Raven Part Two

Raven 

Part Two

E. M. Areson

I hadn’t expected the plain to work but it had. I had gotten home without a fuss and though I was out twenty coins with no fruit to show for it I still had enough food left for a few days. I had just started the water for tea when I heard the ancient door knocker, which had never been used, bandaged twice. I hadn’t known what to do, I knew it was probably trouble. Yet, even for all my show, I was nothing if not simple.

          My house looked like a creepy tower of darkness on the outside and on the inside, it was little more than a tower with no more than a main floor. I walked around the table and grasped the door knocker. Dorcas was standing outside looking ridiculously out of place. Her curls and canary yellow dress were the brightest color this part of the island had for a long time. She was holding my basket filled with the same fruit it had earlier that day.

“I brought your basket back.” She said timidly.

I took it and asked, “How do you know where I live?”

“I went out the worst road in the city through the most dangerous part of the country and into the darkest part of the forest. You really do live your work,” she smiled, and I felt that she wasn’t mocking me in her teasing. She was simply having fun. I wasn’t used to that kind of treatment. It made me uncomfortable, but it was a good uncomfortable.

“I do.” I took a breath for courage and continued. “Would you like to have some tea? I just started some.”

“Are you sure you want to be around such a stupid person?” This question, I understood, was sarcasm. A punishment for my cruel words in the alley.

“I’m sorry for saying that. I didn’t have any right; I don’t know you well enough to make judgements about who you are or aren’t.”

She smiled, “I forgive you. Yes, by the way, I would like some tea.”

The inside of his house was not what Dorcas expected. It was a tall tower, but it had no other floors but ground floor. The walls just went up and up till they reached the glass ceiling some twenty or thirty feet above us. It wasn’t just bare walls though; hundreds of plants grew out of boxes attached to the walls. They only when about five feet high but when she didn’t look up she felt like she was in a garden.

“It’s lovely. I’ve never seen so many plants outside the farms. How do you get them to grow without farming magic?” She set at a little table with two chairs next to some lilies.

“Hard work. Like our ancestors used to do before they discovered the farming magic,” Tyrannic took the ketal off the fireplace in the middle of the room.

“I don’t mean to be nosey, but do you sleep on the floor? I don’t see anywhere else,” She took the cup of hot water he poured and looked-for tea leaves.

“I’ll get them.” Tyrannic got the dried leaves from a box near the table. “Yes, I do sleep on the floor. The tower makes a nice garden, but not a home. I can manage the amount of water all the plants get, they always have plenty of sun with the glass, and I get a good sum money through them.”

“I wondered how you got money,” Dorcus put the tea leaves in the small metal steeper and set them in her cup.

Tyrannic set down across from her, “I make and sell jam. Not the most usual work for a villain but it works. Would you like something to eat with the tea? I have fresh fruit and vegetables and some bread.”

“No, thank you I’m fine.”

“So, what do you do?” Tyrannic asked as he removed the tea leaves from his cup.

“You mean besides die?”

He looked mildly amused, and even smiled. “Yeah, besides that.”

          When the sun was almost set she left and I don’t know why but somehow, we found, in each other, the kind of person we thought more people should be like. Not because we were a glorified servant and a villain; but because we were people who actually worked for things in life. The Princess Ora and Sir Goodheart were both the real idiots of life, they hated each other and yet were going to spend the rest of their lives together. We were going to die, but we wanted to leave the world a better place… Or at least a place with more jam.

          I went to bed that night and looked up at the stars, far above through the glass ceiling, they had been here before all of us and would be long after. I realized then why I had always been alone. I was supposed to be remembered only as a villain rightly slain. Just like, I realized, Dorcas was to play the idiot. She would be remembered as a kind idiot who saved her princess.

I thought then what a shame it was that our roles had not been reversed, me and Dorcas with Sir Goodheart and Princess Ora. We would have been good heroes, Goodheart would be the perfect villain and Ora was already more of an idiot in my mind then Dorcas. The thought I had next was one of a dance where I held a lady, I don’t remember much about what I thought this lady would look like but I do remember her strained hair and black dress. I had tried to push it away to no avail when I accepted that it must simply be some dream my heart secretly had.

          That was how are affair started. No, we were never intimate in any way other than the expression of ideas through discussion. However, I thought of it as cheating on our destinies with a future we couldn’t have.  It was always at my house, we always had tea, and we always talked freely. I don’t know exactly when but sometime, weather during one of the visits or in the time between, I fell in love with Dorcas. It made no since and I never spoke a hint of it until our last tea together before the final attack where I would kill her, then be killed myself.

Part Three Comming On 12/21/17


Photo by Carlos Quintero