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Cut Scene: A Dart Made Of Black Paper

The Unknown Region

At some point, awareness comes back to him and he finds that he is limping, ever so slowly, down the soundless road toward the sea. Something has hurt him quite terribly, but he can't quite seem to remember exactly what it was. The memories slip away like a school of silvery fish, bursting apart as the bubbles escape from his lungs and he crashes into the water.

Everything aches, but that's not enough to stop him. He keeps walking, patiently, one foot after the other, and the recollection of himself gradually comes back together, although parts seem to be missing. It's just a matter of walking it off.

He seems to have acquired a staff from somewhere, long and slender, made of some light metal yet strong at the core. The top handspan of the metal is decoratively embellished with red enamel containing darker patterns like smoke, and capped by a plain piece of clear crystal, the joint of the two very cleanly and carefully machined, like a tool of some sort, rather than a fancy. But try as he might, he can't remember where he got it from.

It's all that's letting him keep walking. On each step he leans into the slightly bent bar of the path, folded around whatever happened to him, a history hidden inside, written in his blood and bones. Expressed in the twisted diagonals of his forward motion. He will not let it stop him. He will keep going, no matter how long it takes, until he gets there.

Suddenly, something hits him abruptly in the face, in the eye, and in his startlement, clutching at his face, he loses his grip and tumbles over slowly, backwards, onto the ground, looking up into a long golden light like sunset that effaces everything, with the stars beginning to glimmer on the edges of the sky.

It's all just too much, and he just suddenly starts sobbing, making small whimpering sounds of infinite pain as he grasps at his eye and the light swells inside his skull until it fills everything, but then slowly washes away like a tide until, much to his surprise, he's still there. He manages to roll over and look at the thing that hit him, which has bounced clumsily off him and spiralled down to land near his outfallen hand.

It's a dart made of black paper, folded diagonally from a square page, one end folded in and up to create a smaller diamond-shaped structure. Whether it's a stealth fighter with an elevated tail-fin, or an angry black dragon with a raised muzzle, pretty much all depends on which way you look at it. He grasps it by the underside and there's something very familiar about it.

Some of the memories start to come back. Black paper is the cheapest kind, made from seaweed beaten flat, edible if you want to want to wrap food inside it. You write on it with ink made from pale pigments, ground shell and limestone, eggshell, but the colors aren't that consistent and so it works better if you add a toner that turns the letters a vivid shade of red, slightly raised against your fingertips. It is a gift from the sea and has been around forever, unlike the far more expensive white paper that comes from the inland forests, which swallows the ink whole and remains all too completely smooth.

"Well, don't just sit there," comes a familiar voice. "Come over here and fly darts with me."

It's a voice he remembers and a voice he knows he should never hear again. Kailey Fenris, with her soft husky voice like love and cane sugar, that lures in everyone she meets and ensnares them, her own son included.

A hand reaches down and pulls him up, and it doesn't hurt him anymore, so he lets her seat him next to her on the swell of the bank, pressing the dart firmly into his grasp.

"But you're..."

"Yeah, I know. So are you. These things happen."

With his mothers arm around him, looking down onto the sunset reflected in an imaginary sea, he lets the memories come back to him, of how it was when they lived by the lived by the ocean, when he was small, before her peculiar jealousy drove his mother into a futile competition with a sethuress who was never really her enemy and had never actually taken anything from her, and they moved inland, and everything turned into a competition and a fight. Of how it was before she died in a way that became a dirty legend, with exclamations of awe and admiration in the whisper of how her explicit talent was cut short.

He remembers the smell of the sea, and the light at sunset. He remembers his father, who liked to fish and was a little overawed by his unexpected relations with the racy celebrity partner he'd known since long before she became famous, and would come back at the end of the day from out on the waves with stories of offerings, all sorts of strange things, for just a few intimate moments with her. He remembers how, no matter what was offered, she would turn the tourists down if she had promised to go somewhere with him, and they would make darts from pieces of a long roll of cheap black seaweed paper, and fly them into the sunset as the stars came out.

"It wasn't their fault. And it wasn't yours," Kailey Fenris tells her son, crooked half-smile askew, as she folds another dart and readies it for its flight, with that exact same wicked gleam she always had in life. 'Are you ready to be someone new?"

She launches her dart of black paper and it swoops across the bay.

He makes his wish, and throws.

Ending For:

Kilseth