Voluntary Misfortune

Featuring Amadán

Spring, Year 766 of the New Age

Oakfern, near the Warren

    He was afraid of them.

     They were magnificent, inspiring, hope-filled songs of youth and  promising futures. Some came with bright and eager eyes, others had  hesitant steps, a few already backing away. But in time all of them  found their way to to the water. Such sweet souls, though, all of them,  destined for something greater.

    Amadán  stepped into the pool. The cave air was cool, but the water around him  felt alive and warm as he felt for its energy. It was the energy he so  treasured, the gift he hoped his students would discover as he did.

    They would go on to use their magic to create, to connect, to bless... and to control, to harm, to kill.  Fawntakers. Manipulators. Oathbreakers, even. The kind that hid under  the radar, undetected, to twist the lives of others for their own  benefit or simply for an inexplicable need to watch another’s life  shatter. He’d seen it. He still saw it. They were all around him, every day...

     Without so much as moving a muscle, Amadán formed a fawn from the  pool before him. The colors of the mossy walls reflected faintly on its  surface, making it just visible enough in the dark water.

    Fawntakers. Devoted to Gealach – praise be –  devoted enough to harm the pure, the innocent, the ignorant. Not  innocent to them, perhaps; such fawns had foreign blood, filthy Oathbreaker  blood, for which he had little love himself. But no matter how hard he  tried, or how hard he thought about it, he could never justify spilling  the blood of a child.

    The watery shape of  the fawn walked across the pool, slow but nevertheless cheerful as  children are, while his magic worked to move every limb.

     Children. Children like those he’d taught, and watched grow into  something more powerful, something with the capability of crushing the  lives of the weak. Children who would’ve grown into something little  different than them, with dreams and aspirations of their own. But,  then, they would’ve grown into a world of the traitorous.

    Better to die for Gealach than live an Oathbreaker.

    The dancing fawn melted back into the pool with hardly so much as a sound.

    Amadán  pictured it. The world above ground, painted from what little glimpses  he’d ever had of it, and a family of foreigners, Oathbreakers. Destroyers of the ancients, selfish, monstrous, allowed to roam the world above as if it were their right.

    Allowed to spread their filth to their offspring.

    They  did not know. How could they? They were but children, born after the  crimes of their fathers, innocent. Guilty of an inherited crime. Such a  thing happened so long ago; they had committed no such sin themselves.

    But then, neither had their kin, not for many generations.

     Amadán started. Abruptly he rose from the pool, ignoring the chill  that swept over his soaked fur. His body shivered, and whether it was  from the cold, the adrenaline, or that cursed tic, he would not care to  know.

    These were dangerous thoughts. Best scrapped, buried, and never brought to light again.

    Instead, he would be content to fear.