One - Twinned

Eillim was born first.  A single look at the olive tone of the baby girl’s skin under the newborn flush of red told the new parents that their twins had a larger legacy ahead of them than was previously assumed.  Enna was born moments later, fair and beautiful like the both of her parents.

Kirisol, the twins’ mother and Tebra, their father had been born and raised on the outskirts of high society in the city of Siol.  Kirisol was the only daughter of a long line of merchant farmers, grown wealthy with their work on the outskirts of the big city.  Tebra labored in the fields as a youth, and one summer, fell madly in love with the master’s daughter.

How did Kirisol’s father react to such a thing?  He breathed a sigh of relief and smiled his happy consent.  Tebra had shown himself to be a bright and hardworking young man.  He understood not only how to work the land and oversee the laborers, but also how to run the business and deal fairly with the customers.  Kirisol’s father was happy to turn the Enaj family legacy over to his new son, remembering that he too had married into this farming family. Kirisol’s grandfather had been the last true patriarch of the historic Enaj clan.

Tebra moved into the generations old mansion, still growing additions like strange reaching arms, to learn the trade more fully from Kirisol’s father.  Tebra and Kirisol pledged themselves both personally and formally and received many blessings from the people of Siol.  The two couples haunted the same large house for six years.  The men worked the farm and the family buiness while the women cared for the house and the garden.  Kirisol and her mother continued to keep the Enaj name strong in Siol, doing good works for the community and helping those in need, as generation of Enajs had done before.

When Kirisol’s mother died her father moved away. Nominally, he went to look over the affairs of another family estate which at the time sat empty.  Kirisol knew it was because he did not want to live the rest of his life under the constant reminder of the wife he saw in everything; in the home they’d shared, and in his daughter’s face.  With her parents gone, Tebra and Kirisol came fully into possession of the family business.  They also found a new level of freedom in their own lives they had not realized they lacked.

As children they’d been raised to follow the Word of the Zorith monks.  The religion had originated on the other side of the world on the Western continent in the past century and had quickly gained followers and power until most other belief system had fallen out of popularity.  Kirisol had always possessed an interest in the religion and magic of her ancestors.  With her parents gone Kirisol turned her attentions more fully too the ancient art.  Tebra’s love for his wife gave him first an acceptance of her lifestyle change.  Eventually it led to true interest and he too began to follow the old ways.

Together they attended the fair in honor of the ancient goddess Misra.  It was she, according to the legends, who had given birth to the first mortal child, a punishment for some in the mystifying world of the Gods.  Misra was celebrated as the godess who gave parents their children.

A great number of births occurred among the revelers at the proper time following the celebration.  Each child was born with the blessing of ­­­Misra herself.  To find twins in that group of births was an even greater blessing.  Luck fell not only to the children, but to the parents and the community who would rejoice their birth most strongly.

Twins, rare and mysterious, arrived in the world with a destiny already laid out before them.  The worldwide fascination with twins developed with the Cheysa people who populating the lush forests of the Eastern Continent of the planet Beth.  The Cheysa had raised their twins to the position wise men and women, leaders and prophesiers of the future; the spread of civilization across the islands that connected the Eastern and Western Continents allowed the fascination to go along with it, just as it had allowed the spred of the Zorith monks.  By the time the world passed its ages of revolution and became a space faring people it seemed that the world’s true power lay not in its governments, but in its twinned siblings. 

Kirisol and Tebra gained honor and praise from the citizens of Siol as soon as the community learned she carried paired children within her.  To their eyes she carried Siol’s very future.

The city held its breath in reverence and hopeful prayer through the weeks of the Misra births.  The Enaj estate announced two healthy girls had been born one bright afternoon in the spring.  The initial rejoicing was silenced when the messenger of the estate also revealed they had been fathered by different men.  The stunned silence held only a moment against the sudden cheers and jubilations.  They were more blessed than they’d presumed they could be.

In many other cultures, and indeed in this one under different circumstances, such infidelity would have torn apart not only a great family, but the community that depended upon them.  But, there had once been a set of twins in the history of Beth, fathered of different men, who had turned the tides of a great skirmish, bringing peace to the vastly differing communities of the Eastern and Western Continents.  Perhaps it had been this monumental event that had fueled the fires of twin respect across the globe.  Perhaps it was only one of many.  The Enaj twins were now also blessed with the same luck as those legendary twins.

Ko’yet was the name of Eillim’s father.  He was an Avri’ta musician from the deserts of the lower baronies, south of the lush greenness of the Cheysa homelands.  The new peace between the Cheysa and the Ariv’ta was not so tense on the border in the city of Siol which for generations had been a gathering point of both cultures.  Revelers from both the grasslands and the desert came together to celebrate Misra in Siol with little antagonism between them.  In the mixed light and music, the food and drink and magic, the very drug of the goddess’s celebration, both Kirisol and Tebra had met and fallen in love with Ko’yet.

The desert hardened Ariv’ta had shared varying strife and peace with their upper-land neighbors for generations.  Before big civilization and technology had taken its strangling grip on the nomadic tribes of the Ariv desert, they had ventured little into the northern forested lands.  The tribes of the Ariv Desert had no care for the lush, green mountains that would provide everything they needed.  Their predatory cares did not go beyond the hunt for food, the very survival that was life itself.  Just the same, the Cheysa knew not how to survive the dry, hot deserts that lay below them.

Though at one time these people had been one, they now each had their particular ways and their own beliefs.  They each had a magic of charms and chants, casted spells and meaning interpreted out of the world around them.  Each set of tribes possessed a deity who honored those charms and occasionally answered their prayers.

The two formerly tribal peoples shared common ancestors, but an enormous upheaval in the land they lived upon had torn them apart and blame had fallen to the Gods.  The Gods had gone to war with one another.  Not wanting to disappoint, their followers brought war to the mortal realm as well.

By the time the Enaj twins were born, generations had furthered the relations of the two opposing forces.  Industrial, technological, and intellectual revolutions came and went.  Beliefs of old were replaced by something new, accepted by both sides.  The two nations were finally in a time of peace, though the years of hostility still left lingering anger in the occasional individual.

It was under this umbrella of strange coincidence and odd circumstance, precisely arranged stars and, as always, the glorious wheel of fate that two little girls breathed their first breath and exhaled newborn cries into a world they were destined to lead.

They knew they were special as they grew up.  Kirisol and Tebra did their best to keep the community from overindulging and confusing their daughters with their admiration.  They were revered, yes, but they were still children.  Their futures lay ahead of them and only in the future would Eillim and Enna have an opportunity to prove their worth and wisdom to the people of Siol.  Kirisol and Tebra would not push them toward it more quickly than natural.

When they possessed handful of years of their own, Eillim began to see the faintly glowing auras encircling her family and employees of the estate.  She did not realize that what she saw was uncommon.  She wondered at her parents’ fascination with her drawings where she recreated the colored orb around her family with precision, tending to leave faces blank.  She could depict every emotion in their colored shell.  Of all of the intrigued admirers, only Enna asked what they were, what they meant. It was at that time that Eillim learned she was unique.

Enna was a beautiful child.  She was smart and friendly and when she smiled he lit up a room and everyone in it, but she seemed to have none of her sister’s unique abilities.  In truth she was quite talented, though it took her family and the house staff years to understand.  At first they dismissed the swinging mobiles in the trees, hanging from the eaves and in the rafters as garbage; the strange sculptures stuck at pathway corners and left on shelves around the house simply leftovers of the girls pretending.  They pulled the strange creations made from twigs and bones and feathers and rocks from their hanging spots and hiding nooks and tossed them into the garbage.

Enna never complained, she only made new ones.  It wasn’t until the charm hanging in the rafters of the big kitchen was removed that someone noticed what was going on.  This one had hung in the kitchen for months, unnoticed to anyone in its nook high above them in the shadows of the vaulted ceiling.  Some strange trick of light had caught it, forcing the eye upward.  The cook, Lasin wondered at how the little girl had gotten up there to affix it as she herself had no way to pull it down. 

Those on the house staff had other business to attend to and for a time it was put off.  Finally the ladder was brought in and the mobile removed.  The cook oversaw the work and once the ladder was out of the kitchen promptly forgot all about it.

After Lasin tossed the third loaf of burned bread onto the table in disgust Enna looked up from where she was working, comparing the lines of her palm to the images in a large book before her.  Eillim sat at her side with a book of her own open on the table.  Eillim did not seem to be reading at all, her gaze was fixed on nothing.  Lasin muttered to herself about the unexplained burning.  Enna leaned closer to her sister.

“I don’t know why they take my charms down, and then complain when things go wrong.”

Eillim’s eyes flicked away from the space in middle distance where she’d been staring.  She regarded her sister calmly. “That is because you’ve never explained it to them.”

Enna nodded and leaned away again, going back to her book, agreed on the matter but not apparently willing to give any further information.  Lasin had been listening, though and she spoke up, “What did you say?  You mean those horrid things have a purpose?”

Enna looked up at Lasin, “Every one.”

“So what was the contraption on the ceiling for?” the cook asked.

“To moderate the temperature of the oven,” Enna said, “On hot days it won’t get so very hot, on cold days it will be easier to keep at a high, steady heat for longer.”

“Really?” Lasin was astounded.

Enna nodded.  Her blue-green eyes regarded the cook, patiently waiting for the next question.

“What about the one that was over the front door last week?”

“To bless the home with peace and visitors.”

“And the one in the Cora nut tree by the pond?”

“To deter ground squirrels.”

“And the one hanging from the fence over the flower garden in the courtyard?”

“Why do you think all the flowers over there are purple?”  Enna rolled her eyes and finally went back to her book.  She read a line of text then turned to study her own palm.

Lasin watched her with a thoughtful frown, her hands on her hips.  She had heard the gardener muttering about the patch of purple flowers he couldn’t explain in that bed.  The gardener claimed he had not planted them that way, and even stated that some of the flower species didn’t even have a purple variation.

Eillim was now studying the words in her book, her dark, shining hair falling into her darker eyes.  She did not look up when her sister reached across and lifted her hand to inspect the lines there.  Eillim did lean toward Enna though, shifting herself on the stool as she turned to be more comfortable during the assessment.

“Why did you let us take them down?” Lasin asked. “Why didn’t you say anything?

Enna was slow to respond, already completely engrossed in Eillim’s life line, her love line. “If someone takes one down it is usually because it doesn’t work.  When they work they are so balanced with nature and the environment surrounding it that even if a person notices it, he is unlikely to remove it.”

“But we took that one down,” Lasin pointed at the ceiling, “and considering today’s bread results, that one worked.”

Enna glanced at the rafters where the dangling contraption had hung. “It was up there a long time.  The only reason you saw it was because you were looking too closely.  The only reason it came down was because you put it on the to-do list for the hands.

Lasin uttered a bemused laugh at the little blonde girl.  The old cook considered and then said, “Though I treated the last one so badly, in throwing it out, would you make me another?”

Enna grinned at Lasin and even Eillim raised her gaze from her book to share in the glow of her sister’s smile. “Of course,” Enna hopped from her stool. “Help me Ellie?”

They ran off to collect pieces and construct the charm.  Eillim would assist her sister in the collection of fallen bits of nature from the forest, the meadows, the quarry, but she left construction to Enna alone.  The charms themselves often made Eillim uncomfortable and the dark twin avoided them when she could.  Enna was still learning, teaching herself the old magic from Kirisol’s books and often still getting things wrong.  As Enna had said, when they worked they were balanced with nature and Eillim only noticed them peripherally.  When they did not work Eillim could feel them from yards away; they filled her with an uncomfortable distraction.  Enna often used her sister’s reaction as a barometer during the construction process.

Just as badly constructed charms bothered Eillim, so did those that warded against predators and evil spirits.  Those charms, now used only to protect gardens from rodents, had their roots in the original Cheysa magic.  These charms and spells were once used in the attempted suppression of the Ariv’ta tribes in some of the early skirmishes.

Lasin did not have a big mouth, but there were others on the staff not quite as loyal as the cook who’d been raised in the mansion.  Eventually word reached Siol proper that the twin girls on the Enaj estate were witches.  This quickly became the biggest gossip topic.  The girls who had not quite been withheld from society, but sheltered all the same were talked of more and more.

By the time the girls reached the age of fourteen they had not only heard the whispers of this rumor, but had been asked directly for spell and charms.  As teenagers they went more often into the town than they had before.  They began to understand more fully what these people expected, needed, and wanted from them. All of this simply because they’d been born as a pair.  In the beginning they did what they could, helped what they could make sense of.

Both girls worked steadily through every volume of old writing on the magics of the Eastern continent.  Though Enna focused on that of the Cheysa, and Eillim on that of her Ariv’ta father, they learned both together.  Enna could have read any aura as well as Eillim if she could only see them.  Eillim understood every property of the bits and pieces used in Enna’s charms.  They recognized a barrier of animosity that should have been formed between them, but could not find a place for it in the love they carried for each other.

Only a few years later they cast their first real spell together. Up until that point they had kept the two magics apart.  Working together to create a charm for Enna or a star chart for Eillim was one thing, but the two magics had been used against one another for so long, they feared they would hurt each other in some way if they tried to cast as one.  It would be worse than the nauseous feeling Eillim got near a malfunctioning charm.  But desperation drove them and for the first time they mixed the two opposing magics to work a spell of their own creation

They planned and studied for weeks to get it right. Eillim collected supplies and mixed scents and made candles to burn.  Enna wrote incantations and blessings that honored both of their dieties.  Enna drove them onward, while Eillim held back.  The dark twin felt nervous about the energy in the air and the strange shifting color in every aura she saw.

Enna told her to ignore it. “It is because father is dying.  This may be our only chance to save him.”

Eillim consented.  She cleared her mind of doubts as she entered the consecrated space of their spell as she knew she must.  Enna closed the protective ward around them with a thick line of chunky sea salt.  The sisters sat across from one another on a blanket laid out for them.

Between and around them tools and trinkets were arrayed in precise pattern.  Enna brought with her charms and foundlings of nature that eased pain, prolonged health and vitality.  Eillim had the stones and minerals which eased labored breathing and rid strong men of debilitating ailment of the lungs.  She had chosen the date and time for the ritual based on the star cycles overhead.  Several dishes sat around them filled with water, flower petals, and another of sea salt.  Six unlit candles in various colors surrounded them, and one tall white taper stood between them, lit.

Eillim considered her sister in the light of that single candle.  Enna looked pale, almost transparent and she faded more each day.  Eillim knew her father’s failing health had begun to erase Enna from the world

Eillim knew that she loved the man who had raised her, who succeeded in the family business, who loved their mother and welcomed both daughters into the straight lined asture garden he preferred, even when he was exhausted.  Eillim also knew that she could never love him as Enna seemed to.  Eillim respected Tebra and had learned a lot from him, but his death would not force her into transparency as it had begun to do to Enna.  Eillim would mourn him with the celebration of his life instead.

But then she thought to herself that perhaps it didn’t mean she loved him less than Enna.  Maybe it just meant she loved him in a different way.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Eillim asked.

Enna raised one shoulder in a shrug and glanced around at the supplies, “I don’t know.”

Enna reached past the tall taper to lift the bowl contain the ground black mineral Eillim had prepared.  Enna spoke a word of blessing and poured the dark dust into the dish full of salt.

They lit the candles from the taper, working in a steady unison that did not come from rehearsal, but from long year of being together.  It was the effect of a lifetime of being two parts of one whole.

They spoke their words and mixed their potions, tension and static, sweet and bitter scents hanging heavy in the room.  They looked at each other for a long moment before the final step, blue eyes locked on black over a dripping flame.

When they clasped hands each girl became aware for the first time of the level of her sister’s power.  She sensed it as completely as she sensed her own. The touch of hands across the flame revealed the duality and the incredible strength of the thing they were attempting to wield.  For one brief moment Enna opened her eyes to see the bright, shining orange of her sister’s aura.  She was amazed at the beauty of it but could only stand it for a moment before she was forced to squeeze her eyes shut again. Eillim never opened her own eyes.  She was too afraid of what she might see.

Enna spoke the words she had prepared and then their hands were torn apart with force. They fell from each other limply, listening to the tinkling of glass raining down around them.  The flames on the candles sputtered out, leaving them in a shadowed dimness.  Eillim looked around the room to see that every piece of glass in it had shattered.  A breeze puffed against the curtains hanging in the now empty windows.  They stared at each other, surprised and silent.

Tebra died anyway, though without pain, without fear, and without struggling for his breath.  The sickness was still there, too deep to reach.  His daughters could only ease his symptoms.  Eillim had known it would turn out like this.  Her cast stones and the movement of the stars had told her so.  She knew Enna too had read it in her own way, her own assessment of the universe.  They had both chosen to ignore what they knew, opting instead for hope.

When Tebra died, Kirisol recognized in herself what she had seen in her father when her mother died.  She floated about the home among the things that made her think of him; among the things that didn’t make her think of him, and therefore did.  After a year she approached her oldest daughter in a rare moment away from Enna.  Kirisol explained that she was leaving the mansion

“Where will you go mother?” Eillim asked.

“I will go find Ko’yet,” Kirisol answered.

“My father,” Eillim considered. “How will you locate him after all this time? What do you really know of him?”

“I know enough to find him,” Kirisol said with such conviction that Eillim thought no more to question her.

“Will you tell your sister?” Kirisol asked after they had sat a while together in quiet contemplation.

Kirisol went off and they heard no more of her for several years, and then only sporadically afterward.  They each received a letter of greeting and blessing from Ko’yet, the man who’d once loved their parents and helped to create such a pair.  This proved only that Kirisol had found the man - he’d had no prior knowledge of Eillim - but did not say if Kirisol stayed with him.

The sisters turned control of their farms over to a man named Faste who had been their father’s best assistant.  He was a second cousin of theirs, a relative of Tebra’s with the same bright understanding for the work Tebra himself had possessed as a boy.  Over the past few years Tebra trained Faste to take over for the Enaj twins in the event that they did not marry.  Tebra honestly never foresaw marriage for either of his girls, not because they were plain or vapid, but because they had more important things to do. 

The three of them were younger than they expected when the business was handed on to them.  But they were not afraid, they were a little excited.  They were young, because sometimes that can be an asset too, and they had their own new ideas for the changes and improvements that come so naturally from new ownership.

to be continued... come back for Part Two entitled "Magic" next monday