The Unending Epic Written to Appease a Friend, Tell a Tale, an...

21

          They walk alongside the stream. For a while, they are silent. Asher's mind turns back to his parents. His father had moved them to their farm when Asher was ten, around the time Malarkia had been annexed by the empire. He said it was to avoid all the politicking that would be happening in the south. His mother, though, told Asher one night that she believed it was because his father's father had just died, and he no longer wished to live near the city in which he had grown. Malark was the only city Asher had ever seen, though his memories were more of the other children he played with than the city itself. Its streets were paved with stone, he remembered, and it had walls. Walls of stone-hard clay as tall as two men standing foot to shoulder.

          Soon they come to the edge of the trees. The stream flows into a narrow gulch, obscured from the view of the surrounding land. "See?" he says. "We'll be hidden."

          They walk along the narrow bank between water's edge and gulch walls. "What were your parents like?" May suddenly asks him. Asher pauses, surprised. She looks at him with curious eyes.

          "They were... kind," he says. "Why do you want to know?"

          "It's sad," she answers, "when those we love leave. I wished to know what you lost." She picks her way behind him, effortless as a cat. He nearly stumbles on a jutting stone when the gulch wall pushes in.

          "They loved the land," he says. "My father wasn't always a farmer, but it's always what called him. My mother had a certain magic about it, too. She could make anything grow."

          "Your mother was magical?" May asks in surprise.

          Asher smiles. "I don't mean magic in that way. She was just very gifted with living things." May nods but still looks slightly confused. "What about your parents?" he asks her. "Tell me what they were like."

          She frowns in thought. There's a light splash as she comes to walk beside him in the muddy pools at the stream's edge. "They were beautiful," she says at last. "Nintu blessed them both with the grace of her waters. My mother could swim as if a fish, and my father could work her magic in the most glamorous ways."

          Asher looks at her. "When you say magic..."

          "I mean the magic Mother Nintu bestowed on my people. Generations ago she created us from her waters. Because of her love for us, she allows the greatest of our people to work her magic. What our priests and elders ask of the river, the river grants."

          "Amazing," Asher whispers. "Magic." After seeing a god rise from the stream and halt a flying arrow, he wouldn't have thought he could still be amazed. Clearly he had been wrong.