Inheritance

Chapter 1: A Mess

The room smelled wet and dusty--the scent of it seemed to cling mercilessly to his nostrils; the walls of his room were close and seemed to be getting closer with each day.

With a stroke of his wrist, the pen he was holding made a clean and beautiful line on the piece of parchment in front of him.

Thunder clapped in the sky, and he, in turn, clapped his hands to his ears and dropped his pen.

Eory kept his hands planted firmly on his ears. He was frozen in fear. After that small moment of forever had passed, he stood up shakily from where he had been lying on his belly and left his pen where it lay.

He wanted to go right to bed so he could sleep through the thunderstorm.

He took a step toward the sofa which was centered in the middle of the room and his toe collided with an article of clothing lying on the floor. He didn't care to pick it up, and so he didn't. Eory stepped over and his foot crunched down on a piece of paper.

It was one of his many drawings of a wrinkled woman that lay scattered about the room.

Time seemed to stop for a moment as Eory gazed at the drawing, and it seemed to gaze right back at him. In a moment, thunder rang again, and he quickly dashed to the sofa, crawled under his blanket, and went to sleep.

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When he woke up, he took a book from the tall shelf which was pushed up against the left side of his room and then sat down on one of the many articles of clothing lying about the room. He began reading.

It was a fairy folk tale about a young warrior on a quest to save his beloved. He could relate as he, too, was a fairy, and...

Eory's heart thudded as his eyes lingered upon a particularly beautiful passage.

He took the hand of his beloved; a thin, elegant, and dainty thing, and then pressed his lips against hers.

And to him, no woman as beautiful as she existed. Her skin was soft as silk and white as a dove's breast. Her eyes seemed to glow as brightly as the sun itself, and her red hair was as smooth as the petal of a rose and was the same, luscious shade.

The fairy's eyes brimmed with tears as he read. He was captivated by that passage and how well it seemed to capture such a beautiful moment—a moment that he, himself, wanted to experience.

But Eory snapped the book closed in a moment and tossed it aside.

He stared ahead listlessly for a moment—lost in his own thoughts.

He wondered what it might feel like to be kissed.

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The fairy didn't seem to see the mess scattered about all around him as he made his way to the dresser. He ignored the clothes which covered nearly every inch of the floor along with the dozens of drawings of a wrinkled woman piled on top of the clothes.

From his mahogany dresser on the right side of the room, he pulled out a piece of parchment and placed it on his desk. He dragged out the chair scooted up to the desk and sat down in it.

As he was instructed to do at this time of day, he was ready to solve the mathematical questions his caretaker had written out for him on a separate sheet of paper.

But his wrist seemed stuck.

It didn't want to write down anything to do with numbers.

Sweat poured down his forehead as he knew he would get into trouble if he didn't have the math problems solved by the time his caretaker arrived.