by Jason Letts
“Not being born into a rich family?” she answered.
“You let him know how badly you wanted it. Now you’ll never get anything from him without paying a king’s ransom. But you shouldn’t feel totally defeated yet. I can still help you.”
Mira eyed him warily.
“If you know how badly I need it, then how’s it going to be different?” she asked.
“I certainly couldn’t charge you as much as he did, or you would walk away from me as well. And if I try to charge more than you have, then I’m certainly not going to get that either.”
“I don’t have very much,” Mira admitted.
“Maybe it’s a good thing that money isn’t the only thing I’m interested in.” The metal plates clinked as his hands moved.
“What is it that you want?” she asked.
“Depends, what do you have that you can give me?”
Mira met his gaze with her own narrow and focused eyes. She brought an unflinching attention to this negotiation.
“Who are you and what do you do?”
“Call me Yannick. I earn my living by locating and retrieving things for people. Sometimes those things can be found and acquired for free, but sometimes they cannot. I live in a tent outside of town on the path to Darmen. There is only dirty water over there, so I carry my water from here.”
It didn’t take Mira long to find a solution to his problem.
“Oh! What you need is a filter. I can make one of those. Then you’ll be able to drink the water from your stream and you won’t need to carry water from here all the way back to your tent.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I can see the value in that. Explain to me what you want.”
Mira told him about the neodymium magnet. She put the one she had in his hand and told him she needed a much bigger one. As soon as he touched it, he turned his head to the side like he was listening for something in the distance. He began nodding again.
Mira also told him about the zinc, and Yannick showed her some he had on his arm. Seeing it right in front of her, she wanted to snatch it up as if it were on the shelf at a store. The thin plate would be perfect and she could cut it into tiny discs and make a battery or two out of it.
“You’re doing it again, with your eyes, letting me know how badly you want something. You’ve got to control yourself. For your water filter, I’ll find what you’re looking for and give you the zinc plate. Do we have a deal?” He extended his hand.
“Give me this, and the plate too, to make the filter with,” she said, pointing to steel plates on his body. He nodded and they shook hands.
“How will I know when you’re back?” Mira asked.
Yannick made a chewing motion as he appraised her. He looked up above her eyes and then his hand shot out at her, grabbing a single strand of hair and ripping it from her head. He studied it.
“You could have warned me first,” she grumbled. Assuming that he would find her upon his return, Mira took the plates and went home. She couldn’t wait to fashion the zinc plate into a battery, charge it up, and see what kind of devices she could power. She felt less enthusiastic about the steel plates and the chore of making a filter for her new supplier.
Still, it dawned on her that she had made this trade entirely by herself. She wouldn’t have to ask her parents for any money, and she would be able to earn what she wanted with her very own hands. Satisfaction bloomed inside of her, and she thought making the filter wouldn’t be so bad after all.
As soon as Mira got home, she went down to the basement and got right to work.
Ogden Fortst surveyed the unruly and rambunctious class before him. The students seemed so much more intimidating and loud on this day, he thought. He tried to rally himself and stare down at them, but he couldn’t match their intensity and fervor.
“Silence! Silence all of you!” he shouted. “Let’s practice our mathematics. Can anyone tell me what seven times seven is?”
“No! We don’t want to do that!” a voice rose above the general outcry of revulsion.
“Come on now. This is important. You never know when you’re going to be bored and want to do some multiplying.”
“No!” the students shouted in a chorus. They went back to chattering with each other, and Fortst felt like he had lost all control.
“OK! I just had an idea. Let’s play that game you like. The one where you put your heads down and try to guess who tags you.”
“No!” The students cried again. “That’s not what we want to do either. You know what we want!”
A sudden fear took root in Fortst’s heart. It paralyzed his limbs and forced him to start breathing deeply. He looked away, shamefully, and felt himself sink further inside his skin. The students called to him, forcefully and aggressively.
“Tell us the story! We want to hear it! You can’t keep it from us!”
The single-mindedness of their fury unsettled him, and he became desperate for a way out. He was only a man, and he couldn’t do the impossible. He couldn’t reveal what he kept hidden even from himself.
“School is finished for today! I’m sick and need to go home! You can’t make me!”
The students rebelled louder each time he spoke. Fortst had never felt so defenseless and powerless. He slunk down onto the floor behind the lectern, hoping the students would go away and leave him alone. Tears filled his eyes and he pulled his massive trench coat over his head. He knew in that moment that taking this job had been a mistake.
He recalled how he’d never imagined he’d live to be so old and how he wished he hadn’t spent so much of his time alone. It stung him that the few people he had grown to care most about had been so ill repaid for their friendship.
The rabble died down, but no one left the schoolhouse. Fortst held those painful memories with a light and trembling hand. But a rude awakening came to him in the form of Chucky, who had crawled next to him behind the lecture. Chucky didn’t speak at first, but just watched with his big, brown bear eyes. Fortst felt like they were drinking him with their empathy and forgiveness.
“Teacher, you need to tell this story more than we need to hear it.” Chucky whispered. “The past can’t get you anymore. It is waiting for you to conquer it. The only way to take control of what happened is through the telling. You’re not one to shy away from a fight, and this is how you take the fight to a story.”
Fortst gave Chucky a puzzled look. His heavy breathing started to calm down.
“I’m not afraid of a story,” Fortst whimpered.
Chucky scrambled back to his seat.
A huffed cry escaped from Fortst’s lungs, and he lurched onto his knees, then up to his feet.
The students waited in silence, their eyes curious and receptive. Even one judging look from the crowd would have brought him to tears. But, with a nervous stutter, he ground the words through his throat.
“I’ve never told anyone this before. It was supposed to be my secret, my burden, something that only haunted my dreams and looked at me from the dark. But I can’t let it haunt me anymore, my greatest failure.
“The old man, a mystic of sorts, who channeled the knowledge of which steps to take, guided us through the wastelands. And let me tell you, he would not have been able to make the journey alone. We carried him up cliffs and over rapids, through the southern fingers of the great frozen desert. Our maps became useless, and we wandered for months. Spirits cracked and healed many times, but we took the chance, because a payoff unlike anyone had ever heard of was at hand. My brothers of the badlands and I took care of our feeble, often-unconscious guide as best we could. We guarded him, brought him food, and urged him on.
“In some ways, he became our pet, operating on a basic level of consciousness. He often forgot what he was doing or settled down to rest while the sun still hung high in the sky. We drove him, encouraged him, or scolded him as was necessary, but deep down we empathized with him. He searched hopelessly for a way to save his village long after it had been destroyed and lon
g after his own body had given up.
“But, slowly, signs came that we were approaching something, even though weeks or months of trekking still remained. We saw the old man’s feet drag deeper into the dirt or the sand, reaching for those buried footprints. His path became more direct, and we imagined the frantic flight of the defeated as they tried to get as far away as possible. He seemed to sense nearby footsteps also, perhaps sensing a phantom crowd attempting the same journey.
“We talked about him, complained, and judged his behavior as if he weren’t there, but eventually he led us to a low plateau in the shadow of a tall mountain. Grasses covered the plain, but no sign of human or animal life presented itself. Not even insects, which unsettled us.
“We crossed the plain and descended into the nook in front of the mountain. We lowered the old man down, wondering where he would lead us next through this jagged crevasse. A fierce wind swept through and he almost fell to his death. But he stepped down on a stable ledge and looked around. The mountain wall on the other side was too far and a great distance still remained to the bottom.
“We called to the old man, shouted at him, and waited for him to guide us. ‘Which way? Let us move on!’ But still he would not move. His back leaned against the rock wall, and he seemed to sleep standing up. We fretted his body would give out completely and we would be stranded there, so close to our goal but lost to it forever.
“After a day of waiting on the cliffside, one of my brothers came upon a genius idea. He said we must have arrived, encouraging us to scour the surface for an entrance, loose rock, a cave, anything. We couldn’t find any markings, or evidence that anything had ever existed here before. Returning to the old man, who was still leaning against the ledge, we moved him to a safer place and then unleashed the full force of our strength against the rock blocking his path. We attacked, mutilated, and pierced the solid stone, chipping away at it, willing it to disintegrate.
“We applied our powers and even then only made painstaking headway. A small cave formed in the rock, enough to allow our elderly guide to give us a hint about our direction. We dug down underneath the plateau, shoveling the displaced rubble into the crevasse. Our path sloped downward, where little light entered. We had to build supports for the walls to ward off a cave-in.
“Slashing and cutting, we delivered the last strike that caused the rock to give way completely and we slid through the opening and fell into an open cavern. The fall was not far, just completely unexpected. When we came to our senses, we lit torches and discovered we stood in a great hall with massive pillars and intricate decorations. Dust and silt covered all surfaces, but the majesty and the scope of it beckoned our wonder and took our breath away.
“The first thing we did was pile furniture around where we fell through to make sure we could get out, and then we quickly moved onto the task of exploring this new environment. Carrying torches, we saw empty frames on the walls, wooden furniture reduced to piles of toothpicks, and embedded jewels of the kinds we had never seen before. The timeless stone dwarfed all of it.
“Cataloguing the different corridors that connected to the hall, we explored other rooms linked through passageways in the floor and ceiling. The palace soon seemed more like a maze, but we kept close to each other, just in case this place was not vacant. The only things we found were dust and decomposed materials, which very well could have been human.
“Checking off another passageway, we made our way back to the main hall and walked down the center aisle. We saved the most decorated passageway for last, the one that stood opposite the entrance. We ducked into it and an eerie sensation made the hairs on our arms stand up. The air smelled like rotten milk. I just wish we’d given up right then and turned around to go all the way back.
“But we didn’t. We didn’t know. And we emerged into a throne room that felt both like a womb and a grave. Everything felt lighter there. Our weapons were weightless. But as we looked around, we saw skulls levitating in the corners around roots that peeked through the walls. That should have been a clear sign something was terribly wrong, but what we saw next could not be ignored.
“I’d like to tell you a special light shone down on it from above, or that it shimmered in its own dazzling light, but it didn’t. It was dirty and dull like an old shoe you find by the road. It just sat there collecting dust on a pedestal in front of the throne. It looked like a rock, but we were drawn to its presence, and we inched forward.
“Time seemed to stop. The diamond carafe of Hakotin lay on the pedestal, the glory and the power of an omnipotent king who preserved the one thing he cherished above all else. The desire to know what it contained drew us forward.
“Our hands were reaching toward the carafe, this little bottle. A sudden vision came into my head. My mind’s eye had visions of a planet, our planet. It constantly changed, moving along a cycle of death and rebirth. A flourish of green gave way to an absolute of gray. I watched it happen before my eyes more times than I could count. I wanted that power. I wanted it for myself. The temptation to rule the world drove me out of my mind.
“In that still moment, I turned against those around me. I drew my weapon and prepared to strike. But something happened that I did not expect. Swinging at them and forcing them back, I drove my friends into the hands of my enemy. Arent stood at the edge of the passageway. He leapt out and grabbed my friend by the shoulder. I could hear his heart burst within his chest and he perished immediately, collapsing onto the floor.
“I recognized his blank stare, like his body operated apart from his mind, and my greed gave way to a tidal wave of rage. The shame and the failure that his presence was enough to choke the life out of me. He must have followed us for a year, staying out of sight, waiting for us to lead him to something of immeasurable value. We never detected him, never imagined that we brought our ruin with us.
“I rushed forward with a warrior’s yell, but my compatriots thought I was attacking them. They defended the man who wanted to kill us all, and while they did so, he came up behind them and finished them off. I tried to tell them what was going on, but by the time they realized we had been followed it was too late. My last companion and I coordinated our attacks, but Arent was too agile and too cunning.
“He shattered my friend’s sword and fell upon him. By the time I got there, it was too late. A pain seared my heart that you can never imagine, and I swore to myself revenge would be mine. We brawled furiously. I held his wrists so he couldn’t do the same to me as to my friends. But I knew the only way to finish him was with his own power.
“I forced him up against the wall near the entrance. My anger and my hatred boiled over, and my strength overpowered him. In an instant, I seized his hand and reached out for his head. But he ducked out of the way and forced my hand to the wall, which exploded, spewing rock fragments everywhere.
“It knocked Arent unconscious, but I sensed the ceiling would collapse and bury us under tons of stone. I dove for the entrance as the room behind me filled with the rock from above. Unable to look back, unable to rescue the diamond carafe that had been my greatest hope and greatest failure, I dashed for our tunnel while the cavern crumbled and filled. I could hear the pillars shatter and feel the ground shake from the weight of great boulders.
“Why I ran so hard, why I wanted to escape from the threat of being buried with my friends, I don’t know. It was instinct, self-preservation, I guess. I wasn’t thinking. But I would have all the time in the world to think about this disastrous series of mistakes while I wandered the wastes alone. Arent left our guide’s mutilated cadaver for me on the cliff’s ledge, and so I was the only one who made it out alive. That massive plateau had transformed entirely, obliterating the ancient palace lodged underneath it.
“The regret and despair over that chain of mistakes haunted my life. Deciding to pursue such an unbelievable artifact, the greedy impulse that made me turn on my friends, my ill-timed attack that sealed their fate, and my desperate need for revenge all ruined m
y chance at controlling the greatest power the universe could conceive. In my moments of weakness, I think about that. Only one man stood in the way of gaining the diamond carafe. Still, I couldn’t conquer him. I was so close.”
The effort of telling the story exhausted Ogden Fortst. He leaned over the lectern and his legs felt limp. His eyes burned on the verge of tears, but that seemed to keep the students quiet. The horrible images he saw in his mind contorted his face as though they were right there in front of him.
“You don’t need to punish yourself for trying to take the carafe. If my gift has taught me anything about emotion, I know your friends were thinking the same thing. If you had waited another moment, one of them would have done it,” said Roselyn, who had difficulty restraining herself from alleviating her teacher’s pain.
“Don’t feel bad about taking a chance at discovering something incredible. If someone started talking about a completely improbable, totally unrealistic way to become the all-powerful ruler of the globe, I would be the first one onboard,” said Vern, checking the reaction of his peers.
“If I were in the same position as you, trying to get revenge for my friends, I know I would have done the exact same thing. I know this. Nothing would have held me back from making him pay the price,” said Aoi, her eyes fiery.
“I just wish it had never happened,” Fortst mumbled, shaken.
Chucky spoke up. “You didn’t have control. It wasn’t up to you how it all turned out. You need to forgive yourself for not being all powerful.”
Fortst nodded grudgingly. “That’s all for today. I can’t do anymore,” he said, looking worn and vulnerable. Slowly, he collected his things and trudged to the exit even though the morning was only half over. The students had trouble conveying their astounded, awe-struck impressions.
“That may be the most important thing he’s ever taught us,” mumbled Dennis, as the other students crowded around him.