The Wyrms of &alon

I was an Elpeck native, born and raised. In and of itself, this was not especially noteworthy. There were nearly 14.3 million of us—over 50 million, if you counted the whole Elpeck Metropolitan Area. Most Elpeckians, however, did not know much—or anything, really—about their city’s venerable history. They could point you to Angel’s Cove, Codman’s Wharf, the Melted Palace, or the Old Imperial Promenade. But that was about it. Ask for details? You’d get bupkis.

Ask me for details? You’d get them by the dozens—and baker’s dozens, at that. Though part of it was just the nerdiness encoded in the most basal recesses of my neurophysiology—I Think, Therefore I Nerd—it really did have practical benefits: it helped break the ice. Working at West Elpeck Medical, I saw folks from abroad nearly as often as I did locals. The city often arose as a topic of small talk, especially when I was working with patients who had flown in from out of town or across the sea, usually for a business opportunity—of which there were many. International visitors loved asking about the Prelatory and life under that regime—the Moral Police, the Institute for the Highest Good, the book burnings, the whole shebang. I told them about all the must-see landmarks: the speakeasy Under-the-Lawn, the most common stops for the traveling concerts, the ice cream pebble parlor on 12th and Brentway where the strike team gathered for a snack before springing the coup that finally put an end to the madness. Yes, I had been in my negative-thirties when Prelatory fell, but that hardly mattered. Someone had to tell the capital’s stories.

And to make sure that no one forgot.

It said a lot about Elpeck’s character and—really—that of the whole darn Trenton nation—that its peninsular capital didn’t mind in the slightest that it was split down the middle by a steep pair of hills running perpendicular to the sea. It was as if the Angel had said, “Stop! Go No Further!”, and twice at that. But that was just par for the course. Going where we shouldn’t have gone was basically a national pastime, as was doing what shouldn’t have been done, and rugby.

Of course, the parts of Elpeck that most people thought of—the tall, shiny bits emblazoned on postcards, pins, and console-cases in souvenir shops all across town—those were up at the peninsula’s thumbnail. The people who lived on the Thumb did alright. The unlucky ones lived in the Valley, in between the Hills. The people who did well lived in the foothills, while the people who did best lived among the clouds, atop spires of chrome.

I grew up in the Valley. Up and out.

The g-forces elbowed me against my car-seat as I zoomed through the on-ramp’s bend, twisting out in a tightly coiled, deeply banked curve that sucked the speed out of a vehicle before spitting it out onto Hillside Drive’s winding, maundered climb. Tall, sweeping retaining walls bit into the hillside. From a distance, the cubic blocks of stone that tiled the walls seemed to blur the cliffs into pixels.

Home wasn’t much further.

After the frictionless ride of the mag-lev expressway, the thrum of the car’s wheels unfolding and skidding onto the road was almost unwelcome. I took the third left turn, down Seacrest Avenue, and from there onto Angeltoe Street.

Home sweet home—and a far cry from what I had known in my youth.

My father was a musical jack-of-all-trades, having acquired skill with the violin, the trumpet, the conductor’s (or, more often, band leader’s) baton and probably several other instruments that I did not know of. He traveled often, and widely, always on the lookout for the best paying gigs. The high point in his career, as he loved to tell me, was when he got the job of guest conductor for the Noyoko Radio Symphony. Most people who knew him, though—if they knew him—would better recognize him as the first violin or second trumpet in Rally Hollworthy’s Big Stand Band.

Home was still in the Valley. I regularly visited Dad, bringing the kids as often as I could. But Home had grown to include the Seacrest Heights, too. Home was a stately, single-floored manse in the ranch style, perched mid-hill with a lush lawn at its feet, framed by forking cypresses. Its footprint was a stout, stocky exclamation mark surmounted by a broad, hipped roof. You could see all the way to the city just by staring down the street, or through the wide bay windows of the dome-less rotunda we had for a living room.

I admit, at times, it almost felt like it was too much. But what else can you expect when you’re married to the daughter of a real-estate magnate? (And not just “a” real-estate magnate, but the real-estate magnate.) The Revenels had put forward the fearsome down payment, though they expected me to pay off the mortgage. I knew they did it in an attempt to belittle me, but, if anything, I took my mortgage payments as a point of pride. I needed to feel like I was doing something to contribute, and if that meant paying off the mortgage, then—gosh darn it—that’s what I was going to do! My success in that department even earned me enough admiration from my mother-in-law that she stopped questioning my manhood.

The best thing I could say about my mother-in-law was that she was not my father-in-law, though that had stopped counting in Margaret’s favor once the old man finally kicked the bucket. In life, Mortimer had been a living corpse who spat words like “parasite”, “scum”, “taxes”, and “atheist” wherever he went. The point is, if life followed RPG rules, my wife and children would have gotten the ‘undead ancestry’ background trait and all the dark magic that would have come with it.

The garage door raised up of its own accord as I drove over the sensor embedded in the driveway. I was just about to cut the engine when Rayph came charging out the front door with a script in hand, waving it like a banner of victory.

“I did it!” he cheered, “I finally did it!”

— — —

My son Rayph was a whirlwind, only one with arms, and an even worse disregard for tidily wearing one’s clothes. With his temperament, I would not have been significantly surprised if he turned into a werewolf on the first full moon after his seventeenth birthday; it would have gone a long way toward explaining his behavioral quirks, that’s all I’m saying. The comings and goings of my young son’s life kept the rest of us on our toes, because they invariably pulled us in and sent us for a spin. Rayph’s latest quest was also his biggest one to date, rivaled only by last year’s Sandcastle Fiasco. A month and a half ago, I’d been filled with joy, pride, and fear—O, the fear!—when I’d gotten the news that Rayph had been assigned the starring role of Orrin Nadkila in Prescott Noctis™ Elementary School’s production of Before the Sword.

For the record, yes, my son’s elementary school was named after the brand of sleeping pill that served as the flagship for Prescott Pharmaceutical’s sleep-aid division, famous for its two greatest side-effects: excessive, noisome flatulence, and life-affirming dreams of soaring flight. If you thought it was unseemly to name an elementary school after a brand of sleeping pill that made people fart up a storm, you’d be right. It was just another one of the many “benefits” of having private industries sponsor, subsidize, or even outright own institutions that were (or ought to be) of and for the public. Other such “benefits” included: propaganda lauding the environmental benefits of fluorocarbon-based coolant fluid for your car, shoe-sellers who made liberal use of x-rays to irradiate your feet for the sake of a “skeletally optimized shoe fit,” and—my personal “favorite”—privately owned prisons who used their inmates as slave laborers in heavy industry, yet avoided outright illegality by audacious, jaw-dropping legal sorcery of the darkest, most technical sort.

The more you know.

I entered the house like the proverbial breadwinner—through the front door—with Rayph at my side, his chest puffed out in a display of accomplishment, holding the copy of the play’s script in his hands as if it was a hand-written proclamation from Lassedite Gerdwick himself. The front door swung open of its own accord after I passed my hand over the scanner beside the camera-bearing doorbell button. As soon as the door had opened, Rayph crawled under my legs and scampered into the living room where the rest of his adoring audience—My wife and my daughter—awaited him, seated in comfort on the plush, black leather couch by the living-room’s big bay window. Pel held a copy of the script in her hands, legs closely pressed together as she leaned forward, full of enthusiasm. She was wearing one of her afternoon dresses: a charmingly brassy plaid skirt beneath a light, faded-yellow chemise up top. Her slender, maroon shoes were as soft to the touch as they looked, and the heels were so low you wouldn’t have noticed unless you stared for a while and squinted. My daughter Julette—Jules to all but the bravest or angriest few—was perched further back, seated atop rather than against the expansive pillows. Like most days, she was still dressed in her school uniform, the one exception being the black, buckled shoes, which she’d deposited—as per family regulation—on the hardwood floor of the niche by the front door.

As for the man of the hour, Rayph had resumed what I presumed was the (highly melodramatic) pose he’d been holding before he’d run out to greet me, with his back to the broad, flagstone column which housed our hearth and chimney. Rayph’s pose consisted of planting his sock-covered feet on the beige shag carpeting while clasping the script in one hand, held behind his back, capped off by the stern, defiant, perfectly overwrought expression he’d forced onto his face.

Today, Rayph had worn the plaid light-blue-and-yellow shirt his mother had selected for him the night before, and the undone belt-buckle that drooped over his waist meant that his slacks were truly slack. Despite his young age—eight years, though he liked to boast he was older than that—Rayph Howle had accrued a troubling number of enemies: math, earthworms, anything raspberry, caraway seeds, foghorns, a bucketful of other assorted peeves, and—of course—belts. Rayph was a machine designed to undo belts, and he’d squirm into activation as soon as he was out of public, much to his mother’s chagrin. But Pel was as clever a strategist as they came. My wife had an uncanny skill when it came to picking her battles, and when and where to fight them, a skill which only ever wavered under a surfeit of emotion. In this instance, what had mattered to her was that she’d gotten Rayph to wear that plaid shirt she so adored (and he really was the bees’ knees when he wore them)—that, and the fact that he’d kept his pants on. Keeping my son properly pantsed had been the culmination of a lengthy behavioral campaign. It was a tale filled with twists and turns, unexpected betrayals (I often grabbed him when giggles had caught him off guard), and pale little legs skittering around the house, with only socks and underwear to keep them at bay.

Despite this, at the moment, in Pel and Jules’ imaginations, Rayph was not Rayph Howle, but Luminer Orrin Nadkila. At this point in the historical events depicted in the play—events two-hundred sixty-one years in the making—Brother Nadkila stood at the very heart of the Holy City of Imperial Elpeck, among the stone columns of the Melted Palace’s basilica, where he spoke of hope and faith, and of the precious strength of little miracles.

“Brothers, sisters,” Orrin said—and my son voiced him well—“see me now, and know that your hopes are not in vain!” He let the words hang in the air. “No matter the aches and pains of your lives, no matter the shadows of your troubles, know that…”

Rayph paused. You could almost see his confidence taking wing.

“Know that…”

It flew straight out of his open mouth, crashed through the window on the way out, and got sucked into a passing aerostat’s engines, where it was shredded to bloody ribbons.

Rayph closed his eyes. It did not help.

“What’s my line?” he whispered, wincing in embarrassment.

He was positively mortified.

Of course, by the laws of sibling rivalry, this meant that Jules snickered from her fortified position on the couch beside her mother.

“You are never alone,” Pel hissed, softly. “You are loved.”

“You are never alone,” Rayph said, loud and commanding, only to take it down a notch when he remembered what the scene was supposed to sound like. “You are loved.”

He took a breath.

“The Angel is there for you, with His Promise, His Strength, and His Care. Even as the sacred Sun, he watches us now. It is for Him that we live. He lays the foundations of our belonging in this wide, wide world. He suffered for us—He suffers with us—guiding us through the long night, toward the Light; toward the Sun. He renews us. Replenishes us. He forgives us for our failings. For us, He paves the way. He fills us with Grace and Love, to remake us into what we were always meant to be. He changes us. He changes the world!”

Bringing both his hands onto his chest, Rayph pressed the script against his blue-and-yellow plaid shirt.

“If you doubt yourselves, if your faith falters, if the Night weighs terribly on your soul, you need only look at me. I was born into ignorance, the child of a wretched Costranak family, ensnared by Sunbasker lies. I did not know the fullness of the Godhead, but that did not trouble the Triun. The Angel knew me. He chose a simple, illiterate servant girl to imbue me with the light of His Grace, and the grace of His Light. He rescued me, and I had done nothing to deserve it. My mother and father, bless their hearts, they loved me and cherished me as any good parents should. They were good people; they still are. But… they lived in darkness—in Error.” Rayph shook his head.

Pel leaned forward, reading from the script.

“Even now, Brother Nadkila? Even me?”

The words filled me with frisson. The hair on the nape of my neck stood on end.