Excerpt: Windshifter

Sparktender had been trying to forget something for a very long time.

For the most part, he had been successful. He buried himself in his work and in his trade. He let clocks govern his mind. Clocks, with their comforting, constant ticking. They were always there. There was always something, some project, he could work on regarding them. They helped push a certain thought out of his mind.

It didn't always work, of course. The thought he was trying to forget haunted him in dreams, and sometimes in daydreams. It came unbidden to his mind when he saw fluffy clouds in a blue sky... days spent laying in the grass, watching the clouds... some shaped like animals, some shaped like trains...

He didn't let himself look at clouds anymore. That was another bonus to living in the middle of the woods, surrounded by tall trees that blocked out the sky.

But sometimes something unexpected would crash into his life, bringing it all back. This had happened just recently, in fact. Because roughly a week prior, Windshifter showed up at his doorstep with a pocketwatch. Not just any pocketwatch, oh no, but one that Sparktender himself had crafted for some dear friends. Before they had been taken away. Taken away by the same thing that had taken him away from...

But no! He wouldn't allow himself to think about it, he told himself, as he putzed around with one of his many clocks. It didn't especially need work, but it would take his mind off of... that thought. That thought that had come increasingly to his mind since the Windshifter incident.

The Windshifter incident in and of itself was somewhat distressing, if only because of Windshifter's resolve to go recover his parents. Sparktender had seen it coming the second the young dragon told him he'd broken his watch because he was exploring it. That was genuine Windshifter blood. And that was when Sparktender knew that Windshifter would soon go to the city.

But he had been raised a farmboy, and that worried Sparktender. Windshifter didn't know his way around the city. Sparktender assumed that he had very little money and no contacts in Faradan. Of course he had his hopes in a tinker's ingenuity, but he was also realistic and knew that the Corporation had raw power. A lot of it. At least, they had twenty years ago, and he could only imagine how much they'd grown since then. For the brief time that he'd been “employed” in their service, they were just finishing up preliminary work on a monstrous golem they called an automaton. Under any other circumstance, Sparktender would have considered this a brilliant invention. But being developed by the Corporation as it was, it only worried him.

Thus it was that Sparktender worried a bit for Windshifter's sake, for he had a fondness for the boy that stemmed from knowing him as a baby.

Still, he reminded himself yet again as he attached a magnifying piece to his glasses and focused on the clock... he'd better not think about it. Either Windshifter would figure something out or he wouldn't, and hopefully he would be bright enough not to do anything particularly dumb. No, he told himself, better not to worry about it. Besides, thinking about it just reminded him of...

His memory was whispering now. “You said you'd never hurt me... you said...”

Sparktender pushed it away. For that memory was forever unwelcome.