The Yellow Mask

21 Firedawn 1072

Lual of West Fael couldn’t remember the day the crown raided his father’s shop. It was a blank spot. He was a child of ten. He had loved carving, wood, stone, anything he could shape. His sister would later tell him that as he crossed past the door, a rough carved bird in hand, the soldiers barged in and the door swung hard. He just happened to be standing in its way. It hit him with a dull thud, recoiled off him and back onto the foot of the soldier. Lual was flung to the ground, the back of his head cracked and bounced on the stone floor with a wet thud. His sister screamed at the blood, she told him later, and ran to his side. A day past before Lual woke up, his head sore and bandaged. His hair matted with crispy blood like mud dried in the sun. He healed quickly, as children tend to. In less than a month, he couldn’t feel a bump. Even a thorough inspection failed to reveal the wound. His mother rejoiced that Death overlooked him. “You were passed over and left to us for some time more,” she would say.

After that, he changed. He anticipated things. He grew cautious. He didn’t stand too close to doors. His father, who had on that fateful day dodged imprisonment thanks to a costly bribe, didn’t approve of the change in Lual. His father was a lore master. An odd trade that paid in coins. Lual remembered hearing others speak of his father like, He’s too smart for his own good, or Nothing good comes from all that learning, or It’s hard to trust a man whose words sound one way, but look another when captured in ink. Lual never came to know the trouble his father had gotten himself into. Lual only had a vague understanding that his father dealt with something unsavory. It would take his father years to rebuild his reputation and be trusted by his clients to work again as a lore master. Shame hung over the family and childhood friends avoided Lual and his sister.

The intervening years reduced Lual’s father to a lowly scribe for the illiterate with their petty needs. And as a mere scribe, coin became scarce. The farmers, miners and fisherman bartered. At one point so much grain filled their yard that the neighbors dubbed their home the Rats Nest. After the door shut on his poor clients, his father bemoaned the smell. “These people slink about unaware of the foul fog that shrouds them. You smell that, Lual? That is what will become of you if you continue to give into your dizziness. Push through, boy, focus on your readings. It’s hard to love that which smells. I’m scared, boy. What if their stench has rubbed off on me? What if I have their smell now, and we don’t know. I wish your mother wouldn’t let them inside. I can speak in the streets.”

Every month felt tenuous. Meals weren’t always reliable. His father worked in his shop but with certain clients (mostly foreigners) he conducted business outside, in the courtyard, in hushed tones. His mother spied from inside, squinting to read his lips. With that stress, his father grew irritable. On sour days, he would bemoan how Lual had become brooding. “What happened to my happy child? You used to fill our house with laughter and now all I hear is silence and gasps.”

7 Cloudtide 1075

Lual’s father’s business began to turn around. Coin filled the small chest his father hid beneath the flag stones in the hearth. Lual read well and had a smooth hand with a quill, his father trusted him with more of the mundane work. Punishment turned to praise, “You perform that work for those mongrels while I do the special work. In no time we will be restored.” With an arm around Lual’s shoulders he’d repeat, “I’ll be restored.”

His mother died first, from fever. Leaves, damp and orange clogged gutters had made the roads slick. Trees almost bare, whistled scratched in the chill winds, their last leaves tossed into the skies. Cold rains hid people inside. Fires weren’t allowed to die for fear they couldn’t be relit. The door opened and a chill wind chased the fire; the priests entered in their beaked masks and black gloved hands. They chanted. Sweet incense tickled the back of Lual’s throat and turned his stomach. His head spun. She died while Lual lay on the floor in the next room. His father shouted for him to come. Lual stumbled into the room, his legs felt as if they would only step in angles while the floor tilted beneath his feet. He fell against the doorframe. A dark shadow loomed over his mother’s bed, out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw it had a face. He looked directly at it, and then he passed out. His time unconscious was peaceful, a sensation of lights that sped by him on a dark night. So many lights that went so fast that they stretched out into lines that faded into nothing. When he came to his father, his eyes red and his face contorted into anger, shouted at him, “You missed your mother’s departure. She needed you and you were too weak.” The remainder of that fateful day, Lual tended to the cooking and the work left by his mother that was left without an owner. He avoided the room where she, her body, laid. He wouldn’t meet the priests eyes. He didn’t speak to anyone. He went about filling the hole she left in the household. He first cried when he was alone, in bed. His sister lay asleep on the other side of the room. Her soft short breathes. The sound of rain pelting the roof.

1 Cloudtide 1076

Almost a year later, his father died suddenly. Lual found him slumped over his desk, his mouth agape, reddened eyes wide, staring into nothing. Outside a wind howled through the narrow lane then was gone. The priests informed Lual and his sister that his father lived a questionable life which spoiled his humors. “He rotted from the inside, boy.” Then the priest held Lual by the chin and turned his head from side to side as two eyes from behind the mask narrowed. Then an acolyte with a warm smile and a promise of food, walked them to the temple where they stayed that night. His sister asked through sobs where their father was. The acolyte only answered with questions of his own, “Where are your uncles and cousins? Did your family have servants?” Lual answered by shaking his head “No.”

To pay his father’s debts, the crown claimed Lual and placed him into service. A tall boy capable of reading and writing was coveted by several ministers. A tribunal was held in these circumstances to determine which minister would be awarded the ward. Lual stood before them. They were seated in rows of tables. Reeds scratched across parchment, thoughts captured and then rolled and sealed with wax. Most were men. All of them preoccupied. Light streamed in from high windows. Lual stood captured by a beam of light, a spectacle in a simple tunic and breeches. Behind him waited several others who, like him, for one reason or another were on the blocks for the ministers. The Eorl (Captain) of the Eorlmein (King’s Guard) held rank over the others and spoke first. The reeds stilled. He levied his claim. “A gangly boy, let’s hope his frame fills out. Anyone who can both hold a long spear and read a map best serves the Dux (King) in grey of the Eorlmein.” The other ministers accepted their loss with false smiles and private scowls. “The will of the Dux,” they said in a kind of haphazard chorus bereft of enthusiasm. Reeds again scratched parchments. A stamp pounded with a thunk.

As for his sister, her fate was decided in a less formal yet similar way. A member of the royal court established himself as her guardian and then quickly offered her to wed an influential but aging minister for a paltry sum. They were wedded within the week. Their first child came shortly after her sixteenth birthday a year later.

1 Flock 1078

Lual made a poor soldier. He failed to fill-out his frame and instead filled himself with doubt. Under the pressure of the sun, he sweltered on those days in the field. Scorched golden grasses that crunched under feet and left burrs and spines in his boots and trousers. He witnessed others lift stones and sprint across fields like they were a different creature from him.

He was convinced his nature was deficient. When he pushed himself and approached the precipice of breaking, it scared him. The pain felt lethal. No one called him craven, for he tried, which they all knew took some kind of courage. But he became known as a quitter, soft. He was ashamed. Most of all he didn’t like being thought of as unreliable, but yet he preferred that to actually failing. What lay beyond true failure terrified him.

He was also a poor friend. He had grown more and more into his moods and while he never sought isolation, he rarely knew what to say. He stood as the silent observer. Even when something came to mind to say, he feared his opinion would be ridiculed. He marveled at how others knew when to joke; how to accept failure; knew when to mock versus when to encourage. He had nothing to offer.

When he met Ilse, the woman for whom he obsessed over for the rest of his first life, she had done all the talking. She would later admit to her sisters that she liked his quietness. “He doesn’t fill the air with words when a look suffices.”

They met in the <KING’S> market on a spring Khalday. She and her father sold apples from their orchard. Lual had been demoted from the Eorlmein to a guard. One of his duties was to stand ceremoniously in the courtyard. Lual was placed by himself in the shadow of the parapet near the stables. The other guards on duty were stationed in pairs.

Her father pulled the cart that she walked behind. Bushels of apples glinted in the morning sunshine. She smiled and greeted everyone with a look of sincere joy. When she happed to look his way, he froze and his face went blank, a mask of paralyzed muscles.

Lual loved her bright smile, the way she brushed the hair from her face, how she knelt down to speak to children eye to eye, how easy she laughed, he saw her and at once was convinced she was everything he wanted in a woman. In that instant, everything she did came to define perfection for him. He never could explain how in that first glance of her he knew she was everything. Rationally, he found the thought ridiculous. Yet he could not deny how from that moment on, she was never far from his thoughts.

Paralyzed by his sudden infatuation, he froze. She approached him, “I recognize you. Wasn’t your father the lore master?” She asked with a tilt to her head, and a dimpled smile. “I know this sounds silly, but I used to imagine he would one day teach me to read.” Then she laughed, a soft, bubbly laugh. She pushed her hair behind her ears and blushed.

“Yeah ... He was ... A lore master.” His words came one by one with long pauses between each as he searched for the next one. His eyes darted everywhere but her face. And when by chance they landed on her face, he quickly looked away.

Across the courtyard, over Ilse’s shoulder, another of the guards mocked his stammering response. He lilted and bobbed while his partner pretended with an exaggerate sweep to wipe long strands of hair from his face. Lual saw it. They saw him and laughed. It stung. Lual, when Ilse was in mid sentence, broke off and left. He made for the barracks. He vowed not to talk to her again; he hoped he wouldn’t see her again. He hoped to avoid the other soldiers and he dreaded mess hall that night.

Only she didn’t allow that to be their last conversation. Every Khalday thereafter she came to the market with her father, sought out Lual and spoke with him. She did all the talking. He looked forward to it. Lual feared the day when she would run out of things to say and he would have to carry the conversation. On her approach he would freeze and wonder what they would talk about. Then she would take the lead and he would stand there, sometimes smile, often times just look at her intently.

On one Khalday the sun shown bright and hot. He stood in the cool shade, she stood in the sun, a hand shaded her eyes, her face screwed up and squinty in the bight light. A silence that lasted a couple breaths passed, then she broke it with a giggle. “Lual of West Fael, would you teach me to read?”

“I’ve never taught anyone,” he began.

“I didn’t ask if you had!” She said in a playful tone, and she swayed on her hips. One hand pulled at her apron tie.

“Ok,” he said.

For weeks on every Mindful he went to her village and a bunch of scrolls tucked under one arm that he borrowed from the House of Tomes. Her family eyed him suspiciously. Her father asked about Lual’s father. Each week their greeting would grow colder. Her father would ask more questions about his father, his dealings, what came of his house and what had become of Lual’s sister. Ilse only let her father ask so many questions before whisking him off to a quiet glen in their orchard to study. After a few months, she would meet him on the road, outside her farm, and they would avoid speaking with her family entirely.

Lual came to realize that they had fallen in love. Or at least she had fallen in love with him, while Lual wondered if his obsession of her was love. When they were apart, he longed to be with her. But when they were together, he didn’t know what to do or what to say and just hoped it would pass quickly. He feared he was boring, and was baffled she kept returning. Every encounter felt awkward and he questioned whether that was what love was supposed to feel like. It seemed to him it should be something more, something tangible. He couldn’t reconcile how his feelings for her were strongest when they were apart.

Lual waited for her on a spring morning at the bend in the road just beyond their orchard when he saw her father approach. He looked past him for Ilse, but did not see her.

Her father said in a banal tone, “Ilse is betrothed. You’re not welcome here.” An apologetic smile came and went. He nodded as if to affirm what he just said and left.

Lual stood there. The sun streamed through the flowering boughs of the apple trees. A tune of morning birdsong danced on the edge of his awareness. He felt something akin to relief at first. He thought of the walk back to the Keep. He thought of the rest of the morning and he didn’t know what to do with it. Then the sadness hit him.

8 Firesky 1080

Lual turned eighteen the year the Forsaken arrived in Fael. Ilse’s engagement had come to an end. One of the guards at the gate told him one night in the barracks. His brother worked in the mill and had overheard. A month later, she returned to the market on Khalday. She smiled to him from a distance. He smiled back. The next week she asked if they could resume her lessons. She never mentioned her betrothal or how it ended. She never spoke of feelings. Whenever the conversation turned towards the nature of their relationship, she said nothing ant just listened with a welcome look on her face. From that point forward, Lual understood she had been waiting patiently for his proposal.

By then Lual had been stashed away as a guard at the House of Tomes. An easy assignment and a good place to hide an inadequate soldier with too much education.

Then came the Forsaken. He arrived from Veinheim. None knew his name. Like all Forsaken he wore a mask. His was distinctive: hammered from a blue-ish metal, it was cast to look like the upper half of a devil’s face - wide eye holes that slant down towards a broad, flat nose set between two prominent cheeks. Fangs spread out like a face guard over the mages mouth. When seen in moonlight, the mask shimmered with a faint blue light that at times looked as if it smoldered a hazy blue mist.

Mages hid from the gods behind their masks to not just protect themselves, but also to protect those around them. The gods frowned upon those who toyed with the threads they wove to hold the world together. Consequently, the Forsaken lived solitary lives. A few married, most did not. They were forbidden from having children for that would pass on the anger of the gods to their descendants. Often, they didn’t share their name when met. This mage hadn’t done so. But it didn’t take long for the keep to know of his arrival, presence and passing. He was a specter in a blue mask.

He came to visit the House of Tomes.

Lual stood guard outside the House of Tomes when he entered. The great wooden doors pinned wide open. The sweet, musty smell of parchment mixed with the tart smell of inks lingered in the air. Lual saw him approach. Long strides with heeled boots that tapped loudly on the wooden floor. His cloak lifted behind him by the wind he called with his quick gait. He passed by Lual, who turned to watch him. He spoke to the clerk with a stentorian tone that echoed even in a room lined with scrolls and tomes. So it was with great ease that Lual overheard the mage grow frustrated with the clerks and their inability to locate a specific tome: a scroll by the great Larynisis. Lual, the son of a lore master and scribe, who had spent most of his childhood sulking in amongst his father’s books, knew at once what this scroll would look like - a stone case with red lettering hammered into the ends.

No matter how many times he told and retold what happened that afternoon, and how the tale changed over time in the way that memories blur the details and alter the specifics; or how one might look back on something later in life and inject a new meaning born of their changed perspectives, the one thing that always remained the same was that he didn’t know why he aided the mage. That part of the story never changed no matter how many times he told it.

The Forsaken looked surprised and curious about a mere guard able to converse so easily about historical matters. Lual spoke confidently without hesitation or thought. He didn’t have to search for what to say. The topic lay there for them, Larynisis, and he knew this topic very confidently from the work his father had done before him.

“What’s your name, guard?”

“Lual of West Fael,” he said.

“That’s an Aeneean name,” said the mage.

“My father’s father was Aeneean, and he was proud of that.”

The mage smiled, a funny contrast to the savage mask that covered the upper half of his face.

The summons came a few months later, in the summer, from the court at Veinheim. The Blue Mage selected him as an apprentice. The Dux had no choice but to comply, nor did he have a reason not to. The Furst (High King) of Veinheim stood above all Dux in Sterich and a summons such as that conveyed honors and favor upon Fael.

Ilse sobbed when he told her. She bunched her hands up against his chest, he wrapped his arms around her, and she cried.

“You can’t go,” she managed to plea between fits of crying in a meek, almost girlish voice.

“What choice do I have.” He said it with finality and resignation.

“But we could just leave,” she said defiantly. The strength returned to her voice. Her eyes, still glassy with tears, looked up at him and pleaded. When he didn’t say anything, she repeated herself and added, “Why not? We could leave right now. We could walk right out that door. No one would stop you. They all like you, Lual. You don’t realize it because, well, you are you. But they do. I know this. And they know what it means to become a Forsaken. What you will give up. You can’t do this. Let’s walk out, and I would be with you and we can be together.”

“To where?” He said it with a smile that stung her. She broke free from his hold.

“Don’t patronize me. I’m serious.”

“But that’s not a serious idea. I have no skills. We have no coins. There isn’t a city in Sterich where we wouldn’t be found.” His reasoning poured from an expressionless face.

“We can leave Sterich!” Her voice rose, and her tone became commanding.

“It’ my duty,” he said to her. The words came out of his mouth like an intellectual reflex more than a considered thought. His face had become expressionless. She looked at that blank face and left.

Lual wouldn’t see her again for two years.

19 Wandering 1081

A retinue of guards from Veinheim retrieved him. They rode under the banner of Veinheim across the grey and beige fields of winter. The winds rushed through leafless trees. Hoofbeats on a solid, frozen ground sounded hollow. Pale skies with ribbons of torn clouds stretched across the sky. They stayed at farms and inns, always with the greatest of hospitalities given. In several homes, fathers paraded their daughters before the Veinheim soldiers, but were politely turned away. The soldiers mocked them in private mocked for being simple dirt workers. Lual felt bad when the that happened and in the morning showered their hosts with praise.

The soldiers of Veinheim spoke little to Lual, until the second night when one of them asked him how he felt about becoming a Forsaken. Lual answered honestly, “I haven’t considered it. Why would I? Others pull these strings.” They laughed and Lual overheard them talk about how odd he was.

Lual spent most of the ride replaying his conversation with Ilse. The conversation became a puzzle with pieces made up of words. He searched for what he should have said differently, and rebuilt the conversation in various combinations seeking a perfect series of words in just the right order that would compel Ilse to agree with him; to agree this was the right thing to do. And, most importantly, for her to remain by his side. He preferred the imagined conversations where she pitied him; where he was the noble one making the sacrifice. He wanted her to see him as a tragic figure, and she would choose to suffer alongside him. She would be the wife of a Forsaken, and together they would fulfill his duty. Because together is what was important to him.

While in Veinheim. Lual received the occasional letter from Ilse. Each time he replied immediately. Then months would pass before she wrote back. The letters, written on wax tablets and carried by messengers with little patience or interest, were never what Lual hoped they would be. But there was always a hint at the love she still had. Like a rope that hung just out of reach, a reminder of a hope, or a haunting - her letters were all three. He continued, while in Veinheim, to search for the right words in the right order that would unlock her love and reunite them. He wrote to her as if upon his return they could simply resume where they left off.

As his apprenticeship wore on the Blue Masked Forsaken was pleased with his progress. Lual heard hidden in his words an insinuation that once this training is complete, things will change. He will have a standing that is greater than that of a ward passed between ministers.

When Lual wasn’t thinking about Ilse, that is what he thought of. Then he would tie these thoughts in his imagination back to her. He convinced himself that she was only concerned about him being a Forsaken. In his final letter to her he tried to assure her that the life of a Forsaken would not tear her from the community but give her a place in it. He wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but he was convinced that it was a strong argument.

She wrote him one more letter after that. It was her most stark rebuttal. “It is not just that you are Forsaken, it’s how you made your choice. Something has altered within you. I cannot love the man you have chosen to become.”

He returned to Fael in the spring of 1091. His mask was a yellow, hammered tin of a sad fiend. As was the tradition, his master bestowed the mask. In those ten years the Blue Mage had heard all about Lual’s youth. He heard about the door, the cracked skull and the brooding. And he agreed, Lual had moods. He thought the mask, the color of the sun but the visage of sorrow, was funny. When Lual accepted the mask without any reaction his master said, “You can’t find the humor in anything, can you?”

Lual was welcomed back to Fael with a small procession. The Dux was proud to say a battle mage trained in the Aeneean tradition was in his service, in the service of Fael. The Dux had bartered mightily for Lual’s return. Lual was his prized possession, and he proudly displayed him for all the city to see. He stood atop a wagon, pulled by two massive destriers in white and gold, flanked by some of the very ministers who had cast him off as a dour, lazy boy. Crowds lined the street to watch the procession. They looked on with a mixture of curiosity to see a Forsaken and thirst for the ale freely given by the crown.

Lual searched the crowds for Ilse. He found her standing on a side street atop a rise. She was alone in the crowd. She seemed to look at him and not recognize him. Her eyes passed over and past him. The ten years and the golden mask obscured his face. He smiled to her, a meek, tentative smile that quavered, and he saw the recognition in her eyes. Then he saw tears stream down her face, and she turned and fled into the city.

The next year passed during which she wrote less. They didn’t see each other. Her father came alone to the market. He learned she had married. She had two children. Lual on one side of the Keep’s great walls, and she, on the other, across the river, living with her family. He didn’t ask about her, but the guards, despite mostly avoiding him out of fear of the gods associating them with a Forsaken still remembered the tall, gangly sad guard he once had been. They updated him on occasion in awkward, quick conversations. It was their token of sympathy for a man who seemed to have been granted an unfortunate fate.

That year went by and Lual, the battle mage, had spent his time in study and seclusion. He almost wrote to Ilse to tell her that he loved her, but he was a man by then, and he had learned to not be so selfish.

Lual spent his time alone. Avoided by those in the Keep, living a life behind his dour, yellow mask. He speculated about how things might have been different had he run off with Ilse, but then he rationalized they would likely both be dead or enslaved for defying the crown. He was proud of his sacrifice, if not happy with it.