Zalinara

Once Upon a Time

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.”  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Once upon a time, there was a young woman who went to school to learn magic. She was very bright and learned very fast and her teachers were happy with her. Perhaps she was not as wise as she was bright, for she wanted to know things her teachers would not teach her.

So the young woman read books she should not have read and learned things she should not have learned and she went places that her teachers had forbidden and she did things that we can not name. Her teachers clucked their tongues and shook their heads, for it was not the first time this sort of thing had happened.

“Occupational hazard”, they said. Then they cleaned up the evidence and they disposed of the bodies and they put the young woman away someplace where she would be safe and everyone tried very hard to forget about her.

But the young woman could not forget, not for years.

The years passed and the young woman rocked herself in her cell listening to whispers only she could hear. Eventually, she stopped trying to claw out her eyes and she did not scream nearly as much. Then one day the monsters came and the safe place was gone and the young woman remembered her magic and the things the whispers had taught her.

The young woman wandered. She found places that had been forgotten and she learned things that no one remembered and she heard the neverending whispers of her master. One day she came back to Silvermoon; it was not the city she remembered, but she did not mind because she did not want to remember. So she settled down to study pottery because it filled up the empty places in her mind.

The young woman met a man. He was mad and cruel but he loved her in his own way. He gave her a title and a home. He gave her wealth and a son. And then the war came and took it all away.

The young woman wandered to strange places and strange worlds, to back streets and muddy alleys, to poorhouses and jails, always learning, always hearing the whispers. And now the whispers grow louder, more insistent; her master stirs in his ageless slumber and she obeys.

You will be more than you have ever been ... and when the time comes, for what we grant you ... you will serve us well ...