Illusions of Soul

It was a shortcut. I’d never known of it, but I didn’t get out much by myself, and, when I did, I took the long way in an effort to make it last.

That night I didn’t argue. Every step felt too heavy and I only wanted a place to lie down. If a shortcut through hell was the quickest route to my bed, I would have taken the fiery path. As it turned out, Paul’s shortcut was just that and I would by lying down sooner than I expected.

As soon as we were within the cover of the trees, Paul lost all his good breeding and religious conviction. Or maybe he never really had either.

He didn’t turn to me. He turned on me. But not right then. It had happened earlier and I was too naive to realize it. From the moment he ordered my drink, he had no honorable intentions.

The leaves and snow cushioned my fall when he pushed me down, but the warmth oozed out of me and I finally felt the cold.

Paul said that he would make it right with my parents. I had no idea how he planned to do that, but I was just drunk enough to leave it to his diplomacy. He gave me his arm to hold onto as we left the pub. I could walk on my own, but not in a straight line.

It had started to snow while we were inside. Flecks fell from the sky and landed on my face. It was strange, trying to put what I saw with what I felt. I was aware of every flake that melted on my skin, but I didn’t feel cold.

Instead of worrying about their wrath, I had actually started looking forward to the moment I would get home and wake my parents. I couldn’t wait to see their faces when they came to realize that they had just lost their perfectly proper daughter.

The pub was local. I didn’t even know better than to sneak out to a place where I was bound to be recognized. Until I walked in the door, it hadn’t even occurred to me. But I came face to face with a room full of people who knew my parents well and were certain to turn me in.

Several of my neighbors already wore the expressions I anticipated my parents wearing when they found out, but it was too late for deliberation, so I walked in and set down at the bar.

I didn’t have to wonder long who it would be. It was Paul Jackson, a deacon from our church, who came up to me first. He asked what I was doing there. I had no answer, but he seemed to know.

“Well, if you’ve come this far, you may as well go all the way with it.” He flagged down the bartender. “Get her a quart.”

The stein was huge when the man put it down before me, and the smell overwhelmed me. It wasn’t pleasant, but I was intrigued by the notion of what it could do.

Then, Paul said the magic words.

“Go on. It gives you courage.”

I took the mug in both hands and downed it in one.

I’d gone out for spite.

My father had forbidden me from taking a lesson in swordsmanship with my three brothers. They thought it was funny. My mother, dutifully, failed to come to my defense. What need would I ever have to handle a sword?

My brothers, they would come to use their skills in many different endeavors in the years that followed. I won’t lie and pretend that I didn’t get a special fulfillment when they took up a life of crime and were finally caught robbing a governor’s carriage and hanged in the town square. They used their learning for destruction. I’d only wanted it for defense. Not that I felt particularly threatened. I was just hoping for a way to get a handle on my fear.

So, I’d gone out for spite, snuck through the front door in the middle of the night. What I was hoping to find, I’m not sure. I was just angry and wanted to disobey.

It was my first and only act of defiance.

She reminded me of someone, the girl from the ship. Someone from long ago, back when I was new to this world.

Me.

I was like her once. What I put out into the world, it was virtue, kindness, trust, and complicity. It was who I was then, a good girl, well-behaved, pious, doing only what was expected of me, never thinking of breaking a rule.

It was my outer face, I know that now, the one I wore out of expectation and demand. Had I lived that life forever, I might never have learned what was lurking just beneath the surface. Or maybe it was that way of living that created it.

Nature versus nurture.

It’s debatable.

It took several weeks after the incident with the bird before I woke up sick, trembling and distraught. I cried for three days straight. I couldn’t eat or speak or get out of bed. My parents thought that I was having a recurrence of my childhood illness.

But it was guilt.

Delayed but heartfelt.

Real.

It seems that too was in the signs.

The place where I grew up is still called Fryslân, but when I was born there, it actually still was. The Frisii were compared by some to the Spartans, all war and no culture. But I saw no war… only survival and slow assimilation into the culture of others.

There was nothing to do, except wait for something to happen. As a teenager, a bird crashed, one day, into my closed shutters. I went out and picked it up. It was a baby. It was terrified. I cradled it in my hands and its shivering slowly subsided. Then, I snapped its neck. To put it out of its misery, I told myself. But, really, I just wanted to see how death felt.

There were signs.

We were never starving, but I was always hungry just the same. Not because there wasn’t enough. There was enough. But I was very aware of what I couldn’t have.

There were other people in town who had meals of meat and wine and fresh vegetables that took special care and fertilizer and feed to grow. We did without. So much did I yearn for these things that I couldn’t have, what I did have lost all ability to satisfy my appetite.

When I was a young child, I became very ill. Left to the care of Christian doctors who refused to dabble in ungodly Pagan medicines, I would have died. But my grandfather was still Frisian enough to disagree with my parents new world leanings. An old friend of his from a disbanded tribe was still in practice with old cures and ways of healing. My grandfather slipped me one of his tonics, a rough and heavy-tasting liquid with roots and owls blood that I can recall the flavor of to this day. Two days later, it was as if I had never fallen ill at all.

But I couldn’t sleep for months after. Not at night. I would lie in bed, at my parents’ order, but I would be awake all night, listening to the house creaking and the insects outside in the darkness. The next day, I would crash in the afternoon and sleep for hours. My parents did all that they could to try to keep me awake during the day, but it didn’t lead to my getting any more rest at night. I would lie down, but sleep just wouldn’t come.

Then, it gradually faded. I started going to sleep earlier and earlier in the day until the earlier became the night before, and I was eventually back to my normal sleep pattern. My parents blamed it on the illness. It took me many many years, more than most people get to live, to realize what had happened to me. Blood changed me into what I am now. Blood changed me then. Owl’s blood. In the time it took to work its way out of my system, I wasn’t just suffering from insomnia…

I was nocturnal.

I was born in a time of alchemists and would-be wizards. People of God feared them, for they seemed dangerous and unfaithful. They were deniers of God’s plan, attempting to accomplish those things that God, in His perfect divinity, chose not to.

Alchemy, as a science, is for fearful men though. Those who fear death, fear pestilence, fear poverty, they search in vain for its rudiments in an effort to eradicate them; the capability to turn scrap into gold, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life. They want great health and well-being. They want immortality. And they haven’t stopped searching yet. On down the line, they will look forever. They will never give up on what isn’t theirs to find.

Whey they want, I could give them. But they are weak. They are undeserving. In its truest form, alchemy is only for the most fearless.