Room of Requirement

short story: the compass of wood

The Compass of Wood

a dark fantasy // futuristic dystopia

***

part one

The stench of blood is high in the air. It was still light when she started on this road; the trees still had a benevolent greenery and the road was lit by a certain murderous orange of a setting sun.

As it is with nature, it was suddenly night.

And with it the wind kissed goodbye and went home too. Her only companion and it was gone. With a frown and a crunch of gravel she stopped on the road, her hands patting the pockets of the light jacket that was hung over her shoulders.

A moment of panic when she couldn't find it and then an audible sigh of relief which clouded ahead of her in the night.

The wooden compass was in her pocket and when she held it in her hand, everything suddenly looked—or rather felt—brighter. She had been wrong about the wind. As long as she had this talisman, this treasure of a compass, she had a companion, a lifelong companion at that.

Unconsciously she traced the words carved into the polished wood at the other side—The Property of Nur. Four simple words, one extraordinary compass.

She remembered the rainy night and the muddy ditch in which she had stared at her mother's face for the last time. She didn't have nightmares but sometimes, the face would flash across her eyelids when she closed them to catch a moment of rest.

Pale underneath the dirt; snot, tears and rain ran down the length of the crooked nose. Her mother had been beautiful, and poor.

And hunted, but she hadn't known it then.

All she had known was that she was leaving, leaving behind her child in a muddy ditch in some over-flooding alley because the Hunt was catching up.

"It'll keep you safe," she had been told. "It doesn't work—thank God for that as long as it doesn't—but it will keep you safe. It has always been yours. Since the beginning of time."

With that and a hurried half-kiss plastered more on the raindrops than on her cheek, her mother had run off in the night. Goodbyes are often felt than said, even then there was nothing good about the parting so maybe, it was better left unsaid.

As Nur has begun to cry, the compass had begun to work. Right then, right there. It had lit up with a strange dark blueness, clammy in her cold hands and the long-stuck arrow moved wildly before settling with the conviction of desperation in a direction.

Nur had run and ever since that night, she had run.

She had been many things in the years that had followed; a vagrant, a lady, a messenger, a student—what a farce that had been—, a smith, a witch—only the cheap trickster type—, so many more.

But she had always been—oh she had a fancy name for it that she liked to put on her resume and advertisements—what was it? The Handler of Transactions of Fantastic and Magnificent Objects.

She was fooling no one, at least no one worthwhile because that would have been bad for the job. She was a smuggler of magical artefacts. The best in her trade.

And yet she had never felt this uneasy—not when she had battled ghouls for the Chains of Atlas, not when she had slipped into a den of vampires for a vial of pure immortality, not when she had been nearly beheaded for stealing the Nightwalker's Cloak, not then, not ever; all these were but minor details.