Chapter 1:
Zephyr across the face of the valley
What ever happens to that boyhood dreaming? We dream of fighting dragons and saving those who care for us and root us on as their heroes. Standing on the edge of ignorance to the world we take shapes and form them into images of what catch our imagination and soon sew entire worlds from what we don’t know. One day they’ll tell us that clouds aren’t lands floating in the sky, dragons don’t and never did exist, there aren’t anymore heroes who trek across vast land masses and over mountains and through rivers just to save a princess or discover a long lost treasure.
Sometimes though, you just have to be stubborn and say, “I’ll choose to live in my world of excitement over your world of submissive melancholy any day…”
“Look up at those stars… Tiny little lights in the sky. To think something that magical goes on every night and we’re so used to it that we are no longer awed by it, we’re way too caught up in our own lives… nobody really lives in the magic of the world anymore do they?”
I turned over, away from the sunrays that leaked in through the window. My body felt numb but regained feeling as blood filled my limbs, giving them their color back from the suspended state of sleep that they had been kept in. As the warmth and blush of my cheeks returned I nuzzled into the soft pillow letting out a long and drawn out yawn to fill my lungs with more oxygen to make more blood to continue to revive my body.
I sighed before I opened my eyes; it was the hardest part of getting up in the morning, besides getting up of course. If I opened them too fast I’d get a sting of sunshine into my wide pupils so I had to be careful, though there’d always be those few moments of pain. My eyelids started to creak open and sunlight even when indirect like it was right now started to flood in and pain my eyes though I had to keep my eyes open so my eyes could adjust. Slowly I continued to open them, more and more light was entering though it became increasingly less intense as my pupils started to close till finally the wall was visible though still slightly in a haze.
There were bands of light across the wall that filtered through my bamboo window shade. The glowing stripes lay across the wall clock and below it was a stack of magazines, all of them were either for video games or whatever hobby magazine looked interesting that I picked up while waiting for the next issues of my regular subscriptions to be delivered. I know what somebody might of thought of me from that, they might be right though, I won’t try too hard to defend myself against being a geek. Being interested in models, video games and random hobbies shouldn’t be such a god-forsaken crime as everyone makes it out to be, though some guys just have nothing better to do with their free time.
I decided finally to get out of bed, which if you’ll allow me to withdraw my last statement as to what is the most hard part of getting up it would have to be this instead. My joints popped and shook as I heaved my weight onto one elbow, if I was a machine you would probably hear gears and motors whining and creaking as they worked with all their might. My elbow that I had put my upper bodies weight on was shaking like it had just been taxed with lifting a great weight, mornings always feel like gravity was increased tenfold I suppose. With another feat of strength and awkward coordination I pushed up with the rest of my arm and was able to get myself sitting upright by some miracle.
My eyes were now down at my feet as I hunched forward on the bed with both hands resting across my lap lazily. My toes peeked out from the baggy brim of my pajama bottoms black legs. Their white tips wiggled a bit as I tried them out to make sure I had not lost control of them, this was a sense of assurance that they hadn’t been frozen till they died during the night. I curled the now pink tips of my toes under the warm fold of my bottoms and looked up at the wall again. I could now make out the dancing specks of dust and other small particles that hung in the air and were illuminated by the beams of morning light. It was hard to imagine that I probably breathed in hundreds without knowing but they were in my mind only present in the beams that shone through windows.
Throwing my legs off the edge of the bed I prepped my body to stand up now accomplishing my last and most astounding feat of defying gravity. I stretched my neck to the side popping it and rotated my shoulders in their sockets, both not going to help me stand up but still felt good nonetheless. The baggy legs of my pajama bottoms fell back to my ankles as I lifted my legs up, leaning my body back on my hands before throwing the weight of my legs down on the floor again. Using the momentum I gained from throwing the weight of my legs forward I was able to stand my body up straight for a moment before staggering forward awkwardly on my still weak legs. This was a great success for me and warranted a victory fist pump, which I basked in for that moment. Indeed I was a bit of an eccentric dork but I wasn’t over the top and was cute in the way that I found that deeper challenge and meaning in the everyday things in life. Spotting a perfect pattern in a cloud, beating a video game 100% and using that as an excuse to walk tall for a week, watching the snowfall in the winter and enjoying the intricate way that single specks of snow fell as well as the majesty of the bigger picture that was caused by all the billions of mini-works of art. I was someone who had made the appreciation of everyday rapture a finely tuned art to keep me happy because from someone else’s eyes I was just a simple boy who watched clouds, played games and played in the snow, all of which are unbecoming of a 17 year old who was but a year away from being swept up into the worries of work and fitting into the mainstream monotony of the small town that I lived in.
Don’t take my last statements as a, “woe is me, a boy who enjoys the simple pleasures in life has to get a job and be productive, oh the spoiled beauty of such sustained innocence, oh the dripping maw of the real world how you tear the wings from birds.” Sure I’ll admit it that sweeping a shop isn’t all too glamorous and since I’m not particularly a genius in any field of education the only place I could take my knowledge is the field of philosophy or maybe even psychology but that’s just a room of old men trying to make the mysteries of life a mathematical equation or old men who pride themselves in telling people that their fantastic dream of flying is to elude to how disconnected they feel from the world and tell them that they need to become more down to earth. To hell if I’m going to be a part of any of that
The world though was still a mystery and you could almost see an entire world happening out there on the horizon as if I was barely peaking over a wall. See the world hasn’t been connected despite all the oh-so-modern advancements that had been made. Entire intergalactic frigates hung among the stars yet there were no satellites that news was transmitted from to all the televisions of the world, There were wars being fought with mechanical giants who could fly around faster than any to scale human could, but all the private computers weren’t linked together by a system to share information. The world was closed off from itself and the only people who were able to take it in were travelers.
Months ago a scientist was on his way to a military city called Aqua (which I still thought was an odd name for a city to call it another name for water) that he had caught my imagination right away from it’s description. A floating city, he said! It hung in the air and on top of it were civilian skyscrapers and below in it’s lower area it held huge hangars (one of which he said could easily be as big or bigger than the valley that my own town of Oaken was nestled in) that could hold floating war ships that were built inside of the hangars right up there in the sky.
The man was pretty nice, somehow I had pictured military scientists as men who had a constant scowl on their face and talked in a thick foreign accent though this one had a more softer appearance to him that became somehow more warm and inviting when he smiled, “Sche Braesal” he said in such a friendly tone that I was somehow drawn closer by it’s magnetism, “I work on starships Gen, huge ships that can enter and exit our planets atmosphere without much effort and can shoot off deep into the uncharted depths of space.”
I had asked, “Why do we need warships for space though?”
“Well…” he shrugged and took a sip of his mug that had a very fragrant coffee sloshing around inside of it, “promise you are not someone who I’d regret telling an awfully big secret to? I’d hate to get in trouble but I’d also hate to stop amazing you.” To this I of course nodded enthusiastically, I had obviously done it in more of an excited way than what I had intended because he laughed in an amused way when I did, “signals and signatures from other worlds… aliens of all things! They are still quite far off from how far we can reach but…” his grin became wider, “that’s what I work on, giving us that extra push to meet them. So now we must put guns on our ships because we don’t know how advanced they are or if they’d fear us enough to strike out.” My heart had started racing at the thoughts of such things, intergalactic travel, aliens, and wars in the stars. Despite how horrible war was it was still a quite exciting thing to think of heroes piloting ships through the stars and discovering new worlds and such and risking life and limb doing it. I know romanticizing space travel is a bit much but my brain was buzzing that night and for quite a few weeks later.
This whole concept had awakened me to the fact that the world out there isn’t too clear to anyone here in this little town that I live. I had asked the scientist who I should look for to give me more information on the world and as I did he took another swig of coffee before telling me that he had come for the day to visit an old friend Ivan who knew more about the amazing things in the world then he did, “scientists…” he claimed, “have our heads too high in the clouds to know what is under the clouds.”
Ivan was a family friend and my teacher in the basic skills of life, mathematics, literature, basic sciences, as well as a teacher in swordplay. I had been much more uncontrollable than how I am right now, “discipline, will keep you from dropping your blade on your foot and will tune your body into something that can be harnessed to defend yourself.” He had been my first glimpse out into the world but I never knew to ask more about it till Sche told me to. Before Ivan had only told me about how the traveling swordsman was someone who was both the most respected and most shrouded individual. They knew about the world and were wise well beyond their years, and even though their morality was very up in the air they were usually the symbol of order.
Upon my request to know more stories about what was out in the world Ivan had answered first with a story about someone who was far more enthralling and interesting to me than swordsmen and even space travel, “People marked by the God’s of the ancients are given extraordinary powers.” He said in a dead serious tone, “Whichever God marks them gifts a touch of their divine power to manipulate the force that the God governs. They are not at all controlled by the God that they have been marked by so aren’t inherently good nor evil though there are those who call themselves demon hunters who think of them as heathens against the normality of the world and claim that such powers can only be given to a being who has sold their soul. You can tell them by a mark on their face like a tattoo and glows when they tap into their gift” He ran his fingers slowly down a side of his face as he described this, “though some are tricky enough to be able to hide their markings with makeup or are in such control that they can make it fade away completely when dormant.”
Can you really blame me for being so restless? I’m here waiting to meet such a person though if they’re traveling around they would surely be hiding their markings and it’s not like I could throw a bucket of water at every stranger hoping that one of them would make the water freeze or evaporate into flames mid-air. It was all so frustrating to me. this world was all the sudden more interesting which all the same made this small town more uninteresting. Despite all the things that I wish would fall into my lap I still kept high spirits in my previous hobbies that have kept me sane all this time.
Whoa, quite a detour I made from just my small victory dance that I made for standing up without falling over. I was standing there for a bit while thinking about such things and I looked up at the clock and sighed, “did I really just space out for ten minutes?” Not like it mattered at all, I wasn’t somebody who had places to be.
I went to the large mirror that sat in the corner of my room and started to change into my regular clothes, nothing too fancy, a t-shirt and Jeans, I tucked the extra length of my shirt down into my pants on one side and tucked the other side under my belt and let it hang far down. I made sure to buy shirts that were long on me so it almost made a bit of a skirt that covered most of the top part of my pants, it was a style that I was quite proud of, sometimes I’d even do something like dye the part of my shirt that hung down to look like another fabric or just cut off, switch, and sew that area of two different colored shirts to get the same effect. Again I know what your thinking and yes, I have way too much free time on my hands.
I smoothed down my messed up hair, brushes made my hair too smooth and even, too boring for me so I always left it slightly messy. My hair was white, not silvery old person white I mean white as snow. People joked that it was so white that it was almost blue, I never got that saying but it was pretty much the agreed description of my hairs color. My hair and my green eyes are the two most distinguishing features of me and set me aside from anyone else in the town who all either had beautiful raven black hair or dirty blonde hair both couldn’t be mistaken for my hair which almost glowed in the mid day sun.
I decided to add some flair to my wardrobe today and added a blue headband that I tied at the side, I hadn’t really done it before though I really liked how it looked today. At that thought I got a twist in my stomach, I had become so bored that I was starting to alter my wardrobe like a girl. I’ll admit that I’m not particularly masculine though it’s always a vow by every boy to never spend more than a minute in front of a mirror while putting on clothes, and I had realized also that I was color coordinated as well. I know what my mom would say if I walked out like this, “what did you do with my son who would where five different un-matching colors like a hobo?”
Somehow the ridicule of a mom expands into compliments as well. I admit that my mom was sweet, though it’ll be a cold day in hell when she compliments me on matching. As your average person who would rather come up with an intricate plan instead of switch their clothing I opened the window and looked down from it, a story high but I’d survive it. I gripped the edge and moved my body out of the window and planted my feet on the outside wall. I breathed in and out deeply before letting myself drop down and as I fell through the air I looked down and time slowed down as the dawning realization hit me that I was falling down onto someone.
