Red's Story - Burning, But Not On Fire

As a child, Red is obsessed with recording things.

He keeps a little leather-bound journal tucked in his belt at all times: its plain, battered cover is as green as a leaf and well-loved, a gift from his parents for his ninth birthday. He writes diligently in it everything he sees and experiences: the color of the sky at sunset, the progress of the little white buds peeping out of his mother’s garden. Even what he had for each meal that day, and its exact ingredients, if his oldest sister Idalia can be pressed to tell him the details. Aware already of the ephemeralness of his days—a change is coming, he can feel, though what that is he cannot say—he is compelled to capture and preserve each of his memories in words, like pressing a flower between the pages of a book to slow its dying.

He inherits the habit from his parents, and the rest of his large family. The Antiqua brood comes from a long line of bookkeepers, chroniclers, and historians. His parents have kept the tradition, his father working as the scribe for a local Norm mayor, his mother as a record-keeper for a physicker. 

It is a dangerous position, of course. Even Red, the youngest child, understands this—his parents have impressed upon him the peril of their circumstances many times. No one knows that the family is actually a red-headed clan of Mages. Through a series of artful tricks, spells, and disguises, they have eluded the scrutiny of the Autarchy so far… but at any moment, this balance could tip.

Red must practice his magic in secret, only in the basement late at night with the door locked and shut. His spellbooks (precious hand-me-downs with crumbling pages passed first through Idalia, Isodel, Lydda, and Gwyn) are disguised as mathematics ledgers, and will be wiped permanently blank if anyone else should touch them. He must never even breathe a word about magic or anything “unusual” outside of their comfortable, two-story country home. 

Even his eyes—the only ones in the family possessing the iladrin—must be glamoured to be appear normal and blue: a fact that startles Red every time he happens to glance into a mirror.

Still. In its own way it is a peaceful, idyllic life. The only disruptions come when his older sisters butt heads with each other—which is very, very often.

One day he comes home from reading by the river to find his house in a disarray. His parents are off working, and Idalia—stern and mature already at fifteen—is scrabbling around the kitchen in a flurry of panic. She is bawling commands at Red’s sisters: virtuous fourteen-year-old Isodel is moving to help her, bookish Lydda hesitates by the door, and rebellious Gwyn, the youngest aside from Red, sets her chin stubbornly and says, “I don’t care that Uncle Stephen is coming for dinner. He shouldn’t come so last minute, especially with a guest! It’s rude!”

Red perks up at this. “Uncle Stephen” is the mayor for whom his father works, a kind and gentle man who is tall and golden-haired and always smelling of fresh hay. He is close friends with Red’s father Navar, coming to visit the family often and bouncing Red on his knee to regale him with stories of past adventure and combat. Idalia insists that if Stephen were to intuit the true nature of the family—“if he were ever to even get a whiff of magic”—he’d hang the lot of them… but Red does not believe this. Stephen is warm and loving, a true uncle to the Antiqua children. Childless himself, the bond he has with their family transcends everything else.

“What guest is coming?” Red asks curiously, just before Idalia turns and whips a floury apron at him. 

“Go and wash up,” she commands instead of answering, “and then come and help me peel potatoes. Gwyn, would you stop being so difficult for once? Go and fetch the dill from the larder!”

“It’s not as if everything’s got to be perfect,” eleven-year-old Gwyn grouses. “Uncle’s here every week.”

“Yes, but not with a guest, you stupid girl. Father said—I mean the courier said—that he’s visiting us straight from Haven!”

An awed little hush falls over the kitchen at that, though Idalia is heedless to it in the clink and clatter of her preparations. Red feels the swoop of excitement in his stomach. Haven was once the capital of Mages: it seems like a place out of fairytales, some ethereal white-stoned metropolis lingering just beyond the bounds of reality.

“From Haven?” he repeats. “The message really said that?”

“Yes,” Idalia answers curtly, “but don’t bombard the guest with questions, all right? We don’t want to offend him. And wash up, please!”

Red obeys, and the afternoon is lost to cooking dinner with his sisters. Even Gwyn sullenly cooperates, cowed by Idalia’s scolding and Isodel’s disapproving looks, and soon enough they’ve scrounged together a passable meal of roast chicken with potatoes and dill. Lydda comments that it all seems too humble for a guest from Haven, which sets off another fight, and Red has only just slipped away and changed out of his splattered shirt when he hears Uncle Stephen’s boisterous voice at the front door.

Red comes pounding down the stairs by twos and threes to greet his parents and Stephen, but he falters at the bottom of the steps when he catches the looks on his parents’ faces. His father’s face is set and white under his fiery hair, and his mother’s blue eyes are wide and fearful, her shoulders hunched and small under the purple edges of her shawl. Neither of them speak much as Stephen strides in through the front door, cheerfully chatting away—and neither of them smile when they catch sight of Red. In fact, Red’s father’s eyes dart towards him, then towards the basement door—and Red’s stomach plummets.

Something is very wrong.

Then he feels it: the headachy wash of magic, the hot ache and press against his eyes and the itch to sneeze. Another Mage, he knows instantly, though he has never felt such a thing outside of his family before. There is another Mage here, and they’re powerful. 

“Liefred!” Stephen booms genially, stepping forward and engulfing the boy in a hug. “You grow taller every time I see you! Come, say hello to my guest.”

Another man steps in through the doorway, and Red’s feeling of foreign magic gets stronger. The man—the other Mage—is also tall, as tall as his father and Stephen, though he is thin and wiry, with strong forearms and dark, blood-red robes. The man’s face is pockmarked and hook-nosed, his features both harsh and ratlike; chin-length black hair is swept back from his face and pinned upwards in a peculiar fashion that Red has never seen before.

He looks coldly at Red, and it’s then that the glint of something on his chest catches the firelight. 

It’s a golden badge stuck to his robes, bearing the insignia of the sun with an eye at its center. The symbol of the Autarch and her Sun Court.

All at once Red’s heart begins to rabbit against his chest. 

“Hello,” he says to the man, because Stephen is expecting it: but the words come out faint and airless. The man’s gaze sweeps over him, lingering on his face—then he turns away and says something cool to Red’s mother about needing a washbasin. 

His mother leads the man away, ashen-faced, while Stephen walks into the kitchen, greeting the girls with the usual roar. Amidst the shrieks and girlish giggles, Red turns to his father and says quietly, “Dad?”

His father does not look at him; he only shakes his head stiffly and says, “Not now, Red.”

Then he walks into the kitchen like a man being marched to the gallows.

Red follows him with a cold hard stone of dread weighing down his gut. He does not know what any of this means. He has encountered other Mages before, from a distance, but if they ever sensed him for what he was, they kept quiet about it. They are all Diminished, after all—it is practically a birthright to protect each other from the people who would exterminate them.

But this man, this Mage… He’s different. He cannot be trusted to keep their secrets. He works for the Autarch. Judging by his robes, he is a personal Court-Mage of the Sun Court. And if he’s that powerful, he can definitely sense their magic, too… or at the least, he can see through the glamour that disguises Red’s eyes.

Red’s stomach tightens. What are they going to do if he tells Stephen? 

Or the Inquisitors?

All at once the image of his house burning flashes into Red’s mind.

When the family gathers at the table to eat, Red’s sisters fall silent as the man from the Sun Court sweeps back into the room. He sits at Stephen’s right side, indicating that he is far above him in status, and eats in silence as the mayor talks away, seemingly oblivious to the tense atmosphere in the room. Red watches as Idalia’s eyes shoot from the man to Stephen to her parents to the man’s badge. He sees her put things together and sees the fear enter her eyes. She scrunches the napkin in her lap and stops eating. 

“Thel was sent here by the Consortium to check our crops,” Stephen informs the table. “Make sure that blight hitting the southern farms is just that—blight—and not some devil-work. Eh, Thel?”

The Mage in red says nothing. 

Stephen cocks a curious look his way and adds, “Normally you Court-Mages have a handler, I think? Regardless: I think it’s fine and dandy that the Autarch trusts you not to do anything untoward.”

Thel dabs his mouth with a napkin and says in a low, sibilant voice: “The Autarch knows to keep her dogs on a very thick leash.”

Stephen blinks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Thel lifts his eyes, which Red sees now are a strange reptilian yellow; he catches the boy’s gaze and says, “Do not trouble yourself over it.”

Dinner passes by in a nauseating crawl. At his father’s glance Red tries to eat, but the food turns to glue inside his mouth. He picks away at his plate as his mind whirs over their options. They could pack up their things and flee in the night: go far away from here, where the Autarch’s men would never find them. But the Inquisitors have ways of tracking Mages, don’t they? And maybe their abrupt disappearance would only arouse needless suspicion. Maybe the man won’t tell their secret, after all. He has no reason to. They’re not harming anybody.

The symbol of the Autarch catches the firelight again, and his stomach lurches. 

That’s not how any of this works, he tells himself. 

Very briefly he remembers a spell that one of his books mentioned, a curse that could strike a man dumb and mute. 

But he has no way of learning such a spell. And a Court-Mage, with far more experience and education, would simply just turn it around on him anyway.

Once dinner has ended, Stephen invites Navar and Thel into the drawing room to smoke and drink. Red’s mother murmurs something about the children needing to go to bed—to the protests of Gwyn, who quiets when Red shoots her a fierce look—but Stephen simply waves her off and says the men will be quiet. Red’s mother bites her lips but doesn’t protest—unusual for a woman more fiery than even her daughters—and when she’s preoccupied with washing the dishes by hand, lost in her own thoughts, it’s only Red who spots Lydda creeping out of the kitchen towards the drawing room.

Lydda is light-footed and willowy, the weakest when it comes to magic in the family by far but equipped with her own skills in stealth and observation. She’s all the way down the hallway before Red can catch up, moving swiftly and silently, and by the time he snatches her arm, her ear is pressed to the study door.

“What are you doing?” he hisses in a whisper. 

Lydda shrugs him off. “I want to hear what they’re talking about,” she answers, as if it’s obvious—which, he supposes, it is.

He hesitates for only a moment before joining her at the crack in the door: a slit of orange light so thin that he can only see the tangle of his own eyelashes for a moment. Red has always been the inquisitive sort, unable to resist the call of knowledge. This moment, of all things, feels vital for him to witness.

From over his sister’s pale red head, which is sweet-smelling and somehow calming, he makes out the figures of his father and Thel standing together by the fireplace. Stephen is inexplicably asleep on the couch, and when Red strains his ears over the clank and chatter of the kitchen, he makes out the strange Mage saying, “He’s asleep. He can’t hear us.”

Navar is tense and unhappy: Red can tell from the set of his shoulders, the way his chest puffs out. His father is a thin, scholarly man, bespectacled and gentle; it’s clear he’s trying not to lose the thread of what’s going on. He says, “Isn’t it illegal to use your magic in such a way? If anyone found out you put a Norm official to sleep…”

Thel makes an abortive gesture. “If you think that’s the worst I’ve been made to do, you know nothing of the world,” he answers curtly. Lydda tenses, but Red breathes out angrily through his nose. His father knows everything about the world; he has read and researched so much. Thel has no place insulting him in his own home.

But Navar doesn’t react. He only says, “What is it that you want from us?”

Thel’s hands are clasped behind his back. He turns to regard the fireplace as if it’s his own; as if it’s Navar approaching him with some business proposition. He says, his voice pitched low, “Let us not bandy words back and forth. You have been hiding who you are from the Autarchy. From Lord Stephen.”

Red’s father says nothing. In the glow of the firelight, his eyes are hidden in a refraction of flame. 

“You are in a unique position,” Thel continues, loathsomely sibilant, even coy. Red catches the wash of magic being worked again and shivers. “You have fooled the authorities well enough to hide in plain sight. You and your wife are in positions of power—of trust. You keep the records for this foolish mayor. You have… resources.”

Still, Navar says nothing. He only flexes his hands. 

“I will tell no one about your family,” Thel continues softly, “no one about your children. The Autarch need not know about your existence.” Then he holds up a single finger, before Navar can speak. “If. If you use your resources to do some research for me. For me and me alone.”

There’s a long, long silence after this, broken only by the crackling of the fire and Stephen’s quiet snores. Red thinks he can hear the sweat trickling down his face. Lydda shifts uncomfortably, and the rustle of her clothes seems impossibly loud. 

Finally Navar says: “What kind of research?”

Red knows that his father pilfers magical texts when he can; he studies them in secret and preserves the records of the past only when no one else is going to come looking for them. He does have resources—though how this man Thel knows that, Red doesn’t know—but the Sun Court has its own archives. A vast army of Court-Mages at its disposal. Libraries upon libraries of their own stolen texts. What could Navar possibly have access to that this servant of the Autarch doesn’t?

“Why can’t you do this research yourself?” Navar asks, echoing Red’s question. “Surely the Sun Court has a reach far greater than my own.”

Thel is silent for a moment. “Yes,” he says finally. “You can not even begin to imagine its reach.”

Then he leans forward and begins speaking in Navar’s ear. The words are too faint and muffled for Red to catch, but this is Lydda’s forte: she is a Scryer, someone who can listen and spy on others even from miles away. She tosses one look back at Red, who nods. Then she cocks her head, breathes out the spell word—and then Red can feel her mind peeling away from herself, arrowing out into the drawing room. Her eyes turn cloudy and distant. All at once she stops her breath. 

At this, Thel turns to stare at the door… and suddenly Lydda breaks the spell with a shuddering gasp. Red feels it like the snapping of a rubber band, and instinctively flinches, too. His sister’s body jerks and falls limp against Red’s side. 

“Lydda!” he exclaims, forgetting himself. He catches her in his arms and begins to drag her back down the hall, despite her taller height. What he’s running from, he doesn’t know. Behind him he can hear the door opening; Navar calling his name. 

“Evil,” Lydda mutters through chattering teeth as she sags against him. “There’s something—evil around him. It’s all around him—!”

Suddenly a shadow looms over them both. Red turns, and it’s Thel; he nearly screams. The man looks down at Lydda and says, “It isn’t wise to spy.”

Red doesn’t remember anything after that.

He wakes up, tucked safely in bed, the next morning. As the golden light filters into his room, alighting on his blanket woven with patterns of the stars, he can hear his sisters merrily at breakfast, his mother’s light voice pitched in song. He almost convinces himself that it was all a dream, that nothing of the last night happened—after all, when he darts downstairs, Lydda seems utterly normal, reading quietly at her window seat. 

Only Stephen, still asleep on the couch in the study, proves that the Court-Mage was ever there. 

Red asks his sisters where the man in the blood-red robes went. They shrug and answer that he went back to Haven, that Red’s father walked him to the end of the country lane. That he and Lydda had fallen asleep together on the couch.

Red feels a chill at this, something he can’t describe. Something has happened to his family; their memories of last night do not align with his. He knows something is still wrong when his father fails to smile at the breakfast table, and only watches him with grave, grave eyes.

Later, as an adult, Red manages to put the pieces together. For a long time as a child, he is petrified that he has somehow been placed in a permanent dream—or else that his family has been replaced by doppelgangers who are ever-so-slightly different. 

As Archmage he realizes that their memories have been altered, though whether by Thel or his own father, he doesn’t like to wonder. But Red has always had the particular gift of resisting enchantments like that: he has always been particularly perceptive, his keen senses sharpened by his constant observations of the world—and so the false memories didn’t quite take.

But he keeps quiet about this. Quite suddenly—for the first time in his life—he isn’t sure which of his family he can trust.

Later, in the Circle, he intuits what he never heard Thel say out loud: that the Autarch had ways of controlling her Mages. That she had somehow bound their will to hers, so that their loyalties and souls would be hers unquestionably forever. That Thel could not research ways to break this hold on his own… so he’d found a way to blackmail Red’s father into doing it for him. A bid at freedom, at the easy cost of threatening to expose their family.

He never learns if his father goes along with the deal. No one ever comes to bother them again, and some years later Stephen informs them that that odd Mage who once dined in their house was killed by an Endarkened attack on the road. Navar shows no reaction to this, and expresses the appropriate amount of sympathy and indifference along with everyone else.

But Red has his suspicions. The morning he wakes up after losing consciousness, he scrambles to record what he remembers in his trusted green journal. He details their encounter with Thel, the man’s appearance, the looks on his parents’ faces. What he heard him say in the study.

Then, the next day, he catches his father burning the book. 

Red watches the pages curl and blacken like wilting leaves and feels his heart shrivel and burn with them. For one brief instant, an unspeakable hatred rises up within him, and he nearly plunges his hands into the fire to rescue the journal. 

But then his father gives him a look, and it is not a look of a parent reproaching his son—but a look between equals. As if he knows that Red will somehow allow this. 

It is in that moment that Red grows up.

He allows the book to burn, and neither he nor his father speak of it again. But he always recalls the vital lesson: he still remembers, even if his journal doesn’t. Words can be destroyed, eradicated so easily, even the hands of a child. But knowledge, true knowledge—his memories of the event—persist. He spends the rest of his life burning things into his brain: the one thing the Autarchy can’t take from him. 

He remembers, always, the burning of his heart. 

*~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*

[Author's note: Yeah, I went hard with the fire imagery here. I'm not even sure what this is... it went through so many different iterations (first it was like a school field trip to a cave and the professors were demons...) but I think what's here is important for your understanding of things that happen to other people in the game... 

(Also, don't worry: Lydda is fine!)

Do... do you guys want this kind of material? Or would you prefer romance and fluff shorts lol?]