Reza Lore
'THE BOY WHO SPEAKS FIRE'
On the unkempt path along the mangrove-lined river, overgrown with vines and flowers, the paladin in his gilded ceremonial armor cut an imposing figure. A dozen warriors and several local guides marched behind him; explorers brought up the rear, sketching, collecting samples and taking notes. The paladin’s wide-eyed young daughter gripped his outstretched finger with her whole small fist.
“Do you like the islands, Grace?”
At six years old, this was her first trip outside of Gythia, and the foreign tropics were a dizzying delight. Wherever there was soil, color burst through. Flowers as big as her head called hi! hey! hi! Exotic birds showed off their plumage and screeched to make sure she looked. Even the mosquito swarms shimmered.
“Yes,” she answered, her tone solemn. “This must be the prettiest place in the world.”
“These shall be the Grace Islands, then.” Her father waved his arm in an arc to indicate the half-moon shape of the archipelago. “Make a note of it,” he called over one shoulder, and a mapmaker scribbled in her journal.
Grace stared in reserved wonder at her surroundings while her father named the flora and fauna as though he’d created it all. The locals wore colorful sarongs and flowers in their hair. They waved and never ceased smiling. One of them fed plums to a young macaque that perched with hungry obedience on the little girl’s shoulder.
“These are nice people,” observed Grace.
“Peace and kindness is embedded into their culture. They even file down the sharp teeth of adolescents to remove their violent nature.”
Grace touched her own teeth. “Does it hurt?”
“Oh yes.”
“You should tell them to stop, Papa.”
“Oh, dulcissima! A man may be a better hunter than a tiger, but he would be a fool to tell the beast how to hunt on its own land.”
“But these are people.”
“Yes, they are people,” mused the paladin. “Of a kind.”
Grace stopped short, wavering on her feet. The world around her brightened at the edges. The monkey leaped away and the retinue came to a halt.
“Papa?” she whimpered.
The paladin held her steady by the shoulders. “Do not fear. Tell me what the light shows you.”
Grace shivered as a great wall of ice rose up, blocking their path. Where the path forked toward the river, a wall of fire blazed upward, spitting embers and burning her cheeks. “Ice and fire,” she whispered.
“Which way is the fire?”
She pointed to the river and the vision ended, the walls only tricks of the light.
The procession moved single-file onto the stone steps leading across the river. In the center of the water stood a temple.
A guide intercepted them. His smile never wavered, though his voice was strained. “Sir,” he said, bowing low, “visitors do not cross here, Sir. Danger, Sir.” He held out his arms, revealing rippling burn scars.
“Stand back,” said the paladin. He rested a hand on the guide’s shoulder, and when he lifted it, a hand-shaped spot of healed flesh remained.
The temple was made of stone. The mangroves growing over it were scorched. The buzzing mosquitos and bickering monkeys stayed away, so that the temple was cloaked in eerie quiet. At the temple’s entrance a local boy appeared, perhaps a year younger than Grace. He wore only a sarong around his waist, so that gruesome scars and new welts from burns showed all over his chest and face.
“This boy speaks fire,” whispered the guide. He stared in wonder at his shoulder as the healed skin spread down his arm. “His name is Reza.”
“He’s hurt,” said Grace.
The paladin guided Grace forward, toward the boy. “Go and do as you have learned.”
Grace stepped across slick stones to the temple with care, leaving her father behind. She greeted the boy with a Gythian hand gesture and he flinched.
“I’m going to take care of you,” she said, gentle but firm. She rested her palms on the boy’s face. The light burned at the top of her head and she guided it down, as her father had taught her, down through her head and throat, flooding her heart and belly and arms and then escaping through her fingertips. The light swelled and the boy’s eyes grew wide. Down to his shoulders her hands slid, leaving behind smooth, healed flesh. The light traveled down his body, enveloping him with its warmth. “There,” she said when she had done. She was tired to her bones from the effort, but the boy’s burn scars and welts had disappeared, leaving behind a dazzling, dark beauty. “That’s better.”
The boy opened his mouth to speak, or cry or laugh; it couldn’t be known, for what came from his mouth was a trail of fire, just like in Grace’s vision, spurting sparks and raining ash.
The paladin’s light shield burst into being between her and the boy just in time. The flames beat against it but could not penetrate. The boy’s mouth shut and his eyes filled with ashy tears as the paladin approached.
“The Mageborn must be trained to the proper use of their power, just as you, born to the light, have learned to control your visions,” he said, patting Grace’s red braid. “Until we deliver him to the mages, you must care for him like a sister.”
“My brother.” Grace took the boy’s hand. “I shall name you Titus.”
'THE FIRST MISTAKE'
Remarkable, Lyra thought, how quickly the settlers had mixed Gythian with the rough syllables of the Grangor tongue to create the language of Trostanian. Lyra never deigned to speak it, but understanding Trostanian was essential in the multicultural port town, no matter what garish throaty things it did to the lyrical Gythian syllables. Only five years ago, her barriers had melted the Halcyon glacier and already the settlement had become a growing, respectable town. Dockside inns filled to bursting with taxpaying travelers seeking their crystal fortune, adding their native nomenclature to the evolving language. On the docks, sailors called to one another in fluent Trostanian as they passed crates down the ramps from the ships’ tenders to the docks.
Lyra, escorted by her Grangor guide, disciplined her expression into sobriety, but her eyes shone as they darted around the dock. Golden-cloaked Gythian soldiers emerged from a tender hefting ornate chests and crates. With an impatient but formal gesture of greeting she approached the most decorated of the soldiers, a silver-templed man holding the hand of a small boy. “I was told my replacement would be of the mages, but I suppose Trostan can be held well enough by the army now that it’s operative,” she said. “You and your son are welcome here.”
“You’re mistaken, Lady Lyra. Your replacement is of the mages.” The soldier guided the boy forward by his shoulders. “Archmage Lora bade me deliver him to you and memorize her message.”
Lyra’s heart sank along with her eyes as she gazed down at the boy, resplendent in a night-black fur cloak far too large for him, his terrified dark eyes widened with hope. “Deliver the message, sir.”
“‘Greetings, Battlemage Lyra,” snapped the soldier. “‘The Mage Guild of Gythia is pleased to present Samuel the Mageborn, son of Archmage Lora the Mageborn and Scholar Titus the Mageborn, to be fostered and educated under your wise tutelage until such time as he comes of age and can take your place in the governorship of Trostan.’”
“What’s this?” asked the Grangor.
“Politics,” said Lyra through a wound-tight jaw. “Or a cruel joke.”
The Grangor hunched down. “Welcome, Sam. How old are you?”
The boy held up four fingers.
“Four winters old! Such a handsome big boy you are.” The Grangor mussed the child’s hair.
“Lora has banished me to Trostan for fourteen more years.” Lyra coughed out a laugh. “She still fears me.”
“We’ll make you up a room in the mage tower, Sam,” said the Grangor. Without ceremony he swung the boy up onto his shoulders and the soldiers followed them into town, leaving Lyra to stare off into the warm sea of her memories.
~
In Gythia, the onshore cold from Bladed Bay breezed the curtains in Lyra’s mage tower apartment. Back then, Trostan was a stratagem, a hope for Gythia’s post-war recovery effort. Before she experienced the ice storms of Trostan, Lyra thought this breeze unbearable; she rolled over in bed, smooshing her face into Titus’ chest to escape it. “Hold me,” she mumbled into his skin. “I’m cold.” He slung one leg over her waist, making her giggle. “Useless, you are. Now I’m overheated just on this spot. Get off me and I’ll make tea.”
He held her down, sliding a steel letter opener through the wax seal of a scroll. “If you wanted to escape, you’d turn me into a toad or something, Miss Battlemage.”
“No need,” she said, arching up for a sour morning kiss. “I trust you.”
“That is your first mistake. Ooh,” he said, drawing the sharp point of the letter opener down her side, “It’s from the Archmage. You are important now.”
“Your envy is unattractive.” Lyra shivered and smiled, inhaling the sweat and sandalwood scent of him. “What is that?”
“A letter came for you with breakfast.”
“If it is for me, don’t you think I should open it?”
He held the scroll out of her reach. “Battlemage Lyra of the Mage Guild, blah blah … immediate deployment to the Kall Peaks to establish the colony of Trostan …”
“They’re sending us to the Kalls?” Lyra reached for the scroll, but Titus held fast to it, his brows knitted.
“Your petition of marriage to Scholar Titus the Mageborn is heretofore denied due to the arrangement of marriage to …”
Lyra rolled over him and snatched the letter from his hands; wax bits scattered onto the bed. “.. to Lora the Mageborn,” she mumbled. “There’s been some administrative error. Someone mistook my name for Lora’s. This has happened before.”
“You are not Mageborn.” Titus drew her close. “You knew they might choose to arrange my marriage. The Guild wants …”
“… Mageborn children,” she said. “But I went through all the proper channels. I filled out the forms. I thought ….” She held his ears in her hands, pressed her forehead to his. “We do not have to obey. We can be farmers in the provinces. We can disappear in Taizen Gate.”
“You have worked since childhood to rise in the guild’s ranks. I will not allow you to give up everything you worked so hard to accomplish,” he said, burying his face in the plum tumble of her hair. “We are Gythian foremost.”
She soaked his neck with silent tears, her fingers clawing into his shoulders.
'REZA, THE FIRE MAGE'
~
ALTERNATE FATES
'RED LANTERN' REZA
'THE DOOR GUARDIANS'
On the night of his death, the thief found himself on the street where he’d always lived, but it was gray and empty except for a nightclub he’d never seen before.
The club had two doors, one red and one blue. Outside of the doors stood two menshen security guards: a hybrid rabbit-woman in a red silk dress twirling a dragon-head revolver around her trigger finger; and a dapper man with ice-blue horns and a blue silk suit swinging chains by his sides. Red lanterns cast a warm glow in the eerie death-gray.
“Look, a thief,” said the man. “A perfect recruit for the Infernal Dragons.”
“Don’t be hasty,” said the woman. “Let’s take a look.”
The thief watched, astonished, as a scene played out on the street before him: the ghostly figure of himself as a young boy, stealing a dumpling out of a cart when no one was looking, then handing it to a hungry beggar girl. “Some people misbehave for darn good reasons. He’s Lucky Aces material.”
“That was just the first thing he stole,” said the man, and his chains swung through the scene, breaking it into mist. Ghostly figures formed again, but this time it was the thief as an adult, taking the pearl necklace from a lady’s throat while distracting her with a dance. The horned man laughed. “He belongs to the Dragons.”
Let’s see how he died,” said the woman, “then we’ll decide.”
The burglar watched in horror as the night of his death played out before him in the mist. He saw himself scale the wall of the wealthy man’s home, slip the cursed Jade Goose into his jacket and race away…
Away from the city the thief fled, into the cold forest night. He hiked until dawn, the ice-cold Jade Goose against his chest, until he came upon the Jade Goose Temple.
An ancient monk met him at the paifang gate. His old eyes widened with surprised tears when the thief handed over the Jade Goose.
“Oh no! You have taken the thief-curse,” said the monk. “Now you will die!”
“I am happy to pay for my wrongdoings,” said the thief, smiling his last before crumpling to the snowy ground. The scene in the mist disappeared.
“How boring,” said the Infernal Dragons’ security guard.
“Right this way, dear,” said the Lucky Aces’ guard, opening the red door into the nightclub.
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