There was a note on the table, and I had not seen it when I came in because Mel had been talking and the porridge had been demanding my attention.
It was written in my father’s careful handwriting on a piece of leather offcut.
Elric — gone to the river to start the tanning. Come and find me when you are awake. Bring the smaller blade. Janus.
I read it twice. My father’s handwriting was the same handwriting I had grown up with. The note was real in the way that the room was real, and I could either reject the note or follow its instructions.
I put the note in my pocket and stood up.
"Where are you going?" Mel said.
"To find Dad."
"Take the smaller blade."
I arched an eyebrow, "How do you know about the smaller blade?"
"Because I read the note before you did, dummy. I read it early this morning when he wrote it. Obviously."
I rubbed my forehead, feeling that familiar headache beginning to resurface, "Mel."
"I am a child of considerable resourcefulness, Elric. You will need to come to terms with this."
"Stop reading my notes."
"Make me."
I made a face at her, and she made a face back. She was better at faces than I was, but I had learned certain tricks over the years that could leave her speechless, but I did not want to change anything; otherwise, this fragile dream would disappear. Let Mel have this victory.
I left the kitchen with her smirking face still being aimed at me from the table, and I went to the small chest in the hallway where my father kept the household tools, and I found the smaller of his two leather knives, the one he used for fine cuts, with the worn handle and the blade kept oiled and sharp, and I took it down from its hook.
The handle felt strange in my child’s hand, since it was the right size for the hand, yet was the wrong size for the memory of the hand.
I put the knife in my belt, and I walked out the front door. The town still remains the town from my memories, and I even saw details that I had forgotten or had changed over the years, now returned to their pristine condition.
It was a small town with perhaps four hundred people, with the houses arranged along the main road and the smaller paths that branched off it down to the river.
The morning was warm, and the sun was up over the trees to the east. The smell of the smoke from the morning fires drifted across the road from the houses on the western side, and somewhere a dog was barking at something that was not me.
Why did I expect it to be me?
Mistress Olen was sweeping the front of her house. She looked up, saw me walking by, and waved.
"Good morning, Elric."
"Good morning, Mistress Olen."
"Going to your father?"
"Yes, Mistress."
"Tell him my husband says the new dye came in. He will know what that means."
"I will tell him."
She went back to her sweeping. The exchange had been the kind of exchange that happens in small towns where everyone knows everyone, and the news of small things travels along the road by way of children sent on errands.
I had carried that message many times as a boy. My ten-year-old self had probably already carried it once before this morning.
The memory of the past was completing itself around me without requiring my permission.
I walked, my sight drinking in my small village like a man dying of thirst finding water.
After I left the village, I only returned once and barely stayed a few days, and I had begun to forget the sights of my home.
When I was in the Academy, there was really no thought of returning to my village because it was small and uninteresting. Why should I miss such a place against the endless mysteries that I could find in magic?
But now, I could not get enough of this memory, as I tried to place everything I was seeing inside my head.
It was early in the morning, and most people were still asleep, so the village appeared a bit empty.
Old Tomas was sitting on the bench outside the cobbler’s shop with the small dark dog he had named after a dead king for reasons no one had ever fully explained.
He raised his hand and smiled. I raised mine and also smiled at him.
The Velar twins were arguing about something across the street. They saw me, broke off the argument long enough to wave, and resumed it.
The widow Karis was hanging linen on the line behind her cottage. She did not see me, but the linen moved in the small breeze, and the white of it against the green hill behind her house was so beautiful that I stopped walking for a moment and looked at it.
The town was beautiful.
I had not remembered it being beautiful. I had remembered it being home, which was a different thing, but I had not remembered the actual, specific beauty of the place I had grown up in. I guess to see something like this, you will need a certain level of maturity that I had unknowingly acquired along the way in the Academy.
I looked at the way the morning light caught the edges of the thatched roofs, and how the road dust rose and settled in slow patterns when the wind moved through.
My soul opened up, and I could hear the sounds of other people living their ordinary lives layered over each other into something that was almost music.
The sound of all these lives pushed against the darkness at the edge of my vision, and they receded like a tide.
I found myself laughing, and I began to jog.
I was a sixteen-year-old who had died many times in a body that was now ten years old in a memory that could not be real.
My life was a strange thing, folks, but I believe that comes with the territory of being a mage.
I registered the raw beauty around me without filter, pushing aside the accumulated weight of knowing what would happen later.
I knew that next year, Old Tomas was going to die, and his dog would mourn him for weeks, refusing to eat until he perished in the grave of his master.
This and many other stories of the future I carried with me, but I placed them aside and just focused on the now, because I knew this was a dream, and I would soon be waking up.
I was crying. I noticed that as I ran, but I did not stop running.