Portfolio

Ada sat in the lab above her garage, listening to computer fans and crickets, waiting to meet the man who killed her father. She watched the branches of their crab apple tree quiver through the open window as her own hair fluttered around her face. On most other days, this is where her father would have been, surrounded by three or four empty mugs and five computer screens, grinning at her as she peeked through the railings from the top of the garage loft stairs. Today, she sat alone, still among the whirrings and steady blinks, her father’s sword-shaped letter opener hanging loose between her fingers. The lab air was dusty, and humming, and she didn’t mind having a moment to herself. She hadn’t yet decided what she would do when she saw him.

The girl named Dianna had a passion for keys. John, her little brother, couldn’t understand it, but he was happy enough to sit across from her on the dusty floorboards of their attic to watch her as she polished her collection. There were twelve in total, and each key had a different story. As Dianna took each off their hook to dust and shine them, she would tell John all about their doors and where they led. After all, a key was interesting because of what it kept locked away—at least to her. John preferred to wonder at their secretive juts and curves and edges, and to think about what noise they might make as they turned in a lock.

One day, during the last good summer, Dianna plucked a slender, silver key from its hook on the slant of the eaves. This was a key to the sky, she said, where clouds rolled like hills, bright and spongy and soft enough to sleep on. It was where the bird people lived in their proud, spiraling houses—houses that wound up into the sky like Jack’s giant beanstalk, except, instead of a giant at the top, they had pipes whose holes caught the wind, giant flutes singing each breath of the blustery blue day. The bird people had beaks where noses should be, and wings where arms should be, and they guarded great libraries full of books and keys and bees. It was the bees that pollinated the clouds to keep them solid. 

When Dianna hung the key back on its hook, her eyes crinkled a bit, like she already knew it was goodbye, somehow. John asked where the door to the sky was, and Dianna sighed. There were two, she said, and they were hidden a long time ago, because the books were too rare, and the keys were too precious, and the bees were too fragile. If an evil person ever found our silver key, the most beautiful libraries in the world would be in danger.

Our silver key? John asked. She didn’t normally share. Dianna just smiled. 

Next was a bronze key, a key to vast coral kingdoms under the sea, to pink and white streets that twisted and bucked through cities only to balk, rearing towards the sun, at the edges of oceanic abyss. If the cities hadn’t been underwater, they would have been intolerably noisy, with all the music and merry-making that went on at all times of the day and night. The people there had gills, and scales, and tails. Extra scales, glittering magenta and indigo and sapphire jewels, frosted their eyelids and the edges of their jaws. Their tongues were forked, and this made them excellent singers, enchanting but strange.

And the gold key? John asked. He though birds and fish were alright, but whenever Dianna talked about the gold key, it made him feel warm. Her words wrapped up around him, and even after that summer, if he concentrated on that story in particular, other things didn’t seem so hard.

The gold key was smaller than the bronze key—a thick, heavy thing whose parents had clearly been to the doors of the prison vaults of some ancient castle—and the silver key—which might have locked a guest bedroom in a respectable house, had it not led to the sky. No, the gold key could have been the key to a grandfather clock, or a weathered diary. It had the simplest bit, and was crowned by a circular bow and a small bulb collar. Every time John held the key, it was warm to the touch, and though he would never admit it, John could have sworn if he held still for a long while, he could hear it humming the faintest, sweetest ringing song he had ever heard. 

The gold key was the key of a king. Dianna always made her voice go low when she said his name, whispered it, rather, to the eaves. 

Gwydion, the Golden King.

When they left the house that summer, left everything to be buried by dust in the attic under the eaves, Dianna left the keys.

Winter hovered over South Shore beach with the same dark blush as the soaking gray sand. A few seagulls ruffled in the cold, squawking in hopes of finding a way through the silence, and, at the edge of the sand, just before the stubble of grass, squatted the Silent Watch. It was the beach house of a couple passed nearly ten years ago. 

At the door, the sweatered and shawled form of Colleen McGivern almost blended into the wind drenched wood, were it not for her curls burning red against the stark sky. Her eyes struck out over the landscape, unable to blink. 

It was the body of a dragon that had driven her back to the porch, its glittering mass like an alien among the sea foam and discarded driftwood. She, in a moment of reckless shock, had touched the leathery wings, the freezing obsidian scales, before the panic took her. Now it was all she could do to remain standing on her grandmother’s porch, the keys to the house burning a hole in her pocket. Instinct insisted she could not look away.

The rat and the mouse had fought that day, leaving the cat pleased to lap up the remnants. You ask the frog what the trouble was this time, and he responds that the rat had stolen a beetle from the mouse, a precious beetle, mummified in the icy winters of his ancestor mice from the North and later gilded with gold and silver and into its fragile frame, sapphires, rubies and emeralds were set. The frog mentions, with a croak, that he might have stolen it himself if his rheumatism hadn’t been acting up. But what was the result of the fight, you ask. The frog sips his goblet of bog water—1976, from a boggery owned by the toads of Hamfringe—and doesn’t respond. You wait, pensive, pondering over fire until the frog once again clears his throat. 

It really began much before the beetle, he said, before the creatures of this land learned to talk and dance. Long ago, there was a cabin, and in it lived a family of three, a wife, a husband, and one little girl. The child favored frills and soft blankets and gentle summer evenings chasing the fireflies around the bog. The husband worked as a lumberjack, each day following the road over the bridge and bog to the river and the forest to the West. Each day, the wife instructed their daughter in the ways of their world. The girl learned to hunt, to fish, to gather herbs, to avoid poisonous plants, and she was happy. But sometimes, in the glass by her candle at night, she would watch the shadows shift over her face until she could stand it no longer and up went the dainty yellow dress over her head, the one with the frills. It was her going-out dress, her mother had told her, and very precious. There was danger in the fingers of the trees and the mud puddles paddies always lingering around the unhappy bog so, her mother had told her, she must never wear it. As the face in the glass widened and lengthened, losing the baby fat to high cheek bones and only half of a smile, the young woman decided to forget. Even if she ignored the dangers, there was no one else to appreciate the dress. Treasuring could not stop the years from turning it lonely.

You tap the mottled wood of the table as the pub buzzes around you. What does this have to do with the rat and the mouse? The frog bobs his head, burping up a sigh. Patience, young grasshopper, he says.

The girl grew to love an axe at her side, a strong handshake, a clever response. The dress still hung, put away now and too small for anything but eyes. And she did gaze at it, wondering like we all do, if change was a good thing. Her father passed on, felled by a tree too many, and the woman and her mother weathered his loss, trading lumber for food, lumber for food. One evening much like this one, the woman decided to visit his grave—a mound of her own construction. From afar, she spied two figures, one the size of her fists stacked, and the other about half that.

The larger rested on his lank, a long tail, convincing enough to catch a fish with, teasing behind him. The lesser, his beady black eyes wicked and narrow, mustered his plumper frame with defiance, whipping his elegant tail. His snout stretched high, not intimidated by the other. These, though the woman didn’t know, were rat and mouse. When she stooped, putting her elbows on her knees and her palms to her face, she startled them motionless, so absorbed had they been in each other.

How do you do? she asked them, and they responded—

Wait, you stop the frog, didn’t you say this was before animals could talk? The frog ignores you.

He wasn’t as tall as Rufus—not as wide, or bright, or warm—and that’s what I liked about him. He wasn’t a strain to look at. He just was. So I just watched, perched on a stump as he worked away at the nick in his blade from his place by the fire. His dark hair stuck to his forehead, slick with sweat, and effort stained his cheeks with glowing color. His shoulders rolled with the steady motion, broken only when he tested the blade’s edge. He didn’t notice my gaze, but if he had, he’d just shoot me sneer and say, “What, Elbow? Can’t take your eyes off me?”

I wrapped my arms around my knees, grinning to myself. The movement caught his eye. He paused.

“So, when do you expect Dire to return?”

“She usually comes back a little after dawn,” I said.

It was too bad. As long as we hadn’t spoken, he was just be a picture, or an idea. Now he was a person, a messenger from the world beyond my forest, carrying all of its troubles with him.

“She leaves you alone? Strange.”

“It’s part of her method. I guard the roads during the night to practice what she drilled me in the day before.”

“And when do you sleep?” Ged held his sword close to his face, frowning.

“When I’ve mastered what I’ve been assigned.”

“How diligent.” He sheathed his sword, and set it down beside him. He hadn’t looked at me, not once since arriving, and it was beginning to feel like an insult. 

“Why are you still here?” I asked. “You’ve delivered your message.”

He hesitated. I didn’t know what I wanted him to say, but the question brought his gaze to mine, which was almost enough of an answer. They were such blue eyes. Unnatural, electric blue, darker around the edges of the irises and flecked with brighter specks towards the center. They were the kind of eyes that I could look into without feeling like I had to look away, without needing to measure the milliseconds between friendly and awkward. I could just rest there, and wonder how someone as irritable and distant as him could feel so familiar.

Keth (Xavier Leclerc, White, French descent) is a mage/archer hybrid, a White Fletcher. He is also an astronomer by hobby, and as a consequence a half-decent navigator. He is tall and lanky, with long blond hair and light blue eyes. Naturally a kind, fierce person, he hides his stronger feelings under a layer of goofy vagueness. It’s a tactic he picked up while growing up in a cold, excessively rich family as the sole heir to Leclerc Estates, a high-end hotel business. Before joining the Procedure, he had a falling out with his parents, who wanted him to marry his childhood friend and unite their hotel empires. Instead, he ran away to grad school. He got quite bored of particle physics, however, and turned to working odd jobs as a game tester for Jaggers and Ajay. His work caught the interest of Jaggers, and when he was offered a spot in the Procedure, Keth was willing enough to give it a go before going home to face the music.

Dulak (Darien Delrahim, Irani-American) is also a mage, but he uses elemental magic, with a focus on earth and water. He has short, spikey black hair, light brown skin, and dark green eyes. He is Keth’s roommate. He’s known Keth since he was in elementary school, but they were never close until college. He’s still studying at the same institution where Keth used to be a grad student, doing his thesis on biomechanics. He was the one to introduce Keth to Jaggers and the Beta 12 project, and they worked together on testing the system for safety. Keth does not know that Dulak is in love with him. Or if he does, he does not show it. It’s for the best, since Keth comes from a wealthy family, and Dulak is not exactly the rich young heiress that Keth’s parents will be expecting.

In the game, Vivy (Vivienne Zhang, Chinese-American) is a merchant (and part time thief). She has shockingly pink hair, brown eyes, and a tiny snub nose. She mostly fights with traps, trip wires, illusion magic, poison: non-lethal, stunning moves to get what she wants but avoid the bounty that comes with attacking another player. She and Rufus meet in Barford, a town along the southwestern branch of Lygeden, where Rufus beats her at a game of dice and with the lost bet she is forced to join his guild, rather than winning herself a pirate ship. A shame, but what can you do? In the real world, Vivy is a spoiled little rich girl. Her parents get her the game to “keep her out of trouble,” in other words, to stop her from stealing from real stores. She’s ruthlessly clever, and always interested in new tech (her main enterprise in the real world).

Fieran (John Corral, Latino, Mexican descent) is an assassin, preferring to do the deed himself rather than using projectiles or poison. He has fluffy, brown-black hair, sharp eyes, and a strong jaw. He doesn’t trust easily, is a perfectionist, and is blunt to the point of cruelty. However, these tendencies have protected him and his friends from death time and time again. Despite his prickly exterior, he feels things deeply, and once he’s decided to trust, he will fight for that person to the end, even if he is betrayed. He and Vivy get along well because they are both harsh people. 

If asked why he doesn’t trust easily, he might explain (begrudgingly) that his sister and he used to be close when they were little. Sometime in middle school, though, she started to hate herself, criticizing everything about herself, and then criticizing everything about him until he learned to hate himself, too. But, surviving is something he’s good at. That’s one thing her hate couldn’t take away from him.