Seablood

by Cameron Bolling

  For many long moments, the king sat atop his chair, scratching his chin. A weary look filled his eyes, but an intrigued one. She had made her case and made it well.

  “This is a direct offense against Aukai and her trials,” said Helis. “‘Retrials have never been permitted, and it is by luck alone that you completed the first at all. Who knows what trickery you employed on the other three in order to bring back the fruits of each.”

  “Silence, Helis,” said the king. “Aukai designed the trials to be a set of tests achievable by only the strongest and most cunning among us. None can cheat them by their very design. Did Oleja cheat when she faced you in combat?”

  “Well… she could not have cheated, but she—”

  “Then she succeeded in the first.”

  “She came late, and exhaustion filled my bones from the day of battle.”

  “Others challenged you later in the day outside of the ceremony, did they not? And you beat them all. I seem to remember it quite clearly.”

  Helis’s face flushed.

  “And Oleja returned with all of the correct materials. How she might have obtained them without venturing to their respective locations and collecting them as intended sounds like a far trickier feat than simply succeeding at each.”

  Helis said nothing.

  “Oleja has made a case for herself and her retrial, and I have listened intently to her concerns. I deem it fitting grounds for a retrial.” He turned to Oleja. “But you should not take such a gift lightly. No other in our history has received such a boon. I will need your word that you will honor this great privilege with the highest level of respect for our people, our hero, and the good of our city.”

  “I give you my word.”

  The king nodded stiffly. “Then please ready yourself for your trial. It will commence tonight. Should you fail, there will be no further retrials.”

  “Of course,” said Oleja. Then hastily she added: “Your majesty.”

  The king waved to the door, ushering her off to get changed.

  “One last thing…” started Oleja. The king looked down at her beneath a strained and tired brow. “Can you watch my dog again?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  When the cart pulled up beside the copse of trees and the trail that led down to the stone, Oleja jumped to the ground before it even rolled to a stop. The attendant hurried after her—the same woman as before.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  Oleja turned and inclined her head. “Yes?”

  “I have to brief you on the premise and rules of the trial.”

  With a wave of her hand, Oleja dismissed the attendant’s words and turned back for the path. “I recall them. I have no questions.” And then she hurried off through the trees.

  The attendant followed her to the top of the hill. Oleja did not look back; she continued down the slope to the ledge of gravel. The stone sat just ahead, seated atop the cliff where it overlooked the city in the valley below. When Oleja arrived at its side, the attendant turned and vanished back through the trees. Oleja stood there alone, away from the prying eyes of the king’s minions.

  The trials ended now. The title of champion belonged to her.

  Darkness covered the slopes of the mountains in a thick blanket. No moon or stars lit the sky above, concealed by a dense layer of clouds that had rolled in through the evening. Wind blew with brisk force through the valley. Somewhere on the horizon, a rumble of thunder broke through the night.

  Oleja placed a hand on the stone, just above the spiraling mark of Ahwan. She took a deep breath.

  The people of the city believed so greatly in the legend that Aukai’s successor would be chosen by the trials. They placed their faith in the process. They waited for a new hero to emerge—to unify the city and bring about a new age of prosperity.

  And she was about to undermine the whole process.

  She had attempted the trial and failed. Aukai’s trials did not select her—no one could deny it. But now she planned to take the title by force. By cheating. By whatever means necessary. She misled the king, and now she would mislead the entire city. Could she truly justify that?

  To save her people, she had no other choice. If she wanted to be recognized as a hero, get the people of Ahwan to follow her, and destroy Itsoh, she had no choice. She had to do this. She just needed to make sure no one ever found out that she cheated.

  Weeks of useless, fruitless running-about lay behind her if the whole thing didn’t conclude with her success. She could never deal with such a monumental failure—to herself and to her people—if she didn’t succeed one way or another. She had to. She simply had to.

  A single cold drop of rain struck her arm. Oleja turned her gaze skyward as a second drop hit her cheek. Perhaps the sky wept for her, for how far she strayed in this quest for heroism. A parent’s tears shed for a wayward daughter. Guilt roiled in her chest. She would make sure all she had to do was worth it in the end.

  With one final, steadying breath, Oleja knelt on the ground before Aukai’s stone. Quick fingers unlaced her prosthetic. Throwing all of her force into it, she drove the foot end of the limb beneath the rock. It scraped between the gravel and grey stone dotted with the widely scattered stains of the raindrops appearing one by one like stars peeking out from the dusk sky.

  She cast a quick glance back over her shoulder. The attendant stood nowhere in sight. She just needed to act quickly.

  Taking up a stone a bit bigger than the size of her fist, she positioned it beneath the prosthetic for leverage. After gathering a few more sizable stones in a pile nearby, she hefted herself up to sit on the lever, ready to drive all of her weight down onto it. There, she paused.

  She had no other choice. It was this or never be the hero, never save her people. She had no other choice.

  Dropping down onto the lever, she threw her weight against it. The wood creaked and cracked beneath the force; Oleja just prayed it held together. It only needed to last a few more minutes.

  The stone tipped up, exposing the ground beneath it—ground that likely hadn’t tasted fresh air or felt the brush of wind in many long years.

  Raindrops pelted down harder, splashing across her face and dampening her hair. The water dripped across her hands and the wood of the prosthetic and the hard surface of the stone. The cold wind bit at her exposed skin and burrowed through the paper-thin fabric of her white robe as it rushed by. The hairs on her arms stood on end, tiny drops of rainwater clinging to them.

  She grabbed a smaller rock from her pile and tossed it beneath the stone. When she let up on the lever, the stone stayed propped at an angle, held up by the rock beneath it.

  Taking up the lever again, she drove it farther beneath the stone to where the surface now met with the ground. She shifted the fulcrum of her lever as well, and after another cautious glance back up to the trees and the top of the path, she pushed down on her prosthetic again.

  Closer to the edge the stone moved, tilting up higher into the air. It shifted impossibly slow across the ground, and took a great deal of force to push each time with such a short lever, but she made do. She had to.

  With a quick glance around the stone, she checked the path she prepared to send the thing tumbling down. She held little control over large falling rocks, of course—a lesson she learned the hard way after nearly obliterating her cabin.

  But here, the slope lay more barren. Few trees stood as obstacles in the stone’s path, threatening to send it careening off track. A steep and loose slope of gravel stretched down after the short drop. To send the stone right, however, meant pitching it into trees and more gravel, whereas the left of the slope took the form of many harsh stone outcroppings and ledges until it reached the city below, marked by dozens of tiny twinkling spots of candlelight in the windows. The homes did not sit as far off as she initially thought.

  She aimed left—more hard objects filled that path, better to demolish the stone on its way down.

  Shifting her lever for
a third push, she moved to the right of the stone to angle it towards the path she wished for it to take. She only had one shot to blast the stone apart and free the vault within.

  The rain dripped from her eyebrows and clung to her eyelashes, obscuring her vision behind a curtain of water. A flash of light filled the sky and then another crash of thunder shook the mountains around her as if a thousand stones cascaded down from the peaks in a roar of rumbling stone on stone.

  Again she pressed down on the lever, and again the stone lifted an inch higher into the air, an inch closer to tipping over the edge and hurtling down the slope. She kept at it—shifting the lever, pushing down, propping the stone on a smaller rock, checking over her shoulder, then repeating. With every glance backwards, she feared to see the attendant standing there, watching, seeing how she worked. Such an encounter promised a swift and abrupt end to her whole plan. And she knew she didn’t have long.

  She wiped the rainwater from her face with the back of her hand and kept going. Her robe clung tight to her skin now, and the chill from the wind pierced her like daggers. She shivered in the cold.

  The stone leaned high, perched just on the edge of the drop. Oleja jammed the prosthetic under the side and propped it on the fulcrum. One last shove, that was all she needed. One shove lay between her and heroism at last.

  You create your path. You decide where it leads.

  Sreovel’s words rang out through the roar of the rain and the rumble of thunder. She cut her path with force now. Nothing could bar her from becoming the hero she was meant to be. She was so close.

  But Sreovel’s voice sounded in her mind again.

  Heroes become heroes because they prove themselves worthy. You must create a hero to be regarded as one.

  Readying her weight against the lever, she cast one final glance back up the hill to the trees. No one watched her. She was home free, her plot unknown to the king and his lackeys. It lived on only as the guilt that filled her muscles and tried to pull her back away from the stone.

  She had no choice.

  All at once, she threw her weight down on the lever. A crack split the night air—this time not the thunder, but the prosthetic beneath her, her makeshift lever. It bent to one side, splinters of wood shooting out like teeth from the body of the broken wood. Oleja’s heart seized.

  But the stone teetered there on the edge of the cliff, shifting as if through thick sap. Time around her seemed to slow. For a moment, Oleja thought it would fall back to the ground, undoing all of her work, dooming her for good. It looked poised to crush everything she had done to get through all four trials, all of her time in Ahwan, and her entire journey there in the first place below it in one single ending blow. But then it leaned out over the edge and pitched into the darkness, falling alongside the raindrops.

  For that moment only, Oleja wished it truly had fallen back to the ground. Her heart dropped into her stomach. What had she done?

  The thundering crash of the stone striking the slope below the ledge snapped her back to her senses. She did what she had to do, and she could never undo it. She could only move on from that point there, sitting atop the cliff, moments away from being recognized as the new hero of Ahwan. At last, she was to become the hero. Her people would be saved, and she would be the one to do it.

  She threw her broken prosthetic back on and laced it up with racing, water-slick, wind-frozen fingers. If asked, it had broken under the force of the strength she exerted as she pushed the stone over the edge with her bare hands.

  Crawling to the cliff’s edge, she looked down into the valley. The night’s shadows and the pounding raindrops whipping about in the wind obscured her view, but the shape of the stone careening down the slope remained unmistakable despite it all. It bounced over cracks and bounded in great leaps across the ground, sending out deafening crashes each time it struck the stone surface of the mountain slope. As it rolled, gaining speed with each moment, it struck an outcropping of sharp grey stone that jutted up from the ground near the homes below. With a blast like two mountains colliding, the stone split apart. One large chunk spun away and slammed to a halt against another ridge. Another bounced again, flying in uneven, wobbling circles through the air, and then struck a patch of grass. It cut a muddy trough through the dirt before it thudded to a stop at last. A million smaller bits flew in all directions away from the impact, raining down with a hundred clattering calls that joined with the wind and rain.

  The sound—like a thunderclap of her own making—echoed off the peaks and cliffs all around, and then died as the roar of the storm subdued it quickly. And then, for just a moment, the night air quieted.

  Even the storm seemed to exhale.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Clambering down the slope with only her right leg to bear her weight made for a tricky task, but she had done it before on steeper slopes and in more dire circumstances.

  She slid carefully down the gravel hill, the incline made slick by the rain. Caution fueled her movements, keeping her from losing control of the descent and plunging into an avalanche-like fall the same way she had while obtaining the snow from the mountain peak. That disaster nearly spelled her demise. She wouldn’t let herself meet such an unfortunate fate now, just after finishing the fifth trial.

  She had finished the fifth trial. She did it. As soon as she held the spear shaft and shield, the title of Ahwan’s champion belonged to her. She filled the shoes left behind by Aila Aukai, and all in the city would respect her as their honored figurehead.

  Finally. Finally.

  At the base of the gravel slope, sliding no longer served as an option, so she pulled herself up to stand. The prosthetic bent under her weight, held together by the cracking splinters of wood and a few metal reinforcements that still clung to the thing as if slipping off a precipice to their doom. Oleja bent the wood carefully back into place. As long as it did not split fully in two, it could bear some weight while the two halves remained properly aligned. Some, but not a lot. It didn’t have to serve her much longer.

  Nearby, she found a downed tree branch on the ground, sticky with sap that ensnared coppery pine needles and bits of dirt and bound the debris to its sides. Snapping off a few extraneous branches, she took it in her left hand and used it as a walking stick, trying to take as much weight off the prosthetic as possible. As she started walking, it held together, so she picked up her pace.

  She went first to the outcropping that smashed the stone into pieces. Rubble lay in various sized chunks all around, but only stone, none of the metal of the vault or anything from within.

  One of the two larger chunks lay a short distance away where a low cliff met the ground. Its impact with the stone wall cracked it into another couple pieces, each one the same smooth grey stone. None of them bore any signs of the vault aside from a strange indent in their surfaces. A shape cut through them—rectangular and perfectly smooth, more so than the exterior of the stone, even. Perfect flat sides and corners marked the pieces—clear signs of something that once lay within, somehow inserted into a precisely shaped and sized hollow in the stone. Still, the vault lay nowhere in sight.

  Only one significant piece of the wreckage remained, and she went to it now with increased haste. The other large chunk of the stone lay at the base of the slope in a grassy stretch of land just before the homes on the outskirts of this section of the city. A few candles still burned within some of the windows, but many folks had retired to bed it seemed—tucked safely in their homes away from the pouring rain and whipping winds and arcing strikes of lightning that struck the mountaintops, illuminating the entire world for the briefest moments.

  Oleja reached the bottom of the slope and hurried over to the stone, lying at the head of a muddy scar cut through the earth. The trench already filled with water from the rain.

  More mud smeared the surface of the stone, but it dripped away under the torrent of rain. The half of the stone lay cocked sideways on the ground, and from it protruded a dark shape, almos
t perfectly rectangular.

  Rain-slick sides of dark metal made up the shape. Though rubble still covered some of it, it looked to be a bit shorter than Oleja’s height in length, no more than five feet long. The shorter end ran about two feet long, and the whole thing could not have been more than a foot in thickness. The corner closest to her strayed from the perfection of the shape, having a crumpled, dented point that looked to be marred by some hard strike against the ground or a boulder. A few other smaller dents marked the sides, but otherwise it looked to be intact. Half-shrouded by the stone and mud and streaming rainwater, the seablood symbol adorned the top of the thing, etched there just the same as the exterior of the stone which now lay scattered in a hundred pieces across the mountainside.

  Relief and power surged through her limbs. The fires within her pushed back against the cold wind and rain to warm her body. She did it. The stone was broken. She had the vault.

  She ran a hand over the metal side. Two pieces comprised the thing—a main body and then a lid, which sat atop the former with a small lip. Scanning the sides, she spotted a hinge, its edge just barely poking out from under the stone.

  After leaning her walking stick against the side of the stone, she seized the lid in both hands, wrapping her fingers underneath the lip of the lid. And then, grinning to herself in the dark, she tugged against the vault.

  But the lid didn’t budge.

  Again, she pried at the thing, but it only bent ever so slightly under her force. Her eyes swept across the vault. Too much rubble still held it down. That had to be it.

  She went to the other end of the vault—the section still buried—and brushed at the rock there. Though cracked and rough and spattered with mud and water, the stone did not shift away. Looking closer, Oleja saw that the stone clutching the top remained in one great piece, not broken up into rubble as she thought.