Hey, Sabet here. Sorry about the pathetic title, but I really couldn't think of anything. Anyway, I actually wrote this a long time ago but only recently dug it up. I'd love reviews, except no flames, because I dislike fire with a burning passion. Wait, that makes no sense. Oh well.
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I remember seeing him for the first time. An acorn almost completely covered the infant. He had been abnormally thin. I could only assume that he'd been abandoned, left by his parents who only valued sameness. Of course I took him in. No one with even half a heart would have left him to die.
I remember watching him grow up. I enjoyed that delighted shine in his eyes as he explored the world around him. It had been so long since I'd been young, I'd forgotten what it had been like to see things for the first time. And his voice, always peppering my hearing with exclamations. Hey, lookit that! Didja see what I did? Howzit doing that? But I didn't mind. It was so nice to hear a child's voice.
I remember watching him go off on his own for the first time. He'd been so excited about school. He came home completely changed. A lonely, sullen boy replaced the one I'd said goodbye to only that morning. He'd realized something I'd forgotten: he was different. I'd turned a blind eye to his lankiness, his skin, his hair. His classmates obviously had not. Sure, he did his homework every night. He tried to make me believe that nothing had changed. In fact, when he came home with his first grades, I thought I saw a glimpse of his old self.
"Your nephew has an uncommon intelligence," the comments section read. He obviously still believed the lie I'd told him, that I was his uncle. Uncommon intelligence. He absorbed everything said to him quietly, then could tell you word for word a week later what you'd said. So he learned astonishingly quickly. His teacher recommended promoting him several grades, to be with children his level.
But I said no. He was already humiliated by his peers; I couldn't imagine the torture his life would be if he was with older kids. So instead, I took him out of school. I couldn't believe the joy in his eyes when I offered to make him my apprentice.
Like everything else he did, he was soon able to perform magic extraordinarily well. But despite my praise and his progress, he sunk deeper and deeper into himself. Soon, he didn't even acknowledge my presence; he only began on the list of tasks to accomplish that day. He grew pale and even thinner, and his hair grew into his face. Instead of pulling it back like I wished he would, he gelled it into a single point of hair that hung over his right eye. I tried to push the red flags to the back of my mind, telling myself it was only a bad case of teen angst and he'd get over it.
I tried showing him the pictographs I'd taken when he was younger. He lit then ablaze with a muttered word. When I tried to ask why, he snapped at me. "Who needs the past?" he asked. "We're the only species that cares about it. And we shouldn't. You can't change it, and all it does is create memories you don't even want." But still, I never heard him raise his voice. Everything he did was calculated and deliberate. Sometimes, I wished he would shout at me. Yelling was normal and could be ignored. It was harder to shrug off words designed to cut.
I could tell he was beginning to resent my presence. In his eyes, I was holding him back. He wanted power. And if he couldn't, he at least wanted to fit in. But nothing could change the fact that he was an outcast. He was at least a head taller than everyone else, and he was prone to anger. One day in particular, a girl had called him some trivial insult. It took four of us to finally rescue her from the onslaught of magic being directed at her.
I don't think he ever had respect for me after that. He'd realized his talent with the wind, and never lost an opportunity to torment me. I never let on that his magical skill at seventeen was greater than mine had ever been, but he still figured it out. And everything finally came to a head over the cap.
It was the one thing I denied him. He wanted it, just for a few minutes, he said. But I knew the power that went with it would go to his head. So when I turned my back for a moment, he was there to grab it. He laughed, high-pitched and cold. I realized there was nothing I could do but watch, as the boy I'd loved like a son turned into a monster.
He was aware that I would stop him, so he prevented that. I became a hat and he became a human. I was left abandoned in the woods, surprisingly near to where I'd found him those many years before.
The rest of the tale is known to everyone. How I aided a young boy in the defeat of the sorcerer. How the power of a god had been overcome. How the cap that had caused such trouble helped to set things right again through a pure heart. How the monster had been sealed away, maybe forever.
What isn't known is how I felt. I remember looking into those eyes before he was sealed. The was no remorse there, only hatred. I could sense his burning desire for revenge, to make right the wrongs committed against him. And so I mourned, not for his fate, but for the death of the Vaati I'd once known.