Free Aethosphere Chronicles: Winds of Duty by Jeremiah D. Schmidt Page B

meant—golden yellow against burning
hazel—there was a moment of grim satisfaction. Bar held up his
hands and stepped back towards the pressing crowd behind him.
Stowe’s gun followed.
    “He means to shoot us all down!” someone
yelled in a panic and that whipped the men back into a frenzy.
    Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Men fell in
droves as bullets chewed up the wooden decking in sweeping
lines— rat-tat-tat-tat-tat —first up and then back down. Bar
rolled away to avoid the fire, but what happened after was lost in
a hazy cloud of unconsciousness as something hard impacted the side
of his head. Rat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat-tat. The sound of
that horrible weapon followed him into the turbulent seas of his
dreams.
    Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

Chapter 7: Take up Your
Burden
    Bar’s father pounded each nail into the board in one
or two precise and deliberate swings of his hammer. He made it look
so easy. That’s what it was like in his father’s dusty workshop,
with the light filtering through the floating motes, and the heavy
scent of spruce and pitch permeating the senses. It always looked
so easy. Bar tried to swing his father’s hammer, but found that his
child-hands were too small and too weak to wield it. Instead he
bent the first three nails and then smashed his thumb on the forth.
He threw the hammer away as tears filled his eyes and he sucked on
his throbbing thumb. It felt hot and swollen, and near to bursting
in his mouth. At the table, his father took up the hammer and
continued to drive the nails, but he smiled sympathetic at his son
as he did so.
    Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.
    “You just got to mean it when you do it,
son,” he urged the boy, pausing so he could look directly into his
son’s eyes. This was a lesson he meant to stick. “You hesitated,
looked away, but you can’t do that when you’re swinging a hammer.
You got to keep your focus, push out the distractions—like thinking
about what has happened, or what might happen. It’s
either set in stone in the past or it’s something for the future to
decide. But for you, you got the present to worry about. We’re
creatures of the present you know, blessed with the ability to look
back and speculate ahead, but it’s always best to pay extra special
attention to where we are—to the now .
    “But, Da, It’s too heavy. I just can’t do
it,” Bar protested, speaking around the throbbing thumb crammed in
his mouth. Where he stood, he was at eye-level with the surface of
the table, and could just make out the profile of what his father
was working on. Was it a wheel?
    “Too heavy…? Can’t do it?” His father’s
hearty laugh filled the warm room with a glow that seemed to
intensify the colors. “That’s bloody nonsense and you know it, boy!
Gods, you’re a grown man after all—should be nothing for you to
swing a hammer.”
    “A grown man?” protested Bar feebly, his
young voice cracking under the strain of indignation. “I’m not a
grown man.” And yet as he said it, he realized his voice had
deepened, and now he was looking down on the table instead of up at
it… and it was a wheel his father was working on, a ship’s
wheel.
    “Aye, and a bigger man than I was in life,
I’ll wager.”
    Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.
    “I’m dreaming, Da, aren’t I?”
    Aye, that you are, my son.” His father
smiled, causing the creases in his stubbly cheeks to fold, yet that
smile quickly slipped away when his world-weary eyes filled with
something like sadness. “But it’s time to wake up, and it’s time to
swing that hammer like you mean it. And here, son.” Cuthbert turned
to the table, and heaved his work up with a labored groan. “This…I
made this for you.”
    He brought it down to just a few centimeters
from his son’s face. At first Bar was terrified of it, terrified to
take the heavy object. It was too big, too important, but his
father wasn’t going to let him back out. No, Cuthbert simply held
it there, out to his