The Troubled Sky

Tana sighed and sat down next to Cira. She slipped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. "You just look worried, that is all. Did you sleep well? You didn’t have any bad dreams did you?"

Cira looked into her mother’s eyes. There was terror there. Every parent among their people worried in this way when their children turned thirteen; that was when the gifted were found. Everyone knew of the test that was conducted with every child found with the gift.

Cira had turned thirteen three days ago.

"Mother, it’s really nothing. I just had a hard time sleeping."

She had seen a child be given the test once when she was very young. The purpose of the test was to determine the strongly gifted from the weak. When a child showed signs of being gifted, they were brought before Lord Sarus, whereupon he would then unleash his power upon them. The child, then, had to either use their untrained power to instinctively protect themselves, or be killed. Those who survived the ordeal were taken from their families and given a home inside the palace walls where they were then trained to use their gift to serve the Lord Sarus and their people.

Cira felt her mother take her firmly by the shoulders.

"Cira?" she whispered hoarsely. "Promise me that is all it was."

Cira bit her lips and stared at the floor of the hut, watching the light from the dying fire dance across the damp wooden planks.

"Cira look at me," her mother demanded.

She looked up into her mother’s pale face and dark eyes. She tried to contain her tears. She opened her mouth to speak but all that came past her lips was a wordless cry of pain and terror. Before the first tears had welled in her eyes, her mother had pulled her close into her warm embrace. Mother and daughter clung to each other while they rocked back and forth, each crying their own devastated cries.

* * *

Lord Sarus stood on one of the many parapets of the palace, surveying the sight of the city below. It was not a beautiful city; at least what lay outside of the palace grounds was not. The palace itself was neither lacking in size nor grandeur; the city beyond it was completely impoverished.

Of course this was not necessarily a terrible thing. The people of the city were completely dependent on him; they knew no other way to live. Sarus had reigned ever since the Great War and all those who would have remembered a life before the sky had gone black were dead.

He had made sure of that.

As it was, the people revered him as their savior. Indeed, he was the one who made sure they had food and were free of disease. They revered him for his power and his generosity. He was the one who kept them from the brink of starvation. The fact that they were too lazy to find a way to improve their homes and surroundings was not his problem in the least.

He rested his elbows on the stonewall and propped his chin on his hands. A small frown crossed his face as he contemplated the information he had received from the Guardians the night before. He knew that they weren’t wrong; the Guardians were never wrong, he had made sure of that when he created them. But if they were never wrong, then a gifted child had been found outside of the palace compound; a gifted child from a family with no history of the gift.