The Light Templar

I AM DEAD.

It was the only thing I knew.

Until my eyes opened. And my first memory of this life was not the first breath I took, but of being alone.

There was stone. Light. And darkness.

And what I had been left with.

A sword. A shield. A scale.

I had no memory of these things. And yet I knew that they were mine.

—journal entry written by Selisara, The Light

***

I WAS ALONE.

Wrong– that beating in my chest said. Wrong.

Memory did not return in fragments, but in words. Sand. Ocean. Sun. Sky. I knew these things as I looked at them. Clouds. Waves. Salt. Air.

I knew what was missing from them.

The question rose up in me with a flash of prickling heat.

Where is my dragon?

“Eme?” I called out the name of my dragon, my voice gravelly and thin and not something I remembered as mine. “Eme!”

Nothing–not the jagged edge of earth that seemed to puncture through the surface of the ocean or the sliver of sandy shore–jostled any memory of mine. But everything inside me hurt. A terrible ache raced down my spine. My legs protested being upright, chest stiffer than my neck that’d been angled on hard sand for what felt like centuries. I pressed a hand to my lower back where a knot had formed in the dark expanse between now and then.

I walked the rocky piece of earth that revealed nothing of itself, other than its endurance against the thrashing waters. And it revealed even less about me. Or what I was doing here. Or where my dragon had gone.

“Eme!”

I strained to remember.

What happened what happened what happened–

I pulled my gaze from the horizon to look at the shield in the grip of my left hand that was nothing more than wood and iron and faded. Scratches and gouges marred its face. The hilt of my sword was worn from time and use, smoothed where my fingers held it even now. The blade was rusted and worn and dulled from salt and decay. I drew my gaze along its edge like I could glimpse a reflection of the past within its face. I saw nothing.

As I ran my eyes down its form, I found something. At the flat of the hilt. An inscription. A name.

Selisara.

Mine.

“Selisara,” I said aloud, though it sounded strange, my voice even stranger.

From somewhere deep, that name rose with memory. Selisara, spoken not by me but by someone else. A man. Warm and deep, like a breath exhaled against my neck. It stirred something in my chest. Mine. Then even softer, Sel.

I wanted to call out to the voice–the memory. But it was only that–a memory, a piece of then that I didn’t have now.

All I could do was walk. So I did. Navigating the rocky terrain down to the lower, softer sand, I realized how incredibly uncomfortable and warped the clothing I wore had become. Straps pulled my shoulders together. Buckles cinched my waist, the metal rusted. I wasn’t convinced I could pry them loose. Faded sigils decorated the long leather sleeves. The white-scaled inlay had turned gray and yellow. My boots reached my knees, but the edges frayed and folded away, the laces stiff and brittle, the buckles as rusted as the others.

No jewels graced my fingers or wrists, no necklaces around my neck or earrings in my ears. I ran my fingers along my hair, unsure of what I expected to find, but found nothing other than a braided crown, so loose I was sure it resembled nothing but a nest.

“Selisara,” I said to myself as if I hoped to give meaning to the name.

This is who I am.

I said it again with that memory and knowing and warmth in my chest. “Selisara.” Then I climbed down the face of rock to the sandy shore that swallowed my feet. A pulsating ache rooted in my legs and spread upward with each drag of my boots out of the sand then back into the sand. Step by step, the breath sawed in and out from behind my clenched teeth.

The shore curved, rock giving way to horizon, and there in the gentle surf–a boat. The vessel was small, its hull intact, sail crisp and folded, anchored into the beach.

The sight filled me with hope. And knowledge. I was not alone. Or, at the very least, I hadn’t always been alone here.

I jumped into the boat. It was a simple thing. A wheel, bench, sail, and two oars. Beside the wheel, embedded in a small wooden post–a compass. Not north, south, east, or west, but its thin black needle pointed in an unmarked direction where the ocean stretched endlessly.

I would follow that needle.

The leather gloves over my hands kept the rough rope of the anchor from burning my palms as I heaved the weight aboard. Then, an oar in each hand, I rowed out of the alcove against the waves that seemed to waken.

My arms found a rhythm. Pull. One-two. Pull. One-two.

It didn’t take long for my muscles to begin to ache. That ache stretched along my shoulder blades and down my spine. But I kept rowing, as the rocky island fell away beneath the horizon, following the black point of the compass needle that shifted ever-so-slightly as the tide drifted me off course.

There was only sky and ocean now. And me.

Selisara.

A strange feeling welled inside me. It began in my chest and tightened, painfully so, then into my throat. My jaw clenched. Eyes burned. And then a droplet escaped me, rolling down my cheek, over my lips. It was salty like the air.

More tears followed.

I released my grip on one oar to wipe the moisture away. The breeze helped to steady my breath, drying my face and leaving tightened rivets of skin.

I held on to what I knew.

I was alive.

My name was Selisara.

I had a sword and shield.

And the black needle that would take me there.

Though, the sun never changed its angle. The wind never changed direction. The waves lapped and pushed and guided. Until they didn’t.

The world stilled to nothing but my breath and heartbeat. Wind ceased to curl through my hair. Sunlight rested unmoving against the water that turned still as glass. Even as my oars broke the surface, I doubted the boat moved. The compass gave no indication other than to fix to the horizon beyond me.

There. There. There.

My arms more than ached now. They burned. Incessantly. The muscles in my back tightened to keep me upright. Heat collected beneath my leathers. Damp and irritating. Dripping into my eyes and down my neck. There was no wind to wipe it away. So I let it drip. But I continued to row.

Pull. One-two. Pull. One-two.

The water broke. A ripple.

I stopped.

The water broke again. Another ripple. Closer. An echo of sound pulsed through the water like a heartbeat. I moved my grip from the oars to my sword at my feet. That pounding in my chest that had once said wrong wrong wrong now beat still still still.

A figure moved beneath the water’s surface. Large. Serpentine. Soundless. I clenched the hilt of my sword tight enough the leather gloves creaked. The water rippled again, then broke open.

Ocean spilled in waterfalls from the great scaled-head that rose high above me. Eyes like two massive pearls, pupilless, and all-seeing peered down at me. Still still still, my pulse beat. Two nostrils flared along its indigo-scaled snout. Its jaw opened, wide enough to reveal the razor-edged teeth beneath.

A dragon. Not mine.

It looked at me as if to question. To see–me.

That grip on my sword loosened a fraction.

“Selisara.” That voice. I knew it. Knew it in the way it said my name. In the way I could feel it breathed against my skin as Sel.

A man sat on a ridge of scaled bone at the base of the dragon’s skull.

I knew his face. Somewhere in this expanse of sword, shield, and Selisara—I knew him. The sharp planes of his jaw and cheeks and brow, and the kindness behind the firm line of his mouth, the warmth that rose in those silver starlit eyes. That disobedient curl of his obsidian hair. Those arms. That body. Him.

And when he said my name again, his voice like a breath through my chest, every part of my being gravitated toward him.

I was found.

“Come, Light,” he said.

Light. I held to that word—that name too—and I obeyed.

The dragon sank beneath the water’s surface until only its snout was visible and the man upon its neck was level with my boat. That gravitational pull tightened. I felt more than him, but the edges of memory trying to form a name.

The water didn’t give as I climbed from the boat and onto the dragon. The man shifted his weight, granting me space against the ridge of spine. I reached, grabbed, and pulled myself into the makeshift seat of its bone and against him.

He was warm. Solid. Known. And something forgotten.

“Hold tightly,” he said, arms coming around my waist to keep me steady.

I did. To him. To the dragon beneath me. To my breath as the creature dove beneath the surface.

The water took us, dark and cold and absolute. I didn’t open my eyes, my mouth–I just held. When the water broke, I breathed a choked, wet breath. But breath.

The air here was cold. Sharp. Not the warmth from the shore that I only now realized was warmth. But those arms were still around me, that chest firmly at my spine. I leaned into it—into him—more as I coughed the water from my lungs.

It smelled different here. Damp. Cold. Earthy.

I rubbed the water from my eyes and opened them.

The creature beneath me was still atop the water that ran narrow and long. The openness of the horizon had been replaced by towering green trees and stone ridges that framed the winding river.

At the widest point, the stone was not stone but figures carved into the gray rock. Four of them—forms half-swallowed by moss and age and the trees.

Dragons. Their wings flung wide and high as if preparing to take flight.

“Halareth,” the man said.

I had no memory of this place. Should I?

“The Lorelight River will take you.”

“Where?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. I almost didn’t move. Then his voice broke that silence, vibrated from his chest and into my spine. “Go, Selisara.”

I did. More gracefully than before.

The blue-scaled dragon looked at me one last time with its pearl eyes before sinking beneath the surface. The man upon its spine said nothing, only offered a parting glance I couldn’t discern as neither kind nor cruel—just there.

The surface barely rippled as the water swallowed them under.

And they were gone.

I stared for a moment or two longer, not expecting their return but quietly hoping for something. Or perhaps someone.

It was a strange feeling. I didn’t have a name for it. But it burned my eyes all the same and made my chest feel hollow and full of it.

I didn’t allow that burn to turn to tears.

I walked the Lorelight River that would take me somewhere.

I found thirst and hunger first. I remembered them. The loud emptiness in my stomach. The dry scratch in my mouth and throat. I learned not to drink the river water—after the fact. It came back up and out, leaving me thirstier than before. And exhausted. Another feeling I remembered and learned the shape of.

My tired legs brought me to a small patch of dirt at the base of a very wide tree, its roots like veins along the earth. They cradled me.

I laid there and closed my eyes and slept. Not long. But long enough for my stomach to settle, to reawaken that hunger and thirst, and for the sun to shift its angle in the sky.

When I walked again, I walked with a singular purpose. Need. I needed drink and food and someone.

I found no one. Only the river that continued to rush alongside me. It whispered. Follow me. And so I did. I followed. Down the river. Between tall trees. Over fallen log and rock and earth that rose and fell. Always I kept the river to my left. My only guide. My only direction.

Memory continued to return to me in words.

Grass. Mushrooms. Flowers.

I recognized pieces of the world without remembering.

The scent on the air—pine needles.

The moisture that still lingered in the soft soil—rain.

And the hollowed feeling in my chest—loneliness.

I picked the white flowers along the riverbank. Their name came to me after I’d collected several of them. Snowbells. And somehow I knew they were the first flowers of spring—a season.

I carried them to have something with me. Because they were pretty. They were real. Because I knew what I was now. Hungry. Thirsty. Tired. And alone. And these pretty little flowers had grown along the dirt I walked.

They had survived.

And I had to believe so could I.

It kept me walking. Walking until I no longer saw the sun. It hung low, caught somewhere between the trees. The sky bled color. I named them.

Pink. Purple. Orange.

I imagined myself there, amongst the bruised clouds, looking down, able to see the world and where I was meant to go.

A force struck from behind, heavy and unmoving, and I was firmly on the ground. It pressed down on all of me, my face in the dirt, my arms and legs pinned against the pressure. A breathing pressure. A warmth. Someone. Their breath fell against the back of my neck. Hands anchored me down.

“Got ‘ya,” they said.

Something tightened around my ankles. Something else at my right wrist.

“No–” I swung my left arm back, elbow striking something hard–something that gave a wet crack.

The pressure on my left-side released, and I moved. Knees under me, I pushed up from the ground. The chains around my ankles caught, and I fell onto my palms. Skin tore open, but I didn’t care, I pushed up again as someone pulled the sword from my hip and the shield off my back.

Run run run beat through my chest.

Fingers knotted in the back of my hair, that hand slamming me back down into the dirt. I didn’t try to get back up–not with the boot pressing to my spine, or the figure to my left that I could barely make out through the fallen hair over my face. A third person yanked my left hand out from under me and clasped it to the shackle of my right hand. Then I was hauled to my feet–dizzy, my jaw now sore from where it’d struck the ground.

A man walked from behind me. He was shorter than me, dirtied, clothes tattered. His red beard was unkempt and hair long, barely contained to the fraying twine at the nape of his neck. The other two men, now that I could see them, looked the same as him. Unkempt, dirty, ragged.

The red-bearded man smiled. He was missing teeth. Too many teeth.

I did not smile back. I spat. That wad of saliva struck the gap where his tooth should’ve been. Then–I smiled.

The man licked away the moisture. His arm moved much faster than I thought possible, his fingers tight and calloused and sweaty around my neck. My own hands strained behind my back in their chains, wanting to swing and claw and fight. But I had no freedom or sword or shield. Just myself–and my boot that I brought down hard on his foot. It caused him to stumble enough to lose his grip on my throat, but the second, taller unkempt man took his place.

He didn’t smile. He swung a clenched fist that I saw too late. It connected with my jaw, sparking pain throughout my skull that somehow affected my knees and sent them folding beneath me. The ground came up fast, hands bound behind me to keep them from breaking my fall. I let my shoulder take the brunt of the impact, then quickly rolled myself onto my back. I wanted to see whose boot would come down on my face.

No boot, but a blade. My blade. At my throat.

“Where do ‘ya fly, rider?”

I understood the question, but not the answer I was meant to give.

“I’m talking to ‘ya.” He kicked the soft bit of flesh beneath my ribs once, dragged his boot against the dirt to strike again. “Where do ‘ya fly from rider?” He struck. My teeth clenched tight on a scream I wouldn’t let free and an answer I didn’t have. “Where’s ‘ya dragon?”

Eme.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know where she was. I knew so very little.

My name was Selisara.

I had a sword and shield.

I was walking the Lorelight River.

And I had snowbells in my pocket.