Center of Attention

What You Can Do

        My hands coiled around Sivill until my breath had stuck hot to his ear the same way it had done to me when he was surrounding me in stakes. My eyes were full of pain as the blackness around them started to crust off into thousands of pieces. It didn't matter. Nothing like this mattered. I just wanted Sivill gone, and I turned back to everyone else with my black book at his throat. There was a way to kill a Center without the world falling apart.
     My voice dropped down low, too low for anyone to hear, and I called out to Giartt thousands of times for his power to bless me. I could slit Sivill's throat with my own power, but it would be Giartt that could even revoke the Center part of him. However he did that.  That wasn't my place to figure it out, but my eyes were expectant on the crowd. On Smallik. He seemed to be held back by Viobin by his fingers as he tried to reach out to his sibling.
      "What are you going to do?" Firstien asked me. "You can't just kill him."
      He was right. My book loosened from his neck.
     "What can I do?" I sighed. "I can kill him."
     Smallik gave me this look of pain in his face. "No."
     "We lock him up," Sobollum had suggested. "I can do that if you wish. I'll shut up his mouth and tie his limbs up so he can't do anything drastic."
     I much rather liked the death idea, but they weren't particularly interested. Of course they wanted to listen to an adult rather than me, and I hung my head as my grip tightened around Sivill's wrists. He flinched, his face contorting until Firstien managed to take him away from my strong grip.
     "Thank the gods above," Firstien muttered to himself, hands pushed on Sivill as he pulled him away along with Sobollum. Killing him was probably the worse option despite how I inwardly protested what they were doing even as they continued to walk farther into the land of faeries without looking back to me.
     I sat there, peeling away the blackness from my skin even as the tips of my fingers were numb from the ongoing pain.

     My hands did eventually let Sivill go when Sobollum asked me to, and I let his body drop to the floor other than the the times I was called here to do different things like he was doing before I showed up here. My mind started to run. I had felt the rush of words as they laid there on the edge of my tongue boldly as those words that I read had left me. I could still hear some of it echoing in my head, and I started to recite it all over again.
     I followed Sobollum and Viobin for a while before spurring off into a different alley much darker than the main street. I felt the trembling of the ground as the loud explosion had rang through the air, and I had stopped for a moment to say a prayer to one of the ancient Gods of the past. Dad had to be safe, I thought. He probably didn't even leave the house yet.
My book stayed hidden behind my overcoat as I ran against the crowd that started to get away from the source of the vibrations. All of them, every single disgusting humanoid face, was terrified of the bellowing black smoke that started to rise from the large concrete building. Oh no. That was the castle, the place where the crummiest of humans had sat in all day and worked out ways to destroy the other humanoids. Just as I was starting to get a good look at it, I had gotten a message on my Vigva from Dad about it. 'Be careful. The bombing that Smallik talked about is happening right now.'
     I gulped. That was my job.
     "Siasel norvis," I managed to say in a clear voice. A small orb that seemed to be made of lightning had started to form in the palm of my hand. Saying those words had barely any power to them, but the source of getting something like an orb was something purely made for a black mage that had high magic in them. Faean was the language of magic, and I had only knew what to say to make my black book produce things from thin air. Like the orb.
Slowly I began to approach the building on fire, and I watched the fire lick up the sides of the concrete. It was immediate fire, and it was scary.
     That happened. I wanted to ask to see if there was proof of this, but I knew that I didn't exactly have to because the story was mostly in my perspective. Through my eyes, you could clearly tell that it was trying to sound as real as possible while also throwing a fantasy side to the life. Despite the fact of it sounding completely out of this world, it was all very much real, and I had to experience every second of that.
     Viobin and Sobollum dismissed Smallik and I after a few minutes of staring at Sivill as he stared at us with his mouth gagged and arms behind his back. We started to walk back to Ogillitiy, slowly and right at a pace that I enjoyed since my legs were still worn out from running. We started to talk. About us. About what happened. About that black book. He had agreed with me that it was scary that everything that happened to us since the beginning words that Ogillitiy had said to me the first morning. It was all so surreal.
     "Dad."
     When we finally managed to find our way back to the beginning of where we were, Ogillitiy immediately shot up with the black book wide open in his lap. He had a pen, scribbling away into the margins like I knew he would do to most of his stories. After a second, he stopped writing inside of it, and he sprinted quickly to my feet. The blackness was completely gone from him besides a few patches that could easily be taken off from a bath he would have to take later, but I was more worried about him. His arms wrapped around my torso, and he started to cry into my chest. Really cry. I could hear every quaking breath as it pressed into my stomach. He was probably getting my shirt wet with tears, but I could honestly care less about what he was doing wrong. My arms tightened to keep him there.
     "I had to use the book," Ogillitiy whispered. "I had to. Everything in it... It's all real."
     My eyes darted to him. "Everything?"
     He pulled out the book. His fingers started to flip to pages that were directly in the middle. "It was definitely from another time. All of it made every individual branch look even more the same than a normal tree, and Viobin was right about the blades of grass encased in metal. Our feet clanked against the ground slowly. We both had seemed uncomfortable with what we were getting into, but we both also knew that there was no other way than this. This was is. Brokilna Sobe better have a damn good answer or life will be stripped from his eyes with one stab of my sap-stained knife. I promised that.
     As we seemed to be in the thick of it, I heard a scraping of a machine. It wasn't anything like Brokilna, so I let my guard down and let the scraping continue. That was a mistake. A large winged horse came rushing. Its body was made of pure metal, and it ran on its hooves with its teeth bared. It was coming straight for us. As Smallik had instinctively flew up into the branches of the tree, I nearly dodged the winged horse by dropping to the ground next to one particularly large tree. My back slammed into the metal bark, and I spit out what felt like the entirety of my saliva."
     Why could I remember those words as if they had merely slipped off the tongue two seconds ago? Smallik was impressed with it, but he was also pretty much null to the idea since he hadn't known what I've been thinking more than what I would say to him.
     "So, the first line is a deception," I said to Ogillitiy. "You had merely made a decoy or something like that just so I wouldn't think you were doing anything suspicious?"
     "Words can be deceiving." That's all he told me, or go to tell me, before Viobin and Sobollum showed their faces with smiles. I wanted to tell them so bad. I wanted them to know that my son's magic came straight from the words he spoke, but they would just dismiss it as if I was talking about Faean or something. My arms fell away back to my side, and I stared towards them as they had stopped in front of us.
     "He'll be stuck for a long time," Sobollum commented. He turned his head to Smallik. "I'm sorry."
     "What about the Dittas?" I asked. "They still have to be dealt with, I think."
      Ogillitiy placed a hand on my arm, his brown eyes staring back into me like saucers of gold.    "The Dittas are dealt with. I know for a fact they won't try anything if Sivill is gone, and Brokilna and Vandilliball aren't there to command them. Besides, that's not the point. All of you look exhausted. All of you need to stop worrying about it all for a second, and you all need to rest."
Viobin agreed with a hasty sigh while sitting herself in the dying grass until she fully leaned back while staring up towards the sky. Her eyes deterred away from the rest of us. Sobollum had fallen to the ground all the same, and then it was Smallik's turn to do the same. Only Ogillitiy and I stood, staring into each others eyes for a moment before breaking our stares. It was like I was staring at a stranger.
     I sat down in the dying grass, feeling it as it poked into my pants. I patted an empty space next to me for Ogillitiy. He hesitated for a moment before landing next to me with his pen shakily in his grip. My arm coiled around him to huddle him closer to me as the Autumn air came and went, and he leaned in without any real protest.
     "So, you going to tell me?" I whispered to him.
     "What?" He was confused for a second, but then it hit him. "Oh! You wanted to hear the story!"
      I nodded. "Read a random part. I've lived it, after all."
     His fingers passed over some pages until he seemed to have found a line he particularly cared for.
     "You don't have to worry about too much along the way," he sighed. "There's a town of humans just a while away and we'll stay there for the night and continue to travel South until we get a little glimpse of faeries."
     "What makes you think they're going to give you the time of day, anyway?" I asked, jostling my knife. "Just because they can do it doesn't mean they will."
     "Faeries are generous to Faes. We're like distant cousins in a way without actually having any blood ties. It won't be hard to convince them with a human."
     I glowered at him. "You're not going to sacrifice me to them, are you?"
     "What?" He cackled at my comment with a genuine smile. He looked less ominous with it as the grooves on his face moved. "Faeries don't care for human meat as much as they don't care for humans in general. They keep to themselves, flying and fluttering with their... magic." The last word was like ice. "No, that's not what I mean. Faeries exchange their gifts for stories told by humans. They care for... plot, I guess."
      My hand passed over him, and he jumped for a minute before staring into my eyes. There was a moment of us just sitting there, looking into the reflection of the trees in our eyes as fear had grasped at our hearts. Nothing was finished. We didn't fix the future, but we sure did fix ourselves, and that was all that mattered to me. Viobin, Sobollum, and Smallik sat up to say something about how genuine the story sounded, but I was stone-faced.
     "Tell me your version," I said.
     "W-what?" he stuttered back."
     "I've heard my version of the story, the words and the feeling they give. Sure, they haven't, but what about your version?"
      He lowered his head. "But your story isn't over, not yet."
     "You're right. My story doesn't end until I see my own death, as yours should be the same.      That's the way life is. The way living should be. We're never going to get the world to be in perfect order, even if we tried to do it with every meticulous step we possibly could try. I've heard my story. Shit, I'm living it. I think you should be writing yours."
      He smiled. "Don't you get it, Dad?" He leaned closer to me. "Center of Attention is my story. You're life is the story I made, weaving the letters and such." His fingers clutched the white pages. "That's the greatest victory of all. Knowing, and feeling emotions through someone else's eyes. You are my story, Dad. And I hope that you never end."