by R. T. Donlon
It was clear, however, that, unlike her father, this was not where Taris Laeth belonged. It was only a subtle distinction, but the far-off gaze in her mother’s eyes—the eyes suddenly made clear by a silver moonlit exchange—exposed all. In fact, it was as clear as a dry summer morning—Taris Laeth would follow her husband into any battle, to any grave, but it would be for him, not herself.
They stopped. The Warriors’ attention quickly shifted to the fog-ridden plain stretching into the horizon.
Kyrah watched.
What has caught their attention? she thought.
At first she noticed nothing, but then, as if out of a mirror, a group of shaded figures appeared—quietly and slowly at first, then quicker and entirely consumed by an intense buzzing noise. The sand squalls obscured their full appearance, but Kyrah could decipher what she needed to know about them from her spot in the bushes.
Danger, she thought. Nothing but danger.
She had never laid eyes on such things as Shadows before. She had only learned about them in her readings.
“You will have plenty of time to worry about the Shadows when you have grown,” Velc had said, “but for now, focus on your meditation positions. A good breather is a good Warrior…”
She had spent hours upon hours begging the adults of her village to tell her the stories of the Shadow King, but none would take the time. They laughed at her condescendingly or simply sent her away with the disgusted flick of a wrist, but now, as she crouched opposite these approaching figures—close enough to experience fear first hand—she understood why.
The creatures were something out of a nightmare. Black, swirling fire surrounded each of them, dancing with the wind in a methodical rhythm. Their faceless heads resembled the shape of man’s, but were covered by a swatch of black fabric, tied off at the back. They held no weapons, just razor-like claws attached to bulging, gaseous arms protruding from their sides. They moved as gracefully as Kyrah had ever seen figures move—almost gliding over the plains—uninhibited by the swirling sands.
Tension bundled in her chest.
The six Northern Warriors stood in a makeshift V, facing the Shadows in wuru attack pose. Her father stood at the tip of the formation, her mother and uncle behind him, while Velc, Salo, and Shara held form at the back. A sense of admiration overcame Kyrah. She was proud to watch such valiancy in her people. The combination of Portizu pride and foreign scenic beauty trapped the breath deep in her lungs. She felt only admiration, courage.
“Retreat now!” she heard her father bark. “You have claimed the Tension Fields, but you are not welcome here!”
He was forced to scream above the wind’s whistle, so much so that Kyrah could hear him clearly.
The Shadows continued their approach. They had made their choice. There would be death for Darkness.
The Shadows closed in enough now to attack, but the Warriors never broke rank. Each understood their own responsibilities—a swinging attar here, a tripping leg there, until the ten Shadows had all but evaporated into dispersing gas, dying like remnants of ancient ghosts. The swords flashed a deep red with every swing, lighting violently as they collided with each Shadow. It was something Kyrah had never seen before, flashing even brighter as they dug deep into the flesh of the creatures, ripping deep into their thin cords of muscle.
Shara and Jeras allowed anger to break through each swing of their blades, grunting as they cut into bodies. Beads of sweat broke across their foreheads. Her parents led the group. They danced among the attacking Shadows, evading with their own shifts of weight.
Velc flailed through wuru attack pose and into wier, transitioning flawlessly from one position to the other with limited movement. Salo did the same, but with a bit more rigidity. The Shadows sliced the air with sharpened claws to counter, but the blunt end of a wrist, followed by a blow from an ankle, held true by an elbow to the fleshy part of the enemy never allowed the Shadows to return any sort of attack. Velc and Salo held the Shadows in this one-sided duel until the others could finish with fatal attar blows.
The battle was not really a battle at all, but an exhibition of Portizu strength, cunning, and wisdom.
Kyrah rose from her place in the bushes with eyes wide with astonishment.
“Mother! Father!” she yelled.
Excitement rose to her throat. She could no longer subdue the urge to call out to her parents.
What it must be like to learn the ways of the attar! How proud they must feel after such a victory!
But there was still one Shadow left—the last of them. It escaped a mighty swing of Shara’s blade and bolted from the Warrior ranks, disappearing into the night in an evaporation of particles. It reappeared a moment later behind Kyrah, so swiftly that Kyrah felt only the wind shift at her back. It jowled menacingly, tasting the beginnings of a fresh kill. She could hear it whooshing above her, keeping itself towering in the raging wind. When she turned to meet it, an angled jointed claw reached outward. She could see each nail’s sharpened edge glowing violently in the sheen of the moon.
She screamed.
“Kyrah!” her father called out to her, running in pursuit from afar.
Before she could call back, a searing burn filled her chest—not one that exerted heat, but rather a sharp pain that consumed her entire body. Neural agony shot through her in every and all directions. Her knees buckled. Her arms twitched. Her abdominal muscles contracted in quick, painful pulses. Everything—every inch—began to hurt.
She peered down at her chest. Around her neck, the amulet began to glow a deep red—the same deep red of the attar swords, except this rock—the one clinging to its chain—started to liquify, burying itself deep into the bone at the center of her chest. She touched it, thinking that she could rip the rock from her breastplate to keep it from fully entering her, but it felt cold to the touch unexpectedly, so cold she could not bear to maintain a grip.
The amulet, she thought. Her four-year-old brain could not comprehend the magnitude of the moment. It’s attar!
She remembered, so vividly, the day her father had given her the necklace—her fourth birthday. It had held such special meaning.
“Keep it close and never take it off,” her father had said. “It will always keep you safe.”
Everything he had said made sense now.
The amulet deepened into a menacing bloody color, pulsing a noisy frequency so high she could barely hear it. The Shadow grimaced at the high-pitched squeal, trying desperately to shake it away with a menacing roar. It inched closer to her despite the pain.
What have I done? Kyrah thought, turning so that her parents came into view.
If she died here at the hands of the Shadow, where would that leave them—the ones she loved the most? Without the next generation of Laeth? Without legacy?
Time slowed to a halt, but the chilled attar pain continued to course through her body. It cycled through veins and arteries and pooled in the crevices, corners, and cracks of her psyche.
The moment of reckoning had come.
“I have you now,” the Shadow whispered.
Its sharp claw reached through the frequency. A new influx of pain surged through her.
She lowered her eyes to the amulet one last time. It was burning at radioactive levels now, beaming so brightly that it nearly blinded her. No longer was there physical separation between the bone of her sternum and the amulet’s rocky surface. It had become a part of her, fully dissolving into the skin of her chest and dispersing red light into a threadlike spiderweb that slithered its way down to her abdomen and up into her neck. It spread across her as though she was suddenly wearing chainmail, paralyzing her arms and legs, and dropping her to her knees. She could no longer move.
And yet, the Shadow inched ever closer, closer, until the tip of its claw stretched to within a needle’s point of her shoulder. She struggled against it, praying audibly to Turisic to save her, to rescue her from the life of endless Darkness that seemed to be awaiting.
She closed her eyes, waiting.
Red aura shot like steady lightning from her chest, upward into the sky above.
And then, as if straight out of one of the storybooks her father had read to her countless times, everything stilled.
She was saved.
A dying roar filled the air. Kyrah opened her eyes as the monster hunched its shoulders defiantly and disappeared. Its black streaks of ribboning energy evaporated into the wind. The bolts of attar lightning reverted to its original blanket of black night, releasing the chainmail-like amulet from inside her, reforming into the original shape of the rock it once was—cooled and at rest.
“Safe,” she mumbled. “Am I? Safe?”
Her father stood over her with his attar blade at his side. It dripped with the ink-black blood of the Shadow’s End. Kyrah scanned the face of her father, but saw no emotion, no quality of thought.
“Father?” she questioned again. “Is it gone?”
Something physical caught her attention—the tiniest irritation at the strongest point of her left shoulder. It was nothing more than a sensation, like the brush of a single hair against her skin, but it was enough to catch her attention. She raised a hand to the spot and pressed three fingers into the pocket of muscle. No infectious bubble. No raised splotches.
A good sign, she thought.
The skin at the sight of the touch was still smooth, but the aching twinge in her head continued to swell as if it wasn’t.
“Kyrah,” her father spoke sternly. He bent to one knee and gently rested his attar blade against the sawgrass. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head without speaking, keeping her focus on the odd sensation beginning to crawl under her skin. Something desperate in her eyes triggered a deeper response from her parents.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, bending closer. “Kyrah, what’s wrong?”
Her mother knelt by her husband with an arm outstretched, reaching forward to her daughter’s shoulder.
“Kyrah,” her father pleaded. “If something is wrong, tell us. Tell us now.”
“Look,” her mother said. She pointed to a discolored line running through her daughter’s sunburned skin. “Her shoulder. She was touched.”
Kyrah looked to her mother, then to her father. Worry seeped from their eyes.
“Listen to me, Kyrah,” her father spoke sternly. “What happens next is going to hurt. Be strong.”
The sting hit her like a sharp rock to the back of the head. She had no time to brace herself against it. A single black line exposed itself across her shoulder and traveled like a worm to the circular outline of her collarbone. It continued climbing slowly from there, up the right side of her throat until it reached the opening of her ear. It pushed for her brain.
She could not breathe, but she gasped for it anyway. The one black line broke into hundreds and dispersed into the skin down her neck, darkening into tree roots, pulsing, sending her backward into dangerously rigid convulsions. She writhed in pain.
But even then, the Darkness could not take complete control of her.
The amulet shivered at her chest. A twitch ran up Kyrah’s body and sparked bursts of orange flares intermittently, showering her with bright, energized particles of light. The convulsions ceased. Her body fell silent. Her parents breathed a sigh of relief as the worming streaks of Darkness retreated from the surface of her skin. Kyrah arched her back violently one last time and screamed so that every village in the Northern Territories could hear.
Then, silence.
Her parents wrapped their arms around their daughter, holding her tight. They knelt there, embracing her quietly underneath the stars.
Kyrah rolled to her side, opening her eyes. She stared blankly at her parents. Fleeting memories left her head like heat and, with them, the awareness of what had just occurred.
“What happened?” she asked.
The amulet dangled from the chain as dull as dirtied rock.
“You fell unconscious,” her mother whispered, “and you were touched.”
Tears drained from her mother’s face—something she had never seen anyone, let alone her family, do—and yet, it was difficult to tell whether those tears were signs of relief or ones of anguish.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Kyrah. “I never meant—”
Every bone, ligament, and joint in her body weakened. The lids of her eyes could do nothing but close, yet she found a minuscule bit of residual energy to keep them open for a few last moments. Through the slits of her vision, she watched her mother bury her face somewhere deep into her father’s chest. The sounds of heaving sobs filled the air as her mother unraveled. She heard her father’s gentle voice as he consoled her mother quietly, but those sounds paled in comparison to the noise of a four-year-old girl falling deeper into a sort of sleep where dreams never dare to go.
When she woke, she found that her arms and legs had been strapped to the walls. At first, instincts prevailed and she attempted to break free, but she quickly realized her efforts were futile.
“It’s for your own safety,” spoke a darkened figure in the doorway. His face was nothing more than a silhouette. His chin moved as he talked. “The others want to keep you locked away until more tests can be done, but your parents…”
The man chuckled half-heartedly.
“…they put up some kind of fight. That’s why you’re here. Restraints were the best of possible measures.”
He stepped into the room, close enough so that the silhouette vanished and, from it, emerged her teacher, Velc Tahjir. His cold eyes analyzed her with quick, brief scans.
“Who else knows what happened?” she asked. “I can only remember…pieces.”
She was sweating. A few droplets trickled from her forehead and into her eyes. She shook them away.
“Your parents,” Tahjir continued. “Me. That’s all.”
“Salo? Uncle Jeras? Aunt Shara?” Kyrah asked.
The names fell from her lips like air. She hadn’t even meant to say them with that kind of intention.
“They saw nothing. If you are smart—as I know you are—you will keep the incident to yourself. Tell no one.”
Kyrah processed what Velc had just said. If she could not trust her own aunt and uncle—people who have been a part of her life since birth—who could she trust?
Velc sat in a rickety wooden chair next to her restraints. She had to crane her neck in order to see him.
“There is a choice in everything. Each defines who we are and, more importantly, who we become. I am about to offer you one of those choices. This decision is not a simple yes or no. It is masked as a forced commitment. You must say yes to my offer, but you do have a choice—whether to accept your role in who you are or play out the rest of your life knowing you’ve surrendered more than just true potential,” said Velc.
It was a lot of information for a child to process, let alone comprehend.
“What are you asking of me?” Kyrah asked. “Is there something still inside of me?”
The childlike pouting of a Portizu student came rushing back to her voice as she asked her questions. Even she could hear the change in her demeanor. There was fear behind each word—fear she could not truly locate. Velc could hear it, too.
“In a way, yes,” spoke Velc, “but if you allow me to be your minjaro…”
His voice trailed off as her ears unfettered that word—minjaro.
“Velc…I—” she muttered, but was quickly interrupted.
“I know this is something you could not have expected, but you must accept my invitation. I am prepared for this, for you. I am prepared to make this work. A minjaro must not only understand his successor. He must be in complete harmony. Whether you decide to embrace the life, however—”
“I will,” said Kyrah. This time, it was her chance to interrupt. “Teacher, show me the ways of a true Warrior.”
Immediately, Velc stood from his chair. The monotonous lack-of-an-expression plastered to his face persisted unchangingly.
He unshackled her left wrist, then her right. She sat up, listening to each of her vertebrae crack their way out of misuse.
“You have very loving parents—more so than any other Portizu. They asked this of me and, because they are the closest of friends, almost blood of my own, I accepted. What lies ahead will not be easy. I will push you further than you have the ability to understand. I am the worst type of Teacher, Kyrah. I am the one that knows all.”
Kyrah nodded, knowing that all that came from her minjaro’s mouth was truth.
“You have Darkness within you. For as long as you wear that amulet,” he pointed to the one dangling from the chain around her neck, “you are protected, but it will grow. It will never stop fighting. There will be times when you want to surrender to it. I will not let you. Instead, you will learn to use it to your advantage. You will use it to overcome what other Portizu Warriors never will.”
Something twanged within her—quietly—but it was present.
“You can feel it, can you not?” he asked. “It lies within. It waits for you to falter.”
Kyrah nodded, but could not understand. She was terrified, so frightened that her legs had begun to shake under the thin weight of her child’s robes. She swam through a thousand meaningless thoughts pooling in her head, each pulling her under like some sort of riptide.
“Tell no one about what you have learned here today,” Velc warned. “Bad things will happen to your parents if you do.”
Unable to speak, she simply nodded.
“Good,” he continued. “Now get dressed. You must wear formal attire for your village ceremony. I have already announced that I have appointed a new student. In a few hours, all of the Portizu Tribes will know I have chosen the path of minjaro.”
He spoke nothing else. He simply walked to the door, opened it, and exited in silence.
The next time she would see him would be on stage in front of thousands of Portizu tribespeople.
The ceremony was as beautiful as any Portizu event could be. The crowds watched in anticipation as Velc placed the crown of the Eldervarn tree atop her head. They had cheered in excited approval.
