Mask of the Fallen: A Cultivation/Progression Fantasy Series: (War Priest Book One)

by Harmon Cooper

  Once again, Meosa came to his aid. “Tell him you are from the Jadean side of Omoto, that you are here to visit the Academy.”

  Arik relayed what Meosa had told him to say to the young herder.

  “That makes more sense. There are slaves in Omoto and in Tenrikyo, Katano as well. But not here. My people, the ones who live on the outer rim, were slaves hundreds of years ago, long before my great great grandparents. But this is no longer the case.”

  Domen didn’t elaborate as they came to a fenced-in animal pen crafted from a mixture of bones and sandstone. The young herder hopped off his kayno, not at all frightened by the enormous yokai around him.

  One by one, Domen herded them into the pen, the boy moving quickly and swiping them on their rears with a switch made of leather. The beasts, even the biggest males with their gnarled horns, responded immediately, some quite afraid of Domen as he made his rounds.

  Arik dismounted, and as soon as he stepped away from his wooly kayno it got in line behind one of the others, where it was eventually guided inside the pen.

  “What a life,” Meosa said as he too watched Domen work. “This boy already has more real worldly skills than you and he’s half your age.”

  “He’s not half my age; if anything, he’s four or five years younger than me,” Arik said quietly.

  Meosa laughed. “I’m kidding about the age part. The skill part remains to be seen.”

  “Can he heal?”

  “No, but he can survive. And that means something this far south in the Crimson Realm. It would be good to learn from someone like him. I’m certain if he were stuck in the desert, he could survive for weeks at a time, perhaps even longer with little fuss.”

  Domen turned to Arik, the scrawny youth now with his switch tucked into the belt of his robes as if it were a sword. He motioned for Arik to follow, the two traveling down a slope and circling around a garden of cacti with prickly fruit growing amidst their thorns.

  “About the wooly kayno, do they belong to your family?” Arik asked after a pair of children passed, both of them in square hats, one lined with fringe, which Arik took to indicate that the wearer was female.

  “No, they belong to all of us,” Domen said. “The community.”

  They came to a home with a thick swath of cloth in place of the door. The two entered, and as soon as they did the young herder removed his square hat and placed it on a table made of bone and hide, where there were others stacked next to it.

  Domen had short brown hair, and while he had yet to grow into his own skin, there was something about his eyes that aged him, the young herder seemingly with a sense of wisdom beyond his years. “You can take yours off now too.”

  “Right.” Arik removed the scarf that he had wrapped around his face and stepped out of his sandals, his feet now on a patch of soft hide covering the floor. A woman came around the corner, Arik noticing a fragrance in the air, something akin to onion.

  “We have a guest?” the woman asked.

  “Mother, this is Arik. He was traveling from the Jade side of Omoto when he spotted the kayno I’ve been searching for.”

  The woman, who also wasn’t wearing a square hat considering they were inside, returned her focus to Arik as a smile took shape on her face. She had strands of gray hair cropped close to her forehead, Domen’s mother in beige robes similar to the ones Domen wore with an apron over the front that featured a multicolored cross-stitched design.

  “In that case, please, relax,” she said kindly. “We will have a meal in an hour or so. Will you be staying the night?”

  Arik shook his head. “I was planning to move on to the city…”

  “Nonsense, you should stay the night. We have a spare room downstairs. Show our guest to the spare room, son, and get him one of your father’s old square hats,” she said, the woman clearly sensing that Arik didn’t have the right attire for Mogra.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Domen grabbed a spare lantern and motioned for Arik to follow him down the stairwell leading underground. In the north, the Onyx Realm, something like this would have been a cellar. But in Mogra it was where much of the house was located, Arik surprised to find a long hallway beneath the ground complete with several rooms, the temperature nice and cool.

  “This is the room,” Domen said as he swept aside the curtain that served as a door.

  Arik entered the space to find that it had been chiseled out of the rock, the ceiling just a bit higher than the hallway, and plenty of space to stretch out. There was bedding that had been folded and placed in one of the corners and a sitting area by way of a small, circular cushion against the stone wall.

  “Let me check everything,” Domen said as he set the lantern down on the ground and quickly swept through the room. “No scorpions. Good.”

  “Thank you,” Arik said, not sure of what to tell the young herder.

  Domen motioned toward the circular cushion. “Please, sit. I’ll bring you my father’s square hat so you can try it on.”

  “Doesn’t your father need it?”

  “He died several years ago,” Domen said as he slipped out of the room. “I still have his sword.”

  “That was a grim answer,” Meosa commented once Arik had his bag off, the leather waterskin close by as he sat down on the cushion. He was removing his blade from his belt just about the time Domen reentered with two square hats.

  “See which one fits better.”

  Arik took the first hat from the thin youth, noticing that, as he had surmised, it was made of some type of wicker material. What he hadn’t seen was the frame inside the square hat meant to keep the sides of the hat off a person’s face. He placed the first one on, and found that the frame was a bit tight.

  “Try this one instead,” Domen said as he handed Arik the other hat.

  The second square had seemed to fit just right. Arik looked up at the young herder through the odd slit in the front of the square hat and nodded. “It’s perfect.”

  “Then it is yours. You must wear this in public settings. It is only in private homes that you can remove it.”

  “I see,” Arik said.

  “Please, rest. Do you need water?”

  “No, I have plenty of that. Perhaps too much…”

  “Hey…” Meosa started to say.

  Domen offered Arik a tight smile. “In that case, I will help Mother prepare our dinner.”

  “Do you need any help?” Arik asked. “I don’t mind helping.”

  “You are our guest, so no. Please, relax. Dinner will be ready shortly.”

  ****

  The meal they had was unlike anything Arik had tasted before, the spice Domen’s mother used to season whatever meat they were eating hot to the point it was nauseating. For a moment, he thought he would have to use his healing power just to stop his own suffering, but the sensation soon passed, and it was further cooled down by the fruit they ate following the entree, which came from one of the cacti gardens.

  It was certainly a crash course in southern Crimsonian cuisine, Arik realizing by the end that the food they consumed was meant to be spicy to the point that it was nearly inedible, this followed by something soothing and sweet. It was tolerable, but he wasn’t looking forward to eating it for the foreseeable future.

  Much of the discussion over their meal happened between Domen and his mother, the two brushing over some of the things he had encountered while out herding.

  For the most part, Arik simply listened.

  He always thought of the Crimson Realm and those who lived here as the enemy, a common sentiment held by most Onyxians. But he liked the few he had met so far, which included Domen, his mother, and a neighbor girl who stopped by to eat with them. Keeping tradition, she wore the square hat with fringe on it, removing it at the door, just as Domen had done. And like Domen, she too had been hardened by life outside the city of Mogra, thin as a stick, a determined quietness about her, the only thing really distinguishing her from Domen being the elaborate cosmetics u
sed around her eyes.

  As a guest, Arik wasn’t allowed to help clean up, although he insisted. Instead he was sent back to his bedroom to rest, and just about as soon as he arrived Meosa let out a big, disgruntled sigh.

  “Worst dinner ever,” the aqueous kami moaned.

  “What? Why is that?”

  “I didn’t spend centuries trapped inside a stone box to listen to peasants discuss the way the wind was blowing. Yes, I’m being a bit harsh,” he said as Arik once again took a seat on the circular cushion on the ground. “But you know nothing of my life before, disciple, and…” Meosa never finished this thought, instead returning to something he’d said just moments ago. “Yes, perhaps I’m being harsh.”

  “They seemed nice.”

  “They are nice because they are simple, which is the best kind of nice. Because you are a disciple, because you’ve spent the good majority of your life holed up at the Academy, you know little of the ways of the common folk.”

  “They seemed fine to me.”

  “They were fine,” Meosa said. “There is nothing wrong with them and their simple life. But you have to understand, I come from a time in which I spent the majority of my existence in the grace of princes and high officials, at least toward the end. With you, things have been a bit more simplified. But that’s not to say that this is a bad thing. Certainly not. Which is why I apologized for what I said earlier. I fear that…”

  Arik waited for Meosa to respond, and when he didn’t, he probed a little deeper. “You fear what?”

  “I am starting to fear that like you, I’m the last of my kind.”

  “There was the yasha back in the desert…”

  “Yes, a demonic kami, just the kind I want to be friends with,” Meosa said, not able to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “What I’m talking about is kami such as myself, a more enlightened one.”

  “Is that how you would describe yourself?” Arik asked.

  “Wouldn’t you describe me in that way? I’m well aware that you know little of my past, but you should be able to tell by my voice and the way I hold myself…” Meosa’s water form took shape. He puffed his chest up, most of his body coming from the tip of the opened waterskin. He quickly deflated. “Who am I kidding? I’ve become ornery in my old age.”

  As much as Arik wanted to poke at him a little further, he got the sense that Meosa was being serious. So he didn’t say anything, but he also didn’t correct the kami. Meosa was ornery.

  As the night pressed on, their conversation thinned to a minimum, both kami and disciple seemingly lost in thought. The family hosting them never disturbed Arik, and eventually he retired to the bed he’d made out of the linen that had been folded in the corner, strategically placing it on top of a thin futon filled with what he was pretty certain was sand.

  There were just a few thoughts that danced across his mind’s eye as he drifted off, mostly involving the woman with the kitsune mask. From there it shifted to what had led him so far south, Arik trembling at one point as he relived the attack back at the Academy. He saw Master Guri Yarna saving him, his family dead, his peers, the other instructors, Arik’s sudden fall…

  To calm himself, he sat up and started going through an old practice called chi cycling, which he had learned during his studies of the Faithful Branch of Common Restoration. The only way to move from the Faithful Branch of Common Restoration to the next school, the Devout Branch of Regrowth, was to pass a series of trials proving one could cycle chi, or Revivaura, with ease.

  Chi cycling was second nature to him, to the point that Arik did it naturally, just like his teachers, and just like anyone who had cleared through a Divine Branch. His body instinctively scanned itself, gathering up and storing the energy that it could, and while he had been taught to visualize that he was storing it at his core, the truth was that it was stored all around him, even in the objects he interacted with.

  There had been a few moments of clarity during the more strenuous trials in which Arik truly saw just how connected he was with everything through chi, his in breaths causing the plants to slightly tilt toward him, out breaths forcing them to shift away. But it had been years since he had arrived at that level of clarity, which wasn’t necessary once a person learned to cycle chi intuitively.

  Sitting on his bedding, Arik breathed in deeply and observed his own Revivaura, a sense of peace washing over him. It had just the effect that he wanted, and soon he was able to lie down and fall asleep, forgoing any traumatic memories as he did so.

  Arik woke the next morning refreshed, ready to continue on to the Double Sword Academy of Combat Arts, where he hoped to meet Combat Master Nankai, the visiting lecturer who had taught him how to fight.

  If anyone would be sympathetic to Arik’s cause, especially with how crazy it was, he hoped it would be him. There was also his backup plan as well, suggested to him by the tanuki back at the infirmary, Master Kojiro claiming that another teacher at the combat academy named Altai Masamune may be of assistance as well, especially with the fact that he was from the Onyx Realm.

  Let’s hope this is the case, Arik thought as he got dressed and began packing his bags. Meosa didn’t say much aside from a morning greeting as Arik slipped the waterskin over his shoulder, his sheathed sword now tucked in his belt.

  Once he was ready to face the day, Arik made his way up to the main living space of the home, where he found Domen and his mother enjoying cups of hot water garnished with some type of root.

  “I can show you the way,” Domen said, immediately getting to his feet.

  “No, it’s fine…”

  “Please, I need to go to town anyway to take care of a few things.”

  The teenage herder said goodbye to his mother and met Arik at the door, where he placed his square hat over his head, secured by its inner frame. Arik did the same. He had yet to arrive at the combat academy, but he assumed that they didn’t actually fight while wearing the strange hats.

  It would be suicide.

  The desert world viewed through a rectangular slit was certainly strange, allowing a much wider angle than he anticipated. Straining his eyes all the way the left and right showed him that he had pretty much the same viewing frame as he would have had without the hat on, at least horizontally. Vertically was something else.

  A pair of dogs with barely any flesh on their bones ran up to Domen as they moved through the settlement outside of Mogra, the youth shushing the two away. As they started off, Arik turned to look once again at his surroundings, trying to solidify in his mind where Domen’s home was just in case he ever needed to stop by again.

  Near the biggest cactus patch, he thought to himself as he followed the young herder down a winding lane that passed between two mud homes, their humble nature disguising just how much of the space was underground.

  The smell of sizzling meat met Arik’s nostrils, and he wished now that he had stayed behind to eat something. As if Domen had interpreted this, he peeked his head through one of the cloths covering the nearest door and spoke to the woman inside. Soon, he was brought a couple of slices of meat that had been folded and pinned on a thin pair of rib bones.

  As they walked, Domen demonstrated how Arik should eat in public, the youth using the two bones almost as skewers as he stuck them up under the bottom opening of his square hat and quickly finished the meat. Arik mirrored his movement, only poking himself once in the nose with the end of one of the bones.

  “I could just as easily have gotten to the Academy,” Meosa said as they came to a set of stairs that had been cut into the stone, the steps trailing all the way down to the bottom of the canyon, a good seventy or eighty-foot drop. There was a rope made of kayno hair on the opposite side to prevent someone from falling, Arik looking down at the bottom of the stairs to see a middle-aged woman using the rope to head up to the top of the bluff, a huge waterskin on her back.

  “One of the porters,” Domen said. “They sell the water in the city and keep what they have left.”


  “It doesn’t look like she sold all that much,” Arik said.

  “They purposely make the waterskins look full so it appears as if they have an abundance of water. It’s probably empty.”

  The woman reached them, said hello to Domen, nodded at Arik, and continued on her way, Arik noticing that she was thumbing through a small prayer of beads, muttering some mantra under her breath.

  It was a half-mile walk from the base of the stairs to the start of the city of Mogra, much of the space in between used for caravans, merchants to set up circular tents, and others who weren’t able to find, or afford, shelter. None of the buildings, many of which were joined together with some kind of hardened clay, seemed all that large. And most weren’t very tall, all of them blending in with a cream-colored landscape occasionally accented by pockets of dusty pink.

  There were no fountains, and the only statue that Arik could make out were a pair of cubes carved into limestone and set before one of the larger buildings near the city center.

  “The library,” Domen said as he gestured toward it. “It has some books and scrolls, but is mostly a gathering place now, and half of the space is actually a bathhouse. That’s one of the things I will do once I lead you to the Academy.”

  Meosa scoffed at this remark. “Leave it to the square-hatted people of Mogra to turn their precious library, which could contain texts that would benefit all of Taomoni, into a bathhouse. Won’t all that steam do something to the paper?”

  Arik didn’t comment as they passed through a square, one erected around a natural stone arch white as teeth. More arches began to appear, some of the homes joined by them with passages built over the top to connect their roofs.

  “The Double Sword Academy of Combat Arts is next to the Whitenor Arch, which is the most famous landmark in the city. If you ever need to meet someone, you should meet them there,” Domen explained.

  The start of the Academy became apparent once they came to a large wall, Arik seeing the top of several arches inside the space. The gate was open, and as soon as they passed through it, Arik started to make out the sounds of grunts somewhere behind a different wall, indicating to him that this was where some training was taking place. The grounds themselves were made of stone, swept free of all its dust by square-hatted men and women.