Water and Brimstone
It is a lonely thing, to die in a world that is not your own. That is the fate that my brother and I now face. It is even more cruel that the world we find ourselves in is so like our own in so many ways, yet so hostile at every turn. The village blacksmith is the same man as our dear friend back home, though here he still has both of his hands, and no kindness in his heart for my brother Walter and I. The town doctor likewise has no knowledge of us, though he was one of my closest friends where we came from. Perhaps the most punishing difference is that there is no magic here. The five Wizard Fathers of our home village sought to punish my Walter and I for the crime of freeing ourselves from their tyranny, and so they banished us here, to this cursed mirror village, to a place without magic and thus no way to return home. They were cruel in their target, sending us to this reflection of our world. All of the faces look familiar, yet they close in on us like shadows and talk of the gallows. It is a lonely fate indeed, and if we are to meet it, then I must first recount how my brother and I came to be banished here in the first place.
The road to this moment began months ago, in our village on a world that looks so similar to this one but that runs completely parallel, never hoping to meet. I have always followed my brother everywhere, even after curfew. On the night that began our desperate journey and led eventually to our unjust punishment, I followed Walter out of our house in the clearing in the woods and crept with him through the trees to visit the hut of our dear friend, the village blacksmith. Though fully grown, we felt an adolescent thrill, sneaking out at a forbidden time of night.
The blacksmith was a stocky man named Edgar, a man of fearsome strength and braided beard. We made merry, the three of us—especially my brother and Edgar, who were old friends. They slapped one another’s backs as they rocked with mirth and laughter, even times oppressive as those. When the laughter died down like the fading embers of Edgar’s forge, he slid his table aside to access the floorboards underneath. He pulled the boards away to reveal a compartment beneath his floor. I was astounded that he’d risked hiding something in a village that forbade keeping secrets; the five Wizard Fathers hated few things more than town secrets, and they rooted them out on sight. To see what Edgar had concealed was terrifying in its implications.
“Been at this for moons, now,” he said. “I’ll stop when there’s one sword for every able-bodied person in the village.”
Walter pulled a crude sword from Edgar’s cache. “We number far more than five, I wager,” he said with his dry humor.
I countered, “Even imagining all of us armed, it seems an impossible feat.”
Yet here were the tools and, more importantly, the will to raise them. No sooner had I raised my doubts than Edgar and Walter were locked in scrimmage. All the while, I glanced out the window into the night, worried that the gnashing and sparking of blades would invite the attention of our oppressors.
All too soon, horse hooves sounded down the road. My blood ran cold. We rushed to hide Edgar’s stockpile, but the magic of the Wizard Fathers spurred their horses to unnatural speeds. With a simple charm, the Wizard Fathers commanded Edgar’s door to open. I heard my true name hollered with a command to cease. My whole body locked, despite my will to flee. Edgar and Walter were also forced to stop by the command of their true names, my brother with a contraband sword still in his hand and the blacksmith still gripping the dinner table.
The five Wizard Fathers filed through the door, the dying fire casting their clean-shaven faces into long shadows. They wore puritan dress: black doublets and breeches with white cuffs and ruffs and wide-brimmed hats on their heads. They carried no weapons. They needed only curses and the fear they invoked.
The First Father shouted for my brother by his true name, demanding he divulge the source of the blade he carried. Walter had no choice but to confess. The Second Father ordered Edgar to reveal why he had fabricated such things when weapons were forbidden, and forging arms was beyond the purview of his charter as village blacksmith.
“I have been forging swords to arm the village against you, Wizard Fathers,” he said.
The Wizard Fathers conferred without a word, sharing thoughts with their minds, nodding once they had agreed on their judgment. The Third Father glared at my brother, eyes burning like coals. I trembled, rooted to the spot. Third Father commanded Walter to raise the sword in his hands and cleave Edgar’s right hand from his arm. It was spoken, so it was done. The Wizard Fathers returned to their horses and galloped back to their abode as Edgar’s cries of pain rang in the night. The three of us had been forced to play-act the gruesome scene like sentient dolls in the hands of evil children.
Walter and I had to wheel Edgar in a barrow to our village doctor. Walter’s hands were slick with the blacksmith’s blood. He fell into a trance, repeatedly asking Edgar’s forgiveness like a mantra Edgar was too delirious to hear. We arrived at the home and surgery of Dr. Jonathan Wells, a good man, though a neurotic one. My nerves would be strained as well were I in his position, allowed to practice only what healing magic the Wizard Fathers imparted, both empowered and constrained by the teachings they chose and their close watch on his activities. The good doctor helped us carry Edgar to his examination table. Formaldehyde stung my nostrils.
Out back, my brother and I washed our hands in the moonlit creek. I tried to console him. He took to pacing about the woods. The doctor got to work. Edgar’s cries died down.
Once Dr. Wells was done, and his patient was asleep, he offered us whiskey to calm our nerves. We gathered around his fireplace. The terrifying sound of my true name being used against me echoed in the back of my mind, though I struggled to lift our spirits with amusing tales about our neighbors. My brother stared at the flames in shock, though each sip and story brought more of a grin to his face. The doctor too was rattled; he was far more accustomed to healing pain than my brother was to causing it. It had taken all of the doctor’s power to stem the blood flow, seal the wound, and dull the pain. But Edgar’s hand couldn’t be reattached. The Wizard Fathers had not granted him knowledge of such sorcery.
“There may be something that can help him,” said the doctor, wavering in his chair as his body grappled with the strong drink. He tensed his brow, staring into the flames. “It’s only the breadcrumb of a memory of a secondhand rumor.”
“How sagacious is the mind of our good doctor,” my brother belched, his humor returning to him.
Dr. Wells was in no laughing mood. He looked over his shoulder, out the window. He listened. Even owls hooting could mean the presence of the Wizard Fathers’ spies. He leaned close to us and whispered, “It is a magic of which they confer with great jealousy, even as they raise doubts of its existence.”
“You speak of a magic beyond their control?” I asked.
The firelight glistened in Jonathan Well’s eyes. The whiskey loosened his lips. He spoke as if to no one, as if merely voicing a private thought—a crime far less serious than conversing of forbidden secrets.
“I heard them speak of a cavern on a hilltop two states north of us. A cavern there contains not a waterfall, but a waterrise. In the pool at the end of an underground spring, water plummets heavenwards as though rising to God Himself. To baptize oneself in these waters is to have one’s greatest wish for one’s own body come true.”
He finished his recollection abruptly, as if it concerned no one. He finished his whiskey. Then he retired, paying us no further mind. It was as though he thought he might deny he had divulged this fearsome secret.
Walter and I wandered home in the waning moonlight. We walked in silence, each of us entertaining thrilling and dangerous designs as dawn approached. The good doctor had disclosed a way to restore Edgar’s hand, but by the time we’d returned home, my brother and I had contrived an entirely different idea. One that tasted of freedom.
There was, at the time, a pox. One that not even the Wizard Fathers had magic to cure. I rumored that Walter had come down with it, and everyone kept well away, our oppressors included. It bought us the time and privacy to search for the divine falls, the fabled water-rise. I watched over our property and livestock while Walter made the first journey. We planned that he could be gone a week before suspicions arose. He snuck out on horseback at night, reached the barrier surrounding our village, and passed through just when a deer traversed it so as to raise the false alarm. He journeyed two states north, urging his horse, Lyle, to the brink of exhaustion. He sought to learn as much from word-of-mouth as possible so as to make good use of his limited time. Meanwhile, I kept watch at home, and Dr. Wells made regular visits pretending to care for my brother.
When Walter returned, he shared his findings. Then we traded places. I took my own horse, Dora, and set out for territory my brother had not yet examined. We employed the ruse that I had caught the pox while tending to Walter and was now myself sick with it. We could not keep up this ploy indefinitely but were willing to risk further searches at careful intervals and with modifications to the story. We esteemed a magic font that could change our true names a reward worth the risks.
Our oppressors’ persecutions worsened in the months after Edgar’s plot had been discovered. Locks were forbidden from the village. Though they possessed the power to unlock any latch, this decree denied us the comfort of even nominally secured doors. The Wizard Fathers increased their taxation, their raids, and their thievery, wresting larger tithes of crops and livestock from their subjects, helping themselves without reserve to the fruits of our toils.
It was in the midst of this increased hostility that my brother returned one night from his latest excursion. I was at home maintaining the charade, avoiding the Wizard Fathers the same way they avoided us like the plague. He found me at the dinner table, face buried in my hands with a half-empty flagon of mead, wallowing in the moonlight that streamed through the window. The speed with which he bounded through the door, the brightness that could be seen in his eyes even in the darkness, told me everything.
We left our home in the clearing in the woods the following evening. We took a chance traveling together without leaving a brother behind to maintain our cover, reasoning that if we could but outrun the Wizard Fathers to the falls, they would never again challenge us. It was bliss, finally traveling north in each other’s company after so many lonely missions. The freedom in the world beyond the village barrier could be tasted in the air like the wafting scent of pine, could be heard on the breeze as clearly as birdsong. It was intoxicating, and it tempted us to ride on, to forget the falls, to forget our resolve to take up the freedom of a life on the run. To fly must mean exile from Edgar, Dr. Wells, our friends, our neighbors. So we retraced Walter’s enlightened path, knowing that true freedom would only be achieved upon successful return home with good news.
At the base of our mountain destination, we passed a log cabin. A wrinkled old woman rocked in her chair on the porch, wearing a coif and a dress the color of hydrangeas. My brother raised an arm to hail her as we rode past on the backs of our steeds. A smile split the woman’s craggy, chiseled face.
“Back so soon?” she called to Walter, her voice a resonant contralto.
“With my brother!” he replied, thumbing over his shoulder at me.
She nodded and picked the knitting up from her lap with a grin. Through the open doorway, I saw the shadow of someone standing at the stove, perhaps her husband. Smoke rose from the chimney. Birds sang. Cicadas called to one another. The woman seemed so at peace. I wondered what she might have wished upon the falls to change about herself, but I felt it impolite to ask.
I followed my brother up the winding trail of the mountain to a rocky outcrop. I heard the trickle of water. We roped Dora and Lyle to two trees and proceeded on foot toward the mossy mouth of a dark cave in the rock. Walter’s footing was sure, though I slipped here and there as the rock grew wet underfoot. The trickle grew into a rush. There was light up ahead. I felt spray on my face. We came upon an impossible sight, illuminated by sunlight that poured through an opening in the rock overhead. A pool on the cavern floor rippled as some unseen stream flowed into it from below. The water of the pool rushed from the ground toward the sun in a rising, streaming curtain that crested the opening’s edge. The reverse of a waterfall, just as Dr. Wells had said. A water-rise that defied logic, that defied what I thought I knew of nature. A majestic torrent that ascended toward God, Himself. I laughed a helpless, high-pitched laugh of elation, barely audible over the roaring water.
We walked to the water’s edge. I extended my arm toward the rise and opened my palm, as if making an offering. The water struck the back of my hand on its way up to the sky. I felt a darkness stirring inside of me. It felt like sin, seeing something so backward. Then it felt like faith. We were placing our trust in this power to lift us up out of distress, trusting this change would give us the power to free ourselves and others from tyranny. I pulled my hand from the stream and clasped Walter’s. We closed our eyes and stepped into the frigid deluge.
When we returned to our village, we rode through the barrier and straight down the main street. We no longer needed to sneak through the backwoods. All was quiet. The afternoon light was dying. Our village was a familiar sight, but the lightness we felt in our chests was new. I felt I might float out of my saddle. We could have done an about-face and raced our horses to the next village, but first we had to share the good news. Dr. Wells was nowhere to be seen. Edgar slept in his hut by the dying light of his forge, a cloth wrapped around the end of his arm where his hand should have been. We left some parchment behind for him to find when he woke up: a message to find Dr. Wells and tell him the legend was true. The water-rise waited in the hills near Chesapeake Bay.
We found our property troubled with silence. Our animals were missing. Our cows, our chickens, our mule. There were no other signs of interlopers, though the conclusion was clear. Our oppressors must not be far removed from the scene. We dismounted and ran inside to gather what supplies we dared. While collecting a change of clothes in my bedroom upstairs, I looked out the window and found the Wizard Fathers at our gate, carried on the silent hooves of their enchanted steeds. The sun was setting beyond the trees, casting a red glow upon a horizon swallowed up beneath a purple sky. The cicadas screamed, their song harsh and alarming. My brother joined me at the window. Our oppressors were here.
The First Father called my brother by his true name and commanded him to come down. My blood ran cold, but when I looked at Walter, he stood his ground. The Wizard Father shouted my true name as well. I heard it, tensed with fright, but let the invocation pass over me. It was, after all, merely a sound, and one that no longer referred to me. The falls had made us anew. Our true names had changed. When the Wizard Fathers commanded me to come meet them, I remained master of myself, feet planted on the floorboards.
We were free. But only from the curse. The First Father looked to his fellow despots. They conferred through their shared thoughts. Then each of them raised his staff and spoke fire into being. Five flames blazed like torches. They took aim and propelled their fires across the ground to our front door. Our home was ablaze. A moment later, we felt the heat.
They called in unison, “Surrender, and we will spare your lives. Defy us and perish.”
“I will not live in their iron grip,” said Walter.
And I said to him, “I will not perish in flames.”
He blinked. Then he nodded. “Nor I alone.”
And so we decided that iron was more easily escaped than fire. I believe my brother saw this as weakness. Indeed, given the judgment that followed, I sometimes regret giving myself to the shackles instead of the blaze. But for better or worse, for once in our lives, my brother followed my lead, down the stairs, out the door, and onto our knees. He hung his head in shame. I kept my hands behind my head and my eyes on the five horsemen at our gate as they commanded the fire to wane.
The Wizard Fathers performed their cursed ritual by the light of our own fireplace. The fire was hot on my face, and our home smelled of smoke. As Walter and I knelt with our hands and feet shackled, I overheard the Wizard Fathers whispering behind us. They were afraid to march us back into town for judgment, lest the sight elicit dangerous questions in the minds of our neighbors.
Between us and the fireplace, they scattered sand upon the floor, creating a trail that glimmered in the fire’s light. The Third Father stepped forth, adorned in a stole embroidered with cryptic runes. He held a hand over the sand and intoned their language, perhaps calling even the sand and the fire by their true names. The Second Father brought a hot poker forth from the hearth. Its glow radiated upon my face. But rather than my skin, he branded it upon the sand. Sweat beaded upon my brow as the patch of sand kindled and burned like a bed of coals. The scent of sulfur scorched our nostrils. A glossy sheen coated the bed of sand, forming a pool like mercury that extinguished the flames. The Second Father joined the Third incanting. We saw our reflections in the surface of the pool. The First and Fifth Fathers joined the conjuration.
The Fourth spoke in language we could understand. “We banish you to a place reflective of our own world. In that reflection, you shall find no magic, no sorcery, no way ever to return. You defy our authority to speak order into the world. This reflection shall defy your wishes to seek order in it.”
A shimmer passed over the surface of the pool. The irons were heavy on my wrists and ankles. The First Father gripped the back of my neck. The Fifth Father grabbed my brother’s. The odor grew overwhelming. Walter shouted that he loved me, raising his trembling voice above the incantation. I held my breath. Then the Fathers thrust our faces into the sulfurous pool.
I closed my eyes. There was a splash upon my face. My head felt as if underwater. I shut my mouth, blew air out of my nostrils as I was submerged. The heat dissipated with a hiss. All went cold as ice. My body heaved as if I had been flung into the air. I felt the air against my skin. A hard surface struck against my back as I landed with a dizzying rush. I opened my eyes. My brother and I lay gasping and sweating upon the floor of our home. There was no fire, no Fathers, no sand, not even the sounds of bugs outside. There was only night, and a loneliness so pervasive that we could feel it in the atmosphere. We were together. We were alive. We were at home. But if the cryptic words of the Wizard Fathers were any indication, all was not right.
“Who’s there?” shouted a voice from the stairs.
We looked to the voice, and saw two strange older men. We scrambled to our feet and ran out the door before they could arm themselves against us. The house may not have been ours, but we found ourselves in the same clearing, in the same woods. With the dweller of this place on our heels, we ran to the horses. We called for Dora and Lyle, but these horses reared back and whinnied, fending us off with their hooves. We ran to the trees. This world looked like ours, but the home and the horses belonged to other people entirely. We never looked back—resisted the impulse to learn whether the mirror dwellers carried with them bows or knives or pitchforks.
We emerged from the forest where we knew Dr. Wells’ house to be. We rapped on his front door, checking over our shoulders for pursuers. The man himself answered the door, still blinking sleep from his eyes.
“Jonathan!” my brother exclaimed.
The man recoiled and raised an arm. “What the devil could you possibly want at this hour?” he scowled. “And who are you, anyhow?!”
We fared worse at Edgar’s hut. Walter nearly tore the door off its hinges to get inside. Edgar stood at his forge, hammering away late into the night. Upon our entry, he pulled a blade out of the fire and pointed it at us. It glowed red hot. He still had both of his hands, without a single seam to betray the cut that our Edgar had suffered.
“Please,” I pleaded, as my brother stood at a loss for words. “We need to find the Wizard Fathers.” This was indeed a backward world.
“There’s no witchcraft in this village,” said this mirror Edgar. His eyes were set. His beard was tangled and mangey. “Unless you’ve brought it with you.”
We were unwelcome, unknown, even to our closest friends. Again, we fled. Behind us, Edgar clanged his hammer on the sword. The warning chime sounded. As we ran onto the road, we could hear footsteps coming from the woods, snapping sticks and rustling straw. Those mirror dwellers whom we had awoken were now waking neighbors. The village was mobilizing against us. We ran down the main street past buildings that resembled establishments from our own village, similarities partial but not entire. The smallest differences left us completely disoriented as we found our way through the dark. We could tell from the torchlight that a crowd was amassing behind us. Outside the village tavern were two horses belonging to somebody inside. We had no other choice. We untied them, then mounted and fled, fighting to control on the stolen horses. We galloped out of town, leaving a cloud of dirt in our wake as tears poured down our faces. I could not see my brother sobbing, but I could hear him over the steady pulse of hooves upon the ground.
We knew not where we’d rest that night—only that we fled toward Chesapeake Bay, in hopes that at least one form of magic still existed in this parallel world.
We struggled to retrace our journey. Landmarks were not what they had been. Towns went by different names. Hills rose in places where there had been level forests. When we stopped to ask for directions, words for things were altered. We never stopped long. We were invaders and horse thieves, shunned demoniacs. The mirror dwellers—our neighbors in another life—had chased us away and kept chasing us.
At last, we came the cabin at the base of our destination. There was no sound in the air, not even insects. Not even the breeze. A man rocked in a chair on the porch, his face swollen and dirty. He held an axe in his lap. His front door was ajar, and the wood was streaked with blood. He watched us passing, and we watched him. I peered into his house but saw no one inside. He let us pass without event, but we were watching over our shoulders as we ventured up the mountain.
We could see that the man had not followed us. But we soon heard the ruckus of the mirror dwellers again at our heels. Mounted, they had nearly caught up with us: a mob of familiar faces, made foreign by anger and suspicion. Hastened by our proximity to the prize and the close pursuit, we urged our stolen horses onward and upward. We had the lead. We could not lose it.
We found the outcrop. We leaped from horseback and stumbled to the mouth of the cave, the militia’s shouts lending me speed, even as I trembled so terribly I could barely stand. My brother and I clambered through the cave. The sounds of rushing water grew louder. Behind us were the yelling vigilantes. Their angry voices joined with the torrent’s echoes in terrible confusion. The ground grew wet. My heart felt near to bursting. We crested a rocky rise and came upon the spilling stream. Alas, gravity had won. Walter and I had arrived at a perfectly natural waterfall, the deluge streaming away from Heaven’s sun and falling ever downward to hell.
My brother screamed. He rushed forward. Feverishly, he collapsed into the frigid pool on the cave floor. The water came up to his waist. He hollered in disbelief and thrust his hands into the deluge. We would not return home—not to the one we knew. Two mirror dwellers grabbed my shoulders and brought me to my knees. Edgar and Jonathan waded into the water to grapple my brother as the falls poured upon him. Walter would not fight them off. He had not wanted to live in irons, but I had been afraid to die free. And so we found ourselves in irons again, marched from the cave with our hands manacled behind. I tried to tell them our story, but it came across mere ranting delirium, only reinforcing their convictions that my brother and I were apostate.
Of all of them, you alone have encouraged me to speak and have listened without judgment. And so I beg of your mercy—as they take us back to your mirror village in chains and speak of the gallows, of burning, of weighing us down on the lake bottom—consider what a lonely thing it is to die in a world to which you do not belong.
I have two hopes. The first lies in the world we left, hidden in a bit of parchment. I hope we will ride back into town to find Edgar waiting, his one hand grasping the hilt of a sword, our desperate note concealed in his pocket. Perhaps Jonathan Wells will be with him, perhaps every able-bodied, free-willed person from our village, all armed to stand with us. My second hope lies in this world we’ve found ourselves in. My second hope is in you, who might not be my friend but is certainly an honest man. If my old friends have not carried over for friendship’s sake, you, my new friend will stand with us, even if it means defying them all. Even if it means confronting the unjust world you know and casting yourself into a world you’ve never imagined. I will not perish in flame, and my brother will not drown alone. We will not die friendless and estranged. But that may be only if the one who has been willing to listen is also willing to speak. Consider, but quickly now, I implore you. I can see the village ahead. We’re almost home.
About the Author
J. M. Williams (@JMWwrites) lives in Atlanta with his wife and their cat. His stories have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, & Livina Press.