Lifeblood - Claire Furlanetto

“Words have power. In fact, there is nothing more powerful in our world than letters strung together, tattooed in the same black ink that pumps our hearts and sates our bodies. That is the sole reason we control who can engage in the sacred art of ingesting and creating these forms… It’s what’s best for us all.”

- Julius Oxnard, Etched in Ink: The Past, Present, and Future of Words in Anglia

The day Rook learned to read was the day the world began to spiral. It was the day that every citizen of Anglia felt the shimmering ink running through their veins begin to hum with a strange power; it was the day when magic snuck through the cracks; it was the day when the rich and the poor and the happy and the sad felt a ripple pass through their very souls—one that caused the tiniest fracture in Anglia’s bloodstained fabric, one that built and built and built until it all came crashing down. 

But before Rook could break the world, he was just a boy. A boy with no parents and no family to speak of. A boy who was tragically, desperately alone. 

Anglia was cold after the sun went down; bitterly, bitingly cold. Mice scurried over hunched figures freezing in the poorer streets. The air seemed thin. The sky was an unnatural black with no stars to be seen. 

This was no place for a world-changer. 

But most world-changers start out this way, don’t they? 

Rook clutched his hands to his chest, his skin taking on a bluish pallor as he hurried through the city, snow fluttering around him in a beautiful, harrowing dance. The lack of signage (or of any words at all) around him didn’t deter his purposeful, if slightly harried, stride. He knew this city, and he knew how to survive it. 

He was no more than twelve, and yet, he moved with the haggard sort of desperation that only came with undeserved years on the streets. He was mostly used to the cold by now—in fact, he didn’t even falter when a particularly strong wind slammed into his back, curls whipping into his onyx eyes. 

Anglia sprawled out in front of him in a jagged, hungry mess of unkempt roads and starving bodies as Rook trudged through the slums with a watchful eye, one hand resting on a dagger with practiced precision. He monitored every move of the dark figures that lined the alleys until he made his way to the heart of the city, where the roads were pristine and the streetlamps bathed the smooth, unbroken concrete in an alien, inviting glow. He had arrived at Quill Street—the homes of the merchants, the politicians, and the writers. 

The houses were extravagant, almost garishly so, with twisting rooftops and soaring balconies, standing out like overly polished sore thumbs against the soot-stained brick of the rest of the city. Rook’s eyes strained as he gazed through the stained-glass windows and noted the plates of steaming food piled on tabletops, the scenes of happy families, and the towering shelves of books. He imagined the smell of their intoxicating pages, how the words would form in his head if he cracked open their spines. He pictured the small children that he glimpsed through open doors reading bedtime stories and learning their alphabets with no small amount of bitter jealousy. He’d always wished that he was one of those children—someone who knew how to read in a world where words were the greatest power of all. 

But then the visions passed, and he was on the street again, illiterate and lonely and starving.

A particularly ferocious gust of sleet-streaked wind jolted him from his wistful daydreaming as the temperature continued to drop. Rook hurried up Quill Street, planning to find his way to a hostel and convince the owner to let him stay with a couple of rings he had lifted from a snotty aristocrat earlier that day. But as he poked his head out from behind the corner of the street’s final mansion, a spatter of gunfire rang out ahead. 

He ducked behind the side of a mansion to hide and cursed quietly as he noticed a black-robed figure—a Saliax, one of the lawkeeping grunts—aiming a pistol at a ragged man with a small alphabet book, a bullet lodged in his gut. The thief bled out slowly on the concrete, black ink spreading like a ripple on a pond over his ivory-colored shirt until his horrible gurgles finally went silent. 

Rebellion pervaded these streets, and it had always intrigued Rook. He sometimes liked to dream of a world where everyone could read and write, where everyone had a chance to discover the magic of words on a page, where everyone could write a story or visit a library. But Rook had always been too preoccupied with finding his next meal to rebel. Here, though, being caught anywhere near the scene of a Saliax execution was a death sentence in itself. 

Rook peeked out from behind the corner of the looming mansion, calculating the chances of safely escaping the way he’d come, but another Saliax lazily smoking a pipe emerged at the end of the street. Rook jumped back into his hiding spot and tried to breathe slowly, unnoticed yet surrounded as both Saliax crept closer, scanning the darkness for anything out of the ordinary. His pulse quickened, breaths growing shorter and shorter as an unwelcome panic infected his chest. Rook needed to find somewhere to hide before the Saliax found him—or it would be his black blood that pooled on the street.

Rook’s mind whirred frantically, uselessly, and his body seemed to move without his brain’s permission as he quietly crept around the mansion he hid behind and into its sprawling backyard, hoping to find safety in the frigid, stretching shadows. 

And that, dear reader, is how Rook found himself shivering as he crouched in a bare tree in the dark gardens draping across the back of 402 Quill Street in the dead of night; how he noticed a piece of discarded paper lying, forgotten, beneath a wrought-iron bench, streaked with mud and snow. He could just make out the faint outline of crude, childlike markings along the page, drawn out carefully in black blood. Ice-cold temptation overtook him—a desperate, maddening urge to learn, to discover, to read. 

Rook crawled down from the tree, his heart beating quickly. What he was about to do was incredibly illegal and went against the very foundations of Anglia. But, in his mind, it wasn’t truly that bad—after all, what great harm could come from a child learning his letters? So Rook picked up the paper, and Anglia began to splinter at the seams.