Story: Seeking

This fill was inspired by a prompt from ng_moonmoth and fills the "guide" square in my 1-1-17 card for the Dark Fantasy Bingo challenge. We made it to 266 words - hope you enjoy it prompter!

This is for a Dark Fantasy challenge, and it hints at darker days to come.

Seeking

It itched and burned inside my soul, a raw spot that never could be soothed. The rough unfinished home where my Guide was meant to live, an empty burrow dug into my being but never filled.

Between two and twenty went the common wisdom, although there were outliers of course. Children born with a Guide appearing nearly the moment they vacated their mother’s womb, or a wise woman of fifty who suddenly drew forth a Shamanic Second Guide. But I’m sitting here in the dank cellar below my village temple at twenty two years old and there’s no peace for me, no Guide to show my way.

So I’ve gathered up the herbs, the oils, the stones, and I’m choosing what the Temple Mother calls “pure mad idiocy” over waiting another day for a Guide that’s late in arriving. I’ve made my decision to summon myself a Guide in secret, using the spell I’ve researched exhaustively every moment since I turned twenty and was turned away from the Sisterhood bereft. My place was meant to be among the elite of the Temple, not tossed out in the street as Guideless and undeserving.

So I’ll just find myself a Guide. Why keep waiting, bleeding around that hole inside my heart for what apparently never wanted me from the start. There has to be a Guide out there as frustrated as I am waiting for the perfect soul to come along. I can feel that there is, a powerful Guide waiting just past the veil, waiting for me, to heal me inside where I itch and I burn.

~~Notes~~

What I know about this world so far is nearly nothing. We don't even have a character name yet, but their motivation is clear & likely to have unpleasant consequences.