Motley (#Wattys2016)

14: Ivory

ONE YEAR AGO

Tetsuya had been alone all his life. Ever since he was little. He remembered his parents' shrieks of surprise when he made black vines shoot out of the ground and strangle a cat. Yes, he remembered that. He must have been three or four, but he never forgot, and he never forgave when they locked him in his room. "It's for your own good," his mother told him kindly. Despite her sweet words, she still recoiled from his touch as if he were a leper.

"Naomi, there's no need to talk to him," his father said. His father, Kazuhiko, was the owner of the textile factory, and therefore had a reputation to uphold. "It's for the village's good, much less his."

"But dear-"

"He killed the neighbor's cat in the blink of an eye! And don't tell me you haven't seen what he does when he's playing by himself! All that lightning? It isn't normal! Don't you see that our boy is a monster?"

The little boy bowed his head in shame. How could he help it? That cat was going to kill his pet snake. The poor little thing would have been eaten alive if he hadn't stopped the cat somehow. He listened to his parents arguing, and was, in the end, shut away in his room.

For five years, he waited. He was shut up in that dark room so much that he almost forgot what sunlight was. Anger boiled inside him like it had never been before; anger at his father, anger at his mother, anger at the village who wanted him locked away forever. He tried again and again to break out of his prison cell, and when he was ten, he achieved his freedom. The whole of the wall had been blasted off, leaving nothing but some stone chunks on the floor. His parents were too late in bursting in through the door to see their son disappear.

He settled in the mountains, where he was sure nobody would find him. He honed his magical powers, purely off instinct instead of reading useless spellbooks. Years and years of training in the mountains made him nearly unstoppable, and he decided to get revenge once he had turned seventeen. Seventeen was the age when one was considered an adult in Lo Stesso, his home village. He wondered if his parents would remember his birthday.

Tetsuya flew down from the mountain and cupped his hands, blowing hard and making a giant black cloud fly out from his hands. It spread ominously over Lo Stesso like a storm, and when he snapped his fingers, black electricity sparked into life. In nearly the blink of an eye, it zapped every person on the streets, tore apart the stucco buildings, started fires. Screams were heard from the town, and he smiled a sickly smile. He swooped down through the cloud, immune to the lighting, and touched down onto the dusty street. People were running left and right, crying out for loved ones. A couple of charred bodies were already lying in the flames. The black smoke and flakes of ash drifting through the air suffocated the older citizens and the young ones. Tetsuya watched as a little boy dropped to his knees, grabbing his throat and gasping for air, until the boy fell down to the ground at Tetsuya's feet. He stepped over the boy's lifeless body indifferently and continued down the street, which went up a hill to a small house with strawberries in the back.

The house was in shambles. He could see a couple of bodies under the wreckage, but there was no fire. "Who are you?"

Tetsuya whirled around. There was a very small girl standing next to the house, her face blackened with soot with tear tracks that streaked through the dark. "I- who am I?" Tetsuya spluttered. He thought he had gotten rid of them all. He was just about to draw out a knife when she spoke again.

"My name's Chie. Are... are you here to save us?"

He was stunned. Didn't this little girl know anything? How stupid was she? "Of course not!" he half-shouted.

"'Cause you look like an angel," she said. Tetsuya peered at his crisp white clothes and rolled his eyes. "Can you wake up my brothers?" Chie asked him hopefully, in the manner of all children wishing for something they know they can't have.

"Wake them up?" Tetsuya sneered. "They won't wake up, not ever!"

Chie clenched her fists with emotion. "I don't like to be alone. Are you alone too?"

Tetsuya could hardly believe he was having this conversation with a little commoner girl. "Of course I'm not!" That was a lie, of course, and Chie seemed to know it.

"My big sister left a month ago. I miss her a lot. I don't want my brothers to leave too."

Tetsuya was intrigued. Nobody left Lo Stesso, nobody! "Your sister? Who was she?"

"Reiko... She liked spells and stuff," Chie reminisced. "And then these people took her away." Her face was screwed up, like she was going to start bawling. So there is another who practiced magic here, he thought to himself. Anybody who knows magic could be useful.

Suddenly, there was a crack from overhead. A burning tree branch was falling from a nearby maple, right onto the tiny girl. She screamed and crumpled under the weight. "Help!" she screeched. More tears welled in her eyes and drew tracks on her cheeks.

He considered Chie for a moment, watching her flailing limbs with a feeling halfway between curiosity and amusement. His hand drew a knife out of a back pocket, the one with the ivory handle his father had given him all those years ago. The knife twirled idly in Tetsuya's hand. The red eyes shone with newfound excitement. "This is all the help you will get from me," he hissed.

Chie had a glimpse of bright steel before the sudden spattering of blood on the ground. Blood mingled with the fire from the tree. Her baby-blue eyes were cold and staring now.

It had begun to rain in the absence of Tetsuya's spell. It was a heavy rain, washing the charred beams of wood from the streets and churned the dust into mud. Tetsuya tromped through this mud, past countless wet bodies littering the street and over debris from houses. His clothes were stained with soot, dirt, and blood. His eyes roamed over his good work, then down to the knife clutched in his hand. The dripping scarlet stood out from the gleaming ivory. "Ivory," he muttered absentmindedly. A smirk stretched across his face. Overhead, thunder crashed and a strike of lightning lit up the dark.

*x's song: Whispers in the Dark by Skillet*