String Lights

Part I: My name is Specter (Chapter 1)

If there was one thing I hated, it was being asked my name.

For others, this was a question paired with the easiest answer in the world. After all, who didn't know the letters making up their very own name? Certainly no one. Especially not anyone on Chronicle soil, on the land where the geniuses of the universe roamed and went about their days.

But I was different. I'd been marked separate the moment I was born, sentenced to a life where I would live in constant fear, jumping at every passing shadow and unable to get over my fear of being asked the simple question, "What is your name?"

It had been during the year of my birth that the invaders from the west first stepped foot into our land. My mother had already been pregnant with me throughout the earliest months of Chronicles' capture, and thus had experienced the abrupt changes in our country firsthand. She had watched the news about the two major independence riots on television with my father at her side, and shortly thereafter, experienced the infamous Chronicles "Blackout" without him. By the time all of the warmth, in addition to light, was driven out of our land, everyone had gone back to using old-fashioned radios, their modern electronics rendered useless by both curses.

While most of the Chronicle citizens had had themselves occupied in joining public protests and research teams during these months, Mother had stayed at home in bed, patiently waiting for my arrival. Even with our country in a state of disarray, her concern and attention had been directed toward nothing but my safety.

With each challenge and change that colonization brought along, however, her hope and optimism had begun to waver. The voices of guilt in her head, calling her heartless for choosing to raise a second child in such a corrupted nation, had only grown louder and louder, to the point where depression began to stem from her self-accusatory thoughts. It had struck her that I'd never grow up to see the blue sky, nor the green grass, nor the vibrant colors that had once bloomed in Chronicles, but empty, endless darkness, both in the womb and out. It was nearly impossible to find visual pleasures in this post-Blackout Chronicles, after all; instead, everything showed up as shapeless lumps with indistinct outlines in the pitch-black.

Yet none of these absences mattered to me. As I had never experienced any light or warmth, constant darkness and cold simply became a part of my daily life. I grew up unaware of the glow produced by desk lamps and flashlights, of the cozy feeling of mittens and furnaces. I was, unlike many of those who'd lived before me and were living alongside me now, perfectly content with everything I had.

This was much unlike my elder sister, who had been seven years old during the year when I was born. She'd seen lots of things I hadn't, and though she wasn't the type of person to complain about something that couldn't be changed by human hands, I knew there had to be times when she yearned for the out-of-reach memories of the past. Sometimes I envied her for the time she'd spent living in the Chronicles before the Ereban occupation, though on other occasions, it was she that envied me. I couldn't possibly fathom why anyone would prefer my ignorance when they were fortunate enough to possess the opposite. When I voiced the question aloud, Lia simply smiled and told me that there came certain moments when she wished she could forget altogether about how Chronicles had looked before her seventh birthday. I didn't need to ask any more, nor did she need to tell me. At times, it truly was better to be figuratively kept in the dark, to not know rather than to know.

Of course, this wasn't true all the time, and it had been through experience that I had been able to gain such knowledge on my own.

This realization had come to me at age eight, along with a new piece of information that had proved to be several times harder to absorb and accept than the first.

Up until I was eight years old, up until I became informed of this answer, I hadn't known the reason why I was kept indoors all day. Why, on the days Lia had accompanied Mother to the market, I'd been left alone at home. Why the number of secretive conversations between the two of them had seemed to be increasing, conversations in which they'd exchanged barely audible words like "government" and "soldiers" in hushed and anxious undertones.