Children of the Citadel

chapter 4

 I woke up to a knock on my door. A reserved knock of courtesy, not someone demanding entry. "Lady Guinevere sent me to inform you that you depart at noon," a young, female voice came muffled through the door.

Lady Guinevere. A new honorific for a girl who was no different today than she was yesterday. Or maybe she was. I didn't know exactly what she had all learned in those hours yesterday when I had been sleeping. About her new life that would begin today. About the Incantare.

Incantare. They were mentioned so seldomly in the books I had read and with descriptions so vague I thought that they may have been a metaphor, perhaps for the barbaric ways of humanity before the coming of The Messiah. No one I knew had ever been to the land across the sea. To be honest, I couldn't be sure that place existed either. Perhaps that was why The Messiah had known every year that I was not suited to be his vessel - I was a skeptic. It was probably all the reading. I didn't know a single acolyte who read of history and culture with the same fervor that I did. For me, it was a result of a life of living inside the compound. I had actually only left Messivita once in my life, on a brief mission trip to a town called Aradhna, a two-day trip on horseback. It was sort of like the vacations that wealthy townspeople or bureaucrats sometimes took to the warmer southern regions, except with more praying and preaching, probably. There had been nothing in the news lately – at least, nothing people were talking about. I didn't actually pay attention to the news. Things that happened in the past were far more interesting to me than the events of the present when every single day was the same.

I looked to the pentagon shaped splotch of light on the floor, cast by the single window of similar shape. There were minor, nearly unnoticeable notches unevenly spaced in a line across the floor, along path that the light would take as the sun moved. It told the time, albeit in a rudimentary, slightly inaccurate way. I had done it through the use of my father's timepiece, a handy device that he rarely allowed to be taken outside of his office. Two differently sized arrows of metal moved about at different speeds, rotating around the center of a pale ceramic circle. There were only a handful of timepieces in Messivita, probably in all of Illamore. No one understood how they worked, and no one could replicate one properly. Some were the size of a dinner plate and could be placed on a wall or shelf while others were built into bands of leather or chain that could be fastened to the wrist or a traveling pack. Father let me borrow this particular timepiece for an entire day, during which I sat on my floor, marking it with a dinner knife where the bottom of the window's beam of light met shadow every time the longest arrow pointed towards the top of the circle that read '12'.

From where I sat up in my bed, blankets covering me from the waist down, I could tell it was slightly past the ninth hour of the morning.

Rather than sit in the dining hall to enjoy my breakfast, I brought my eggs and bread back to my bedroom. I hadn't planned to, but the whispers and stares I received upon entering the commonspace changed my mind. There was no malice in them, none at all; the reactions were only the result of what was possibly the most monumental gossip to hit the Citadel in decades. The result of feelings like surprise, reverence, and maybe even a bit of jealousy or pity. Regardless, I couldn't stand it, and I knew that I'd be asked questions that I couldn't answer.

Guin wasn't there either. I stopped by her bedroom door on the way to my own, and knocked. This time, there was an answer. "Come in."

I cracked the door and poked my head in.

Guinevere was sitting on the floor of her room, clothes and packs scattered about. She looked up at me when I opened the door wider and crossed the threshold, but did not get up. Instead, she continued folding one of her violet acolyte robes in her lap.

"Are you bringing everything?" I asked, curious for my own purposes as well.

She shrugged, and sighed. "I don't know," she admitted, "emptying this room seems so permanent."