Into The Icy Dark (The Wish Cycle Book 1)

  Into The Icy Dark

  Copyright © 2021 L. Y. Levand

  All rights reserved.

  Published by L. Y. Levand 2021

  Maumee, Ohio, United States

  No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

  Cover Imagery from Pixabay.com

  Cover Design by L. Y. Levand

  For my husband, who made me promise to finish this story, and encouraged me on the days when it was really, really hard to get started. We’ll do it together.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  ~*~

  The council room in the capitol building of Sen was filled with the glow of a skylight, but nothing else. It poured through in a golden column, lighting upon the five caskets arranged there in a line. At the end of each casket stood a small wooden table, and each table held a single item: a painting of a family, a painting of the city Sen in the sunset, a vase in a shade of transcendent amethyst that glittered with flakes of gold, a rug woven with such intricate patterns it confused the eye, and a leather-bound book.

  Beyond the glow of the skylight, the room was dark, and filled with quiet rustling as hundreds of people filed in, searching for seats on the curved benches: the Artists of Sen, arrived to mourn the loss of five of their number. Faces ranging in color from milky-pale to deepest ebony turned toward the dais where the caskets sat, waiting. Beyond the walls of the council chamber, the sound of voices and revelry could be heard, the common people, celebrating Artist's Day. Inside, however, not a word was spoken, until a man in the front row stood, and turned to look out over the assembly.

  “Artists rarely live long,” he began, his voice the rich, deep timbre of a singer, echoing effortlessly over the crowd. “This month, five of our number heard the Call, and answered. Their life force was expended to create items of surpassing beauty and skill, artistic works that no replica, no matter how skillful, can ever recreate. They are Masterpieces, and their like will never be seen again.” He waved a hand at the paintings, the vase, the rug, and the book.

  “Twenty years to live as we will – thirty, if we're lucky - and then we die. Turned to dust, our names little more than a memory to those who loved us. But we are never completely forgotten. Some people believe that the more beautiful an Artist’s life, the more beautiful their Masterpiece, that when they weave the final strands of their own life into their Masterpieces, the events and choices of their lives form the essential fabric of the item created. Perhaps it is nonsense, or perhaps it is truth. If it is truth, then those we lost over the last four weeks led incredible lives. These Masterpieces will touch hearts, heal hurts, and teach lessons – that is the purpose of a Masterpiece, and the purpose of an Artist. Today, we honor the men and women who gave their lives to accomplish this noble goal.”

  There was a moment of silence, and the music of the festival outside filtered in, distant, bright notes to remind them of the outside world.

  "If the pallbearers will come forward," the speaker said, "we can move to the graveyard."

  A group of young men made their way to the front of the room, and took hold of the caskets. They led the way from the council room, through the warren of the capitol building of Sen, and into the vast graveyard that spread behind it. Flowers in full bloom filled the air with their fragrance and the soft buzzing of bees. A fountain, built in the roots of a weeping willow that soared three stories high, added the musical running of water to the rustle of leaves in the hot breeze.

  The crowd of somber men and women, not a one of them older than thirty-five years, flowed through the garden, and around the grave markers that filled every empty space. Occasionally, one of them would stop to touch the stone that marked the grave of a family member, or a friend, before moving on.

  The assembly came to a stop at the graves that lay empty, five holes cut in the sod, dark blots on an otherwise pristine lawn. The caskets were lowered into the earth as the speaker faced the rest of the gathering.

  "We come here every month to bury our own," he said. "Every month, there are more, and with every passing day, the moment of our own Calling draws nearer. It is tempting to look at our limited years and think we have no time, to forget that the festival going on in the city right now is a celebration of our contributions to the world. But I say, as I've said every month I've been privileged enough to speak to you, that we, the Artists, must live our lives to the fullest, cramming as much into as little time as we possibly can. Let us mourn our dead by ensuring that when our own turn comes, we can go gladly, with no regrets!"

  The crowd, which had been silent until this point, burst into applause.

  "Go and enjoy the festival!" the speaker exclaimed. "Today, we celebrate the lives of those who went on before, we celebrate the many gifts of Artistry, we celebrate the fact that we are all still here!"

  It took only a few moments for the crowd to disperse, laughing, singing, to join the rest of the city. It happened every month, after all. Sometimes there was only one casket; the month before there had been ten. Death would come for them all, sooner rather than later. It was the Artist's fate.

  Chapter One

  My mother had been waiting for my father, Fortez, to drop dead from unnatural causes since he was sixteen.

  He’s an Artist, you see.

  They took him when he was a teenager, to be trained at the Muse Academy of Arts in the north. At sixteen he was much older than all the other students in his classes. He might have escaped notice entirely, but for the Artist that got lost on his way to the academy for the winter. He was already in love with my mother, but they put off their wedding so he could study. When he completed his training, instead of going off to make his fortune in one of the big cities like most of the other Artists did, he went home and built a different, less glamorous sort of life. A life full of the mundane things most married couples did, like try to have children. I was born after nearly two decades of infertility, an only child.

  The defining feature in most of my childhood memories is the silence. By the time I was born, the reality of my father’s future had finally sunk in, and even on happy days I could feel that falseness in my mother’s smile, the sad acceptance in my father’s laughter. I didn’t understand what it was until I grew older, why my parents always seemed so sad. But I suppose it was inevitable, with the Call hanging over them.

  It’s described as a burning desire, the kind that keeps you up at night, pacing the floors. A closer description might be inspiration, since what an Artist does is create a Masterpiece. There’s no telling what that Masterpiece will be before they begin, but once they start, there’s no turning back. The Artist’s Masterpiece is always their final work. They expend their life-force in the making, and once it’s completed, they die. Most Artists don’t live very long.

  Thirty is pretty ol
d for them; I’d always secretly wondered if they might live longer without the honing of their unnatural talent in the academy. I wondered if progressing their abilities with training might hasten their end. But whether that was the case or not, my father’s impending death hung over us all, even when I was too young to recognize it. As the years wore on and I grew older, I realized it was odd that my father had not yet died. When I was born he was nearing forty, an almost unheard-of age for an Artist.

  But I didn’t realize exactly how unusual it was for him to still be alive until I entered my twenties, and Yent moved to town.

  Yent was an Artist, he was my age, and he had been everywhere. He wrote books, and had spent a few years in the southern cities, becoming famous and making gobs of money, but he didn’t like the cities, and so he moved to my hometown, bought a house, and wrote from there, instead. We first met in Old Man Gort’s bookshop. I had brought my father his midday meal, and he had come to give my father a plate of cookies. As the only other Artist in town, my father had helped him get settled, and they were on good terms; we were introduced. They talked for a minute or two, and I returned home and tried not to think of it again. He dropped off one of his books at our house later that day, with a note asking me to read it and tell him what I thought. That was how it began – I read his books, and offered him my opinions, and he listened intently, scribbling notes down on one of the scraps of paper that littered all the surfaces of his house. It was one of the few bright spots in the gray, a happy time that I’d never expected to have. I went to his cottage every week for months, where his housekeeper would serve us tea and cookies while we talked about his stories.

  And then it all changed.

  I’d come to his house with his most recent book tucked under my arm, only to find him wild-eyed and desperate to get back to his project. He greeted me, thanked me for coming, apologized, and then vanished into his workroom.

  I didn’t understand what was going on at first – even less so when he abruptly returned to the city with nothing but the clothes on his back, a supply of ink and paper, and a horse. Even the housekeeper didn’t have any more information than that. It wasn’t until I received a bound book a year later, with two notes tucked in the front, that I realized what had happened. I read the notes - the one in his familiar hand I read first, in which he told me that he was sorry he had left, but he didn’t want me to watch him die. The second note was from the bookshop that had bound the volume, informing me that he’d wanted me to have a copy of his last book, and he’d been found dead after writing “the end.”

  He’d heard the Call, and for the first time I realized what that meant.

  Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me when I drew the portrait. Maybe I should have expected it to be easy. I don’t know. But as soon as I saw the finished drawing, I crumpled it up and hid it. Not very well, obviously, or she wouldn’t have found it, but I didn’t want to look at it.

  I liked to imagine what other mothers would have done. If one of them had found a piece of paper shoved under her daughter’s bed, they would just give a lecture on throwing things away when finished. Or wasting expensive resources – paper wasn’t cheap. This would, in my imagination at least, have been immediately followed by the offending paper being properly disposed of. But my mother, Kii, wasn’t other mothers and she had to look at it first.

  It was a drawing, done in ink; a face I’d never seen before, but imagined. When I first started drawing, it was because I wanted to know what the face would look like in real life, not just in my imagination. I got the paper, a scrap, from Old Man Gort, and started to draw. The face came easily, and in more detail than I had expected. Some things didn’t turn out quite right. The eyebrows were crooked, one eye was slightly smaller than the other. But after the first few lines, I knew.

  To be an Artist is a sentence of death, and to die for your Masterpiece is supposed to be a great honor. But thinking the words, saying them, is very different from believing them in your heart.

  My bedroom was a small square, with a window in the center of the southern wall, letting in sunlight to shine dully on the chipped white plaster. The only furniture on the dark wood floorboards was a chest of drawers beneath the window, topped by a line of books, and a thin cot next to it in the corner. The cot was draped in a quilt that my grandmother had made before her death; brown, but patterned in butter-yellow sunflowers, a splash of summer color when it had first been made, now little more than a washed out ghost.

  It was the books beneath the window that we were talking about – she remembered reading one when she was a girl. We had been talking about one of the characters. And then she stopped, looking down at the floor behind me. I half-turned, wondering what had distracted her.

  “What is this, Mizna?” she asked suddenly, bending over to pick something up before straightening and waving it under my nose. “And why is it on the floor?”

  When I saw the paper fluttering in her hand, my heart almost stopped. I had thought it tucked safely under my bed, in a place where the shadows would hide it, but I had been wrong. My knees went suddenly weak, and I sank heavily down on my cot.

  My mother frowned in disapproval, her face almost as pale as the whitewashed walls. It looked odd, her porcelain skin under the messy knot of her golden hair, as if, like my quilt, all the color had been seeped out from repeated washing. Her faded gray dress didn’t help the impression, and neither did the thin light from my window, which made everything look tired and sallow.

  The entire world fell into silence as she flattened the paper against her hip until it was smooth, then lifted it up so she could see what was on it. I realized I was holding my breath, and slowly let it out as she held it closer to her face, squinting her blue eyes as she tried to make it out. If her eyesight had been any better, she would have realized much sooner what she held in her hand. As it was, she dropped it like she had been scalded, and took a step back. Her sharp intake of breath almost echoed in the quiet as the paper floated down to the floor.

  “Mizna, why didn’t you tell me?” she asked in a whisper as she met my gaze. What little color was left in her face – and there wasn’t much – had faded, and her hands were trembling. I didn’t answer – I looked away. I stared out the window, where I could see the pine trees against an iron-gray sky. I didn’t want to see the paper. I’d known what it was, and what it meant, almost since I’d first put pen to paper. That was why I’d hidden it, after all.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” my mother asked again.

  “I don’t know,” I lied. I refused to look at her, instead watching out the window as she stared at me. I could still see, from the corner of my eye, that her face was drawn, and there was a shadow in her eyes.

  “I need to tell your father,” she said softly. The words were like darts, snapping needle-pains through my heart. They were already waiting on tenterhooks for his death. That was bad enough. “We’d hoped...” she stopped, searching for words, but instead she bit her lip, and turned to leave. I watched her go, shoulders bent. We’d hoped that you wouldn’t be an Artist, too.

  She walked slowly down the short hall to the kitchen, and I waited until she was gone before I bent and retrieved the paper from the floor. The ink lines spread like slashes against the surface, forming the face of a man I’d never seen before in my life. His eyes, dark splotches of ink, seemed to stare right into my soul.

  This picture was how I’d known what I was. If I’d never picked up a pen, if I’d never tried to draw it, then…what? I knew it wouldn’t have changed things. I still would have been an Artist, just an ignorant one. But ignorance had to be better than this. In one swift motion, I crumpled the drawing, and threw it at the wall. It hit with a barely audible thud, and slid to the floor. I just sat there for a moment, paralyzed, staring at the wad of crushed paper.

  Finally I slid off the bed onto the floor. I got on my hands and knees, and peered into the gloom under the bed. There, in the far corner, I could just make out the st
ack of uneven paper, scraps. I’d picked them up here and there, saving them to give to Gort for his books. At first, anyway. Now they were mine, and there was no point in hiding them. I rolled onto my stomach and groped in the dark until my fingers struck the shifting stack, the scent of dust thick in my nose. I drew them out, sneezed, and set them on the bed before turning back to the drawing I had thrown.

  I stared at my tossed sketch for a long moment. I didn’t want it – but then, I didn’t really want the others, either. So I retrieved it from where it had fallen, and spread it out as my mother had done. Then I put it with the others, my collection of drawings, the images that had poured from my pen and looked strangely, eerily alive. I spread them out in an arc in front of me as I sat on the floor. A tree, a dog, a cat. My parents, smiling on paper like they never did in life. I touched that one, and wondered if they had ever truly been happy. I picked it up, and looked at how I’d imagined their faces would crease if they really smiled. Maybe they never would.

  I looked up and out the window, towards the book shop where my father worked with Gort. He would be coming home soon, and then he’d know, too. I collected the pictures into one stack again, and held them on my lap as I watched the light outside fade. Soon, I heard the opening and shutting of the door, followed by low voices.

  I looked toward my door, listening – but though I recognized the low rumble of my father’s voice and the higher pitch of my mother’s, I could hear nothing more distinct than the rise and fall of their conversation. They were speaking too quietly for me to distinguish individual words.

  I looked at my stack of drawings, and sighed. I had known, from the moment I first put my pen to paper, that I would be shipped off to the academy if the drawing was found. That’s what families did with their young Artists, sent them for training. I’d never heard of an Artist that refused to go, and even if I had – was that option open for me? I didn’t think so. But then, what options ever had been? I had believed, for a few shining months when Yent lived in his cottage, that I could do and be something else. But then he’d gone, and the dark curtain had fallen again over my life. I couldn’t see a way to go forward in which I could be happier than I was right then, so why not simply accept it? But the acceptance felt like defeat, and it bowed my shoulders under an unseen weight. Why fight it at all? I wondered.