Resigned

The feast was just like all others of its kind; boring and needlessly formal. I was edgy all throughout, and I obeyed the urge to excuse myself to my rooms in my father’s large dwelling by claiming tiredness after the long day. It was dark out, and I guessed that I looked tired enough because my father laughed and dismissed everyone.

“After all,” he said in the booming tone he possessed, “we have training tomorrow!”

There were a few good-natured groans about his expected proclamation, and I used the distraction and rushed to my rooms. A sense of urgency gnawed at me, and I knew something was coming…something big. Already in my room were the armor and the new blade my father had found in our armory and given to me as a gift for my victory over him. They had not yet been polished, he had explained as he and I walked across the square to our home. He had said he would have someone get to it right away.

“I’ll get it later tonight,” I had told him softly. “I want to do it myself, the first time.”

For some reason, a nagging thought at the back of my head also added, “And the last time”, but I shunned that thought as best I could.

Father had laughed, clapped my shoulder with his hand and said, “ ‘Atta girl, Fayna!”

He had often called me Fayna as a little girl. It made my name sound more feminine than it really was, and it was my favorite thing to be called as a child. Sometimes others around the village who had known me from birth still called me Fayna on occasion, having forgotten that I went by my given name more frequently than that childhood name.

Father approached the house from a different way than I did, so he reached it earlier although he had left the scene of the feast later than I. On my way, I stopped to find a bucket, a rag, the polish, and a whetstone for sharpening my blades. I took the items to my room, then walked out behind the house to draw some water from the well. I poured it from the well bucket into my own and carried it with utmost ease back to my rooms from the small courtyard.

First I washed my new armor with care, taking the dust off and making it shine. When polished, the shine was just intensified, gleaming in the light of the single lamp I had lit to work by. I laid the finished product on my bed and took the washrag to the blade Father had given me. I could already tell it was the dependable sort of blade. I already knew it had been put to good use when I was nine summers old.

It was my grandfather’s old blade.

My father knew it very well, and he had noticed the look in my eyes as he’d handed it to me earlier.

“Your grandfather had wanted you to have it after he was gone,” Father had said to me confidentially just as the merrymaking of the feast began, “He said that he thought it would be the right balance and length for you, and also that he had no doubt you’d follow in our footsteps and choose the path of the warrior…and look where we are now!”

I sighed and suppressed the memory of just a few hours earlier as I took the whetstone in my hand. I silently thanked the fact that I was smart enough to have changed out of that ceremonial outfit before I had taken on the duty of caring for my own equipment. It would have been ruined if I had not changed out of it, not to mention that the trailing sleeves would have been in the way. I laid the sword across my knees as I looked over it, then I put it aside and sharpening two daggers I had taken down from my wall. Once done with those, I switched to a short sword that had also belonged to my grandfather, which I had been given when I first became a warrior. My braid fell over my shoulder, messy from my nighttime work on my equipment. Finally I was done, and switched again to the long sword that I had been given that day. Methodically, I started working on honing the edge. I watched as the already sharp blade turned into a more lethal instrument of fighting, of killing, in just moments.

Even as I sharpened this blade, I felt a strange gaze upon me and looked up. My braid tickled the side of my neck and a light layer of sweat coated my brow, my neck, and my back. A brief, blank feeling crossed my thoughts, and in that instant I learned what all of this was about. My feelings of something coming, my strange vision earlier. Resignedly, I nodded to the faint silvery smudge that was in the corner of my room and just seconds later, it spirited away.

I knew then that my life had just taken a turn that nothing could stop from claiming it.

*

One week later, the entire village turned solemn as a group of six entered through the main gate. Leading them was a woman with silver hair and slightly tapered ears, almost elfin, with light lavender eyes. All of the people knew what the woman represented, for we had all seen her dozens - hundreds! - of times before.

“Lady Linara,” my father bowed respectfully to the Seer. “We will start the preparations for a feast immediately.”

We all knew by now that this was code for, “we’ll prepare to say our final goodbyes to whomever it is that has been chosen”.

“Do as you must,” she said, and looked past my father to stare into my eyes for the briefest of seconds. To me, it felt like an eternity had passed.

*

The feast was more extravagant even than the one for me when I had bested my father…it always was, to honor whoever we would be losing. And then my father stood to formally open the feast.

“Brothers and sisters,” he called, and any timid chatter fell into nothingness instantly. “Comrades, brave souls all. We father here to honor the one from within our midst who goes to battle. We will honor the Chosen and feast to his - or her - glory! Tonight, my kind, we will say farewell to yet another of our own.”

A murmur when through the crowd assembled, and my skin tingled as I glanced toward where my prepared pack sat, ready, on the small front porch of the house my father and I shared.

“Before we say farewell, let us eat!”

It was subdued. Fewer people talked than at my feast a week prior, and those who did used hushed voices and short sentences. I knew that they all wondered who it was that would soon leave them forever…unless, of course, there was enough of a body to be returned. I couldn’t eat, for I could already imagine a look of utmost horror and fear upon my father’s features that should never be there. He looked at me with pity in his eyes then, and I knew he thought that it was his turn to go, or that it would be someone else who was dear to me like Seina and Nona. Little did he know it was I who would leave, ne’er to return.

He would soon realize the horrible truth of the Chosen.

As the feast drew to its end, Father stood up once more.

“I stand here as a man loyal to Quinn and I ask of you, Lady Linara, who is it we are to wish farewell to, and shall we say our goodbyes tonight or in the morn?”

“In the morn,” Linara stated in a voice that was strong and carried throughout the square. “The Chosen shall reveal their identity on their own. I suggest that all of you sleep until then, lest we be gone before you wake.”

Even though she had said to sleep, the sleep would not come. My disjointed thoughts of the last several hours roamed through my head, my pack tucked safely under the cot I slept on, where I had placed it when I excused myself to get a drink from my father’s well…he had asked no questions. He always said that the cool water of our family’s well had always brought him a sense of serenity and calmness.

I sat awake when I gave up on sleep and brushed my thick, dark hair for the morning to come. In my mind, I knew what my parting gift to my father would be. Others had left behind daggers, or shields, or other such things for the family they would leave behind, but I knew that such things would not matter so much to my father. I had chosen to take along with me the long sword and short sword that had once belonged to my father, and the two daggers I had sharpened. I had my new armor polished and ready to don. I would tell my father, when the time came - if the time came - that I was getting ready for the farewell, which would not be a lie. I would be fastening on the armor by the time he knocked on my door, and would be almost ready to leave Quinn and step into my new, short existence. The short sword would be belted on my right hip, for use in my left hand, and the long sword at my left hip to be drawn quickly by my right hand. Just like my grandfather had left.

And like him, I would not be returning.