The Ties That Bind

You watch him walk through the gates again. He cuts an imposing figure for someone so young. His shoulders bear the weight of the world and a heavy spear besides. It's difficult to watch him go, both figuratively—your heart near skips a beat when you think of the impossible task he's bound himself to—and literally, wisps of night ripped from the inky sky trailing after him like moths in the absence of a flame.

You know for all the power and favor he's curried, for all the otherworldly spikes and shrouds he garbs himself in, he's still the same boy who fumbled his way through the gourd patch in the aftermath of the harvest festival. Funny. You never thought that would be something that scared you.

You think the electric tingle that runs down your spine is fear, anyway.

The hut where you do your work is dark and cool, windows drawn to shutter the morning light. The door clicks shut behind you, latch falling into place, and you steady yourself against the door frame. Brush a wisp of hair from your forehead. Tuck it gently behind one ear.

No time for worry, young apprentice. Too much work to be done.

The herbs and dried flowers reek of medicinal spice as you uncork the jars and phials. The familiar scrape of pestle against mortar pushes the feeling of nagging discomfort to the edges of your perception. Two whint blooms. A thimble of spring water. A pinch of dried climber vine.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

You rub the heel of one hand against your eye, trying in vain to banish the sparks that prick at the edges of your vision. At first, you thought you were simply dehydrated. Then, you worried that you were coming down with a fever. To be safe, you take a dab of the foul concoction in the pestle on your tongue. It burns with the kind of spice only a proper poultice can. Your eyes flutter closed, but the pinpricks of light dance and cavort all the same against the darkness of your eyelids.

No fever you know of causes such phantasmagoric displays. No mushrooms or herbs. You open your eyes, staring down at the bowl of murky brown-green. A whint petal sticks out of the medicinal muck at an odd angle, the stark white of the blossom striking an almost uncomfortable contrast.

Your eyes wander the veins of the minute petal unbidden, flowing along the patterns so barely perceptible in the thin streamers of light that filter in between the shutters. A perfect interconnected web of life, a pulsing river—alight with all the colors of a summer rainbow, and more still that dare not touch the sky.

You feel a dull pulse behind your temples as the shifting roads of the petal fill your vision. You hurtle along the length and breadth of a single capillary, body twisting and turning as drops of mercurial white-blue slide past you. The water remains, though its purpose is gone. The flower is dead, the vine it was plucked from withered, but to your eyes the structure is laid bare in its original shape. A petal on a flower. A flower on a vine. A vine on a cliff face.

Your head reels as your mind's eye is forced up that rock wall, through the onslaught of a waterfall—a brief glimpse of your own impossibly bright form falling, another figure racing down to meet you—to the top, where a wellspring of that same white-blue erupts from a tear in the fabric of the world.

You teeter on the precipice of that abyss for a moment. Even as the colors of the world around you threaten to blind you, you know the world beyond that tear would burn the eyes from your skull with its sheer radiance. The temptation is a riptide and a landslide. You tilt forward. An impossible well of light opens up like the maw of the sun itself, awaiting your inevitable fall.

You start as the door slams shut behind you. The walls of the healer's hut fall into place around you with a sort of comforting finality.

Anchored again.

“Hard at work already.” Your master's comment comes without praise or disappointment. A statement of fact. “We've more work yet before we will be ready to weather the winter with our stores. The cold brings the worst of the plagues with it.”

You swallow the gorge that rose unnoticed in your throat, blink the tears from the corners of your eyes.

“Yes, ma'am.”

The healer turns, glancing at you sidelong.

“Focus, Elana. He'll be back soon.”

You close your eyes. That retreating figure fills your mind's eye, and for a moment the web of intricate gossamer ties that make it up are superimposed before it. A thousand tiny knots, a web of purpose filled snarls.

“I know,” you say, and falling from your lips the words are akin to a knell.