Robbie Ballew - Arianna and the Spirit of the Storm

This book is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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Copyright 2019 by Stephen Landry / Robbie Ballew

Cover Illustration by Purwa Gustira

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database, retrieval system, or torrent web service, without the prior written permission of the author.

Ash fell around me like snow. Or at least, what I've been told snow was like. It hasn't snowed since the day I was born. No snow, no rain, nothing.

"It isn't fair!" I yelled at the top of my lungs. Flames engulfed the funeral pyre and danced into the night sky like a fire-demon taunting me from beyond the veil.

I could feel the still warm embers as they brushed against my skin. Electricity arced up and around the palm of my hand. My eyes were glowing blue in the moonlight.

"You can't leave me like this," I screamed again at the fire. Angry. I could hear a voice in my head screaming at me to run. The voice he'd taught me to ignore. To suppress. At that moment, I wanted to listen to it. To get as far away from there as possible. But it was impossible. Where would I go? What would I do? I felt useless.

I felt dizzy. Disoriented. I stared at the words on the torn piece of paper in my hand hoping they could help me find my footing. Keep me grounded. I've stared at them so long now I can see where the ink is starting to run. The paper, faded yellow, starting to crack.

"Aria, if you are reading this, it means I am dead and it is your turn to carry on my mission," My father's last message to me. Carine the explorer. Carine the adventurer. Carine the abandoner!

He had always told me to choose my path and yet now, after death, he was telling me to finish his mission.

"It isn't fair," I screamed again.

I had watched him leave so many times. He always promised he would return. Now he was both dead and a liar.

I felt my stomach rumble. I had forgotten to eat again. Not that there was anything to eat. The Kingdom of Idril was a wasteland. Elves everywhere were starving. The world was on the brink of war and now I was alone.

Before the drought, he worked for the survey corps, where he would take missions into the forests to explore old ruins. That's how he met my mother, Solph. He's told me the story many times. They were from two different villages, working on two separate survey missions, united by chance at an inn in the dwarven kingdom of Vaeger. He was coming downstairs for a drink when he saw her dancing in a blue cotton dress. "In that moment," he would always say, "I forgot how to walk, to breathe, to do anything but love."

Their eyes met and she gave him a smile that he said could have calmed the fiercest storm. I try to imagine what that smile must have looked like. It helps calm me when I feel the storm welling up inside. I wish I could have seen it for myself.

When the survey corps disbanded he continued to leave on his own accord. Sometimes it was just a night or two other times he would be gone for weeks. Maria, the mid-wife, a woman as old and ancient as the village itself, maybe older, spent those nights with me. She would tell me my father was a brave man, braver than even the greatest knights of the kingdom. She told me how he would venture across mountains, into caves, how he had fought and slain Satyrs and even held his sword against dragons. Determined to uncover some truth, some hidden magic out in the wild.

Always happy to hear of his return I could remember him telling me stories of his adventures. Teaching me to harness what I had hidden inside me. We would spend several days and nights out in the woods, starving, struggling to survive as he taught me to build a shelter, gather and start a fire, even hunt and fish though we rarely caught anything. When I was young I blamed him for my starving. That was until I learned there was almost nothing there to catch. The little food we had came from the kingdom. My father had worked harder than most to make sure I didn't go hungry.

Our kingdom was once a far different place. I've heard stories of the great Fennox Castle, towering over the sprawling city if Fennox-Calil. They say from a mountain ledge overlooking the city you could see miles of lush farmland to the south, and the never-ending ocean to the north. The world was alive with the sounds of animals, birds in the sky, rivers, and streams filled with fish and surrounded by life.

The bustling streets of the city were walked not only by elves but dwarves, centaurs, even humans. We openly traded goods and ideas with our neighbors and even began embracing the principals of democracy.

It should have been different.

As a child, I came to believe I was unlucky. My father who disappeared time and time again, who spent night after night in his study. I would listen to the stories of the world as it once was. I was so close. Almost born into that perfect world. That peaceful, beautiful world where I could have had cake on my birthday. A world in which my father and mother would still be alive and would grow old and die with grandkids by their side. I was almost born into that utopia of a world but the night of my birth was a curse.

15 years ago.

A fierce storm raged as my mother cried and my father, Carine paced back and forth outside a small room. His messy ponytail whipping back and forth hitting the side of his face as he turned on his heels. He would pace for hours keeping rhythm with the storm outside. Turning as lightning lit up the silhouette of the mountains miles away. The sound of his footsteps masked by the thunder and wind that cracked our modest little home. A bolt of lightning followed by crashing thunder, the sound deafening and yet once it's over the silence becomes maddening. The storm and my mother's screams come to an abrupt halt.

My father told me about that day so many times I feel like I was there with him. Like the memory was a gift he gave to me. The first time I heard it I was enthralled, saddened but happy in the way my father told it to me. For a long time, it was my favorite story. Until I knew better. The parts my father left out that came to haunt me. Knowing that I had never seen rain like he had that day. That as the midwife, Maria, handed me over to him and he held me in his arms he cried for me. The touch of my soft skin against his calloused hands. At the moment of my birth, my father told me I had a spark in my eyes, magic, that I was special and destined. I couldn't help but ignore his words. I never felt different than anyone else in my village. We were all just getting by.