Chapter 2: Memories of Pain
From amongst the poor, one day she'll rise
Of fire and fury, she'll comprise.
-prophecy of the duskbringer
Guppy awoke with tears in her eyes, the dream of a time before misery struck was a painful reminder of all she had lost.
"Three years already mamwe that you've been gone, and ten since father left us. How did you do it? How did you rise each day and smile at us with such love and apparent hope?" Guppy softly asked.
She lay in bed in the early dawn light and let her mind sink into memory, the anniversary of her mom's passing always lent itself to brooding.
Her father Frank Bright had been a charismatic man with curly blond hair and deep brown eyes that always twinkled with mirth. He had been tall and well built from years of hard work in a manufactorium, a non-magical workshop.
Such places were quite rare these days in Nolusburg, but as a dull, a person with no magic talent or affinity it was the only decent paying work he could reasonably find, short of travelling to the steam presses of Imperyn's capital of Umbresal.
However, ten years ago when Guppy was just seven, he died in a steam explosion when the workshop's boiler ruptured. The blast killed Frank and three others, and shut the manufactorium down for months while repairs were effected.
Her mother Esmeralda had grieved and wept the whole night upon hearing of her husband's death.
Then in the morning, with the strength and decisiveness that was so characteristic of her, Esmeralda sold their home in the respectable craftsman quarter, moved herself and her three children to a residence in the workers quarter, and took a job in one of the magitech core generation plants found there.
To make matters worse, debt collectors had appeared with a writ of debtorship that Esmeralda had never seen nor heard of before.
According to them, Frank had been an optimistic man with vision; he had been planning to take over the manufactorium and upgrade it greatly.
To fulfill this dream, he had apparently borrowed a large sum of gold royals from the writ holders, the Grakoan mafia.
With his death, this debt fell to Guppy's mother, Esmeralda Bright.
Her mother had tried to fight the debt bill, but their case was thrown out of court. The writ was 'Legal' even though the paper was freshly filed under an unknown, new company of money lenders.
Guppy could still remember helping her mother clean herself and dress the next morning, and watched her mother leave, though she would not say where or to whom she went.
Esmeralda had left them in the care of a friend for a day, and only came back in the evening, with a split lip and bruises. The pained smile she wore did not fool Guppy, but it had for Stalia, so Guppy pretended too. She knew not then what was wrong, only that something bad had happened.
So Guppy had silently watched through the holes in the shutters as her mother stiffly strode to her first day of her new job. In time, and as her mother grew in popularity with the manager she had been allowed to accompany Esmeralda every first-day of the week to her work.
True, Guppy was not allowed to work with her mother as she condensed crystals, but she relished the time spent there and quickly made friends with the other workers and their children.
She loved watching her mother channel her mana into a foot by foot black magitech cube that lay at her work desk, and laughed as it condensed and crystallized a shiny orb. Esmeralda explained that it was used as a standardized power source across the city.
Each days's work left Esmeralda tired but satisfied, for it put food on their table and clothes on their backs despite the harsh monthly debt repayments due.
Guppy would often tuck her mother into bed as Esmeralda slept to recover her mana for the next days work. .
Growing up this way Guppy's education was varied. Basics such as reading and writing were taught by her mother, but Guppy supplemented her knowledge by listening to other adult's conversations, piecing together information about her world as she did so.
She listened, for instance, when the manager boasted to his mistress about the many gold royals he earned selling the mana crystals created by the factory workers. Apparently, these crystals were always in high demand to power the vast array of magitech devices used by society.
She had even heard a visiting inspector reminisce about a time when people would harvest, and then refine crystals from wild and dangerous magical beasts.
As these beasts became over hunted and demand grew dire, a genius mage had developed a process to refine standardized crystals from channeled human mana.
This process became widespread across the continent, and crystal factories sprung up to meet society's ever increasing demand for the magical fuel.
As Guppy grew in years and knowledge, she started to spend time in a magitech tool shop run by an irascible merlady.
Guppy's ceaseless questions at first brought down upon her the tinkerer's ire, but her persistence wore through the merlady's resistance. Before long, old Sjdkar allowed Guppy to hang around the shop, and even taught her the basics of her craft.
On one occasion Sjdkar had opened a broken lamp and shown Guppy how magitech devices consisted of a magical array, also known as circles or circuits, inscribed carefully upon a medium - usually brass, or some other metal - for permanence.
To fix the lamp, Sjdkar re-carved the simple circuit grooves and reapplied conduit fluid. She waited a few minutes as it dried and then fitted a white crystal orb to the input rune.
Sjdkar had let a small smile slip out as the little girl shrieked in delight at the resultant flare of light from the lamp. She explained to the excited girl how different runes and arrays produced different effects.
From lamps to magic cannons. From simple fans to robotic mechs and airships. The spectrum of magic arrays researched and produced were vastly differing.
Sjdkar somehow found herself taking young Guppy on expeditions, to point out the magic behind the city's fountains, or watch the military airships from a high up spot as they took off or landed.
On these forays, Guppy even learned a bit about the old ways of magic. A mage had had to study for years to learn each array off by heart, then how to draw the array and stabilize it in the air with their mana before channeling even more mana through it in order to produce the desired magical effect.
Guppy loved the wonder of magic. And, she hated it - because it was forever denied her.
Sjdkar learnt one day, from a weeping Guppy, that the standard Magic Affinity Test had revealed her to be a Dull. No magic affinity. None at all.
To her credit Sjdkar did not show disdain for the little girl, but drew her into a long hug. Guppy hugged her back, and tearfully wondered if this was what it was like to have a grandmother.
So Guppy lived and learnt, and for a time all was right with the world.
Life had settled back down into a semblance of normalcy as seven years swiftly passed.
And then like her husband, Emeralda's job killed her.
The draining sickness slum folk call it. For years Guppy's mother was hale and hearty, and then she got sick. Really sick.
Over the period of a couple months Esmeralda thinned to skin and bone. Her once beautiful hair dried out and split, as her skin yellowed and teeth loosened.
Daily draining of her magic core took more out of her than the simple expenditure of magic. Too late they found it had slowly leached her vitality as well, until her body collapsed and withered.
Once the sickness had hit looking for other work proved fruitless, word had gone out, and no one would hire an impending corpse.
One evening, when Guppy was barely past her fourteenth year, Esmeralda called her daughter over with a dry cracked throat and dull eyes.
"Gupalagia Esme Bright, come sit with me for a moment."
Guppy knew it was bad when Esmeralda used her full name, she could only remember her using it a total of five times in her life thus far.
Guppy slowly moved across the now single shared bedroom their family had downgraded to, and grasped her mother's frail hand.
Guppy had almost flinched when she felt how fragile those once strong hands were, and tears glistened in her eyes.
"Yes, mamwe?" Guppy sniffed, "do you think you can manage some food tonight?"
Esmeralda had smiled at her, and for a moment, the memory of her previous beauty shone through the wreck of a body she currently held.
"Can you do me a favor Esme?" she had softly whispered.
"Of course mamwe.. What is it?" Guppy asked, fearing the answer to her question even as she sought it.
Her mother's request had been simple, words spoken many a time, but Guppy engraved them upon her heart.
"Look after your sister and brother for me, there is nothing more precious in this world than your family. . ."
With that utterance Esmeralda had drifted off to sleep. The next morning she never woke up...
Guppy slapped her cheeks and sat upright on her bed, shaking off the feelings of pain and loss that buffeted like waves each anniversary. The memories always came, and they hurt, but it was a good hurt, for it meant she still remembered.
One lessor pain replaced a greater as Guppy gave herself a sharp pinch.
'Focus Guppy,' she thought, 'focus on the living and not the dead.'
Taking a deep breath Gupalagia threw back her thin blanket and got up. A new day was dawning, and with it, a thousand thousand possibilities twisted anew.
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