The Azenor

It starts to drizzle as I stare at the bookshop’s grimy, brass doorknob; a strange, gray mist that wavers in the air and never seems to fall. I shiver and wrap the borrowed black cloak tighter around my shoulders. Two drunken men stumble out of the tavern to my left, slapping each other on the back and laughing. Behind me, some scrawny kids are playing a game I don’t recognize with a couple of empty cans and a ball made out of scrunched up newspaper.                                                                                

I’ve been standing here for ten minutes, trying to work up the nerve to go into the store. My efforts are hampered by my father’s gravelly voice repeating over and over in my mind the words I know he would say if he could see me right now.                                                                                                                        

“Ophelia, please explain why you are doing this. You know the First Circle is forbidden. Please, I don’t understand.” I can always tell how much trouble I’m in by how many “pleases” he uses while reprimanding me. My record is three, but I don’t get in trouble very often. My older brother, Remy, has been on the receiving end of eight “pleases”, a fact he is very proud of. I’m guessing that my current infraction would garner me at least fifteen.          Remy will be mad if I’m caught. He likes being the rebellious sibling.                                                                                                    

“Ophelia, please explain why you did this. You know the First Circle is forbidden.”                                                                                                                                  

“Shut up,” I growl to the voice in my head.                                                            

To my right, a cat knocks over a trashcan. The sound startles me and I spin around, convinced my cover is blown; the Monarchists know who I am and Dante has come to drag me off to his headquarters where he will torture me and kill me. Then I see the cat. It looks like a skeleton draped in a wet blanket. Its massive, yellow eyes stare at me and I get the feeling it’s wondering whether I would taste better than the trash in its mouth. I glare back. I hate cats.                                                  

The lure of the bookshop calls me back like a siren’s song.This is ridiculous; I didn’t lie to my father, sneak out of the Fifth Circle, and bribe a guard to let me into the First Circle, just so I could chicken out a few steps away from my goal.                                                                                                               

I grit my teeth and reach for the doorknob. A rusty bell clangs somewhere overhead as I step over the shop’s muddy threshold, my muscles tense as a hunted deer. The old man behind the register gives me a once over, his beady eyes narrowing.                    

“You try and steal anything and I’ll have your hands as payment,” he says.

Apparently I look suspicious. That’s not a good thing. The shopkeeper has a long face that reminds me of Uncle Junus’s hunting dogs. Perhaps he can smell my fear; he at least seems to know I’m doing something I shouldn’t.                                                            

I nod and push the cloak’s damp hood off my frizzy, whitish hair. One of my two closest friends, Flynn, gave me the cloak this morning, to use as part of my disguise. After the Monarchist uprising last year, he volunteered to be part of a scouting group that makes sporadic visits to the First Circle. He told me he found the cloak during one of these missions.                                                                                

“If I can’t talk you out of this,” he said, when I told him about my plan to find the book that’s been haunting my Dreams for the past three months. “At least I can make sure you look the part. No one’s going to believe you’re a First if you’re walking around in a velvet cloak while everyone else is wearing rags.”                              

I thanked him as he hung the scrappy black cloth around my shoulders, but secretly I wrinkled my nose and wished he hadn’t given it to me. The fabric stunk and I had a feeling that its previous owner was lying dead in a ditch somewhere. He was right though. Dressed in my usual clothes, I would have stood out like a sore thumb in the down here.                                                                                                              

The old man stares at me for a few more seconds before turning back to his ledger. The only noise in the shop is the scratch of his quill against the page, and the thunderous roar of my heart beating in my ears. I have to remind myself to breath as I walk past the register. Inhale, count to five, exhale, four, three, two. My heartbeat doesn’t slow until I realize the store smells exactly like the library in my house; worn, leather bindings, musty paper, and the slightly metallic scent of ink. I love books, if my father let me I would spend hours at a time in our library, sifting through the endless piles of tomes.                                                  

Our library is much cleaner than this shop though. Each shelf I pass is darker and dirtier than the last, and all the books look moth-eaten. The warped, grubby floorboards creak and groan beneath my feet. The rows are organized alphabetically by title, so it only takes me a few minutes to find what I’m looking for.                    

The book is much smaller in real life than it was in my Dreams. More like a pamphlet than a real book. The dark red leather cover is the same though, and so are the loose threads that stick out its binding the same way the thin, translucent bones stick out of fish before Meena, our cook, has cleaned them. The familiar feeling of déjà vu tingles down my spine as I run my finger across the faded, silver lettering embossed on the book’s cover. It is the same feeling I experience whenever something happens in real life that I’ve Dreamt about.                                                                                

The title of the book is “The Azenor”. The words seem to burn beneath my touch, but that’s probably just a placebo effect of my excitement.  For months I’ve been dying to know—who, or what, is an Azenor? What could possibly make a word so dangerous the Pentad would ban it? What could make this word so important my mother would use her last breath to whisper it to me? I have so many questions; it’s hard to believe this flimsy collection of dog-eared pages might hold all the answers.                    

Although my excitement is close to boiling over, I haven’t forgotten that I’m in forbidden, dangerous territory. I pause to listen for creaking floorboards, for any sign that someone else is haunting the stacks besides me, but the shop is silent. There is a chair at the end of the row. I hang my bag over its stiff, wooden back, and melt the seat. My hands shake as I open the book.

In my section of the city, the neighborhood known as the Fifth Circle, this book is banned, just like travelling to the First Circle is banned and the word “Azenor” is banned. For some reason thinking about this makes me smile even though I’m terrified. It’s the irony I guess; I hardly ever do anything bad, and here I am breaking three laws at once. If my father knew…no. Don’t think about that. I shiver, and this time it’s not because of the cold.          Despite its thinness, “The Azenor” is written in the same format of my school textbooks. Under normal circumstances, this would make me happy. Right now it just annoys me. What I want is the basic, dictionary definition of “Azenor”, and instead I’m getting a history lesson:                                                                                                    

“Illustria has a long and tumultuous past.”                                                            

No shit. This book was clearly written for people with zero previous knowledge of the Kingdom’s history. I keep reading because I’m scared that if I skip ahead I’ll miss the part where the book spells out the meaning of its titular word.                              

“The kingdom’s capital city, Whitewyck, named for the mountain on which it was built, was broken into five, vastly different neighborhoods not long after its founding. Throughout Illustria’s fraught history, these neighborhoods, known as Circles, have functioned as a power gauge for the kingdom’s warring factions. Whoever holds the Fifth Circle, at the mountain’s summit, holds the power.”                                 

Okay, this is ridiculous. Even the smallest, stupidest child in Illustria could recite this same spiel from memory. I flip a few pages ahead and continue reading. It starts to get interesting as I reach the bottom of the new page. I hunch over the table and my eyes strain to see the words in the shop’s dim lighting.
“Five hundred years ago, during the War of Entitlement between Illustria and Cerulea across the Sea, Queen Aldora gave each of the King’s five generals a—”                    

The ringer in the bell over the shop door slams into the metal lip so violently that the pealing is followed by a loud thud and a soft tinkling that could only mean the bell has fallen to the floor. I bolt up from my seat, the book clasped to my chest as if I was drowning and it was a life preserver. The door must have been thrown open to create such a raucous. And no one throws open a bookshop door because they’re in a rush to get to the books.                                                                                                              

Forsake it all, forsake it all, forsake it all. I am so done for.                                                  

“Get out,” says the old man. “You’re dripping all over the books.”                                        

Whoever he’s talking to is either deaf, or chooses to ignore him, because I don’t hear a reply.                                                                                                                        

My feet are glued to the floor with fear, but my mind is churning. My eyes whir frantically around the room, searching for a back door, a cubbyhole, anywhere I can hide. After a few, frantic moments, I’m forced to accept there’s nothing for me to do besides stuff the “The Azenor” into my bag, sidle behind the nearest shelf, and pray whoever just entered the shop somehow trips and dies before he reaches me.                                                                                                    

He doesn’t. Heavy footsteps echo toward my hiding place. As the steps grow louder, I pull the hood of the cloak down over my eyes, and bury my face in my bag. I have to, otherwise I’ll scream. And then I really will be dead. The footsteps stop at the end of my row. I hope they kill me here; I’d rather die surrounded by books than in some rebel hideout, hemmed in by Monarchists.                                                            “Fee! Come out, I know you’re there. I can see your hair. You seriously suck at hiding.”                                                                                                                                  

That doesn’t sound like something a bloodthirsty monarchist would say. I poke my head around the corner. “Flynn?”                                                                                           

It’s definitely him. The shoots of bright copper hair sticking out from under the newcomer’s black hood are unmistakably his. I slip out from behind the shelf, run to him, and throw my arms around his neck.

“What are you doing here?” I say into his collarbone. I’m so happy to see him, I don’t ever want to let go. Then I remember that less than a minute ago, I was about to pee myself because I thought he was someone coming to kill me. I stop hugging him and push myself away. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, you ass!”                                        

His old smile resurfaces, but only for a moment, then it darts off his face like a scared rabbit. “Sorry, but you’re gonna get much worse than that if you don’t get back to the Fifth Circle right now.”                                                                                                    

“What?” My heart takes a nosedive into the floorboards. I take another step away from him. “Do they know I’m here? Does my father know?”                                        

Flynn shakes his head. I stare at him as I wait for clarification. He’s a mess. Mud is splashed halfway up the thighs of his black pants, there’s a large rip in his cloak, and little rivers of water stream off its hem. There’s a blue bruise above his left eye.                                                                                                                                  

“Are you ok?” My hand gravitates toward the bruise. “Did you run all the way here?”                                                                                                                                            

He flinches away from my touch and shakes his head. “Later. We have to go. Your dad doesn’t know you’re here, but he knows you lied about being with Iris. I told him you went to visit my mom’s grave in the Third Circle, he knows you were friends.” When I don’t move, Flynn grabs my arm and pulls. “Come on!”                    

The old man yells at Flynn to pay for the broken bell as we dart by, but Flynn ignores him and shoves me through the door. The dirt road is now a muddy river. All the people have disappeared except for one of the drunken men from the tavern, who is lying on his back in a large puddle, laughing. The sound of his manic laughter chases us down the street, urging me onwards. Frigid rain blows into my eyes and drips down the back of my neck as we run. For a while I hold the hood of my cloak onto my head, but it keeps blowing off and I’m already soaked, so eventually I give up and let the saturated fabric flap uselessly around my ears.                                                                                                              

I have no idea where we’re going. It seems like years ago I got off the lift that brought me down here, and even if I could remember where to find the lift station, I can’t see more than five feet in front of me anyway. But Flynn doesn’t seem to have that problem. He darts down a couple narrow alleyways, hemmed in on either side dilapidated, wooden shacks with corrugates tine roofs that seem to lean this way and that, based on what direction the wind is blowing. And the end of the second alley he climbs over a metal fence and turns to help me over too.                                                            

After what seems like a half hour of running, slipping, and sliding through the mud, I see the lift station in the distance. The lift station looks like a giant’s swing set. It is an open structure; just a narrow roof supported on either side by large metal beams. In between the beams is a row of what looks like metal park benches, suspended a few inches above the ground by wires attached to a wheel like contraption set into the underside of the roof.