The Curse of Arcadia

Tomorrow, Kaelid would turn sixteen.

Usually, once someone reached that age, they were allowed to pick their trade and decide what they'd do with the rest of their life. Most people in the village treated it like a gift, something to look forward to. Kaelid had spent the better part of a year dreading it anyway — not because of what turning sixteen meant, but because of what he intended to do about it the moment it happened.

I'd rather die than keep living in this damn village for the rest of my life.

Day's been shit so far, and I still don't know what I'm going to—

That last thought was a lie, and he knew it the moment it crossed his mind. He knew exactly what he was going to do. He'd known for years. His family just wasn't going to be happy to hear it.

Some of that was ambition. Not all of it. In a village where hair came in exactly two colors — red or blue, no exceptions, as far back as anyone could actually trace it — Kaelid had spent sixteen years being the only person anyone had ever met with hair black as a crow's wing. Kids grew out of teasing him for it by the time they were ten or eleven. Adults never quite did. He'd catch the sideways looks in the market, the sentences that trailed off whenever someone forgot he was close enough to hear, the way certain older folks touched wood or muttered something under their breath when he passed too close. Nobody ever said “cursed” to his face. He didn't need them to. He'd heard it plenty behind his back. Somewhere else, he figured, nobody would know or care what color his hair was. That alone felt worth leaving for.

Fuck 'em anyway. He wasn't going to miss a single one of them.

Kaelid lived in a remote village pressed up against the border of a massive mountain range — the kind monsters called home more than people did. The ones who defended it, the wanderers who made a living hunting along its edge, were the closest thing his village had to legends. Kaelid wanted to be one of them someday. Never mind that he was still a weak kid who barely knew which end of a sword to hold.

Most folks called the strong ones “enlightened,” at least until you started running into the ones who'd climbed even higher than that — the kind of people regular villagers just called gods, or near enough, because there wasn't really a better word for someone who could level a hillside without trying. That was the ladder Kaelid meant to start climbing, one way or another, even if he had to claw his way up it with his bare hands.

Anyone could become enlightened, in theory. What actually mattered was how fast you could get there, and that mostly came down to whether you had a clan behind you — people trained from birth to fight, resourced, connected, already halfway up the mountain before they took their first real step. Kaelid didn't have any of that. Didn't matter. He'd figure it out. He always figured it out.

His family ran a bakery. His father baked, his mother kept the books, his two sisters worked the counter and the ovens in turns. His father and Rose shared the same deep red; his mother and Lily, the same cool blue — the two colors that ran through every family in the village, generation after generation, in every combination except the one that had somehow produced him. It was a good, honest business, and for a long time Kaelid had told himself that was enough. It wasn't. He'd rather die today than spend one more decade behind that counter, growing old in a village that had nothing left in it for him but bread and quiet and the slow certainty of never once finding out what he was actually capable of.

Dinner that night was tense before anyone said a word. Kaelid could feel it the second he sat down — the careful way his mother avoided his eyes, the too-casual way his father passed the bread.

“So,” his father said eventually, not looking up from his plate. “What have you decided to take as your job?”

Here it is.

He'd been dreading this question for weeks, though it wasn't really a surprise to anyone at the table. They already knew. They'd known for a long time. They were just hoping, the way people hope even after they've stopped believing it, that saying nothing might change something.

“I'm going to become a wanderer.”

“No!” His mother's voice cracked across the table like a slap. “I'm not going to let my son become monster food!”

“Are you insane?” Rose, his elder sister, didn't even look up from her food, though her knuckles had gone white around her fork. “Most people don't even make it to eighteen once they leave.”

“He's been saying this for years,” Lily said quietly, not unkindly, from the other end of the table. “He's been crazy about it for years. Nothing we say is going to change his mind now.”

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“You all think I'm the crazy one.” Kaelid heard his own voice rise before he could stop it. “But from where I'm standing, you're the ones who are insane. How the hell do you stand it — working this same bakery counter for the rest of your lives? I tried. I really did. I can't do it. So I've decided to do the one thing I know I actually want, and the one thing I know I won't regret.”

Nobody answered him. The table went quiet again, and stayed that way through the rest of the meal — not an angry silence, just a tired, resigned one. This had always been coming. Everyone at that table had known it, in their own way, for longer than Kaelid had actually said it out loud.

His sixteenth birthday arrived quiet and grey, morning light barely cutting through the clouds. Fitting, somehow, for a day he'd spent the better part of a year treating like a deadline instead of a gift.

Kaelid checked his pack three times before he trusted himself to leave the house with it. Blanket, tent, flint, a few days of bread his family's shop hadn't managed to sell. He added his toothbrush almost as an afterthought, like some small, stupid piece of him still expected to need it for something other than a memory of home.

Before he left, the village chief pulled him aside — every departing wanderer got the same lecture, Kaelid was pretty sure, word for word, generation after generation. Meet people. Become comrades. There's strength in numbers, and I hope to god you live long enough to prove it to yourself. Kaelid nodded along and meant none of it, not really, not yet. Rely on people who'd spent his whole life looking at him like he might be cursed? Yeah, no thanks. Still, the chief handed over some leftover gear from the village armory — a longsword in decent enough shape, two short knives, a bow he had no idea how to use yet, and, sitting apart from the rest, a full set of plate armor he didn't even bother trying on.

I'd kill to wear that someday. Not today, though. Not even close.

Lily was waiting for him in the front hall when he got back, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised in a way that said she'd been waiting there a while just to see the look on his face.

“Tisk, tisk, tisk,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just surprised you actually went through with it.”

“I've been saying I would for years.”

She didn't argue the point, just gave him a small, tired smile and disappeared back toward her room. He dropped his gear off and rejoined the rest of the family outside, where dinner was already being laid out one final time — bread, butter, a little chicken, some greens he skipped in favor of thirds of everything else.

This is going to be the last one of these for a while. Maybe a long while.

The thought sat heavier than he expected. He pushed past it anyway, the same way he pushed past most things that threatened to slow him down.

The next morning, his family walked him as far as the village gate — his mother pressing one more loaf into his hands like it might actually help, his father clasping his shoulder and saying nothing at all, which said more than anything he could have come up with.

Rose hugged him quick and hard and told him not to do anything stupid, which they both knew was a wasted request.

Lily hung back until the others had said their piece, then fell into step beside him for the last stretch to the gate itself, hands shoved in her sleeves against the morning cold.

“You're actually sure about this?” she asked, not looking at him, eyes on the road ahead instead. “Not the ‘I've been saying it for years' answer. The real one.”

“I'm sure.”

“That's not what I asked.” She glanced over now. “I know you're sure you want to go. I'm asking if you're okay. Those aren't the same question.”

Kaelid opened his mouth for the easy answer and found it didn't quite come. “I don't know,” he admitted instead. “Ask me again once I'm actually out there.”

Lily huffed something that was almost a laugh, almost not. “Least you're honest.” She reached up and flicked his ear, hard enough to sting. “For what it's worth — I'll miss you.” She shrugged, like she hadn't just said something real. “Don't die. I mean it.”

“I won't.”

“You don't know that.”

“No,” he agreed. “I don't. But I'll be back anyway. I'm not planning on dying that easily.”

Lily gave him a look like she wanted to believe that more than she actually did, but didn't push it any further. She shoved him lightly toward the gate instead, before either of them could turn it into anything bigger. “Go on, then. Before Mom starts crying again and makes it worse for both of us.”

He went, and made it maybe twenty paces past the gate before he stopped and turned around anyway — one last look at the village that had spent sixteen years never quite deciding whether he belonged to it.

Nobody was watching. His family had already turned back toward the house, Lily's blue hair catching the morning light as she went, and the street beyond the gate was just the street, red-haired and blue-haired and utterly unremarkable, the same as it had been every single day of his life. Nothing about it looked different now that he was finally leaving. Somehow that was worse than if it had.

He turned back around and didn't look again.

South, toward the Death Mountains, toward the monsters that made his home dangerous and the wanderer's life he'd chosen instead of the counter that would have kept him safe.

He didn't know yet how close that choice would come to killing him before he ever got the chance to regret it.