“It’s… him.” Arik glanced again to confirm. “It’s Konwa.”
“Who?”
“Him, the slaver.”
“You mean the fellow I chased out of the cave?”
Arik clenched his fists at his side. “He knows where they are. He knows where Jinmo is. Which way is he going?” he asked, knowing Meosa would be able to look without drawing attention to himself.
“He just slipped into the trees, heading away from the road,” Meosa said quickly. “There are small cabins and campgrounds deeper in, at least there were five hundred years ago. They are likely still there. I’ll tell you when to turn so you can follow him. If you need my help, do not be afraid to ask, disciple.”
Arik nodded, barely able to bottle the feeling of darkness blooming within him. He had seen what Konwa had done to some of the other captives; the man was a monster in every sense of the word.
Once he was in the clear, Arik turned back to the road, and stepped into the woods, this time keeping an eye out for green and yellow snakes. I have to figure out where he’s going…
Meosa was able to travel forward to some degree and still communicate with Arik, allowing him to stalk their target from a distance. Even if he knew that he wouldn’t be seen, Arik kept a low profile, cautious of his surroundings as he pressed onward, ignoring the way his heartbeat had ticked up.
You must stop him.
(You must.)
The voice echoed deep within, Arik wishing he had an actual weapon.
It wasn’t long before they came to a deeply shaded campsite, the forest floor a mixture of sand and mottled leaves not yet blown away by the wind. Arik crouched along the perimeter, watching as Konwa plopped on the ground before an extinguished fire, the long-haired slaver gazing up at the canopy above, completely relaxed.
“What do we do now?” Meosa whispered.
Arik tensed.
Something came over him at that moment as he watched Konwa relax even further and sigh, Arik recalling how the hare-lipped man had treated some of the other slaves, especially the mother of the boy who had died, his lack of pity and penchant for sadistic violence. For Konwa to be sitting there so casually just basking in the beauty of the small forest was an insult to what Arik had been through, his fallen peers and teachers, his worldview.
“Disciple?” Meosa asked, but rather than reply, Arik tore out of the foliage.
“Konwa,” he said in a low voice, startling the slaver.
“What are you doing!?” Meosa hissed so only Arik could hear.
“You… yes, I recognize you.” Konwa tilted his head slightly as he took Arik in, daring the disciple to take another step. “You really are stupid, aren’t you? You had the chance to escape, yet you have followed me here.” Konwa got to his feet and produced a dagger from his boot.
“I can help…” Meosa said suddenly.
“No,” Arik told him, his voice firm. “I will do this.”
Konwa continued sizing Arik up. “Look at you, half-starved, talking to yourself, so far away from your pathetic home. You won’t survive here, not on your own, not this close to the Crimson Realm. Your only chance for survival will be as a slave here. So…” Once again, Konwa grinned, his teeth crooked and yellow, gums black. “How about you make this easy for both of us? I don’t kill you, and you get to survive as a slave. Perhaps I’ll even take you as my personal slave considering the contract has been completed. I could always use a hand around here, and—”
“—What happened to the others?”
“The others?” Konwa asked, the look on his face telling Arik that he was a bit surprised by this question. “Some are now in the Crimson Realm, a few of the larger ones are at the stadium, the Omoto slave tournament. If you are wondering where you would have gone, it would have been straight to the Crimson Realm, perhaps Tenrikyo. You aren’t strong enough for the tournament. That one fellow whom you seemed to know, the large one, that’s where he is. Those broad shoulders from years of hard labor? Can he fight?” Konwa sneered. “That’s another question entirely. I wonder how long he’ll survive—”
Arik careened forward, tackling Konwa, and as predicted, as he had foreseen in his mind’s eye, the slaver brought his dagger down onto Arik’s back.
The sudden flash of pain caused every muscle in Arik’s body to ignite, Konwa bringing the dagger down once again, Arik’s oxygen cut short as his lung was punctured from behind.
“You really are a fool,” Konwa whispered as he twisted the dagger in, its tip just beneath Arik’s shoulder blade, Arik feeling his chest swell as his punctured lung tried to heal itself.
“I can help, disciple!”
“No…” Arik told Meosa. He swallowed the pain, practically fueled by it now as he gripped his hand around the side of Konwa’s face and neck, his thumb digging into the slaver’s throat. Konwa tried to push him away, and as he did, Arik summoned his wound transfer power.
The slaver gasped, his body going limp. “What… what are you doing?” Konwa asked, suddenly short of breath.
He attempted to dig the dagger in even further, but it was already at the hilt, Arik tensing up as he transferred more of the pain forward.
Soon, Konwa lost grip of his dagger, his hand falling to the side, the man passing out from the pain.
Arik gingerly reached one hand up and managed to grab the hilt of the dagger.
Must…
Breathe…
Arik gritted his teeth and yanked the dagger out of his back, air coming to him a few moments later as if he’d just come up from a pool of water.
He tossed it off to the side. No time to catch his breath, Arik placed both hands around Konwa’s neck, everything on the periphery of violent blur.
Konwa barely put up a fight as Arik both choked him and transferred more of the wound. The pain associated with blood vessels being burst, muscle tearing, nerves ripped to shreds, and organs punctured all streamed out of Arik’s hands and into Konwa’s throat, a watery substance appearing in the air around him, Revivaura.
As Arik strangled the man, the two wounds on his back stitched up, leaving bloodied marks on the robes he had procured from the cave.
The disciple finally let up and relaxed his grip, Konwa now on his last breath, Meosa saying something to him but Arik ignoring him for the time being. He felt savage.
He wasn’t done yet.
Recalling what he had been put through, and what he had been trained to do, Arik instinctively conjured the Revivaura around him, healing Konwa from the brink of death, enough for the man to open his eyes and take Arik in.
“You’re… you’re one of them…” Konwa said on the tail end of a whisper, tears at the corners of his eyes now, his pupils dilated. “You’re…”
“I am.”
And with that, Arik squeezed his hands even tighter around Konwa’s neck, transferring what was left of not only his wound, but what he had pulled from temporarily reviving the slaver, a form of torture if ever there was one.
Konwa expired a few seconds later, his body twitching and finally ceasing to move.
Dead.
This had a way of snapping Arik out of what he had just done, the healer scrambling away from Konwa’s lifeless body awash in shame.
“…Disciple?” Meosa asked, the world spinning. “Disciple Arik…”
“I’m…” He bowed his head deeply. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry that you had to see that. I’m so sorry…” He felt a wave of nausea move through him which he sucked down with a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re him…” Meosa said, his voice thin now, barely audible. “You’re him. There’s no need to be sorry, you’re…. You’re him.”
“Who?” Arik finally looked up at the aqueous kami, who floated next to him, drooping, an indecipherable look on his watery face.
“I can’t believe I’m actually saying this aloud but… you’re the War Priest. Do you know what that means? You know who the War Priest is, disciple?”
“The War Priest?
” Arik asked.
“It means that I…” Meosa never finished this sentence. “You’re him, I know it. It all makes sense to me now. You’re the War Priest.”
.Chapter Four.
“Most things in life end poorly, which is why we should probably get married.”
–Prince Tenzin of the Jade Realm upon meeting his third wife, Dawan, following the War of Gods in Year 789. Their marriage lasted for the rest of her life.
Arik Dacre kept his head down as he passed the Jade Realm flags, the seafoam-green banners with dark-green boxes in their center lining the road that led to the border city of Omoto.
He wasn’t convinced with Meosa’s claim that he was some kind of reincarnation of the War Priest, Arik not able to shake the shame he felt for what had happened to Konwa the slaver back in the forest. His actions went against his basic code of ethics, the oath he had taken, which was something Arik would have to come to grips with going forward.
But this still didn’t make him the War Priest.
The Crimson-Onyx Shroud War had desiccated the continent of Taomoni five hundred years ago, leading to a decade of reconstruction. Beginning in 1080, the war lasted five long years, Arik’s home country, the Onyx Realm, on the attack, the Crimson Realm defending itself from invasion, both using the sandwiched Jade Realm for most of the battles.
Coro Pache, the War Priest, was a Crimsonian man.
Coro didn’t start off as a healer; he began as a blade who had graduated from the Double Sword Academy of Combat Arts in Mogra after transferring from an academy in the southernmost city of Jur. And like many of his peers at the time, Coro was called upon to join the cause once the Onyx Realm reached the northern border.
After a battle near the oceanside city of Katano, Coro had been captured, and subsequently imprisoned for several years in Arik’s home realm. He somehow escaped imprisonment, and secretly enrolled in one of the healing academies that had since disbanded.
Coro’s background in weaponry and Thunderaura had a way of augmenting his newfound knowledge of Revivaura, and once he returned to the battlefront in the year 1083, he took charge immediately and began a counteroffensive, the Crimson Realm pushing back, the legend of the War Priest born.
Coro Pache was instrumental in ending the war two years later, only to disappear afterwards, never to be seen again. Naturally, he became an instant celebrity in both the Jade and Crimson Realms. Only recently had the people in the Onyx Realm come to grips with Coro Pache’s legacy, the older generations considering much of it myth. Combat Master Nankai, the guest lecturer who had taught Arik how to use a sword, had spoken highly of Coro Pache, even though the lecturers at the Academy of Healing Arts frowned upon this practice.
The memory of these lectures came to Arik just about as soon as Meosa referred to him as the War Priest, an exceedingly rare title given to a person who was both the combatant and healer. But Arik wasn’t a combatant, at least not a classically trained one. And he certainly wasn’t like Coro Pache, nor did he have any plans to lead his realm in the war that was to come.
As it stood, Arik had one goal in mind, to help those who had been enslaved alongside him, most notably Jinmo, who would know what to do next.
Arik only hoped that he could find him, that he hadn’t already been taken to the Crimson Realm.
****
The border town of Omoto had once been demarcated from the landscape by a solid wall of sandstone. Jadean civilization had spread past the barrier, many shops using the wall’s parapet as stakes for canvas awnings that protected their wares from the relentless sun. If there were city guards, Arik didn’t see any as he approached the entrance of the city, the sheer glimpse of humanity overwhelming to some degree.
All of these people, Arik thought as dozens upon dozens of Jadeans and a handful of Crimsonians moved all around him going about their lives, oblivious to the man from the north, the disciple in disguise, the one who would come so far.
“And this, my boy, is where we part ways,” Meosa said suddenly, his watery form not visible but his presence felt, his voice seeming to exist somewhere in the back of Arik’s skull.
“Part ways?”
Arik stepped aside to allow a woman with a child to pass, both the woman and her child with scarves wrapped around their heads to reduce the power of the sun.
Arik had noticed the swell of heat as they approached the city. It felt like they were much closer to the sun in the Jade Realm than in the Onyx Realm, the air drier, the temperature blistering outside of the shade, which was why many of the men wore conical hats made of straw, the women generally covering their heads with cloth, and a few people of both sexes in odd, square-shaped hats that Arik had never seen before.
“We both have our own agendas,” Meosa said. “I need to check on something while we are here in Omoto, a private matter that I’d rather not get into at the moment. And you have your own motives as well. How about this? In three days, we will meet in the town square. It’s not very far from here, just straight ahead, you can’t miss it nor its sandstone sculptures. This will give you time to see if you can’t figure out where your people were taken, and maybe you can learn a little more about this part of the world during that time. What do you say, disciple? Care to explore on your own?”
“What will I do for food? Shelter?”
“Do what you would have done without me,” Meosa told him. “If you truly are who I think you will become, then I am fairly certain you can figure it out.”
“I’m not the War Priest,” Arik said, loudly enough that he caught the attention of a man passing by, one of the man’s eyes yellow and cloudy, the other immediately darting in Arik’s direction.
“That remains to be determined, disciple. But if you want advice, if you want to know what I would do, it would probably be best to deal with your clothing first.”
“My clothing?”
“You are wearing boots, and as you can probably see, no one wears boots around here. Also, you’re in gray robes that hermits wear, but you don’t look like a hermit, no long beard, not quite the right kind of crazy look in your eyes, too young for that matter. You understand, don’t you? And if you didn’t know, the colors you’re wearing are the colors of those who have studied at the School of Illusion, shinobi.”
“The School of Illusion no longer exists,” Arik said stubbornly.
“Yet shinobi somehow attacked and destroyed the Academy of Healing Arts. Hmmm… that seems a bit curious to me. Who told you that the School of Illusion has closed its door?” Meosa asked.
“Everyone knows…”
“You told me yourself that masked men in gray robes attacked your Academy during a ceremony, yet you say the school no longer exists. Who do you think these masked men were? Do I really have to connect the dots for you? I’m afraid they don’t make disciples like they used to.”
“The school was disbanded…” Arik said under his breath, doing his best to suppress the urge to argue with Meosa, especially with so many people around.
“Again, who told you that? Have you ever even been to the Jade Realm before a few days ago? I’ll answer that one for you. No, you haven’t. And with that in mind, what do you even know about the School of Illusion?”
Arik gritted his teeth as more feet shuffled by. “Nothing.”
“You have a lot to learn, disciple, and if someone were to tell me that the School of Illusion had disbanded, I would tell that person they were of the same intelligence as a desert gaki. It is called the School of Illusion for a reason, you know.”
“I’m aware. I understand why it would’ve existed and the chi they used.”
There was symmetry to the way that Taomoni’s interpretations of chi had worked out, the three realms—Crimson, Jade, and Onyx—each with unique systems for understanding and utilizing chi, which was the energy source that consisted of everything in their world, from plant life to even something as abstract as mental power.
It was common knowledge that the academies of
healing, like the one Arik had graduated from, utilized a fluid form of this chi known as Revivaura; the combat schools utilized a fiery and static form of this chi known as Thunderaura; and the enigmatic School of Illusion, true to its name, had successfully hidden the nature of the chi it used, most people only knowing its name— Chimaura.
Revivaura, Thunderaura, and Chimaura. The three codified usages of chi.
“I will take your silence as proof that you agree with me, the school hasn’t disbanded.”
“You know…” Arik stopped himself from continuing. While he didn’t quite believe this to be the case—considering it had been his favorite healing instructor, Master Guri Yarna, who had personally told him that the school had disbanded—it made sense. After all, he had seen the men and at least one woman with their demonic masks, and he had witnessed firsthand what they had done.
“Yes? You still want to argue with me?”
“Never mind. The square, three days from now. If that’s where you want to meet me, that’s where I will be.”
“I was about to say the same to you,” Meosa told him with a huff. “Before you get into whatever it is you’re going to get into, may I make a suggestion?”
Arik nodded as a richer man traveling in a covered rickshaw came into view, a window open so he could look out at the crowd.
“Start with your boots,” Meosa told him. “Those will be worth some money around here, considering they are relatively new, from the north, and made from deerskin leather. Sell them and get some sandals, and try to not spend all the money on sandals. The traders here can be treacherous fools if you don’t know how to play them right. They will make an offer, and your first instinct should be to walk away. Then they will begin negotiating with you. Only when they turn away, do you take the price. Same goes for buying. Show some interest in something, then pretend that you don’t need it, watch the price drop until the seller loses interest. Good luck, and try not to die between now and then.”
Mask of the Fallen: A Cultivation/Progression Fantasy Series: (War Priest Book One) Page 6
