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butchers with more artistic flourish than you. You’re little
more than a brute with a vocabulary.”
Seconds after I exited the water, there descended upon me
a flurry of throwing knives—the type blindfolded magicians
throw at beautiful women tied with brilliantly colored
rope. Except these blades hadn’t found bright balloons or
smoldering cigarettes, but the blood that surged beneath my
skin. Yet I continued on my way, heading towards the smell
of wet ashes and old wood. Upon seeing my family’s home
before me, the Prince conjured back into life the fires that
had once consumed it, again setting the charred remains
alight. I plunged through the mouth of the flames towards
the sound of my sisters’ weeping and the undeniable heat of
my father’s rage.
From somewhere within the billowing smoke behind
me emerged the wizard, hands filled with cold steel. I felt
his knife pass through my neck and exit out the front of my
throat. I fell silently to the ground.
“If it makes you feel any better,” the Prince of Smoke
crooned, “I will certainly enjoy looking at your name, cut
clean in half by a straight black line.”
I felt something emerge from the smoking ruin of the
house and fill my hand. It burned as my fingers closed around
its handle, completing an embrace I had for too long been
without. A wrath that had been building for weeks consumed
me, blinded me, nearly destroyed me.
I was lifted to my feet, my father held high in the molten
grip of my hand. I turned to meet the Prince, this time the
one performing miracles and he but a dumbstruck onlooker.
“You’d be dead even within a Red Dream,” the Prince
sputtered, backpedaling away.
I fought past the rage to offer my opponent a wan smile.
“I have an impressive mother and father as well, magician.
And doing the impossible runs in the family.”
My father blasted into the ground near the retreating
magician. The world tumbled and separated as dirt and stone
258 | Mark Anzalone