Origins: Kerrowyn Lightfoot - Part IV

Part IV: Shadows of the Past

Echoes in the Air 

At the top of the Tower, above the offices, seminar rooms, and the cluttered bedsits where apprentices came to rest and rot, lay a small laboratory built to specification and, as of lately, maintained to a standard bordering on paranoia. It was hers and hers alone. One of the privileges of graduating and being accepted as a full acranist of the Tower. Every surface had its logic: rows of labeled vials, ordered by volatility and shade; rods of infused glass or orichalcum, nested in velvet so they could not gossip with one another in the dark; racks for books arranged not by subject or author, but by spine width, to maximize shelf density and visual pleasure. There was a window, too, but Kerrowyn kept it draped in cheesecloth, since direct sunlight tended to fade both dyes and focus.

In the laboratory’s center stood Kerrowyn herself, perched atop a step-stool designed to bring her nearer the plane of human eye-level. She wore the standard smock, customized to fit her diminutive gnomish frame and patched in half a dozen places with whatever thread she’d happened upon in the years since her last proper shopping trip. Her hair was ungovernable, and today she’d simply crammed it under a makeshift kerchief. Her hands, at this moment, were cupped in a shape reminiscent of an acorn, or the sheltering palms of a supplicant, except that the gap between them crackled with a small, impatient weather system.

Lynx chirped from atop the bookshelf, voice bright as a bell and pitched to needle. The lavender pseudo-dragon never missed an opportunity to criticize.

Kerrowyn ignored the commentary and closed her hands with surgical precision. The pressure within grew, a localized cyclone of energy that swept bits of dust and errant parchment into a spiral. She counted heartbeats, one-two-three, then flicked her fingers open.

The air above her palms bent, rippled, and resolved into a creature that was more intent than animal: a miniature air elemental, its form defined by crackling veins of purple energy and the ceaseless compulsion to escape the boundaries of this world. It hovered, vibrating, then darted in a circle before landing lightly on her left forearm, where it began, with the patience of the obsessive, to rearrange the fine blonde hairs into a more aesthetically pleasing orientation.

Lynx observed, stretching her wings and knocking two volumes to the floor in the process.

Kerrowyn suppressed a smile. She addressed the elemental with a voice both gentle and matter-of-fact. “You are not allowed beyond this room, and you are especially not allowed to touch the planar tuning forks. Understand?” The elemental regarded her with the uncanny stillness of the uncomprehending, then attempted to braid her hair.

“Good. Progress.” She plucked the elemental from her sleeve and suspended it between two glass rods, where it would harmlessly dissipate over the next hour. She made a notation in her logbook—subject showed improved response to negative phrasing, possible resonance with last night’s lunar cycle, recommend further testing—and moved to tidy the aftermath.

A lesser practitioner would have left the room a wreck; Kerrowyn preferred that every tool returned to its assigned place, every droplet of catalyst wiped up before it could stain, every datum recorded while still warm; a far cry from the cluttered mess that was her office and bedroom. She found the ritual soothing, even necessary. Control was the difference between success and catastrophe, or, as her mother would say, between being a Lightfoot and being nothing at all.

She was halfway through replacing the quills when the door banged open without warning, and Alric Verenium—her friend, sometimes instructor, and perennial thorn—swept in like a breeze that had decided to stop playing nice.

“Urgent,” he said, and the word crackled with something more serious than his usual arch enthusiasm.

Kerrowyn did not bother to set the quill down gently; it clattered against the inkwell and spattered a comet of blue across the margin of her logbook. She wiped her hands on her apron, conscious in the same moment of how childish the gesture looked, and squared her shoulders.

Alric was a study in contradictions. Half-elven, tall as a banner pole, his hair gone prematurely to storm-gray, but his face still arranged in the impish lines of a man determined to enjoy his own cleverness. Today, though, his gaze was all business, and he carried with him a folded newspaper, gripped so tightly the knuckles were bloodless.

“I need you to see this,” he said, not even attempting a segue. He tossed the paper onto the desk, where it slid to a stop at the precise boundary between Kerrowyn’s organized chaos and her territory for “miscellaneous substances.”

She scanned the masthead—Capitol News, dated that very morning—then the bold headline beneath: CLAN MATRIARCH ARRESTED, EXECUTION IMMINENT.

Kerrowyn’s world snapped to the size of that headline. Her body did not move, but in her mind, the steps of the laboratory receded to an impossible distance, and every sound narrowed to the rush of blood in her ears. She read the subhead twice, then again. “Klaudia Lightfoot—convicted of high treason, conspiracy, and multiple counts of larceny against the imperial exchequer—scheduled for public execution in Fountain Square at first light.”

It was as if some hidden wire, strung between her shoulder blades and the base of her skull, had been jerked taut. The pain was not physical, but it was unmistakable. Her fingers trembled, then clenched, and she drew a steadying breath before speaking.

“How long have you known?” Her voice was as thin and cold as the air elemental, dissipating.

Alric hesitated, which for him was almost unthinkable. “The Watch posted broadsheets last night. There’s… there’s more, but I wanted you to see it for yourself.”

Kerrowyn’s first impulse was to laugh at the absurdity—her mother, the unkillable, the architect of every scheme from the Nightvalley to the royal palace, caught by something as pedestrian as “the law.” But the sound wouldn’t come. She read the article in full: the rumors, the accusations, the list of alleged co-conspirators (half of whom were dead, the other half likely soon to be), the boast of justice served, the reminder that mercy was not an imperial virtue.

There was a picture, too, a grainy depiction of her mother at the time of arrest. Even through the muddy ink, Kerrowyn saw the tilt of the chin, the refusal to cower, the eyes so sharp they seemed to puncture the page.

“What will you do?” Alric asked, and for once, the question was not rhetorical.

Kerrowyn said nothing. The air in the room was so thick with ozone and unspent words that even Lynx had gone quiet, her wings tucked close, eyes unblinking.

In the silence, the faint remnant of the air elemental drifted from between the rods, hovered above Kerrowyn’s hand, and vanished. She watched it go, and felt, for a fleeting moment, that she might vanish with it.

But the moment passed. She folded the newspaper, tucked it under her arm, and turned to Alric.

“I will not mourn her,” she said, and the lie held steady until her knees nearly buckled. She steadied herself on the edge of the table, the tension in her hands now raw and visible. “But I would like to see her one last time. To be sure.”

Alric nodded, his usual mask of wit replaced by something older and heavier. “Just think about it some more, then let me know,” he said, and left with the soft click of a door that sounded more like an ending than a beginning.

When the room had gone silent again, Lynx unfurled herself from the shelf and glided down, landing on Kerrowyn’s shoulder. She nuzzled her cheek, a rare display of affection, and Kerrowyn stroked the familiar’s chin with a gentleness that belied the tremor still working through her hands.

“You think I’m making a mistake,” she said, mostly to herself.

Lynx, not for the first time, offered only a contemplative silence.

Kerrowyn stood there a long time, feeling the last currents of conjured air die out in her laboratory, the memory of her mother’s eyes lingering in the space it left behind.

Then, with the deliberate care of someone building a defense against the world, she cleaned her tools, closed her logbook, and set her resolve for morning.

Reminiscence 

Her quarters were too large. She’d earned them, years ago, when an old arcanist retired to a beach somewhere that was probably illusory, and the Tower repurposed the suite for the most promising of the next generation. Kerrowyn’s name, if not her presence, commanded respect in these halls, and she wielded it like a borrowed blade: careful, always conscious that if she tripped, the blade would cut her first.

Tonight, the chambers felt even more cavernous. The fire in the hearth was down to embers, the glass orbs in their sconces dialed low and tinted blue, so the shadows had corners to collect in. Kerrowyn sat at her desk, which was not a desk but an old banker’s table, the surface scarred by a previous owner’s manic devotion to neatness. The newspaper lay open on the desk, its headline daring her to read it again. She left it there, untouched, a challenge she refused to answer.

Instead, she turned to the shelf behind her and pulled down a sequence of objects, each chosen for its ability to stave off silence: a clockwork mouse she’d stolen and then improved, so that now it could traverse the entire Tower before winding down; a brass key to a door that no longer existed, hung on a blue ribbon; a marble with the Tower’s sigil inside, purchased for a day’s wages from a street vendor, but now the only remaining evidence that the vendor had ever lived; and a jeweled brooch in the shape of a bird that Alric had bought for her after she told him about her branding. She arranged them on the desk, then knocked them out of order, then lined them up again, a game that would have exasperated her mother or, more likely, been used against her in some later negotiation.

She caught herself reaching for her mother’s memory before she realized what she was doing.

It was always dark, in the way that places become dark not for lack of light but for the color of what they want to hide. In her first memory, she is six, crouched in the belly of a broken piano while her mother haggles with the pawnbroker in the next room. The task is to open the lock on the coin box before the broker returns. The piano is full of dust and moths and splinters, but she has already learned that the world is a series of boxes, and that all of them, eventually, can be opened.

Her mother’s voice, through the wall, is bright with laughter and the implied threat of violence. When the broker laughs back, there is the sound of a bottle being opened, the beginning of a friendship that will end with someone’s pockets turned out. Kerrowyn ignores the adults and works the lock. She’s small, and her hands are steady. The first attempt fails; the second, she remembers to breathe and listens for the click, and the box yields. There’s a ring of coins, a few silver, mostly brass, and she takes the smallest coin—a copper half-mark—and pushes the rest back inside, as if the broker will never notice.

Later, Klaudia will slap her for taking the half-mark, but also teach her how to hide it better next time. There is never praise for doing a thing well, only for doing it better than last time.

Another memory, older now, seven or eight. It is night, and she and Kerric are on the roof of the clan house, looking for the moon. Kerric is angry because Kerrowyn is not listening; she is counting the footsteps of the patrol below, timing the rotations, already practicing for the day when she will be allowed to run errands alone. Her mother appears at the hatch, hair down and eyes like obsidian. She watches them for a long time before speaking.

“You’re both wrong, you know,” Klaudia says, and they freeze, unsure if it’s the start of a lesson or a punishment. “You think you can outsmart the city, but the city always wins. Only question is, how long can you make it forget that you’re trying?”

She brings them down from the roof, silent, and in the kitchen she gives them hot bread and tells a story about how she once outwitted a guard captain by hiding in his own laundry chute. Kerrowyn laughs, and Kerric laughs, and for a minute it feels like a family. Then her mother turns cold, and tells them never to be so stupid as to trust a clear sky on a job night, and sends them both to bed with the reminder that nobody in the world would ever come for them if they were caught.

Kerrowyn remembers the bread, but also the cold after.

And then: the branding.

She remembers everything about that day. She remembers the pain—not as much as the world going silent afterwards, as if she had stepped into a room with all the air sucked out.

When she returned home, she was not praised for saving her brother or the cleverness of her escape. Instead, she had been banished to the cellar and lectured for five days straight about her weakness. Her wound healed slowly, painfully, Klaudia refusing to use any of the clan’s precious healing potions or salves, telling her that the pain was part of the lesson.

She never once asked if Kerrowyn was alright, never once betrayed a hint of relief that her daughter made it home.

The years at the Tower were supposed to unspool all that, to give her a place where no one saw the brand first, or at least where they pretended not to. But the brand lived on, a fresh scar every morning, a warning that even among the city’s chosen, she was only tolerated on a leash.

For a long time, Kerrowyn tried to compensate by being the best—first in her cohort, last to bed, most meticulous in the labs, never late, never caught unprepared. She could see, after a while, that this impressed the other wizards at the tower, even if they never expressed it openly, never offered encouragement, never acknowledged her small successes. Instead, she would overhear whispers in the hallways, catch snippets of conversation from passing apprentices, or receive cryptic notes slipped under her door from those who sympathized with her struggle. Always with an air of “I knew she’d rise above her past,” but never the words, “We are proud of you.” It often felt like she was still back in the clan, fighting for validation that seemed perpetually out of reach.

She blinked and found herself back in the present, the blue lampshade of the magelight above her desk humming faintly, the clockwork mouse stuck at the edge of the desk, its wheels clicking in protest. Lynx, asleep on the pillow, flicked an ear at her restlessness but did not wake.

Kerrowyn let the memories run through her one more time, then reached for the blue ribbon and tied it, not around her wrist, but around the copper coin she’d kept since childhood. She placed the coin on the desk, directly atop the article’s headline. The symbolism was not lost on her, but she did not smile.

It was close to midnight when she made her decision. She rose and made her way through the sleeping corridors of the Tower to Alric’s suite. His lights were still on, of course; the man didn’t believe in sleep when a problem needed solving.

He answered her knock on the first tap, as if he’d been waiting. His face, in the lamp’s glow, was older and softer than it had been even hours before. “You’re sure?” he asked.

She nodded. “I need to see her. Not for her. For me.”

Alric hesitated. “I know you think this is closure, but sometimes all you get is another wound. I’ve seen these things; it’s not pretty.”

Kerrowyn shrugged. “I know.”

He looked at her, really looked, and she saw in his expression the ache of someone who had lost something they never named. “We’ll leave before dawn,” he said, “to avoid the crowds. If you want to call it off, just tell me. No explanations.”

She shook her head. “Thank you.”

The silence that followed was, if not warm, at least not cold.

Back in her quarters, Kerrowyn sat awake on her bed, the fire burned out, the room as dark as the city she had left behind. She studied her hands, the fingers that had picked a thousand locks, conjured a hundred beings, written whole treatises on the physics of binding. They looked unremarkable. They looked hers.

For the first time in years, she let herself remember her mother as just a person, not a myth, not a warden, not even a villain. In that memory, she saw the flaw: how every lesson had come as a warning, every kindness as a setup for cruelty, every dream as something borrowed, never given. Her mother had never known her, not really. Only the version she’d engineered.

When dawn came, she dressed in silence, tying the copper coin inside her sleeve as a ward against the ghosts of the day. Then, with Lynx perched on her shoulder, she went out to meet Alric, ready to see what the world would make of her, now that she was no longer a piece on her mother’s board.

The Weight of Witness

Dawn in Capitol City had a way of finding its own audience. On days like this, the light leaked through the alleys ahead of the bells, painting the granite buildings with a sickly optimism that never lasted past the first tolling. Fountain Square was already half-full by the time Kerrowyn and Alric arrived, with more citizens streaming in from every direction, their breath visible in the early chill, their chatter the nervous laughter of those pretending to be immune to spectacle.

The gallows had gone up overnight, ugly and efficient, its construction less a feat of engineering than an assertion of authority. It stood at the square’s center, surrounded by a ring of pounded earth and a double cordon of imperial guards in their parade uniforms, which looked new but already smelled of sweat and last-minute starching. Kerrowyn could barely see the top of the platform from ground level, so she and Alric staked out a position near a vendor’s cart, the better to watch the crowd as it swelled.

“Not the largest turnout I’ve seen,” Alric murmured. “But the mood is—” He broke off, searching for a word.

Kerrowyn supplied it: “Festive.”

He grimaced. “That’s not how I’d put it, but yes.”

The citizens of the Capitol had come in all their best: humans in wool cloaks or merchant livery, dwarves with their work-stained hands folded primly behind their backs, even a scattering of elves in the subdued grays favored by refugees from the northern reaches. There were others, too, clustered in silent knots—workers, servants, children with noses pressed to the fence posts, hungry for a story to tell at supper. The bloodlust was not loud, but it was present, a quiet, collective yearning for a punctuation mark at the end of a long, ugly sentence.

Kerrowyn felt nothing at first. Not the cold, not the growing press of bodies, not even the nervous anticipation radiating from Lynx, who hid beneath her scarf and occasionally snaked her head out to observe the square. She kept her eyes on the platform, watching as the functionaries brought up the last of the props: a portable dais for the herald, a crate for the executioner to stand on, a stack of weighted ropes. The show was for the city, but the efficiency was for the record books.

“Did you ever think it would come to this?” Alric said.

Kerrowyn didn’t answer. Her mind was elsewhere, circling through memories of the Square as it had been: market days with Kerric, night jobs run for her mother’s benefit, the time she’d almost been trampled by a runaway horse and spent three weeks dreaming of hooves. Now, every brick and window had been rearranged around the promise of a single, ugly morning.

The crowd’s murmur grew restless as a procession of imperial guards entered from the west. At their center, shackled and surrounded, came the prisoners. There were five of them, heads bowed, hands manacled in front. Kerrowyn spotted her mother immediately—Klaudia Lightfoot, or what was left of her. The newsprint had not done justice to the transformation: the gnome matriarch was shrunken, her white hair gone limp, her face a mask of bruises and old arrogance. Her feet barely touched the cobbles; two guards practically carried her up the steps.

“They must have worked her over,” Alric said under his breath.

Kerrowyn nodded. It did not surprise her. She watched as her mother was positioned at the far end of the gallows, away from the larger prisoners, as if she were contagious.

The herald, a man with an unfortunate mustache and a penchant for dramatic pauses, read out the charges: theft, conspiracy, treason, assault on the person of an imperial officer, and so on. Kerrowyn listened for signs of doubt or mercy, but the charges rolled out like a catechism, each one received by the crowd with a satisfied silence. When the herald finished, he gestured to the executioner, who took up his place beside the lever that controlled the trapdoor.

Klaudia did not speak. She did not lift her head. She looked smaller than ever, as if she had folded herself down to the size of a regret and was waiting for someone to notice. Kerrowyn felt a moment of panic, the urge to shout, to run, to do something, but it passed. She stayed where she was, a single spot in a sea of witnesses.

As the final preparations were made, a thin woman to Kerrowyn’s left leaned in and whispered, “You know her?”

Kerrowyn turned, not trusting herself to answer.

“I used to run bread for her, before she—” The woman caught herself, glanced at Kerrowyn’s robes and the mark on her wrist, and then nodded as if she understood. “She had a way of making you feel seen,” the woman said. “Sometimes I wish I’d never met her.”

Kerrowyn considered this, then looked back to the platform. The guards fixed the nooses. The condemned stared straight ahead, the morning sun catching on the polished brass of the trap mechanism.

The silence that followed was not the hush of anticipation, but the uneasy quiet that comes when an entire crowd suddenly sees itself in the mirror. Then, with no fanfare, the lever was pulled.

Four of the prisoners dropped at once, their feet vanishing in a blur of motion and their bodies swinging like marionettes in a poorly staged show. The last, Klaudia, hung for a moment at the edge, her head tipped back as if looking for something in the sky. Kerrowyn saw the exact instant her mother recognized her in the crowd, or maybe just saw through her, because for a fraction of a heartbeat their eyes met, and the world collapsed to the distance between two bruised lives.

Then the trapdoor opened and her mother was gone.

They stayed until the bodies were cut down and the crowd began to thin, the voices rising again as if eager to fill the vacuum left by the spectacle. Lynx curled around Kerrowyn’s neck, her warmth a small comfort against the wind.

Only when they reached the edge of the square did Kerrowyn look back. The gallows was already coming down, the crowd dispersed, the world returned to its business of forgetting. She wondered if, in a hundred years, anyone would remember this morning, or if it would just be another story, passed down and edited until the only thing left was the lesson: the city always wins.

Alric waited until they had walked most of the way back to the Tower before he spoke. “You did what you came to do,” he said. “Do you feel better?”

Kerrowyn thought about it. She thought about her mother’s last look, the hollowness of it, the way the city had swallowed everything and left nothing behind. She thought about the girl on the roof, counting patrols. She thought about Kerric, wherever he was, and whether he would ever forgive her for surviving.

She shook her head. “No,” she said, voice flat.

Alric did not press. They walked the rest of the way in silence, the city waking up around them, the shadows shrinking as the sun climbed higher.

She went inside, the familiar weight of her life settling back onto her shoulders, and let the world move on without her for a little while longer.