Chapter 1: The Day Before Everything Changed

I woke up to the sound of a chilled wind whistling in from the gaps in my bedroom window’s terribly sealed edges. I slipped out of my bed like cold honey out of the jar, and slid on my slippers so my bare feet wouldn’t have to touch the icy cold tile flooring that lined my room. I groggily walked my way to the one window in the corner of my room, throwing open the flapping curtains to stare off into the snowy landscape outside, the usual summer scene for an arctic Silver Region settlement. I grab for the bottom of the window and jiggle it left and right until the whistling ends, I then rub the sleep out of my eyes and look around my room. This was as good a time as any to get ready for the day. Senga, my twin sister, has probably been up for hours at this point, waiting for me to get up so I could braid her hair all fancy like and help her pick out a headscarf to match her raesdios for tomorrow’s Selection Ceremony. She’s been super excited for this day since she saw her first one when we were five. She’s so excited for magic, but for me, meh, if it happens it happens, but I wouldn’t be super down if I didn’t make the crystal glow. Getting out of this little nowhere township would be great though, so getting into a magic school might be in my better interest.

I quickly toss on some loose fitting, black cargo pants and a geometrically patterned, thick wool sweater and some grey wool socks before taking a quick look in the mirror. I fix some of my locs behind my ear to get my hair out of my face. I make faces at myself in the mirror before facing the mirror sideways and running a hand down my chest, flattening my sweater down.

“Flat as a board, good man,” I say to myself with a grin before leaving my room and heading down to the living room where I found my sister sitting on the couch watching a documentary about the Great Anci Relics. “Morning Senga,” I say, getting her to turn her to pause her show before looking at me,

“Hey Wilsen, you gonna braid my hair like ya promised?” she asked, leaning over the back of the couch to look at me with begging eyes,

“I will, geez, I kinda want breakfast first. You got a lot of hair, girl, I’m going to be sitting there until lunch. I need the nutrients, I’m a growing boy.” I say as I walk to the other end of the living room and enter the kitchen. Before doing anything that involved feeding myself, I clean up Senga’s dishes from the counter and put them in the dishwasher. She always forgets to do that and it annoys mother to no end. I could tell by her bowl that she had oatmeal, so I guess that’s what I’ll have. I grabbed myself a bowl from the cupboard and a packet of dino oatmeal from the pantry. Senga had opened a new dino brown sugar box even though there were still some left in the old, apple cinnamon box. I sigh and stuff the remaining three packets of apple cinnamon into the box of dino so mother doesn’t notice. I walk out of the pantry and over to my bowl, smacking the packet against my hip to settle all the bits to the bottom before opening it and pouring the powdered oat contains into my dish. I press the button on the kettle and then hop my way up onto the counter to wait for it to pop. I stared around the kitchen as I swung my legs. This might just be one of the last times I see it for a while. The grey-black cobblestone flooring that was ice cold to the touch year round, the teal painted wooden cupboards, white laminate counters with a printed top layer to make it look like marble, a double sink with a window above it that looks out onto the pine tree wilderness of Orathiorah, curtains hung from the window, they were the hand embroidered ones Senga made for mother’s birthday. I’m not as good at delicate crafts like that, so I built her a display case for her decorative spoons instead, I was also incharge of the card. My reminiscing was disturbed by the rumbling of the kettle before the switch clicked back off, meaning the water was ready. Well, I guess I’d have plenty of time to reminisce once I’m homesick.

I poured the water into my bowl, just enough to melt the sugar dough eggs to reveal the colourful dino sprinkles but not so much that it’d be watery, mixing it around until the colours from the sprinkles started to seep into the goopy oats. I add a splash of milk to the bowl before picking it up and heading to the living room to sit with Senga, the documentary still playing. As I take a seat on the couch and put a spoonful of food in my mouth, I notice that the documentary isn’t even playing in Inguish, our native tongue. From what I could pick up, it was in Anci, language of the spirits. It was taught as a second language course in school, but only because we had a retired Anci literacy teacher from Nobilitentia move to our tiny little town and decide to continue his teaching career. Senga and I took it for six years. It was the only subject Senga did better in than I did, even if it was only by five percent.

“Why are you watching this in Anci? It’s not like we’ve got a test or something.” I ask between eating,

“Well, if we’re going to get into a magic school, we should get a head start on our studies, knowing Anci is a basic stepping stone of advanced magic spells.” Senga answers,

“If you really want to get ahead on studies, you should be picking up an algebra book,” I snicker as I finish my food,

“Magicians don’t need math,” She responded, rolling her eyes.

“Magicians should know that four plus four is eight, not nine,” I answer back, sticking my tongue out at her, only to have her toss a pillow at me,

“By the Gods, it was one test, you’re never going to let that go, are you?”

“Not.A.Chance.” I stated, getting up from the couch to go put my dish away. I stack my bowl into the dishwasher before returning to the living room, “All right, if you want your hair braided before dusk, I better get started now, go get the stuff, and you better have washed and conditioned your hair properly, or else this is going to be painful for ya.” I said before sitting myself back on the couch.

“Yeah, yeah, we’ve done this, like, a million times before.” She answered, getting up and leaving the living room. I grabbed for the pillow she tossed at me, placing it on the ground between my feet and then shoving the coffee table out of the way so she’d be able to sit comfortably. I then sat back against the couch to watch the part of the documentary Senga was on.

It just so happened to be on the part about the Silver Anci, the guardian messenger for all Silver Regions. She was apparently a great warrior that fought alongside the God Empress and the other Anci during the ancient battle against the Conqueror, though historians didn’t have much more information on her besides that. The most information available about anything to do with the Anci is about their relics. The Silver Anci’s relic was known as Inanna’s Values. People like to say that ‘inanna’ is some Anci word for something, but it’s not. At least it’s not based on my studies of the Anci language, especially since Anci isn’t really a language all to its own but technically a dialect. Anci is known as the language of spirits, but also of magic, since it’s used to make spells more powerful because you’re replacing Inguish, the language of mortals ,with the language of spirits, the originators of magic. Or at least that’s what school teaches us, I, personally, have other thoughts on the matter. What people don’t usually realize about Anci, since no one really uses it for anything besides magic spells, is that Anci, in the spoken sense, is really just Inguish with words from a completely separate language sprinkled in. It’s actually the separate language that affects magic spells, but I wouldn’t go telling that to any scholar since the Empire like to try to convince it’s people that there are only two spoken languages, and five general languages. Anyways, inanna isn’t a word. I think it’s a name, I think it’s her name. I’d never say it out loud, though, I’ve seen people arrested for saying something like that, apparently it goes against the God Empress’s teachings. It would make sense for it to be a name though, it aligns with two different regional naming systems. Each region has its own way of naming its people, like names from the Silver Regions normally have “lyn”, “sen” or “ina” within them, like how my name is WilSEN, or my sister’s name is SENga, or my mother’s name is INAyat. Some people don’t have names that follow this, like my father’s name being Noor, but that’s much, much more rare. It’s why the thought of Inanna being the name of the Silver Anci makes so much sense to me, Senga likes to refute the theory by saying that if Inanna was really a Silver name, it would be spelt Inana, without the double ‘n’ at the end, since that’s a trait of Brown Region names. She might be right about that, but she should know as well as I do, if not better, that Inanna is not an Anci word.

“Okay back, what did I miss?” Senga asked as she walked back into the living room, sitting herself on the pillow and placing the plastic pitcher full of different things onto the coffee table.

“Nothing more that what we learned in history class,” I answer, grabbing for the pitcher and dumping it out on the couch beside me and picking up a handful of thick hair ties and a rat tail comb. Before doing anything, I nudged her shoulder with my knee, “did you detangle your hair already?”

“Of course I did, you’re never gentle and I’d like to keep my hair,” She responded and then leaned back against the couch so she could look up at the TV at a comfortable angle for her neck. I roll my eyes at her comment, I wouldn’t have to if she’d just learn how to moisturize her hair properly. 

“How do you want me to braid it anyways? Cornrows, box braids, over braids, under braids, or do you want micro braids like the last time?” I asked as I parted her hair down the center with the thin end of the comb,

“Hm, maybe cornrows, they’re flat against my head, so the pretty head scarf mother bought me for tomorrow will sit nicely all by myself.”

“You know you could get it to sit nicely if you just ask mother how she does it, or me, since I have to fix it for you almost every time we leave for school. You should really figure out how bobby pins work.”

“I only started wearing it after our fourteenth birthday, so it’s been, like, six months. I’ll figure it out.” She said, shifting herself on the pillow for a moment before going back to sitting still. I continued to section her hair off for cornrows, then applying a generous, though not excessive, amount of hair butter along the part next to the section I was about to braid before taking three small sections of her hair and began braiding it back, keeping the braid close to the scalp. I was about half way done with the first one before Senga spoke again. “Do you ever wonder why they’re called ‘cornrows’, wouldn’t we call them ‘rutabaga fields’ since that’s what grows here. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen cornrows besides in movies and books.”

“Ah… probably because they aren’t originally from an arctic Silver Region? I know corn grows near mountainous Silver Regions, that or it grew a lot in Gold Regions, people native to there have a similar hair type to Silver people, and I’m pretty sure a lot of their land was farmland before it became a lot of high traffic cities.” I said, trying to come up with a reason. “Also, did you want beads on the ends of these? I know you like the click-clacking they make,”

“I would totally say yes, but I couldn’t find them,” She answered with a sigh, she really liked beads. Mother always wears them and as a kid, Senga always wanted to be just like mother, so she wore beads to look like her and then got heavily fascinated by the sound they made when they clacked together. 

“Let me finish this braid and I’ll go look,” I told her as I continued the braid.

“Thanks bro, you’re the best,” She said in a sing-song sort of way, as if this was her whole plan. I finished off the braid and got Senga to hold the end so I could go look for the beads. I left the living room and walked down past Senga’s room to the bathroom, where all of our braiding stuff was kept. I got down on one knee to look under the sink, where the box of beads normally is. Guess what? It was exactly where it should have been, if not even more out in the open than normal. Weird. I pulled out the box, which was less of a box and more like a small plastic shelf with different little boxes in each compartment full of different beads. I stand up, shutting the cupboard, and taking a quick glance at myself in the mirror out of pure habit.

 

I found myself staring into completely different eyes

 

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I’m from the Silver Region, my eyes are grey, that’s what I was born with at least. Now, though, I find myself staring into eyes the colour of amethysts. I could only blink a few times as I stared at myself. My eyes weren’t purple this morning, or at least I don’t remember them being that way. It wasn’t like it was a quick look, I made faces at myself for a solid five minutes before leaving, I would have noticed my eyes being the wrong colour. My first instinct was to set the box onto the counter, a little too quick that one of the little boxes fell out and scattered beads across the floor, but that was a mess for later. I quickly rushed back to the living room so I could have a second opinion from Senga, in case I was just losing it.

“Senga, Sen, Sen, my eyes are purple!” I say as I rush into the living room, nearly hitting the floor as I slip on the carpet but successfully catch myself. She simply looked up at me, still holding the end of the braid. She stared up at me so calmly, too calmly for the situation. 

“I know,” She says so nonchalantly, so calmly. She knows? What does she mean she knows? When did my eyes change anyways? When I came down the stairs? When I came back from the kitchen? When she came back from the bathroom? It’s not like she could change the colour of my eyes, she’s a seer, not a magician. Well not yet at least, but still, there’s no magic I know of that could change a person’s physical appearance. I’d be far more excited to be a magician if that was a thing.

“What do you mean you know, Senga, that doesn’t make any sense!” I exclaimed, expressing myself a little too dramatically, but I was panicked. She simply shrugged before her gaze shifted to directly beside me.

“Why don’t you ask her,” she simply said,

“Who’s ‘her’, Senga, you’re the seer, not me.”

“I’m not really supposed to tell you,”

“Sen, my eyes are the wrong colour-”

“So are mine,”

“What?” I asked, looking down at her from where I stood. She simply rolled her eyes before pressing down on her cheeks with her index fingers to make her eyes wider, staring up at me with irises that glimmered like mother’s silver spoons. Her eyes were now no longer grey, but silver. Something had caused us to no longer be identical twins. “So some spirit  changed our eye colour? Do you think mother is going to believe that? I don’t even have the right eye colour for my race.”

“What do you want me to do about it? It’s not my fault the spirit lady chose you, I’m a seer, all I can do is see, I can’t make her change her mind,”

“Wait, wait, spirit lady? You know as well as I do, Sen, that it’s either a spirit or a lady, can’t be both.”

“Well it is, I know what I see, Will. Just calm down, I don’t really know what’s going on any more than you do. All I know is what I see, and what I’ve seen is that a spirit lady has taken a liking to your soul. Just wear sunglasses or something until tomorrow, it’ll be fine once we get on a bus out of here. Mother isn’t around enough to notice something like this anyways and Dad would accept the answer of you experimenting with contacts to change your appearance.” She answered, leaning back against the couch, “can we just get back to hair braiding, my butt’s going numb from sitting here,”

“You want to maybe give me a minute to process whatever in the Gods’ names you just told me?”

“Process and braid at the same time,”

“You’re ridiculous, you know that, right?” I say before sighing. She was a bit right though, if a spirit did this, there was nothing I could really do to change it. I decided to head back to the bathroom, to clean up the beads, grab beads for Senga’s hair and to possibly vomit from the stress. I walked back into the bathroom to find that it had happened to be the letter beads that had scattered everywhere. Mother used to use them to bead abbreviated prayers into our hair to ward off ill intent. I get down onto my knees to start picking them up but as I reach down to scoop them into a pile to make them easier to pick up, I notice something strange about it. You’d expect a case of dropped beads to scatter out all over the place at random but these weren’t. The more I stared at it, the more I noticed it was almost a perfect circle of beads with seven sitting lined up in the middle. S-A-V-E-H-I-M. Save him. Save him? First a mysterious ‘her’ only my sister can see that changed my eye colour and now there’s a mysterious ‘him’ that something or someone is asking to save? “Hey, Sen? Can you come here for a sec?” I call to her, not getting a response but hearing her slippers scuffling across the floor in my direction.

“What? What’s up?” I hear her ask before I see her in the bathroom doorway,

“Please tell me you see what I see in this bead splatter?” I asked, pointing at the scene in front of me. She leans down to look over my shoulder and I watch as she mouths out the letters she’s reading.

“Save him? Hm… I wonder who he could be?” She said, tapping a finger to her chin.

“I thought you would know,”

“I mean, the spirit lady would mention something about a shepherd that needed saving, maybe that’s it?”

“This day has just been too weird,” I said, shaking my head before starting to clean up the beads, wanting to get back to braiding Senga’s hair, something I understood. “Pick out what beads you want while you’re here.” I add as I scoop the beads back into their container, making sure to get all of them. I listen to Senga pulling out the little boxes from the shelf thing, shaking around the beads to hear them clack against each other. She’d finally chosen some purple ones by the time I stood up with the cleaned up beads in hand. I cocked an eyebrow at her choice and I guess she noticed.

“It’s so we’ll match, I know you’ll probably wear those silver cuffs in your locs that grampy gave you for your birthday. You’ll be purple eyes and silver cuffs, I’ll be silver eyes and purple beads.” She said with a grin, as if what she’s planned was the most clever thing ever thought.

“Yeah, okay, whatever you say, Sen.” I said, taking the container of beads from her, “Let's get back to doing your hair, I need a distraction from your ghost.”

“She’s not a ghost, she’s a spirit lady,”

“Yeah, sure,” I said before heading back to the living room, the documentary over and the TV now playing a cooking show. Weird. The Silver Anci is normally the fourth to be talked about, out of twelve. Spirits really like order and categorizing things, so the Anci are categorized the same way regions and magic are, since the Anci are technically like the spiritual governors of those things. The twelve Anci are broken into three classes, Seasons, Elements, and Bounties, and they’re normally talked about in that order. The Seasons class includes the Pink, Yellow, Black and Silver Anci, so there were still, like, eight more relics to talk about before the documentary would have ended. At least it should have, I don’t remember it being labeled a solely Anci of Seasons Relic documentary. Or maybe I’m just looking way too into this because of all the weirdness that has already happened, Senga could have simply changed the channels.

I sit myself down on the couch, Senga quickly sits herself back on the floor in front of me and I get back to braiding her hair, sometimes looking up at the show on TV. It was about Purple Region lucky cakes, a light, fluffy lemon and almond cake made in a fluted tube pan (whatever that is) with an apricot preserve jam glaze thing on top. The lucky part, apparently, was that before you cooked it, you sprinkled like one or two almonds into the batter, then once it was cooked, glazed and served, the people who got almonds in their piece would be considered lucky for the next year. It was typically served during Fortune’s day. That’s like five months away, so it’s a little weird that they’d be airing this episode now. Wouldn’t they be showing Yellow Region recipes, since their biggest holiday, the Summer Solstice, is only ten days away. Though, again, I’m probably just thinking way too into things because of earlier. I should just focus on doing Senga’s hair well and quit looking for things to have a deeper meaning when all there really is, is my own paranoia.

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