July 03, 2018

PodCastle 529: Chesirah

1 hour

* Author : L. D. Lewis

* Narrator : Stephanie Malia Morris

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

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Previously published by FIYAH Literary Magazine #1

Rated PG-13 for violent captivity and violent rebirth.

Chesirah

By L. D. Lewis

“It is almost time.” Chesirah smiled despite her screaming fingers. They were a blur, working feverishly to finish lacing together the last of her dark braids before Nazar the dollmaker made it home. She wove one braid into a dozen others and then a dozen more until she wore a high crown of them pinned in place by the dollmaker’s thick needles. She needed them to make her escape.

Fenox, as a rule, were kept creatures, usually by those of means, influence, and the odd eccentric streak. They needed a safe place to burn and someone to keep their ashes. Their keepers needed a conversation piece: something subservient and entertaining. By and large, it was a shit life, and Chesirah had a tendency to run, so she spent thirty of her adolescent years in the city of Kirjan, caged.

First there’d been the banker: a mountainous Common Man possessed of an arrogance misplaced in a species with such a short lifespan and a fondness for the misery of others. As his toy, “others” usually meant her. He liked to collapse the shell of ash she became when she cycled through her burning, and he emptied her into an ornate glass bottle. It had been a lovely blue color with a round bottom and a long, fluted neck and a heavy brass stopper that tinkled like a bell when she tried to escape and re-form the thousands of times she cycled at his command. He loved the tinkle of that ball. In her less subtle days, she’d contemplated killing him with it.

On her least subtle day, she did.

The view she had now was nothing like what she’d seen of Kirjan from the banker’s penthouse. The city outside her small, round window sparkled at night. It was known as one of Atlas’s most beautiful cities, an island tiered with jewel-toned architecture and bustling with wealth and secrets. The glowing arc of Irth beyond Atlas’s atmosphere washed everything with blue notes. Skyfaring vessels shuttled goods and their traders between the planets and looked to her like lazily drifting stars.

One of them would be her way out.

She was enshrined now in Nazar’s attic workshop: a long, red room where Chesirah existed in secret surrounded by carved heads with sightless eyes on shelves separate from their arms and legs and naked, varied torsos with immaculate breasts. Nazar kept her behind gilded bars adorned by weeping falls of beautiful blossoms, and a throne of colorful pillows she was sure he thought spoiled her. He’d hung a swinging perch at the center of the cage where she was allowed to sit like some bird, her legs swaying, the length of her raven hair reaching through the bars further than even her arms had gone.

Until recently, anyway. For a while now she’d been letting herself out at night while Nazar slept. She wandered the house with the most delicate of footsteps and touched with ghostly faintness objects she’d only ever seen handled before. More importantly, she’d ventured out to explore parts of Kirjan, the better to make her escape. She locked herself back in before sunrise. She was a few nights’ wandering away from escaping for good.

Chesirah finished braiding the last of the needles into her hair when the front door slammed. She startled.

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