Coffee Stained Pages. Volume 1. Лилла Сомн
scientists and royal families, small offices and private intelligence agencies. Everyone who could was trying to find something, to find out something, to make a discovery, to profit from something… Of course, this was not without its intrigues and rivalries among the competitors.
Primers are obsessed with knowledge and information, and as it turned out, it was a valuable resource, thanks to which the city lived and prospered.
… Even for Amelia, who had no practical use for it, whose ever-hungry, inquisitive mind was in desperate need of new stimulation and nourishment, this approach was close at hand. Prime is the perfect place for people like her. A city of ageless students. Ami walked for a long time between the buildings of the educational institutions, mingling with the crowds of students, anxiously hurrying somewhere, imagining that she was also hurrying somewhere, alone. For something meaningful and interesting… What can you get now if you go into one of those carved towers, get a stack of tablets full of tasty knowledge and disappear from this world, swept away by an exciting stream of new, tasty information. Like a speck of dust in the rays of light passing through those beautiful, infinitely varied, multicoloured windows of which there were so many in this City…
Kantinian sighed dreamily. This is life! Damn it. Somewhere… Where she is not.
Well… Let’s think about something positive and pleasant. About food. Food for a stomach, not just food for thoughts.
Prime includes chic restaurants and refectories. Local magical fruit dishes, famous for strange and unusual combinations, refined and simple, traditional and regularly appearing innovative, which were an eternal reason to snort for those who preferred simple and satisfying vegetable dishes from the Kantine. If Ami had enough dried herbs and grains to trade, and enough time to try everything… she would probably go mad with happiness, because there would be no more pipe dreams in her life.
Eating and wandering around the city had always been her favourite pastimes.
Here, the pleasure was multiplied tenfold. An incredibly bizarre architecture, houses that could hardly be mistaken for dwellings, a fairy-tale city that could already boast of magnificent views beyond its borders, buried inside it in a huge number of coloured stripes of fabric and ribbons stretching across the streets, fluorescent plants of different colours and glowing witch lanterns that looked absolutely fantastic at sunset, attacking the visual receptors with a rainbow of coloured pebbles on the paved paths, incredibly beautiful stained-glass windows and shining glaze covering the buildings… An enchanting, hypnotic sight that for a long time took away the will and the desire to live… somewhere else.
The Om houses themselves and their interiors were the main source of pride for those who owned them. Everyone tried to build something fundamentally new and different from their neighbours. As a result, the shapes varied – from buildings that looked more like strange vegetables or local sweets, to transparent structures, looked like the crystals of the Zeth Mountains, they all attracted the eye for a long time. Witches could take some liberties with reality.
All this was already amazing, even if one had never seen one of the bright and abundant local festivals with all kinds of entertainment and delicacies…
Ami sighed enviously.
… Prime also meant for her five unsuccessful attempts to settle there, the complete collapse of all hopes for the aforementioned bright future and a dull resignation to the dark present…
“I'm going to sit here, in this beautiful place near my inner personal swamp, and I'm not going anywhere. I've had enough of this…”
Ami reached her only true love in these places – the soothing green edge.
… When she was a teenager, her parents threatened her to be taken to the edge of the forest and given to the elves, if she continued to behave badly. When she grew up, she did not stop behaving like that. And also began to come to the Forest herself, hoping that the elves would take her.
Of course, no miracle happened. Again. But Ami found a wonderful place for herself, which helped her a lot to come to her senses and calm down.
Thoughtfully, kantinian sat down on the log, crawling along it to a comfortable half-lying position, and exhaled, staring at the sky and the treetops…
… This place consoled her every time she came here with confused feelings, it was the only being that understood her, giving her, if not rest and inspiration, then mind saving indifference to the world.
…which helped her not to go mad after each successive failure…
She had already internally agreed to this swamp, a “pit” with slippery slopes, having decided in some kind of humble detachment that if she sits here until the end of her days, then so be it.
Without wasting any more strength and nerves, she will do it with maximum indifference.
She will not struggle to climb and slide down again.
… Everything is pointless. Everything is meaningless…
Everything in this life.
And Ami gave up her long-held idea of running away from here, and let herself be drawn into a boring daily routine in the form of her relatives, into plans to renovate their shared house. They lived with their whole large, unfriendly family, according to the bad old Kantine tradition.
And… That's it. Just like that.
It was definitely the Bottom.
Now Amelia knew what it looked like. And could examine its slippery, viscous base in detail. Feel with her cheek the wet, viscous cold of despair slowly seeping into her core…
For there she lay, face down, turning away from the hideous, eternally inaccessible light of hope shining from above.
… Remarkable cosmetic procedures, you know. Quite effective.
Nothing is scary or unnerving. The frost is an excellent painkiller. Her life is over.
The body decomposes, but not before she's cold and still. She's empty inside. Everyone's gone.
What's left will serve another and go where it's sent. Nothing matters. If it doesn't get what it wants, why go on? What's the point?
Silence. Total surrender. Empty body, empty mind. No more ideas; no one to control. No need to. It has not led to good results.
Ami has escaped mentally.
'Wake her up when it's over'.
This breakdown came after her failed attempt to get a job in Prime. Was it her fault? Yes and no. If she had witchcraft skills, she could have stayed in one of the mainland cities as a student or a service woman. She wouldn't even have to escape her hometown. Her neighbours and relatives would send her away, providing supplies additionally.
Since time immemorial, all Kantinians with witchcraft gifts have been banished.
“Don’t expect any good from a witch,” they said.
Well. Ami would expect. She was jealous of the exiled witches.
It was like an endless holiday. You were placed outside the Kantine and there was no question – stay in the familiar warmth of your swamp or get out. There is only a choice – where to go next.
Most chose Prime to develop their skills and find a new place in their suddenly broadened horizons.
Exile would at least be an unequivocal, direct and explicit rejection. And not that awkward case when nobody here is interested in your hopes and wishes, but nobody is going to let you go. Because you immediately find out that your relatives and homeland desperately need you. For some reason. You might be useful in different weird ways. For example, to look better against your background.
Exiled ones became the very witches, whose services in critical cases, even kantinians themselves were not afraid to use, forgetting about dislike and their own beliefs. The dogmatic beliefs that hold the kantinians together. The ‘unshakable’ traditions that were the bedrock of family and society.
Yeah. Comfort is much more important.
But it turns out that not everything is as optimistic and joyful out there as it first seemed.
Without