I was so happy. We all were.
If we hadn’t offered the work, I think he would’ve returned to Fletland, but I knew he didn’t want to go. He was afraid of that place, haunted by memories of bloody battles he’d fought, and adventures that hadn’t always ended well.
Soon enough, he gave me another chance to giggle at him. This time it wasn’t because of held back tears, but my approaching coming-of-age. He began to get awkward around me, just like my father. It was very endearing.
Mother spent her days teaching me the skills of a lady; etiquette; how to manage a household; and how to master various crafts.
It was a bore.
In the afternoons, she’d send me to my loft bedroom with stitching to complete or some other enthralling task.
I’d often end up sitting at my window lost in the caress of the summer breeze. Once there, it’d not take long before I’d let my thoughts escape the monotony of my work to seek the freedom of lazy dreams.
Being from amongst the wealthiest of Flet families, I was destined to marry a Heletian to help Father’s business bridge Ossard’s cultural divide. The thought frightened me. Unlike the blue-eyed and blonde Flets, the Heletians with their dark hair and eyes matched to olive skin seemed so different and stubbornly traditional.
My mother sensed my apprehension, so she started adding a lotusbased concoction to my meals. It was reputed to induce thoughts of motherhood, love, and even lust. I didn’t notice any change, well, not at first…
Finally, and much to my mother’s relief, I began to look at the idea of a husband, my husband, with a fresh and hot-blooded heart. He became the focus of my dreams, shameful things, as my mother strengthened the dosage so that the fantasies crossed increasingly into the waking day from the sleeping night.
It threatened to become an obsession.
I could see him, handsome and wealthy, but at the same time gentle and loving – a Heletian merchant prince. He would be my hero, standing alongside me through the travails of life, living for me as I did for him. Together, as best friends, partners, and lovers – nothing less than a true couple. We would be inseparable…
Soon enough, bored with my mother’s lessons, the daydreams became an escape. More and more, when I wasn’t lost in a lotus inspired haze or taking lessons, I sought them out at my bedroom’s loft window, most especially at the end of the day.
In contrast, in the waking morning, when the grip of the lotus ran at its weakest ebb, my head often grew heavy with pain. At such times I felt trapped by a destiny promising comfort, but no excitement, where I could see a lingering lifetime only to be mercifully ended by the hand of Death.
Such bleak moods only fed my hunger for lotus.
I dreamt of a sacred union, of two souls joined by all things honourable in a partnership heralded by angels. It would be so beautiful that even the gods would weep. In time, with the passing of many happy seasons, children and prosperity would strengthen our most important gift to each other – our love…
I knew it was just a fantasy, but I couldn’t get enough of it.
I was being enslaved.
To my surprise, a respite surfaced in the strangest place; my sleep.
It began a little over a week out from my coming-of-age. At first it was just an image, like a glimpse of a distant land. It wasn’t until after its first few visits that I realised how much I needed it – something to counter my growing dependence on the lotus.
Every night this new dream came stronger and longer. It pushed aside stubborn scenes of handsome husbands, breathless kisses, and naked, sweat-covered shame. It ran like a vision, as if I flew free with the birds, seeing me glide high above a green and beautiful land.
Without the passion and lust of the lotus dreams it might sound like a bore, but it stirred something deep within. It gave a sense of life, hope, and liberation: It was of freedom.
Within its sleeping caress, I dove down into steep mountain valleys and soared up by rugged, snow-dusted peaks. Eventually, that landscape gave way to a rock-lined sound where the sea spilled in. Behind that coast rolled green hills that grew in height and grandeur, and not much farther back, a shadowed canyon cradled in their midst.
A sanctuary.
The canyon was warm, lush with life, and full of water’s song. Little streams trickled down tier after tier of the canyon’s moss-covered sides, falling lazily to its mist-shrouded and fern-forested bottom.
But the lotus always fought to reassert itself…
And out from that mist-veiled fern forest stepped my naked husband, his olive skin glistening, while the curve of his muscles caught the overhead sun. With a cock of his eye and a strong hand, he beckoned me, demanding that I come and make love to him…
Even my sanctuary could be violated.
My mother kept increasing the dosage, determined that I fall for the first man presented to me. She knew I could be rebellious and feared my initial reluctance. She wanted me nice and agreeable.
Amidst all this my headaches continued. At first I thought it was the lotus causing them, yet in the end I realised that the stronger doses actually worked to quell their pain.
After our courting, when finally he came to propose, the question would be asked with flowers – red roses. I’d always said; the first man bold enough to give me such a gift of scandalously coloured blooms would be welcome to my hand, for surely anyone so daring would have already won my heart!
Such daydreams were best had sitting at my bedroom window oblivious to the household and the crowded streets below. It was on one such afternoon that I found myself settled in and looking out at the maze of moss-covered rooftops, the whole vista still damp from a long morning of showers.
The soft green ridges reminded me of the rolling hills of my dream sanctuary as the afternoon sun peeked between clouds to highlight them with passing shafts of gold. Beyond that living mosaic climbed the sides of the steep valley we lived in; the Cassaro, Ossard’s cradle, and whose exhausted silver mines had given the city life.
The ancient range made the surrounding Northcountry difficult to farm. All about us, its granite pushed through the thin soil to loom rugged and stark.
The Northcountry was a treeless place.
The pine forests that had once veiled so many of its hills and mountain slopes had succumbed to a blight over a century past, and its few survivors long since been felled. The city’s symbol, its famed rose-tree, was also gone. Thickets of it had once lined the gullies and riverbanks along the valley-floor, but the same blight had also stolen it away.
Such a history saw the present slopes and valley-floor given over to pasture and crops, or where too boggy or steep, abandoned to herbal brush and a hardy oleander. The latter had spread without invitation many years ago, growing its long branches full of thin and poisonous leaves. The shrub’s one blessing came in its bright pink blooms, while pretty, they were also deadly. It was certainly no rose-tree.
But all that lay to the sides of my view and the inland depths behind, in the distance spread something else; the Northern Sea.
The port crowded the far side of the city. There, the sea’s deep blue drew a dark line between the mossed roofline of Ossard and the cloud-streaked sky above. In one place, partially hidden by a set of church towers, it glittered golden as it reflected the late afternoon sun.
A soft breeze tugged at my blonde hair, soothing in its caress. The sun also worked to seduce me as it set my pale skin aglow with its warm and sweet kiss. And all of it combined to make me sleepy.
I’d come here to daydream and endure a headache that had struck me earlier in the day. Its lancing pain had faded, but a muffled buzzing in my ears warned that it hadn’t finished with me yet. The aches had haunted me for weeks now, at first soft and barely noticed in the morning, but recently they’d worsened to grow rough and breathtaking. My mother had been concerned at the news, overly so, but she’d always been prone to fretting.