[laserkid]

Dycle's Past Memories...



So cold does disappointment feel. Unlike the heat of hatred and lust or the sublet warmth of kinship and love. It is cold, followed blindingly fast transition of the thousand different paths one could have taken. It dizzying, unnerving, and then the emptiness of disregard.

This is the world I felt from those who I call kin, sister, brother, mother...all felt the same. Nothing I could do could change it, nothing good enough...or bad enough. Just cold...

I fell into blackness.

The weight of the darkness was nearly unbearable.

I thought of ending it all...

I wondered...

Following invisible currents of emotion...

I would go to a window from which heat was coming...

Sometimes I would see a family, much like my own... crowding around a hearth, eating what little they had...sharing and loving...

Other times I saw a master beat her slaves... the intense pain of flesh flayed from bone, a sickening perverse feeling of joy from the master.

A strange and alien warmth of love from the master...as she inflicted wounds on her property...and perhaps her only lover.

I would follow the cold...

A school house...

The cool of the instructor, a light waft of sadness and occasionally the intense hatred stabbed out when a student was obnoxious...

The young faces, much like my own were a mix.

Many would be in their own world, flipping madly in their thoughts through their boredom. A rare few were so focused and imaginative I could almost see the battles and theories take shape in their mind.

I listened as only I could... The words did not matter. A cool stream gobbled up by a few and dashed against the rocks of many.

Dancing lights of glorious battles past...

The marketplace...

A torrent of minds...

Most a feeling of distrust and deception. The supple hunger of greed... One among them a pin prick of light, a child younger then myself...in blinding awe of the place and its colors and smells...

I could sense something else...

A darkness in the ally way beyond...

Many hungry souls...desperate and searching...searching for prey...

A saw the light and her father...oblivious in their joy, get to close to the darkness...

A moment of fear...desperation...pain...panic...then silence...

The light faded into a flicker...

A crushing heaviness filled that ally way...

Then intense greed as the darkness fell upon the dead...

The torrent of the market place carried on, indifferent and unaffected.

The heaviness lifted...

I saw those monstrous men and women walk out from the ally way...

They bought some meat and bread...then wandered off themselves...Without guilt or sorrow...

The ally way...

I went to the fading light...

She was laying there looking at me...

I was standing in their blood...

Tears were in her eyes, but they has stopped a minute before...She could not move, or even cry...

The light kept fading...I would feel her asking for help...though her throat was slashed nearly to the bone...

The light got dimmer and dimmer...and then nothing.

Gone...

[laserkid]

A young Dycle at four feet tall tries to drag a bag of coal to the forge. The bag, above 50 lbs weight about 2/3s as much has him and yet still he tries. The bag catches on the corner of an uneven stone of the forge room floor. The small boy heaves with all his might tearing the bag and falling over from the bag suddenly giving way.

Before he can even get up...a chill of cold washes over him...

Disappointment...

He looks up at his Mother, brothers and sisters working iron into steel. His sister, Darria, giggles at him while holding a future blade in place...

He scrambles and tries to put the coal back in the bag, it falls out of coarse...

...cold...

Dycle cringes, then realizes the uselessness of what he is doing...

..must stop the cold...

He scrambles to pick up the coal, then runs over to put it into the forge...

...the cold subsides...for a moment...then is replaced by emptiness...

Dycle repeats the process of scooping up the coal and putting it in the forge several more times.

...A white hot stab of anger...Dycle flinches...

“Dycle! Why are you so dirty!” His mother launches out. The giant of a woman towers over him...

“I..uhh” Dycle's stammering is cut short by the booming voice of his Mother. “Go clean your cloths! Get clean or no dinner tonight.”

Dycle runs out of the forge...the duel nip of anger and disappointment at his back...He runs toward the river.

He is jolted from his panic by a strange feeling...He stops and looks around for the source. He finds it. From the window of the large house across the street. The landlady's house... He looks at the house...

The rest of the world turns dark as he focuses on the upper right window. A pair of glowing eyes, like a predator, stare at him.

Strange...strange...somewhat...warm.

Dycle moves toward the front gate of the house.

The metal gate whines as it opens...and then closes behind him.

Soon he is at the front door...
The world snaps back into place...

...timidly he knocks at the large wooden door...

...for endless seconds, no answer...Dycle wonders why he is here...the Landlady has always been scary, one of the few people to talk to his mother in a derogatory tone...

The door suddenly opens and Dycle jumps back in surprise...

A slave...he feels...weird...a cold sadness...

The Landlady is at the foot of the steps, she approaches. An alien warmth washes over Dycle...he staggers a bit.

“My, My, the neighbor child...” The landlady says in a somewhat gentile voice. Dycle locks eyes with her and the feeling intensifies. The hairs on the back of Dycle's neck stand on end...

“And so dirty... Come inside and get cleaned up...”

Dycle, memorized by the warmth, walks in...the slave closes the door behind him...
.
.
.
.
.
Dycle returns to home a few hours later...

Darria, lets him in... He is clean, but off somehow. “Where have you been?” she asks concerned.

…Dycle doesn't reply and goes to bed without dinner...

[laserkid]

A few months have past since Dycle came home late...

The Landlady hasn't come by to pick up her tribute nor been seen since that time either.

No one knows where she went or what her condition is.

Dycle is different now, he doesn't try to help out in the forge, he doesn't play with Darria, simply reads tablets from school, goes on walks alone or stays inside his room.

The rambunctious child, seemingly desperate for attention is gone now.

One early cycle, while Dycle's brother, Jor'dain is swapping out the forges water. He notices Dycle on his way to school with his sister. Dycle stops by the front gate of the Landlady's property and takes a long emotionless stare at the house.

Memories flash in Jor'dain's mind as anger fills his face. He gaps a forging hammer and stomps past Dycle and pounds on the door.

“Adria, you sick bitch! Open up! You can't do as you please with our family anymore!” He yells at the door.

The male slave opens the door slightly...and after a few servile words Jor'dain kicks the door open sending the slave sprawling.

He disappears inside the house. The slave scrambles after him.
.
.
.
.
A few minutes later he comes out several shades paler.

He looks at Dycle with wide eyes.
Dycle looks back in a piercing neutral stare.
.
.
.
...monster...
.
.
.
After that Dycle is left alone by the rest of his family, save for his sister.
The Landlady is said to have died some years later along with her slave. No one talks about it.

[laserkid]

Informal education...

Dycle comes to the city's school. Families better off then his own would send their young here to be educated in high arts, mathematics, engineering, culture, history and inadvertently politics.

He waits for a groups of students to get close to the gate and then melds in with them. A group of girls, but they are young like he is so their physical differences were not quite so obvious yet.

They seem to all be friends, but focus around their leader. Mard'deth was her name. They giggle and talked back and forth. They do not like a girl named Gas'verta and her group of friends. She apparently went out with some low class male and was a slut for doing so. Another girl who's name had not yet been dropped in the conversation chimed in that her house may be having difficulties because of some mine Gas'verta's family owned was rumored to be not producing at many crystals and investors were worried.

The banter shifted to new fashion and continued as they passed the outside gate with an instructor keeping anyone not enrolled away and punish any late comers. She didn't notice the member of the group that didn't belong.

The hallways of the school a clambering with students and teachers. Dycle frees himself from that clic and picks a class room following the last group of students into the class room. They all hurriedly sit down and Dycle fills an open seat. The instructor a rotund woman walks into the class as the bell sounds, closing the door behind her.

She takes roll, but doesn't seem to notice that there is one extra, but Ja'kurii is absent again. Dycle reaches under the desk and take out a writing tome with thin copper plates and a writing stone. He reads the notes. This must be a math class. Unlucky...and hard to follow if you aren't there for previous lessons. The instructor begins to write on a large black stone sheet with a shard of lime stone. Dycle silently scrawls down the formulas...

The next day Ja'kurii opens up her tablet and discovers she doesn't need the notes from yesterday....and her homework is done, who's hand writing is this?

[laserkid]

“Damnit Dycle, where have you been!”

Dycle's mother launches a open handed slap toward Dycle's juvenile yet still cold and silent unhappy face.

For a slight second Dycle's control breaks. The fear of his mother's rebuke and corporal punishment triggers a primal response. For a moment Dycle's perception of time slows and as his mind seals the gaps in his control the cold logic allows him the sensation for a second and look at the incoming hand.

But only a split second.

Dycle's head snaps around as the meaty and callous hand of his Mother scores a perfect blow on his cheek. Dycle staggers a bit then, his looks back at his mother with the same unfeeling face, albeit starting to reddening on one side.

“...” Dycle's eery silence.

“You've been gone for four nights!” Her anger still fresh. “I didn't know what the hell happened to you!” The boys emotionless face didn't even register guilt, shed a tear, look away or even rub his face. The strangeness of the small boy's lack reaction sparked another flare of anger. Her widened eyes focused on Dycle's piercing stare. She clenches a fist.

“Go to you're room, now!” She hissed.

Dycle turns and silently walks to him and his sister's room. He could feel the anger quickly turn to disappointment lapping at his back, then a million chaotic anxieties.

The shop had fallen on hard times, iron ore of good quality was getting rarer driving prices up. To keep competitive, his mother and sisters where having to use earth magic to remove the impurities before they would make the steel into the same quality their valuable regulars had come to expect. The process was draining and tempers were short after the first few months.

Darria, his twin sister, was in bed already. She was already several inches taller then him and helping out in the forge. Dycle was still a diminutive useless little boy in comparison. Despite being under her covers Dycle could tell she was awake. She didn't feel like she was dreaming. Dycle silently gets under the covers of his bed. Dycle feels a rise in emotion from his sister's direction.

“She is worried about you.” Darria says intently.

“... “ Dycle pauses. His mind replays the previous event and possible motivations of his Mother. Dycle ascertains the same thing, if Mother wasn't worried about him the she would not have reacted to his presence or lack there of. He is curious about the time slowing effect that happened. Could he reproduce it? Could he provoke it? What would happen if he couldn't control it? He would go out tomorrow and experiment out in the barrens on the edge of the city. He he went mad out there no one would notice and he would probably disappear from this world without troubling anyone else.


“She shouldn't be.” Dycle replies flatly and falls asleep quickly. He hadn't slept those four days.