Before You Go

(Swords with Souls)

Cover by Darren Joy

(Adult content)

It hurts to see this giant of a man fading before her eyes. She remembers asking him when she was a child how he was allowed to live in Damp Wind. His long straw hair was tied back so his wide forehead glistened. He had grinned at her with his thin lips and strong jaw. ‘Well,’ he told her, ‘I was wise. When they measured me, I bent at my knees and shrugged my head into my shoulders.’ He demonstrated it to her. ‘If you stand tall with your chest out and knees nearly locked, you’ll look taller and more intimidating. If you lower your head, sink your chest, and bend your knees just a bit you’ll look smaller and meek.’ In the other room she had heard her grandmother chirp in, ‘If I had done the same, I would have been sent to the dwarves.’

“Lara, my time is almost up.” The lament in her grandfather’s voice hurts so much. “You must do to me what you did to the baron,” he continues.

“No grampa! I won’t!” She remembers the feel of the baron’s hot blood covering her hand and how quickly it became sticky.

“Stay until it’s time,” he pleads. “I have so much more I want to learn and so many stories to tell.”

She looks up at the curved wall at the back of the room. Shelves of lambskin and other skin covered books. “I will stay and hold your hand while you pass, before I go,” she assures him.

“I wish your father and mother could be here, but….”

She knows the story of how her and Gwen’s mother was seduced by their father. He had seen her swimming in a nearby pond and become enchanted. He had to have her. Without her grandmother’s knowledge, their father had made a love potion from one of the herbal books found down the stairs. There was no way of knowing it would actually work but he was so smitten that tried anyway. Day after day their father neglected his duties at home as he learned the daily routine of their mother. Sometimes she lived in a tree, other times she lived under water, perhaps within a cave that led to air. She always drank from a particular spring. One day he poured the entire contents of the potion into the water. For the next six years she was obsessed with him. He brought her mother home to her grandparents. Shocked, her grandparents did their best to pretend nothing was abnormal. Their mother had slits along her upper ribs. She also had pronounced webbed fingers and toes. Her long sinewy hair grew like roots. First, Lara was born then Gwen. When Gwen was two, the potion no longer had effect on their mother. Furious, their mother took their father deep into the woods. She used vines to tie him to a tall maple. Then she cut off some of her silken brown hair and forced it into his mouth. ‘Why do we look average?’ she had asked when she was a few years older. ‘At least on the outside you have your father’s heritage’ her grandmother had told her with a concerned smile.

“Remember what I taught you and Gwen about physics?” her grandfather rasps out.

“Yes Grandpa,” she replies.

“It allows you to do anything, if you live long enough. Books are the knowledge of what has already been learned. Gwen is making copies but you must memories them.”

She watches in horror as he coughs out a streak of dark blood.

“I want to live forever, Lara,” he says in a barely audible voice. “To continue learning and helping.”

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