After nine months of agony, Anita Trelawney held a baby in her arms. The first thing that struck her was its size. The child was small and thin, frail and fragile like a porcelain doll. It was still, almost unmoving except for a pair of large grey eyes. The eyes were the second thing she noticed – odd, it was, that a newly opened window into this world should already have so much stirred within it. The child’s pupils were dark; the irises, a softer grey on the outside, faded in gradually like fog on a mist-drenched moor.
The third thing she noticed, as the baby was passed to the father who had so longed for the child, to the sister who already had experience in these matters and to the brother who had not, was the sound – or rather, its absence. The baby had no cried no whimpered though a storm raged in its eyes.
The baby was placed into the arms of the grandmother who held it firmly in paper-thin wrinkled hands. It gave a single whimper and glanced upwards, turning a fraction, balanced in the ancient palms.
The silence had intensified around the child as if a blessing was required. For this child whose birth had appeared more troublesome and whose appearance had seemed somewhat disconcerting – different, stronger than the others.
“This child has storm-eyes,” muttered the grandmother.
“Storm-eyes”, she repeated softly.
The family looked around in confusion, save for the mother, the sister and the brother who had heard these stories before – heard them as children, scorned them as teenagers and near-forgotten them in adulthood.
“Stormy eyes, I see the soul stirring behind her lids, the future hidden in her dark pupils”, whispered the grandmother. “This child will, I have no doubt, know before you know, See before you See…”
The father opened his mouth, closed it again, a feeble argument dying on his dry lips.
“You mean …?” The unspoken question lingered in the air, a bitter taste like the musty stench of dry rot that crept at the foot of the house – like a gift that was both wanted and not-wanted, both awed and disgusted, so not a gift at all.
“Yes.” Her nod confirmed it and nobody challenged this statement for she was the eldest and so most knowledgeable in these matters of stories, and dusty cobwebbed tales that were perhaps woven of a web or a strand of truth, passed down by ancient lips.
“Yes. This child will be a Seer”.
And finally, the child cried. In the dim light and amidst the dreary residues of birth, its tears rolled, pearly grey down to its neck and across its small body.
The morning was like any other in midwinter; cold and dull with frost biting the windows and icing the glass like thin layers of sugar on the top of a cake. Those who were not acquainted with the Trelawney family (who despite three whole generations had still not rid themselves of suspicion) steered clear of the cottage where soon, wails and screams of new life and of old and of the bridging of the two cut the silence. There was still a fear, among the older generations at least, that these things (not-understood nor believed but not wholly unappreciated) would be resurfacing in the family soon.
Seers, locally, were not popular. Cassandra Trelawney, the child’s great great grandmother had been celebrated by all whom had not known her. Writers and historians, others who saw themselves as Seers, all sought her company, hearing of miraculous predictions, rare even amongst all of those claiming to be gifted in the art of Divination.
And yet those in the village (or their ancestors before them) could remember uneasiness about the Seer. Fear, almost, at the disturbed stir in her eyes when she passed them; the dark grey swirls within her pupils like heavy anvils weighing down on her mind, the burden of a thousand futures that were wanted and not-wanted, loaded but blessed with curiosity.
So the grandmother knew, having heard from her own mother, the tales of the grandmother who had died young – seeing perhaps, the foretold doom of her own future, that this child would face the same. Three generations had passed without the slightest change, three generations where each mother who bore child feared and hoped (though fear was always the greater of the two) that it would be their child who emerged into the world with this cruel gift burdened upon their shoulders.
The family began to disperse, leaving the mother and father alone in their house, clutching the child. The family left and ventured out into the storm, clouds rolling and turning fitfully as if from a nightmare which they could not wake. And the child gave a laugh, the harsh and discordant tones reverberating against the thunder that clapped deep and laborious across the sky.
While the child was young, while it could not speak, they would perhaps, be safe for a short while. There was always that hope (which was really quite hopeless) that the grandmother had predicted wrong and that this child had merely been troubled at birth, but would grow up healthily and happy and laughing, living a long life with the usual burdens that life brought upon oneself, live a normal life and not (lest history repeated itself) end its days prematurely (tragically) on a hardship of guilt and dying promise.
The baby, silent again as the rain ceased but for a steady melodious undertone, stirred. Its large grey eyes opened revealing a world of their own where erupted a raging quiet, a reflection perhaps of days past and days-future, of wars that roared dormant and alive in distant years, along the jagged edge of time where the storm crept ahead to rest at its epicentre.