Learning Your Lessons (Flashback)

[Fenilen]

15th of Spring, 504 AV

The clatter of pipes was a sound that often met the ear of the young Inarta currently residing within the depths of the Volcano. The clash of the clay and metal pipes against the rack as a glassblower, more often than not more experience than him, settled down to work was a sound he had heard from his earliest days performing Bendi, and from the first time he had heard it, the sound had provided him with comfort. Now that he was an Avora, a glassworker by profession, a man sworn to dedicate his life to crafting beautiful goods for the betterment of Wind Reach, the sound had an even more powerful meaning to it. It didn’t only mean that he was in a place where he could relax, where he was in an element so familiar to him that it was like air. It also meant that he was in a place where he was in complete control. When he was working on the semi-solid glass, he was entirely in control. He could shape it as his will saw fit, so long as the basic criteria were fit. For example, he had to keep the glass spinning, and he had to keep the glass heated. If he failed to continue with either, than he would fail the shape the glass as he wished. The glass would cool too much and crack, or it would begin to droop to one side, eventually dripping off of the pipe and onto the ground, where it could end up injuring him or another artisan. Unfortunately for the poor, youthful red head, he was going to learn this lesson the hard way today.

Working with him today were two very different people. One was the Yasi, Jeheld, assigned to the Hot Shop for the ten day as his Bendi assignment. Every time Jeheld was assigned to the Hot Shop for a ten day, he could see the joy and delight in Yidah, his instructor’s, eyes, and after working with the boy for a few hours, he knew just why. He was dedicated, and he showed certain promise. Yidah was already speaking of taking him under her wing, much like she had for Fenilen, assuring him a place in the Avora caste when he came of age in a year. Somehow, Jeheld had caught wind of these rumors—which were just that, rumors—and had begun to interrogate Fenilen as to what his experience had been like a year ago, when he had turned fifteen, and when he had been assigned a caste, his lot in life. Fenilen ignored him even now, as the melody of eager, interrogative chirps flew from his lips, assailing him with questions so probing that Fenilen almost felt violated simply by being asked them in public.

“What was it like when you were assigned your caste?” Jeheld asked him, golden eyes looking up at him. That was something that was nice. Fenilen was a whole three inches taller than the midget, who stood about 5’2. A quiet glare found its way down to him as Fenilen simply continued spinning the pipe with his non-dominant left hand, humming a quiet tune to himself as he focused his attention on his work. Yidah had instructed him to create a cylinder, measuring six inches long. Probably a piece for a sculpture she was working on right now, that was sitting in one of the furnaces, waiting for this piece. The feeling of the glass parting under the paddle he was using to even it out was as satisfying as ever. Spinning the piece was second nature to him by this point in his short career, but that didn’t mean that he was great at making shapes. He had never made a cylinder before, and it showed. The one he was producing was sloppy and misshapen, with a slight list to the left when held up. A sigh left his lips, and he set about on rectifying it to the best of his abilities. He held his paddle flat up against the listing portion as he spun the pipe, creating a sort of primitive sander. Pushing upwards with the paddle, he began to influence the sagging glass back up to its original position, biting his lip ever so slightly as he did so. If he messed up too badly now, he would have to start all over, and if he had to start all over, Yidah would not be pleased with him. A quiet curse broke through the happy façade his humming had put up, causing Jeheld to look up at him, tilting his head curiously. He had been observing Fenilen’s work on the piece, and disapproval was evident on his young face. What did this little twerp know!? Fenilen had been walking before this little shit was even conceived! Fenilen furrowed his brow, and then the kid did something that made the man have to walk away, lest he explode.

“Were you scared when you went to see the Valintar? Were you nervous?” he asked in the same, high pitched chirps he had before. Damn him! Couldn’t he see that it was his distractions that had made him deform his piece in the first place!? Fenilen bit down on his lip. Hard. He took the pipe in his hand. It needed reheating anyway, this was just a convenient excuse to get away from a Yasi who was asking too many questions about something that didn’t concern him. When Fenilen made it to one of the many Glory Hole furnaces on the wall, he plunged the glass inside of it, spinning it even as it was inside, to ensure that his piece was evenly heated. As his glass’s temperature rose, his fury subsided. Perhaps he was overreacting at the Yasi. He had every right to be curious as to what was in his near future. Fenilen simply… didn’t take kindly to strangers prying into his past. A minute passed in silence before he removed the piece from the Glory Hole, making his way back over to the bench they had claimed for their work, where he placed it on the two metal racks.

“Here, spin for me,” he requested of the boy. “I need to fix the sagging, and in order to do that, I can’t be distracted by maintaining the motion on the piece.” Jeheld eagerly took the opposite end of the pipe in his youthful hands, rotating it with a practiced proficiency. Fenilen hoped Yidah would return soon. He was not sure if he could straighten this piece without her aid or not. Red lips pursed into a thin line as he silently adjusted the paddle, holding it with both hands, moving it up and down the length of the piece, praying to Priskil that Yidah would emerge from the depths of the Hot Shop and save him from his insufficiency sometime soon.

[Fenilen]

Thankfully, not a minute later, she did, approaching the youthful pair. Blue eyes scanned over the drooping piece as she shook her head in dismay, pale arms folded across her vinati-covered chest. Fenilen spared her form a glance. Not that any man could help themselves. She was strikingly beautiful. Silently, she closed the last few feet between herself and the pipe, standing next to Fenilen. He had spent enough time working under her tutelage to know this was a sign to back off, and did just that, a small and slight sigh passing through his lips as he backed away, extending the paddle to her in a single, gloved hand. She took it without so much as another glance to him, and then looked up at Jeheld. “Keep it spinning at this rate as I show Fenilen here what he was doing wrong,” with that, she returned the attention of her dazzling blue eyes to the piece, pressing the paddle up against it in a fashion not too dissimilar from the way Fenilen had, but there was one key difference. She held the paddle at a slight angle, shaping it into a tip, which confused him. She had asked for a cylinder, had she not? Why was she turning it into a sort of cone? He pursed his lips nervously as he watched her run the paddle up and down the length of the spinning piece. Jeheld’s tired breaths could be heard ringing out over the spinning pipe. He couldn’t exactly blame the Yasi. It was tiring, demanding, unrewarding, mind-numbingly boring work, spinning the pipe as he watched others go about their business at the load-bearing end of the pipe. Finally, Yidah finished shaving off the excess glass from the tip, leaving him with an odd shape. It wasn’t a cylinder, but it wasn’t a cone. It was more of a candle shape, starting thick at the bottom, but thinning out before it reached the top, which was a rounded point. She turned to him and spoke.

“Keep it in this general shape, but try to shave off some of the excess length. Shrink it down to five inches instead of six, and lose a quarter inch in diameter. I’ll be back in ten chimes,” and with that, she was gone, her hips swaying as she departed. Fenilen watched with longing, craving, lustful eyes as she departed, until the nasally voice that made him want to lobotomize himself rang out again. Of course, he didn’t know what a lobotomy was, so it was really just him wanting to gouge out his eyes.

“What about your sister? What caste was she put into?” Jeheld asked. Fenilen had made the mistake of mentioning his sister to the whiny brat earlier, and ever since, he hadn’t stopped bringing her up in conversation. If he thought he had a chance with her, he was wrong. Fenilen would run him through with a sword before he let him anywhere near his precious sister. A quiet sigh left Fenilen’s lips as he pressed the paddle up against the glass once more, shaving off the excess while keeping the shape, just as Yidah had instructed him too. He would do anything she asked him too. Oh, how hopeless the teenage mind was when it came to beautiful women. Especially when they were in positions of authority. The paddle remained in the clutched hands of the Avora for many long minutes, before his eyes began to ache from staring at the glowing glass. A quiet sigh left his lips once more, and then he rose to his feet, looking back at Jeheld, who was sweating from head to toe, exhausted from the non-stop spinning of the pipe. “You heard the instructions, correct?” he inquired, sparing only a quick glance at him to catch his half-hearted, exhausted nod. “Switch.”

With that simple command, the two danced to the opposite end of the pipe to where they had been standing prior. Fenilen took the pipe in his scarred hands, and started spinning, quickly and efficiently, hands twisting the pipe one at a time, so that while one was twisting, the other was moving back to push again. The movement was something he had practiced and experience millions upon millions of times before. Long before he had ever been allowed to touch the tools, his Bendi task had been to spin the pipe as the workers worked on the end. He hated dedicated spinning. Hated it with a fiery passion. This was not working glass. This was busy work. Real glassworkers were at the end of the pipe, molding the piece to their will, making it look just as they wished it to, making every detail of it perfect, exquisite, just right, so that they could sell it and make a profit, survive off of their beautiful artwork that they put so much time and passion into. Spinning the pipe was the work of complete novices, not those who had some experience, like him, and children. Children were best put to work spinning pipes. He had better things to do. Like shape glass. Shaping glass was lovely. And artistic. And actually productive. Spinning pipes was not for people who had actual experience working with the material at the other end.

Jeheld’s notably less experienced hands pressed the paddle up against the glass as Fenilen spun it in his hands, chirping out Nari quietly. More specifically, he was letting out the prayers to Priskil that came out so often when he worked. He was letting out the thanks the Goddess was due. He, and everyone who worked glass, owed her for granting them the gift that was fire upon them. The Inarta and particular owed her for granting them the warmth of the mountain. It was as Fenilen was contemplating the nature of the deities, more specifically, all of their relations to the most important one in his opinion, Priskil, when he heard that petching nasally kid ONCE AGAIN.

“Why are you ignoring everything I say?”

[Fenilen]

Fenilen’s ears burned as the young boy called him out on what he had thought was a fairly skilled dodging of his prying into his personal life and past. Pale flesh turned red, creeping from the extremity of his ears, down his cheek bones, where gravity pulled it down much like blood or another liquid, so that it filled the entirety of his freckled cheeks, from jaw to cheekbone. Along his cheekbones the red crept, eventually making its way to his nose, spreading down around his lips, over his chin, his forehead, until his entire face was only a few shades of red less intense than his hair. It was then that he snapped at the younger boy, turning to face him, calloused hands flying from the end of the pipe. The sound that had barraged their ears, a sound so familiar to the both of them, grinded to a halt, but the glass never stopped. It always flowed, whether the pipe kept it moving or not. Jeheld rose up to his full height as Fenilen approached him, causing him to take a quarter-step back, as by this point, even Fenilen’s chest had turned a bright red.

“I choose not to hear the words you say, Jeheld, because you are prying!” Fenilen spat, his eyes burning, searing through the eyes of the Yasi. “You are prying not only into *my* personal life, and *my* past, but you are prying into the life of my sister, something which you should *know* is unacceptable! You want to know these things? Fine! Go talk to her! I’m sure, if she wants you to know them, she’ll tell them to you, but me? I am busy! I am busy doing something that is of more importance not only to me, but to the entirety of Wind Reach, than answering your stupid, uneducated, prodding questions!” As he yelled, he swung the front of his arm forward, one finger downward, annunciating every little syllable that left his lips. “The nerve that you show by prying into *my* personal lif-“ he was cut off. He had forgotten something, and so had Jeheld. Glass flowed, whether one wanted it to or not.

While he had been yelling, the creation they had been shaping had been, quite literally, falling to pieces. Gravity was taking its toll on the front, causing it to droop even more than it already had been, until it was at an almost ninety degree angle, positioned directly over the bare foot of the Yasi.

Like a meteor from the sky, like Zintila falling into the Sea of Grass, like a shooting star, like a bad storm, the glass fell from its precarious position. The front half of the piece simply separated, gravity pulling it down to Earth. However, one thing stood in its way, one particularly important thing. Jeheld’s foot. Molten glass slammed into the bare top of his pale foot, instantly searing flesh. Burnt, charred skin met Fenilen’s nostrils when he inhaled sharply through his nose to continue his verbal assault, but he did not get to speak. The words never left his lips. A sound, however, did make it out of the other boy’s lips. An inhuman scream, one more fit to leave the lips of a banshee than the lips of a boy. As he scream, the glass, hundreds of degrees above the temperature of the air the engulfed them, continued to burn into his foot. Flesh gave way, charring black, until it burned through to bone. It took a full ten seconds for the boy to finally begin to react, flinging his foot around wildly, hopping up and down. Workers all around them turned their heads to look, trying to see what the commotion was about. Fenilen simply watched. There was nothing he could do while Jeheld was flinging his foot around like that. He would get hit by some of the molten glass, and then HE would get burned.

Eventually, Jeheld’s hobbling found a water bucket, and he plunged his foot into it, steam rising from the barrel. Fenilen cringed. The glass on his foot would have cracked, but he supposed that was hardly of any real importance now. His eyes simply watched the scene in stunned silence, the water-vapor beginning to thin. Beginning to recover his senses, Fenilen approached, his eyes watching Jeheld in dazed stupor, his mind grasping for words that he knew his mouth would never be able to form in this sort of situation. He couldn’t just apologize. He couldn’t just shrug this off. As much as the prying boy had deserved the punishment had received, he had undoubtedly scarred him, and as such, he was going to be punished. His ears burned with guilt as he looked over his shoulder. Sure enouth, Yidah had recognized her favorite Yasi’s scream, and was already three quarters of the way to him. Her blue eyes had already passed over the pipe. A quick glance towards it by Fenilen confirmed the worst—the mess was only getting worse, with more and more glass dripping to the floor, to cool and solidify. Fenilen looked at the ground abashedly as the entrancing instructor approached, her face red with anger.

“You IMBECILE!” she spat, curling her right hand’s fingers into a wicked fist, blue eyes boring holes into Fenilen’s head. “Look at what you’ve DONE! You’ve RUINED my piece, set back production by at least a day,” as she spoke, she gestured behind her with her left arm, sweeping it at the gaping workers and the pipe, still dripping glass onto the ground. Fenilen’s eyes stayed focused on the ground, observing the way the cobblestones flowed into one another, observing how they were intricately designed and caulked together. “and, worse yet, you’ve SCARRED a Yasi who showed promise in the field! I was going to take him in as my apprentice, just as I did you! Now!? Now it’ll be a miracle if he can even walk! It probably burned through the muscle and tendon in the top of his foot, thanks to your stupidity and your inaction! You FOOL!” as she screamed, a wild fist flew, slamming into Fenilen’s unprepared solar-plexus. Fenilen coughed loudly, the air leaving his lungs as he doubled over, bending to protect the area that had just been hit, arms folding over his stomach. He gasped for breath to fill the void that the hit to his stomach had produced, breath that no matter how hard he tried, would not come. As he was doubled over, he heard a taunt from Jeheld, but the words did not register in his stunned mind. The only thing that did register was a sudden, stinging pain in his face, as her fist met him again, hitting him straight in the right eye, her knuckles slamming into his eyebrow. It was only by some miracle, he thought, that his socket did not collapse, but he did not escape unscathed.

He collapsed, his face stinging, his hand reaching up to cover his wounded eye, which would undoubtedly be bruised come the next morning. He felt warm, wet blood flowing through a gash in his eyebrow, slipping in between his fingers, dripping out onto the ground, staining the cobblestones, seeping into the caulk that held them all together. It didn’t take long for tears to mix in with the blood, clear, salty water falling to the ground, intermingling with the elixir of life before vanishing into the ground. Jeheld was scurried off by a medic a glassworker had summoned, as Fenilen simply lay there on the ground, crying and bleeding, Yidah looking down at her failure of an apprentice. After a full chime, she grabbed him by his hair, yanking his head up so that his good, green eye was looking at her. Albeit tear-filled, she could see she had his attention, so she spoke. “Do not fail me again, Fenilen Ruin, or I will not hesitate to drop you from my care. With nowhere you practice your skills, you will be nothing to Wind Reach, You know as well as I do that the only way you can become a true Avora is with practice, and without an instructor, you have no one to correct your mistakes. You will become nothing better than a Dek, a Chiet, if you’re lucky. Do not fail me again.”

With her point made, she tossed him backwards by his hair, causing his head to whiplash against the ground as he slammed back into the ground. Tears flew even more freely, but he would not stay here. He would not let them see him so emotionally compromised. He struggled to his feet, despite the breaths he could not draw, despite the pain that seared in both sides of his head, and fled, fled as fast as his feet could carry him. His booted feet echoed in the caverns of Wind Reach as he sprinted back towards his home, the one place where he could truly cry. Finally, he made it, flinging open the door to his Common Room, where he instantly buried himself in his bed, hiding his face in one of the few cloths he had, sobbing, blood and tears staining the cloth.

As he sobbed, as he cried, as he wept, he made an oath he knew he would uphold, then and forever. He swore to himself that he would never fail again.


The End

[Flicker]

Character: Fenilen Skill Experience Award: Glassblowing 5 ; Brawling 1 ; Leadership 1 Lores: Seeing talent in a Glassblower, Redirecting Anger, Recognizing the limits of your abilities, subtleties of paddle holding, mimicking other's glassblowing techniques, working successfully with a whiny brat, abandoning duty to relieve anger, failing in a position of leadership, irresponsibility leading to other's injury, Glass burns flesh, flesh's frailty under molten glass, lust's scorn for stupidity, being knocked out of wind and the difficulties of drawing breath afterward, being punched in the face by an object of lust, respect, and admiration, tears of shame and pain, receiving an ultimatum, shame, guilt, utter resolve Comments: Jake, Fenilen is a real person under your authorship. This was a delight to read and a pleasure to award. I've heard that XP awards are rewards for great writing, I hope you feel proud and satisfied with this thread. Great work. If you find something I've missed or made a mistake with, feel free to communicate with me via PM or office.