Free A Facet for the Gem by C. L. Murray

“you’re telling me that makes us… brothers?”
    Matufinn chuckled at the question. “What it makes us is ours to find, in time. What remains to be found is in you, and always has been. You must decide whether or not you are ready to face it.”
     
    They traveled for miles through woods that receded to reveal wild grasslands, down green hills and quiet glens that opened into valleys of violet and jade. When Morlen passed under more enticing apples, he eagerly gathered two, relishing them both. Matufinn, however, hardly even glanced at the overhanging bounty.
    “The apples,” Morlen sputtered through a mouthful. “I’ve never had anything that made me feel so… free. Why are you not eating them?”
    Matufinn smiled. “The apples are beyond your world, but they have always been an ordinary part of my own, from the moment I left my mother’s womb and opened new eyes to see them around me. It is through knowing the vastness outside of what we’ve known that we find real freedom.”
    Morlen cautiously pressed, uncertain whether he should question Matufinn’s decision to live here in seclusion. “And did you find that, when you left this place?”
    Holding quiet at first, the man led Morlen to think he’d struck a nerve. Before long he replied, “I found a great many things when I left, when I was not much older than you are now. Death and suffering, more than anything else. I lost… people, out there… one in battle, and the other later, in Korindelf.”
    “You did battle with the shriekers?” Morlen asked intently.
    “Oh yes,” said Matufinn. “Along with the only other of my kind who dwelt here, years ago. We charged into the fray with Korindelf’s army—men who served long before those treacherous fools currently in power, mind you. We moved like water and wind,” he boasted, drawing his sword to swiftly cut two apples from a nearby branch, slicing them both cleanly in half with a single stroke before they hit the ground. “We shattered scores of foes by the minute, letting none land a single blow.
    “Until”—Matufinn’s voice became grave—“the two of us were separated. And I, engrossed in the task of keeping them off of me, saw that they had overpowered him… biting, ripping, pulling him deeper into their fold where even the strongest bones are crushed, and thickest skin devoured.
    “I drove them back in rage,” he continued, “lifting one after another as shields against the rest, hoping that as they withdrew, they would leave something of him to recover. But they leave nothing of what they take.”
    Matufinn stopped from time to time as though basking in the atmosphere, guided by every energy that Morlen was only beginning to feel, near and far. Such an odd mannerism led Morlen to suspect that if Matufinn had ventured to Korindelf during his upbringing, perhaps his own uncommon features would have met more acceptance than distaste.
    “When you first went to Korindelf,” said Morlen, “did you feel—”
    “Overwhelmed?” finished Matufinn, laughing under his breath. “Dazed by the thousands who knew not whether to fear or accept me?
    “Like you would drown under the way they looked at you every day?”
    “Ha!” Matufinn laughed aloud this time. “I had a special spot picked out to escape them, where I’d often go just to remember which feelings were my own.”
    “Till it became more difficult each time.”
    “Much more. That is, until I let in someone different than the rest, someone who wanted nothing from me except what I wished to freely give.”
    Morlen’s interest rose, this time unable to share from his own experience. “What was it you gave this person?”
    Matufinn’s steps scuffed more against the ground as his expression became nostalgic. “Everything,” he answered.
    “And they took it from you? And left you worse off?”
    “She? No. She made me better for it, far better. But, when she died, a great deal left me as well.”
    Beginning to uncover how