Center of Attention

I'm Your Father

          What scared Smallik most was the inability to know. He could not share his words with others because they sounded like the extreme to anyone who was listening in. They did not know why Smallik wanted the world to suffer, but they knew it was wrong and it should never be practiced. Smallik had a past he never even told his own mother. If anything scared him more than the idea of death itself, it would be someone knowing about him.
That's why they all have to die. No one can know what happened to him.

Ogillitiy never looked so on edge before. He had his knuckles turning white from the grip he had on the book he was holding, and he had kept his eyes ahead as if there was nothing else. His voice was low as he muttered in Faean, probably curses he knew I couldn't figure out. Maybe I should've yelled at him. All those times he was writing about people killing others or people trying to fight the system should've been signs for me to stop him from attempting anything dumb. Anything. Now I was being dragged in a car by a man who only spoke in Faean, and that wasn't even supposed to exist. "There stories, Firstien," my mother would tell me. "Why would you believe in something made for babies?"
It was very much real, and I was stuck in the middle of it. I leaned my head against the plastic window of the car. It was warm from the Fall sun, and it made my black hair stick to the panes. Ogillitiy was talking to the driver in Faean, and he would glance at me with a smile. It reminded me of Mavara. He looked so much like her, and it was scary to think that he was acting like a lunatic. Maybe I should've have restraints. I kept thinking of all the things I did wrong to get me to this point. None of them... Nothing would have fixed this.
I heard an explosion from behind us. It shook the car, and the driver swerved as if he was about to run into something. Oh he was. There was a car driving crookedly across the lines of the road in a fast manner. It suddenly slammed into the side of a large skyscraper and exploded. Just as the last one had. I gulped in my fears as the driver only slammed hard on the gas. My face squished into the back of his seat. Ogillitiy had done the same, and he grabbed onto me as if he was fearing for his life.
"Oohi vigini broaet!" Ogillitiy spat. I didn't have to know what that meant to know that he was cursing out the driver.
"Where are we going?" I yelled.
"The outskirts. Now that the Dittas know who you are, they're trying everything they've got to destroy you." He pulled out his Vigva and began typing away at it. It was actually in a language I understood, but it also sounded like pure gibberish. I decided to ignore it.
"Why would they want to destroy me? I'm the reason for their existence!"
"Exactly."
The car screeched on its breaks and seemed like it was going to flip over any second. Thank the gods above (I was breaking a rule) that it didn't, but when I exited I began to throw up. I wasn't fond of cars. I purposely lived close to work just so I wouldn't have to drive anywhere unnecessary. Ogillitiy only gave me a second before pulling on my wrist to take me into a back alley. The alley, though it was still daytime, was lit up by fluorescent lamps on each side. The metal plating that was on the ground was rusted from neglect, and every door we passed seemed to be hit by an electronic axe. I was deathly afraid that my son was doing something he couldn't stop.
He pulled me into an abandoned building similar to the one right next to our apartments. He spoke lowly in Faean, but picked up again in our language. Candles. Candles that seemed to light by themselves slowly began to illuminate corners of the room. Every corner had been caked in dust from a millennia of forgotten time, and there were ashes to adorn every spot where a piece of furniture should have been. I had never seen candles. The light was practically useless, but I had always heard of how magnificent they had appeared to be. Wax had dripped from the wick at the top, sloshing down onto the things they were standing on. I was mesmerized.
Ogillitiy mouthed something and walked into a different room. I didn't hear him say anything, but maybe he wasn't talking to me. Did it matter? I was just afraid that there was something about him that was going to end up getting me killed. My own son. He was even scarier than the bowels of death itself, but I just saw a room full of lamps and a Fae. The first Center.
"Ogillitiy." My voice was screeching brass.
"Yeah?" he shouted. You could hear him clanging something.
"Come here."
The footsteps were careful. As he came in from the other room, I saw nothing but a dark void in the eyes that I gave him. "Dad, we have to get out of the city. If you just give me-"
"That's not going to cut it. I don't care about leaving even if the entire world is coming after me. I need answers. Now." Act like a strict parent, Firstien. I was soft like a teddy bear, but I was trying to act like I did at work. In my head I just had to pretend he was a convict, and it wasn't that hard. Ogillitiy didn't stray from the rotted wall he was leaning against. "How do you know?"
"Mom."
Mavara? "She's dead. She was dead before you were alive, and you know that's not how you got anything."
"Her journals, her legacy. I was born with the knowledge, for crying out loud. Because guess what? Mom was the true Center, and you were her backup."
​​​​ "Ogillitiy Sorgit Istinti, I am your father and you will listen to me instead of back talking like you own the place." He grimaced as I brought out his middle name. I had never done that, and he knew I was on my last leg. "Explain it to me rather than telling me riddles all the time."
He went back into the room with a big sigh and stayed in there for a long time. I was growing impatient. I almost stepped in there, but he came back with the book from before in his hand. He started to recite something in a language a little bit different from Faean, and a large blue light shot out from the yellowy pages. It swirled in the air, illuminating everything that was once dark. A picture formed from within its blue wisps. A face. Mavara. Her poignant nose and green eyes were hard to miss. Her skin was smooth as silk, and I almost thought she was real. I wished she was.
"Mom, or Mavara Istinti, has a long line of Fae blood in her. I mean that her family is pure Fae, and she is full Fae." Ogillitiy was announcing like he was explaining it to a small child. "In Faes, they have people called Centers. Centers are people that keep the world... going with their own life force. As long as they are alive, the world will not crumble in on itself. Mom was one such Center, and she inherited from her own mother long gone. Needless to say, she had complications during birth, dying in the hospital. In her effortless moment, she gave the power to you, Dad, a Fae-less human being with no concept of reality. I know everything because I'm half-Fae. We are born with this knowledge just as much as you humans are born with particular knowledge."
She had always believed of the unnatural. She would tell me stories about things that reached far beyond the clouds or swam deep below the ocean. My family had told me that everything like that was pure myth, but I kept believing for Mavara. Fake believing. Even when Ogillitiy would tell me of the unruliness of his stories, I still could not believe them. Now, I was being told that a human's reality was just a cover up, and everything anyone has ever taught me was completely wrong. Half-Fae... My son was half of something that didn't even exist in my eyes.
"I guess I was the only person in the room she had," I sighed. I had asked to be alone with her as her breathing had started to deteriorate. "She probably would have picked someone else more capable."
Ogillitiy shook his head. "You're capable. Mom chose you to fix everything that has ever gone wrong in the world, and all you need to do is go back to the beginning of where the problem starts."
"The beginning of the day?"
"Before the trees were ripped away, before candles didn't exist." He motioned to the waving fire burning on the wick. "Before anything you ever thought came into existence."
I widened my eyes. "The year was... 4065..." Ogillitiy's story. That story wasn't fiction, it was real. "You haven't been writing fiction..."
The building began to shake, and I heard an explosion outside. He ran back into the little room. Glass shattered from inside, lots of it clambering to the hard ground. When he returned, he had a tiny blue vial. He opened the cork and every little piece of swirling blue had dug deep into the vial. It glowed, and he handed it to me without even thinking. I knew I had to drink it.
The building had shaken again. "You need to go to that year. Smallik. That's the character in my story, the man playing God. Meet him."
Smallik. It sounded like a name he would make up.
"Go!" The front door burst open with a gunshot and a foot, and I gulped down the blue liquid. It tasted like spit, and it wasn't my spit. I wanted to choke on it, but I knew that everything was depending on this.
"Kill the boy!"
I saw men with black bandannas shoot rapidly in Ogillitiy's direction, but he didn't move. Bullets had pierced his skin like they were simply going through nothing. I screamed, but everything was starting to fade out of my sight. As Ogillitiy squirmed violently out on the floor, I yelled out his name. I screamed until everything around me had disappeared. It was all gone.
Everything went black.