The Eyebright's Dimension

Chapter .5 - Eunae's Story

When Eunae was born, her father put the traditional Jinin flower on their doorframe to signify the birth of a baby girl. Its delicate yellow blooms grew only on the Cliffs of Serentan.

One week later, the proud parents presented their baby girl to the fortune teller, who, after studying her books and the stars, promised her an exciting and promising future. "She will be one of the most beautiful girls in the region," the fortuneteller foretold. "Not only beautiful, but gifted in many ways. But beware: one cannot have everything in life. I sense tragedy in her life, tragedy that will take either her talent or her beauty.”

The fortuneteller consulted the astrological charts and chose an auspicious name: Eunae. The first character in her name was for luck, to counteract the tragedy written in the stars, and the second for obedience: to her parents, and, more importantly, to the fates.
Eunae revealed her sensory ability early in life. Even as a baby, she could sense out where her mother had hidden her toys or bottle. By the time she could walk, she also could feel the hidden treading of thoughts across the room; every person had a distinctive flavor she could track with her mind.

Her parents had her tested for Sensory when she was close to two years old. During her mother’s second pregnancy, Eunae put her head on her mother’s stomach, and, feeling the death creeping within the baby, said, “The baby is sick. I can feel it." She received a good scolding for saying such inauspicious things, but when her mother delivered a stillborn son, her father remembered his daughter’s words and took her to the nearest Sensorist Society. They told him his daughter could someday outstrip the world with her potential.

Soon after, Eunae was introduced to her tutor. He was a tall, lanky man with bespectacled eyes and a lopsided grin. He taught Eunae how to control her powers, to select which thoughts she would hear, to block out certain false feelings and to delve not into others, but into herself.

The first couple of years of lessons consisted of games, such as finding things hidden in difficult places or trying to grasp onto a moving object mentally. By her third year, she still made incredible progress and continued to amaze her parents and tutor.

That same third year, her sister was born. The fortuneteller predicted another promising future for her. "She will be even more beautiful than the first, docile and attractive in spirit. Here is the warning: the meek do not often get what they want. I sense weakness plaguing this girl’s life." And Eunae's sister was named Jinae: the first character for strength, to balance the signs of weakness. The second character was obedience, like Eunae’s, but with a different connotation: obedience to the self.

Eunae flowered. She was a pretty child, with big eyes and black hair. However, by the time she was five, she was tainted with the look of knowledge. She had outstripped the village fortuneteller in sensory ability, and had taken to correcting her under her breath during the public ceremonies, a snide, childish habit that Eunae would not outgrow until her father’s death.

Eunae became not unattractive, merely unnatural. Her sister had no burden. She had nothing but childlike innocence, which is what adults want to see in a young child. Jinae became the new darling of the town as Eunae retreated quietly into her studies, forging a closer bond with her tutor and her father, who always, in his kind, quiet way, encouraged her while the rest of the village exiled her.

Then everything changed when the Emperor demoted her father from his position as magistrate over their district. They sold their nice home and moved into a smaller, crowded house that smelled like manure and had odd stains on the ceiling. Eunae's father left them to travel to the capital in an attempt to get another job. Eunae sensed him leave with infinite sadness. She could feel he was broken with the grief running through his veins. Then she cried herself, although she wasn’t allowed to, according to her tutor.

“Sensory is the rarest of the magical disciplines, and therefore the most valued and the most powerful,” her tutor was fond of saying. He constantly told her that sensory could corrupt the mind, and she had to keep herself unemotional and detached to keep the magic pure. If she didn’t, her own emotions could distort what was really there, and present things through her own biased perspective.

However, she was eight, untainted by the grievances of the world, and did not understand this important maxim of sensory. So when her father returned, wearing a bleary smile with little heart, Eunae convinced herself that her father was fine, that he was a little sick, but would get better, despite the fact she could sense it was not so.

He died two weeks later by his own hand.

The weakened family moved once again, this time to a one-room apartment where her mother, for the first time in her life, had to do everything: the cooking, the cleaning, and the laundry. They could no longer afford Eunae's tutor, but he came weekly to visit her anyway, and kept her fresh on her magic. He took her out to the countryside to fly, taught her concealment charms, and gave her used copybooks to practice her penmanship in the margins. But something in their relationship disappeared with her father’s death. Eunae became cordial with him, began to address him as an informal teacher rather than a close mentor, afraid of her own powers and influence.

After the latest rebellion died down, the Emperor’s men came around to gather up all the noble widows. Apparently the distraught wives, daughters and mothers of dead or demoted noble men had caused the last revolt. So Eunae bowed to her tutor for the last time at the age of ten and went off to the Palatial City with her mother and sister, carrying all their earthly belongings in five meager cloth sacks.


Five years later...


Lady Xé surveyed the young girl standing across from her with interest, for she seemed unperturbed by her lavish surroundings. Chests of gold coins sat in one corner of the room. Lavish tapestries hung along the walls, and bejeweled trinkets lay scattered on the marble floor. Along one side of the room stood twelve sculptures, replications of herself, carved from stone imported from Toan. She had instructed the sculptor to catch her best side, and he had. The sculptures were her pride and joy. She glanced at them fondly for a moment, then turned her attention back on the girl.

The girl looked out-of-place in her grand surroundings, her black hair blending into her simple black dress. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her, her shoulders straight and erect. Lady Xé had yet to see such good posture in any of Irinifa’s young maidens. She was fifteen years old.

Lady Xé reached for her emerald-studded snuffbox. “Look up at me for a moment, please.”

The girl obeyed, amber eyes blank. She was quite pretty, Lady Xé noticed, studying her face, but there was something about it that didn’t seem right, foreign, almost. She pondered on that for a moment before the truth hit her, and she chuckled softly to herself. Foreign! Of course, she was! Lady Xé had this girl imported from Serentan, just like she had imported her Toanese stone.

Lady Xé broke the silence. “You do know, Eunae Sun, that you are the only Serentanian in the entire nation of Irinifa?”

“I believe the Serentanian ambassador was here just a few days ago,” the girl said.

Lady Xé was taken aback. The girl dared to contradict her! “You should show more respect,” she snapped. “I had you brought here to Irinifa, the most magnificent country in the world. I saved you from what they told me were dismal living conditions. The Widow’s Section! Hah! They’d call them the slums in Irinifa.”

The girl, Eunae, bowed. “The gesture was most kind.”

There was something about her that infuriated Lady Xé. She seemed untouchable, as if there was nothing in the world that could bother her.

“I have arranged for you to be attending the Academy, girl,” she continued after a sufficient amount of glaring. “They will tell you that you are here under a student exchange program, but I will have you know that your presence in Irinifa is due entirely to me. I brought you here.”

“You have my gratitude.” But she didn’t mean it. That much was obvious.

For a moment, Lady Xé was tempted to throw her snuffbox at the girl, but then remembered she was the adult in the room. She tossed the snuffbox on the floor instead, its contents spilling over the marble flooring with a loud clunk.

“I have servants to clean up after me,” Lady Xé said. “I can do whatever I please. The Xé lineage is second only to Aé, the royal bloodline.”

That statement didn’t seem to have any impact on the girl. Perhaps they didn’t have lineages in Serentan. Lady Xé wouldn’t be surprised. It didn’t sound like a very civilized place.

“I have arranged for you the best of the best in the Academy,” she said. “Although you enter the Academy just a year before graduation, I expect you to excel and graduate with honors. I do warn you, however, that none have excelled when entering the Academy late. Few have the fortitude to survive the rigorous curriculum if they haven’t been exposed to it early on. I expect you to work hard. You will start attending next week, and then I will not see you until your winter vacation.” She had asked for a smart child because graduating the Academy after just one year of training would me close to impossible. This Eunae Sun would need to be Serentan’s best to do it.

“I will put all my efforts into it,” the girl replied.

Lady Xé patted the pearls woven into her braided hair and sank bank into her chair with a content smile. This girl, as infuriating as she was, amused her. And amusing herself was what Lady Xé lived for.