Two Homes

   I don't remember much. And that is my choice.

   The mortal races die young because their bodies and their minds can no longer last the compounded weight of the world and their own works. So they die. Their vessels crack - not even lasting a century - before their overwhelmed souls rush into the rest only the grave can provide.

   Elves die, too, but of a different sort. They kill their souls that their bodies may survive. They declare that all the darkness of Amaura and of all their mistakes mean nothing. Detached from the fatal weight of remorse they live for centuries.

   And the Seafolk. They were born with the immortal bodies of elves, yet they cared too much to step into elven apathy. They kept their emotions alive, and when this burden proved to be too great, rather than following Empathy into Mortality like the half-elves, they found a different kind of escape. They began to forget.

   Moments, memories, centuries of time: lost. Sacrificed for survival. The shore understands that to hold its ground against a rising tide, it must be willing to let some of itself go. The relinquished sand may be returned or replaced but it cannot be withheld from the sea. Better to let it go, and survive the steady battering of time and tide.

   I don't remember much. And that is my choice. But there are a few things to which I will always cling.

   I remember the house in Stormhenge. Like all other constructs of that city, its exterior was nothing but greystone slapped against greystone. But inside there were so many rooms. Big, beautiful, gaudy things. Each one decorated with the greatest fineries of Amaura. My adopted parents were not extravagant, but certain measures had to be taken to assimilate into the wealthiest district of Stormhenge. To protect us from the onslaught of aristocracy, Thurimë and Calavir Duása filled their house with all sorts of treasures and artifacts and hanging lights and gold-green wallpaper. These were our sentinels. And for a time, they kept us safe - a hundred glittering bunkers - from the vicious conceits of the neighbors.

   Sometimes when I would feel my old memories returning to me - those that tried to strangle me in the night when I would let my guard down to sleep - I would wander the house until I forgot where I was. And in that forgetting, would forget the things that killed me. Mermaids clawing at my face, shivering in caves, beautiful elves withering into monsters, watching the elf city shoved out into the ocean, feeling my family slip away and leave me in the darkness of Ëidine. I do not know how I would have survived without the house in Stormhenge. It became a second body for me. With all its rooms, it made me big enough to hold everything in my heart and in my head without cracking like a human or shriveling up like an elf.

   I was spectral on those nights. Haunting each room and filling it with the chill of my body - cold from the water that ran through my veins. A tinkling of chandelier, a groan of high-back chair, sigh of curtains bending to opened windows - each room answered my footfalls as I would fill it with all the essence of myself. But as soon as I stepped across the next threshold, I could tell the space had already forgotten me. It was not me but my blood that drew the attention of the house. I was a ghost in my own home. Or perhaps I was a ghost because it was not my home. A place to haunt, not live.

   The house was aquatic in the moonlight. Sometimes this helped; sometimes it did not. On nights when the light was particularly blue, I would avoid the dining room because the great wooden table reminded me too much of the ship that carried me away from Ëidine. And then I would think of the voyage over the Accordic.

   I remember the first time I crossed the ocean, gliding over its surface on a strange brown vessel rather than riding the currents that raced beneath. I should have been within the water, traveling home with the rest of my kind. Instead, I had been abandoned in the caves of the elves. Only luck and the kindness of Thurimë - then one of the High Council of Il'Ardenise - allowed me to escape that cursed rock. She and her husband took me with them in the Great Elf Exodus and made a new life for us in Sembre. There they declared me their son to protect me from the ravenous mortals who had committed the Harvest Massacres.

   We did not make port in Stormhenge when we first arrived in Sembre. Our ship was waylaid by pirates, and we were forced to land in Favish, the westernmost hovel of the Wrackline towns that litter the coast of the human country. It was there that I learned how much the short-lived mortals hunger for my blood. Were it not for Thurimë and Calavir, I would have been killed and harvested a hundred times.

   In our caravan to Stormhenge, I was forbidden to speak to anyone as a precaution. In that long pilgrimage to the seaside fortress city I learned to love flora and fauna more than people. Even when people abandon you, nature will always be there.

   Except in Stormhenge.

   A massive, clattering city of greys and gates and pavements. From the moment we set foot on the docks of Stormhenge, chaos erupted. Hordes of humans, fearful and fighting to send the filthy elves back to their homeland, had gathered to stop the ships from Ëidine. But the Stormhenge soldiers were already descending on the mob. Thick smoke, loud voices, shouting, shooting, explosion, the soldiers, swift justice, "Round them up! Lock them up!" The whole lot of them, the good, the bad, the unlucky: gone. Swept away like trash into the gutter. Peace and Justice in furious waves of military might. Clear the docks, bring in the next shipment. All is well. All is well in the safest port city in Sembre.

   In the pandemonium of the anti-immigrant riot on the docks that first day in Sembre, I lost hold of my mother and fell into a stack of crates. They came crashing down over me. When my head cleared, I could hear people tearing through the wreckage to get to me.

   "Don't move, lad. We'll get you out!"

   Unknown voices, the kindness of strangers, tearing through the wood to get to me, but there in the darkness I could feel that I was bleeding. On my chest, the place above my heart, I could feel my treasured blood pulsing out. I panicked. The sounds of rescue became the sounds of impending doom and discovery. They were getting closer. I could hear them tearing away the crates along with the shrieks on the docks and the shouts of soldiers. I groped blindly for anything to stop the bleeding. Clothes would not help. They would not be turned red. Something else would have to stop the flow. My right side was still trapped underneath something heavy, but with my left hand, I felt my fingers trace cold stone then brush over something powdered and soft. I grabbed a fistful of the stuff, and shoved it into the gash on my chest.

   Sembren Mountain Ash, while an excellent incendiary agent in many apothecary offices, should never be mixed with the body. It is innocuous to humans but reacts so differently with Seafolk blood.

   I saw a man fall into a fire once in Bottletown. He was drunk. He crashed through a tavern window and fell into a bonfire in the street. Soaked to the bones in drink, he immediately went up in flames. I was mesmerized by the light that rolled over him and caressed his body. I had never seen fire before. Then the screaming started. Horrible, guttural. Not like the fire at all. The red light peeled the skin off his face, crept into him, like it was looking for something. Melting away layer after layer of body, searching for something buried inside him. And he all the while screaming and thrashing and screaming.

   When they put him out, he was black and twisted. I do not know if Fire found what it was looking for. I wondered if perhaps Fire wanted human blood as much as humans wanted mine... 

   But as I ground the powder into the gash on my chest, my body shuddered. My chest felt like it was being torn open like lightning splits the sea. Everything in me was seared unbearable. And in that moment, Fire found me. This was burning. My body smoldered and wailed underneath the crates. My wound bubbled grey; tendrils of smoke hissed out of me. Every part of me was so horribly alive and altogether wishing to be dead. I wailed in the dark, clawing at my chest, until the darkness was pulled away with the sound of breaking wood.

   Hands above me, lifting me, carrying me. I remember the hands. I will never forget them. Calavir rushed over me, bleeding too. He scooped me into his arms, Thurimë appeared, blood on her sword. What was this place? Stormhenge soldiers swathed in blue herded the elves to safety. I felt Calavir hiss at the sight of my chest, before he began muttering in Elvish. I felt the pain ebb away, even as the world retreated into darkness.

   To amend the atrocity of the terrorist incident against the elven refugees, the city granted many of the elves substantial residences in protected areas of Stormhenge where the human residents did not attack refugees. With their vast knowledge and extended life cycles, the elves quickly rose into the aristocracy of Stormhenge. Yet the native aristocrats were not so much tolerant of the elves' presence as much as they were tastefully disinterested, shut up inside their grey manor houses, emerging only for a coy wave at their new neighbors before disappearing behind green curtains and navy blue jacket cuffs.

   But Thurimë and Calavir - my parents (as I came to call them) - adapted and survived. Their knowledge of Ëidine helped them infiltrate many of the affluent military communities in our district, and soon they were dining with the families O'Ryon, Delson, Markum, Valice, Carthritt, and Patricos. They solidified their status as Sembren citizens by acknowledging the human tradition of surnames. We called ourselves "Duása." In Elvish it means "two homes."

   Despite all this luck and success, there were certain things that time and fortune could not mend. The line on my chest, where I forced fire inside me, became a thick scar scraping over my heart. There was no remedy, I found out. I had plenty of time to research any sort of cure, for I was forbidden to leave the house.

   I stayed in that place for years, growing in knowledge. In the room I claimed as my own, I could see out over the entire grey city, watching smoke curling up and away like Sembren Mountain Ash. When the sun sank over the western horizon, setting the sea ablaze, I would stare at that raging firelight until I was no longer afraid of burning. I could allow Fire to rule me forever, or I could choose to conquer it. So I stared at the sunset every night until I - a Seafolk - had mastered Fire. After that I turned my attention to the mastery of swords, then books, then silence, then the body.

   But knowledge of the world, knowledge of Fire: these things lose their luster in the trailing of the years. Fire fades again to grey when the sun sets and I missed the blue of the water. For a time, I worried that my world would sink inevitably into haunted nights in the grey house, then I stopped worrying and started allowing it to happen. If I could not have the sea, I could at least have this half-life in grey, haunting in blue.

   But then I met Cinza. And she too was well-worth remembering.