Jabril De Souza's History (WIP)

Chapter I: The Snow and the City

It was a white desert. Cold. Dry. The sun beamed down from a cloudless sky, turning it luminescent like bleached bone. This was my second time seeing snow. It suffocated me, assaulting my lungs with chilled needles. It drew out the moisture from my body, leaving me parched, and it froze the sweat to my skin. Even the sun seemed weary of the snow; the coldness sapped its energy so that its light burned smaller, less brightly. I hate the snow. I hate trudging through it to get to work. It was just like the people of this damn country: cold, unhelpful, and cruel. People actually say that it’s beautiful. I could laugh at that...no...no, it’s not beautiful. White is devoid of life, devoid of experiences, it’s boring to look at. The only time snow is beautiful is when it’s melting. Then it collects the dirt of the earth and turns muddy brown. It becomes colored with experiences and stories. It turns darker with minerals and adventures until it finally turns into water, then, what hadn’t evaporated seeps into the ground and waits to nourish the earth come spring. Just like humanity.

The snow hid the grit of the city. Neutral Grounds, the biggest city in Fiore was also the dirtiest, but its glamorous reputation served to hide its nastiness; its poverty, its crime, the desolation of its poorest residents. The people of the city rushed past me, too busy and too privileged to worry about food. The cars revved by, engines spewing pollution from exhausts and transporting important people that were warm and cozy. No one wondered why a child was in the city alone. It was possible they already knew. As I reached my work spot, a shadowy alley between two tall buildings, I checked to see that there were no cops nearby. They sometimes disguised themselves as common people, but I could tell who was a cop from a mile away. They all looked haughty because they were used to having all the power in the world. When the coast was clear, I discretely melded into the shadows of the building, only stepping out when a client approached me. I shivered. From the cold and from the thought of what I would have to do. It was cold today so I wouldn’t have many customers, but I would still get work today, I knew that well. In this city, there were no shortages of rich old men looking to do those types of things with little boys. Only my father knew that I sold my body for money. When he found out, he slapped me so hard that I couldn’t breathe for a moment but he didn’t ask me to stop; it was good money and times were hard in the Central District. Besides, even if he asked me to stop, I wouldn’t have; my sister Seyna was a growing girl.

I didn’t have to wait for long. Five minutes after I arrived at my work spot, a long, black, gleaming limo pulled into view. Its grill was glistening gold in the sun and the rims of its tires were plated in silver. This geezer was rolling in money. The last door of the limo opened and out stepped a tall, slender man. He was dressed in a luxurious two piece suit with a luscious dark brown fur coat to guard him for the cold. The fur was probably from some endangered animal that was poached illegally. His short, graying hair was combed back and parted to the side and on his right ring finger was a single gold band. A married man...most of my customers had fat, shallow wives who shopped all day and drank margaritas with small, diamond encrusted umbrellas. As he approached me, the only thing that I could focus on were his piercing grey eyes. They were cold, distant, they saw me as less than human. His thin lips opened and the words that escaped his lips were icicles, “I have need for you. Get in the car.” He didn’t ask for my services, he demanded it. A part of me was hesitant. This man didn’t seem interested in my body, but the thought of Seyna going hungry tonight stopped all my reasoning. So facedown, I walked to the parked limo. The quick crunch of the snow let me know that the man was right behind me, piercing me with his eyes.

In the limo, the silence was heavy enough to crack my skull. The old man didn’t make any effort to touch men like other men did and when he stared at me, his eyes were devoid of longing. Only power lust and cold, grey pupils lived within his eyes. The longer the ride went on, the more nervous I got. Finally, when the car stopped, he spoke softly, “ I heard those from Teranga have strong power within their blood.” I froze when he mentioned my home country. My dark skin was a dead give-a-way, but there was something in the way his icicle words pierced my ears and chilled my lungs that filled me with unnatural fear. My eyes started to dilate, my skin grew slippery with sweat, and from the pit of my stomach, an unnatural scream started to work its way out. Then there was a flash of white light. I caught myself thinking, ‘Off course something so evil would have white magic.’ Then I blanked out and darkness overtook my conscious.

I was groggy when I came to. My head felt like it had been split open by a cleaver and it was as though my eyes were looking at the world through a thick veil. I tried to move but I couldn’t. Panic struck me. The more I struggled the more constricted I became. I finally stopped when I started gasping for air as though ropes of ice were binding my lungs, slowly cutting into the meat of my organs. “You will do well to stop struggling,” a cold clear voice called. I looked around to pinpoint who it was, but the room was dark with just a single, pathetic candle to the immediate right of me to illuminate what little I could see. The air, however, smelled familiar. It smelled of dry flowers and herbs that were native to my homeland, Teranga. Looking around I could see the scattered petals of Bansa flowers and the cut up roots of a herb called tokeur. The old man stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed in all white now. It seemed that the dark and somber wardrobe that he initially wore dressed him in discipline because all signs of restraint were gone from his body. His eyes were electric and his hair frenzied. He fidgeted a lot, his thick eyebrows gave him a look of bewilderment, and his speech became faster, “Your people have a strong connection to a veiled reality of great power! I will soon take that from you!” He spat out “your people” as if my people weren’t people, just simply tools to use in his quest for power. I couldn’t say anything. The old mage had placed a magic gag on me. “Tonight you will die and your power will be mine!” he continued. The light from the candle grew dimmer and the air grew colder. I started grunting and moving uncontrollably from fear, from wanting to live, from thoughts of Seyna. I didn’t care that the icy ropes seemed to be tearing into my lungs. I didn’t care that my head was pounding and that I was fighting an impossible battle. All I wanted was to live and see my little sister, Seyna. To feel her small fingers wrap around my index finger because her hands weren’t big enough to hold her older brother’s hands, I would give anything. As all these feelings and thoughts started to surface uncontrollably, I started to feel sick to my stomach. A power was building up inside me. An unpleasant power. The way it crawled over my skin was revolting and it tinged my throat with the taste of nausea. The power started to expound upon itself until suddenly it felt like my body was opening to another world. The pounding in my head lessened and my mind grew misty. I could no longer feel the icy ropes constricting my body. Instead I felt my limbs moving wildly as if I was suffering a seizure. It was too much, my eyes were rolling into the back of my head and I threw back my face and an unearthly scream rose from my throat. It was a scream that gave me nightmares; a slavering, thirsty scream as if all the poverty and illness in Fiore had coalesced into a primal yell that could shatter the continent. As the scream escaped, a blast of power rocked the bones of my body. It shattered the room and threw the old mage backwards into a jutting piece of stone with a sickly green wave of energy. I heard a crunch, and I saw the old mage’s dead body against the piece of stone; he had been blasted so hard that his neck snapped in mid air.

It turned out the old mage had taken him to an abandoned mansion on the outskirts of the city. There were no guards to stop me as I walked outside the decrepit estate. I was clothed in the mage’s fur coat; I had pillaged every valuable thing I could get my hands on from the old mage’s body. His gold band will catch a small fortune in the black market. My head was still misty and my body felt broken from the power of the revolting energy. But Seyna needed to eat, so I made my way home with the valuables I found on an old man that I murdered.

Chapter II: Seyna

Two weeks after the third death-day of the old mage, the stench of my mother’s body still permeated the small apartment that Seyna and I called home. After my father died of pneumonia two years ago, my mother couldn’t bring herself to support her children. Initially she tried to persevere through her grief by doing her best to fill in the role of two parents, but it was no use. She couldn’t make up the income that was lost by my father’s death and we steadily grew poorer and we sunk deeper into abject poverty. Things worsened after I grew ill to a debilitating disease that kept me from working. My mother stopped talking, then she stopped cooking, then she stopped bathing, and finally she started locking herself in her room. I guess the next point was that she just stopped eating all together. So she died. It took us a five days to get around to burying her body because initially we couldn’t afford services for her, so Seyna had to work extra hard to come up with the money. All other income went to purchasing my medications and buying food; it was far more important to sustain the living than to honor the dead.

Seyna was the only one of our household working now. She was deprived of her beauty; her natural stunning features were hidden by a hard mask of difficulties, her hands were rough and blistered from working with grainy wool, and her eyes were hard with age. At only twelve years old, Seyna had the mind of an old woman; she was deprived of her childhood. Her family deprived her of her childhood. She was the only one I confided in about my encounter with the old mage and she told me about my powers. She always liked listening to our father speak about our home country; about the peculiar magics, the culture, and the Unformed Lands. I never cared for the magics or the Unformed Lands, but according to Seyna, I had a rare and deep connection to the magical source of my people. She was right; after the incident with the mage, I could never be rid of the almost sinister energies that clouded my head. I wished the magics that intruded on my mind would just leave; they weren’t doing anything to help us survive.

Yes, I love my little sister, Seyna and it pained me to see her working herself to the bone just for me. I asked her to leave me when I grew sick. To take the valuables I had looted from the dead mage’s body and to build a foundation for a new, better life. She should have just left my mother and I to die, but she stayed and she devoted every ounce of her being to us. The illness caused me to be bedridden and unable to function by myself. I couldn’t eat by myself, I couldn’t clean myself, and I couldn’t shit by myself. So she stayed so that I could at least live with some ounce of pride. At first I resisted her help; I didn’t want her to see me with my dignity compromised. I didn’t want her to hear my whimpers of pain, to wipe my buttocks of feces residue. Sometimes, I was so embarrassed that I would cry after she left my room.

(to be continued...)

(reserved)