Bloodlines of Archaea I. Afira
A Flicker of Hope

My stomach ached as I stepped up to the pedestal, the large crowd staring into my eyes. Akuma stood next to me. Suauu had told the people of our meeting and expressed his opinion, they now had questions. It had been scheduled for me to answer some of them, hoping to quiet their questions. Akuma yelled from beside me, “your queen will answer your questions now,” he said, “one at a time.”

At this, everyone raised their hand, signaling to me how many of them wanted answers. It was my choice to decide who’s questions to answer first. Deciding to work from the center out, I called on a mother who held a young boy to her chest. The young boy held his little hand high above his head. He began to speak quietly. I had to lean closer to hear his question. “Yo-yo majesty?” he called my name, with a kind of uncertainty to his voice. I allowed him to continue without saying a word, worried that if I did, he would stop speaking altogether. “What I want ’know is why the sun ‘gett’in all covered up da’ way it is. I’m get’tin kind’a scared for my Papi, who goes out do’in the fish’in for all us and he been gett’in home late, sayin’ that he can’t replace him way home,” he said, at this point, he burst into tears.

I hesitated, wishing I could dash off of the stage and give the young child a hug, but watching his mother do just that, I remained where I was. “The answer to the darkening of the sky is-complicated,” I began. “But I will do my best to explain,” I said, looking up at the sky, myself. “As many of you have heard, our island is preparing for war. A lot of us may have learned about this, but many of us treat it as if it’s more legend than fact. It is, unfortunately, fact,” I said, pausing. “We are at war with the creatures of the shadows. They are the reason behind darkening the sky,” I explained. I watched the crowd of people, each of their faces becoming tense with fear, before raising their hands once more to ask another question.

Some of the questions were unsettling and dark, like crying children calling out to their mother with a dying breath. I wished I could tell them that everything would be okay, I wished I could tell the little boy that his daddy would never get lost again or have to join our small army, but I knew that neither of those things were true. All I could do was answer their questions the best I could without rising too much worry, even though I, myself had a mind riddled with worry and fear for the future, not just of my future, but for the future of my people, for I was their queen and that made it my responsibility to keep them safe. Me, Afira, queen of the island of Skyfire was one of my people’s last hopes to live freely after years of ignorant freedom. I wished more than anyone else that Grandma Lilly was there to guide me. I wished she would pull me up onto her lap and remark about how big I was getting before sharing her wise words and sad stories with me, but I couldn’t, because she was gone and I was the queen of the people who had lived for so long without knowing of the prison they had trapped themselves in, but there was still hope, no matter how little there was, a flicker was still enough. It came in the form of those people hidden by a thick fog of fear. They were those who asked the questions which were exciting, even charmingly funny. These were the people who kept the hope alive, no matter how many times disaster struck, these were the people who watered the seedling of hope, treating it with great care, never being swayed by the amount of darkness which lurked just a few feet away, they kept the hope alive. “What kinds of stuff can you do with your powers?” A young and spunky girl asked loudly from the center of the crowd. From my vantage point, I could only really see two tufts of hair which stuck almost straight up from her small head.

I chuckled. “Would you like me to show you, or should I just tell you?”

She thought about this for a moment, before asking me very politely to show her some of my powers. I paused before climbing the steps leading to the pedestal three more steps so that every person in the crowd could see what I was about to do. I concentrated, lighting both of my arms on fire before dimming it and bringing a flame to my hands, where I molded it into a ball of flame. The audience watched, dazed. I then shaped it into a dolphin, imagining it swimming free in the sea, bending it to complete the task before adding three more to the flaming pod. They danced in the air for a moment, before I commanded them high into the air, where they exploded in bright colors, brightening our dark sky for just a moment. Once I was finished, the girl cheered as I stepped down from the steps. “That was amazing!” she shouted from the crowd, excitedly.

“Thank you,” I said, bowing before looking down at my hands to make sure they had cooled. Pleased that they had, I rested them on the wooden pedestal once more. I smiled at Akuma, for once realizing the hope I could bring to my people, and for the first time since I had gotten them, I thought of my powers as a gift, and not as an obligation, it was something which gave me a flicker of hope in those anxious times. It gave me the hope that I could accomplish what I was born to do.