Michelle M. Sagara - Gifted

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 22.33KB 10 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.

GIFTED

Michelle Sagara

He was the last of the Genies.

The others had served their purpose in a brilliant flash of three sharp bursts, and

had been dust or less for many centuries. When he was born, if indeed a Genie can

be said to know birth, he was taught. He could not remember the teacher at all, but

the teacher's words were as sharp and clear now as they had been at the beginning of

his awareness.

"You are part of the magic of the world," the teacher had said. "All things that

live must have purpose, and that is yours. You will not be strong, as camels are, and

you will not be cunning or wiley in the the manner of men; you will not be mortal, but

you cannot live forever."

"What will we be?" One of the Genies had asked.

"What you are: Wishgivers. And when you have found the one, you will make

your choice — and three times, you will know the power of the Maker. You might

be as Gods, if you choose your dreamer wisely."

"What happens when the wishes are given?"

The teacher did not answer.

Time did. Time, and the first of the Genie's brothers. He was an impatient wisp

of air and colour, with no thought to the future and only the desire of power to guide

him. He found a poor man — who better than the poorest of the poor to make a

great wish? — and gave his gift first to gold and jewels, second to beautiful flesh,

and last to a kingdom that spanned the deserts. The wishgiver, the first of the

wishbringers, knew the glory of power and the song of fulfilment, just as he had

desired.

But the gold and jewels were scattered now, melted and changed over the

passage of time. The beautiful women were dust and less than dust, and the

kingdom was lost scant years after its founding. The first of the wishgivers had not

lingered to see this: The last of his power, and the whole of his life, broke and burst

in the instant the kingdom had been created. He was gone to wind and sand and the

burning sun above.

The Genies had no time to bid their brother farewell. Sobered, they hid in the

shadows and the little, secret places that magic makes. They made vows of

abstinence, and swore to each other that they would no squander their lives or their

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Michelle M. Sagara - Gifted.pdf

共10页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Michelle M. Sagara - Gifted

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: