hwango

A caution for returning readers: No funny this week. Seriously.

Kara could remember every detail of her father’s final performance. It would be nice if it had been flawless and beautiful, so she could keep a perfect memory of it inside of her forever, but real life doesn’t work that way. He had almost missed a few cues, and she’d been forced to improvise when he conjured the wrong images during one of the battle scenes. And of course there was the matter of him upping his dose of Light, which was what those in the trade called the drug that enabled their performances.

They were a father-daughter act in the business of Illuminated Storytelling, and had been a team for nearly a decade. It had been a wife-and-husband act before Kara’s mother had passed away while Kara was still quite small. Now Kara was the storyteller, and her father, Wayland, still provided the visuals. He did this by ingesting an alchemical concoction that granted him the ability to create visual illusions of things he imagined.

Not everyone was cut out for Illuminating – your average person off the street using Light for the first time tended to leave out all kinds of details or let their attention wander, which meant fuzzy edges and empty spaces or even things suddenly turning into other things. And, like anything full of power, Light was highly addictive and did unspeakable things to your health if you used too much of it. Both of Kara’s parents had absolutely forbidden her to try it herself. When she was very young, Kara had found this infuriating and unfair. As she got older, and saw what it was slowly doing to her father, she grew to hate the stuff, and certainly had no desire to try it.

It was painfully easy to tell when Wayland upped his dose. If an Illuminator used more than what was considered “safe,” the illusions gained a little substance – say, about enough for a swooping miniature dragon to knock off hats and stir up a bit of dust…which is exactly what had happened. The crowd, of course, had loved it. They’d whooped in delight or stared in amazement, wondering how Kara and Wayland had done it. Because everyone knew that Illuminations were just pretty pictures - they couldn’t touch you, and you couldn't touch them. It was one thing that every Illuminator agreed upon – absolutely no tangible conjurations. Once the public got a taste for that they’d never be satisfied with just pictures ever again, and no one could keep dosing themselves high enough to produce tangible images for performance after performance and expect to live more than a week.

This is why Kara had been so furious when she’d seen the toppling hats that she had stopped mid-sentence and just glared at her father until the crowd calmed down and began muttering in confusion. When he finally dropped his eyes in shame she had resumed the story as if nothing had happened, and eventually everyone in the audience forgot about the incident as they got wrapped up in the story once again. But Kara did not speak to her father or even look at him again for the rest of the evening.

Much later, he had come to her to apologize, judging by the look on his face. Before he could even speak she had coldly called him a stupid old man and stormed off to their wagon to lock herself in her tiny room.

Wayland had packed up the rest of their things and gotten them moving on his own. They tried to travel between towns during the night whenever it was safe to do so, since mysteriously appearing in the town square with the light of dawn added to their mystique and drew in more patrons. That night, Kara’s anger kept her awake for several hours as the wagon bumped and shook its way down the muddy road. Eventually, however, the familiar motion and the exhaustion from a long day’s work combined to send her off to sleep.

She woke up when her body slammed into the wall. She felt herself hurled towards the ceiling and then against the other wall, ricocheting from one side to the other over and over again, all the while surrounded by the sounds of splintering wood, breaking glass, and screaming horses. Once everything finally stopped moving the cacophony was replaced by a strange drumming. It took Kara several disoriented moments to figure out what had happened – the wagon had tumbled down a steep slope or fallen off a short cliff. As water leaked in her broken window she realized that the drumming must be rain.

The door to Kara’s room was wedged shut or blocked on the other side, and she was forced to kick out the remains of her broken window and crawl through it to escape. In the dim pre-dawn light she tried to make sense of her surroundings and situation. The wagon lay on its side at the bottom of what looked to be an old streambed – certainly some kind of gorge. The ground under Kara’s feet was a slippery, sucking mud. Both of the horses were dead. She did not see her father. Some of the liquid running into her eyes was blood, not rainwater. Her whole body hurt.

Kara called out to her father several times, but he did not answer. She finally spotted him during a flash of lightning. He had either been thrown from the wagon as it fell or fallen off before it stopped moving – Kara was still too disoriented to be sure which direction they had fallen from. As she moved closer she could hear that he must be alive, because he was moaning over and over again that he was sorry. When Kara was close enough to see her father’s injuries she stumbled, suddenly nauseous. Between the dizziness and the mud she was unable to get to her feet again, and in the end she was forced to crawl to him through the mud, as though it were her legs that had been shattered, and not his.

Kara found herself unable to speak. The last thing she had said to her father was to call him a stupid old man. It was desperately important that she say something else, anything else. Otherwise, "stupid old man" might be the last words she ever said to her father. But she could barely breathe, let alone speak.

Wayland opened his eyes and saw her crouched in the mud looking at him in horror and anguish. His face twisted into a pained little smile.

“I guess I must look pretty bad?” he said, and the little laugh at the end turned into a painful cough. Suddenly, Kara was furious all over again.

“Don’t you dare make jokes!” she hissed. She wanted to shake him or slap him or at least scream at him, but she didn’t dare. She forced some false calm into her voice. “Hang on, Papa, I’m going to find a way out of…” she trailed off when she realized she still wasn’t sure where they were.

“Dried up riverbed, I think,” Wayland said. “I didn’t realize we were so close…the rain…I think the rain softened the edge, and it caved in under us.”

“Why didn’t you stop the wagon when the rain started?” Kara asked. Now she was angry with herself instead of with him – right now, the important thing wasn’t how this had happened. The important thing was to get help before her father bled to death in the mud.

“I didn’t think it would…get this bad. Just a passing storm, I thought.”

Clearly, he had been mistaken. If anything, the rain was coming down harder, the mud turning soupier.

“Stay here,” Kara said, an absurd, ridiculous thing to say. She was panicking. She needed to get a hold of herself. “I’m going to look around.”

Kara was appalled to find that the situation was even worse than it seemed. The sides of the riverbed were too high and too steep to climb even if they weren’t currently slick with mud. The feeble light improved a bit as dawn grew closer, but she could still barely see where she was going. The mud underneath them gradually turned into muddy water. Her father’s injuries were too severe for her to risk moving him even a little, so he lay shivering in the deepening water.

She went back to check on him often at first, but it became too painful to see the look of hope in his eyes die each time she returned with no good news, and she started ranging further away on her searches before returning to him. Eventually, she came back and didn’t see that look of hope anymore. He was giving up.

“Kara,” he said, “You have to get out of here. This…this place is flooding. You have to get out of here.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do!” Kara said. But she knew what he meant.

“I know you…don’t want to leave me like this. But you have to. You have to go. Please honey. I…please don’t let me have killed us both.”

Kara kept looking for a way out, but it was clearly hopeless. The water was getting deeper, and had an obvious current to it. She slogged her way back to her father, and he did not open his eyes at her noisy approach. Kara rushed forward, terrified that he was dead. No, he was still breathing. It was ragged, though, and his eyelids jittered as if he was having some kind of seizure. She shook him and yelled for him to wake up, but there was no change. Then she noticed a bit of paper clutched in his hand. She wrenched it free and saw that it was a page from the notebook that he always carried, where he wrote down new story ideas or other bits of inspiration.

It was note, scrawled in the dark with a stub of pencil on wet paper by someone clearly in a great deal of pain.

I love you. Sorry. Hope this works. Tread softly. I love you.

Kara read it twice, but it seemed unlikely that it was meant to say anything else. Hope what works? Tread softly?

Then she noticed the little bag resting on his chest. The little empty bag. The bag where he kept his Light. The empty bag where he kept his Light.

The last time she’d seen that bag, it had held enough Light for another week of performances.

He had taken it all.

Kara felt numb. It seemed inconceivably perverse that her dying father would choose to kill himself, and furthermore to do it using something that she hated to much. That can’t have been what he was trying to do, even though it was sure to be a lethal dose of the stuff. But she couldn’t fathom what else his plan might have been…until she saw the softly glowing staircase leading up out of the gorge.

It appeared to be made of sturdy oak and brass. There was even an elaborately carved handrail for her to hold, and grooves in each stair that channeled to rainwater over the side. Wayland had clearly put a lot of care and effort into it.

It really was an insane, desperate idea.

Kara leaned in close to hug her father one last time and to whisper into his ear.

“It worked, Papa,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. She knew that might very well be a lie, but she wanted to say it regardless. If he could still hear her, hopefully it would bring him some peace. “I love you, Papa.” An even more important thing to say.

Kara sloshed her way through the deepening water towards the staircase.

Hesitantly, she placed her foot on the bottom step.