I sat on the edge of a rooftop, my legs swinging back and forth, the entire city stretching out before me. Chilly wind bit into my skin, but I didn’t mind. In my opinion, rooftops were the best place to be on Archora. Of course, there was the constant danger of falling, but that had never stopped me. I stared out at the jagged horizon, all the wildly creative buildings making it look like broken glass. The laboratory-castle, Needlespur, jutted far above the rest of the buildings; it shaped like a jagged bolt of lightning shooting from the ground.
If I tilted my head further back I could see the darkening sky begin to fill with stars like a giant dome studded with diamonds. Small, flying trade ships, no larger than dinghies, skirted across the sky glowing faintly azure with the æther they used for fuel.
But the best thing about the roofs wasn’t the view and it definitely wasn’t the cold. It was the silence. I could see people moving around below me and I could still hear the faint, indistinct sound of people’s voices, but, most importantly, I couldn’t hear the raucous, overwhelming sound of their minds. It wasn’t that I wasn’t used to the sound of people’s thoughts, in fact ‘sound’ was the wrong word, but it was a calming experience nonetheless. The thoughts of other people often manifested themselves as words or images, depending on the person and the thought or memory.
For as long as I could remember, people’s thoughts came to me. They weren’t like sound, it was like they were my thoughts, but I could tell they weren’t. They functioned like sound, though. They were best heard up close, and farther away, they became more indistinct. They were almost impossible to ignore. Even from the roofs, if I stretched my mind, I could still experience what people were thinking, but I rarely did that. It wasn’t that I wasn’t curious, in fact, quite the opposite. I wanted to know just about everything, but after thirteen years of eavesdropping on people’s minds, I learned that, in general, it was boring. People were always thinking about the outrageous prices of that pocket watch or the cute boy across the street or how many minutes until school was out. These things just didn’t matter to me. Of course, that wasn’t always true.
I had once learned of a new prototype of Clockwork three months before the it was released to the public. I always aced my quizzes, not just because I knew the answers but because I could peer into my teacher’s mind.
It took years of experimenting with my magic to make any real progress, not made easier by the fact that I kept it secret.
I heard a loud and familiar voice ranting from the room below me. He was another reason being on the roof was better than being under it.
“It’s not bloody fair!” my father roared. “Mages are given money and power, and all because they were born different!”
My father’s prejudice towards mages was the root of my problem. It wasn’t unfounded. Mages were given higher status than non-mages and so it was almost impossible for anyone else to gain power. If I revealed to anyone that I had magic, I’d be speedily removed from my home and everything I knew.
So I kept my head down. I tried to avoid talking about things that I shouldn’t know and became good at lying. Still, I always had a mad desire to know more about magic, about the mysterious æther, about….everything.
“Why should we common folk be treated any different from them?” my father snarled.
A tiny part of me agreed with him. The rest of me came up with the logical answer. Mages had power no one else did and were rare enough that we were invaluable resources. I sighed and slid off the roof onto a lower platform, opened the door and stepped into my house. I walked by my mother, a short, plump woman with greying hair, who stood next to my father. He was taller, heavy set, and red faced, with a bushy beard. My mother looked melancholy, her response to her husband’s rage.
I darted to my room without exchanging a word with either of them, but they both watched me go. It was going to be hard to fall asleep if my father was so loud.
A half an hour later, the ranting had stopped, but the voices had moved closer to the door to my room.
“Are you sure we made the right choice?” my mother asked.
My father heaved a shaky sigh. “Of course we did,” he said. “This is what’s best for him. I still can’t believe…”
“I know,” said my mother. “I just hope everything will be alright.”
I attempted to stretch my mind enough to reach them, but they were moving away and I couldn’t find anything except vague emotions of confusion and sadness.
I yawned as I walked through the school door.
“Thørn Feltrix,” I muttered to the Clockwork Secretary.
It was brass and humanoid enough to operate standard machinery. Still, it obviously wasn’t one. Instead of facial features, it had a blank metal plate and it’s fingers were more clawlike than any humanoid’s. Past it’s metallic rib cage, I could see gears whirring and deep within, azure æther glowed like a tiny flame.
It clicked my name into the typewriter, adding it to the ‘present’ side of the attendance list. I moved along to my first class.
The day passed. I moved through my classes, nothing remotely remarkable happening during any of them. Until history.
During history, we had been learning the impact of the invention of the Clockwork. “Needlespur was first developed as a place to harvest æther,” the teacher said. “But it soon gained influence in Archora’s government…”
As usual, the mental activity had dribbled to a bare minimum. A dwarf in the back had fallen out of his chair and was sleeping on the floor. A goblin two rows in front of me was attempting to carve his name (spelled incorrectly) into his desk with a pencil. I had been watching him for twenty minutes, during which time he’d gone through four pencils, and he still hadn’t realized that the graphite wasn’t strong enough to make a scratch.
The teacher droned on in her usual monotone voice about the revolutionary æther powered engine. She looked almost as bored as everyone else in the room.
And then I glanced at the door and the teacher’s voice lowered to cicada drone. The Clockwork Secretary was standing in the doorway. Looking at me. But that didn’t happen. The Clockwork didn’t look. They didn’t see, they didn’t acknowledge any biological organisms above others unless programmed to. They registered their surroundings which relayed back to their processing, giving them an accurate image of their surroundings. So that wasn’t possible. Why was the Clockwork so fascinated by me? It hadn’t until today. Why would it show a response to me now.
And then the Clockwork held out it’s arm and beckoned before turning away from the door. It wanted me to follow.
So without further ado:
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