Apotheosis : Ashes of the Arcana

Several years later....

The sun streamed in at the tall, ivy clad windows of the Orphanage of Saint Elara and flooded the stone floors where were children playing and laughing. The wood lances clapped and broke, the imaginary dragons slammed and fell to the ground and laughter was heard in the air.

Rion, deceased in the middle of it, mop as lance and pot as helmet cutting his way through. His worn castaway boy's shirt of a boy who'd grown too big for them brushing against stone-granted loveliness of centuries as he sprang up onto a bench, his do-it-yourself sword grasped in all the clumsiness of a knight attending a royal tournament.

"Feer not, Lady Mira!" he shouted, his arm outstretched to a lass on a cask, her dark locks bobbing as she giggled. "I shall kill the beast and rescue you!"

"Sir Rion, gallant knight!" she screamed, laughing. "And the dragon swallowed my muffin, not me!"

"Hoo! Then it's about honor!" Rion yelled, puffed out his own chest. He jumped off the bench in a lurching bound, spread his arms wide to break the fall—before he collided into Sister Olma, the caretaker of the orphanage, who marched down the hall with a wicker basket of crisp new bed sheets.

The crash sent the basket over, sheets flying across the floor like fallen flags.

Arms folded across chest, frowning, scowling Sister Olma glared at him with the displeasure of a woman who'd already had to put up with too many mop knights that week. Her oak-black eyes, black as ancient trees, slitted.

"A bit of hall sweeping, I should think," she sneered.

Rion leapt to his feet, flushed face. "Yes, Sister Olma…," he growled, taking off his pot helmet and mopping out into the corner.

The other children suppressed a laugh behind their hands, but Rion smiled sheepishly only. Unfrequently chastised, he never remained blue for more than one second. His sun-fouled brown hair at thirteen years of age had been trimmed short from passing hours lying in the orphanage courtyard whose weeds rose up tall, and his crooked smile was sincere even when they weren't.

His kitchen and back yard were not within his territory, though. No, his own private sanctuary was the attic, where among the dust and cobwebs along the eaves a dusty old trunk containing forgotten books waited like a treasure chest of lost booty.

Later in the night, after there had been work and supper had been put aside from the table, Rion climbed up the sloping stairs which went up to the attic, a knot of candle between thumb and forefinger. The stairs groaned beneath him, and dust and yellow-odored smelling old paper clung about.

He opened the old wooden door and pushed it both ways in darkness to the room. The moon peered in through an open round window and a wide strip of moonlight crossed the floor. One corner of the room was occupied by the trunk enveloped in a blanket that had been chewed by moths.

Rion knelt before it, tearing off the cover in awe left behind. It was packed with books, some of their backs broken, some of their pages torn out, all left behind by children grown or gone. To everyone else outside, they were histories of the past. To Rion, they were blueprints for another life.

His knuckles brushed against the covers: The Ballad of Ser Gallant, The Last Stand of the Iron King, Tales of the Shadowed Realm. He drew out an old-book, its pages pale-yellowed to translucence with age, and sat on a stack of sacks, the candle sending dancing shadows dancing around him.

He lingered for hours within the book, knights battling sorcerers of darkness, heroes triumphing where they ought not to, prophecies of great heroes who would start from the beginning and rebuild the world. He traced the pictures with his fingertips, praying he was there, his own sword held aloft, his own name on every lip.

Rion, however, possessed something that no other boy at Saint Elara's had.

It had started years earlier, a fleeting sensation which he had originally confused for fever. But things were happening increasingly since then and were increasingly hard to discount.

Sometimes, for absolutely no reason at all, he felt it, this burning fire under his skin. Not the glow of work or the flush of guilt, but the searing cold fire that ran through his arm or chest, as if some internal thing had been lit.

It burned when it came incontact with something. It was never seen by any other person. But during those minutes he would jerk about, with set teeth, pinching into arms with his fingers as though he would squash the flames out. And in a second, before you could quite see it, then it would be gone, and he would be shaking, panting.

He had never said it to a soul. Whether to Sister Olma, to Mira, or even to old Garret, the groundsman with tragic eyes, who now and then gave him some piece of bread.

Heroes are given strange lives, he told himself. Maybe that is it.

Rain fell fine on panes that night and fire spat and made dancing shadows on flagstone walls. Rion rigid in a splintered, oak armchair, book of legends open on his knees. Sister Olma on her knees beside him, clicking knitting needles as she labored over a scarf for one of the younger men.

"Think you heroes are born or bred, Sister?"

Rion broke from the silence, his voice ice-cold.

Sister Olma froze, her hands suspended mid-air. Her sharp eyes looked up at him for a moment before she continued.

"Me, I believe…," she stalled, "some are born with storm within. And some are born where storm comes through."

Rion furrowed his brow. "What're you talking about?"

She leaned back in her chair, exhaling and laying her knitting on the table. "It's that destiny is not always a matter of blood or birth. Some are born great. Others." greatness catches up to them somehow."

Rion nibbled at his lip, weighing the words. "So. what do you think I am?"

Sister Olma's lips twitched into a half-smile. "That, boy, you will learn for yourself." She rose out of the chair and then straightening her skirt. "And time enough to consider it, after dark. No candle snuck into the attic tonight."

Rion smiled.

But her words ringing in him, like an unheard, weighty warning.

Later than anyone of its offspring, Rion slept fitfully in the little cot, looking up at the cracks in the ceiling. The orphanage lay out except for leaves that blew in the wind a good long way away.

And again it came, the fire.

It started in a tingle of his fingers, twisted into his arms till they felt like the wires of fire. The breath was knocked out of him, the muscles were tensed to stand still. The scorching heat penetrated into the chest, burning, burning as if his ribs were the fuel which kept it alive.

He grips his hands, his nails grate into the flesh of his palms, and he slowly breathed through his teeth.

Not now. Not tonight.

Sliding back, fireburn receded, and he shuddered in its path. He uncurled curved fingers, extended them to the shadows. No sear. No blight. Hands intact.

"Useless," he grumbled turning on his side.

But when he closed his eyes, then another thing was growing in the darkness, than the bulk of the orphanage.

Farthest from the security of his bed, past the twisted oaks and iron railing that marked the property of Saint Elara's, the first fingers of the dark cloud seeped into the ground.

It moved abnormally, encircling root systems and scurrying across broken leaves, an otherworldly hush.

Where it moved, air chilled. Birds stopped singing. Even insects stopped humming, as if the world itself observed and waited.

Something glimpsed in the mist.

A radiant spire of white coal eyes, vacant staring, into the distant figure of the orphanage.

And Rion, chivalrous and knight-romancing, slept soundly unaware that his humble and peaceful life would be too, soon finished.