[TRIGGER WARING: The prologue contains sensative content: depictions of emotional abuse and an implied threat of violence between parent and adolescent child. Not recommended for persons under age 14.]

Fennorin. UE 2256. 124 Years Pre-Recollection.

“In a time before light, when the heavens had yet to be hung, there was Luth. It crackled in the nothingness, a void of potential. It was not darkness, nor light, but pregnant with both. At the birth, Order and Chaos were washed from the womb. They were followed by their celestial sisters: Good, Evil, and Truth.”

Footsteps sounded outside the stone door, and Fenn held his breath, leaning protectively over the book. They retreated as they had come: ignorant of his reading. He returned to it, squinting in the dark.

“Order, Chaos, Good, Evil, and Truth. ‘These were not gods, nor creators, but energies. Each burst forth in explosive zeal, and in the wake formed a realm. The Ordinal was magicless, ruled by natural law–”

“Fennie, when will we get to the elves?” The little she-elf’s voice whistled through her eight adult teeth. 

The older brother looked up from his page. The sight of her on the bare stone, leaned forward on her criss-crossed legs, tugged a smile from him.  “In just a moment, Kit. We have to read about our makers first.” He pushed a loose strand of obnoxiously yellow hair behind the point of his ear. 

 “Where was I?  We read the Ordinal… ‘The Good was called many things: Heaven, Celestia, and it was a Land of Power. Its attributes were Faith, Hope, and Love. The Evil was like it, of Power, known as Hell, the Arsdark, and its attributes were Fear, Loathing, and Pain.

“‘The Truth birthed a land of compromise: magic and strength, weakness and power, laws and exception. Its attributes were Trust, Zeal, and Knowledge--’ that’s the realm we live in now.” Fenn glanced over the edge of his book at the two little hands pressed together in front of Kitaryn’s mouth in focused thought, her pointed chin on her thumbs. “‘Finally, Chaos birthed the Wildlands, what we’–that’s mankind, not us–’call the Fae. It was anarchy, and its attributes were Beauty, Passion, and Grace.

“‘In the Chaos, Beauty reigned supreme. It surged and staggered and grew until it became the form of an elf, the first god. Now Boidhan was of more handsome appearance than any creature in all the realms, and he walked in all the grace of the universe. He sang the songs of the stars, and relished in the tails of comets, painting them across the skies. But there was none to share in this Beauty or challenge his growth. And so he learned to sculpt. First among his creations, he formed for himself a wife.’”

“Do you think I’ll be a wife someday?” Kitaryn’s finger traced the dust on the well-ordered shelf behind her. “I think I’d like to be married.”

“Well I imagine so, you being pretty and a Fyr-Ceann and all, but you won’t be of age for another eight decades, much less the age for partnering. Now did you want me to read this to you or not?” 

“When you turn a hundred-fifty, will you get married?”

Fenn sighed, burdened by the weight of expectations. “No, Kit, I have no talent.”

“You are pretty and good at books.”

The brother squirmed under the light of her admiring gaze like a worm would squirm in the sun. “Then can I go back to booking? We were about to hear about the wife.”

The elfling wiped a thick sludge of dust from her finger. “Okay.”

“‘Her name was Sabaed, and she had the power of Disruption. For ages unknown, it was the two of them on a world of their own, Boidhan creating Beauty, and Sabaed bringing to it a Wildness.

“But as times passed and the world aged, they longed for more. Boidhan took to the clay once again. Just as he prepared to pour his Grace into the creature, Sabaed stopped him. She reached up and pulled from the sun a single drop of light. She pressed this into the clay, and Boidhan poured out his Grace, and it became Anruwan. And he walked in all the Beauty of the Father, as brilliant as the S–”

The door ground open, the orange light of his father’s candle reaching for Fenn’s bare toes. He slammed the book shut and jumped up, knocking his elbow on the bookshelf that had been his backrest. “Athyr!”

The elflord’s height filled the doorway. He glared down his straight, perfect nose at his son, imperfect. “Skulking around in the private libraries again?”

“N-n-no, sir, I was only–” Fenn’s arm shook with the severity of a tempest as he tried to shove the book into a shelf. 

His father closed the gap between them in a single stride and snatched the book. He spared one glance for the title, The Faerie Beginning. He leaned over his son, and as he did the flickering candle cast a light that glittered off his teeth and eyes. “Only? You were only reading forbidden literature. Only filling an impressionable child’s head with fantasies that are no good to her. Only setting her on a path to become like you.”  He hissed his words with the cold poison of a snake.

“I’m s-sorry, I j-j-just”

“Atti, I asked him to read to me!” The small girl tugged the drapes of her father’s robes. “Please don’t be mad.”

“Do not lie for him!” He whipped his head around. “I will not have you become a cloud-headed, talentless fool like him. You have promise. Don’t waste it on that boy. Now out.”

The girl’s already pale color turned ashen, singed by the heat of his words. “Yes, Athyr.” She fled from the room, disappearing into the light beyond the doorway.

With the witness gone, all of his father’s attention was laid again into Fenn. “I know you’ve read the laws, Fennorin. And yet I find you in the Library of the Admonished. Reading Faerie tales. You are nearly an adult! Has nothing I taught you ever remained in your head? Or is there only room for nonsense?”

Fenn shrank into the shelf behind him, wishing its deep shadows could swallow him whole. But his refuge had become his trap, digging into his ribs and back. He stared at the cold stone floor. “Yes, I remember. Dissemination of Forbidden Culture can lead to imprisonment or banishment.”

“As codified into law by my great-grandmother, and enforced by me, as my father before me. But you,” his palm slammed into the shelf beside Fenn’s head, rocking it back, “can’t even follow the rules I’ve raised you to enforce.”

Fenn could feel his father’s breath on his cheek, cold and even. Something stirred inside him. It wasn’t rage, or hate, or defeat. No, he boiled with conviction. It swirled within. But all that came out from him was a small whimper, “but Athyr, what if it’s true?”

“True?” His father’s tone was even and thin, like ice on the lake after a first freeze. “True? What is truth, when we are trying to create Culture?” He shoved with his hand, and the shelf teetered over. “Tradition.” It plowed into another shelf behind it. “And Unity.” The second shelf crashed against the built-ins on the wall, sending a cascade of books and scrolls to the floor with a great tumult. “Whether or not it is true, it will not instill order.”

“But we are creatures of Chaos, not Order,” Fenn pleaded. As soon as he said it, he regretted it. He wished he could suck the words back into his mouth, unspoken.

“Chaos? Is that what this book taught you?” His father’s eyes gleamed with a fire no candle could hope to produce. He held up the book. “You want chaos?” For what seemed like the first time, Fenn saw his father smile. It was an evil expression underlit with fury. “Here is chaos.” He moved the book over his candle. It caught like kindling, puffing with smoke and bright yellow light. 

No! The word stayed in the young man’s head, his jaw hung slack with shock. He felt the sting of loss in his eyes.

The flame shifted, turning from expected yellow, to fearsome blue, to voracious green. His father’s brow shifted in mild surprise. Then he sneered and tossed it on the pile of broken shelves and toppled books.

“No!” Fenn reached out as if to catch it. It flew past his hands, spreading its fiery judgment like an ash-forming disease. The loss turned to mournful tears as Fenn watched the massacre of knowledge play out. He could almost hear the dying screams of the wisdoms he would never possess.

Beside him, his father dusted off his hand as one might at the end of a routine trash-dumping. “I have tried to be patient with your… oddities, Fennorin. Coddled your boyhood with notebooks and sketchbooks, gave you free roam of the forests. Trained you to study and learn. But Frosts, not the Everguard, not art school, nor even my own careful instruction could help you. You are useless! Good for nothing but imitation and rote memorization.

“So that is what you will do. You will go back to the one thing you are good for, you will go immediately, and without complaint. I want a scribed copy of all ten volumes of The Books of Law and Tradition from you by the end of the week. And this time, you had better heed what you are writing. Understood?”

His father didn’t need another copy of the tomes. It was a punishment. To finish within a week, he would scarcely be able to sleep. Yet he was right. Fenn was useless. Even he knew that. Useless at art. Useless to save the knowledge of their forefathers. Useless to his people.

He squinted through the smoke beginning to fill the room. The blaze flickered lower, choking on its own whisps. This room was a secret kept in stone walls. Once the door was closed, the fire would fade out on its own.

 He clenched his fists and nodded his head. “Yes, Athyr.” After that week of copying, after the embers had sputtered their last coughs, he would come back here. It may be futile, but he would try. One by one, if he had to, he would smuggle what remained of those books out. 

He understood now that his family had never been preserving knowledge, but preventing it from reaching the people.

He would write that copy. But then, he would take those books and find a place where they could be appreciated. Protected. Studied. And maybe, just maybe, he might be allowed to study them, and someone might appreciate him, too.