simply sipped on her tea without saying anything and waited on me to regain my composure. My mind was racing, but I could tell she wasn’t going to say anything else until I calmed myself, so I shakily took the teacup and sipped at it a few times myself.

  “Feel better now?” Mother finally asked me after a few moments of silence.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just shook my head up and down in confirmation.

  “Good.” She finally continued. “As I was saying, I’m going to kill your father in 57 years, 3 months, and 2 days. I hope it’s something that you can come to accept over time, but his death was something we agreed upon many years ago; before you were even born. 42 years, 8 months, and 2 days ago to be precise.”

  “Why?” It seemed as if they both loved each other greatly, and they both seemed happy together. I couldn’t understand what she was telling me.

  Mother simply smiled slightly and then tapped me on the nose. “And that, my dear child, is a very good question. Many would want to know how, or would argue to stop it, or claim it was wrong, evil, or impossible. They’d either deny reality or seek to alter it to suit their wishes. Instead, you seek to learn why it is the way it is, and that shows a lot of wisdom for one so young.”

  “I’m proud of you,” she told me while smiling. Honestly, I think I was in a state of shock. First, she tells me she’s going to kill Father, and then she brags on me. Is she a monster or a loving mother? Is it possible to be both?

  “One thing you should realize,” she continued, “is the difference in our ages. My magic keeps me from growing old – I’ve already seen thousands of years of life, and I expect to see thousands more – but your father doesn’t have the same gift I do. He’s a normal man, and would normally have a lifespan of about eighty years – provided he didn’t die in a battle, or to a disease, earlier.

  “He was a strapping young man with a healthy appetite for beautiful women when we met, and even when I told him that I would outlive him by countless years, he wouldn’t stop pursuing me. To your father, that simply made me more irresistible. A beauty that could never grow old and wrinkly? I was his dream made reality, according to him.

  “For me, however, it was a different matter. If I gave my heart to him, I’d have to watch him grow old. Age. Weaken before my eyes, and then eventually fade away. I didn’t want to bare that, but he wouldn’t give up.

  “In the end, we found a way which works for us. Using my magic, I can heal him and keep him young and as vibrant as the day when we first met – but all things have a limit. My power is strong, but even I can’t keep someone ageless for an eternity. A hundred years is pushing the limit of what I can do, and that’s what I promised your father.

  “One hundred years of youth, with me constantly pouring my magic into him and keeping him young.”

  Slowly, she sipped at her tea and gave me a few moments to digest her words before she spoke again. “After that, death will have a stronger grip upon him than my powers of life can counter, and he’ll weaken quickly. Diseases, sickness, aches and pains will creep up on him overnight. His body will age weeks at a time, every day that passes, and he’ll suffer a dark and terrible death, which no man should ever have to endure.

  “I’m not going to let him suffer like that, and it’s not something he wishes either. Before my strength to hold off death’s embrace weakens, I’m going to use your father in a magical ritual. A hundred years of constantly filling his body with my energy will alter him in many various little ways. If his death is harvested properly, a very powerful magestone can be created from it.

  “That’s what we agreed upon. I would give him a hundred years of vibrant youth, and at the end of that time, I would end his suffering and create a magestone to keep, use, and treasure for the rest of my days.”

  My mind was reeling and I finally sat my teacup down and started towards the door. “It’s… It’s a lot to take in at once, mother,” I told her honestly. “I’m going to have to think it over some and sort out what I think and feel about it.”

  Mother simply laughed lightly and smiled over at me as I walked to the door. “I’d expect nothing less from you, Mik’hail. Don’t worry, I’m a patient woman and we’ll have plenty of time to sort out whatever feelings you might have.”

  “Your magic is going to keep you from growing old as well,” she informed me nonchalantly. “Someday, perhaps, you’ll find yourself facing the same problems we faced. It’ll be up to you to choose your own path forward when that time comes. Just know, I’ll always be here for you if you need me.”

  I hate to say it, but I turned and ran at that point. I don’t know what I was going to accomplish exactly by just running away from her words, but I needed some time to myself to try and process what I’d learned already.

  My family has some pretty dark secrets in it, and I’m not certain I’d be able to handle it if she dropped another one on me so suddenly. I needed some time to process what I’d already been told first!

  Luckily, my room was just down the hall, and I was able to go hide in it for the rest of the evening so I could be alone with my thoughts.

  Choosing My Path

  Spending some time along, I tried to sort out all my thoughts and feelings. Being told your mother had plans to kill your father was rather difficult to swallow. But, on the other hand, it really wasn’t so a bad deal for father either – he was probably over twenty when he met mother; she was going to keep him young and healthy for a hundred years; and she was the one giving him a paradise to live in by providing food, coin, young girls to share his bed…

  Had he never met her, he’d be an old wrinkled man almost in his seventies by now. His youth would be gone, and he’d be suffering and close to death’s door. Instead, he was still as young as he had ever been, and he had another fifty years of youthful life to indulge in.

  If someone would have made an offer like that back on Earth, they could charge millions of dollars and people would still pay up for such a deal. And, when the time for death finally came, it was swift and painless. Really, it wasn’t a bad deal.

  But my mother was going to kill my father!

  It was one of those things that made my brain run in circles. I convinced myself it wasn’t bad; that I understood it. And yet, I didn’t like it. But I wasn’t against it, I don’t think. But it wasn’t right!

  ARGH!!

  It was one of those things that made my brain run in circles…

  I guess in some ways, it also helped explain some things to me that I’d always found just a little odd. I used to wonder how Father could pull a girl into his office every day, without wearing his equipment out. The reason for that was simple – mother was using magic to heal and restore his body back to the same perfect state it was in the day before.

  It also explained why Mother didn’t care about a girl’s virginity. That’s one of the things you only lose once in your life, and she probably lost hers several thousand years ago. Hard to care about something which you haven’t had for that many years.

  But at the same time, it filled my mind with a lot of questions as well. Did I have brothers or sisters? Was any still living? Had she been married before? If I was ageless like she implied, did that mean I wasn’t ever going to develop anymore? Was I doomed to always be stuck a preteen and be unable actually to be with a woman? Was everyone with magic ageless? Were all the girls here going to stay young forever? If so, I could see why they didn’t care about their virginity any more than mother did.

  In the end, I decided it was simply too many things to worry about that, I had no way of knowing without asking, and I tried to let my worries go. If I was ageless, I didn’t have any reason to worry. I had plenty of time
to learn the answers in the future, and only once chance in this life to enjoy being a child for a while longer. At the age of twelve, I could leave the island here, leave mother and father, and find my own way in the world as a tentative adult.

  I’d have thousands of years to learn adult things, deal with adult problems, and worry about adult issues. This was the only precious time I’d ever have where I could just relax and be a child, and I decided to indulge myself in it. When tomorrow is forever, it’s easiest to think just about today.

  The next morning, I got up and resumed my normal routine. I ate breakfast late in Le’Nara’s room. We hid from Father and skipped out on his lessons. Things went back to normal, with just a few exceptions. Most evenings now, I took time after supper and before bed to visit mother in her room before father showed up. I asked her various different things about being ageless and about magic in general. We grew closer and I no longer viewed her as a distant unapproachable figure.

  My mother had never ignored me; she had just been waiting for me to get old enough to seek her out for the things she could help me with. Mother knows magic. She knows about not growing old. She knows how to manage a school full of teenage girls, and how to defeat enemies with a flick of her wrist. She, however, didn’t have much of a clue at all about how to deal with babies of young children.

  As odd as it sounded to me, I was her firstborn child. Apparently, when magic alters one to make them ageless like us, it also alters them so that they’re no longer compatible for children with “normal” people. By using her magic to keep father young, she’d apparently altered his seed enough so that he was able to give her a child. I was a true miracle for her.

  Several thousand years of life, and I was her first child. It’s no wonder she was as awkward around me as I was around her sometimes! But, over time, we grew closer and learned to accept each other for the unique individuals that we were.

  A few other things I learned were first that I wasn’t finished growing yet. There wasn’t any reason for the magic to halt my growth to full adulthood. It’d just prevent me from growing older after that. Second, magic didn’t keep all people eternally young. In fact, it only affected a very small portion of those who could learn magic, and that was always those with the greatest potential.

  Of all the girls on the island, there were generally only one or two out of the whole bunch, who might have an extended lifespan, and usually, they still grew old – only at a slower rate. Currently, there was only one girl on the island who had the potential to become ageless; and that was Le’Nara. Her sister De’Nara also had the same potential, which is why father chose them both as his ‘favorites’. After all, if he trained them well now, when they come back to visit in twenty or thirty years, they’d be just as young and vibrant as ever – and used to indulging in his pleasure.

  He truly was an epic dirty old geezer!

  Another thing I learned was about male wizards. I had always half feared that they might be outlawed or something since there was never any on the island. Apparently, that’s not the case at all. It’s just that male wizards are much rarer than female wizards. Men had evolved to grow bigger muscles, and there were a lot more male soldiers, guards, and hunters than there were female. When it came to magic, it was something which women generally evolved to do, and they greatly outnumbered the males.

  And, when it came to those with the stronger magics, the ratio grew even more lopsided, just as it did when it came to women being able to lift weights. The stronger the man you looked at, the fewer the number of women who could compare with his strength. The same held true with magic. The stronger the female in magic, the fewer number of men could compare.

  And since the strength of magic helped determine the length of life, there were many times the number of ageless women-wizards than there were male-wizards. Mother had met several hundred ageless women throughout her life. She’d only twice had met an ageless male. I was the rarest of the rare, and mother suggested that it’d probably be wise if I didn’t go around flaunting my talents to the world until I grew a lot stronger.

  She even warned me that if I weren’t her own flesh and blood, she probably would’ve put me in shackles and chained me to her side for a couple of hundred years of training before unlocking me. Ageless women either walked the years alone; or else they walked them and watched the men they cared about grow old and fade away. What sin would be justifiable to get their hands on a man who could walk down the endless ages beside them?

  Needless to say, mother definitely opened up my eyes to a whole new field of worry in life!

  As far as magic goes, mother helped teach me many of the things that I was uncertain about already. She also helped me learn more about my limits. Magic is one of those things which is truly only limited by power, understanding, and imagination. If you could shape enough energy, imagine what you wanted to do with it, and understood how to do something, you could do anything!

  This made me really regret being born on Earth originally! I had the imagination to think of a limitless number of things that I could do, but my mind couldn’t accept that it didn’t understand how things worked. Travel magic like mother used was absolutely impossible for me! My mind wanted to think in terms of black holes or wormholes, as I’d read about those in books and magazines before. The only problem is, I didn’t have a clue how something like that actually worked. I knew OF them, but I didn’t understand them; ergo no POOF magic for me.

  Other things I couldn’t do was healing style magics. For some reason, most people of this world who learned magic could perform basic healing with it. I couldn’t. What was blood made of? Hemoglobin, iron, plasma, water… What the heck was that?! I knew just enough to know that I didn’t know, and thus I couldn’t understand how to make it and therefore I couldn’t heal. Others just thought “blood is blood”, and they didn’t worry about blood types or anything like that not matching, so they could imagine it working without worry and thus perform the magic.

  I knew just enough about some things to know that they didn’t work the way these folks thought they did, and thus it wouldn’t work for me. Earth made me smart enough to be unable to do some things!

  Of course, it wasn’t all bad; as some of the things I’d learned on Earth also helped me do other things. And some of the things that I could do were even beyond mother’s talents. Refining ore was one place where I truly excelled. I knew iron came from ore. I also knew that if the iron was smelted, and you worked the impurities out, you could make steel.

  For me, my brain simplified the process down to “get it hot, push the bad stuff out, and pack the good stuff tighter”. In magic, imagination could overcome the lack of understanding, and I could easily imagine the process in my mind. All I had to do was keep imagining, “get it hot, push the bad stuff out, and pack the good stuff tighter,” and I could reform plain stone into some magical substance stronger than any steel we had on the island. That’s what I had done to make the blade I had for De’Nara. I don’t know what material it was that I’d actually created, but it was a one of a kind Mik’hail special.

  Other things which I could do that amazed mother was turning sand into glass. I’d seen lightning strike the beach on TV back home, and I knew all it took was intense heat to turn sand into glass. I could easily imagine making it hot enough to melt, so transforming one to the other was a breeze for me. I could even turn coal into diamonds -- all it took was heat and pressure, and I could imagine that easily enough -- and that was almost enough to get Mother to hyperventilate. I was warned not to do such things very often as I could collapse the economy if I over did it. Not to mention that I’d probably become every kingdom’s number one target for secret kidnapping and abduction!

  With her stern warning ringing in my heart, I promised myself that I’d find some other way to earn coin beside turning coal into diamonds.

  As a safe means to earn myself some coin, I started playing around with wood and stone carving. It’s a breeze for me to work and
shape those things with my magic – I seem to truly excel in the elemental arts, and both wood and stone are influenced by earth magic that is my specialty – but I started learning how to make things without using my magic. Little carvings of birds and bunnies, wolves and foxes, deer and horses, became my forte.

  At first, I simply made them and gave them away to some of the girls on the island for whatever whimsy struck my fancy. If one looked depressed, I might give her a carving of a flower. If one laughed a lot and I liked it, I might give her a carving of a robin in flight. I did it to learn, and since I could feel the grain of the wood and steel with my magic, I learned rapidly.

  Before long, girls started coming to me and asking me to make things for them. At first, I was happy to do it simply to do it, but in time, the orders were coming faster than I could produce them without cheating. I was falling further and further behind, and it was Le’Nara who tossed me a lifeline and stepped up and helped with the problem. She couldn’t carve her way out of a paper bag with a machete, but she understood supply and demand and became my “middleman” with the customers. She started charging for my work – while taking a small portion off the top for her services of course – and I was finally beginning to earn some coin on my own!

  And, like that, a year came and went before I even realized it had passed. I hadn’t contacted anyone for an apprenticeship, I was still hiding my magic from the rest of the world, and I hadn’t made any plans really to leave home at all yet. I guess I’m blessed to have parents who were more than happy to see me stay with them longer, because without anyone ever making a conscious decision or talking about it, I simply stayed where I was and continued to learn and grow at my own pace.

  In the year that followed, I finally turned thirteen and entered puberty. I finally grew hair between my legs, and my manly equipment started to work all the time. Bulges in my pants weren’t uncommon and the girls would always giggle and have fun deliberately pointing my problem out for the world to see. Apparently, it became a game for some of them to see who could make me pitch a tent in my pants the most often.