No good magic would conjure a sanctuary like that.
I told our Eldest about the yellow Dream House once I could bring myself to talk about it. That’s when she told me that the evil mages like to torment us with bad things from our past. I asked her what had happened to that yellow house in the past, why it was so terrible inside. Eldest thought for a while. Her gaze went narrow like it does when she’s sorting the good dried berries from the spoiled ones. Her clothes were the only ones that hadn’t gone to rags, since we always gave her the newest felt to wear, and I started to feel twisty-nervous standing in front of her with my skirt in shreds.
“How do you think the Ruined City came to be?” she finally said. I had never imagined the city as anything else but what it was now—a terrible play-land for angry mages. I started to tell Eldest that it must have been the mages who had created the city.
Except in my heart, I knew that it hadn’t been the mages. I knew from Eldest’s hard stare. From the way her chin wobbled just before she turned away. Mages never create anything at all. They only conjure things that already exist from other places, or turn good things bad.
It was the people, then.
It might be difficult for you to imagine how people could smash up something as big as a city without any kind of magic. But I’ve seen a whole camp trampled and charred. I’ve seen the look in someone’s eye when he means to kill—like there’s nothing that can stop him from tearing the whole world apart. And long-ago times, people made those great screaming machines the mages conjure in their not-sanctuaries. Machines can do about as much as magic can, I’ll bet.
So it was people and their machines who ruined the yellow Dream House, same as what happened to the Ruined City.
The evil mages probably sent the Dream House to me to hurt me because they hate my special love for the Other Place. No one else has ever seen the yellow house. Only me, who loves the stories of Dylan and the Girl Queen and the beautiful land they live in. Who has been visited by visions no one else has seen.
When I was a young girl I was once alone in the forest, gathering plants for medicines, when I caught a rare sight: a girl lifting up out of the ground as if out of water, her wet hair shining in the sun. Just for a moment she appeared, only one moment and then gone—vanished like a sanctuary. She was an avatar, a magical sighting sent to us from the past for shoring up our hearts. This avatar was the Water Nymph, a symbol of that which belongs to two worlds—water and land, our world and the Other Place. I am the only one who has seen her since the time our Eldest saw her, as a young girl.
When I went back to camp, our Eldest told me that long-ago times, there had been a stream there where I had seen the Water Nymph avatar, but it had dried up like so many others and filled in with trees and dirt. She said my sighting of the Nymph meant that I had one foot in the Other Place, just as I must have put one foot into that dried-up stream.
Not long after that we went on our way to the Cold House of Bounty Sanctuary, which is a metal room full of icy-cold foods that sits on a wide gravel bank. It’s one of the best sanctuaries but also the hardest to get to—not only do we have to pass over the mountain ridge, but we also have to be on the lookout for bands who don’t want to share the Bounty.
We were tired and wary by the time we reached Cold House, but still we sought out the avatar that appears near there quite often who we call the Exhorter. When she appears, she looks right through all of us with her piercing stare and says, “When you finish all of your homework, you can play one hour of Mario. Just one hour, don’t try to ask for more.”
Then she sits down and stares through our torsos, just stares like she’s watching to see what we’ll do, and sometimes she’ll move her wrist or give a snort of laughter and then watch silently again. We children stand with our hands folded before us, contemplating her words. Finish your work and then play. It’s the simplest of commandments and the hardest to follow.
But this time when she said her words, it was different. It seemed to me she didn’t look through everyone. She looked right into my eyes. And so I knew her words held a special meaning for me. Finish your work.
Afterward, I told our Eldest that I knew I had a Special Work ahead of me, because I had seen the Water Nymph that few others have seen, and because the Exhorter had looked me right in the eye when she had exhorted.
“What is your Special Work?” Eldest asked.