Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

by Matthew Medina

  But despite her strength and the refinement of her other senses, her lack of sight certainly made things more challenging.

  Catelyn was five cycles into her tenth sojourn when she had lost her sight and her family. Despite being so long ago, she could still recall the precise details of the horrific experience, six sojourns later.

  Perhaps it was because of the traumatic events which led to her blindness, or perhaps it was the simple fact that she wished to hold on to the last thing she saw, in spite of the horrors it unleashed upon her to do so, but whatever the reason, that last day was seared into her memory and she could recall every detail with perfect clarity, as if it had formed permanent scars on her mind.

  They were as familiar and comfortable to her as the scars adorning her face and chest, and the many thickened pads on her hands and feet.

  Catelyn did not shy away from those scars, or the pain that had led her to acquire them. Her parents had given her the gift of unflinching truth before they had been ripped away from her.

  She was their only child, and so they took great pains to maximize her understanding of their lives and not hide the reality of their situation from her.

  Her father Tomas and mother Sera were loving, kind and simple folk who lived as best they could under the insane yoke of the Emperor Uriel, the Third of His Name, as did nearly all the citizens of the continent of Exeter. To remain such warm and compassionate people in the face of what they had endured was rare, Catelyn knew.

  When she asked them why other people she met, though the occasions were rare, were not as kind, they simply responded “It’s because they don’t have you.”

  They had been teenagers when they had come to the Seat, both children of farmers who had lived outside the Walls before the ascendance of Emperor Uriel III, working the land in a tumble down village just outside the heart of the Empire.

  Since the rise of this new Emperor however, all citizens, free or indentured, had been required by imperial proclamation to relocate within the city walls.

  Her parents had begun teaching her about everything they could, from the humble lessons of their rural upbringing to the history of their nation, as soon as she was old enough to understand their words.

  Her father always prefaced such lessons by declaring to her that he hoped to one day chronicle these events, and that is why he repeated them to her day after day. Her parents might have been the children of simple farmers, but before the Empire had forced them inside the Walls, they had been educated by their families, and they recognized in Catelyn a keenness of mind well beyond her sojourns.

  Catelyn remembered the lessons her parents would give at the end of every day, the weariness and the despair plain on their faces. But somehow, they found it in themselves to leave their cares outside their hovel and smile when they saw her.

  She was not surprised to realize that she recalled nearly every word of the last such lesson with her father, just half a span before they were stolen from her forever. And she smiled at the memory of her father’s voice, deep and full of warmth, despite the grim subject matter.

  “Uriel the Third of His Name, the Emperor, usurped...that means to take away from someone else... the Empire from his own father, Uriel the Second of His Name, in a military coup by gaining control over the vast Imperial army, comprised of both free men and mercenaries.

  “The Imperial army of Exeter is renowned for its military prowess and size. Under his father Uriel the Second, this army had been spread far and wide across the known world. Uriel the Third secretly recalled many of the army’s most elite units to the capital, and used them to take control of the Seat, overthrowing his father in a bloody conflict that nearly tore the city apart. After he seized power, his first act was to recall every one of his soldiers to the homeland, to be the fist that he needed to enforce his power over the people.”

  Young Catelyn tried to imagine the streets she knew clogged with soldiers fighting and dying, but she couldn’t. She had never seen so many people before.

  “When the Emperor proclaimed his relocation order, ordering everyone to move within the walls of the city, a number of people refused and many were summarily executed. Outlying villages, like the one your mother and I grew up in, survived for a while, until Imperial army “death squads” were sent to eliminate any who dared oppose the Emperor.

  “Some of the commanders of the army were noble men, and they refused to follow such inhuman orders. To a man, every one of them was relieved of their command and executed in the most horrifying ways. Uriel is merciless in his application of discipline. When all the people saw what the Emperor was capable of doing even to those he had once put his full trust in, they saw no other choice but to comply.”

  Catelyn always felt the pain of her parents deep below the surface when they talked about this last act of defiance. Although her mother and father were beaten down just as everyone else was, she got the feeling that there was more to it. More than they were comfortable telling her. Those moments always passed, though, and the lessons moved on.

  “Uriel spent the bulk of his immense wealth and power, and the first dozen sojourns of his reign fortifying the city walls from threats both within and without his domain. He rewarded the most cruel of his commanders, and they soon rose to positions of prominence alongside Uriel.

  “With their help, and the unpaid labor of all the citizens of the Seat, the walls were expanded to a number of the outlying cities of the Empire, until finally the entirety of his Empire was enclosed within walls several hundred paces high. Our entire nation, and all of its people, imprisoned under the yoke of a mad ruler.”

  This last sentence was always spoken in hushed, clipped voices, as though her parents feared being overheard by some secret listener. Although they seemed cautious about revealing such feelings, Catelyn also saw a spark of something in their eyes when they talked about it.

  “Only a few citizens of Exeter have seen the world outside of these walls in the last two generations. Your mother and I were among the last, with our families holding on as long as they could, gathering what we harvested and using it to bribe officials to keep our village alive and free from Imperial control.

  “It took an Imperial regiment marching upon our village before our elders realized the dire threat we all faced for not moving. Our families gave up our homes and our lives and we entered the Seat. Sometimes, I wish that they had made the decision to just run and that we had taken our chances as fugitives. But your mother and I were young, not that much older than you are now.”

  It didn’t matter whether it was her father or her mother telling her this history. The look on their faces at the end of this story was the same, and Catelyn felt a stab of pain at seeing her parents so full of fear and regret.

  They never talked much about their lives after moving into the Seat, but Catelyn could fill in the gaps on her own.

  She knew that her parents had been unprepared for the radical change their lives had undergone. A simple life as farmers may not have been glamorous or exciting, but it was a noble calling and one which both her parent's families had taken pride in. But within the walls, every citizen was assigned their profession, and there was no discussion or debate about it whatsoever.

  Despite having sojourns of farming experience for much of their young lives, food production in the Seat was tightly controlled and her parents did not have the influence to land such fortunate positions. Instead, they were forced into trades that they would have never considered outside the Seat.

  Tomas was forced to work directly for the Empire as a “tax collector”, which in the case of the rule of Uriel III, meant that he ran with a gang of street toughs who in fact collected protection money, extorting businesses in return for their continued ability to remain unmolested by Imperial soldiers. Nothing could have been more inappropriate for her father, as Catelyn’s experience of him was of a warm, peaceful man at heart.

  She couldn’t have imagined him being capable of raising his hand in a
nger to anyone, but she also knew that he had no choice if he was going to bring home his ration of food every week. He also brought home the marks and scars of such a trade, but he always made excuses about where such wounds had come from, so as not to worry his family.

  Sera, on the other hand, was employed to sell addictive substances to her fellow neighbors, and on occasion, to sell herself as a companion to Imperial soldiers.

  Catelyn hated thinking about this part of her family’s struggle, but her mother had never shied away from talking about what she did or how it made her feel. She would always tell Catelyn truthfully, “This is the world we live in now. I do this for us.”

  Catelyn knew that it repulsed her mother to be made to satisfy the darkest desires of the thugs which comprised the bulk of the Imperial Army, but she bore this burden in order that she might enjoy what remained of her life with her family, rather than face execution.

  Only once had Catelyn seen her mother unnerved by what the Empire had made of her, and it was a memory she would never forget.

  Catelyn was just a few sojourns old, and she was playing on the floor of their family's kitchen, with some wooden blocks that her father had carved for her. Every now and then, she looked up at her mother, pacing back and forth and biting her nails. Catelyn had seen her mother acting like this before, usually when they were waiting for her father to get home.

  “It's OK, mama. He'll come home. He always does,” Catelyn said, hoping to reassure her mother.

  Catelyn's mother smiled at her, and she went back to her play, confident that her father would walk through the door any moment.

  A knock on the door came instead, and Catelyn looked up to see a look of utter despair on her mother’s face. Her mother hurried to Catelyn and picked her up, saying soothing words and trying to smile through the tears smudging the dirt on her face.

  Her mother rushed Catelyn inside the closet of their home, and shut the door, but not before putting one hand to her lips, letting Catelyn know that she should remain quiet.

  Catelyn could see through a crack in the door, and she watched as her mother nervously crossed the room to open the door to their hovel.

  Catelyn wasn’t able to see who it was. Her view was obscured both by the open door and her mother’s body. It looked to Catelyn as though her mother was deliberately shielding her from whoever had come calling, but Catelyn could make out the muffled sound of a man's voice, and the sound of it still gave Catelyn chills.

  The exact words he said were unclear, but her mother was saying “I've done everything that has ever been asked of me! When will it be enough? Please. Please, just let me go.”

  Catelyn was horrified to see her mother's plea interrupted by a vicious blow that knocked her mother to the ground with terrible force.

  Catelyn forgot all about her mother's warnings to remain quiet and hidden, and she opened the closet door, crying out as she watched her mother try to get up and fight back, her hands clawing at her attacker.

  The man, who stepped into their home so that Catelyn could see him, was an Imperial officer wearing a full set of armor. His angry face, which Catelyn knew she would never forget as long as she lived, was criss-crossed by a number of scars, clearly identifying him as someone who made his living at war. His grey eyes were cold, and he once more struck out with his metal fist, effortlessly laying her mother low.

  Catelyn felt her heart sink as her mother slumped to the ground, beaten, and then she could only watch in horror as he stepped over Sera’s prone form in the doorway and marched across to where Catelyn was standing. Behind him, other men entered the room and picked her mother up and held her between them.

  The man looked down at Catelyn, then turned and growled at her mother in a gruff, heartless voice.

  “If you won’t come with us, then we’ll be forced to take the little one in your place!”

  Catelyn watched her mother's face screw up and her mouth moving wordlessly, as tears fell from her eyes, mixing with the flowing blood from a handful of cuts.

  The man turned back to Catelyn, his cold eyes glaring out from within that mask of mangled flesh, and he simply reached out and struck her with the same metal fist that he had laid into her mother.

  Catelyn’s world collapsed into darkness in that moment, and she felt herself drop to her knees. She didn't know how long that pain and disorientation lasted.

  When she regained some semblance of awareness, she heard her mother’s pleading voice, followed by the hateful shouts of the man standing above her, as she was jostled roughly and pulled to her feet and away towards the door.

  And then finally, Catelyn heard something that would haunt her nearly every night from that day forward.

  Her mother’s surrender.

  Sera broke free from the men holding onto her and went to her knees, grabbing the leg of the man holding Catelyn.

  “Please no, give me one more chance. Please. Don't take my angel. Please. Take me. I'll go. Just let her be. Please,” her mother wailed, each word more plaintive than the one before.

  Catelyn was still dizzy and her jaw was on fire from the blow, but she looked up to see the man shift his gaze from Catelyn to her mother, and back again.

  Finally, he reached down and slugged Sera once more, and then dumped Catelyn back onto the floor.

  “That one was for making us have to come out here to this shithole.”

  He grabbed her mother by the collar and dragged her away, out the door.

  Catelyn sat on the floor crying, in a numbing haze for prayers, before her father Tomas came home.

  Catelyn was only dimly aware of him at first, as he frantically searched their home, and then he came running to Catelyn, picking her up in his arms and holding her so closely. She recounted everything that she had witnessed, and her father simply listened, tears in his eyes as wailing sobs escaped his chapped lips.

  When he regained some of his composure, he spent that afternoon caring for Catelyn, cleaning and dressing the cuts on her face as she could only look at him in shocked, stunned silence.

  Her mother returned to their home later that night, her face still swollen and her eyes fixed in a rigid mask of pain. When she entered their hovel, Tomas got up and ran to her, grabbing onto her and refusing to let go, with the exception of when it was time to put Catelyn to bed.

  Once he'd tucked her into her blankets, Catelyn's mind and body refused to sleep, and she spent that whole night wide awake, listening numbly as her parents talked in hushed voices until morning.

  After that encounter, Catelyn witnessed her mother begin to dissociate from the essential, vital part of herself in order to survive, and both her parents took on the look of all the other people Catelyn had ever seen in her life; broken and hopeless.

  Catelyn learned something else from that encounter as well. She didn’t know how she had come to the conclusion, whether it was from seeing the tragic lives of her parents or from reading the contraband books that her parents had hidden throughout their small home, but she was convinced that despite his delusions of divinity and righteousness, the Emperor Uriel III was really no better than a criminal, and his empire a playground for his own dark desires.

  Despite her young age, and ironically in spite of her physical blindness, Catelyn’s experiences had opened her eyes to an Empire built on a foundation of corruption and the demented will of criminals, where chaos and violence were rampant. The only “order” Catelyn had known came from the Imperial army, a tyrannical organization that was renowned for putting down any hint of unrest with brutal swiftness and lethal force. She had experienced firsthand how fear, sheer numbers and superior arms did much to control people already made vulnerable by poverty and abject terror.

  Catelyn also knew that Uriel III did much to appeal to his citizens basest instincts, and in her life, she had witnessed or been told about myriad forms of abasement such as sexual displays on every corner, blood sport arenas which hosted daily shows of barbarism and brutality to animal and man alike
, and encouragement by the Empire for the common people to imbibe free-flowing drink and drugs. Even Catelyn could see that Uriel maintained his rule by keeping his people either too numb or too stimulated to care that they were little more than chattel for the whims of a madman.

  One of the books that her parents had given her to read told of a different kind of empire; and of the rights of ordinary men and women to liberation of body and mind. The land of Exeter, once a free nation with nobility and dignity, was now comprised mostly of the worst criminals in the history of Ereas.

  It was into such a world that Catelyn had been born. It was the 1,056th sojourn by Imperial Reckoning, of the Grand Cycle. Her birth was one of several successful births in several sojourns, Uriel III having instituted rigid population controls after completion of the Wall of Regret in the 1,034th sojourn.

  Her parents had explained not having brothers or sisters to her one day, as something that had been decreed by Imperial Order. Her parents had been fortunate enough to be one of two hundred couples throughout the Empire each sojourn who had won a lottery that had granted them the right to procreate. Any unauthorized childbirth was deemed a threat to the Empire and the entire family was subsequently slaughtered; the parents and infant made very public examples of. Despite her fortune in being allowed the chance to live, the early sojourns of Catelyn’s life were fraught with danger and heartache.

  Resentment and jealousy surrounding the rights of the “chosen”, as the winners of the lottery were called, was rampant and encouraged by the Emperor himself. The parents who were given such a chance were often set upon and killed following the birth of the child, and those children at times stolen by rival couples who had not been selected for the privilege. Catelyn’s father had explained that Uriel III believed devoutly in the idea that such struggles would only benefit his Empire, making the children stronger future citizens, and that any of the parents who died were clearly too weak to raise the next generation of Imperial subjects.

  This was the reason that Tomas and Sera moved the family on several occasions, and why they worked opposite prayers from one another, so that Catelyn would never be home alone and unprotected.