The Prisoner

There was a boy named Lishna, who lived in Cromka, an outlying province of the Cregarian Empire.

He was born with the angry red silhouette of a hand on his right cheek, the mark of the Witch-Goddess, Severia.

Once in a great many generations she would choose a youth, that she might bestow both a blessing and a curse upon her people to remind them of her grace and her wrath.

Worship of Severia was forbidden by the Cregarians, but the Cromkans passed the tradition on, in secret, through oral instruction.

The Cregarian Thunder-God, Brazen, had his own designs, and sometimes he also tested his people.

The blessing manifested as early as Lishna could walk. The toddler, blindfolded, could wander unerringly to any treasure hidden in his vicinity.

As he learned to speak, he was able to identify, through waking visions, treasure in various far-off places.

Whether it be a buried mine or well, a bandit’s secret hiding place, an abandoned dragon’s den, the treevaults of the fae, or the storemounds of the gnomes, Lishna could find it with his eyes closed.

Emperor Salasas learned of the magical boy and naturally craved him as an asset for the empire.

It was after Lishna was taken from his family and moved to the Cregarian capitol of Sesspitia that the curse finally manifested.

***** * *****

Salasas treated Lishna well, and took care of his family back in Cromka, figuring that the boy was yielding him more than he would ever pay out, but he kept the boy cloistered in the Western Tower of his sprawling fortress city.

He knew his Cregarian subjects, especially the ever-conniving nobles, might be tempted to steal Lishna for themselves.

So, for this reason, though many knew of the boy, they never saw him.

Lishna had free reign of the Western Tower and often spent time in the courtyard at its base with a beautiful garden and fountain, which was forbidden to the emperor’s other subjects.

Arsicuss, the son of a nobleman, was a snotty, entitled brat who always picked on the help. He got lost one day and found himself in the garden, where Lishna was sitting by the fountain, quietly reading.

“Servant!” Arsicuss commanded. Lishna looked up, and Arsicuss saw the Mark of Severia, but it meant nothing to him. “Escort me back to the kitchen!”

“I apologize, m’lord,” Lishna replied, “but I am not a house servant, and do not venture anywhere beyond the Western Tower, so cannot help you.”

Arsicuss walked up to the sitting Lishna and slapped him hard on the left cheek.

“There! Now one cheek will match the other, you insolent worm! How dare you fail to stand when addressing your betters!”

All his life, Lishna had been peaceful, helpful, calm, stoic, and a dutiful citizen of the empire.

He only wanted to help bridge the gap between his people and the Cregarians. He considered himself a peacekeeper.

Yet never before had he felt such rage.

He stood and looked Arsicuss in the eyes.

“At least you’re standing, cur, but you’d better wipe that stupid look—” Arsicuss began, but then his eyes rolled up to the whites and he gasped as if struggling to breathe.

Arsicuss fell to the cobblestones, violently thrashing, cracking his skull, bleeding out.

Lishna stared, unblinking, burning with rage, until the noble was still and breathed no more.

As Lishna’s hate and rage receded, horror dawned in its wake.

He stared the other boy to death!

Then, an unwelcome ecstasy assailed him, and he heard the voice of his Goddess hissing through his brain like a snake in the grass.

The emperor will spare your life, Severia whispered, but you will pay a price. Fear not! My curse is power, young Lishna, and cannot be dispelled so easily.

Lishna hid in the tower that day and wept, for though he did not like Arsicuss, he liked being a murderer even less, and the ecstatic sensation he experienced when Severia inhabited him mingled with and overwhelmed his guilt in a way that inclined him to despair.

***** * *****

Lishna was completely honest about what occurred.

Emperor Salasas did indeed spare Lishna’s life. He reasoned that the boy, soon to become a man, would provide great treasure to the empire beyond Salasas’ reign and into that of his first-born son.

The question of what to do about Lishna’s damning eyes, however, was another matter. He did not need them to find treasure, but with them open, he could kill again.

“I can always wear a blindfold in the presence of others, Highness,” Lishna remarked.

But the emperor thought even this was too great a risk.

Damn Cromkans and their witchcraft! He thought. We ban the practice but we can’t purge it from their blood!

“Ah, dear Lishna,” Salasas replied. “You are such a gentle soul and have been such a loyal subject. I know that this was but an accident. I believe the court sorceress can help us.”

Yaga, sorceress and apothecary, put the boy to sleep with a powerful potion.

Lishna was so far under that he didn’t even feel it when she gouged his eyes and cauterized the wounds with hot iron.

Yaga drugged Lishna continuously, to keep him in a coma as he healed. She was uncomfortable with what she did but would not dare disobey the emperor.

She sensed, however, that there was more to the boy than Salasas understood. Her private divinations indicated fate, and a magic superior to her own, was at work.

While Lishna was comatose, he dreamed of Severia.

***** * *****

Severia appeared to him in her three primary forms, as the virgin, the mother, and the crone; also, a snake, a lioness, and a raven.

She spoke of a great destiny which was his, if only he would accept it.

This dream journey stretched on as if an eternity unfolded within an eternity.

Though his body slept only a week, in his mind, in the ancestral realm of Severia, the Goddess of the Witches and Warlocks of the Western Mountains, he was outside of time.

He raved and ranted and railed at his Goddess, as he faced trial after trial, starting with that of witnessing what was done to him by Yaga in the waking world.

It was a dreamscape, yes, but also a Hellish nightmare.

How could Severia let them take his sight? Why had she allowed the Thunder-God and his besotted, greedy followers to ban her worship?

What kind of deity was she, to skulk in the shadows while her enemies oppressed her acolytes?

Rather than reprimand him, Severia guided Lishna through a dialogue with the self.

His hate and rage cooled, replaced by calm acceptance.

When Yaga allowed Lishna to surface, she noted that he was unsurprised about what should have been, to him, sudden blindness.

“I suppose this was as good a solution as any,” he said, smiling, and she squinted her eyes, now more wary of his magic than ever.

***** * *****

Lishna went on for some time aiding the emperor in finding treasure far and wide to enhance the coffers of the Cregarians. When he was not reporting his visions of treasure to Salasas, however, he was honing his inner vision for other purposes.

The Cregarians fashioned advanced weapons and medicinal knowledge but had little understanding of witchery. There was no spiritual tradition that would have led them to accept that there are not two eyes, but three.

The hidden eye, the mind’s eye, the third eye, was the most important treasure Lishna ever found.

He allowed the wealth of the Cregarians to grow, for he always knew that one day it would be his.

He smiled and nodded and attended to the emperor’s every wish. He did not want Salasas to suspect anything.

Lishna developed his third eye to the point where he found not only treasure, but could locate anyone, anywhere in the empire with a mere thought. Though he never left the Western Tower he traveled all over the continent every day.

With the power of mind alone, on a fateful and infamous day of which every Cregarian knows best not to speak, Lishna wiped out the Cregarian nobility, including the emperor’s line, but kept Salasas as a slave and an example to the remaining Cregarians.

This is how the Cregarian Empire became the Cromkan Empire, with Lishna being the first in a long lineage of kings.

Future generations would think of him as The Blind Seer and Bringer of Light.

As it turned out, Brazen, the Thunder-God, was tired of his people’s senseless greed and lack of spiritual insight, so he left them to their own devices almost a century before the reign of Salasas, tipping off Severia on his way out.

“They’re yours for the taking, love! No hard feelings, I hope!”

Severia had hard feelings alright. Brazen was a real jerk, but his power was beyond the scope of her own cunning and guile to usurp.

Her only consolation was how little he’d really cared about anything but his own passions.

As for Lishna, he felt no sense of vindication. Even now that the tables had turned, and he was master where once he had been a slave, he wished he could live in a world where no one ever needed to be either.

But the gods wouldn’t have it, so Lishna quietly used his power to aid people across his Empire until the day he died.

In the grand paeons and holy tomes he left behind, Lishna encouraged his descendants to do the same, for they were not granted Severia’s blessings or curses, but merely human powers, and the merely human needs all the help it can get.

But, like their Cregarian predecessors, they squandered their prosperity over generations in the most bitterly ironic way: by hoarding it until it was taken from them, renewing the cycle that Lishna lamented, but leaving a glimmer of hope, perhaps, in the sure knowledge that all such ventures are doomed to fail.