Chapter 1
“Hey, Ethan.”
Someone was whispering my name, but still in a manner that was urgent.
“Ethan!”, the voice said louder.
I woke softly from my nap. It was the middle of the day and the sun was shining in through the giant window next to my desk. I squinted around at my surroundings looking at the other students in the class hunched over their desks scribbling furiously.
“What’s wrong?”, I asked turning my head to the guy who had woken me up. His name was Owen, his brown hair was cut short, giving him a military like hairstyle. His skin was the color of roasted almonds. It glistened like pearls when he was sweaty, which made every girl in class fall head over heels for him. He was tall and slender which also made him a perfect fit for the school’s basketball team.
“Miss Westby is glaring at you”, he whispered back. He was right, our teacher, a short woman in her late fifties was glaring at me. Her small stature was complimented by her plump figure and small squinted eyes. Her eyes that were now fixed on me in a murderous glare, like I had run over her cat.
“Mr. Davis, please come see me after class”, she shouted through the classroom with a hoarse voice that sounded like nails running down a blackboard. The whole class lifted their heads from their test sheets to look at me. Everyone had that look in their eyes, as if they all thought the same thing, “you’re in trouble now.”
Everyone finished their tests, and we all went to hand them in, me going last since I was going to have to stay after everyone anyway. “I’ll wait for you at the school entrance”, Owen said to me after handing in his test. Miss Westby kept staring at me while accepting the tests of the other students, like a robot programmed for this one task. I handed in my own test and looked down toward my teacher.
“So why did u want to speak to me Miss Westby?”, I asked her as polite as I could muster. She looked up at me annoyed, our height difference clearly bothering her. “Mr. Davis this is the third time I catch you sleeping in my class”, she said while not breaking eye contact with me, “and this time you are not getting off easy.” She was still not breaking eye contact with me, I was starting to get uncomfortable, she wasn’t even blinking while staring at me.
“What is my punishment?”, I asked her meekly. “You have detention for the next 5 days after school”, she said with a sly smile, “and you are going to hand in a thousand-word essay about the most widespread use of runes in modern time”.
“A thousand words?!”, I asked, shocked at the unfairness of the entire situation. I could stand behind the detention, I had been sleeping in class for a while now, and this wasn’t the first time I had gotten punished, but this seemed a bit to harsh for just sleeping.
“Yes, Mr. Davis. A thousand words.”, she said with what sounded like malicious glee. “And I want it on my desk by the end of the week!”. She spat the last part at me, as if to command a dog. I was sure of it now, this woman truly despised me. She was going out of her way to give me an assignment just to see me suffer. It was already Wednesday, and she wanted me to write an essay in two days. It wasn’t helping that runes were my worst subject.
“Alright Miss Westby”, I said with clenched teeth. “May I leave now?”. “Yes you can leave”, she said to me still with maliciousness in her voice. “Have a nice day!”, she shouted after me as I walked out the door.
Miss Westby had never liked me, she started teaching at my school a few months ago, and from her first day she had set her squinty eyes on me. She had never done anything as direct as this, but she had always gone out of her way to grade me harder than everyone else. Whenever I compared tests with Owen, it always seemed like she had used extra time to find every tiny mistake I made and highlight it with a thick red pen.
I walked down the stairs from the second floor where my classroom was, and saw Owen waiting for me in the entrance. “What was your punishment?”, Owen asked me when I reached him. “Hey! Why do you think I was punished?” I asked jokingly. He looked at me with an exasperated smile. I laughed at my own joke, “I have detention for the next five school days, and I have to write an essay with at least a thousand words and hand it in by Friday”.
“Damn, I’m really happy I’m not you right now”, Owen said while starting to walk out of the schoolyard. I followed him out the school gates where a car was waiting for him. Owens’s dad is a paranoid rich inventor, so Owen is only allowed to leave the house for school and basketball training and matches. The driver climbed out of the car and opened the door for Owen.
The driver is dressed in a black suit with a white shirt underneath. He stands about 10 centimeters taller than Owen which is very tall since Owen is almost 2 meters tall already. He is dressed in a black business suit with a white shirt underneath.
“Hello Mitchel, how are you today?”, Owen asked the driver. “Pretty good young sir” the driver answered merrily. “We have to get to the manor immediately, your father is waiting for you”. Owen climbs into the car and turns towards me. “See you at school tomorrow Ethan”, he says as the driver closes the door. The driver gets into the car again and drives away, leaving me standing alone in front of the school gates.
On my walk home I started thinking of what I should write in my essay. I still thought that it was unfair how just for sleeping in class I have to write an essay, and it didn’t exactly help that runes were my worst subject. We started having it as a subject when I started school, and I still haven’t learnt anything I considered important. I knew that runes were the backbone of society today, and that without them we would probably fall back to the middle ages.
About 40 years ago, the world underwent an energy crisis. We had almost used up every non-renewable energy source like coal and oil, and the renewable ones like rivers and windmills were starting to fail because they couldn’t keep up with the current energy demands.
Then some mines in the eastern part of the world found stones that could emit elemental properties. The miners had called the stones runestones because of the symbols marked on them. The symbols each representing the runestones elemental property, the symbol warried from each type of runestones, and only 5 different runestones were found.
My train of thought was interrupted when I spotted my house just up ahead. My house is very easy to tell from the other houses in the neighborhood. My neighborhood consists of very similar houses which only differs in color every few houses or so, most of the houses are white with red roof tiles, some chose to paint their houses either black or red. Apart from the color every house had the same floor plan, so if you ever visited your neighbors you almost always knew which room was used for each purpose.
This was also the case for my house, except for one thing. Our garden had all sorts of weird structures and statues scattered all around it. All of it were projects my parents are working on, they made art sculptures and decorations for a living, they had even sold some of their creations to Owen’s dad which was how I had gotten introduced to him.
I walked towards the path leading up to the house and saw my dad in the garden, he was sitting in a lawn chair in with his back turned towards the path, making some sketches with a pencil in one of his giant sketch books.
I walked up behind him and looked at the sketch, it looked like it was resembling a human only difference was the lightning coming out of its arms and enveloping its entire body.
This kind of statue was one of his usual commission, since everyone wishes they could use the power of the runes in that way. There have been attempts at weaponizing runes for use in guns or other sorts of weapons, but none have been successful.
“New commission dad?”, I asked. He jumped up and threw the sketchbook and the pencil high in the air. The sketchbook landed about half a meter away from him and the pencil fell down on his head. My dad turned around fast, he looked like he could have used the pencil to stab out my eyes. When he saw it was me his face softened, “Oh Ethan, its you”, he sighed. “You scared me pretty good right now”.
“Sorry dad, I didn’t mean to”, I said trying to hide a smirk. I had totally meant to scare him, my dad was one of those people who got scared by everything and his reactions were just as hilarious every time. My dad was also never mad at anyone, he might look like he could murder me like right now, but he always defaults to his easygoing and super nice demeanor.
“That’s alright Ethan, just don’t do that again”, he said knowing full well that I was probably going to the same tomorrow. “And yes this was commissioned by a gentleman from the east, him and your mother are inside right now discussing price”. That was very interesting. Usually, the clients ordered the sculptures online at a predetermined price, with a description of how they wanted it to look. If the price of the sculpture was being discussed then that meant that, either it was bigger than what my parents were usually making, or it had some sort of special gimmick that would need extra work to implement.
“That’s exciting”, I said intrigued by this new client. I started walking towards the house, “How was school today?”, my dad shouted after me. “Same as always!”, I shouted back. He got a defeated look, I used to tell him everything that was going on in my life, but after highschool our relationship had gotten a bit strained.
I got into trouble for bullying someone in my class once, but my dad just told me that bullying was wrong and all that dad talk. I never got punished for it, and the guy I bullied changed schools just to get away from me. You can call me an asshole for bullying, but he asked for it. He was trying to act all high and mighty because his dad was a big shot in some rune distribution company. So, I found all the dirt I could on him, I made fun of his every flaw, and I pushed him around in school like a sack of potatoes.
After about half a year of bullying him, since none of the teachers intervened even once, he told his dad about the situation. His dad contacted the school and I had to have a meeting with the principal and my parents. It was all just the usual speech about how bullying is bad, and not tolerated at this school, it’s all just a load of bullshit. No one ever cared before it was reported from a parent, and no one cared after it unfolded. The only teacher who ever gave me a hard time or called me out about the things I did was Miss Westby, and she hadn’t even been there for the incident.
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