World Building

METAMOR VIGNETTES: THROWBACK

Preston Matthias’s life began to go wrong the moment his parents learned he was a singleton.

His mother, Arabella, had gone in for her first ultrasound and discovered, not a healthy litter of five or six, but one single, enormous fetus, wrapped around the bend in her uterine horn like a man draped over the back of a sofa. The doctors had assured her that everything would be fine, but Preston had grown to a monstrous two-and-a-half kilograms before they finally took her in and removed the infant by abdominal section.

It was, Preston reflected, a fitting beginning for a singularly painful life.

By age five he was eating more than any four of his elder siblings put together. By age seven he stood eye to eye with his father. By twelve he had to stoop to fit through the doors, and his parents had to have a special bathroom built just so he could use the toilet. His own bedroom they renovated to fit his freakish proportions, so that he could stand and sit and lie down in comfort — but that only reminded him how alone he truly was.

All the adults in House Matthias assured him ad nauseum that he was special, that he was important. His great-grandfather, the old Count, came to visit on his tenth birthday and lectured him for an hour on the critical role he played in the family’s fortunes. He told Preston about FPDD, the terrible illness that House Matthias was so prone to manifest, and how a quirk of biological fate had made Preston into their salvation. Someday Preston would marry, and his children would restore health and vitality to the House for another three or four generations. House Matthias would go on, as it had for thirteen hundred years: the greatest of all the noble houses of Metamor. Preston was the key to it all.

But he heard what they said about him when they thought he wasn’t listening. He heard the names given to him by his fifteen siblings and eighty-seven first cousins: Freak. Loneborn. Throwback. And the kids of the other houses were no kinder. His parents sent him to a private school where he could learn with other children just as hideous and disfigured as himself, but most of them came from whole families that had been born that way, and they mocked him for his “weird-looking” relatives. They couldn’t understand that he was the weird one, the genetic misfit. They could never understand the sacrifice he made, abstaining from the magic that could have made him whole and perfect and … normal. Sure, he could have taken the spell — but in doing so he might have damned his entire family. There was no telling when another freak would come along, and the threat of FPDD was always waiting in the wings. He couldn’t afford to be selfish. His family couldn’t afford for him to be selfish.

Honor in service! That was the house motto. A true Matthias didn’t seek his own good above others’. Their house founder, Charles the Mighty, had saved the entire world, and taken a terrible burden on himself in the process. He had left his family and friends, the people he cared for more than anyone else in the world, and had faced darkness and terror, an evil so poisonous and alien that it had been draining the magic out of the world for eleven thousand years. Charles’ willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of all had assured him a place among the greatest heroes in history, and secured for his family the prosperity they now enjoyed.

Now, though, as he put on his tuxedo and waited for his bride-to-be, Preston wished that old Charles had let someone else handle the job. The man cast a shadow that was impossible to escape — even for a throwback like Preston, who didn’t even have the honor of wearing Charles’s form.

A knock sounded at the door and his mother came in. “Preston? Are you almost ready, dear? The priest has arrived, and I think he wants a word with you.”

Preston sighed and fussed with his tie again. He’d tried three times to get it on, and it still didn’t look right.

Mother clucked her tongue and came over to him, her feet making little tick-tick-tick sounds against the polished wooden floor. Inside this oversized room she looked like a midget.

“Poor dear,” she fretted. “Here, sit down and let me help you with that.”

Preston pulled up the lowest stool he had and sat on it, his legs sprawled out awkwardly in front of him. Mother came up behind him and started loosening the tie for another go.

“I’ve just been to see Mariella,” she said, as if divulging a juicy bit of gossip. “She looks positively radiant.”

“Mom, don’t do that,” Preston muttered.

“Do what, dear?”

“Don’t make this out to be better than it is. It’s an arranged marriage. I’ll do my duty for House Matthias, but don’t try to convince me that this is some big, wonderful thing for me.”

Mother tsked and pinched him lightly on the back of the neck, her long nails leaving little scratches on his too-sensitive skin. “Duty doesn’t have to be such a burden, dear. You just have to look at the positive side! Mariella Barnhardt is a smart, funny and kind-hearted girl, from a house as noble as any in Metamor.”

“She’s a freak, like me,” Preston said sourly.

“Oh, come now, Preston, don’t say that!” Mother admonished him. “What’s wrong with dear Mariella?”

“She’s too bloody tall, for one thing!” said Preston. “And her eyes are too close together. And her head is too big. And her nose is too small … and her ears … and her teeth.” He clenched his fist. “And she doesn’t even have any fur!”

His mother looked at him for a long moment, a deep sadness in her large black eyes. Her round, pink ears laid back against the brown fur of her head. She took her long, naked tail in her hands and wrung it in quiet agitation.

“Preston, honey … she’s a human. That’s what humans are supposed to look like.” She pointed a clawed finger at his own hideous reflection in the mirror. “That’s what you’re supposed to look like.”

Mournfully, Preston looked from his reflection to the portrait on his wall: His hero and forefather, Charles Matthias, the Rat of Might. The man he most admired. The man who, because of Feralistic Psychosocial Developmental Disorder, he was forever cursed to resemble only in name.

“Honestly, dear,” said Mother, “you’re both quite fetching, by human standards.”

Preston put his head in his hands. “I know,” he murmured. “I know.”

FIN

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