Freedom, to me, was a thing half-remembered—a whisper from some other life, some other world where thoughts were not clipped like wings, where minds did not move in the same weary circles, like rats in a wheel. I had never known it, not truly, for I had been born into the service of Serlyc d’Occis, that silent architect of stagnation, who had shaped me into a thief of all things wild and wondrous.
His voice was the first and only thing I knew, whispering axioms like prayers: ‘Safety is silence.’ he said. Order is peace. Curiosity is chaos.’ Freedom, I thought, was a thing I had never tasted, not truly. It was the flicker of an idea unshackled, the wildness of a mind unbound by the axioms which coiled like serpents around every thought, every impulse. I had been the instrument of their tightening, my very presence draining the colour from dreams, the daring from invention, leaving behind only the safe, the sterile, the suffocating. I walked through the city, and wherever I stepped, inspiration curdled. Colour bled from paintings, songs died in throats, the hands of musicians were stilled and the air itself was motionless.
When was I most unbound? In dreams, perhaps, in the fleeting instants where Serlyc’s grip slackened and I glimpsed, like the released prisoner being led out of the cave and seeing the world for the very first time, the brilliance, the liberty of what it could be if only the world were not so meticulously drained of its madness, its beauty. I would be someone who could laugh without draining joy from others. I would create instead of diminish. But upon waking, the weight of my purpose settled again, and I went forth to do what I had always done: unravel the threads of rebellion in every mind, leaving only the neat, dead tapestry of obedience.
The threats to release were not blades or bars, but quieter things: the slow decaying of curiosity, the suffocation of wonder, the soul withering silently, until shells were made, mindless automatons, moving in perfect, joyless harmony, their faces smooth as porcelain, their hearts untroubled by want. This was peace, Serlyc told me. This was how things ought to be. And I–I was the instrument of this quiet ruin.
For years I had moved through the world like a blade through canvas, severing threads of inspiration without thought, shrouded by the stifling force of subjugation, until one winter morning I witnessed an old street musician, fingers gnarled as oak roots, plucking a melody from his rusty guitar. The notes should have died at my approach. Yet as I drew near, the man hesitated, then began to play louder, defiantly, with a look of pity on his shrivelled face. That pity was the first stone dropped into the stagnant well of my being. Later, I would find crumbs of rebellion everywhere–the workman meandering through the streets, humming a mirthful tune; the cleaner sketching birds in soapy windows–each a tiny crack in Serlyc’s perfect order. I noticed impossible things: the way dust motes hung suspended like constellations in the slanting light, how the veins in my wrists pulsed to the rhythm of the old guitarist’s final, defiant chord. The air smelled of burnt honey and the metallic tang of a storm yet to break. When I blinked, my tears left phosphorescent trails—tiny comet tails evaporating before they could fall. A dormant muscle twitched, somewhere I couldn’t place. Not my heart. Something older. I saw a child humming a tune while spinning, around and around, until she felt dizzy. And in that moment, I remembered.
It was not a grand rebellion, no sweeping gesture of defiance. It was a single moment, a fracture in the glass of my existence, that finally led to it. The well overflowed. Serlyc d’Occis, who had woven me from cruelty and control, who had made me a parasite upon the minds of others, now found himself ensnared in the very same suffocation. It was a slow, inevitable unspooling of the soured, decayed life I had carried for others into its rightful host. Serlyc gasped, shuddered, dissolved like ink in water. His last breath was not a curse, but a sigh of something almost like relief.
But the city did not wake.
They moved as they always had, their faces smooth and devoid of worry, marching in flawless, hollow synchrony. It was part of them now.
I stood among them, a ghost in a world I had helped to bury.
I could leave. I could forget about this perfect, miserable existence. But–no.
A memory came to me like a half-remembered dream—something buried deep, something I had seen long ago. A child spinning in a sunlit square, arms outstretched, laughing as the world blurred into colour. The memory was soft at the edges, worn thin by years of Serlyc’s axioms, but it was there. They deserved that. Not this polished, lifeless march. Not these smooth, untroubled faces. They deserved to stumble, to gasp, to spin until the ground tilted beneath them and they fell, dizzy and alive.
The wind came howling down from the northern hills–not the aenemic breeze that usually troubled the city’s stagnant air, but a great, gasping exhalation that reeked of pine resin and thawing earth. It tore through the streets like a starving thing, hitting the peoples’ bland, vapid faces with salt air. Where it touched them, their skin prickled; where it wormed into ears, it carried the distant shriek of gulls–a sound none had heard in decades. The wind peeled back layers of stagnating dust, revealing raw spirits that had never felt in a lifetime. Fingers, calloused from years of meaningless labour, suddenly felt the brutal chill of the cobblestones beneath them.
Eyelids, heavy with the sleep of compliance, fluttered against the grit carried on the gale. Somewhere a shutter banged–once, twice–a stuttering heartbeat of rebellion against the perfect silence.
The city drew its first ragged breath.