It took a twenty-minute walk eastward from the edge of our farmstead to the edge of town.
Trident Wood, a small forestry town, comprised little more than a main market road and a few houses scattered around it, with industry further to the south for cutting trees. There were only a few small farms around this town, and my mother and I were one of them, all located to the west, inland. This town mainly survived from lumber exports and general trade as it was at the crossroads in the middle of the great ironwood Forest, a place I've never left nor ever really expect to.
We passed the graveyard as we came into town. Every time I passed it with my mother, I had the same thought: if he was still out there in the world somewhere or if he was long gone. I never knew my father either way; I don't know his voice, his face, I was born nine months after he left this town.
Sparse were the glances, and even more rare were the half-hearted waves. Few people acknowledge our existence, and even still, all the looks, the waving, the one to two vocalised greetings were to my mother while I trailed several paces behind her. I was a black sheep, an outlier, an anomaly, and an outsider. I took after my father, or so I'm told, I look different from everyone else, my eyes slightly more narrow. My skin, slightly less pale. My hair, slightly less bright. My eyes, slightly darker. These were the characteristics of the Metonyms, the enemy. Worse still was my name, a name that sounded out of place in this town, a name my father chose a year before my birth… I hated him for that.
"Ah, Sera! Tu viens vendre ton raisin, hein?"「Ah, Sera! Ere to sell your grapes, huh?」
Before I realised we were in the market on the main road, standing before Noah's stall. A wine vendor and an old friend of my mother from when she first settled in this village. He is a tall and thin man, but with a kind smile hidden under his beard. He is one of the few people I feel comfortable looking at.
"Ah, et je vois que votre fils est là aussi."「Ah, and I see your son is here as well.」
They spoke in Viltin, the common language of the Southern United States of Vilta, though when at home or conversing with each other, my mother and I spoke Imperial, the language she was most fluent in.
"Shinya. Can you go and grab some meat from the butchery? I'll try haggling a bit more with this bozo"
I smiled for a moment there. That was one joy we had. The ability to speak our own language that only the two of us knew, for why would anyone in this rural backwater speak Imperial? I took the Franks she handed me and set off to buy dried and salted meat that would keep for a time. Grapes didn't sell for much, but the harvests were faster than the long crops.
I didn't enjoy coming to town, even more so when alone. I felt the scornful eyes of people burning into the back of my skull. I could hear their thoughts echo in my mind. "Traitor, outsider, enemy, spy". Often, I think about placing a sack over my head and cutting eye holes, but I fear that might attract more eyes. So I simply lift my cowl and sling my head low. This, along with my smaller size, helps me vanish into the sea of bodies.
I hate it.
There are three in this village that I can actually call friends. They are around my age or slightly younger, with parents who are on the younger side as well. Normally, with the adults, they have a strong sense of national pride; however, in the younger adults, they didn't care as much and as such didn't push those views on their children. That's what I can guess from my mother's explanation for how I'm treated by the older adults. But those three, Louis, Stéphane and Pierre. They were the only ones that I can actually call friends, though before them, there was a one another I considered a friend. I suppose I still do, even though we only spent a short time together.
At the age of seven or eight, one afternoon, I was exploring the woods just north of our home in search of mushrooms for my mother to use in cooking, something I did at least once every week or two. It was there I, by happenstance, stumbled upon a boy, around my age or maybe a year younger, but unlike me, he was well dressed with an ornate coat with green stripes and other decorative parts. I was stunned at the sight. I had never seen clothes like that; I couldn't describe them even now. The boy was shorter than me by only a little, blonde hair and blue-eyed, he wandered aimlessly through the woods, but hadn't noticed me, my brown and tattered t-shirt helping me blend into the trees. I stood there for a moment watching, I have no idea why, but I was overwhelmed with the urge to flee or hide from this boy. Until I noticed, he was crying.
"You lost?" "Êtes-vous perdu?"
I called out in Imperial on instinct but quickly realised my mistake, repeating the same question in Viltin. To my surprise, the boy responded to me in imperial as well with a simple "yeah". Why does he know this language? I wondered. After a moment, he approached me and asked if I knew the way back to the village.
"Not really, I only come to this part of the woods from my house, so I know the way back there, but I don't know how to get to the village from here. Wanna just come back to my place? My mum's cooking lunch soon, then you can go back to the village from there, it's just a dirt path from there is a straight line."
The blonde boy's eyes lit up at the mention of food.
"Oh, but I need to gather a few more mushrooms first for lunch, wanna help?"
I held up the white mushrooms in a small basket to show him so he knew what they would look like.
The boy nodded enthusiastically. "I like helping our herbalist back home anyway, but mushrooms are new to me"
Herbalist? What was a herbalist? I brushed his comment off, though I had noticed he had stopped crying; I guess he was just afraid of being alone. Being alone isn't that scary.
We spent around twenty minutes looking for mushrooms together, though to us it felt more like an hour. It would have been faster, but this boy kept picking the wrong ones, either ones that were poisonous, toxic or would make you hallucinate.
There was one we found that even I didn't recognise, however. It was a deep, dark purple colour. I told him to back away from it, as I know some you shouldn't even touch, but I was curious to get a better look at this mushroom. I crept close and squatted down near it. The tree it was growing under was rotten, a fact I learnt when my foot bent the root of the tree as if it were made from a soft material. This bending shifted the rotten ground the mushroom grew from, and it twitched like a living thing. I saw black spores come from it slowly as they got picked up by the wind. I decided to cover my face and move back. We left and headed to my home. We had enough mushrooms now anyway, and I was getting hungry. Thought I was curious about that black mushroom, I know some that might look dangerous but can actually be the most tasty.
"What's your name anyway?"
"Huh? Oh, my mistake."
The boy stopped, turned to me and bowed, "Nigel Fenring, a pleasure". I stood there a bit dumbfounded by the spectacle. Why did he do that? What was the point? Confused, I repeated the same odd gesture back to him, "Shinya Akame".
"Huh? What kind of name is that? That's a funny-sounding name."
"It's a Metonym name, my father was a Metonym"
"Metonym? You mean that island nation to the west we're at war with?"
"Yeah, that's the one. That's where my dad was born, and he chose my name"
"They're the bad guys, right?"
Nigel walks in front of me, stopping as he stares at my face. It was a look I was all too familiar with even back then, the look of someone examining my face, noticing my differences.
"You don't look like a bad guy, though, here."
Nigel removed a necklace from around his neck, lifting it over his head. He held it aloft and tiptoed to reach above my head as he put it on me. I took the item in my hand and looked down at it. It was a small golden feather shape with a small emerald gem at its widest end, just below where the sting ran through.
"With that, others will know you're not a bad guy, too."
Nigel smiles and grabs the necklace, cramming it into my shirt. I'm not sure, but I figured that was his way of saying to hide it, to not show it to anyone. I would of course show my mother, but not just yet, I wanted to ask about it, what it was, what it meant, why he gave it to me. But I didn't, I simply thanked him and we kept walking.
We arrived at my farm after a short walk through the woods, coming out of the woods near the well behind the house. We entered the home, and my mother was surprised at the unexpected guest I had brought with me, but she quickly adjusted. Throughout the whole time, she seemed somewhat on edge. She constantly asked Nigel if he was comfortable, if he was too warm, too cold, if the food was to his liking, and if he would like more water. I understand the concept of caring for guests, but that seemed a bit overboard to me. She even went out of her way to cook a bit extra just for him, granted, she usually only cooks enough for two, so with an unexpected guest, she should cook more, but it was more like she cooked enough for four people rather than three. At some point, I asked him how it was that he spoke Imperial.
"Imperial is the language of trade, economics, diplomacy and worldliness". He said as if reciting something someone else said. I didn't quite get it, I still don't, but whatever. I did want to pry further, but I felt that even he might not know the answers.
After our lunch, my mother escorted him back to town. That was the only time I saw Nigel, but I still held onto his necklace. I ended up showing it to my mother a few days later and explained why Nigel gave it to me and that I didn't quite understand what he meant. She simply reinforced the thought I already had to keep it hidden from others. It was something valuable after all, people like us are not meant to have valuable things, when we do have them, people take them away from us. So I kept it hidden.
All these years later, I still have that golden feather around my neck, and I even sleep with it on as well. A reminder of the first friend I ever had.
We returned home from our shopping trip with supplies to last us a while, and mother even haggled a free bottle of wine made from our own grapes. The surrounding land was too densely wooded for a vineyard, so our grapes were all that were really available for the winemaker who otherwise sold imports. The wine apparently wasn't even that good compared to that of a big city or the wines he had, but as the cheapest option, it sold well. Not that I would really know, I've never tried it, but my mother seems to enjoy drinking it late at night in her bedroom. But I don't even really want to touch that stuff, seeing how she looks in the morning.
My duties from a day-to-day basis were quite simple and mostly done jointly with my mother. The only thing she did without me was cook, and the only thing I did without her was draw water from the well. Of course, when working together with tasks such as moving heavy things, I would naturally do that; however, if something were too heavy, we would move it together. Most of our days were quite uneventful and tranquil. Tending to crops would only take a short amount of time if the weather was fine, but only when it came to harvest and sewing crops did it ever really feel like hard labour. This day was no exception; it was cloudy and not too hot, and a faint drizzle of rain had passed the night before. The ideal conditions for slacking off all day.
On days like this, it would be perfect to go and hang out with my friends, though I don't actually know where they live. We either meet near the northern woods edge in town, or they come to my place to drag me away somewhere. Though they've started to do that less and less lately. I thought about it for a moment, and part of me simply didn't want to deal with them. I just wanted to spend time alone, after all, that's what I'm used to, that's what feels comfortable. But then I guess even then I'm never really alone, am I?
On days like today, when I don't want to do anything, my mother takes advantage to force me to learn something. She, after all, was my teacher as well; she taught me many things, how to walk and talk. She taught me two languages and basic arrhythmic for handling money. She, of course, taught me farming, how to identify different types of plants and herbs and mushrooms, how to purify dirty water and some of the basics of literature so I could at least read basic words. I felt that when she taught me reading and writing, she was also teaching herself. The alphabets of Imperial and Viltin were simple enough that over time, we could read nearly any words that were new or unknown after a few seconds of sounding them out in our heads, understanding the words was another matter entirely, though. She liked to keep an eye out when in town for written words that were new, so she could teach them later. She was far more fluent in Imperial, and so was I because of her. Viltin came more naturally to me, and I could speak more fluently and read faster than she, she says it's because I learned it young, and she did not.
"What about father's language?"
I asked one day as we were nearing the end of the lesson. Well, it was true that I had never heard my mother speak Nishigo, around the house, there are a few things left behind from my father, all with the characters of that language. I was told that one of them was my name, though it puzzles me how anyone could read it. It's so different looking from the other languages I know, it felt impossible to learn, but I had this thought, this sneaking intuition that perhaps it was only the written words of that language that were like this, and the spoken word might be easier to comprehend.
She disappeared into her bedroom, a place at the end of the hall I seldom ever entered and returned shortly after with scrolls and parchments. Splayed across the table, they were covered with strange markings and symbols.
"This is your father's language; this scroll contains the alphabet"
She unrolled the scroll that showed 46 characters that I couldn't even begin to describe. She then unrolled another scroll atop that.
"This is the second alphabet"
Another 46 characters, but they all look quite different from the others.
"This is the rest of the written language"
She unrolled a third scroll. This one was different. The symbols were far more complex and intricate than the others, and there were well over one hundred on the scroll.
"That's just a small bit, I'm told. He kept these in the hopes of one day having you learn, but with him gone, it's impossible...so...now they gather dust."
I looked over the myriad of characters, and near the top, I noticed something out of place. On top of the scroll, where two characters were in the middle, I pointed to them and asked if she knew what they meant. She explained it was the spelling of the name of the language itself. Nishigo, it was written 日死語. Another oddity on the scroll was the line directly under that. It also had characters in a horizontal orientation rather than virtual, like the rest where. I recognised them as my name, I pointed to them and asked.
"That's my name, right? Shinya Akame?"
My mother looked at the characters under my finger, they were spelt 震也赤目. She nodded and said to me.
"In the country of Nishi, apparently names hold a deeper meaning, unlike here in the east. My name, Sera, literally means nothing other than my own name. But Akame means, red eye."
"Red eye? Were Dad's eyes red?"
"No, they were a very, very dark brown, almost black. It's an old name given to warriors over there, apparently."
"Oh...do you know what Shinya means?"
She shook her head.
"Sorry, hun, I have no idea. Maybe one day, if you meet a man from the Isles once this silly war is over, you can ask them."
I smiled and nodded.
"That would be nice."
It took me about three months before I totally gave up on trying to learn anything about the language of Nishigo. I only recognise my own name, and the name of the language itself; however, it seems that the two alphabets have no relation to the symbols at a glance, if not told otherwise, I would assume they were two separate languages. All mothers know is that the more complex symbols each represents something, like a word or concept. She explained it like this.
"Look at when I write a simple word in imperial, it is several letters strung together to create something with meaning. This language, however, looks more like if you overlay the letters on top of each other to form a word"
She wrote the example with the word 'city' but wrote the letters atop each other. Of course, if someone looked at the imperial alphabet and then at this, they would see no relation. I thought on this for days and tried to match shapes from the 2 alphabets to any of the symbols, while some do match this idea to many do not. The simple fact was that, without someone who already speaks the language to help, this task was impossible. I thought about comparing it to other languages. Viltin and Imperial, for example, have a lot in common and even mostly share an alphabet in terms of shapes. Nishigo is so vastly different from the two primary languages of the mainland continent, but perhaps it might have something in common with the lesser languages.
"Mother, do you know anything about the lesser languages?"
I asked her one day as I sat at the table with the scrolls of Nishigo in front of me, while she toiled in the kitchen preparing dinner for the afternoon.
"Oh, well, most have fallen out of fashion. I lived in the Imperial City for most of my life before meeting your father, so I know of Vikilan, and I've seen that language written before. I also know about Quimish, and I think there was the Snow language, but I can't remember the actual name of that one. Oh, and the language of the church, of course."
"Did any of those have any resemblance to this?"
She simply shook her head. "Most languages have most in common with Imperial. They say Imperial was the first language."
I found that interesting. This language, however, seemed like it was totally different in every way. I don't know much about history, but surely it didn't appear on its own. The world is just too small for that. Just then, it him me, the one thing I can do before deciding to give up for good. I recalled that there was a store in town, a tiny store crammed between two larger ones, so small you might be forgiven for not realising it was ever there to begin with. It was a bookstore. Well, in truth, it was where a very old man lived who used to be a scribe in Vlita. I recall when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, I wandered in there by accident, but I recall they had a map...a world map.
I decided that tomorrow I would go into town, visit that shop and look at that map. This all made me curious, very curious. How big was this world? I only knew this town, this farm, this life with my mother. I knew of places elsewhere. I knew of the nearby towns of Kingsport, Keld, Hogsvile, Fin and Black Hollow, towns we shared this great forest with. I knew of the great city of Vilta and the Imperial Capitol to the far far north. I had heard through my religious teachings of the Wall of the Seven Saints in the furthest reaches of the north and the great white beyond where the souls of the dead gather...the souls of the dead?
I wonder if Dad is there?