They had a name for me, where I came from. They called me Bogoath (Bog-gway-th), or soft wind; but here they just call me the Black Monarch. A monarch is a butterfly, and the new companies were claiming they called me this because I was such a “graceful swordswoman” and I dressed in all black. Of course, they made a serious mistake because they didn’t realize the name was already taken by a bird. In my opinion, the actual definition of a Black Monarch is much more descriptive of me. I do not flutter about pointlessly like a butterfly, nor am I dressed in black to hide who I am. No, I am purposeful, swift, sharp, and decisive; dressed in black not to hide who I am, but to accent the dance. What dance? The dance between justice and lawlessness, of course; although I do not believe myself to be justice itself, only the sword of justice.
Perhaps I should take a step back and tell you how I came to be. Some come from the stars, while others come from sabotaged science lessons, but I came from somewhere else. I was born Kirra Seyman to Robert and Amanda Seyman on December 13, 1992. I was a small child, but not a weak one. From the moment I stepped into life, I was different from everyone else. It wasn’t very obvious at first, but sometimes my mom would come into my room to check on me in the night, and I would be gone. She never told me because I would always be there in the morning. Any night she tried to watch me go, I would stay, so eventually they only way she knew to discover where I was going was to spy on me. So she set up cameras around the house. Turns out she only needed the one camera, because what she saw in my room was something, and then nothing. I was just gone.
I had no idea where I was going, because I thought I was asleep the entire time. In my dreams, I would meet my daddy. My birth father, that is. I never knew him, and he left my mother before I was born, so I didn’t really know what he looked like. Still, he was always the same in my dreams. He was tall and had dark hair like mine, and he would take my hand in his and walk with me through the woods and over the hills, and we would look at the stars and laugh with eachother as we named them. And then I’d wake up and the stars would be different, so I couldn’t even share my world with him in my dreams.
It was when I was twelve years old that I discovered my gift. I was walking through the fields with my parents at night, and we stopped to look up at the stars. I closed my eyes and imagined they looked like the ones in my dreams, and when I opened my eyes they were the same. My mother and Father were nowhere nearby, but my birth father was. I feared that, in the “real” world, I had fainted or something. As it was, I knew there was no escaping and I decided to make the most of my time in my dreams. So I walked with him, and we talked on and on about everything until morning came and my dream did not end. Instead it went on and on.
Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t truly a dream. Then my father explained- I was in an alternate dimension. In his world, certain people were born with the ability to move from place to place literally in the blink of an eye. As it was passed down from parent to child, I had inherited this gift. Some could control the gift more than others, and those in my family were those with the greatest control, which had allowed my father to jump to her mother’s world. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how he had done it, and one day he woke up and he was back. He had almost thought it a dream until I had started to fade into his world through her dreams. Now she was in his world for real, and neither of them knew how to get back.
The years past, and the first three were spent searching for a way home. I spent endless nights practicing and training with my father until I believed I could return. I almost did return, but something threw me back. I found myself tossed roughly against the wall of my father’s hut, and knew in that moment that I would not get home any time soon.
I contented myself to live in the world I found myself in, and quickly adjusted myself to its ways. The way of the sword was a path not only respected but required by all at some level. I mastered it. Perhaps it was my gift that helped me to learn, as I quickly learned how to make myself faster and more unpredictable than any other master of the sword. That is what earned me the title of Soft Wind. It was during this time that the happiest and saddest moments of my life occurred. On my Eighteenth birthday I was married to the most wonderful man in the world and soon gave birth to twins. These were the happiest moments of my life. On my Twenty-first birthday I lost everything.
There were two groups of people in that world- the Ceartes and the Ainbertach. The Ceartes were those who used the gifts they had been given for good, while the Ainbertach used them to accomplish their own will. In this case, their own will was to obliterate their greatest threat- my father. But they were not satisfied to simply kill him. No, they needed to eliminate anyone he had ever known. The worst day of my life was the day I buried my father, my husband, and my children. Some in the village nearby had also survived, but none that I knew. I was stony-faced as I walked out into the fields and felt as if I had died. Perhaps, in some ways, I had died. I laid myself down in the long grass and stared up at the stars, remembering how I had loved to look at them with my family. A single tear fell from my eye, but I was screaming in pain inside. I made no noise, but squeezed my eyes shut to block out the sorrow of life. I didn’t know why, but I suddenly thought of the stars in your world. They shone crisp, clean, and beautiful in the dark blue of a winter sky. Their brilliance pierced the darkness of my eyelids and, opening my eyes to the world, I saw them stay. I was back.
Not knowing where else to go, and not wanting to go back to the world that had known so much death, I went home. I don’t know how I found my way there, because it had been so many years that I couldn’t even remember my address. Somehow, by some miracle, my parents still lived there, but they did not recognize me. It didn’t take long for them to confirm that I was their child, but it would take them an eternity to make me tell them what had happened. They do not know till this day what exactly occurred. All they knew was that I left, and then I returned. That was all they needed to know.
It took me more than two years to re-adjust to life in your world, but I never again would think of it as my own. I had brought my sword with me when I came back, and hid it in my room for most of the time. Sometimes I would take it out and stroke the handle, and then I would cry for hours because it reminded me of my life before. It reminded me of the feeling of holding my child’s limp body in my arms as I placed into the cold hard ground. Those were the only moments I would show any emotion, and the rest of the time I would keep any signs of any emotion absent from my features. My parents learned to deal with it, although they were never truly comfortable with it. They would pressure me to get a job and go out into the world, but I didn’t know what to do. My only job before had been that of a mother and wife.
One day, there was a bright flash in the sky and the stars disappeared. On that night, I had decided to take a walk through the streets with my sword by my side. It was on this walk that I heard a cry from an alleyway. The cry reminded me much of my daughter’s cry when she was scared, and my motherly instincts crept in past my defenses. I ran, I ran so hard to protect and defend this child. I rounded the corner and saw no child, but rather a group of men beating a helpless man senseless. There were three tall men dressed in suits, carrying canes, and wearing bowler hats who were attacking the fourth.
Enraged by the treatment of the man, I drew my sword before I even knew what I was doing and leapt upon them. Even in uncontrolled anger I had great self-control over my sword hand and I managed to scare the men off without more than a nick or two. It was a small victory, but as I caught a bowler hat that fell through the air, I suddenly had a thought. What if I could help others again?
I hadn’t been able to help my family, and that killed me every day, but what if I could use my gifts to help people in your world? I tucked that thought safely into the bowler hat and popped it on my head, wondering what I could do. By the time I made my way home, I had also made up my mind. I would help people again, but not as myself. I would be myself, but hide my face. That was all I really needed, to serve God by helping others. So I put on a black mask and strapped my sword by my side. Placing all my thoughts inside the bowler hat, I creatively flipped it into the air and then patted it securely onto my head.
The world quickly grew to like me. To them I was just another superhero to name and idolize, but I tried to be different. I didn’t want to be an idol; I wanted to be an arrow to Christ. They gave me a name, the Black Monarch, and cheered me on at every battle. What they didn’t know was that, each day, before I stepped out of my room, I would close my eyes and imagine the stars. They would not be your stars, they would be ours. I would close my eyes, smile, and be gone.