The Bound - A Tale Of Tamriel

10

10

i. Öenthir's dream.

She remembered this. Every last thing had burned into her mind. The stitched and restitched covers on the bed, made from the cheapest of cotton. The threadbare rush floor covering. Her sister's bed, propped up by a shapeless lump of wood. Even the scorch mark on the pitted mud wall where her first attempt at a flame spell had gone awry.

This was her home. The tiny mud hut in Grahtwood where she had grown up.

And she remembered what day it was too. Several bags were on her bed, half-filled with her belongings and, yes, there, in the corner, was her satchel. Tossed aside. Reported to be of Ayleid origin and paid for by the meagre earnings of her parents in anticipation of her acceptance to the Elden Root Mages Guild. She hadn't wanted it and she wasn't going to Elden Root.

There was something else, though. Something amiss. She turned, a slow, sluggish movement trying to catch the something that seemed to anticipate her and stay of sight. A wisp of a presence in the corner of her eye.

She realised there was a noise, also. As if she was hearing something from a great distance, or like listening to something while immersed in water. She tried shaking her head, but she moved as if trapped in honey, slowed down by its sticky weight. She tried to concentrate. It was someone speaking. Concentrating harder, it soon came into focus.

"You're just going to leave." Very much like Öenthir, a little taller, a little older and with shoulder length dark brown hair, not the shorter blonde of Öenthir, but with the same snub nose, freckles and deep, dark black eyes. Her sister. "Just going to disappear while mum and dad are out working their fingers to the bones."

"Get lost, Ferinwé!" Those were the words she had spoken, but not the words she wanted to say now, but she had no control over this play. "You couldn't possibly understand if your tiny mind tried."

"Oh, right! That's our Öen! With the high and mighty brain." Her sister held her hands at the side of her head, mocking, angry. Her thick Grahtwood accent reminding Öenthir of how hard she had tried to lose hers. "She's too good for Elden Root! She's better than us. Better than me and mum and dad."

"I am better!" The words whiplashed between them and Ferinwé reacted as if the words had struck her. "I deserve better! Better than this infested hole. Better than the mud and the rotting filth that we walk through everyday! I deserve it and I'm taking it."

Öenthir struggled to change what she had once spoken. She regretted it then and she hated herself for it now. The pain she had caused. The distress. If she could go back and change it, she would. She'd still go to Auridon, but not like this. Not again.

Instead, her body moved as it had done that day, grabbing things and shoving them into her bags as her sister stood and watched. The anger in the air was as thick as a wall between them.

And still the 'something', dancing out of sight, teasing her eyes, watched on.

Ferinwé broke her furious stare and turned toward the satchel that Öenthir had such dear love for now, but had only seen as a token of her old life, the life she had been desperate to leave behind back then. She picked up the satchel and tossed it onto the bed in front of Öenthir.

"You better take that." This was where her sister said the most hurtful truth before leaving, "You'll disappoint mum and dad by just leaving, they'll know its for the best, but you leave that and they'll know that it's them that you're leaving and that'll break their hearts."

"I don't care!" Öenthir could feel her own heart breaking on hearing those words once more. Spoken by her in a fit of anger, yet regretted in an instant. She would take the satchel and write occasional letters home, but she had never gone back.