The World Beyond the Wall

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley, wrote Shadow, his quill scratching across the parchment in the candlelight.

Lost Tom remembered those days before, when the sedges stretched high toward the sun. When he would tumble through them, laughing and singing with the other village children, the sheepdogs bounding in their wake. Those summer afternoons when the blueberries grew fat in the alpine meadows, and he would crush them with a potato-masher, adding sugar and spices brought by the traders. When he would preserve the mixture in labelled jars, and lick the earthy sweet juice from his fingers.

In his thirteen years of life, Shadow had never tasted blueberry jam. He hadn’t the faintest idea how dogs behaved, or what alpine summers felt like, or even if sedges were pleasant to run through. But the books he read let him imagine.

He felt as free as the sparrows flitting through the rafters; as bold as the prowling wolves. Until it all ended, that cold spring morning.

Shadow paused, dipping his stolen quill in its stolen inkwell, looking up from where he hunched at the desk. No moonlight through the ragged curtains. No wind beyond the window. The orphanage slept, and the world slept with it, and the boy made his decision. Yes, tonight would be the night.

The village had named him Lost Tom, as he had no father or mother. It was he who saw the dragons first, as he fed Mr. Fen’s goats before the sun spilled its yellow light into the Valley. A black smudge against the dark sky. Tom watched it circle twice above the village before it vanished over the northern peaks, and when he told Mr. Fen, the man only laughed. "You read too many books," he said. But it wasn’t long before the shadow returned, and hundreds with it, scaled beasts the size of pine trees soaring through the sky. Their leathery wings whipping up snow and earth as they landed, the ground trembling beneath them.

His hand froze. A floorboard creaked in the hallway. He scribbled the next line.

Their footprints scarred the earth with craters.

Another creak, approaching his room.

Shadow put down his quill.

He snuffed out the candle, pushed the inkwell and parchment into the shadows, swept his tattered copy of Skarlend Alpine Botany off the desk. He crawled into the narrow bed and pulled the threadbare blanket up to his chin. Eyes closed, breath steady. A sharp click as the door unlocked, a groan as it swung open. Her cold presence leaching from the hallway.

“Shadow,” said the Headmistress. “I know you’re awake.” He could feel her eyes on his back, sharp and careful as surgeon’s knives as they prodded in the gloom. Nothing to see here, he prayed, but a dark haired boy in a cramped room in a children’s house. Sleeping peacefully.

She sniffed. “Is that candle smoke?”

He waited for the belt to whistle down. For the buckle to bite into his back and tear through his skin, and he clenched his teeth and thought, I will not scream. “So you’ve been writing again,” she said, her voice like a blade across glass. “You know the consequences. We’ll discuss this in the morning.”

His shoulders relaxed ever so slightly.

“I’ve received word that they’re willing to take you,” she continued. “They’ll be here tomorrow. Despite you being weak with your…abilities. It seems there are still operations in the north interested in your sort.” He imagined her pale face leering over him, her lips twisting around the words. Abilities. Your sort.

“I thought I’d give you warning before tomorrow. You’ve been adopted, Shadow. Be grateful.” He heard the swish of her dress as she turned from the room, and the door scraped shut behind her. Click.

Only then did he breathe.

He listened as her footsteps creaked down the hall and disappeared, until there was only the scratch of mice in the walls. Soon even they retired for the evening, and the world returned to its slumber.

Shadow sat up in bed and thought of saving the Valley from the dragons. It was tempting, to sit back down and become lost again, to resolve the villagers’ problems with a scratch of his quill and a flurry of ink. To transform Tom into the hero who would bring peace to the Valley. But not yet. The boy wasn’t ready yet.

Shadow rolled onto his stomach in the dark, leaning over the side of the bed until his eyes met the rotted, mildew-blackened floor beneath. He pulled a cloth sack from the shadows, lifting it into his lap and opening the drawstrings, feeling inside. Yes, it was all there.

Two wedges of cheese.

Four dried sausages.

Three red apples.

A small bunch of grapes.

A dull paring knife and a box of matches.

All of it stolen from the Headmistress’ quarters. His heart hammered as he crept across the tiny room, pulling the parchment from under his desk. He cradled the world of the Valley in his hands, placing it gently inside the sack. Then the inkwell with its cork stopper, slipped carefully into his pocket, and lastly the quill, laid on top of the parchment. In a moment of fantasy he retrieved the quill and stuck it in his hair, and he imagined himself as a knight from a faraway land. But then the feather drooped and nearly fell out, and he placed it back on top of the parchment.

His bare feet padded across the wooden floor, toward the square window, the sack slung over his shoulder. He drew the burlap curtains back: perfect darkness outside. There was the dead grass five stories below, and the tall stone wall forty paces away, barely visible in the gloom. And beyond the wall, one hundred paces north of his room, he knew an ancient oak tree twisted from the ground.

The window was bolted shut. Shadow took a shaky breath. Then he rammed an elbow through the glass.

A crash, a stream of glinting shards down the stone facade. His heart thundering in his chest. He broke off the jagged edges and peered out the window, whispering into the night, “I’m ready.”

He’d been Speaking for the past four years now. He’d been practising. He could do this.

Shadow let his mind drift to the oak tree, his eyes closed and his breath measured, easing his heart to a nervous thud. He willed the roots to move. He imagined them pushing through the earth, the soft spring earth, creeping over the wall and onto the grass, wooden fingers prying at the stone facade and climbing toward his window…

A breeze kissed his face, soft and sweet and whispering two words.

"I come."

Footsteps in the hall. A key rattling in the lock. The door burst open and there was the Headmistress, an oil lamp swinging in her hand. Three orderlies lurking in the hall behind her. “What are you doing, Shadow?” she said calmly, her face flickering a ghoulish orange in the lamplight. He stood frozen at the window, his eyes darting between the room and the night. Then movement outside, five stories below, a pale root slithering over the stone wall, across the grass and toward the orphanage. Making for his window. He had no other choice.

Shadow hurled his sack into the night. It hit the ground below with a thud, and then he was scrambling onto the windowsill, up onto the wood, cool air brushing his face. He perched there like a gargoyle, teetering on the edge and realizing a fall from this height would most certainly kill him.

The Headmistress’ eyes widened. “What are you doing, boy?"

The orderlies were across the room in two strides. Thick hands stretching forward, ready to pull him back inside, back to the Headmistress and her belt and her careful, venomous words –

Shadow jumped.

A rush of air in his ears. Cool air. Sweet with the scent of damp grass, and fresh rain, and honeysuckle.

The root met him halfway. Branching out into a small oak tree, leaves budding and unfurling, whole seasons condensed into seconds. Shadow grasped a bough, his arms nearly yanking out of their sockets as he hung on. “Thank you,” he breathed. Feet scrambling for a foothold, his body swinging about, sound of cracking branches, a snap and he was falling again, reaching out and grabbing another limb. Clambering down toward the trunk, legs wrapped around it, slipping and twisting, dropping the last six feet to the grass. One of the orderlies crawled out of the window above him, reaching for the upper limbs, jumping into the tree’s embrace.

Shadow hauled his sack from the ground and sprinted for the wall. Wet grass under his feet.

The other two orderlies emerged from around the far corner of the building, the Headmistress in their wake, fifty feet away. One orderly raised his palm and a jet of blue flame arced over the grass, igniting the roots on the stone wall. Shadow skidded to a halt as fire surged in front of him. A pyromancer?

“We don’t want no trouble, boy!” the orderly called. Thirty feet, twenty feet, they would be on him in moments. Shadow turned and ran alongside the wall as new roots branched away from the flames, following him, snaking up the stone bricks to form a crude ladder. Thank the Ten Divines.

Shadow hurled his sack over the wall and grasped one of the twisting limbs, heaving himself up, reaching the top, tumbling forward and grabbing at nothing. Yelling as he fell. Down, down, down, landing with a grunt in a bed of damp grass. Voices on the far side of the wall. The orphanage on the far side of the wall. The Headmistress on the far side of the wall.

For the first time in seven years, Shadow found himself in the world beyond the wall.

He grabbed his cloth sack from the grass. “Now retreat!” he urged the ancient oak. “Fall back, grow thorns, anything to stop them from following!” He nearly collapsed with the effort of Speaking, grey spots dancing in his eyes.

A voice rumbled from the ground, flowing through the soles of his feet, touching his lungs, his heart, his mind. “You haven’t the energy for such a command.”

He tried Speaking to the grass, and nausea bubbled in his stomach. A growl emanated from the earth. “Now you can only run.”

He ran.

The sack slung over his shoulder, drawstrings clenched in his fist. Nothing but a wall of grass in front of him, growing well above his head. He pushed through it, away from the wall, a wave of blue flame scorching the greenery behind him. “Don’t burn the boy!” he heard the Headmistress scream. “We need him unharmed!”

Shadow hurtled blindly through the grass, the story racing feverishly in his mind.

Tom fled from the valley, away from the burning and the slaughter. He ran until the night was upon him, the moon like a silver button stitched to the fabric of the sky. Holding back the darkness.

Shadow’s lungs burned and his heart thundered and he ran until the grass fell away, until his feet hit packed dirt and he found himself on a road. A forest of pale oak on the far side. He sprinted toward it.

Tom slid down one slope, and then another, dragon fire burning orange and green and purple in the Valley behind him.

Wait, that wasn’t right. Tom was the hero of this story. Why was he running from the dragons?

He reached a wooded dale and slowed, catching his breath.

The trees seemed to lean forward, embracing Shadow. He ran until the flames disappeared behind him, and the smoke no longer prickled his nose, until his legs shook and he could run no more, and then he walked, stumbling between the trees. Moving deeper into the forest.

Tom, our unlikely hero, felt a change overcome him. He turned back, mustering the courage to face the dragons –

What utter drivel. Tom was a coward, a boy who’d fled from everything he’d known to save himself. It wasn’t in his nature to face the dragons.

Shadow collapsed to the ground at the base of a gnarled oak, his back against the smooth bark. Breath rattling in his lungs. Maybe Tom wasn’t the hero. Maybe there was no hero in this story. Maybe the dragons would decimate the Valley and the moral was to run when you still could. Shadow would have to think about that. Whenever he was able to write again.

He eased onto his back and peered through a gap in the canopy, at the star-speckled sky above. A window toward the face of the universe, Shadow thought, and he was so small and inconsequential beneath it all.

No, don't think like that. There was no need to think like that. Because he was free.

By the Ten Divines, he was free.

Shadow squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, sat up and brushed the dirt from his hair. What was this feeling? He wanted to whoop and laugh and sing, to scream and curse, to ask the world why it had to be so cruel. But he didn't. Now was not the time.

Keep moving forward, his brother had told him all those years ago. That was easy enough, just one foot in front of the other. Act as the hero would. Slay the dragons when they came, because they would come. Everyone’s life had its dragons. Every story had its dragons. It was just a matter of what form they took, and how you faced them.

That was a good metaphor. He smiled, closed his eyes, raised his face to the canopy above and breathed in. Damp earth, damp grass, damp air.

Then he eased to his feet, slinging the sack over his shoulder. One step forward, and then another, the oaks watching him silently. He’d start by travelling to the coast. Find work if he was lucky, perhaps make a little coin. Ask the trees for advice. He took another step, then another, padding through the forest in the perfect darkness. Bracing himself for whatever dragons lay ahead.