by R. T. Donlon
She felt the comforts of home as she caught the eyes of her father from across the fire pits. For a single fleeting moment, a weary flicker of joy passed through them. She knew what this meant. She had known him for too long not to. He motioned to her with a nod of his head and, almost reflexively, her legs pulled her toward him as they had for so many years before.
“What is it, Father?” she asked.
The question almost sounded weak as if she were once again a child sitting daintily on his lap.
“They will be announcing it very soon, Kyrah,” he said, allowing another flicker of a smile to stretch the corner of his mouth.
“Announce what?” she asked.
When she was met with only silence and a warm stare, she asked again, but still, she found no answer she deemed convincing.
“I cannot be the one who brings this news upon your ears, my girl. You are my blood, but you are much more than that to this Tribe. Allow for Jeras to tell you.”
Her heart suddenly thrashed against her chest. Her fingers instinctively lifted to the base of the amulet, running the pads of her fingers against the rough rock of its core. It had always been a nervous habit to do such a thing, but in the wake of a day filled with tragedy and tension, it seemed more of a comfort than a nuisance, so she allowed herself to relish in the motion, taking everything about it and bundling her thoughts into a ball of unwanted energy.
“Uncle Jeras will tell me? Does that mean—”
But before she could continue her rambling thoughts, Jeras Laeth stepped into the ring of flailing dancers, raised his arms high above his shoulders, and unveiled a pair of stern eyes from the hood only worn by the Northern Territories Tribal Chief. Circling the whites of his eyes were smeared circles of deep-red animal blood. It did not shimmer in the licks of flame that surrounded him, but instead sat heavily against his mocha skin. Small, dripping tributaries had formed at his cheekbones where the blood had pooled thickest. Her uncle had transformed into something straight from a nightmare, but gravity had not matched the weight of the circles and had stabilized the smears enough to keep them contained and mostly pristine.
Kyrah’s uncle stood fierce against the rising bonfire flames, peering out over the oranges and golds to the anxious and excited faces of his people.
“Warriors of the North,” he began. “Tonight is the commencement of something mysterious—a tradition fused with belief in higher powers, communal offerings, and celebration—but it is something more than that, as well. It is an initiation for those who dare to take leadership in our villages. One must show great valiance in the Hunt in order to prove worth. All Portizu know this as truth.”
The crowd of men, women, and children roared, fists raised in the air as a call of unity. People stared intently at their Tribal Chief in awe with undying respect.
“Tonight, we bring forth one of our Land’s fiercest Warriors, meant to lead the Portizu people into a time of resilience and peace. She will prove herself in the Hunt and return with nourishment so plentiful that the North will bask in her harvest for years! Turisic looks upon you favorably, young Warrior.”
The building anticipation of the crowd nearly sent Kyrah into fits. She had never known her people to be so excitable, but tonight, on the eve of the Great Hunt, emotions ran wild, allowed only by Portizu tradition.
“Kyrah Laeth! Join me here in the fires!”
The crowd roared even louder now, pushing her through a sea of arms and shoulders until her feet could carry her farther into the circle of flames. Jeras peered down at her from his side, allowing only his eyes to smile. On his tongue, the announcement loomed, sending her heart into another series of flutters, rising up into her throat and down into her stomach.
Jeras bowed into marjhi—not yet significant enough for minjori, but far surpassing the common perception of murduri.
“You have waited long enough,” Jeras continued. “Tonight, you shall lead a Pack of your choosing and return with the fruits of Turisic. You shall return with the pride of your people!”
Another explosive bellow from the crowd broke so loudly that Kyrah fought away a subtle uncomfortable grimace.
“Tonight, you shall take one step closer to the throne of Warrior Elite.”
At the mention of the name, Jeras peered across the horizon of faces. He scanned several more times before turning to Kyrah to whisper in her ear.
“Where is your Teacher? Where is Velc?”
The sound of her Teacher’s name twisted something within her. The lungs that had just moments ago housed a batch of heart-raking shallow breaths now squeezed down into her stomach, producing only a strengthening bout of nauseous waves. Jeras noticed the sudden change in Kyrah, but did not ask anything more. He only returned to his erect, standing posture and, like a true leader, faced his people without a hint of distress written on his face.
“People of the Northern Lands,” he addressed. “Enjoy your festivities. In one hour, we will proceed to the jungle for the sendoff. Send your thoughts and prayers upward. Send them to Turisic!”
The untuned drums once again began their constant thrum while the people dispersed into clusters of dancing bodies. The fires seemed to burn brighter, fueled by dozens of bundled Eldervarn stacks thrown into the pits intermittently. The ring of five pits created a sort of cyclonic plume of smoke as it burned methodically, dispersing somewhere into the depth of the cold night sky.
“We must talk,” whispered Kyrah to her uncle, gently pulling him away from the crowds. “Now.”
And so Kyrah told her uncle the entirety of the story, holding nothing back from memory, yet Jeras seemed as insatiably confused—equally as panicked—as his niece. The blood smears that circled his eyes had now started to stretch downward into a newfound perspiration forming across his brow. They had found privacy in the Laeth household—dark but quiet.
“I wish I would have known,” said Jeras, rubbing his hand through the stubbled beard at his chin. “Sending you out to the jungle without Velc’s guidance is…is…” he stumbled through the next thought, “risky.”
“I’m ready,” said Kyrah. “He has prepared me as best as he could.”
A certain sort of intensity broke the plain of eye contact between them. Kyrah fingered the amulet once again.
“But you haven’t finished your training. Your Hunt is early as it is. Velc had assured me—”
“Uncle,” Kyrah interrupted. “There will be no more trainings. There is no more Velc. I’m ready. I have to be.”
An astounding silence blanketed the space between them. Jeras walked to the corner of the nearest hut, bowing his head in concentrated thought. His acceptance of these events meant that Kyrah had reached the approval of the highest tribal means and had gained the utmost trust of her people of the Northern Lands. If Jeras should accept, she would be elected as the nominee for the next position of Warrior Elite.
“You are ready?” Jeras questioned.
Anxiety riddled her uncle’s voice, not so outwardly, but through the way his shoulders tensed against the bulge of his neck.
“I am,” she said. “Allow me do this. Allow me to guide the Hunt.”
He stared into her almond eyes for a few, last moments, bringing a gentle calloused hand to the right side of her chin.
“You must do one thing for me before venturing into the jungle,” he said. “You must honor Velc in the best way you can. Show your people you have nothing to hide. Show them you have completed your training.”
Kyrah nodded solemnly, although she did not know how.
“I will.”
From the dimly-lit doorway, Kyrah heard the scratching of door fronds against the packed dirt of a ground foundation. Her father entered the room with eyes wide.
“You sensed something, didn’t you?” Kyrah asked.
Her father entered cautiously, approached Jeras and his daughter with respect, but also with concern.
“This is an unusual meeting, especially on the Eve,” Jae explained.
Jeras shook his head slightly.
“We live in unusual times,” he said.
“Should I not have come? Should I have kept to myself?” her father asked.
“Don’t be irrational,” Kyrah scoffed. “You are my father. You will know everything I know.”
Jeras turned away from the others, inwardly reverting back into heated concentration. He pulled the robe over his head, retreating into a sort of loosely-fitting cocoon.
“A Tribal Chief must not be present for news such as this. You will not take this well, my friend, so I will focus my thoughts into tansij. Do not disturb me until you have overcome your emotions.”
All tension washed from the lines of Jeras’ frame. Suddenly, he appeared as relaxed as a flower in the wind. The hood covered his face, shielding his vision, but Kyrah knew that he had already reached the immovable state—a place void of the real, void of the material.
“Father,” Kyrah said. She noticed his eyes first, then the tiniest tremors in his hands. He was preparing himself for the worst. “There is no other way to put this, so I will simply say it. Velc Tahjir is dead.”
Jae managed to maintain steady eyes, glossed with a thin coat of newfound moisture. He would not allow himself to cry in the presence of his daughter—never should a Warrior do such a thing, let alone a father—but she knew he was weeping inwardly, torn into a million pieces of rage and silent sadness.
“You’ve told me so many stories. He has done so much for our family,” Kyrah continued. “I know how close you were with him.”
The silence of the moment stretched into a series, then beyond into minutes. She had all but surrendered to the idea that her father would remain mute, consumed in an incomparable sorrow, but he lifted his eyes as she was about to leave him and held out a strong hand.
“Wait,” he whispered. “Were you there? When it happened?”
Kyrah nodded hesitantly.
“Tell me,” he continued. “I need to know. Please.”
So Kyrah told him everything as she had Jeras—about Velc’s strange quality that morning, about all that he had said before taking his own life, about the blue flecks in his eyes. She had expected some sort of shocked appearance to wash over her father then, but only confusion and frustration filled the shape of his face.
“I immediately ran to the Highlands and told all to the Chieftain. I know the custom, father, so I knew what needed to be done. When I told Chief Ultara about the blue in his eyes, he shifted. He knew something, Father. He knew something he did not want to tell me.”
He had seen this kind of suspicion in his daughter’s eyes before, but never this strong.
“Perhaps he could not tell you,” said Jae.”
“There is always a choice. If he knows something and Velc was involved, as his apprentice I deserve to know,” she explained. “I am required by Portizu law to uphold his unfinished work.”
Jae only nodded. It was all he could do, even if it was half-assuredly.
“There is much more to this situation than following the law of our people, Kyrah. He may have been shielding you from something worse. He may not have wanted you to know.”
Kyrah folded her arms against her chest. Her father had come to know this as a signal of defiance, stubbornness.
“Velc never lied to me. He never kept me from anything. He understood that, if I was to take up the mantle of Warrior Elite one day, I must know all there is to know about the Warrior’s life. Whatever the Chief is hiding would have been included.”
Her father nodded again, but this time, forced his mouth into a thin uncomfortable line. He continued.
“Yes. Velc understood all there was to know about the Warrior Elite, but he did have his secrets. He swore he had told us everything about his journeys deep into the southern mountains—before we had formed our group to protect the Wall—but I know he had lied to all of us. I knew he had always been hiding something.”
She could sense her father trailing off into a stream of his own thoughts, so as she had been taught, she reeled him back with more questions.
“How could you have known?” she asked.
Her father dropped his eyes, relaxing the frustration mounting in the creases of his forehead.
“I’m not proud of this,” he explained, “but I did something…” He turned away from her with his right hand against his cheek. “…and it was necessary.”
Kyrah listened with hyper-focus now, tilting her head with such slight that the movement almost manifested as a twitch.
“Did what?” she asked.
“Velc had returned from the South with only a few bundles of the attar metal,” her father explained, “but he explained to us that it was all that he could find. We had never seen anything like the attar before. It wasn’t strong. In fact, it disintegrated every time we used it. Somehow we managed to preserve a few chunks in the shape of swords and…in a few other forms, as well.”
Her father’s eyes traveled to her sternum where the amulet rested against the tension of her necklace. Immediately, she ran her hand across its surface, feeling its pockets and rough divots.
“And everyone was okay with just giving this to me? Even when you were running out?” she asked.
Her father nodded.
“The metal, Velc explained, came from the lost city of Attara. He didn’t offer much more than that about the actual city, but he did tell us that it no longer existed. It had been decimated some time ago.”
Kyrah had shifted into a new train of vivid memory. She remembered the fight in the fields of the Wall, the giant Shadow hovering over her with its outstretched claw. She remembered the eerie glow of red and the unbearable pain it brought as the Shadow reached closer to her chest.
“The amulet shields me from Darkness, doesn’t it? All kinds of Darkness,” she asked. Somehow, she had never asked her father this question. “This is why you and…mother…gave it to me when I was a child.”
She hesitated as she spoke the word mother, knowing that it would hurt her father more than it would hurt her.
“You always possessed more curiosity than most children at that age. We were afraid that. If we hadn’t taken precautions, you would have found too much trouble for us to handle. It turns out we were correct on that front.”
“And that’s why—” Kyrah hesitated and shifted her gaze quickly to that of her uncle, still immersed in his meditative state. After all of those years, the secret of the Darkness within her had not crossed his ears. “The amulet keeps it from taking me over.”
Her father nodded hesitantly.
“The amulet can do many things. It shields you from the Shadows, it keeps you from changing, but it also holds powers that we may never see. The attar metal only works in the midst of certain people. You were lucky to be one of them,” he said. He cleared his throat to continue, “But I think Velc trained you well enough to understand why the Darkness within you is not just a curse, but a blessing. Turisic chose you to carry this burden. No one else.” Jae, like Kyrah, turned to Jeras’ still body, hunched quietly on itself. “We don’t have much longer. He’ll wake any time now, so listen carefully.”
“No one doubted that Velc had actually found the lost city of Attara. He had spent most of his adult life searching for it, actually. He drew maps. He traveled the Great Range and talked with many kinds of people. He even traveled to the Light Mountain, despite the incompetence he felt for them. The truth is—Velc’s ambition was not the problem. It was the change in him when he returned.
“We wanted to know where he had been when he returned with the metal. We were so excited to hear the stories. He told us about the underground buildings, the grand ceiling of rock and hanging stalactites eight feet tall. He also told us of the decimation the city had undergone. Something serious had happened down there—giant troughs of dirty water flowed through tears in the ground. One chasm over a mile wide seemed to have been ripped from the hands of an angry giant, Velc had said. The emanating glow of orange-red
underground molten embers shimmering vaguely as a backdrop. He described it so vividly that we sat listening to him for hours.
“But I will never forget the look in his eyes as he told us those stories. It was as if he had no choice but to lie to us. I remember watching the others, waiting to see if they felt the same way, but they were all too wrapped up in Velc’s storytelling to notice. Even your mother thought I was crazy, but I wasn’t, Kyrah…and I wanted to prove it.”
Kyrah tried desperately to absorb this information as her father told her, but it almost felt too traumatizing, too surreal.
“So I left the Portizu Lands without permission. I should have asked Ultara, Velc, even Jeras, but even your uncle would have never allowed me to do what I did. I could not risk the consequences of treason if I was caught. I, too, found the city of Attara, but what I came upon was nothing like what Velc had described. What I saw was…”
Jeras jarred from his meditative sleep with a violent cough, inhaling a deep bout of air. He lifted his eyes to the Laeths, content enough to be back in the real.
“I hope you have heard what you needed to hear. There is no more time. The Great Hunt is about to begin.”
DARK CONTROL (BEFORE)
“Take it off,” he said.
Kyrah widened her eyes and, immediately, her fingers reached for the amulet dangling from her neck.
“Take off the amulet or I will do it for you,” Velc pushed.
In all of her years of formal training, her teacher had never asked her to do such a dangerous thing. This could mean her End.
Am I ready? she thought.
She clasped the rough edges of the object in a bundled fist and pulled it over her head. She had gripped it so tightly between her fingers that Velc thought that she may have accidentally ground the precious metal into a fine powder.
“Give it to me,” he commanded with an outstretched hand.
I have always trusted him, she thought. Why should I stop now?
