Pain is fuel for writers. We experience life and loss and trauma. We experience happiness and it’s awful twin despair. We use those energies to imagine lives and worlds in which people face these things and the outcomes can play out in ways that it didn’t for us and for the ones we’ve seen hurt. This is not why I write, but it is often how I write. It is what Author Barbara Abercrombie calls ‘Writing out the Storm’ and it is in fact how I tend to make sense of trauma. And make sense of it I will…
Chapter 11
The group is settled by the fire and they are with a man who is meant to take them to their destination. He was provided to them as a guide in payment for the actions they took on behalf of the syndicate. During those actions there was a surge of magic and Ikrivain was able to channel that energy but others were not so lucky. There is bad magic in this place and people are dying from it. Their guide knows something is not well in the land and this time by the fire is an opportunity for them to all discuss what is happening.
Over the course of the conversation we hear the twins discuss their childhood and it is like they lived two completely different lives. Thea bore a terrible burden as the sister who faced all of the bad and shielded her twin from the horrors of the world. Marek already knows this and often tries to shush his lady from bringing stuff up.
Sensing a moment of reality, Ikrivain talks about his childhood and how he first thought it was happiness but realized that his mother was feeling trapped in the home and his father was living two lives and had a second home outside of theirs with joys and responsibilities he needed to attend to. He still wonders if there was a second son he sent out into the world and that he trusted with more than numbers and being this kind of home born man.
There is a lot of angst released in this chapter, and I will enjoy writing it. The chapter ends with sounds of animals gathering nearby but frightened by the flames and perhaps even more firghtened by what else lurks in the darkness. They make the fire larger and allow themselves sleep for they expect to travel harder and farther the next day in order to avoid whatever darkness is building in these woods.