Lorima
by melusine
Chapter One
Aristide stood at the doorway to what had been his late wife's room. He had not wanted to open it again, but King Morgan had ordered him to make rooms available for the visiting Tasnican soldiers. The soldiers were due any day now, which necessitated that all guest rooms and unused or otherwise spare rooms be cleaned out and readied with fresh bedding. The maids had done the majority of the work, for which he was grateful, but they left that room untouched. They knew as well as anyone to ask his permission before doing anything that would involve Enid's belongings. Aristide felt as though he should clean out her room himself; it was his job anyway. Even as the mayor of the city of Lorima, which he realized held less status than a low-ranking duke, he had no illusions as to what should be the maids' work and what was rightfully his. The duty of stripping away all memory of his wife and her passing from her room was his and his alone.
His daughter, Evie, had offered her help in the same way that she always offered to help whenever the question of her mother's room came up. As always, he refused and watched how relief mixed with sadness in her eyes. Aristide doubted that it would be any easier for Evie; though she barely remembered her mother, Enid's presence clung as thickly to the room and what was within it as the dust that coated its furniture. And Evie had her place in there, too. No doubt she would remember how she would try on Enid's dresses and jewelry or how she would sit beside her mother on the bed and show her the drawings she had made and tell those strange stories that had delighted Enid, but troubled him. When he would ask her how she thought up those stories or who that strange man who stood beside her in some of her drawings was, she would tell him the same name: Justice.
The winter that Evie first spoke of Justice was a bad one. It began just after the leaves had changed colors and ended over a month after it should have. When Enid first took sick, he would take his daughter outside while the doctors attended to her mother. Aristide remembered breaking off frozen, ice-coated leaves from the trees and placing them in Evie's mittened hands and smiling at her delight at each fire-colored leaf. He also remembered helping her build a snowman and how she asked him to place two copper coins where its eyes would be. When he asked her why she wanted coins for the eyes instead of stones, she had laughed and told him that it wouldn't look like Justice without eyes that color. That was the first mention she had ever made of him and, at the time, he assumed that Justice was one of the children she played with. That assumption ended when he told Enid, who said that none of Evie's friends were named Justice and that she doubted than any of them had eyes like that. Enid suggested that Justice must be an imaginary playmate and that he shouldn't worry -- Evie was, after all, a young girl and children were given to such things -- though Aristide was uneasy.
His feelings of unease grew when he asked Evie to tell him more about Justice. She said that Justice came to her room every night to tell her stories and sing to her if she couldn't sleep. Testing Enid's suggestion, Aristide asked her if Justice was there at that very moment, to which Evie replied that it wasn't time yet and that he never came before the old tower clock struck one. She told him that he came in through the window and that, if it was bad out, she would keep the window open for him. It was then that Aristide was sure that his daughter's imaginary friend was no imaginary friend, but someone real; a thief who was perhaps a kidnapper or worse.
Aristide never told Enid about his suspicions, feeling that she had enough to worry about without fearing for her daughter's safety. Besides, she was likely right: five-year-olds tended to create strange and elaborate stories regarding their imaginary playmates. Still, he posted sentries outside Evie's door when he put her to bed. They were told to enter her room at the slightest sound and arrest the culprit. None of them, all honest men, reported any sound coming from her room during the entire week they were posted. Evie, however, said that that Justice still came to her ever night that week to tell her stories. She said that he whispered them into her ear. In time, Evie stopped talking about Justice. Aristide wondered, still hoping that Enid was right, if it was because she had stopped believing in his existance or, as was more likely, because she had realized that talking about him made her father nervous. But he didn't think about that at the time. Then, he thought about how he could raise his then six-year-old daughter alone and live without Enid.
Evie was fourteen now and the years that had passed between Enid's death and now were no easier for her than for him. He wondered if she remembered how hard he had fought to save her mother's life, even after Enid had slipped into an exhausted coma. He had even petitioned King Morgan for his aid. The king, known as the Warlock or Warlock king, was no mere warlock: he was a sorcerer whom Aristide was sure could heal anyone. However, the king's magic was all but useless. He could not heal Enid or bring her out of her coma; he only succeeded in giving her enough strength to sleep for two months longer. The king could not even succeed in saving his first child, who died three months before it was to be born, or his wife, Queen Amelia, when the stress of giving birth a second time proved too much for her heart.
It was all because of the Mana Fortress, a floating city ruled by Emperor Valerius. No one knew exactly when the Mana Fortress had rose into the sky, though the records that remained from the catastrophe suggested that it had been at least two hundred years. The Emperor himself, the son of Emperor Magnus and the descendant of Mana Emperor Nail, was less terrifying than the kings that dominated the Imperial cities on the ground. Though the Mana Fortress and any man of Nail's line were each capable of terrible things, the prospect of invasion and Lorima's slow death through war was considered worse in Aristide's mind than the possibility of annihilation by the mana cannons that studded the Fortress's sides. The people of the Imperial city of Vangold lived much closer to Lorima than the inhabitants of the Fortress. And the Vangold were liable to invade at any time.
Aristide sighed and shook his head. He needed to get the room cleared before tomorrow. King Morgan had promised him that only a general would sleep in Enid's old room and that he would be respectful of the place. He knew that this was an apology for the King's failure nearly nine years prior and accepted it graciously. When the soldiers left, he would put Enid's belongings back in the room. He considered asking Evie if she would like to have the room after the general left, though he doubted that she would accept it. The tower room below the clock had been hers since childhood. He wondered if Justice still told her stories.
