The Arkanist

Chapter Three: Beginnings

Chapter Three: Beginnings

Beginnings are not entirely simple concepts. They just aren't. Such is common knowledge. They say an entire person's life can be explained, or rather defined at times, by their beginnings, their origins.

Mine is no different.

Mind you, my time came before the darkness, before the Fall, before the gods died, before the Evernight swept the lands cold and grey and ash cloaked the ground. My life was lived in light, but nevertheless, an altogether dark place.

***

I think I can say my life started, truly, when my father died. Yes, there could be no better time to start, no question at all. If this book is to provide a certain clarity, a certain truth to my being, both for the world and myself, I can undoubtedly, and without hesitation, start off there.

At that moment, everything seemed to change, and not for the better. I suppose I was too young then to understand the severity, the finality of the event, but in no way was I immune to it.

It had been snowing, I remember. It was the first snow of winter, and it had come early.

I had been reading, as I always was back then, when I heard the news. News that said not only was my father dead, but he had killed himself. My first question was: why? It was a natural question, a natural response to something so sudden and incomprehensible. Yet, it asked more than anything else I could have said. With one word, completely unawares to me, I was asking the question I would search for the remainder of my life.

The question of why, at its core, you must understand is an altogether ambitious entity, in the context of anything. You are, ultimately, questioning and quite debating at times, the existence of something, if not everything. If this book is to represent me in anyway, I feel inclined to plant this idea in the minds of whomever may read this. It is the center of me. It is the center of life as we know it. Never forget that. There were times, however, I wished I could. Those were the worst; that was when it was bad.

Now, beginnings, yes, I almost forgot.

The graveyard, a wholly grim and old place, was dusted in a pale white cloak just outside the city walls the day my father was to be buried, a pike stabbed through his heart. Such was the price of suicide in those times, Aylar being alive and well in the hearts of men.

My father was a kind man, an honorable man. He was no king or lord, not even a noble, but he possessed a certain honor that few courtly men hold, or even attempt to. It was natural and pure. I always admired him for it, that and his curiosity. You see, he was a philos, a highly intelligent man, who had earned his crest, his badge of knowledge, at the University in Iyll, the capital of Lent, and the western-most city along the Old Road. I suppose much of my own curiosity was attributed from him. For that, I am thankful.

Apparently, my father had killed himself with a hemlock poison. That was what the other philos' deduced, after a careful examination. I had not been informed until after such was conducted, and his body set to be buried. There were no bells, no songs of mourning, no ballads of misery played following his passing. Only silence.

Outside the city, I waited for them, but they never came.

The clouds were heavy upon the horizon and the wind was biting, rippling my cloak as I stood there among the dead, waiting, waiting for something that would never come. Raenish loomed like a ghost behind me, stood atop an old rocky hill, shrouded in snow and shadow. The Silver City it was called, long ago, during the First War. There was nothing silver about it anymore, sadly. I didn't think there ever would be again.

The graveyard had been a good mile from the outermost gate of the city, the majority of my travel spent on rugged cobblestone with the wind at my face, spitting snow and ice. In the end, I was the only one in attendance, apart from the gravediggers, of course. Nobody else had come. Nobody else seemed to care.

I had been standing there, watching the snow fill my father's empty grave, when I heard their singing. As expected it wasn't particularly good, but song was spilling from their lips nonetheless, and I found it odd. I didn't know gravediggers ever sung, I barely thought they talked. They were always a dour lot, backs hunched over their iron trowels, black hoods drawn up over their faces, digging away at the earth, handling the dead. Song wasn't part of the aesthetic.

I wrapped my blue, felt cloak about me, and ambled over to their hooded figures. My father's body, hidden by a grey pall, rested, face upwards on a long wooden box. A red circle of dark blood burned over his heart. The corners of my lips twitched, and my stomach fell. My throat tightening first in shock, then anger, and at last: sadness.

I never knew my mother. My father was all I had. I'd been raised by him, taught to read and write and think by him. I'd lived in his house and eaten with him. Now, I had nothing. I didn't know how that was going to feel. At that moment, it felt like nothing. Maybe that was all it was going to be.

Either way, I found myself walking, away from the graveyard, away from the singing gravediggers, away from it all. That was when I started to cry. It was the first time I truly realized he wasn't coming back. What was scarier, I found, was that I didn't know where he was, where he went.

The other philos, his "friends", all said he was forever cursed to dwell within the oblivion, in the very pits of Tarten's snare. I didn't want to believe that, though. I didn't want to believe my father was cursed to the oblivion. The longer I walked, the longer I had time to think.

Time is a tricky thing, however. At times, it is seductive and ensnaring, others, it is comforting and liberating. For me, personally, I had experienced both sides of time, and to be quite honest, I didn't particularly like either one.

***

Hale closed the book with wet eyes when he heard the pounding. It had broken his focus, sent his mind from the pages.

He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, and leaned upwards so that he sat against the wall, his pillow propped comfortably at his lower back. The room was dark and cold in the dead of night, the lonely oil-lantern fluttering to a soft pulsing of light, making reading difficult and strained. Yet the words had taken him, taken root inside his mind, sunken deep into his conscience, and lingered.

He wanted to know more. He needed to know more.

He was broken out of his revelry, however, by the pounding, a sudden sort of pounding, rushed and erratic. It was coming from outside, he was sure. He set the book on the small table and parted the curtains at the window, but all he could see was shadow and blackness, lightning crackling in the distance, cold and vague. His own reflection stared back at him.

In the ruddy lantern-light, his brown hair fell over his forehead, unkempt and untended. His eyes were heavy and drooping, and bloodshot. Looking into them, deep into their dark hearts, Hale saw his father. Growing up, his mother always insisted he had his father's face. Hale never believed her, until now. He could see it clear as a flame in the dark, saw his father's face smile at him through the reflection and vanish in the dark.

Hale slouched back down against his pillow. His hands were sweaty and clammy from holding the binding of the book, and his chest rose and fell in a slow sort of dance, ragged and weary.

He was tired, yes, but he couldn't stop reading. It seemed impulsive, the urge to continue, the urge to find the answer. Shifting into position so that he lay just to the side of the lump in the straw mattress, he cracked open the book and escaped the harsh world for time untold.

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