[Mage] - Let me be your childhood trauma

[lslaw.livejournal.com]

With apologies for a few liberties.

There is a place; a patch of deserted land in the heart of a great city, hemmed in on three sides by broken walls and shielded on the fourth by a thick hedge growing on a pile of rubble. Once, it was a great house of industry, before the war and the bombs and the fire that gutted it, leaving only the broad, stone floor and the other relics of architecture. It can be reached on foot by anyone willing to scramble up ivy and through the empty windows, or to force a path through the briars, but there is an easier way, half-hidden by greenery yet open enough for a van, or a cart, to pass through, over the broken mosaic of an antique god, whose rakish pose once greeted the guests of the management. To most, it is the ruin of an old bottling plant, destroyed in the war and never reclaimed. Those in the know, however, look upon it as a place of sanctuary and come here for a brief respite from the road. They are travellers, but not Romani, nor Irish, nor yet the dreamy romantics of the New Age, for this is Fort Dionysus, and they are the Showfolk.

On an ordinary day, they dress in the dull hues of any working man and woman, and yet there is always something brighter about them. It is not a smell of greasepaint, for they are - whatever some might say as they turn away in disdain - as meticulously clean as any householder; rather, it is a sense, almost a nimbus that each one carries with them, a vestige of their many lives lived on the stage or in the bright lights of the carnival. They live faster and fiercer than settled folk, and among them are those who are poorer or richer than most of those who dwell in houses could imagine.

But here is one that is not like that, and yet who moves among them as one of their own. He is tall and lean, with a weary gait and a face that tells a hundred tales all by itself. His eyes are deep set and hooded, wreathed in pale shadows. He carries with him a sense of music, soft and tragic, and of a thing often broken and remade. Most among the bright throng pass him by, but not this girl. She seeks him out, although he makes some effort to avoid her, and engages him, capturing him with her eyes so that he can not help but listen.

She speaks to him of the brightness, of the colour and vivacity of those around them, but he merely smiles grimly. "Shall I tell you what I see?" he asks.

"Please do," she replies boldly.

"I look at that woman and see an angel," he says. "I look at that man and see a lion; and at that boy and see a towering cross. I look at them and I see the only houses that they shall ever know."

She laughs at that. "They will never have houses."

"All showfolk find a house in the end," he says. "Don't you know that? When their wandering is done, they find that house and they dress it magnificently, and dwell there forever after."

"But when would their wandering be... Oh," she says, realising.

He looks into her eyes and she feels a chill along her spine. "You will have a soldiers tomb," he tells her. "I can not see its form exactly, but it will be clad in blood. Do you know how to fight?"

She shakes her head, aware of a pressure around them; of a moment in time that possesses rare significance.

"I'd better teach you," he says, "otherwise that blood is likely to be yours."

She meets his eyes, refusing to be afraid. "And what if I prefer it to be mine?" she challenges him.

"Then you will walk away, and never return."

He meets her gaze for a long moment, then turns and, pulling her shawl tight around her, stalks away into the camp.

That night, when all the rest are asleep, she steals back to his van and slips inside with the skill of a burglar. There is a small lamp inside, illuminating a table and a tarot spread. She pauses, examining the spread with professional interest. On either side of the table is a wooden box, about a foot long and a few inches wide and deep.

"It's impolite to enter someone's home uninvited." His voice startles her, but she does not show it save in a quickening of her pulse.

"You dared me to come," she replied. "If you know me as well as you pretend to, then that is as good as an invitation."

"Touche." She can hear the smile in his voice, slightly mocking, somewhat approving. "I have a gift for you; well, two gifts, although you can only have one of them. Choose one of the boxes."

She reaches out and flips open the lid of one of the boxes; it doesn't really matter which. "I don't want to learn to fight," she insists.

"If that were so, you would not have chosen that box." He walks around her and opens the second box, taking out a slim conductor's baton and slipping it into his jacket lining. "Take your gift," he invites, "or else leave me to my sleep."

She considers not doing it, but either he is right or the challenge is too much for a girl of her age. Her fingers close around the grip of the knife and it is as though her hand was never meant for anything else.

"And so we begin."

I release this memory into the Abyss. Its bitterness is sweet and it could have been a weapon against the Arcadian Guardian, but that was before. It is of no use to me now that the ring has passed. I dip my fingers again and look for something new.