The Bewitching Hour

✧ chapter thirteen: memory lane

Yorak isn't the sort that spends a lot of time with others. At all. He does visit that baker occasionally, but it's not as if he can stick around for long when he does— the villagers would punish Takashi if they saw Yorak in his place of business. So he has never kept the company of a mortal long enough to hear about his family and his daily life. Lance McClain is a strange disruption to his routine and has completely defied each of his expectations of a human farm boy.

...It's also made him recognize his own loneliness for what it is. That is his motivation as he frantically searches through a velvet bag of what would appear, to the unenlightened, to be a bunch of shiny rocks. They're much more than that. Memory stones, his mother called them. She spent many long nights making them for him not long before she left him here all alone.

There are many ways to use a memory stone, but Yorak has his preferred methods. He picks the memories he wishes to see and he dons his special fitted glove with a groove in the back of it in which he can insert the right stone. He then stands above his cauldron and casts the memory like a vision across the glass-like surface of the water. He is proficient enough at magick that he can see the visions clear as day.

Yorak usually picks the same stone. Tonight is not different in that respect. It is the first one in his collection, chronologically speaking. Or, at least, he has always assumed as much— some sort of nameless fear has thus far kept him from inspecting each memory. He ignores that fear as he watches the familiar pictures dance across the water. Krolia holds her newborn son in her arms and rocks him gently back and forth, singing him a chant in a language he knows only bits and pieces of even now. She tells him what his name means, why she chose it for him. He is dressed in handmade robes that look strange on an infant and are too big for him. She tells him that he is quite small for a warlock, hence the errors in his wardrobe, but that she loves him anyway because he is her son, and she knows that his heart is big. She will see to it that he grows bigger and stronger and she will never, ever leave him.

But that memory, as it always does, fades, and then Krolia is gone. She has been for quite some time now and no amount of remembering will bring her back. Even magick can't do that. Yorak stares at the water in what is now a pitch-black room, and for the first time in a long while he finds himself thinking about his father. He hardly knew the man, after all. Even his face is a blurry picture in Yorak's head.

He takes a deep breath. He lights a lamp before he searches through the stones, the surfaces of them cold against his skin. He feels the energy that pulses from them and searches for his father. He finds one that bears the man's energy, and for many long moments he does nothing but cup it in his palm, uncertain of what to do with it. Now is as good a time as any, he decides, and so he casts the memory.

Yorak's father was a mortal man. Yorak is stiff as he squints at his features, searching for something familiar there, and he finds it. He sees his own self in him. His coloring, and the texture of his hair. His smile. Yorak doesn't have his mother's smile, and he always thought that he did, and he doesn't know how to feel about that revelation.

How much more is hidden in these unassuming stones? Yorak can approximate a vague idea of their contents and their emotions, but he isn't certain. Once more, he argues with himself as a vision ends. This is always where he stops himself. But Krolia gave these to him for good reason, didn't she? He has been terribly selfish thus far. Selfish and cowardly.

Yorak has, without thinking, ignored his mother's repeated warnings. She once made him promise that he would never, ever cast a spell while he was angry— when he didn't truly mean it. And yet he's done just what he promised he wouldn't in cursing the village chieftain. Why didn't he listen? He of all people should know what can happen when spells are cast under emotional duress. When magick is used like a reflex. Krolia learned that lesson the hard way, and even now, his memory is a senseless swamp of sensations because of it.