Midnight's Song (10 page)

Emily didn’t even have to
say it. I knew what she meant. “I know how you feel. I miss mine
too.” I told her softly. I began holding back the tears myself. “I
was just thinking about her a few minutes ago…about how she used to
tell me fairy tales and sing with me.” I let out a small laugh,
reminiscing. “My favorite one was the one we’d sing after she’d
tell me the story about the mortal princess –”

“Who fell in love with the
prince?” Emily suddenly lit, finishing my sentence for me. “I love
that story!”

I smiled, for some reason compelled to
start singing that same song. I knew it by heart, and so did she. I
didn’t stop to realize that I had given up my singing – forgetting
the grief that had stifled my voice. I forgot about all other cares
during that moment, losing myself in the song. Emily soon joined in
my chorusing.

“
In folly he thought he
came, only to bring her rain

But the love was within
wrapped up in the skin

That she’d see to be him
all the same”

Emily fell against
the wall afterward, almost in disbelief. “Elissa
McClellan
,
you
have a beautiful voice. You shouldn’t hide it.”

I looked up at her
from my bed, seeing the bittersweet tinge in her eyes from the
emotion of the moment. She had called me by my name; my real
name!
It was an act that seemed small…but
it spoke an entire story to me all the same. It was as if a glass
wall had just been shattered. We were truly connecting. I was born
of the 10
^th
caste – not as a Devereaux. Emily was of the
11
^th
.
I was more like her than I was like Stella or Wren any day. When
she called me who I really was, she was telling me that she knew
that no matter what anyone said or did – we were both very much
the
same.

And in that moment, she
became more than a servant to me; she became my friend.

I’m not certain when this
happened, but I know it did.

The skies were clear and
the moon of an eerie glow that night. Not one human being was awake
to see the spectacle which would occur. If anyone had been – only
the good Lord knows what would have happened to them.

I had been told of the
almost-mythical tunnels that lurked beneath the manor. They were
located beneath my home and those of all of the other 2’s and 3’s
in the region. Everyone knew about them and their history – though
it was a history that seemed strangely incomplete.

They had once been a
bustling circuit of maids and servants who walked through their dim
pathways on a daily basis. They connected all of the wealthy homes
to each other, making it easy for workers to get here and there
without troubling the world above. There were even parts of the
tunnels that had been converted into living spaces for the
servants.

Better letting them live beneath the
earth than to soil the world on top of it, I suppose.

One day, the Magistrate
ordered all of the tunnels to be boarded up. There had been no
collapses or robberies in the tunnels, so it baffled people as to
how or why it happened. Normally the Magistrate came up for some
reason for the things he would do – maybe a phony-sounding reason,
but a reason nonetheless. This time, he was completely silent. And
perhaps it was for good reason.

You see, he knew
something that the people did not. He knew that in those tunnels,
there was a ticking time bomb simply
waiting
to go off. There was the
potential – not just an uncertain potential, but an
imminent
potential –
that what was contained in those tunnels would threaten his reign
forever. And, it wasn’t a human threat. There was no secretive
rebellion or human conspiracy going on down there. What was going
to happen in those tunnels was much more
dangerous.

For 50 years, the Magistrate sat
dreading the threat that lurked below. After a long while had
passed and two more Magistrates had taken the throne after him, the
tunnels had become long-since forgotten. Though, the threat had
not. All that these brutal rulers could do was wait. It could still
happen at any time and for any reason.

And after all of
those generations, it was happening
tonight.

In the deepest of
the crevices in that black, spanning channel; a strange thing began
to happen. A harsh wind came, blowing through every single part of
the tunnels in a spontaneous gust! Whatever caused this wind to
come about wasn’t of the earth we know – and it was no natural
event. The world above remained unchanged; but the world below had
begun to transform. The rock began to quake, the walls moving in a
sudden burst of convulsing energy! The wind began to pick up speed
– howling so loud that it was almost truly
singing.

Before another
second passed, a void opened up in the side of the rocky earth.
Where there once was only dark, moist ground; there was light. It
was a marvelous, translucent light! A door had opened up from
nothing – a door that had seemed to come about through nothing but
the
air.

In all of the
passage’s glowing splendor – something jumped through. Not just
something; but
someone.
A figure suddenly dove through it from the other
side. He cartwheeled through the air and rolled out onto the earthy
ground, heaving. The passageway behind him suddenly snapped shut.
The wind stopped gusting. There was darkness.

The world above remained unchanged –
so there was no way for the Magistrate to know who had come to this
place. There was no way for him to know that the fear that his
grandfather and the father before him had always been wary of had
actually come true. One thing was for certain – this being was not
of our world.

Of all the stories
that had been told, this was the epiphany of it all. This creature
was not one of us. He wasn’t mortal. This creature had been told of
as one of the
angels
who had walked among us. One of the monsters in human skin.
He was one of the guardians
that came
through doors of air and with powers of both darkness and
light.

And this one wasn’t
an ordinary one of those creatures, either – this one was a
prince.

Even though war had
been prophesied, he hadn’t come to wage it. This prince came to our
world without even intending to make himself known. In fact, here
he wished that he might not even be called a prince at all. He
wished to renounce this title – this
curse
– which he had been born with.
He was not coming to our world to conquer it…but because he was
running from his own.

He stood up in the darkness of the
underbelly which he had escaped to. Where was he to go now? Could
he truly pull it off – hiding with the humans? That was something
he did not know. One thing that was certain, and it was that the
blockades of this tunnel wouldn’t be able to contain him. They
wouldn’t be able to contain him or anything else that escaped
through these portals.

Just as this creature had
crossed over – others were sure to follow.

“Now, sit up
straight!” It was the first thing I had heard from Monica
Blackwood. I heard about her – gathering from the approving
familial nods that she must have been respected a great deal - but
clearly not
from
her. I won’t say that I regretted my failure to expect the
unexpected; but I will say that any preconceived notions I had
about this woman were for the most part, totally and completely
false.

The day after my primping, I sat in
the study waiting for the woman to enter in. Of all the things I’d
been told, I knew that she was incredibly smart and dignified.
Along with several teaching certifications; she had a magisterial
doctorate in the 4 major sciences (Astronomy, Chemistry, Botany,
and Existence). Not only that, but she was the first and one of the
only women in the entire realm to have done so. I assumed that
having such a scientific mind, she would touch only on
academics.

I was wrong.

I nervously fiddled in my seat and
twiddled my fingers around on the desk as I waited. I soon took
notice of a moveable model of the solar system that sat on the desk
only a few inches away from me. The sun sat at the far end,
dazzling all of the planets orbiting around it. Beside the earth
hovered a moon and a strange, crystalline object. The same
crystalline object had several identical brothers and sisters that
were scattered all around the miniature solar system. Each one was
strung on a wire that hung it in place and allowed it to move
around. Intrigued, I lost myself and began playing with it like a
small child.

It was at that very moment that Dr.
Blackwood came in. Without even so much as seeing me for a moment’s
time, she ordered me to sit up straight and retain my posture.
Then, taking notice from behind her glasses that I was fidgeting –
she looked at me completely mortified. She turned for a moment,
muttering to the wall.

“We have much work to do…” She
mumbled.

Over the next two
hours, I became extremely well acquainted with Monica –
ehem,
Dr. Blackwood
– and all of her tendencies. For one thing, she was
incredibly proper. Also, she was quite organized; perhaps to an
alarming degree. Twenty minutes in, it became apparent how she was
able to pull off having achieved so much in respect to the
left-brain. She wasn’t a terrible person – she was actually quite
intriguing – it was although apparent that she did have a very
certain “way” of doing things.

“Seeing that it is your first time
with me, we will start quite simply,” Monica told me a few minutes
into our first lesson. “We will work first on your eloquence and
posture.”

It seemed like the
kind of thing I’d only read about, yet somehow it was all reality
to me. Just like a princess-in-training, Dr. Blackwood forced me to
stand up straight and balance a book on my head until I had
achieved perfect posture. Though, this “perfect posture” was an
incredibly difficult thing to achieve. With each try, the book
would fall off of my head and topple to the ground. After the
10
^th
try, Monica Blackwood realized that today wasn’t going to be
that day that I achieved it.

“Hmm…” she trailed
off, staring discomfited at the books that had for the
10
^th
time toppled onto the floor. “You must learn to stand tall.
But, we can do so another day. I suppose now we might work on your
grammar?”

Humbly, I agreed. So, for the next
hour and a half or so we worked on word patterns and sentence
conjugation. With her long wooden stick, she pointed to the
blackboard on the wall urging me to pronounce every bit of each
simple word with extreme care and caution. More than anything else,
she stressed a great deal about my accent.

My accent? Apparently I had one.
Proper ladies apparently spoke with more eloquence than I did. It
was a peasant accent, she stressed. Honestly, she wasn’t trying to
offend my lineage. I could tell. But my goodness – the way I spoke
must have irritated her so; for she felt it necessary to completely
beat the diction into me.

“We say
cah-lore –
not
cah-leur
.” The teacher
stressed, pointing toward the chalk-laden words on the board. I had
to keep myself from laughing. This particular word sounded so
amusingly odd in a formal accent! “Proper ladies speak in rolling
patterns. Peasants speak in short, repetitive clicks. It is a fact
which has been proven by the most established linguists. I am
tasked with forming you into a proper lady; so please do as I
instruct. Now say it with me:
cah-lore.
”

The teacher continued her
beating day-after-day, starkly meeting with me for two or three
hours each morning and instructing me on matters such as diction
and posture. Our lessons were mostly productive – if turning me
into a well-mannered circus monkey is considered productive. Still,
we didn’t get to science. I wondered how or why that could be the
case if Monica Blackwood was everything that she said that she
was.

Dr. Blackwood was never
spiteful – but she was straightforward nonetheless. It seemed that
there was one strange thing about our lessons, and it was that she
never used my name. One day she made it plain as to why.

“This is your
seventh lesson. You have been taught the basic principles of
etiquette; it is time to move on to other things. Before you do, we
must handle the matter of your
name.”
She emphasized the last word
in a way that led me to believe that she felt she was handling
something extremely detestable.