1
Once upon a time, there was a little village called Talythia. It belonged to the Kolkos Province, sitting on the outer rim of the kingdom of the Yecateríne dynasty and precariously hedged by Zeraphathia, an empire believed to have been founded by a legendary demon. The village was shrouded in forest, dotted with cottages and little huts in which its inhabitants lived, surrounded by lush greenery both natural and harvested. Talythia was the home of the singular waterfall from which the surrounding demesnes took their drinking water and bath water and cooking water. The Lila Waterfall, which rose high above the village to the northwest, thundering down from Czar Peak, got its life from a river flowing from somewhere far north in Kolkos, that emptied out into the Gulf of Kholadna that mingled with the Ocean, the name of which no one of the village knew.
The denizens of Talythia led simple lives; they were mostly farmers, of rice and cattle and vegetables and fruit, but also they were craftspeople and tradesmen, and, like anywhere else one may venture in the vast region of Pingtan, Talythia was a place where a number of witches made their homesteads. Some of these witches, men and women alike, were farmers and homemakers as well, but most often were known in the provinces for their herbs and potions that could cure an ailment or help to catch the eye of a lover. Some could use manipulations of sorts; such as those who could with a thought and a flick of the wrist fashion a puddle of water into a liquid puppet or a short wall; or those who could in that same manner transform a flicker of flame into a hardy bonfire for nighttime festivities in the village.
Two such witches were Sunila Calder and her seven-year-old daughter Marina. They lived in an ivy-covered old water mill on the river just below the Falls, a quaint little cottage with a chimney and a far view of virtually the entire village. Marina’s father, Douglas Quade Calder, had been killed when she was only three years old, protecting his sleeping young family from robbers, generally believed to have been two unnamed murderers from the Zeraphathian empire—an attack unheard of before, and so unrepeated thereafter. So the mother and daughter lived in some subconscious level of fear in their cozy pine home on the Colkien.
“Mama!” the little girl called through the cottage. She raced through from the back door out the front, where her mother was replanting the year’s crop of herbs and vegetables, arranged neatly in rows parallel to the front porch. Marina burst through the open doorway and ran to her mother, who was crouched over newly turned soil with a trowel in one hand and a bag of Klamath weed seeds in the other. “Mama, can I go for a walk along the river?” she asked.
Sunila looked up at her daughter, shaking her bangs out of her pretty blue eyes, the same that her daughter had inherited. “You promise to be home before dark?” the woman replied. She was a young woman, in only her later twenties; Douglas and she had fallen in love and married early, when Sunila herself was only sixteen. The eyes with which she questioned her little daughter now were still youthful and lively.
“Yes, Mama. I promise.”
Her mother smiled. “Go on then, Marina. Have fun, and be careful!” She called this last bit, as her daughter had trotted off at the first sign that her mother would let her go.
—
Little Marina slowed down once she was out of sight of her home, just a little way up the river. She tied back her long brown hair, which was the only thing she had inherited from her father, aside from his nose and his strong spirit, and hummed to herself as she walked. Marina was a solitary child, since she and her mother lived far away from the other children, who were on the other side of the village with the new schoolhouse. Her mother had begun homeschooling her two years ago, and was delighted to learn first-hand how bright her daughter was, in both academics and in learning her magical abilities. The girl, with some concentration on the river, fashioned her fingers in the shape of a walking man, which then manifested itself on the surface of the hasty river water. So she walked along the river with her little friend, humming daintily and soaking in the beautiful summer day and all the colors of the Talythian forest.
As Marina walked, the edge of the forest drew in as the trees had grown closer and closer to the river’s edge. She had fine-tuned her ears to the sound of birdsong, and hearing the many being sung around and above her, she easily noticed the unsettling rustle in the trees at her left. It was quick, and stopped abruptly several times, seeming to close in on her, then wait for her to get ahead so it could catch up to her again; but she saw nothing, and so returned to concentrating on the little water man she had made instead. It could be some little animal, she thought, something that’s just little and curious, like me. I won’t bother it.
The girl paid the noise no mind for a good while. She walked closely enough to the line of trees that each one brushed against her arm, so as not to be steered into the empty high water gully from the last rainy season. When the path became too narrow for even Marina’s small body, she made her way through the trees that were standing side by side like watchful sentries, forgetting completely about the disturbance and the little man on the river, who proceeded to walk to his death against a rock jutting out of the water. With the confidence that comes with familiarity, Marina made her way through the brush and into the forest.
Birds fluttered about above the youth’s head as they caught wind of the cracking of twigs and branches beneath her bead-adorned gypsy slippers. Marina clawed her way through the thorny vines and drooping moss that wrapped their hands around the skinny birches and the tall pines, navigating her way through thickets and high grasses.
Once she lost sight of the Colkien River, the girl turned back toward her cottage and waded through the tall grass like water for about five kilometers, until she came to an uncanny clearing amidst the brush. Here the grass did not grow; it stayed always the same length, like turf, littered with a few medium-sized stones and the occasional branch fallen from the giant angelim tree at almost the exact center of this elliptical clearing. The old tree had a base about one meter around, and the rest of the trunk was about half a meter in diameter, with vibrant green leaves growing off the large, sometimes decrepit, boughs. A long, thick, thornless vine snaked down from one branch, and curled back up to hook around another—a makeshift swing. This was Marina’s refuge, the only place that she alone would go. Her mother did not know this place, and nor did anyone else, that she was aware of; this was hers.
Marina slipped her shoes off next to the great tree and sat on her swing, only the tips of her toes touching the earth beneath it. She simply sat there, without swinging, listening to the world around her and enjoying the warmth from the specks of sunlight that entered her haven between the angelim’s foliage.
Again she heard the rustling somewhere in the forest outside of her clearing. The girl listened curiously to it, tracking it with her ears, trying to piece together what it was. Dangerous creatures in the forest were so rare, especially around Talythia, that Marina was hardly alarmed by the mysterious stalker. She finally felt a twinge of anxiety when she heard the rushed gait of a biped—a person—coming up behind her, but by then it was too late to flee.
“Hello, little witch,” a voice cooed from behind her—a young man’s voice. He placed a hand on her shoulder, holding Marina where she sat.
“H-Hello,” the girl replied.
“What is your name, little witch?”
“Who are you?”
“Perhaps I will tell you, after you answer my inquiry first, little witch. What is your name?”
Marina’s voice came uncertainly, “Marina Calder.”
The voice chuckled, and he repeated the name aloud, to himself, musingly.
“Who are you?” Marina asked again.
“Prince Dmitriy Zeraphath, my dear Marina. Second heir to the throne of my father’s Empire. A lover,” the voice seemed to smirk at this, or so his voice inflected, “of children. Now, my little Marina, I noticed your exquisitely cerulean eyes and lovely face, and I have decided that to you I will give an option.
“My brother, Prince Brennan, is needy of a wife, you see; our poor dear father is dying, and to become the Emperor in his stead my handsome brother will need to marry. He sent me, dear little Marina, to fetch him a beautiful young wife, and this I do intend to do this afternoon. If you will not accept this offer of marriage—and how could such a beautiful little witch like yourself reject the courtship of a soon-to-be emperor?—then, my dear,” Dmitriy’s voice piped up cheerfully at this last bit in the way that a voice betrays a wicked smile, “I have other plans for a treasure such as you.”
The seven-year-old turned her head to glance into the eyes of the man with his hand gripping her shoulder. Everything about him was dark; he was of a tan complexion, raven-black hair and eyes, clad in clothes that were simple and black as well, a long-sleeved shirt and long pants, despite the heat. Marina saw the gleaming tips of fangs beneath his upper lip, which was curved into a lustful smirk. Even in her village naivety, the girl became uneasy and knew what his intentions were, even if she could not put her finger on what it actually was. “I want my mom,” she whined softly.
“No, my dear little Marina. You will come with me, to meet my brother or otherwise.” Dmitriy snarled, still in his sing-song way of speaking.
Marina swallowed hard and frowned, her body trembling. “I…” she began, then stopped. After a moment of consideration, she continued: “I-I want to meet him, then.”
With a bit of a frown casting its shadow on his own brow, Dmitriy nodded. He picked up her gypsy slippers and put them on the earth beneath her feet, and Marina slipped them on. The prince moved his arm from the girl’s shoulder to wrap it around her waist, pulling her up off her swing. Wordlessly he carried her away, across the Colkien bridge to the south of Talythia and to a coach that would take them into the capital city of Zeraphathia.
