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The boy was drowning in darkness.
The water, warm and nauseating, made him choke in his own screams. I’m drowning, he thought, my veins are filled with black water and my guts are pulsating and my blood is nothing but water.
The boy was to die. He was to die without a name, reduced to a pale body full of water. He held onto his life with bleeding fingers, but it kept dissolving away.
Was there really nothing to do but succumb?
There was no need to scream, for no one could hear him in this tomb of water; no need to resist, for water always goes where it wants; no need to open his eyes, for either way he would be surrounded by darkness.
Why do I want to live?
Bubbles crept in his throat; the boy shivered.
I don’t even know what it means. I don’t know anything…
Yet his body fought to live, arms and legs wriggling to escape the engulfing darkness.
However, he wasn’t strong enough.
As he sunk in the everlasting stillness, he thought of the eye he had lost. He couldn’t see his face, but he knew it was gone. His right socket was weightless. He wondered what had happened, why it was gone, who had taken it.
The boy woke up disoriented.
His head spun and pain stabbed his body with cold needles, but he lived. He wasn’t drowning anymore, but breathing the misty air that wrapped around his body like a blanket.
The boy kept his eye closed, refuging in the buzzing sensations of his body. There were no memories, no thoughts, just the tingling feeling of being alive and free… and the knowledge there was something missing.
Slowly, the boy opened his eye and blinked several times. The world took shape. Those gray stains were clouds, the dark pit was the sky, and that figure was…
The boy sat up, and the water that had been trapped in his lungs came rushing back. He coughed acutely for a few minutes before focusing the gaze on the figure before him. They were wrapped in capes, their face concealed behind a cloth with a single eye sewn on it. The stranger hovered before him like a menace.
“Why didn’t you let me die?” the boy’s voice was shaking as if he had cried. His bones felt heavy and he wanted to close his eye again.
The stranger laughed wildly. The noise echoed in the woods like a bird’s cry.
The boy’s hand rose to the right side of his face; it was warm and sticky. He thought of leaving. He would wander away and once by himself he would be free again.
“Ah, yes. Your eye,” the voice of the figure startled him. The boy looked away, trying to hide his face. “You can see fine with just one, right?”
“It hurts.”
Slowly, like taming a wild beast, the person placed their hand on the boy’s cheek.
I feel better. I don’t know how but…
“You’re exactly what I need.”
The boy looked up, confused and scared.
“What did you do to me…?” he babbled.
“Do you know what magic is?”
The boy shook his head, distrusting.
“It’s an untamed power, born from the poisoned blood of the silvertrees, and you…” the person makes a pause for dramatic effect, “you were born from it.”
The boy remained quiet. He is again tempted to walk away. He wanted nothing to do with magic; it was unknown to him and it should still be. Does he exist because of it? He didn’t care, he didn’t owe anything to it. He wasn’t even sure the stranger was being truthful.
“Do you hear them?” the figure leaned towards him conspiratively. “They’re coming.”
“Who?”
“The pointed cap witches.”
Witches. The word was somehow familiar, as if he had heard it in a dream.
“They want to control magic.” the figure said. “They blame it for the horrible acts of humanity, and limit it without changing themselves, the true makers of calamity. We, on the other hand, let it flow free.”
“Will they hurt me?”
“Probably. You are made of what they call forbidden magic; your existence breaks their precious unbending laws. What will you do?”
The boy stayed quiet. He thought of the coffin and the water, of the silence and the cold. He didn’t want to go back to the darkness. He didn’t want to wither.
Perhaps magic had given him life, but this person had saved it. The least he could do was trust them.
He got up and accepted the hand reached out to him. The stranger laughed, and something in the boy trembled. He could feel the stranger grinning, even if he couldn’t see their face.
“You made the right choice, Qifrey.”
Before he could say something in return, both were engulfed by the shadows.