I hope you enjoy reading them as I am hoping to publish them soon.

    Back then, though, it was enough that my father had ensured the continuity of the family name by producing a son at his very first attempt.

    However, when my father finally emerged from his shell shocked state, he also ran into the problem of providing a suitable name for me without causing a massive falling out between his family and my mother's equally eager parents, brothers, sisters and assorted aunts and uncles.

    Both sides were anxious for the honor of providing a suitable appellative for the firstborn representative of the new generation. Had things turned out differently, I would be named either Eng Leong, which means Magnanimous Hero or Lai Joo, which means Arrival of Treasure, today. As it was, my parents racked their brains for four days before arriving at a solution pleasing to both my grandfathers. My parents decided to name me and their subsequent children, after the kings and queens of England.

    And so, I was named Charles, my sister, Elizabeth and my brother, Edward. It was a solution born of desperation but a brilliant one, considering the fact that both my grandfathers were the most steadfast of Babas. In case you don't know it, the Babas were the original WOGs, westernized oriental gentlemen. The Queen's Chinese, in fact.

    Unfortunately, my parents forgot the Chinese habit of giving children baby names or 'milk' names, by contracting their proper names and doubling the syllables.

    Had I been named either Eng Leong or Lai Joo, I would have been either Leong Leong or Joo Joo. Either milk name would have been acceptable since the former meant Great Magnanimity and the latter, Bountiful Treasure. Elizabeth and Edward were luckier, ready contractions for their names being readily available, and to this day, everybody in the family calls them Betty and Eddy. My name was Charles, however, and I became Chacha.

    I hated that name at first and I still wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that to this day, I have never been able to learn that particular dance. I wished that my aunts and uncles who were responsible for the dreadful contraction of my particular cognomen, had nicknamed me Tango instead.

    It is my father's favorite dance and mine, the throbbing rhythm and romantic melodies of its music being so much more attractive to me. It is also the only subject on which my father and I have ever seen eye to eye.

    Family legend also has it that when my mother was rushed to the Alor Setar General Hospital to deliver me into this world, my grandmother had rushed out to the main road, commandeered the first passing trishaw, incidentally bumping the wife of a local bigwig, headed straight to the Temple of the Lotus Cave and demanded that the temple medium invoke the Monkey God to answer her queries concerning the fortunes of her very first grandchild.

    Back then, in those innocent days of 1959, the medium at the Temple of the Lotus Cave was considered to be the best and most proficient at invoking the various gods of the Chinese pantheon and his forte was invoking the Monkey God, a frontline general in the Heavenly Host, bravest, wisest, most puissant, powerful and kindly, who was the resident deity of the temple.

    The Monkey God asked my grandmother for thirty drums of fragrant oil to light the temple continuously for thirty days and nights. Apparently, the old lady had asked the deity to make the firstborn of her own firstborn child, both male and exceptional and the deity had agreed, informing my grandmother that the stars having ordained it so, my fortunes were linked to the radiance of the temple's interior.

    My father has always felt that his mother asked the wrong deity's help because apart from all the other godly attributes, nobody has ever been able to deny that the Monkey God's prime claim to godhood was his indefatigable deviousness. I have always felt that granny's mistake was not specifying in which fields or areas I should prove exceptional. I know for a fact that I am exceptionally good at giving my father white hairs, for example.

    My earliest recollection is that of my father patiently trying to teach me to play football. My father and all his siblings are blessed with wonderful co-ordination and had learnt ballroom dancing from grandpa even before they could drive. My father and First Aunt actually had lessons from a British couple who were certified gold medallists and the two of them often joined their teachers in giving ballroom dancing exhibitions at various other towns in Kedah state.

    My grandfather's children were all sportsmen and sportswomen as well. Even Second Aunt, whose later interests centered solely around the beauty industry and its effects on her lily-white face and body, was a school runner with five running medals to her credit.

    My father had taken out the most prized sporting memorabilia of his own school days. His dark blue leather football boots and the football with which he had scored the winning goal against Alor Setar Secondary School, both much darkened by time but the leather kept still supple by monthly oiling and polishing, to teach me the rudiments of the game that had become a family tradition.

    Unfortunately, Destiny played a cruel trick on my father. His firstborn son turned out to have less kicking power than an aged and arthritic duck. To his anguished cries of "Harder! Harder!" I tried my best to maintain the family tradition. And failed miserably. Had I known how cruelly I was fanning my father's hopes with various excuses and he spent thirty minutes each way, carrying me on his Raleigh bicycle, to and from the Ibrahim School field, first to put on socks, then to put on sandals with closed toes, and then proper shorts and after that, a proper football T-shirt, and finally shoes that laced up properly...
 

     Auroch, Woodclaw, Red Lily and White Palm.

     I have been told that I am passably good looking if you liked the strong, silent and dark type of man. And I have also been told that I dance passably well. That I was seldom invited to dance and had not been invited to do so even once that night did not reflect on the tastes of the many ladies gathered for the Harvest Ball.

     For all that I was one of those rare individuals fully possessed of the Seven Talents at Adept level, I was sterile and would never be able to pass on my gifts to my progeny. I would never be the Lord Firebird either though my brother possessed only five Talents and my sister, four. 

     Even that had less to do with my inability to find a dancing partner than my mode of employment.

     My father, the current Lord Firebird, had solved the problem of what to do with me by making me his official executioner.

     Not many ladies care to dance with an executioner.

     My sister, Nimeii, drifted past on an unknown paladin’s arm. Strange, that. I thought I knew them all. I have to since I also serve as chief of House Security when I am not executing people for my father.

     Of course, he might have been one of the minor lordling’s recently returned foster sons or a travelling mage cheval, owing no allegiance to any specific House of the Empire.

     He would bear watching.

     Any stranger brave enough to dance so openly with the Princess Firebird definitely required careful watching.

     He wore a short open coat over his red peasant shirt and a pair of loose black silk trews. The thin, triple rope of twisted gold links and fine lemon colored embroidery that accented his cuffs and collar gave me no clues to his identity either. They were peasant work moonflowers and not emblematic of any known House.

     I scowled and my brother, taking a welcome break from the unremitting attempts of the four hundred or so unmarried ladies present to become the next Lady Firebird, clapped me on the shoulder in passing. He definitely did not lack for dancing partners that night and probably, never would as long as he lived.

     When I turned my eyes back to the dance floor again, my sister was gone. So was the mysterious stranger.

     I searched the floor with eyes and Talent but it did no good. There must have been at least a hundred or so other ladies dressed in red and gold with jeweled feathers floating from their elaborate tiaras and coronets. There was also close to a thousand people of Blood milling around. It was impossible to pick out the flaming rainbow of my sister’s aura.

     I had not had the chance to scan the stranger’s aura with either magic or Talent.

     I began to feel uneasy.

     Nimeii could look after herself, I knew. She had stood shoulder to shoulder with Jinsho, our brother, and me at Griffin’s Wall during the last war against the Butterfly Masters. Flamelet, her sword had run red and green with Butterfly ichor and her aura blazed cold white with the intensity of her burning gaze.

     Still, I could not escape a niggling feeling at the back of my neck. Prophecy was one of the Seven Talents but it was the only one which only the Ancestor had been able to exercise at will. For ordinary mortals like myself, it came only when it came, no telling when.

     I wondered if I was going to fall into a seeing trance.

     That was all my father needed. For his eldest son and executioner to flop about all over the Grand Hall’s floor at the height of the Harvest Ball, muttering and grunting strange things.

     I put down the glass of red Darapunji and found myself a comfortable seat in a partially curtained alcove. I had not liked it much anyway. I prefer white wine. Just like the Ancestor did.

     My eyes closed as my breathing deepened and the Seeing talent came to the front of my mind. My awareness expanded in rings like ripples in the fabric of reality.
My father’s aura burned russet and sunrise on the High Seat. Beside him, my mother’s opaline flames rose straight and hot. Jinsho, so like myself, only a little dimmer and lacking the cold sapphire and amethyst of Beguiling and Seeing, was a candle about which the lesser auras of the assembled ladies fluttered like so many moths. Save for me, they were brightest in all the Hall.

     My sister’s familiar quad-colored aura was not evident amongst them.

     My Seeing expanded another level and the servants life lights impinged on my consciousness like many colored fireflies. Still no Nimeii.

     Another level and the guards coldly pacing the ramparts of Firebird Heights became evident to my Eye. Uncle Hanomani was on duty and the three primary colors of his Talents were a burning trident against the flickering starlight of the North Tower. In the courtyard below the North Tower, my cousin, Ranjana paced, trailing ghostly wisps of blue and silver soulflame behind her

     One more level then. But downwards this time. To the cellars and dungeons. Save for the Dragons, no other Lord or Lady of the Empire was able to See through the solid rock.

     I Saw with ease.

     They were not there.

     One of them was blocking me.

     Nimeii perhaps. Her Beguiling talent was just as strong as mine.

     Or it might have been the stranger. No telling what his Talents, if any, were.