by Jade Alters
I lead the ASTF through the barren village of wilted grass and tired elders, the only ones left. They greet me with warm, wrinkled smiles. I return every single one. We’ve watched one another grow old, them and I. I’ve seen them go from proud warriors, hunters, and farmers, to the wise minds who council my father. They’ve seen me go from a hapless, starstruck thumb-sucker to someone almost ready to be Chief himself. I don’t know if I’m ready to be everything else I need to yet, but I have to act like it for them. They’ve already heard from Sasoen, on his return, all about the Blood of the Origas and the great honor our tribe has forgotten. They look like I should, so proud to be part of something bigger than themselves. As I always have, I try to learn from those who came before me, and hold myself up a bit higher.
Through the crowd of them, I lead our party, to a particularly ornate tent. It’s decorated with more animals than anyone else’s in the village, both hand-painted and illustrated in bead formations. Some of the colors and patterns jump out with fresh new hue, while some have faded over long years in the sun. The tent belongs to the man who’s had the most time to decorate, the eldest in the village. I pull back the entrance flap to let the group in, then follow suit.
“Stonebreak,” Sasoen’s lips tremble into a smile at the sight of me. He looks every bit as tired as I expected him to at the big Truce Camp meeting. It seems he can stave off the toll of his age for only so long.
“Elder Sasoen,” I bow to him in response. I try to fix my face while it’s directed at the floor, and bring it up to him with the confidence I need. “I’ve come seeking entrance to the Totem Tower. I suspect that is the site mentioned in the Dalshak records.”
“I suspect you are right,” Sasoen nods. He grabs a small rod, decorated with an eagle’s head, to help him walk towards us. Towards me. He walks so uncomfortably, without another word that I blurt,
“I… thought you might know the way.”
“Well of course I know the way. I’ve been here since before your grandfather took his first steps. I might be the only man left alive in this village who knows the way,” Sasoen says. Even hunched over, even as his bare feet shake against the dusty clay floor of his tent, the man holds such presence. It’s like he’s twice my size.
“Will… you share this knowledge with us?” I gulp. Sasoen pauses a few inches from my face. My lip and cheek twitch as he scrutinizes me, with no attempt to hide it.
“No.” A chorus of quiet gasps hits my back. I hold my breath to keep from letting one slip myself. “Not until you wipe that look off your face and be honest with yourself.”
“I- I’m sorry?” I stammer.
“No you’re not!” Sasoen surprises me yet again with a thrust of his palm to my collar. The strength of it, for a man his age! I’m stopped only by Hoster and Helena, who put their hands on my back. “You’re scared. And you should be. I am. Your father is. This trial you’re undertaking… this is no duty of the Chief. This is something deeper. A heavier burden you will not carry with that mask you wear all the time.”
“I…” I choke. I can’t believe I almost just talked back to an elder - the eldest. But it’s not fair! This isn’t right - none of it! “I’ve been taught to hold it together… myself… the village… everything…” I hear my voice say, despite all my attempts to wrestle the words back down my throat. Hot streaks of water bead up over my cheeks. They plunk in the thirsty clay around my feet.
“I know that, son. I’ve seen three Chiefs in my long, lucky lifetime,” Sasoen says. His hand comes at me again, this time to grasp my shoulder. “And it seems something everyone failed to teach you, or maybe you failed to learn, was that you’re allowed to feel. Not in front of the entire village at a gathering, no. But in the privacy of small counsel? When you’re with people you trust? The walls we put around ourselves are too tight a space in which to live all the time, Stonebreak. Let them down, while you can.”
“I… thank you,” I offer for his wisdom. Really, I keep it short more so I won’t break down even further. My shoulders heave with quiet little gasps as I try to calm myself, to rein in the feeling of helplessness. But, when I feel a hand on my back, then another, and another… the tears keep flowing. The entire ASTF touches some part of me, besides maybe Darius. I don’t turn to look, but I don’t feel the chill of his Vampire skin. They hold me up, when I feel I could fall any second.
“Now you may go,” Sasoen smiles. He shrinks back a few steps from me, turns around, and draws back a hidden flap in the back of his tent. This unveils a crevice in the mountain wall that rises behind his home.
“The entrance… is here? In your tent?” I marvel.
“Why do you think no one has been able to get to the Totem Tower in so long?” Sasoen smirks. “We used to visit it when I was a child. We revered it without knowing why, but I always sensed something dangerous about the place. When I was the last person left to remember how to get there, I decided to guard the secret. Until such time that we understood. It’s for you to find what lies inside now, Stonebreak.”
“Thank you, Sasoen,” I offer, but the elder holds up his hand.
“Thank me if the place doesn’t kill or curse you,” he warns. I nod and wipe the last of my tears away.
Rock,
Yosemite, Totem Tower
The crevice takes us up a narrow, jagged stone staircase to the cliffs over the village. Cliffs on a particular side of it that haven’t seen foot traffic in some time. The path to the base of the Tower is hardly visible through the layer of moss that’s grown over everything and yellowed in the cold of winter. I walk its twisting way, companions close at my back. Then the shadow rises, tall enough to blot out the afternoon sun. It makes the details of it hard to determine, but none of us can help but squint up at it, hands over our foreheads. Even Darius, who’s hardly looked interested in a thing since we left the Truce Camp, gazes upwards.
I can’t tell if the Totem Tower is wood, stone, or some combination of the two. Its texture confuses the eye, somehow grainy and jagged at once. The only things clear about it, aside from its formidable height, are the detailed carvings of beasts the whole way up, which seem to be mostly untouched by time and the elements. From where we stand near the base of the structure, I can make out a bird of prey, a rhinoceros, a lion, and some kind of ape. There’s more, as the designs climb higher, but I can’t decipher them. It makes me wonder how the Ahwahneechee Ancients erected the thing, without higher peaks around it to hang from.
At the stony double front doors, a small, dry fountain bed protrudes in wait for the key to unseal this most hallowed and haunted of grounds. A key no one knew, until the Truce Camp meeting. Luckily, I bring it with me everywhere I go. As we discussed before departure, Fey Deller joins me before the rock gateway.
“Are you ready?” she asks me as a formality. Fey Deller takes up my hand in both of hers. They’re perfectly lukewarm and smoother than I ever imagined, I notice, before she holds my fingers over the empty fountain. I nod. Her forest green fingernail sharpens to the point of a large thorn, which she slashes across my palm. I cringe silently through the sting as the Blood of the Origas trickles down into the thirsty fountain. Ten or twelve drops paint the bottom of it a deep red before a tremor shakes the ground. The drain in the bottom of the stony bowl sucks down every last drop.
“Holy shit,” Hoster coughs as the fountain shoots my blood through a hundred glassy tubes I hadn’t noticed in the doors. The entrance comes alive with designs of beasts similar to the ones carved in the tower. First, with the deep color of my blood. Then it shines, just before the doors scrape apart from one another. Fey Deller grows a thornless, gentle vine to wrap my wounded hand and staunch the bleeding before letting me go.
“Let’s inherit some secrets,” I signal to the group, and lead the way inside. The interior of the Totem Tower is lit in a way very similar to the Forbidden Shelves. The walls themselves seem to glow. But, aside from this, the interior is remarkably unremarkable. Plain, smooth rock marks the
edge of a room that’s neither incredibly wide, nor tall. There is only a staircase towards the back, riding the curve of the wall upwards, though it leads only to a solid ceiling. There is also a single shelf, high up on the wall. There sits an object that I can’t see from so far below.
“Stonebreak Cloud,” a voice thunders through every stone of the Tower. Whoa, when was the last time I heard my full name like that, from a human tongue, let alone that of a disembodied voice? “You enter this most sacred of Ahwahneechee grounds to seek the most sacred of Ahwahneechee trials. The Mastery of Form. Have you not yet achieved this, you will achieve nothing further. The doors to knowledge will be closed to you.” When the voice is done, I stand in awe right alongside the rest of the ASTF, counting the aftershocks of the voice beneath my feet.
“Don’t fuck this up,” Darius murmurs in the quiet. The next second, I hear the back of Emery’s hand slap his chest. If I’m being honest, like Elder Sasoen said… it’s actually a little funny. I let myself laugh to offset the nerves.
“What do I do?” I call out to the unknown, the spirit of the Tower itself.
“Retrieve the totem in each chamber to earn passage to the next. What you seek awaits you at the top,” the Tower tells me. I nod to the invisible advisor, and lift my eyes to the shelf.
“An easy one to start,” I mutter to the others over my shoulder. Hawk was one of the first forms my father taught me. My feet leave the ground first in a little hop, then in flight as the rest of me morphs into a winged, feathered body. I shoot off around the perimeter of the room to the high shelf, unreachable by anyone on foot. There waits for me a tiny wooden carving of the very beast I’ve become. I pluck it up in one talon.
I touch back down in my human form on the rock floor right where I left my companions, hawk totem in hand. A huge block of stone dislodges from the ceiling right above the staircase, sliding over to create an opening. A way to the next floor.
“Nice work,” Emery smirks at me.
“Thanks,” I fight down the flutters in my chest as I embark up the stairs. “But save the compliments for when I do something worth them.”
“Whoa, watch out for Chief Stonebreak, everyone,” Emery raises her hands in mock surrender. I let everyone share a chuckle at my expense, and even join them for a second. Before hesitation has a chance to take root in the cracks of my heart, though, we have to get to the next floor.
We climb up to a floor of a similar layout. It’s mostly empty, save for the staircase that leads to the ceiling. In this chamber, however, there’s no high shelf on the wall. In its stead is an airtight dome of rock, like an igloo made from stone. No light escapes, so I can’t see what totem might wait within, but my form of choice is a no-brainer. My muscles swell while my skin leathers up and grays. My nose elongates and hooks upwards, into a brilliant white spike. I charge two gigantic rhinoceros steps forward and gore the dome of stone with my horn. A few tosses of my head is enough to rend my sole obstacle to pieces. I revert to my human form amidst the settling dust.When everything clears, the others find me waiting amongst the rubble before an empty podium, a rhino totem in my hand.
“An easy one to follow, too?” Hoster raises an eyebrow in suspicion.
“How easy do you think manipulating all of my bodily systems into a different shape is?” I bounce back at him. I drop the second totem in my satchel while Hoster offers,
“Fair enough.”
“It’s the same as the designs on the outside of the Tower,” Emery realizes aloud.
“Hawk… rhino… you’re right,” I recount the shapes from the outside of the rising structure.
“Then next is… the lion?” Helena remembers.
“Then the ape,” Fey Deller adds. “But past that… it was too high to see.” Faces turn in worried glances, but we agree in silence to worry about that when we reach it. There are, after all, still two floors between us and there that we do have an idea about.
On the next two floors, I find myself before more straightforward trials. Though they involve more advanced transformations in terms of the Ahwahneechee teachings, I’m more surprised than anything when each totem drops into the growing collection in my satchel.
The lion chamber presents its totem on the other side of a huge gap in the floor. I note the oddity that there is no corresponding gap in the ceiling, in the previous floor. A viscous current of air from two gigantic windows prevents me from simply flying over it, if I don’t want to be tossed around like a hawk rag doll. So I hunch over, massive paws growing beneath me across the stone. My claws dig in while my mane unfurls around my head. My friends part ways to clear a runway for me to build up momentum. I hurl myself into an all-out sprint for the edge. Every fiber of my four hundred muscular pounds constricts to launch me over the edge. My paws tuck up to float across the wide gap. But only the front ones crash down on the platform on the other side of the gap.
My chest hits next. My back legs kick wild like a drowning swimmer while my paws scrape and scratch, but fatigue has a solid hold on me. I bare my visceral fangs and snarl to embed my claws in the rock as best I can. A cacophony of,
“Rock!”
“No!” and,
“Come on!” explodes behind me. There’s no way to tell who’s saying what, but it all converges as one message in my brain, in my very veins. Pull yourself up.
I scrape my chest fur across the stone to jerk up as high as I can, while that very fur falls away. My claws turn to toenails, my paws to fingers. My muscles remain just as tight to pull my human form up onto the platform. I let out a few heavy breaths on my way to the little podium with the lion totem. It tinks down into my bag alongside the others. The gap in the floor is sealed by the rise of stone from within it. The rest of the group crosses with a gloss of concern over their eyes.
“Now the ape, right?” I say through heavy breaths. I have a feeling my weak smile fails to convey the don’t worry that I mean it to. I take my time up this set of stairs, to the trial of the ape.
Looking up at this chamber, ape probably would have been my form of choice anyway. The whole room is one gigantic knot of pillars. Thin ones. Thick ones. They come from the floor and walls in equal measure to form a near impenetrable web of stone with minimal gaps for maneuvering. Wings wouldn’t cut it. I doubt my human limbs would be able to cling and shimmy in the way I need to either - not for as long as it would take to get to the tiny idol I see in the high corner of the chamber.
“You think the Tower would know if we just had Captain Planet grow a vine to get it?” Darius asks. Somehow, the joke lacks the usual color of his humorous intent. It really is just the way he talks. I look back at my pale-faced companion to see if he’s serious, only to find him staring blankly at the idol.
“With the way the Forbidden Shelves acted when we tried to cheat it’s rules… I’d say it’s not worth the risk,” I decide to say for posterity’s sake. My own eyes climb, leap, and twist along the path I’ll have to take. “Besides… I can do this.”
Before anyone else can offer up their own doubt, I jump atop the first horizontal platform. My body shrinks, tightens, and thickens a coat of fur around the outside of my body. It’s not human feet, but simian that come down on the stone. My dexterous toes wrap around the curve to better control the jump. My frame shoots between higher and higher pillars like a shadow. I hold my exasperated breath between each departure.
In the skin of a chimpanzee, I rise all the way to the shelf and the ape totem. But to get it, I have to leap sideways from a thin vertical pillar that’s really more like a rocky pole. With my hands and feet clenched so tight around it just to stay up, I can’t figure out the jump. I let go with one hand several times, only to find myself slipping before I can get a good look. The group fans out below to watch. Hands fling over mouths to keep themselves from yelping every time I almost fall. When my breaths heave my chest almost more than I can stand, I climb a few feet higher and let go. I flip backwards and flop flat on the platform. The ape totem tips
over and rolls beside my head. It takes more effort than I care to admit just to reach out and grasp it.
At my touch of the little wooden ape, the whole chamber transforms. The platform lowers under my chest, like an elevator, all the way back down the floor of the room. The sound of a thousand scraping stones marks the pillars’ retreat, into the ceiling, floors, or walls. I manage to get up on a knee before the platform reaches my friends at the bottom, back in my, albeit deflated, usual human form. Emery offers me a hand, but I shake my head.
“There’s still… so much more to go,” I try to help her understand. “I’ll never finish it if I can’t even sta- hey!” I cough as Helena blindsides me with an arm under each of mine. She comes up from a squatting position, dragging me with her before I can protest. She leans close to my ear, flattening her breasts against my back to murmur,
“Save it. Pay it back to me when my trial beats my ass.” I bite my tongue while she moves to the side of me, slinging my arm over her shoulder.
“On to the unknown, then,” says Hoster as Helena helps me up the stairs in the front of the group. It’s not until we climb to the next floor that I let myself fully lean on her. I have little other choice, since the next few stories aren’t divided by chamber space like the previous ones. No, now the ASTF and I face a seemingly eternal spiral upwards, like the inverse of the Forbidden Shelves. Helena helps me limp up, with the others close behind.
“Could this be another trial?” Emery lets out behind me after about ten minutes of climbing with no end in sight. Not for us, anyway.
“There’s a top. You just can’t see it, yet,” says Darius from the back. I almost ask how he knows before I recall his naturally superior night vision.
The others are tired, too, when we finally arrive. Thanks to Helena, I’m only half dead in my shoes. We stand in the highest room of the Totem Tower, wherein lies but a single object. A book thicker than my chest rests on a stone altar. A single blade of sunlight cuts down into the middle of it through a slit-shaped window in the wall.
