Rated 12+ for fantasy and violence.
Darell’s history was a very interesting one. It started off deceitfully normal. Anna learned quickly that not only was Darell a distinguished actor, but also a poet of sorts, for when he described his home, Anna could picture it in her mind.
“It was a small farm, not much bigger than the house you have here,” he began, his voice carrying even in the small room. “The house was wooden, nearly falling down from many years of use and none of repair. Out in the front yard was a mud pin for our two pigs, and off to the side a small penned in area for the cow and the horses to graze. There was the chicken coop with only one hen and a rooster off to the other side, and the entire thing was enclosed in a white picket fence. Other than these farm animals, we had only a spotted cat. We didn’t make any money from our farm, but rather lived off of the food we gathered from it. I never went to school, and other than my mother, I had not come in contact with many other human beings. Perhaps the occasional passerby, the one who dared to travel as far out as our house was, but hardly anyone—not anyone I could ever come to call a ‘friend’. Even so, it was such a wonderful life. We were free from worries, from drama, from hatred or rejection from others. My mother and I fought occasionally, but by the end of the day, we had made up. She taught me so much . . .” He looked off into the distance, smiling slightly. “When those days passed, I’d look back on them, wishing for the simplicity I felt when I was that age. It would never come back. Even now, I look upon people whom are uptight and angry with their life, and wish that they could only spend their first six years on a farm with their mother . . .”
Darell sighed and looked down, realizing he was rambling. He half-said, half-mumbled, that these days went on, these days which he would “call perfect if such a word could honestly exist,” until his sixth birthday.
“I remember it so clearly, like it just happened yesterday,” he said in an undertone. “The fog had fallen slowly over the ground, and I awoke earlier than my mother, just like every morning, because she always stayed up later. I crept outside my house, my plan to feed the animals as fast as I could, so I could run down the road and climb the sycamore tree to watch the sun rise on the day of my birth. I had just finished feeding the pigs and was running to get some of the hen’s favorite sunflower seeds when I saw a figure coming up to the gate.
“Now, as I said before, we didn’t get visitors often, so I dropped everything and ran to the fence. I leaned off of it, squinting through the fog, and when the visitor came close enough I saw that it was a man on a tall horse. He had a long, winding coat as brown as the animal he sat on, and his hat was tipped down, so when he looked at me, there was a haughty sort of presence.
“I didn’t know what to say, but he did. Before I could speak a word he immediately questioned, ‘Can you fight?’
“ ‘What?’ I spluttered, though I had heard him fine.
“ ‘Can you fight? You know, combat?’
“Though at six I hardly knew what ‘combat’ meant, I had gotten the message. ‘Sure I can fight! Wanna see?’ And I grabbed the nearest shovel.
“The man’s straight face slipped to a frown. Looking from the shovel to my excited face, he replied coldly, ‘If you don’t learn to fight in ten years’ time, you’ll be dead as a doorknob.’”
“Who was that?” Anna immediately interrupted. Darell jolted, as if being dragged out of his memory, and looked over to see Anna’s face unusually heated with embarrassment. He couldn’t help but grin.
“It was my father. Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he added quickly, at Anna’s look of shock, “but he was a nice man. A real nice man. After I had brought him in the house Mother started crying from joy, happy as can be to see him. She had thought he was dead. I was confused when she introduced him as my father—seeing as he had never dropped by for a visit since I was one, my mother didn’t find a need to tell me about him. She thought it would only bring unnecessary pain. I was mad at her for a while because I didn’t understand, but when I did, I accepted him quickly. After all, when another person shows up to a small farm of two and promises to remain a part of your life, how can you not?
“Mother never told me where he had been all those years. Perhaps even she didn’t know. And for a long while after I met him, he was just as cold as his first words to me. In fact, for the first few months I knew him, he didn’t speak a word to me. After my birthday he left on his horse, returning with a pile of wood strapped to the back of it. He made many trips over the next few weeks, until he had gathered so much wood that the pile nearly stood as tall as our house. Then he began building, with nails and hammers. Often I would stop my work to just stare at him, nailing boards together, and then setting them up together in different patterns, different fashions. I watched him, but never helped him. When I requested my services he’d either shake his head or ignore me—so I learned fast. It took many months, but after all his hard work, he built a barn. He returned a few days later with burgundy paint, and told me to paint the barn, then set off on his horse again. For three weeks, alls I did was paint that barn, inside and out—and when he returned, he brought a flock of animals to put in it. We now had five cows, fifteen chickens, and one black cat for my mother. He taught me how to put the horses and the cows in at night and how to bundle them up inside it when it was cold. While I was leading his own horse in, he said out of no where, ‘Will you meet me in here tomorrow morning before you start your chores?’ I said I would.
“The next morning, when the sun was still fast asleep somewhere underneath the world, I ran out to the barn and saw my father was already there. Inside he had set up a small wooden table with a white tablecloth on it and two chairs. He was already sitting at one, and gestured for me to sit in the other.
“Once I was seated he pulled from underneath the table-clothed table, hidden to me, a stack of books. He showed me each book individually.” Darell paused, looking up, as if to remember the exact names of the books. “There was . . . the book which told the story of the world, and . . . the book that spoke all languages . . . oh! There was the book that was riddled with troubled numbers—looking back, I laugh at that—. . . and last, but certainly not least, the book that taught about how every element interacted with each other. He called the books ‘History,’ ‘English,’ ‘Math,’ and ‘Science,’ and welcomed me to school.”
He went on to explain how each morning before breakfast, each afternoon after lunch, and each night right before bed he went to study with his father. “No matter what kind of health he was in, or how cold it was out, we always studied in that musty little barn,” he said, a smile slowly beginning to grace his face. “Sometimes after we studied I’d go up to the house and see Mother sitting out on the porch. She’d ask me, ‘What did you learn today?’ Sometimes I had something to show her, a token of my work—perhaps a paper I wrote about the story of the world, or a few words muttered in a foreign language. Other times, however, I just grinned and said, ‘A lot. More than I’ll ever need to know living on a barn.’” Darell suddenly frowned. “But it wasn’t my destiny to become a farmer, and Father made that clear from the beginning.”
He recounted softly of one night, upon hearing those words, a fit his father threw. “No son of mine is ever going to become a poor farm hand,” he had said nastily. Darell had glared at him, fought back to no avail—and finally, stomped up to his room angrily, slamming the door closed.
“I didn’t understand,” whispered the older, wiser Darell. “I had been living on the farm with my mother for as long as I could remember. And now here was a man that I had hardly knew save for the few hours each day he spent with me, threatening to take it all way.”
Darell told how even though his father and he spent time together each day learning, Darell never knew more of his father except for the plain fact of his identity. “And I thought I’d never learn about him, not until that one night when I was thirteen.”
He remembered that night vividly too, or so he said, but his descriptions were quite plain. “I went out to the barn and my father was not there. I looked around wildly for him, even called his name, but eventually just lay my eyes on the one thing on the table—a small white book. On it, a crumpled piece of paper, bearing the words, I’m out for the day. Finish this book by tomorrow morning. There was no ‘I love you,’ no ‘See you soon,’ no ‘Stay safe’. My father wasn’t like that. He was simple and never spoke his feelings.” There was a pause as Darell collected his thoughts and fought through the emotion suddenly rising up in his throat. “Anyway, I read the book that night in a matter of hours. It wasn’t a hard book, the reading level quite simple, only a hundred or so pages.” Anna tried to hide her contempt at those words—it would take her weeks to read a book with a hundred pages. Apparently she hid it well, because Darell went on, “It was a good book, easy to understand, but . . .” He hesitated.
“But?” Anna urged on.
“I didn’t understand why Father wanted me to read it.”
“Why? What was it called?”
“The title, in scrawled handwriting over the front of the book, was The Tale of the Serenity Stone.”
Now Anna sat up straight, looking very intrigued. “The Tale of the Serenity Stone?”
“Yes. Well, you know the story, the idea’s classic,” he said plainly, and Anna nodded as if she knew the story by heart, but she had never even heard the title uttered before now. “The story with the heavens granting humans with prosperity in order to--well, you know the story.” He then moved on, “However, this time, it was different. It added something my basic history books had left out. It added . . . magic.”
For the second time since Anna had met Darell, she burst out laughing. He looked at her, shock evident in his eyes, for he could not understand her reason of laughter. When she finally calmed down enough to speak, she croaked, “Magic? Don’t tell me you believe in that pish-posh!”
Darell was silent.
Anna stopped laughing immediately—it was as if all the humor had been sucked out of the air. “You don’t believe in that, right?”
No response.
“Darell . . .”
“I didn’t,” he muttered, avoiding her gaze. “Not at first. But when Father came back . . . When Father came back, I went in the barn like we had every morning, and there he was, sitting. I set the book on his desk, sat down in the chair opposite to him, and he asked, ‘Did you read it?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said.
“ ‘Did you like it?’ was his next question.
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Did you understand it?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Did you understand why I had assigned it to you?’
“ ‘No.’
“He said . . . he said, ‘I know. You don’t understand it. You’re questioning where I’ve been, why you had to read this, and for the first time, you’re wondering whether you trust me.’ And it was true, it was all true.”
“So you believed him because he knew some simple psychology?” Anna rolled her eyes thickly.
“No!” Darell yelped immediately. “Not at all! But he proved himself, he proved himself alright.”
“What’d he do?”
Darell didn’t say anything for a moment. The room was dangerously quiet. Downstairs, the sound of Marcus crying was heard, and then suddenly Celine’s voice was cooing over him, making sure he was silenced. When Darell spoke again, Anna jumped.
“He told me he was a Magical.”
“And you believed him.” She didn’t ask, she stated.
“No. And he knew that.”
“What did he do? More psychology?”
“No. He asked me what it would take for me to believe he was a Magical.”
“Well, what did you say?”
“A bunch of insane things. I told him to make the entire barn fall down and then reconstruct, and told him to light my wrist on fire and then make the fire go out without a singe mark. I told him to make it rain but make it so that I couldn’t feel the rain on my skin. I told him to erase the words on the pages of the book one moment and make them reappear the next. I told him to give wings to the pigs—”
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, we know where the saying ‘when pigs fly’ comes from,” Anna muttered her interruption.
“—and make the cats as tall as humans. I told him to disappear and reappear on will. And then, I told him most of all, to teach it all to me after he was finished.”
She waited for him to go on, but he said nothing more. Anna, growing impatient, spoke next.
“So?”
“Well, to say the least, now I believe him.” Darell rubbed his wrist apprehensively and Anna studied him for a while, trying to make sense of it all.
“So, you were a Magical all along and never knew it?” Anna found it pretty far-fetched.
“No. I was never a Magical. My father was. He said that when the time came, he’d pass on his powers to me, and I’d be automatically teleported to somebody who could help me.” He paused, watching Anna’s expression carefully, making sure he didn’t take it too far. “In . . . In the meantime, he had me train for some huge war that was coming up.” He put a hand to his head and stared down, emotion now choking him. “I can’t tell you much, because I don’t know what’s completely happening either. I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
Anna shook her head and stood up. Darell glanced to her, looking at her curiously, as if trying to figure out when he had crossed the line. Anna saw the look from his face, reflecting off her vanity mirror, and in that second hated him with a fire. She couldn’t quite explain or place her hatred, she just knew that she couldn’t stand him, just like she couldn’t stand Celine, or Raf, or Marcus, her mother, or her father. Her heart fell—she had been hoping he was different—but finally she got over her disappointment, just like she always had to, and turned to face him, bracing herself for a war.
“You’re lying to me.” She said it quickly.
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are! If you were telling the truth, then, well, you wouldn’t have told me at all!” She threw her hands up, gesturing the exasperation clearly indicated in her voice. “I mean, why would you tell me? You hardly know me! I’m just some random nurse at the clinic that you met this morning!”
Part 2
Pish-posh ^^
