The Death Machine
Hedgewind Jalinbeti was dead. When I say that he was dead, I mean that his heart had stopped pumping blood. The tissues in his body, deprived of oxygen were dying at a cellular level. His brain, once full of thought and energy was also inert; mere jelly encased in a skull that was slowly cooling to room temperature. Hedgewind Jalinbeti was as dead as anyone had ever been.
The worst thing about Hedgewind's death was how disappointing it was for Hedgewind. He knew that dying would be a horrific process. All of his apprehensions were confirmed as he died. He doubted the usefulness of his life. He doubted whether he had ever truly loved. He doubted whether he had ever truly been loved. A choir of cascading doubts and disappointments swirled in his head as his heart stopped. His mind losing consciousness used the last of its faculties to process his greatest doubt; why had he ever lived at all. And then he was dead.
In death, Hedgewind understood that there were a number of possibilities. First of these, he assumed that his mind would simply be cast into a void, a nothingness from which nothing escapes. There would be no thought. Of course he considered the possibility that the clergy was correct. Had he not witnessed evidence of the power of the gods? Surely the powers possessed by the holiest of men were not all illusions.
If the clergy were to be believed, considering for a moment, "Which clergy?"
If the Wodenists and Aspanists were to be believed, then his mind would not go to the void, but rather to some afterlife prepared by the gods. The gods would, or at the very least should, reward him for having lived a good life. He was due a pleasant afterlife, an afterlife so incredibly pleasant as to keep its charm for an eternity.
On the other side of this fateful coin, the gods were, depending on who you asked, inclined to punish those who had lived a bad life. Hedgewind confessed to himself that he had made some bad decisions in his life. Some gods were said to choose destruction for the doomed soul, a second and even more cruel death than the first? Still others touted the claim that there would be endless punishment, and yet others believed in the worst punishment possible, an eternity of boredom.
As Hedgewind considered these various possibilities and dozens more, he found that he had run out of gods, rewards and punishments to contemplate. He had exhausted his clerical knowledge of the afterlife and prepared to brace what ever was ahead. It was then that he thought to think, "Why am I thinking?"
He quickly decided that the afterlife, at least not his, was not one of immediate and painful destruction. He took some relief that he was not being destroyed; his instincts telling him that he would feel something if he were being destroyed. There would be no reason for the gods to impose a second death to an unrepentant soul if that second death wasn't several score more terrible than their departure from life. "Why do the gods make the first death so terrible?" He wondered to himself.
"Maybe they don't even know it is terrible. No, surely someone has complained." He continued to think.
His hand gently brushed his thigh. He could feel. A reel of all the benevolent afterlife possibilities filled his head as he wondered if had the temerity to open his eyes. Would there be a paradise before him or a terrifying hellscape? For the hundredth time he allowed his pantheon of doubts to flash through his mind.
Hedgewind readied to open his eyes when sadness overtook him. He could feel his body convulse as the sadness spread through and around him in waves of pain and regret. We are all familiar with the sadness of death, but only in the afterlife do we experience the true sadness of death. Hedgewind was not prepared. There was no way to prepare. His mind bent backward.
Hedgewind, now a seven-year-old in his mind, was presented to his teachers at the Imperial Academy in Kala Astanals. "He's a very bright child, if not a handful." His father explained.
The Imperial Academy served as the foremost school of the land, taking in the children of nobles, even the Zhurek family, the dynasty of the Tsars attended the Imperial Academy where they honed their student's skills in all matters within their grasp of learning. Politics and history for all. Strategy and tactics for some. Magic and the dark arts for others.
Hedgewind had a particular gift for the latter. As a young child he developed a fascination with fire. He would stare into the flames of the family fireplace for hours, entranced by the beauty of the dance and the color of the embers. He was no more than four when he was able to cause flames to shoot from his fingers.
He did this without training or even the slightest understanding of magic. It was his passion. By the time he was presented to the Imperial Academy he had mastered a few methods for producing magical flame. His experiments at home would lead him to trouble with his parents quite often. When his attempts at fire magic would go awry, they would leave him with burned hands, hair and clothes. Other times they would burn things in the home that his parents did not want to see burned. He was indeed, as his father had pointed out, a handful.
As a student, Hedgewind was less than ideal. He did not care for his politics and history classes and would drift off into imaginary battles with dragons, wondering if one day his own flames would exceed those of the dragonkind. He took little interest in the strategies of the battlefield and it was not long before his teachers stopped calling upon him for answers.
Everything was different in his magic classes. While he was less than studious, he paid close attention to the studies of what he deemed the lesser magics; those which did not involve flame. When the topic rolled around the the magic of flames, he exceeded his class. He exceeded his teachers. He did not understand how they used so many more words, so many more sleights of the hand to produce so little flame.
His teachers, powerful wizards all, found themselves being mocked when the subject of flames arose. To all who observed Hedgewind's progress, they would have predicted that the academy would have served him no purpose other than to bolster his arsenal of utilitarian magic. They would have also predicted that Hedgewind would leave with the Academy with a sharply honed ability to mock the powerful. Of course, these two predictions would have been prescient as they did eventually come to fruition.
Something happened, however, that changed Hedgewind for the rest of his life. On a cold Kantar morning, Prince Batil Zhurek the the prince regent and heir to the throne of Ortalyk arrived at the Imperial Academy. Along with his entourage of servants and armed guards he had brought a young girl with him, his daughter, Princess Svetlana Zhurek. He came to consign his daughter to the very same Academy in which he was trained and the matters of politics and warfare. Here he believed, she would receive the education she would need to ascend to a great title, perhaps exceeding her already lofty title of princess.
The seven-year-old Hedgewind, of course, thought nothing of this new arrival. She would probably have no interest in magic, he decided. If she did study magic, she would have no interest in flame, he further decided. Hedgewind took little interest in his classmates at the best of times. He had not yet developed an interest in girls, and he certainly had no special reverence set aside for the royal family. This meant nothing to him.
"Hedgewind!" His teacher shouted.
Hedgewind was in class. His history teacher, a slight grey-haired woman pointed at him with her pointing stick. The rest of the class all looked at him apprehensively. Hedgewind had been a universe away. The new student, the princess, Svetlana had been placed in his history class. It was no fault of her own that she had red hair. It was no fault of Hedgewind's that during his normal course of not paying attention in class, he had looked into her hair.
It was in Svetlana's hair that he could see flame, dancing and cascading waves of flame shimmering and beckoning him to pay close attention or perhaps miss some important... "Hedgewind!" His teacher shouted again.
"Yes Magister?" He coughed, looking for clues as to why he had been pointed out.
"Please remind the class why the migration of the Ungir from the Aydahar Confederation across the Ortalyk countryside deeply agitated our people."
Hedgewind had never seen an Ungir or an Aydahar for that matter. He drew a blank. No one could possibly care about this topic, he decided to himself. "I don't know, Magister." he finally muttered.
The class laughed. Svetlana laughed. The princess of fire shared in the mockery; his mockery. The class went on and Hedgewind's shame grew. To stare into this fire, he would need Svetlana's approval, not her mockery. It was in this moment he vowed to take his studies more seriously.
