everest callahan. koldovstoretz

PARENTS & BIRTH.

2012-2013
tw: traumatic birth, parental child abduction

Reducio

Harper Callahan was twenty-three and starry-eyed when she first met him — tall, enigmatic, and impossibly out of place in the winding streets of Prague. She had arrived in Europe from Australia to chase something bigger than home, something unnameable that pulled her across continents. Prague, with its golden domes and twisting alleyways, felt like a dream calling to the part of her that could never be tied down.

He never told her much about himself — nothing about his family, not even his real name — but there was a quiet confidence in the way he carried himself, like someone used to power. He spoke with an old-world accent, crisp and clipped at the edges, and seemed to always know just where to be at the right moment. He appeared one rainy evening in a café near the Charles Bridge, where Harper had been attempting to immerse herself in the hustle and bustle of the city around her, and became her world in slow degrees.

They spent the next several months in glorious, reckless, decadent love — first in Prague, then Vienna, where he had invited her to move in with him. She followed him there without hesitation. She had never felt so certain of anything. For the first time in her life, Harper felt as if she belonged somewhere.

Harper thought she was living in a fairy tale. The apartment in Vienna was beautiful, spare but elegant, and he treated her like something precious — almost too precious. Looking back, there were oddities. He never let her meet his family. He never spoke of his past. There were whole days when he’d disappear with no explanation, only to return with gifts or charm or silence that somehow excused the absence. She was young, in love, and soon pregnant.

He grew gentler as time passed and her stomach swelled. He was strangely attentive, almost as if he was waiting for something. Harper could feel it in the way he watched her and their unborn child, the way he touched her stomach like he was trying to coax a secret out of it, the way he was almost paranoid in the later months of her pregnancy. Still, she believed in the future they were building. She believed in him.

What Harper never knew, could never have guessed, was that the man she loved came from ancient, storied wizard nobility. What he wanted from her wasn't love or devotion, it was an heir. And Harper, who was achingly, terribly human, was caught up in the machinations of a force much stronger and older than her.

The labor was traumatic and besieged by complications from the first contraction. For Harper, all she remembered was pain, then light, then darkness. When she woke again, nurses congratulated her on the birth of her baby — a boy. A single child, small but healthy. There was no sign of the father. It seemed as if he had disappeared into thin air. When she questioned her doctors, they grew irritated with her and insisted that she had arrived at the hospital alone. They told her that she must have been mistaken. The exhaustion, the sedation, the pain — surely she had imagined it. She tried to believe them, even though the memories of her time with her child's father were still as clear as water.

What Harper didn't know was that she had borne twins: a boy and a girl. In the confusion of it all, their father had spirited away the wrong child. The son he had so desired laid in Harper's arms, destined for a life without his father or sister.

Harper returned to Australia heartbroken but fiercely protective of the life she still had: her son, Everest. She named him for the highest peak in the world, determined he would never know the pain of falling the way she had. She never spoke of his father again and convinced herself that the feeling of wrongness and emptiness that haunted her sleepless nights were just echoes of heartache. It wasn’t just her own heart on the line anymore — it was Everest’s as well. Whatever had happened in Vienna, whatever had been taken from her, she had to believe she could keep him safe from it.

CHILDHOOD.

2013-2019

Reducio

Harper returned to Adelaide with a newborn in her arms and a yawning hole in heart. Her parents welcomed her back without question, folding her into the familiar rhythms of the life she had once fled from in the pursuit of something more. The Callahan family home was modest, sun-warmed, and filled with creaky floorboards and the scent of eucalyptus and lemon balm. It became a sanctuary for Harper, who was slowly learning to live for something other than Everest again.

For his own part, Everest was a quiet, solemn child. He was observant and thoughtful, the kind of boy who seemed to listen more than he spoke. His wide blue eyes saw more than anyone realized. Everest grew up on stories from secondhand books, barefoot walks through dusty gardens, and late afternoons helping his grandfather fix up old furniture in the shed. Harper poured every ounce of love she had into him — she may have lost the life she thought she’d have, but she was determined that Everest would never feel that absence.

Yet Harper had always been a restless spirit. Even as her son flourished in the gentle, calm love of her own childhood home, something in her itched. And so, when Everest was six, she accepted a job offer in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. It was meant to be temporary. A year, perhaps two, to allow her to spread her wings on the continent where she had experienced the most formative events of her life.

But the city suited her in ways she hadn’t expected. It was grey and quiet, its history wrapped in every balustrade and balcony, and she could build a new kind of life there. Everest, for his part, adjusted with a strange, inward resilience. He missed the sun, the space, and his grandparents, but he took to Russian easily enough, and learned to carefully layer both his clothes and his emotions.

FIRST INSTANCE OF MAGIC.

2020

Reducio

It was in Nizhny Novgorod, in their narrow, drafty apartment above a small bakery, that Everest’s first burst of magic occurred. He had been upset, even though he couldn’t remember why exactly — typical for a seven-year-old. Perhaps it had been a forgotten word in Russian, which he still struggled to shape in his mouth, a bad dream, or the sudden sharp grief that sometimes came from nowhere.

The room had flickered, just for a second. The window had cracked from the inside, though the cold outside had not penetrated. The lights had fizzled and come back stronger. His mother chalked it up to faulty wiring. Everest wasn’t so sure. He felt the electricity of it in his fingertips for days after, like static clinging to something deeper. Although he eventually dismissed it as nothing but a fluke accident, the moment would stay with him, right up until the moment he received his acceptance letter to a strange institute named Koldovstoretz.

SEER ANCESTRY.

????

Reducio

“The blood remembers” is the motto that generations of Everest’s paternal side of the family has lived by. The gift of the Sight is passed on as their most guarded, hallowed inheritance. Only a few in every century ever manifest it, and although their family is one of the most consistent in displaying the talent, it remains a closely guarded secret. Those who possess the Sight are both revered and feared within the bloodline, often set apart and controlled.

The family’s blessing can be traced back several centuries, all the way back to the old dynasties of Europe. Although no one is quite certain of who originated it, there are records dating back to the Middle Ages of Seers bearing their name. Several of Everest’s ancestors served in various royal courts as oracles and seers, although of course the aristocrats they served had no idea of the true magic behind their eerily accurate predictions.

There was his great-great-great-grandmother, whose warnings were the only thing that saved her small village from total destruction by a flash flood. Her prescience caught the attention of a local nobleman, who recognized the wand she kept hidden up her sleeve as a near-twin to his own. He courted her for two seasons before they married in the summer. They soon had several children running around underfoot, although not a single one of them inherited their mother’s gift.

It was her grandson — Everest’s first cousin thrice removed — who bore the burden again. Pale-haired like her and prone to trance-like silences, he began to have visions of fire and ruin. Unfortunately, his prophecies were generally dark, unsettling, and painfully accurate. The family, wary of his gift, which had already revealed one too many destructive forces, placed him under seclusion “for his own safety”. He was kept out of the public eye and his journals were burnt, his name becoming taboo at family gatherings.

Not all Seers in the family were quite so easily silenced. The next person to possess the Sight was a wild force: a fiery redhead with a knack for cards and chicanery. One could never be sure if her declarations were true and she was shunned by the rest of the family for daring to step out of line. She didn’t mind one bit and soon ran off to the New World with a troupe of fellow Seers — authentic and sham — where it was rumored she attempted to teach Divination to No-Majs and create her own Tarot deck based on precious metals.

Everest, of course, knows none of this.

All he knows is that his flashes of “intuition” almost always come true, that he has an uncanny ability to catch things before they fall, and that coincidences tend to occur around him. His lucky guesses somehow prove correct. His dreams are clearer than water, even on the darkest of nights. And sometimes, far too often to be chance, he catches a glimpse of a girl with eyes like his, standing in a room he’s never seen, reaching out through the dark.

The blood remembers, even if he doesn’t — and the Sight cannot be denied.