Last month, I published Beyond the Ocean Door - my new young adult fantasy novel! You can check out the prologue and first three chapters below.
Find out more about the book here.
Check out the Amazon page here.
If you've read the book and enjoyed it, leave a review via Goodreads/Storygraph!
Prologue
The following tale is – to the best of this humble historian’s ability – pieced together from the memories of those who lived through the events in question. However, the reader should be warned that memories are fickle things, easily swayed to fit agendas, and therefore not to be trusted. Where possible, letters of correspondence have been included, though much of this material has been destroyed in various floods, fires and misadventures.
It is hoped that this chronicle may serve to correct the widespread fabrications about Kallista, acolyte of King Eldrik, orphan of the Vale, whose life is so inextricably linked with the complicated history of the organisation once known as the Vow.
Chapter 1: The Veil
In this, her Veil, it was the water that so often mystified Kallista.
The grass, sunlight, sky – even the breeze – had been simple enough to craft. Other things had taken longer: the leaves, with their myriad of earthy colours and beguiling manner of drifting to the ground; the shadows, always shifting and overlapping and fading; the feeling of rough bark under her fingertips; the light scent of flowers in the humid air.
All of this had been overwhelmingly complex to conjure. Oh, but conjure was the wrong word, Kallista thought to herself ruefully. Her teacher, Master Valeria Reed, certainly never approved of it
The more seasoned readers will likely be familiar with the gift of telepathy. The land brims with it, from detectives with the ability to compel witnesses to tell the truth, and pirates that exchange unspoken messages across the sea, to explorers that traverse the depths of dreams. However, the ability to create psychic landscapes called Veils is lesser known… and extremely rare. Indeed, you would be forgiven for knowing nothing of it at all. Kallista and her teacher were two telepaths with such an ability.
Copying a real location to make a Veil was both a blessing and a curse. It was much like a painting. Replicating a real subject meant working within the restrictions of reality. The finished piece was never much more than a shade of the original. Still, it had taken years of training for her to get to this stage, beginning from the mere age of ten. Her Veils had come a long way since the days of creating lifeless, desolate meadows. She could now create complex environments limited only by her imagination. Although it had been nearly eleven years, she still had her off days. And this was certainly one of them. Much to her chagrin, the pond in front of her remained stubbornly dry. Water… why was it so damn difficult?
(Of course, it wasn’t a real pond. No, it was a psychic manifestation of a pond constructed by and existing within the mind of a telepath, like the rest of the environment. However, for simplicity’s – and indeed sanity’s – sake, we may refer to it as a pond here.)
Valeria tore her eyes away and fixed them upon her student, who shuddered. “You have been able to create Veils since you were a young girl,” stated the woman. Her voice was cool and silky. “And yet, here you are wasting so much of our all too rare time together failing to summon a drop of water in a single pond.”
They looked around at the scene, half-finished but still beautiful. Lush grass underfoot, trees rustling gently in the wind, a clear blue sky overhead. In the distance, the looming silhouettes of the mountains encircled everything. They could very well have been standing in the real Vale. The reader will note the difference between Vale and Veil, the unfortunate naming of both having led to years’ worth of irritation and misunderstandings. The Veil exists entirely in the mind of a telepath whereas the Vale is a very real valley, one where Kallista and Valeria’s bodies were sitting at that moment. The names were settled upon independently which, if anything, is a lesson in the importance of proactive communication.
Kallista wondered if her teacher recognised this specific area of the Vale (the valley). The thought made her uneasy. This Veil (the telepathic landscape) was an attempted replica of a childhood hideout of hers, a site of the few fond memories of her sorry life. It was a good imitation, stubborn pond notwithstanding. Trees enclosed the tiny clearing like a mother’s embrace, and here and there white flowers dotted the carpet of grass. Even the noises of the insects, birds and rustling plants echoed that of the real world. Only the most minor of details set it apart from reality. Flower petals that fluttered the wrong way, blades of grass that refused to flatten underfoot and clouds that remained stayed stationary in the sky.
Brushing her long black hair out of her face, Kallista tried again. The air in the hole shimmered a little and all seemed to be going well until she started to think about overthinking, and lost focus once again.
Looking fearfully towards Valeria, she ran through a range of apologies in her mind but opted for the truth. Valeria was not a woman to tolerate excuses. “I started to overthink and… The water simply isn’t coming back. W-we could continue the rest of the lesson without it. Everything else is ready. I’m ready.”
“I’d prefer to decide how my lessons proceed myself, Kallista,” said Valeria, narrowing her dark eyes. “Overthinking for even a moment in a real battle is the difference between an honourable death and a senseless one.” Before Kallista could stammer out an apology, Valeria softened and easily slipped back into a charismatic smile. A little too easily, perhaps. “However, it is best not to dwell on our mistakes. Very well. Leave the pond to its lack of cooperation and prepare yourself for the usual.”
Kallista nodded eagerly. Tilting her head upwards, she reached her hand into a stream of sunlight, and ran her fingertips down the beam. The ray solidified, morphing into cool steel under her skin, until she held in her hand a sword with a blade fashioned out of a beam of white-yellow sunlight. It wasn’t bright like the sun itself, but instead subtly illuminated its surroundings, dust particles floating lazily through its centre. She had conjured – no, crafted – its shape into the image of her preferred weapon, a one-handed sword, the blade slightly curved, the hilt solid in her grip.
The familiarity of the action, one she had performed a countless number of times in previous lessons, reassured her. This was simply a sparring session in a telepathic landscape with her sun sword and a fake pond under the tutelage of her warrior teacher. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Valeria, Kallista, evenin’,” a man greeted, appearing suddenly. He was not present one moment, but there the next. His uniform was identical to that of reality, the traditional deep green and brown apparel of a Vow soldier with a gleaming, red brooch on his lapel to signify his status as one of Valeria’s personal guards. Despite his rank, he was not used to all of this telepathic nonsense. His expression was fixed in a comic mixture of wariness and confusion.
“Carson,” acknowledged Kallista, coolly. More quietly, so that Valeria could not hear: “A bottle of Jones’ liquor, under ten moves.”
Out of the corner of his mouth, Benjamin Carson muttered his assent to the deal. He had lost each of their previous three duels despite being more than ten years her senior, and his bitter scowl told her that his pride was still bruised. His skin was leathery and tough, and his shoulders broad. Compared to Kallista’s slender frame, he was an imposing figure. Luckily, trivial matters such as physical strength or stamina were immaterial in the Veil. All that mattered was skill. It was the beauty of being in one’s mind.
The ring of trees bordered the opponents like silent spectators. Valeria stood in between them, hands behind her back, pacing slowly.
Carson charged forward, broadsword in hand. Kallista’s mind whirred with various defensive and offensive strategies that had been drilled into her since she was a little girl. She could win this fight easily, had the skill to do so even if she was just a Rook and he a fully-fledged soldier.
An idea emerged. Why fight at all?
Her gaze flickered to the right, at the pond. She may not be able to fill it with water, but she could move it directly in Carson’s path… The fight would be over before it even began. But how fast was he moving? How far away should the hole be moved? Would Valeria approve of the tactic?
By the time Kallista willed the pond to move, it was too late. Carson was already in front of her. He swung his heavy sword, the iron blade glinting in the sunlight at the apex of its swooping arc.
The blade severed her right hand in one clean motion.
A brief moment passed in which all three of them stared at the severed limb on the ground – fingers still gripping the hilt of the sunlight sword – in stunned silence.
If you have ever had a limb sliced off in a telepathic construct, you will be aware it is not a pleasant experience. Though the injury is not ‘physical’, it doesn’t make the pain any less real
Valeria sighed. Carson stumbled backwards, taken aback at his own action. Kallista, meanwhile, recoiled in horror, her piercing shriek cutting through the empty expanse of the Veil. The sky darkened until it was a starless night, and the trees withered and melted away into ash. Nearby, a solitary door, with wood made of a miniature blue ocean, rattled in its frame, blood leaking out from its cracks.
“Exit the Veil calmly,” instructed Valeria, arms folded. She regarded the bleeding stump on Kallista’s body and the unruly environment as if they were no more interesting than a questionable shade of wall paint in a living room.
Shaking violently, Kallista felt for the ‘corners’ of the world with her mind, found one and brought it to the other ‘edge’. The forest, sky, flowers, dismembered hand, luminous sword, Carson, Valeria… everything collapsed at once like a book slammed shut. The last thing to fade was the waterless pond.
Kallista roused as if from a daydream, blinked a few times to let herself adjust to the change in light. As always, they were sitting in a pleasant courtyard in the Keep. Everything in the real world felt solid and noisy and rough. The blossom tree above rustled in the breeze, its branches and delicate pink flowers reaching up into the blue sky overhead. Sentries were posted at each of the four entrances, hidden in the shadows at the edges of the open courtyard. (Unbeknownst to Kallista, they had placed bets on the outcome of her sparring session and, later, three of them would begrudgingly present the youngest, Roland, with his winnings.)
Pins and needles shot down her body as she uncrossed her legs. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth. She wiggled her right hand a little just to check that it was indeed attached to the rest of her body. It was. There wasn’t a mark on it.
“It seems no one can escape hubris,” sighed Valeria. She was looking down at Kallista with cold disappointment. An enormous, ivory white sword rested at her side. “I have told you, time and time again, that manipulating the environment around you in the Veil is a last resort. Even if you wish to ignore my advice, at least commit to your decision and go through with your strategy quickly. Really, Kallista, I would have thought the incident of last month was enough of a lesson.”
Kallista pushed aside the still raw memory of the unfortunate axe incident and rose to her feet shakily.
“Recite it again,” ordered Valeria.
“Where an injury to the body cuts the flesh, an injury to the mind wounds the soul,” Kallista recited forlornly. A passage from the Eldrik book that she’d recite after every failure in the Veil. “As such, dying within the plane of one’s mind would result in the death of the soul which is, for all intents and purposes, akin to death itself.”
More than the pain or close brush with death, it was the humiliation that stung most. At the edge of the courtyard, Carson sneeringly mimed the drink she owed him as he resumed his normal post. A younger sentry, Roland, approached Valeria from a dark passageway with his usual air of self-importance. His uniform was loose, and his sword bounced awkwardly against his back. Valeria held a hand up to him while she addressed Kallista. He instantly stopped and fell back respectfully, the only sign of his urgency the tapping of his finger behind his back.
“I imagine your head is beginning to hurt now,” Valeria said, casting an appraising glance over her. “I suggest you take yourself off to Griffen for a soothing remedy. I won’t have you falling behind the others.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kallista, dutifully. Her head was indeed beginning to ache painfully, and her eyes felt heavy with lethargy, the after-effects of injury in a Veil. Her arm felt no different from normal, other than a slight paranoid tingle.
Without turning, Valeria summoned Roland forward with the crook of her finger. He sprang forward dutifully. The pair looked almost comical standing together. With dark brown skin, hair cut almost to the scalp and a warrior’s build, Valeria Reed towered above Roland in both stature and presence, with his jittery demeanour and pallid complexion. The one thing that united them was the Vow emblem, a ring of twisting vines, tattooed around his wrist like a bracelet and around Valeria’s neck like a necklace. Kallista had one too, eleven thin coils, around her left wrist, a couple of inches wide. The eleven coils were meant to celebrate years served with the Vow, but for Kallista, it was more akin to a tally of imprisonment etched on a cell wall.
“Forgive the interruption, ma’am, the guards over on Homados received a message. And I thought you should hear it at once,” said Roland.
Kallista rolled her eyes as she pulled on her coat, sensing the young sentry was infusing an over-the-top sense of gravity to his voice. Of course, that did not stop her from hanging back to catch any snippet of information about the Outside, fumbling with her buttons as slowly as possible.
There was a pause before Valeria asked, with the subtlest hint of exasperation in her voice, “Yes, Roland?”
“The Enemy has moved south, leaving their settlement near the falls exposed. They appear to be going after the amulet. Whether they are working with the Guild is unclear. The regiment at Fleeting requests orders.”
Valeria remained silent for a few moments. When she spoke, her voice held no hesitancy. “Send a scouting party ahead. The amulet may be a deception. We don’t want another repeat of the oasis fiasco.”
Roland chuckled a little too loudly.
She continued on without a smile. “If all is well, tell them to proceed and to recover the marks safely. Take caution, one of them is an acolyte and the other is—”
At this point, Valeria glanced at Kallista and said not unkindly, “You may leave, Kallista. I’ll send a message for your next lessons as usual.”
Masking her disappointment, Kallista bid her master a polite farewell, Carson a quick nod, and Roland a mocking salute, which drew the smallest of smiles from Valeria.
Kallista left the light of the courtyard, entering the shadows of a nearby corridor. Her hand brushed against the smooth wooden panels to her right as she walked. The small habit had always soothed her, a physical association with the feeling of relief at the end of Valeria’s lessons. The corridor joined the grand entrance hall of the Keep, its floors covered in hand-painted, fading mosaics depicting the old myths, and then through the curved oak doors that led outside. She nodded at the pair of sentries posted there before stepping out onto the hill.
Celestial Rise was the only high ground in the Vale, apart from the mountains that encircled the land. From this spot, one could see the entire valley – the village far up north, crawling up the face of Mount Homados, the stream cutting through the central green. A couple of villagers sat on its bank with their feet in the trickling clear water, holding fishing rods or washing clothes. The land on the south side of the river was sparsely populated; there was the hill upon which Kallista stood and a tall infirmary building down the winding path to the left. On the right, further away, there was an enormous Gazebo, more akin to an amphitheatre, where the Rooks trained each and every day. The Keep, perched on Celestial Rise, was the oldest building in the valley, the only one that had stood for centuries before the Vow had even arrived there. Perhaps that was why—
“You look on the verge of bursting into poetry,” interrupted a familiar, musical voice from behind Kallista. “Come on, regale me with a beautiful sonnet, little mouse. Perhaps a song?”
Kallista had no need to turn her head to envisage Maya’s expression, undoubtedly fixed with her signature smirk, equal parts infuriating and endearing. She heard her friend shifting slightly, the rustle of clothes and a soft metallic clicking that Kallista knew to be the pocket watch that Maya always wore around her neck, with its blackened case and rusty chains. Though she did not see this, its various little dials read ‘five years, one month, nine days and eight hours’ counting up with every hour that passed. One day the watch would be gone, and Maya’s sentence would have elapsed.
Careful not to face Maya in case they were being watched, Kallista pretended to tie the laces of her boots. “Do you, er, ever have trouble conjuring water? In your Veils?”
Maya ran a hand through her springy curls and transformed herself into the image of Valeria, the light around her shimmering like it did near a flame. Her warm brown skin turned darker, her height increasing by a few inches. Her talent as an illusionist was natural, barely requiring any training, something Kallista had always been envious of. She adopted an eerily accurate impression of their teacher’s silky voice. “Conjuring is not the right word to use for our gift, young students. We are not common tricksters.”
The illusion faded and Maya, grinning, began to move away towards the Keep for her own lesson. She cocked her head with that captivating arrogance of hers. “Please! I had water perfected years ago. Admittedly, the other day I accidentally made my trees hundreds of feet high, but I suppose that’s easily done by those of us with a grand vision. Not that you would know about that…”
Kallista made her way towards the Barracks, grinning as she imagined Maya’s giant trees and Valeria’s reaction to them. It was nearing suppertime, and the valley was awash in a beautiful orange glow from the sunset, the clouds a swirling mix of peach, pink, orange and cream. After a few minutes of walking, she was close enough to see the rest of the Rooks filing indoors after having completed their labour duties. It was always convenient when Kallista managed to miss labour, though it did draw some resentment from the rest of her classmates who did not have the luxury of private lessons with Valeria. The perks of being a telepath.
Rowan Birch never resented her though. Along with Maya, he was one of the only friends Kallista had in the valley. And, unlike Maya, speaking to him was not Taboo. Kallista smiled at him in greeting as she drew closer, ignoring the building ache at the back of her head.
“Good lesson?” asked Rowan. His hands and clothes were caked in dirt, and his usually tidy black hair was tousled, yet he still somehow managed to look like the perfectly presentable soldier that he was. Kallista guessed that he must have been picked out to help on the farm. An arduous task but one of the better options compared to other labours like lugging heavy water containers, cleaning out the stables or unloading the supply carriages or – heaven forbid – categorising the library’s various documents and books with Mr Rafferty. None of those were pleasant after a full day of lessons. Not that any of those would have dampened Rowan Birch’s unfailing politeness or good humour. The closest he ever came to insolence was waiting a few moments before apologising for not holding a door open.
“Oh, just had my hand lopped off by Carson, but otherwise nothing too exciting,” replied Kallista, dryly. Rowan nodded as though this was a normal response. “Starving now, I wonder what’s for dinner today?”
This, dear reader, was a stale but staple witticism that all of the training Rooks had uttered at one point or another over the years. At the risk of over-explaining an already dull joke – breakfast, lunch and dinner for the young trainees was always, without fail, the same. A grey pasty substance with no discernible texture or ingredients, that had somewhere over the years been dubbed ‘pap’.
Kallista opened her mouth to continue, but the sight of something nearby made her lose all track of her thoughts. Rowan’s cousin, Felix Birch, was holding a battered training staff. The noise of bones breaking, and wood snapping lashed through her mind like the crack of a whip.
She made some sort of mindless excuse to Rowan, ignoring his protests about missing supper, and began to walk away without a clear goal in mind. Her mind was oddly blank.
Kallista wished, as she always did in moments such as this, that she could allow herself to experience anguish properly, to let it wash over her and then move on. Her mind told her to be frightened or angry about Master Cadmus’s lesson the next day, a class in which only pain and misery awaited her. But really, she barely felt a thing. Despite her telepathic gifts, her own emotions had always felt somewhat muted, as if she reasoned through them rather than experienced them. Her laughter always felt slightly hollow, grief dulled and anger distant. She sensed everything and felt nothing.
After all, it was difficult to feel anger against certainty. Life in this damn valley was all about certainty, she thought bitterly. The certainty that pap was for supper. The certainty that Cadmus would make her life miserable. The certainty that she would one day be a soldier under Valeria’s command. And the certainty that Kallista would spend the rest of her miserable life in the Vale living out infinite certainties.
The reader might be relieved to know that Kallista’s worry about the next morning was entirely premature. She might have done better to have worried about a familiar travelling merchant journeying to the Vale, a secret package hidden amongst his wares. Or about the traitor in the West Woods receiving an encoded message from his ally. Kallista should have worried about a certain dark-haired boy and his sister fleeing from their crumbling settlement at that very moment hundreds of leagues from the Vale, whose lives would so quickly collide with her own.
However, there was no way for her to know to worry about these things, therefore she did not.
Chapter 2: Small Victories
Kallista mindlessly walked for twenty minutes and found herself at the Vale’s central village, a modest settlement of one-storey, wooden cottages haphazardly strewn about the land. Smoke curled out from a few chimneys, lines of laundry criss-crossed between windows and vines crept up the walls of the older houses. The tall iron gate at the northern outskirts was the largest exit out of the valley, leading to an immense ravine nestled in between two of the largest peaks, where a stream had once flowed. It was Taboo for anyone to step through the threshold into the ravine without permission. There were sentries posted on either side of the portcullis, standing at attention with shields and spears. The gate was currently open in preparation for a trio of horse-drawn supply carriages and the accompanying riding party set to leave for some far-off Vow outpost many leagues away.
No one noticed Kallista standing amongst all of the hustle and bustle. The tip of her boot was resting on the dark line in the ground that marked the edge of the Vale and the beginning of the Outside. Her eyes were fixed upon the uncharted territory that lay just beyond the bend in the ravine. She shifted her foot forward slightly, just by a fraction, so that only the very tip of her boot lay on the other side of the line. Do what you’re told, a voice echoed in her head. She retreated half a step.
“Girl, make yourself useful or get out of the damn way,” barked Jones, a boorish and foul-mouthed worker, as he roughly shoved past her with a massive bale of straw, ruining the peace in that special way of his. Muttering an insult, Kallista left the threshold line and wandered around aimlessly. She approached one of the horses that was tied up to one of the carts. He happened to be her own favourite, a horse called Midnight she had been riding ever since she could.
“Hello, old friend,” she whispered, stroking his glossy black head gently. His coat was warm and soft. “Going Outside, huh? Lucky thing. Wish I could come with you. What an adventure that would be… But I’ll be here when you get back, just as I always am. Just like I’ll always be.”
Midnight whinnied, shaking his mane as if to tell Kallista to stop being so bloody sentimental and self-pitying. Staring at the cart behind him, a small smile played on her lips and her mood brightened a little as a scheme popped into her head. “You’re right, no point wallowing about it, is there? In fact, I know something that’ll make me feel better… See you later, friend. Safe travels.”
Keeping an eye out for trouble in the form of Master Cadmus or Alma Reed or one of the captains, she retreated away from the portcullis and cut across the village. She knew, at least, that Valeria was currently occupied with her friend Maya’s lesson and that put her at ease. For what she was about to do, it was best for the authorities to remain in the dark. She stopped at the side of the blacksmiths’, folding her arms casually as she leaned against the coarse brick wall.
“Three, two, one…” she counted under her breath. She gently kicked off from the wall and headed west. And sure enough, the blacksmith, Mister Quinn, emerged from his open forge right on schedule, dragging along a small cart full of newly sharpened swords and a replenished supply of arrows for the armoury. She slipped behind him, using the cart as cover to cut through the open square, past the forge and onwards to the west.
The valley and its people ticked like clockwork around her, bound as strongly to routine as they were to the Vow itself. Kallista stopped twice more. First, behind a grazing horse to hide from Demelza Birch and her group of old crones on their evening walk exactly five minutes after Mister Quinn’s departure from his forge as they did every day. They shuffled into Demelza’s door with their everyday weariness, and Kallista continued onwards west. The last time she stopped was to duck behind a tree a minute before a pair of chattering sentries emerged from the West Woods, having just finished their shift.
Kallista entered the ethereal silence of the West Woods, walking for a few minutes until she reached a pine with the words ‘Have we broken the Vow?’ scratched into its trunk, faded over the years. Nearby, she had buried a box full of contraband that herself and Maya had accrued over the years. She didn’t much worry about it being found. Not many ventured into the West Woods. It was haunted, after all.
Brushing away the loose dirt from the top of the box, she opened the lid to reveal a length of rope, pots of paint, dried flowers, glass vials, a water-stained deck of cards, a half-full bottle of plum wine, a weathered poster for a historical museum and a serrated dagger. She pulled out a handful of makeshift firecrackers, tucking them into the deep pockets of her long green coat. (Jones had smuggled the firecrackers into the valley with his usual contraband and sold them at an extortionate price a few years ago. Maya, of course, simply had to have them.)
Back at the main gate, one of the unmanned carriages presented the perfect opportunity for her experiment.
Kallista clambered in, hurriedly tying up the glowing fuse. It was a rather clever telepathic contraption, which would only ignite upon next being observed by a conscious mind. Smiling as she left the scene of the crime, Kallista settled down at the base of the Crosspath tree, which was an ancient willow tree about fifteen minutes away from the village on the southern side of the stream. As the sky turned darker, she forced herself to relax her muscles, unclench her jaw… and bury the voice in her head that kept repeating ‘Do what you’re told’ over and over. Those words, softly uttered many years ago in the icy chill of a blizzard and from behind the threat of an ivory white blade, refused to leave her.
The carriages began to move off after an impatient shout from the head of the party. Half a dozen soldiers led the way on horseback with the carriages trailing behind them. She idly dreamt of all the wonderful adventures this party would embark upon, but the majority of her attention was on keeping time. It was when Kallista reached exactly six hundred and sixty-three seconds that she saw a faint golden glimmer in the evening sky above the ravine followed by an echoing pop.
Someone had opened the door to the carriage. Which meant her theory was right. There was a security point there, beyond the curve but still within the border of the valley. Interesting.
Satisfied with her handiwork, Kallista hurried into the Barracks. The main dormitory was empty, so everyone must have settled down for supper in the mess hall. She wet her hair to make it look as though she had been bathing, and joined everyone else, luckily not too late. Rowan had kindly saved her a bowl of pap, which she scarfed down without much heed to its odious flavour, grinning now and again at the thought of the surprised soldier who had unwittingly opened the carriage and been met with a face full of fireworks.
Before turning in for the night, she pulled out a notebook from the chest at the end of her bed and jotted into the back cover: 663 seconds – checkpoint in Northern Ravine; cargo check; possible Monocles?
It was the seventh in a list of encoded notes, written under the title: ‘Attempt II’.
Chapter 3: Ghosts and Memories
Kallista generally refrained from stepping into her Veils during the daytime (outside of her lessons with Master Valeria). She disliked leaving her body vulnerable and paralysed, while her mind was locked away elsewhere. The moment before drifting off to sleep was when she constructed her various Veil environments, keeping the framework of about three or four in her mind at any one time to open up as needed, as easily as unfolding a map. She was no artist like Maya, but there was a certain satisfaction in adjusting the colour of the sky, crafting a soothing breeze, envisaging the grandest possible architecture that her mind could imagine. A place that belonged entirely to her.
That night, instead of entering the Vale Veil she often used during Valeria’s lessons, Kallista unfolded another in her small repertoire. An imagining of the world outside the Vale was always difficult; the valley and its mountains and forests were all she knew. Despite her imagination’s limitation, she was proud of this particular environment, with its infinite expanse of still, mirror-like water reflecting the starry night sky above, deep blue and indigo blending into each other like watercolour. There was nothing except the sky and the sea and the horizon dividing them, a knife’s edge.
Kallista walked forward – the water so still it was like treading on the night sky – towards the only other presence in the Veil. A woman. She had ‘designed’ her with black hair, but longer and thicker than her own. The same dark eyes and dusky, brown skin. The details were harder to acquire and came in snatches. Dimples around smiling lips. A slightly crooked arch of the eyebrow. And, unlike Kallista, no scar slashed down one side of her face. This was an imagining of what her mother might have looked like, an older version of herself with a few added differences.
Kallista had been told by Valeria that her parents had perished many years ago, killed by thieves for what little they had. Children rescued from outside the valley – like her and Maya – were known collectively as orphans. But most orphans had heirlooms, memories or anecdotes from friends to cling onto and construct an imagining of the past in which they took their solace. Kallista had none of that – it was as if her family had never existed at all.
“Creating consciousness is an impossibility. Humans are far too unpredictable, complex and imperfect,” Valeria had said during a lesson years ago. She would sometimes conjure apparitions for Kallista to spar against. Apparitions with hazy, obsidian silhouettes and burning red eyes that had haunted her dreams for years. Apparitions that were decidedly not human.
When Kallista’s gaze moved over her mother, the apparition’s features would blur together. When she smiled, the woman simply looked blankly ahead, a lifeless illusion. Sometimes she would momentarily turn into one of the red-eyed ghouls, a glimpse of her – its – true form.
And yet night after night, Kallista would return, gazing longingly at this lacklustre imagining of her mother, unable to speak, unable to interact. Even ghosts, if they were real, were echoes of a memory. This was nothing but an echo of loneliness.
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