Chapter One
Theo
We are the longing of what we were, and if we are lucky enough, we are never what we loathe. But that is the thing with us humans—we always end up becoming what we loathe. Why is it that the whole of the human civilization begs for freedom when it is the slave of its own beliefs? It may be that our biggest enemy is our unawareness, the one that we force upon our minds as if it were the prisoner of our hearts’ deepest and most twisted desires. Or maybe it is the other way around.
I don’t know how to start this, but I’ll eventually get there. It just takes a little bit of attention and much time to achieve that, and I’m on the way. It started out with something that I wasn’t around to witness. It was years before I was even born that all of this started, but the way it got to this massive hole of nothingness was partly due to my active indulgence.
The villagers used to always say that humans are self-destructive. They described themselves perfectly. I saw the irony in that statement and caught it when I was young whenever I saw their bodies worn out and dripping with sweat when the sun set. It made me wonder why they sweated to their own self-destruction? Was apathy that strong?
But I was young and unaware. I didn’t know that the world was so much more complicated than my mother’s love. I thought that what I saw was all that was and that all I observed was all that is, but I was wrong.
There was a castle behind the range of mountains that blocked the setting sun from our village. That was where King Harold lived. It was also where he had all the animals that were butchered to ease our hunger. Every week, rations of bread and meat would be sent by the king to the villagers who had done work for him. They destroyed themselves to be fed by that king.
In the beginning, I thought the king was different from all of us. Perhaps he had a golden heart or a platinum brain, but it wasn’t so. The only thing that was different about him was that he had been concealed from the whole of humanity. We only heard stories of what he looked like, how he spoke, and how he slayed any man who stood against him. His secret was his identity, and he only kept it so that his power would be thought of as divine.
However, my secret was divine on its own because it wasn’t mine alone—it was hers more than it was mine.
She kissed me for the first time when she revealed her secret to me, and I learned the art of loyalty and faith because of that brief kiss—from the moment she confided in me until later in this tale.
I saw her hide behind the bushes across from where I lived. She was so immersed in everything that she did just like the child she was, her innocence hid behind the veil of mystery that she wore. And when she took it off, it was only to show me that pride and mystery are two different things—one’s a sin and the other a defence.
Elise was a magic spell cast over my soul when I was nine years old. When Elise was seven years old, two years younger than I was, her mother brought her to our house and left her. Elise didn’t shed a tear. Instead, she stared at her mother’s rivers of tears. Her mother was on her knees, begging Matilda, my mother, to keep her safe and to treat her like her own child. Elise’s mother let and never returned.
I was oblivious to what was happening, but I knew that her tears meant that she was suffering. Later, I learned that Elise’s mother was called by the king to become one of the women of his castle. They say that she was the most beautiful woman in the village and the king was infatuated. Her gray eyes and silver hair brought any man to his knees, and the king wanted her on her knees for him.
I stood in the yard when Matilda embraced Elise and took her into our house. I was distant at first, maybe because I was startled by the beauty in her eyes. It was like seeing a candle flame dance and knowing that if I touched it I would get burned.
Our rations of food were divided among the three of us. I gave Elise half of my bread every day because she was pale for the first couple of weeks.
There was a curfew in the village. The king had a rule that no one could leave their home after the sun set. Whomever was seen outside would be taken to the king’s castle, and we would never hear about them again.
It was true people did disappear, but that never stopped little Elise and I from sneaking out and breathing the moonlight into our skin. The moon was a round, red flame that hung on the purple sky. It seemed like it was fading into the dying or dead stars behind it. My mother once told me that the moon was white before the great war, the one that dehumanized the earth.
“Theo, my dear,” she once whispered into my ears before she went to sleep, “sometimes I see in your eyes the world before it died, and other times, I see it as it will be made.”
I never understood what she meant by that. The only world I knew was the one formed from the remnants of the dead world, and the world seemed like it would never change.
My mother had stacks of dusty books that she kept hidden under a wooden plank beside her bed. She had to keep the books concealed because the king’s Hawks used to search all the houses for literature. Literature was forbidden, whether you wrote it or kept it, and you would be killed if it were found in your possession.
But my mother read those books of hers every day, and at nights would sit me and Elise down and tell us her version. She told us the story of what the world was before the war.
“Everything was electronic,” she said, expecting me to know what “electronic” meant. “The whole world was connected, everyone knew everyone, and everyone feared everyone.”
“But isn’t it better than all the world fearing King Harold?” Elise questioned with great conviction in her green eyes.
“It’s better if there were no fear at all,” mother replied.
What I understood was that some time ago, in what they called the “twenty-second century,” the west thought the east was different. People were cursed with different figures and looked slightly different.
“They were idiots,” Matilda said. “They were all exactly the same, but because of different eyes or skin color, they thought they were different from others. And you know how we feel about different things—we fear them. That fear is what made the big explosions.”
Explosions in the sky. She said it was called a “nuclear war.” She said that people bombed each other until they all died. Only a few remained. Mom said we were lucky to be of the ones who remained, but she never lived long enough to see my curse. It wasn’t only my curse—it was also the secret.