When I was just seven years old I remember my momma explaining to me how no matter what happened, I can never raise my hand to the Master.
I must always smile.
I must always thank him.
I must be grateful just for being aloud to live.
Others aren’t so lucky.
If anyone ever asks, “Do you want to be free?” I can only ever respond with, “Of course not. This is just the way things are.”
Property doesn’t want.
Property doesn’t mourn.
Property doesn’t avenge.
That night, when the Master’s wife caught him with momma I had woken up sick, like my soul knew something was going wrong even though I didn’t.
It wasn’t the first time he had taken momma to his room.
It was the last though.
“Why don’t you make him stop?” I remember asking momma when she came back to our little room in the basement. She didn’t respond. Just held me in her arms so I couldn’t see the tears falling.
I guess our treatment was a little better than the other slaves.
We got a room inside.
They just had a shack they all shared outside.
Sometimes I wonder if they were luckier though, being inside meant being closer to the master and his family.
When his youngest boy caught me practicing magic outside one day he gave me an evil smile.
I swear that was the face of the devil.
He said it was amazing for a slave to even be able to do magic and if I wanted he would have me practice alongside him.
Property can’t say no, and I didn’t know well enough not to trust a boy my own age so I agreed despite that sickly feeling in my gut begging me not to.
He brought me inside while explaining that his dad was a genius magical engineer, assuming a slave like me wouldn’t know what that was, despite the fact that I lived and worked in his home throughout his entire life, he explained that a magical engineer is someone who tests the space where science, specifically physics, and magic meet and uses this boundary line to design amazing devices.
I just stayed silent and nodded along, complimenting him.
I wanted to stop following him and run away as we moved into the warehouse. I had seen slaves come in here before and when they would leave the light in their eyes would be missing.
We went past the black door with a burning candle engraved onto it.
He told me that today was the first day his dad gave him permission to use this space.
“As long as the candle burns, our pursuit of knowledge and power will never end. Is what Dad always says when he comes here.”
I don’t exactly remember what happened after that.
He ordered me onto the table.
He said I had to give him permission to operate though.
I didn’t know what he meant by ‘operate’ but I couldn’t say no anyways.
Property can’t say no.
Then he started cutting.
And tearing.
And chanting
And burning.
I blacked out eventually.
I heard someone yelling at me, telling me to stay awake. To fight back.
I couldn’t understand back then though.
How was I supposed to do any of that when I wasn’t even a person to begin with?
I woke up in my mother’s arms.
I wanted to hug her but for some reason I couldn’t move my own arm.
When I looked at it, it just hung there lifelessly.
Mother kept apologizing but I told her I didn’t know why she was but that just made her cry harder so I started to stay silent after that.
I overheard the Master and his Son talking sometime after that saying that something must have gone wrong with the surgery. His son claimed that ‘the installation was perfect’ but the Master refused to listen and ended up hitting and yelling at him for ‘wasting good material.”
That was the same night Master was caught with mother.
I never saw her again after that.
Something broke within us me.
I never spoke again.
I was thrown out of the house and into the shed with the other slaves but nothing changed for me.
I was a toy discarded, but I was still a toy none-the-less.
Some of the other adults tried talking to me. They spoke of a place to the north where slavery had been outlawed. They spoke of people who would be coming here to get them all away.
I was a young man then, almost sixteen years of age, I’m sure they assumed I would fight with them but for some reason I just… couldn’t.
The revolt was quick but violent.
The Masters son was taken away by the slaves as a hostage and his wife was stabbed through with a pike thrown with someone’s telekinetic magic, impaling her to the second floor of the old stone house.
A good throw indeed.
The master himself was quite a show.
A slave tried to cut off his arm but instead of bleeding flesh it sparked like metal letting the master peirce through the slave with just a thrust of his palm.
His magic was hardly a match for numbers though. They weren’t able to kill him but kept him bound in place for more than long enough to escape.
One of them tried to take me with them, a kind older man who seemed to have seen me as some kind of replacement son for his own that had been lynched by some boys from in town after he was caught flirting with a girl there.
I wouldn't leave then though.
I had to wait for momma mom my mother.
All in all I was the last one there.
Some other younger slaves had wanted to stay but the adults refused to listen. They would simply knock them out to stop their struggles and carry them away like bandits or stubborn princes.
Master brought me into the house, though as the days passed it quickly came to be more of a dungeon.
He stopped calling me by my title and began to call me son, but I didn’t mind.
I was just his toy to play with and I would fulfill whatever make-believe role he needed me to.
I would behave like she taught me.
The days past and Master father used me to assist in his magic. Making my body more like his own.
His friends and followers visited the house often at first but as it became more debilitated and father’s mind collapsed more and more they came by less and eventually not at all.
On my eighteenth birthday father gave me back my arm, though we still hadn’t exchanged a word at all.
He constructed a wonderful mythology for me.
How I was secretly always his son and the other boy who hurt me was actually the slave. The magic had made us swap minds is all. He did all he could to give me the other boy's body but even magic has limits.
He taught me the laws of magic on that final day.
- All action has an equal and opposite reaction.
- Matter cannot be destroyed or created
- Power borrowed must always be returned two fold
- A nature foreign to the world will always be rejected
- Divine will is not magic.
- Magic casts without power will be paid for in life
- All magic, regardless of form, is simply will made manifest
- The true cost of magic is derived from the first three laws
I really like the laws though I couldn’t understand why.
When he told me of them I would always smile and the sickly feeling in my stomach would grow but feel comforting.
That final night he brought me into his workshop and cast a spell over my body I felt the smile grow even larger as he collapsed to the ground coughing before finally growing silent at last.
