Black Eyes

PART ONE | chapter 1

Zraegan was a large city that was home to all species from the entire continent. It was also called the city of eternal rain for it was very rare to see a clear sky without the perennial grey clouds blocking the sunlight. The city was divided into four sectors whose edges were not clear, but it was clear from a sensation on the skin and from the surrounding landscape that the division was profound. To the North of the city was the headquarters of the Kwer: a government branch that monopolised the city and kept it under control through the Zarka, the militia belonging to the Kwer that made up both the civil and military control part.

Nakir lived in a small semi-dilapidated apartment in the eastern area at the edge of the city. He had been living there since he outgrew the Fray Institute Orphanage in the leafy western part of Zraegan. He didn't really know how he ended up in the East part. When he came out the orphanage he was ten years old and to earn some money he ended up working as a chimney sweep. His thin and agile little body fit perfectly through the narrow cracks and with the few djil, the Zraegan coin, that he earned he could afford a hot meal and the protection of a large man who also managed condominiums on the border with the South, the ones where people preferred not to go and Nakir had rented at a very low price a room with peeling walls and a bed with iron slats that creaked every time he laid down or turned over.

Soon his body began to feel the strain of that work, giving him a bad phlegmy cough. When Nakir saw blood in the phlegm he decided he would find something else to do: he didn't want to die at the age of ten with his lungs blackened by sooth.

The West, however, had nothing left to give him in terms of work. He was always too small for a job and too big for another, so he decided to march North.

There he found even less that suited him. A dirty child without shoes was not welcome in high society. The area inhabited by the most famous doctors, bankers and entrepreneurs had nothing to do with his work experience and he was kicked out of every possible place.

He found himself on the streets, without a roof to protect him from Zraegan's eternal drizzle that polished the slippery stones of the cobbled streets and made the walls and gates damp and slimy.

With shoulder-length hair and perpetually soaked from the rain, despondently he headed towards the East area, where half of the buildings had been abandoned after the plague of the South area, almost ten years earlier. He was still sheltered in the Fray Institute and did not have to experience the horrors of the disease, but after that violent attack the city had never been the same. Many had lost their lives, abandoning entire buildings which were now inhabited by homeless people like Nakir and by the few who had fallen into despair.

The boy now nineteen wore a black sweatshirt and let out his long red hair that reached below his shoulders. He looked at himself for a moment in a mirror hanging on the wall that had already been there when he had found the small apartment, one of the few still intact. Its green frame was peeling from the years and it was broken in two places as if the mirror had been shot. It mattered little. Nakir arranged his hair in a low ponytail and swept it behind the pointy ears that indicated his elven nature. The sea of light freckles covering his pale skin was always there to remind him of his mother's face.

He had never seen her and yet every now and then he seemed to dream of a young woman with sweet features, flaming red hair like his, but curly and indeed, her face covered in light freckles even if he never really managed to see her real face. He often wondered if he was anything like her. However Nakir knew well that he was not just an elf.

There was something dark in him that was pushing to come out, like a tingling in his hands. Every time his hands tingled Nakir rubbed them on his clothes and the sensation went away on its own. He still didn't know what it meant. Or rather, he would have preferred not to know. He had seen what he was capable of, but it had been a one-off and he was still too young to understand its meaning. That horrible incident still haunted him after almost ten years.