It Won't

“Must have been over two hundred years ago now. But we still remember that story clearly, ‘cuz we’re a damned lot of storytellers, aren’t we?

Your great-great-great grandmother was on the job. Travellin’ with some no-good band of useless ruffians that she was trying to whip into shape. She figured throwing ‘em at a mage’s cart would be a good way to test their loyalty and knock some sense into ‘em. Twilight falls, that blue gloom we all know so well drowns the forest as if it were in the deepest part of the Diamond Sea, and she’s tracked this cart all the way out from Osivyver. Miles she’s been stalking it, waiting for the bastard sitting criss-cross on top the cart to fall asleep or something. Of course, he doesn’t. He’s some kind of monk, or shaman, some mystical man.

So she gets impatient. Her archers tip-toe out of the woods in a big ring about the cart, and she steps out right in front of it, fearless as ever. She looks up at that mystic man and says that old line, ‘Your cart or your life!’ Of course, she’s expectin’ that a man like this is traveling with some useful goods.

He stands up, the archers all draw their bowstrings, but she just watches him hop right off that cart and gesture to it. Not a word, not an expression, she was stunned by how fearless he was. He even smiled at the archers, and just started to walk away, leaving the cart and its horse with her.

So she climbs in, rummages through it, finds not a damn thing but hay and robes. She pokes her head out of the cart and starts shouting at him, and he turns to look at her. For the first time, he opens his eyes, and the two lock gazes, and she feels this chill run through her whole body. She looks away, and after she doubles over the side of the cart and damn near pukes, she just drives off, leaving her band of bewildered bandits all by themselves.

She gets back home, feeling hollow, like the look he gave her carved her soul out of her. She doesn’t say a word to anyone else, she’s silent as can be. She never spoke another word to nobody. Her wife had their kid, and she still didn’t speak a word to ‘im. She never sets foot on the trails again, neither. She just stays at home all day, wrapped up in blankets, staring at the walls. They learn to work around it, but when she’s on her death bed, she whispers to her son and tells him that she hears the voices too; the same voices he’d been hearin’ all his life.

The voices you’re hearin’ now.

She told him she’s got the same passenger he does, and she’s so damn sorry. She tells him the story, and tells him that when she confronted that specter on the wall of her dreams at night she realized she could never speak again lest its own voice come out her mouth. She told him to go be better than she was.

‘Course, he never listened. Nobody in our family did.

It’s our curse to bear, kid. It’s what our family legacy earned us. At least it’s got some benefits.

Oh, and for God’s sake, keep it together. Because when you die—and you will—…

It won’t.”