jeriendhal | WIP: The Last Story

Probably won't be able to work on this over the weekend, so I'm just posting what I did at work this week. No particular spoilers, aside from the most obvious one (hint: It's set about seven hundred years after the "present day" Tez and Maria stories)

A cool winter morning.

“Alisa, dearheart, what are you doing out here?” Tez asked, taking hold of the sleeve of his daughter’s housecoat. “It’s too cold to be wandering in the gardens.”

“That’s what my nurse said,” His daughter replied, leaning on her cane, trembling not from the cold but from the weakness of her limbs. She looked back at him with dark, rheumy eyes, her curling gray hair a-fly and uncombed, framed by the two horns that swept back from her forehead. Seven hundred and fifty years of life had made her light brown skin scored with age lines and translucent as fine parchment, her once clever hands knobby with arthritis. “I haven’t been outside for weeks.”

“It’s been winter, it’s still too cold for the garden to bloom.
”

“It’s my garden, I planted it. I should be able to see it whenever I like,” she said petulantly.

“It’s still too cold. You’re only wearing slippers.”

“You’re not even wearing a coat,” she countered.

“I’m an elf, you’re just half-elven, the weather can’t effect me as it does you. Come inside, dearheart. I’ll get you a cup of tea and we can look at the garden from the solar.” Gently, he guided her back inside the manor house by the elbow. It was uncharacteristically empty and quiet at the moment. It was a holiday week and most of his extended family had gone to town to have luncheon at one of the local restaurants and the servants were at home with their families. No doubt in a few moments Alisa’s nurse was going to come rushing through, wondering where her charge had wandered off to.

He had stayed at home, ostensibly to watch over his last surviving daughter, in truth also to duck out of the chaos of the luncheon. The horde of grandchildren, their spouses, great-grandchildren, their spouses and children, a sum of nearly two hundred individuals, had become too much for even his immortal elven mind to keep track of. Strangers all, really, except for one or two of the grandchildren. None of them were Maria or her children, so his interest in them had become increasingly academic. He didn’t have any choice in that, the alternative was despair and madness

Alisa however, the product of his elven and his wife Maria’s beast-kin blood, his last surviving offspring of this age, was his deepest concern now, especially given her increasingly frail condition over the past half-century.

He managed to get her seated in a well padded lounge chair, her legs covered with a blanket. After a quick trip to the kitchen where an electric kettle held simmering water, he returned with hot tea for her, which she drank without complaint.

“How long before it’s warm enough before they let me outside again, Father?” she asked.

“Spring will be soon. Another month at most.” A month that she, in all likelihood, didn’t have.

“I don’t care for winter. It reminds me of Len.” Her first son, drowned when he was eight while trying to walk across an iced over lake. Tez tried to remember the boy’s face, but couldn’t, only his body being pulled from the lake and wrapped in a blanket to be brought back into the house. He had been the first of Maria’s family line to die. The fact that he remained a cipher in Tez’s mind disturbed the elf greatly. Why can’t I remember what he looked like?

“It’ll be warm before you know it. With spring flowers and spring birds,” he reassured her.

“Yes, Father.” She pulled the blanket up to her chin and looked over to him, her eyes wide and aware. “Tell me a story, like you used to when I was a little girl, would you?”

“Of course, dear. What story would you like to hear?”

“I want to hear the one about you and Mother.”

He smiled down on her. “I’ve told you that one a thousand times.”

“That’s all right. I never grow tired of it.”

Tez nodded, taking her hand in his own, and leaned forward in his seat. He could deny her nothing.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “your mother, Maria, was made. Not in the manner of male and female, but in the manner of alchemy. She was a Beast-Kin, a chimera made from her creator’s alchemy, part thinking being, part animal. For her creator, you see, was a cruel man who desired a beast of burden with a thinking being’s intelligence. In his laboratory her essence was quickened and then placed in the womb of one his servants, who bore her bodily but did not hold her in her heart.

Her face was dark brown, the color of mahogany, her hair black, red and curling. Upon her head two horns grew in spiral curves, marking her as a product of alchemy and not more natural coupling. Though she bore the mark of beasts, her master’s skill assured that her mind was not that of animal. She was as wise as any human or elf. Truth be told she was a bit wiser. Certainly more so than her master, who jealous of her cleverness and of her strong will. When she fought his restrictions, seeking to assert her self as her own being, he bound her in chains and treated her little better than a slave, forcing her to remain in a cell for seven years.”

Though he kept his face outwardly calm for his daughter’s sake, Tez could feel the old rage in his heart at the sheer stupidity of humans, for keeping such a marvelous creation such as Maria in such conditions for so long. Instead of uselessly shouting at the universe however, he planted a smile on his face and continued.

“Despite all the hurt that her master inflicted on her, Maria remained resolute, for her master was old, she was young and all that she required to gain her freedom was patience. In time, her master suffered a stroke and was bedridden, now more helpless than his slave, though she still bore his collar and irons. Though she could have treated him cruelly, in vengeance for what was inflicted on her, she chose mercy instead. For that she was rewarded, for when he died her master’s will specified she be granted both her own freedom, his fortune and all of his lands. This manor’s foundations are built on that first one, and it has been your family’s home for nearly eight hundred years.”

And if he chose to break down the bricks of a certain wall of that foundation, revealing the iron bars, iron door and rusting iron chains behind it, he could show Alisa where her mother grew up in her formative years. But that was a past Maria had chosen to bury along with her hated old master.
TBC