Chosen (A Tale of Thyss the Sorceress)

by Martin Parece II

  ***

  Thyssallia leaned out her window, looking down the side of her father’s palace and out over the river. The river was a thousand foot wide, blue snake that ran west to the ocean some fifty miles away. Even this far inland, it still tasted of salt, and little grew within several hundred feet of its banks. Several large docks had been constructed on the River Thyss to accommodate both her father’s barge and the vessels that occasionally came from the ocean bringing goods.

  The palace itself was ten levels, each about fifteen feet tall and a little smaller in area than the one below it, giving the whole edifice a tiered, stair stepped appearance. Thyssallia occupied half of the fourth level from the top, while her mother had the entire floor above her. Mon’El kept the top two floors to himself of course. The palace was constructed of a rather plain brown stone, but then obsidian had been veneered across almost the entire outer surface.

  She dreaded what was to come, for she had seen anger upon her father’s face before, but rarely directed at her. She didn’t completely understand why her father was angry. Generally, she was allowed to do what she willed when she willed, as was proper of the bronze skinned rulers in Dulkur, but she was not yet a ruler. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be, especially if that meant she couldn’t visit proper punishment on a mere peasant.

  She waited for hours, as the sun passed its highest point, and her stomach began to growl with the realization that she hadn’t eaten anything but the grapes. She grew sleepy and her limbs heavy, so she curled up into a ball on her bed not unlike a cat. When she awoke, the sun was halfway to the horizon, and still Mon’El had not come. She paced her large room like an anxious cat, looking for something to amuse her, and she found it in her two guards that watched her from just inside her door.

  “Give me your sword,” Thyssallia commanded to one as she approached. It was a bronze handled weapon, long and curved, and her muscles protested momentarily as she felt the weight of it. The blade almost fell to the ground, though its hilt was firmly within her grip, but she recovered just in time. The guard to home it belonged hid his dismay well. As she backed away, she looked to the other well-muscled guard and said, “Arm yourself.”

  Thyssallia was barely a slip of a girl, thin of frame, but she had taken to practicing with a sword at least twice a week. She of course was no match for her guards, professional fighters to be sure, but she smiled grimly at the sound of the steel whistling through the air. The first time one of her weak attacks had been parried, the impact vibrated painfully in her hands and forearms, but she knew she had done well. The man had actually needed to block the attack lest he had been injured, whereas normally he avoided the sword altogether. After six months, Thyssallia had actually started to develop some small skill with the blade. Her foe had little trouble defending himself, and he only attacked gently with obvious blows that she could easily deflect. But still, she knew that one day…

  “Must you do this?” her father’s voice called over the ring of steel. It did not boom frighteningly as it had in the market before, but it still caught the combatants’ attention.

  Thyssallia reluctantly lowered the weapon and placed it in her man’s outstretched hand. As he moved back to his place by the door, she said to her father, “I like it. One day, I will rend flesh with steel.”

  “Thyssallia -”

  “I like Thyss.”

  “Thyssallia, it is unbecoming of a future priestess to use steel. When you are Chosen, you will have no need of such primitive devices. Also, it’s at that time that you may change your name if you please,” Mon’El admonished. “What you did today was unnecessary.”

  “That fat bitch dared -” Thyssallia started, her temper flaring, but her father cut her off.

  “Do not argue with me! I said it was wrong, and my word is law here!” Mon’El shouted. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm his ire, then he whispered, “Nykeema, grant me the strength to deal with such a child.”

  “Father,” Thyssallia said, dropping her tone of defiance for something more reasonable, “you rule Kaimpur and the lands around, and I am your daughter. She had no right to demand payment for something so little as grapes. We take what we want.”

  “Yes, that is true,” Mon’El agreed, “but I take when it is right. I take what we need to support us as befits our station, I take their girls when my body requires them, and I sacrifice those beneath us as the gods demand. But I take no more. What we leave them, they need to survive. Nay, they need to thrive. For if they all die out, we have no one left to support us.”

  “Then Father you are weak, for I will take the world by the throat, and it will give me all I desire.”

  Mon’El’s face grew hard as stone, and his silver eyes almost seemed to turn blue with his next words. “That too is your decision to make once you are Chosen. Until then, I forbid you to ever again leave these rooms.” He turned and strode away, but he stopped just before leaving to say, “Thyssallia, I find it interesting that you choose to shorten your name to that of the river below. Your temperament is not suited to the Mother of Water.”

  Mon’El was true to his word in that Thyssallia was not allowed to leave her rooms the rest of the afternoon or that evening. Her evening meal was brought to her by servants, and her bodyguards, once her protection, were now her gaolers. She took to again practicing at swordplay, practicing until her hands grew raw then numb, and she smiled every time the steel rung out in the hopes that the sound further aggravated her father.

  When she lay down, she found herself unable to sleep despite the pleasant soreness and weakness in her limbs. She tossed and turned fitfully until the moon was high in the sky, and finally she rose from her bed, wondering if she might be able to sneak away from her new prison. Her eyes hurt from lack of sleep, and standing in the middle of her room, Thyssallia rubbed at them for just a moment.

  When she opened her eyes her room was gone, replaced by a landscape the likes of which she had never seen. In fact, landscape didn’t describe it at all, for there wasn’t one of which to speak. In fact, she could neither see nor feel ground beneath her feet at all, yet she stood. Fire provided the only light – a baleful blaze that ranged from white to red to orange and writhed with life uncommon to normal fire. To one side, a pool of serene water bordered the fire, and steam exploded constantly from where the two met. On the other side of the fire stood a small mountain of stone and earth which then mixed with the blaze smokily to create molten lava. A breeze took the smoke and steam away only to repeat the action when they returned.

  “Thyssallia,” whispered a woman’s voice in her ear or maybe her mind, “you are at odds with your father, but his mind is without bounds. Be mine and be so.”

  “No,” rumbled a voice not unlike the sound of a rockslide, “come to me and know the strength only the ground beneath your feet can offer. The mountain never bows to the wind.”

  Thyssallia cocked her head to her left and waived her hand dismissively. “No,” she said, and suddenly the miniature mountain vanished. Also gone was the breeze, leaving the water and flame to spew steam frightfully.

  A soft, yet powerful voice that she knew to be Nykeema’s implored, “You are strong, yet your strength requires wisdom. In my depths you shall find what will temper you to new strengths. You shall be my greatest priestess ever.”

  “Join me,” Hykan hissed, the flames growing suddenly to frightful heights, “and you shall burn your foes away. No one shall ever deny you anything, and all shall be yours to claim!”

  Thyssallia took one step toward the inferno, one step that could not have been more than a few inches in its direction, and the flame leapt from its place to engulf her fully. It should have burned, should have seared away her hair and scorched her flesh. It should have blackened her bones and melted her eyes in their sockets, and yet it did none of these things. It was a burning the likes of which only a number of the bronze skinned priests of Dulkur have
experienced, but for Thyssallia, it was different from what even those before her experienced. An ecstasy took hold of her as the blaze penetrated her very being, and she moaned and laughed with the feeling of it. Later, she would wonder if it was the same thing her mother felt when touched be her lovers. Her body absorbed the fire, merged it with her very being, and eventually there was no more to be seen. Thyssallia fell limply and slept on the ground which she could not see.

  When she awoke, the sun shined warmly through the unshuttered windows into her room. With unexpected energy, she jumped to her feet and ran toward the light. Reaching one of her windows, she climbed up onto the stone sill, ignoring the danger of falling, and held her arms out to the sun, laughing. She dropped from the window back into her room and crossed back to her bed. A once hot breakfast of fried bird eggs and fresh bread sat upon a silver tray on an ottoman nearby. Famished, Thyssallia considered it for a long moment, even poked it with a lone finger. Finding it unacceptable, she hurled the tray again a stone wall with a hiss. She felt strong, stronger than ever before as she padded toward the dark-skinned guard that stood inside her door.

  “Give me your sword,” she demanded.

  “Mistress,” he replied haltingly, his voice a deep bass, “I do not have another to spar with you with.”

  “I said nothing about sparring! Give me your sword!”

  Perhaps it was something about her voice, her newfound energy or her eyes, but he did as he was told. He handed her the steel bladed weapon with something akin to regret, as if he feared that immediately upon receiving it, she would skewer him or lop off his head. She did neither as she took the weapon, and it did not threaten to fall to the floor as it did the day before. Her right arm held it firmly as she strode out the door, and the guard did not stop her.

  None stopped her as she nakedly climbed brown stone steps to the level immediately beneath the palace’s apex, scimitar in hand. She found her father there, leaning luxuriously on a cushioned cough as three scribes and a vizier sat upon the floor, likely recording matters of state. Mon’El jumped to his feet at his daughter’s unexpected, forbidden intrusion, preparing to make his fury known to all in Kaimpur.

  “Thyssallia, how dare -?!” he thundered, and the palace shook for just an instant, but his words suddenly caught in his throat, as he looked into his daughter’s eyes. Instead of the deep brown irises that he had seen for thirteen years, he beheld shining silver ringing black pupils that seemed to burn with inner fire.

  “From now on, you shall call me Thyss.”

  THE END.