The Curse of the Gift

Part 1

I am walking along a familiar path. A warm, but not hot wind is blowing outside, the sun will soon set. Another hour and there will be sunset. If you go straight to the very end, you can go to the cliff, which offers a stunning view of the ocean. And in the middle is an old willow tree. You can also see off some of the most beautiful sunsets in your life there.

If you walk around twenty meters and turn right, then you will go straight to my grandmother's house, which is located a little outside the small town located on the island of Astara. My mother and I live not far away, just near the border of the city and the forest, which hid us from strong winds in autumn and winter, and the scorching sun in summer.

Afraid of falling, I look at my feet, and in surprise I notice that I am not wearing shoes. But I don't feel any pain. It's strange, because my mom would hardly let me go for a walk in the woods without shoes.

Before I can take another step, a blinding white flash appears in front of me. Startled, I lose my balance and fall to the ground.

Despite the fact that everything is still floating in my eyes, I begin to distinguish a voice and some figures. Every second they become louder and clearer, and out of all the many sounds, I can distinguish one voice that stands out from all. It's my mother's voice. A scream.

When my vision returns to normal, I see a picture that I have been trying to forget all my life.

I'm on a cliff. My grandmother is standing and crying, and my mother is being held by some men, and she, uttering inhuman screams, is trying to escape. I force myself to look in the direction where the mother is so desperately rushing — there is a little girl lying next to a willow tree as old as the world. She's unconscious. And as soon as I see her hands covered in blood, in severe burns, it dawns on me that this girl is me.

At that moment, my hands begin to burn, as if they had been put into a fire. When I raise my palms to my face to check what's wrong, they burst into flames and begin to burn. The fire slowly spreads from my hands and down the length of my arms. A searing pain runs through my whole body. My breathing is labored, and I feel like I'm suffocating. My eyes went dark, and I fell into darkness.

***

When I open my eyes, it takes me a few more seconds to wake up. But the pungent smell of manure and urine does its job, and I come to my senses immediately. This isn't the first time I've had a dream like this. They start out differently, but the end is always the same.

The guy sitting next to me, who had been vomiting all day, finally fell asleep. But I still moved as far away as possible — in a hold full of people. I don't want to catch a disease from him and die before we reach our destination. Maybe dying would be a better idea, though. But I didn't want my remains to be tossed into the sea, like the others who couldn't last a couple of days.

It's still dark in the hold, which means it's not morning yet. I'm not sure, but I think we've been sailing for about five days. And it would have been a great sea voyage if it hadn't been for almost a hundred people in this one little room. Or rather, future slaves.

There is a catastrophic shortage of fresh air. But the longer we sail, the fewer people there are. I am surprised that under such conditions, I myself still have not given my soul to the goddess of death. They feed us only once a day (if a stale piece of bread can be considered a full meal), probably so that we do not often go to the toilet, because they, unfortunately, do not have a separate room for such needs. Service also leaves a lot to be desired, but after one of the carriers slit the throat of a man in front of us, who had simply stood up for a child, I learned one simple thing. Never lift your head, make eye contact, or speak. But we were still allowed to breathe, because that way they wouldn't have anything left to sell, which meant they wouldn't get any money.