Snow ✓

The Sorcerer

"In fairytales, spells can be learned and magic controlled at will," Elis said. "The truth is much more enigmatic. With practice, I was able to achieve control over time, but for me, magic has always been cankerous."

He shifted in his chair, as if steeling himself for a story.

"Growing up, I was always in pain and thus a very angry child. My mother liked to tell me that when I was a babe, I'd cry and scream until I turned beet red and passed out. My earliest memories are of my worst days, when it felt like bugs scurried beneath my skin and chewed on tender tissue, and my head split with such aches that all I could do was curse the pain. On those days, my parents tied me to the bed and kept a rag stuffed in my mouth between meals--now, don't get the wrong idea, they did this to prevent me from hurting myself. Healers from all over tried to stem the pain, they bloodlet me, gave me drugs, pumped my body full of solutions--nothing worked.

Elis pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and his spectacles trapped the lantern light, two crescent moons of white light.

"I was in the kitchen with my mother one evening, slicing apples for tarts while she kneaded the dough. My head was pounding as usual, and my mother brought up a fight I'd had with some neighbor kids out in front of the house earlier that day. I was always fighting. It was the best distraction, the only time my pain and subsequent rage budged, even the slightest. She was trying to help of course, as only mothers do, but when you're a child, you don't want to hear such things. You want to hear them even less when it feels as if someone is driving an anvil into your head. I can't recall her exact words, only the building pressure pulsing under my skull. I slammed the knife down into the cutting board. Shut up, I screamed, and it was like a cork popped. I felt such a sudden rush of relief, it brought me to my knees. All my pain was gone, like that," he said, snapping his fingers.

"To this day, I don't know if it was something I actively did, or if I had so much pent up energy that my body could no longer contain it.

"My naiveté as I sat on the floor seemed to last a lifetime. I couldn't comprehend what my eyes were seeing, a horror in direct contrast with my mind steeped in such undiluted bliss; the entire kitchen, everything was slick with red, the floors, the walls, the counter, the dough and apples, me—I could taste the blood, smell the overwhelming stench of iron. Where my mother had stood was a pulpy mess of entrails. I had never seen someone turned inside out, but I knew it had to be her; it had taken her place, though I couldn't fathom how. I crawled on hands and knees, I poked and prodded until I fingered the largest piece I could find, what I later learned was a vertebra."

Skin crawling, Mat strived to not let his face shatter.

"The cuts were surgically clean," Elis said airily, as if the expert precision with which he could undo a body both puzzled and awed him.

"My father came in and found me caressing what was left of her right cheek. I paid him little mind—I could not avert my eyes from her one, still sitting in its socket, the eyelid shorn away—until he shook me. 'I didn't mean to,' bubbled at my lips, a quick and clumsy admission. All the fear my father had ever had for me, toward me perhaps, culminated in that moment, and he wrapped his hands around my neck, grunting with the effort it takes to smash a windpipe."

The tinker went quiet, the lull nearly enough to quit Mat's breathing.

"It was survival," Elis said. "My arms were too short and weak to push him away; I grabbed at his hands, and he started to burn. The look on his face—we smelled it before he felt the pain. He released me, frightened more than anything, I think. I ran out the door and never looked back.