Terrick was correct, but it is not an easy thing to control one’s emotions. The more one tries to restrain them, the harder they fight. The more one restricts them, the faster they gallop out of control.
As the tonic lost itseficacy—efficacy, the dreams returned. My brain delighted in tormenting me with horrific images while I slept, and it gave my hated power ample opportunity to seize control.
Terrick became adept at recognizing the signs, and always woke me before my fire damaged the building. But, in doing so, he wounded himself. Burns marred his palms and arms.
Every time I stared at his mottled skin, my stomach turned to rot. My panic grew. It’s an awful thing when you fear yourself. There’s no way to escape. No relief from the constant churning of anxiety in your gut, or the horrifying images that run unbridled through your mind.
I’d never been so terrified. Even on that day in Detha, as I’d waited to be cooked, I did not experience the same intensity of terror that I felt during my time in Darfield.
Terrick tried to help. He gave me meditation exercises to “purge my mind of negative thoughts.” He also taught me a stretching exercise he calledyoga,whichwas meant to calm my mind.
They didn’t work.
As my fear grew, and my power became more temperamental, Terrick turned to the tonic, increasing its potency.
When I drank the tonic, my mind became blessedly blank. My emotions numbed. Sleep came easily, and I slumbered deeply, never dreaming. But wakefulness became more and more difficult. Even when I was awake, I was rarely alert. A permanent cloud seemed to hover over my eyes. My brain sometimes struggled to form coherent thoughts. The days, weeks, months, and years passed in a blur.
Once, I remembered being startled by the snow falling outside because my last clear-headed memory had been of summer. The seasons had changed, twice, without me noticing.
I never left the room.
Terrick maintained the lie that I was his ailing daughter and was too sick to leave bed. No one questioned him.
He spent his days laboring at the tannery. At night he returned, damp and dingy and smelling of alkaline and ash. If I was awake, he’d eat his supper with me, often telling me the stories he’d learned from his fiction books. I’m sad to say I don’t remember any of them.
On my clear-headed days, I noted how quickly he was aging; his skin sagged more and more, and his hair turned whiter and whiter. Sometimes, he stared at me with tears in his eyes and desperation etched into his face. He hated what he was doing to me. He would try to make up for it, using his spare coins to buy me things: wooden dolls, cheeses in a variety of flavors, hair pins, orjewles—jewels. At one point, he procured the beautiful tunic I’d once spent so many hours admiring. Surely, he had saved his coin for months to afford such an exorbitant gift.
And I couldn’t summon the energy to wear it. Truthfully, I don’t recall when I received it. I simply noticed it one day, hanging in the armoire, its dazzling color muted in our poorly lit room.
The last years of my childhood slipped away. I spent my days sitting by the window, dully watching the world change.
Often, I saw the blue-eyed boy, always dressed in military leathers, as he visited the shops on our street. It seemed he’d given up his quest to leave the army. He’d grown into his too-long limbs, although his frame remained thin and somewhat gangly. His smug smile faded, replaced by a grim expression that aged him beyond his years. It made me sad.
I wanted to hear his music again.
If I went down to him, would he play the harp for me? Would his smile return? Would he accept my apology for not upholding my end of the wager?
I wanted to speak with him. Desperately. But I never did.
As I began the path toward adulthood, my power grew with me. The tonic lost itseffacy—efficacy again and my dreams returned with renewed vigor.
Every night I woke screaming, fire erupting from my fingertips.
Every night, Terrick rendered meunconcious—unconscious, usually by wrapping his arm around my shoulders and applying pressure to the sides of my neck. It caused a momentary flash of panic as my airways were restricted, but then I slid into darkness. And the fire retreated.
It was a barbaric system. But it worked.
For a time.
Terrick was old. And those four years were as unkind to him as they were to me. Between the guilt that weighed on him and the strain of his tannery duties, his days on earth were rapidly ending.
It happened on an autumn eve.
I’d been having a clear-headed day. Enough to notice the blue-eyed boy, fully into adulthood now, walking with a woman on his arm. He smiled again. Maybe not as vibrantly as he had a few years prior, but he smiled. A hot, dark feeling coiled in my chest. Jealousy. I hated that girl, with her shimmering black hair;hatedthat she’d been the one to bring the light back into his eyes. In another world, it would have beenmeclutching onto his arm as he strolled through the streets. It would have been my voice making him smile and laugh.
I cried when the boy left my sight. Although I made sure my tears were dry when Terrick returned that evening.
Terrick moved slowly, pausing on every third step up to our room. When he walked through the door, he was winded. His face was pale, and a blue vein pulsed at his temple.
