74th Ashan, 709
L
Pharan had experienced his first bout of aggression when the had been twelve. He had stood in his mother’s chambers, wedged between her wardrobe and a dresser. In his hand, he had sheltered pieces of a broken flacon. Whole, it had been a frail, delicate thing. Lavender colored glass given the likeness of an exotic bird perched, of all things, on a soft, cushioned pillow. Even as a child he had known about the ridiculousness of the display. It had not even been crafted in the image of a real bird. And yet he couldn’t have helped but admire how much effort the glassblowers had put in the modeling of its wings. How much care they had paid to the carving of its feathers, the curve of its neck. He remembered his father’s voice, upset, angry, shouting not at him but his sister for letting him run unattended. His own confusion over why he should have broken something so beautiful. He remembered the mire of exquisite perfumes drenching the carpet. The cacophony of smells rising from a pile of broken glass. After the long time, his mind could even single out the one or other predominant smell: the sharp, fresh sting of citrus, the rich bouquet of foreign roses and faintly, jasmine. He couldn’t remember what had happened.
Like now, as he puzzled over last night’s events, trying to remember anything.
No, that wasn’t true.
He did remember parts of the ordeal. The fight at the tavern, Hyron’s soft, mocking voice. What he didn’t recall was the reason for the quarrel. It couldn’t have been important. Or not important enough to justify that level of escalation. He still saw himself linger before the building; relieved to finally have come across a place serving warm food, annoyed the place was nothing more than a hovel in the middle of nowhere, joking with Kaelvyn and Raesol about the feast they would have once home. He recalled a vague sense of dread about once more sharing close quarter with noisy, unwashed, uncultured humans.
The next thing he remembered was a woman screaming. The rich, copper stink of blood. Hyron crying something obscene in Lorien which was absurd as none of the patrons understood him. And then everyone had been running. Caught between the fight and flight drive of the bird brain, they all had set on the later. He remembered the press at the door as half a dozen bodies tried to make it past the threshold, the hands which had seized him from behind.
He had woken up in the barn sometime after. How long after, he couldn’t tell. A while, as the sun had already been high in the sky, flooding the shed with the comfortable warmth of midseason. They had bound his wrists with iron shackles. A chain, not wider than one of his fingers and made for a dog bound him to a wooden beam to the side of his stall. At some point, his cell had been home to a lesser beast like a swine or sheep. Whatever they had kept in it—it had been gone for a while. The soil in the box was hard and dry and the air smelled of hay and fresh cut grass not beast.
Again, he tugged at his chains. Like the times before, they gave nothing.
