by E. M. Knight
She opened her eyes and spread her arms to the side. The ball continued to float in mid-air.
I stared at it.
“You see it,” she said.
I frowned. “Of course, I do.”
“Good.” The ball winked out of existence. “I had to check. A great amount of time would be wasted if you did not have The Spark.”
“I’ve heard that term before,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“Why, it’s what gives you the ability to do magic.”
***
From that day on, the woman became my stalwart companion.
She would not reveal much of herself, however. I was not even given her name. All she would say was that she was there to make sure I was being taught.
But taught what? I could not tell. Every day she cast that small glowing ball for me. Every day she would ask if I could see it.
Every day I would affirm, and every day she would let it wink out and disappear without a single word of explanation.
Within a week, I had the scope of the entire Red Keep mapped out in my mind. It was a near-endless maze of tunnels and paths, but each of them ultimately led to a dead end. The only way in, or out, was up.
It was how Dagan had deposited me there.
Sometimes I thought I glimpsed quick shadows darting down from the ever-present smog above. But whenever I looked they were gone. The number of children in the cages remained constant.
It was not until some months spent living down there that I realized that while the number of children remained the same, the population didn’t. There was a constant turnover. Existing prisoners were taken away and new ones added on a near-daily basis.
But my interest was not in them. I could not abide their screams any more than I could abide their wretchedness. They all disgusted me. Perhaps it was a self-defense mechanism, a saving of my ego, for I was in exactly their same state. But directing my loathing outward, toward them, prevented me from mirroring that same emotion at myself.
That was, perhaps, the only way I remained sane.
Sometimes, I joined the woman on her chores. I gave the children bread without looking at their faces. These paltry humans could not compare to the magnificence of the creatures holding me there. I suffered from delusions of grandeur, have no doubt, and because of that, I saw them as miles below myself.
Life took on a monotonous, meaningless routine. But in the background, the clock was ticking. I was coming closer and closer to being transformed.
In fact—though I did not know it at the time—the transformation had begun the first day, when I tasted that awful blood. There was a drop, just a smidge, of vampiric blood mixed in there. It initiated the slow, drawn-out transformation process that ultimately left me weak and perpetually incapable of increasing my strength.
But the King had planned things that way, for he could not have someone with his blood, and The Spark, rising up to threaten him in the future.
That understanding came only in later years.
So life continued on as such, in monotony, without purpose, but with that ever-present goal in the background: to become as beautiful, as polished, as fantastical and sublime and pure as all the vampires I had seen celebrating the day I was caught.
After an indeterminable span of weeks, or perhaps even months, the woman confided something in me. She said that the only reason I was outside of the cages in the Red Keep was my magical talent. I viewed the revelation with great skepticism. I did not feel like I had any talent.
But then she said that the reason I had been lured down to the underground was that I could see the way. I knew not what that meant. She left the remark as cryptic as that and spoke no more of it.
But as our daily ritual of her showing me the glowing blue ball continued, I began to suspect the question she asked each time had a deeper meaning to it than what I had previously gathered. I also noticed, for the first time, how none of the children in the cages gave any sort of reaction when she created the magical light.
I was blinded by my utter disdain for them. At first, they’d commanded my pity, but no longer. I had never given them enough attention to realize that if they could see the light, they would have shown that. In some small way, with some small reaction, they would have acknowledged that something about their surroundings had changed.
They did not.
And so it fell on me that perhaps I really was different, that perhaps what this woman said of The Spark really was true.
Perhaps—though this was hardest of all to believe—I actually was the son of the vampire King.
A shudder of ecstasy took me the first time I entertained the thought.
What possibilities did the world hold? What wonders would be revealed to me when I was made? Suddenly, my entire mindset shifted. No longer was I merely here to endure. I had to survive, I had to thrive and prosper.
But how to prosper in the pits, how to prosper in this eternal gloom? Only one way of doing so came to me: I had to develop and exploit this Spark for all its worth.
So I started questioning the woman ceaselessly. When she summoned the light, how did she do it, what did she feel? What was it like to wield a seemingly otherworldly power like that?
I had to know it all.
But, true to her character, she refused to say a word.
I did not give up. Her existence in that place seemed as meaningless as mine. But then I realized that maybe she was there to teach me, maybe she was there to guide me, and maybe—just maybe—none of this was coincidence at all.
I persisted. Just like she could pick up the bread that was deposited for her every day and feed it to the children, I could pick up my feet, re-engage my mind, and ask her, again and again and again, how I could do what she did.
My approach could have easily backfired. She could have gotten greatly annoyed and started to shun me. But just as she was my only companion, I was also hers. I did not know what she had done to be sentenced to such a fate, but I sensed within her a longing for greater meaning. For greater purpose.
For a life above the smoke.
So our daily ritual evolved into something progressively more instructive. She would summon the light. She would ask if I could see it—I would confirm I could, then I would start barraging her with questions.
I was like a woodpecker, incessant, unrelenting, stupidly obsessive.
It was some weeks before my questions met a response more meaningful than silence. Almost a month in, she actually paused, looked at me, and smiled.
“You really want this?” she said.
Hope bloomed in my chest. “Yes. I really do.”
“Then follow me.”
She took me down a path away from the stinking fires and rusting cages, in a direction that I knew led to a dead-end.
We reached the end of the cave. I looked around. The light from the fires had long ago ceased to reach that far, but the woman had summoned that glowing ball again and used it as a miniature sun.
She nodded to the corner wall. “What do you see?”
I squinted in the near-dark. “Nothing.”
She struck me. I cried out, not from pain, but from surprise.
“Try again.”
I stood back up and glanced at her, then at the cavern wall. It was dark, uneven rock. Nothing about it was the least bit peculiar.
“Close your eyes,” she whispered.
I gave a start. “What?”
“Close your eyes, and use your senses. You made your way into the vampires’ midst once. You were guided by The Spark then. Do it now, Riyu.”
It was the first time she had used my name. In fact, I could not remember ever having given it.
That cemented things in my mind. She was there for a reason.
So, I did as she asked. I closed my eyes, concentrated, and really tried.
“The same way that you felt my presence,” she told me. “I want you to feel the opening in the rock. Trust not your eyesight, for it is false. Trust only you
r instincts. Trust only your heart.”
An image of the big, muscly vampire came to my mind.
I dismissed it as quickly as I could.
I focused more on the cave. The woman’s whispers continued in my ear. “Yes… there you go. You’re doing it. Yes, yes...” Her growing ball winked out. “Yes, focus, boy, focus!”
I strained and concentrated. Doubt started to swirl in the back of my mind about the sanity of all of this. But I bade the thoughts away, and continued focusing on nothing but the cave, trying to know it as I knew the presence of one near.
In a sudden flash, it revealed itself to me. I had no conception of how it had happened, or what I had done. All I knew was that in my mind’s eye I could see the entirety of the rockface before me.
But it was more than that. I could see, I could sense, every small imperfection, every crumbled roughened edge. I knew the rock that was in front of me, more intimately than I had known anything in my life. I knew the faults in it. I knew the strengths. I knew the precise point one would have to hit it with a hammer to make it erupt in a spider web of fissures. I knew the amount of water it contained, the amount of ash, I knew the very composition of the stone itself.
I also knew, there and then, that part of it was a facade. Some sort of illusion, which I had no explanation for, that disguised the secret entrance near the ground.
I opened my eyes. Though it was still pitch black I moved with perfect precision. I crouched down before the opening, reaching out…
Where my hand should have struck stone it found nothing but empty space. Triumph rang through me like a winning bell. In my excitement, I surged straight up—and lost my hold on the vision in my mind completely.
For a second, I staggered. The woman did not seem surprised. Nor did she appear overly pleased. “Took you long enough,” she muttered, and, ducking in, called out over her back, “Come on.”
Groping blindly in the dark I found the opening once more and followed her through.
We only had to crawl for a short span of time before the tunnel opened up and allowed us to stand. The woman cast the ball of light again. It was stronger, brighter in there, than I’ve ever seen it before.
I looked around. We were in an oval chamber. I had the distinct impression I had been there before.
And of course, I had. This was where the vampires first dumped me after the King had stopped Dagan from feeding.
The woman explained what it was.
“We are inside something that might be called a torrial, Riyu,” she’d said. “Though those who would deem it such would be mistaken. Torrials are the creations of witches. This cavern, this place… is a natural feature of the earth.”
“What is it?” I asked. And then, “Is that what you are? A witch?”
“It is what you are,” she’d said. “If you allow yourself to be.”
I did not understand what she meant by the last. But the first part resonated deeply.
I was a witch?
Yet on some level, I had always known I was different. Beyond my… certain tastes. Perhaps that was why I’d never felt quite at home in the village. Maybe that was the drive that inspired me to go beneath ground in search of those we’d deemed as gods.
“This chamber is a place that concentrates the magical energies of the world,” she said. “There are four of them. They are called the Elemental Seals. Each time you channel magic, you draw upon a select portion of each of the seals. They correspond to the four elemental forces: earth, fire, air, and water. Together they work in perfect harmony to give order to the world. What we can do, as witches, is disrupt that harmony and manipulate the Seals to serve our purpose.
“Imagine a still lake of water. There is no breeze. The surface is placid. It does not move. But! Drop a pebble in the middle, and you create a splash, and from the impact, ripples, ripples that fan out and bring small waves to shore.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“We are the pebble, Riyu. The lake is the combination of all the seals. The disruption—that is magic. And the waves reaching shore? Those are the tangible effects of our spells on the world.”
My eyes widened in excitement with every additional word.
“The Elemental Seals flow all over the world, in great, huge, invisible flumes. They are like the ocean’s currents or the streaking clouds. Most are oblivious to them. And yes, this includes those creatures you so much look up to. Vampires have a much richer palette of senses than humans do, but even they are blind to the Seals.
“That is because meddling with magic is a dangerous business. Only those born with The Spark have any chance of success. Not only that. The Spark must be nurtured, it must be grown. If it is not developed in time, the ability that a child was born with is forever lost. And that, my dear, is a tragic thing.”
I stared at the woman—the witch—and tried to soak up every last word. That was the most she’d ever said to me. In fact, I thought her verbal output then doubled all the words she’d said to me before.
“But mine exists,” I said. “And we’ll nurture it, that’s what we’ll do?” I could scarcely contain my budding excitement.
“That is what we will try to do, yes, in the time that is given to us.”
“You mean—”
“Four years is not enough, Riyu. And already months have been wasted. I am sorry, but I had to know. I had to be certain you wanted this.”
“I do!” I exclaimed.
“I had to be sure you were ready. For what I will teach you next… can be more dangerous than all the vampires above us combined.”
***
And so my tutelage under the unnamed witch began.
She taught me, in that chamber, how to manipulate the forces and let them do my bidding. She taught me the difference between an incantation and a spell, between a vexation and a curse. She opened my eyes to the wonderful kaleidoscope of colors that magic was, while, never letting me forget its dangers.
“Draw too much and you risk burning out. Channel too often and you risk losing control. There is a balance, Riyu, to everything we do. The best witch understands that balance, understands her limitations, and works with them to do exactly what her talents allow her to do and no more. The amount of magic you can use will never change. It varies from person to person, based on the strength of their Spark.”
“And mine?” I asked. “How strong is mine?”
I’d been growing bolder the last few weeks, hurling spells around in the chamber with reckless abandon and no small amount of glee.
“...middling,” she told me.
My face fell.
“But your mind is sharp, and that accounts for a lot,” she said. “You do not have the raw strength possessed by some witches, but you make up for it in other ways. You grasp concepts quickly. You can weave together more strands of the Elemental Seals than a witch with twice your training. Those are not small trifles to be dismissed out-of-hand. They are the mark of someone with great potential, the tell-tale signs of one who may yet go and leave his mark on the world.”
I glowed under the praise. I was starting to develop a soft spot for my teacher.
She thrust a slop bucket at me. “Now, go clean out the cages.”
***
Little did I know that my stint in paradise was not to last.
For my Father’s vampires were watching. Dagan was watching. And, above all?
Beatrice was watching.
***
Another month passed, perhaps two, before calamity struck.
It was a morning like any other. And by morning I mean the time where I was usually asleep. There was no way to distinguish true morning from that far underground.
I turned over in my cot, lost in a strangely pleasant dream, when an odd smell flitted to my nose. It took me a few seconds to realize it was not part of the dream, and another few moments for my mind to truly wake up and jolt me to alarm.
I opened my eyes. I had grown accustomed to the scents down there. But tha
t one was something fouler, something more awful.
It smelled like… roasting flesh.
I sat up, testing the air once more. Yes, the odd, unpleasant aroma was still there.
Something told me to investigate.
I crawled out of my cage and stood up. I took one casual glance at the other cages—and stopped cold.
They were all empty.
That’s when I realized it was not the far away smell that dragged me awake, but the strange, pervading silence that had fallen upon the Red Keep. There was always some child crying in one of the wretched metal contraptions that surrounded me.
Now, there were none.
Alarm rippled through me. I felt my pulse quicken. I tried to open my mind to the Elemental Seals to let them give me an impression of the place, but the forces were too distant. The magic was too faint.
Before, all the channeling I’d done was conducted in that concentrated storeroom.
I did a slow circle, sniffing the air, and found the direction of the smell. I picked my feet up and hurried that way.
As I trotted, the smell grew stronger and stronger. It repulsed me. Every cell in my being urged me to turn away. That instinct was overpowered not by any grand sense of courage, but by my damn pervasive curiosity. I could not do away with it even if I knew it would be best for me.
I turned a corner and found a grisly scene.
There was a fire burning in the middle of a pit. Around it stood countless tall, hooded figures. Beyond them, off to the side—a pile of bodies.
I nearly gagged when I saw what had become of them.
All the children were there, all perfectly dead, and all arranged in a grotesque pyramid formation. The memory of that day is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind.
The hooded figures—the vampires, I knew it from the way they moved—made their way over to the bodies, and, in an oddly precise ritual, cast them into the burning pit, one by one.
Each time they did, that awful smell intensified.
I was speechless, aghast, terrified. My feet were rooted to the spot. I could not move, I could not run, I could not look away.