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.