The Adolescence of Silas Trester

Be warned . . . There is an air of mystery about me. That was my only attempt at levity.

Kassen, where I’ve grown up, is a logging community. There’s more than one logger baron that calls it home, and logging is generally the family business in some fashion if one lives there. Not being anything particularly special, the latter was my family’s lot. My great grandfather settled here nearly a century ago and built a little home a couple hundred yards south of the town square. He didn’t appreciate feeling crowded by people, and that’s something else that stands out about Kassen: While a central community exists, many townsfolk prefer to live outside of it and meet up there after the workday or on festival days. It’s a rather tight-knit community, mind you, with people that take tremendous pride in it, but they tend to like their space and privacy a bit more than most.

Silandron Trester worked as a logger for one of the lesser barons in Kassen, just as the two generations of Tresters before him. The livelihood was difficult, and we didn’t have much in the way of earthly pleasures, but that hardly mattered. Loyalty had always been of the utmost importance to the Trester men, and they would go to the grave supporting the house that had given their family a living. Such would have been my lot in life, as well, if my father had any say in the matter, and a betting man would have not gone against him, though my desires remained elsewhere. I had a higher calling, or so I always proclaimed to anyone who questioned me about the future. There were fortunes to be had in the wider world—I’d heard a great deal about them from the stories travelers brought with them through town—and Kassen always felt to me a quaint town to retire in, not to spend a life toiling for coppers. My parents only laughed at my declarations, and my elder brother would take me out with his ax to gain experience swinging it in anticipation of the family trade.

In my 12th summer, however, my dream changed everything.

I oft dreamed of adventure. One thing my brother appreciated most were the stories I’d share about how he and I would save the town from a marauding owlbear or defeat a Molthunian reconnaissance party near the southern border. He never chided me for the ridiculousness of these dreams, and I believe fancied the tellings greatly because he played the part of the bigger hero in them, being the stronger of the two of us. In the last of such dreams that I can remember, however, he and I were wandering through the wood with his ax looking for a worthy tree to call our next victim when a war party of goblins ambushed us. We fought bravely, but their numbers were too many and threatened to overwhelm us. One of their tiny, makeshift swords had penetrated deep into his ribcage and broken off in there, leaving my brother virtually incapacitated on the forest floor. I swung the ax wildly until the head flew off and left me with only a well-fashioned haft to defend us both. After throwing the handle at the nearest goblin, I straddled my brother’s bleeding and broken body, feeling hopeless as the monstrous vermin closed in for the kill. Fear and rage built up in me with equal measure, and I recall vividly wishing them all dead. It was then that I felt a breeze pulled into me from all sides, and it swirled around my body in a moldering chaos as power the likes of which I’d never known surrounded me. The air became dense; it literally grew heavy! My thoughts reached out to it, demanding its obedience to my will, and, shockingly, it granted me complete control.

The goblins closed in around us, weapons hoisted to shred us to ribbons. I released a feral scream, and with it all the air packed in so tightly blasted outward from my body with tremendous force, ripping through, and blowing back, all the goblins simultaneously!

In that moment, I awoke. Everything was still and silent. The common sounds of the night that had become as familiar to me as breathing ceased to exist. I waited and listened, eerily disturbed by the quiet strangeness. I sought to hear the deep intake of breath from my father, whose exhaustive work always left his body weary and in need of intense strengthening while he slept. I wished to whisper to my brother in the bunk above me, to hear the shifting of his body whenever something disturbed his rest, but my voice failed me . . . It would not break the silence of the moment. Something deep inside me understood that it would not matter anyhow.

I laid awake for the rest of the night. Eventually, sounds crept back in, but from a distance. It felt as if a curse had descended upon my home, and nothing desired to come near it . . . near me.

That was the night I became an orphan. That was the night my power began to manifest.

Orstil found us the next evening. He and my father had developed a long friendship at a young age. They worked together for the same logging house, and when father hadn’t shown up for work, he came by to see if anything was wrong. He discovered only me alive. I remember him asking me over and over, “What happened?” I could tell him nothing. I couldn’t even speak. It’s as if the queer silence of the night before had wormed its way into my soul, and I had no voice. Even if I had, what could I have told him? I didn’t know what had happened. I had woken from a dream into a nightmare that I’d tried to wake from again and couldn’t.

When he recognized that no answer was forthcoming, Orstil took me into his arms and carried me to the nearest residence—that of Hallissa Willow, an herbalist. He left me with her, then raced onward to the Temple of Erastil to get help. He explained only that the rest of my family had died somehow and hoped the Erastilians could discover more. What Orstil failed to realize—what none of them would ever realize—was that it wasn’t just my family that died that night. It was everything in the house. Every insect. Every spider. The swallow that nested in a niche near the chimney. A fieldmouse that had infiltrated the pantry that night. Everything . . .

Except me.

The devotees of Erastil learned nothing about that night. They questioned me more, but even after my voice returned, I could tell them nothing new. Only that I had been sleeping. They accepted that as truth, and why shouldn’t they? It was. I thought to divulge to them about my dream, but, alas, I could not. It still scared me too much thinking about it, so I stayed mute on the subject. In the end, their investigations fizzled out, and the mystery narrowed to the one final answer that none could accept, but all could agree upon: They had all stopped breathing, and that was the end of it.

Hallissa the Herbalist became my new guardian. I fought hard to stay in the home I had been raised in, but Mayor Uptal refused to allow a 12-year-old child to take care of himself. I was near adulthood, but not near enough. Finally, I agreed reluctantly because what else could I do? I hardly got a wink of sleep those first couple months; perhaps because it took me that long to adjust to my new residence, or maybe due to other reasons.

I visited my family home often. It was so close, and I would think long and hard about that night. Very few epiphanies struck me during those times, and Hallissa would come to collect me when I didn’t return. She chastised me softly after the first few times and told me it would be best if I stopped going there—if I stopped reliving the memory. I don’t believe she ever considered that it wasn’t to relive the memories that I went, but to solve the mystery . . . and to face the fear that continued to nibble on the edges of my conscience.

In that time, I began to notice that things about me had changed. Not physically, mind you, but mentally. I heard whispers in my mind, though they never seemed to originate there; instead, they fluttered about me in jovial merriment. That may seem an odd way of stating it, and I don’t know if it’s the most accurate way to depict it, but there’s no way better that I can think to express what I heard. I couldn’t help but pay attention to it because my thoughts were nowhere near to jovial or carefree, yet that’s all I heard about me. Those not-voices desired me to play with them, to control them, to lose myself in the nonchalant, buoyant fun they were currently involved in.

After many days of confusion and sheer stubbornness against what I felt had to be madness setting in—that’s what my recollection affords me to say, as I couldn’t attach a name to it at the time, I permitted myself to do what the not-voices were continuously prompting me to do: Join in. When I did, however, they suddenly fought against me! It was as if my doing what they desired required them to stop doing what they desired. Admittedly, it took tremendous force of will for me to join into the “fun” they were having, but in using it, I was able to make small variations in the course of the wind.

As the weeks passed by, my willpower strengthened, but my understanding of the air’s desires also sharpened. I came to better grasp its enjoyment, and so blended its carefree nature with my own purposes to better manipulate its desires. Ever-so-slowly, I taught the wind to find enjoyment in what I wanted it to do. For example, when near bonfires, I convinced the air to form a small current that caused the fire’s smoke to filter around me. Thus, even when I stood in the thick of it, I breathed in only fresh air, as the smoke itself never actually penetrated to me. Granted, the current I created through the wind only kept it smoke-free for a matter of seconds before tendrils of smoke began blending with the current, but that’s how I was beginning to shape air to my own whims.

Hallissa soon had me studying to better my knowledge of nature so I could learn how to collect the various herbs and plants she used in her remedies and tinctures. She tried to teach me the secrets to their creation, as well, but in that pursuit I proved utterly hopeless. I earned my room and board through scaveng—err, foraging, then. Most plants have rather peculiar aspects that make them easy to differentiate, so discerning the useful ones from the detritus wasn’t too difficult. That’s not to say I’m an expert at it, or that I didn’t make my fair share of mistakes, but I grew efficient enough to warrant the moniker of boon to the town who used her services.

More important to me, it allowed me to spend the bulk of my time alone and able to continue to refine this unusual relationship with the air around me. I learned a certain playfulness with the air, creating mini cyclones that could pick up leaves or other light objects and blow them around some. Air loves to laugh and dance and twirl, so developing any skill involving such things pleased it immensely. In return, it grew more apt in protecting me, such as when I called upon it to not carry my scent downwind to dangerous predators while out collecting ingredients. It took some years, but I even ascertained how to form air into a weapon, making a more focused gust that impacts with the force of a maul. I blew branches off trees or could even pulverize the trunk until it snapped in two pieces, though that entailed large amounts of time and energy to pull off. At first, my range of control for this blunt-force trauma was quite close, but I’ve succeeded in expanding the range rather significantly. Unfortunately, doing so caused me to grow incredibly tired very quickly, so now I’ve dedicated much of my efforts towards building up stamina to perform such feats. I’m also working on my aim, which isn’t always the greatest . . ..

It must be noted that I haven’t spent all my time a recluse in the Fangwood. After those first couple months that I repeatedly retreated to my original home, Hallissa decided it imperative that I spend some time each week in the community center “socializing”. I would play games, go swimming, and generally interact with the other youth of the town. Some treated me like an outsider, while others were far more accepting of my new status as parentless. A few I grew somewhat close to even. I’ve never divulged my unique talents to any of them, however, nor to anyone in the town, for that matter. A part of me has always feared what the townsfolk might think about these abilities . . . a part of me fears what I think about them. I know there are many that manifest innate magic, and it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to attribute this power to something mundane as that, though the truth of it is vastly different, I believe. There’s just something about controlling air, manipulating it to my whims, that I worry others may have uneasy qualms about. If I’m being truly honest here, there are aspects about it that I have reservations about . . . that I can’t bring myself to think, let alone say out loud.

The time draws near now for the annual ceremony to retrieve a piece of the eternal flame from the crypt of Ekat Kassen. Quite often, important people in the town are given the honor of its retrieval, but every now and again, some of the town’s youth are esteemed with the honor as some sort of coming-of-age custom. As it turns out, I have been selected this year to perform the rite with others roughly my age. I believe, in some small way, it’s almost as a celebration in honor of the family that I’ve lost that they selected me, and it’s for that reason that I can’t turn it down. Perhaps if I perform this ceremony in their honor, I can put to bed the demons that haunt me still about that night and finally be ready to leave this place for the wider world and all it has to offer.