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 sky. 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, my voice gravelly and thin and not something I remembered as mine. “Eme!”

Nothing answered. Not the sky or endless horizon or sun. 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.

“Eme!”

I strained to remember.

What happened what happened what happened–

A glint of light caught my eye. Something shiny and round buried in the sand. I reached down and pulled a shield from the sand. My shield. Nothing more than wood and iron and faded now. Scratches and gouges marred its face. Another glint caught my eye beside it. My sword–worn from time and use, smoothed where my fingers held it even now. The blade was rusted 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. 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. And 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.

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.”

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, sand giving way to the nothing of the horizon. No Eme. No shore but this one. Nothing to take me from this place.

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 wiped 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.

My name was Selisara.

I was alive.

I had a sword and shield.

And I walked. Though, the sun never changed its angle. The wind never changed direction. Heat collected beneath my leathers. Damp and irritating. Dripping into my eyes and down my neck. The waves lapped and pushed at the shore.

“Eme!”

The world stilled to nothing but my breath and heartbeat and that scream of her name that tore from the very center of me. And then, it answered.

The water broke. A ripple. Then broke again. Closer. An echo of sound pulsed through the water like a heartbeat. I tightened my grip around the sword. 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. The water rippled again, then broke open.

Ocean spilled in waterfalls from the great scaled-head that rose high. 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.

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.

“There you are,” he said. “You don’t belong here.”

I didn’t, I wanted to say. Where's here? I wanted to ask. But what I managed and all I cared about— “where's my dragon?” Eme…

“She was much easier to find.”

My grip tightened on the sword, drawing those starlit eyes to my fingers and the weapon I threatened to raise. “Where. Is. She.”

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

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

I reached for the dragon’s curled horns and pulled myself against the man.

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 now ran narrow and long. A river. The openness of the horizon had been replaced by towering green trees and stone ridges.

At the widest point of the river, 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.

But not Eme.

“Halareth,” the man said.

I had no memory of this place. Should I?

“The Lorelight River will take you.”

“Where?” I asked. “Where’s Eme?”

I didn’t care about this Lorelight River or the statues of dragons further down the current or the trees. The sky was empty and Eme was not here.

Raising my sword, I turned to face the man. But he was gone. The sea-dragon was gone. And I no longer bobbed along the river, but stood on the grassy river edge having never moved on my own but somehow had. The sword swung low to my side as 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. 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 Eme.

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.

“Eme!” I screamed into the sky.

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 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. 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.