by R. T. Donlon
It was not for Reana to hear, but the girl leaned in closer to Kyrah. She had not meant to nearly confess her Dark secret to a girl so young, but for some reason, it seemed a moment to loosen the grip of her private thoughts. The voice of Velc suddenly flooded the framework of her brain.
You must be more careful. If the wrong people know, they will call for your execution. This is a secret you are obligated to keep.
“Perhaps this will help,” Reana spoke. “I learned this from my Teacher the other day in preparation of traji.”
Kyrah exhaled quietly. Reana suspected nothing. Instead, the girl ripped a piece of bread from the whole of a loaf and held it up to Kyrah.
“See this piece of bread? By itself, it is only a piece of grain, among other things. If I were to abandon it here—in the grass—the bread would serve no purpose. It would only harden and disintegrate against the weather, but if I use it for nourishment, it becomes a part of its greater whole—an entity within an entity. The energy of it stays the same, but it has taken an entirely different form. Perhaps what you seek is the new form that has adapted to its whole.”
“I wish it were that easy,” Kyrah said.
“Traji is a lifelong journey. You should not feel bad that your control is lacking. We must always strive for better. If you do that, you should feel no frustration,” Reana spoke.
Kyrah nodded to accept, although traji was the last of her concerns. Reana held out an open hand.
“If it will help,” the girl spoke. “We can meditate to together.”
Kyrah reached for the amulet. There was still hesitancy in her eyes.
“We don’t have to,” Reana continued, withdrawing her hand. “No one trusts me. I have the eyes, but I am too young to start training. The others ignore me. You, though…you are different. You talk to me like a…a friend.”
The words struck Kyrah with an odd sort of energy—a blend of pity, guilt, and humility. There was an honest sense of gentility in Reana’s demeanor that struck Kyrah more than she thought it would.
“Hold to your truths,” Kyrah said. “Listen to your Teacher. He is training you well.”
Kyrah grabbed Reana’s hand and held it tight.
“Traji,” Kyrah whispered.
“Yes,” Reana whispered. “Traji.”
Kyrah waited.
Her mother’s voice rang through her head constantly like a ringing bell.
We will return as we always do, it said, and the Darkness will be driven away from here for the final time. I am certain of it.
She tried to find confidence in these words, tried to find strength in the way her mother had focused her energy to comforting her daughter’s constant worrying, but this excursion felt different. The Shadows had grown more powerful. The attar blades had nearly been worn to nothing. Doubt crept into her like moths drawn to light and, in the midst of it all, in the midst of her deepest traji, she could not shake the idea that she had let her parents down by withdrawing from the Shadow battle.
They wanted you to stay, she convinced herself. You will see. All will be right when they return.
“Help!” someone screamed from far into the depths of the Northern Jungle.
It was so distant that, at first, she was certain the word had come from her own thoughts, but again she heard it, and then again, until the sound of heavy breathing broke the traji calm from her mind and three sweaty figures emerged from the tree line.
The burning communal fire emanated a horrible singed aura. Flames stretched into the night sky, sending billowing smoke dispersing somewhere into the ever-blackening sky. Periodic gusts took away most of the sizzling firewood smell, but Kyrah could still smell the most minor of its tones, like the remnants of hidden memories unlocked by a single inhale. She sat cross-legged and motionless for another few moments, listening to the rustle of bodies approaching from the trees.
Jeras was the first to come into view. His cloak had been shredded. Several deep slashes dug vertically from his hip to his abdomen, dripping lines of deep red-black blood, dried in smears across his skin. His hands were shaking at his sides, reaching for something—or someone—not there. He had dropped himself into taerji, but even with its help, there was an amplified sense of desperation in his bloodshot eyes. The remnants of an attar sword had been sheathed at his hip, but the majority of the blade had been stripped, leaving only a chipped piece of rock attached to the hilt.
Kyrah rose to her feet. She watched her uncle slowly descend to his knees. His tunic fluttered in the growing wind.
“Kyrah,” he whispered. “Kyrah…”
Velc had joined Kyrah’s side. His strong hand clutched at her shoulder. She wanted to ask why he had done such an intimate thing. His grasp kept her upright, balanced against her numbing legs. She could feel it—fear. She could sense the nerves it brought, the constant, feverish beating of her heart.
“They have returned!” a villager said. “The Warriors have returned! The Shadows are vanquished!”
There was a roar from the accumulating village crowd, then silence.
“Kyrah,” her uncle continued to whisper. “Kyrah…”
Her father emerged, stumbling hard against his own footing. He fell to his hands and knees and wept in the grass..
“Father?” Kyrah asked. “What’s wrong?”
He had ripped himself from taerji some time ago and had allowed his emotions to flood into him.
“Taris,” Jae whispered. His call crescendoed into a scream. “My wife! Where is she?”
Kyrah understood. She understood it all.
Her father’s shaken eyes drifted downward to the pair of his own trembling, open hands. Blood dripped from his fingers.
“I tried,” Jae said. “I tried to save her. I couldn’t.”
Her legs pushed forward, but Velc’s strong grasp on her shoulder kept her stationary.
“He must grieve,” Velc whispered. “You will, too.”
“I tried to save her!” her father wailed. “She isn’t dead. She’s not!”
Dead.
“Where is she?” Kyrah asked. Her eyes bobbed from the fire’s shimmering light to her father’s collapsing frame. “WHERE IS SHE?”
No emotion weathered the canyons of Velc’s worn face.
“Down the path with Salo,” he whispered. “She’s treating her with the medicine of the Dead.”
Kyrah broke through Velc’s strength and bolted for the jungle.
Her father, paying no attention, wept loudly into the stalks of grass. He pressed his bloody hands to his face while the villagers watched, cringing in too much discomfort to look away.
“I tried to save her!” he screamed. “I tried! She’s not dead! She’s not dead!”
Strings of saliva pushed from his mouth. Beyond panic now, beyond raw emotion, Jae had reached the internal torment of pure pain. He had reached the point of total chaos, the vulnerability of losing the cornerstone that held the framework of his entire life together. He had allowed his wife to die. He had allowed it to happen. He had let himself fall into the pit.
“Kyrah, no!” Jeras yelled, but the villagers, the Teacher, the uncle and aunt, and now, the widower watched as she had disappeared into the jungle.
She could hear her father screaming even as she crossed the jungle line. With every word, her broken heart shattered a little more.
“I tried to save her! I tried to save her!” he screamed. “She can’t be dead! I tried—”
She wanted nothing more than to cry, but the Portizu shell of her training held those emotions in fragile check. Velc, it seemed, had taught her well.
When you sense you are losing control, she heard her Teacher’s voice saying, enter tansij. Emotions will fade and you will think clearly, that is, for as long as you can maintain focus. Soon you will know taerji, but until then—
She did as Velc instructed and dropped into tansij. Her emotions, like a flood of pent-up water, melted away.
The soft sounds of Salo Geru’s voice traveled th
rough the air. Kyrah could only decipher a few words, but she recognized them almost immediately.
“May Xan take you to your resting place. May Turisic guide you home…”
Salo repeated the phrase over and over, holding her hands only inches from the surface of her mother’s face. Kyrah reached the entrance of a pond and, without prompting, calmed her breathing. The beating of her heart slowed. Salo crouched within a blooming bed of ferns, her eyes concentrating on the body below her.
“May Xan take you to your resting place. May Turisic—Kyrah?”
Salo stood, holding out her hands to signal Kyrah to stop.
“You cannot be here,” Salo continued, “not yet.”
“Is that—” Kyrah whispered, “my mother?”
She almost did not recognize her own voice as it left her throat.
Salo swallowed hard.
“Please, Salo,” Kyrah begged. “Tell me. Is that her?”
She crept only steps away now.
“You do not have to see her like this,” said Salo. “Seeing her will only…”
But Kyrah had already pulled back the bed of ferns to expose her mother’s pale, lifeless face. Seeing her porcelain cheekbones, the closed but swollen eyes, the stern Warrior cut of her mouth, all but shattered her tansij meditative state. Nothing in the world could have saved her from the emotional deluge of that moment. Tears pushed through her eyes. She collapsed to her knees and ran a gentle, shaking hand down her mother’s jaw.
“Mother,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
The sound of kicked-up dust and barefoot soles grew loud. The others had followed her—her uncle, aunt, Velc.
“Wait for me,” Kyrah whispered, “in Xan’s place. I will find you there. One day I will find you.”
She could smell her uncle’s piney scent from behind her.
“There is nothing you can say,” she said to him. “My mother is dead. Xan has taken her.”
“No,” Jeras whispered, crouching behind her. “This was not Xan. This was the Darkness. It must pay for what it has done. It must pay for what lies inside you and what it has taken.”
A wave of nausea rose into the base of her throat. She suddenly felt as though she could not breathe.
“How?” Kyrah began. “How could this have happened?”
Jeras fingered a fern with downcast eyes.
“There were hundreds of them, Kyrah. We expected to fight more than before, but not that many. At first we kept ourselves hidden. We had not found the leak in the Wall and we knew the Shadows cannot climb, so how in Turisic’s name were so many of them finding their way to our side of the Chasm? It just did not make sense. We figured that if we cut their numbers off at the source, then we would avoid a similar problem later. That was our first priority.
“When we reached the Tension Field limits, we found the problem. The pillar at the easternmost base of the Wall had been chipped away enough for an entrance for the Shadows. Your father thought it would be impossible to seal the opening shut during the night hours, but your mother…your mother wanted it finished quickly.
“So she devised a plan to end it once and for all. Your father hated the idea—thought it was foolish—but your mother wanted to hear none of his refusals. He tried desperately to get her to reconsider, but your mother…she kept true to her plan in true Taris Laeth fashion.”
“What was the plan?” Kyrah asked.
She listened with her mother in her arms.
“A diversion,” her uncle continued. “Your Aunt Shara and I would deflect the Shadows to the easternmost front and hold them there for as long as we could. Your father would push through the tunnel with the last of his attar and return before your mother closed off the lip of land for good. It was plausible enough. I thought for sure it was doable, but I had no idea, Kyrah. I had no idea this would happen.”
There was a long, undisturbed silence. Kyrah could sense the guilt seep from her uncle’s words.
“It took your Aunt Shara and I a few hours to funnel the Shadows away from the pillar and into the eastern set of fields, but we did. It worked. We battled the Shadows there with everything we had, but we lost a pack of them. They had seen the light of your father’s attar sword and ventured back around to the Wall. Your parents hadn’t accounted for that and, before I could call out, the Shadows had already—”
“Stop,” Kyrah spoke.
She did not want to hear any more. A fresh set of tears dripped from her eyes to the pallid skin of her mother below.
“I am so sorry, Kyrah,” her uncle spoke. “Your mother…she will forever be missed.”
The Darkness within her pulsed. It felt the anger boiling at her uncle’s apology. It sensed the hate in her heart.
Release me, it whispered. Let me go.
She thought about it. She felt as betrayed as she ever had before—by her mother, by her father, by her complicit aunt and uncle. She could release the power within her and erase them all for good. But what good would that do? Velc had taught her to know the transcendence of death.
“I should have been there,” said Kyrah. “I should have stopped this.”
“Nothing would have saved her,” Jeras spoke calmly, “and nothing will bring her back, but she died in honor. She loved you more than words.”
Another wave of anger flooded her chest.
Release me, she heard the Darkness within her call. Let me go.
“Leave me alone,” said Kyrah. “Please.”
Jeras rose from his crouch and, silently, began walking away.
“Your father needs you,” he said. “Without your mother, you are all he has left. You saw him. He can never be the same.”
“Leave,” Kyrah barked. “Before I make you.”
“Jeras, we must listen to her. Let her grieve,” Velc said.
Her uncle did as she asked without another word. The others did the same, but Velc remained, unmoving.
“Your mother was a fine Warrior. I will miss her. She would want you, above all else, to fulfill your destiny. You know this to be true. When you return, I will be waiting to continue your training.”
Kyrah held her mother closer to her chest, rocking slightly against the ferns.
“Do not return until you are ready to focus,” Velc continued.
And, with that, he vanished into the jungle.
She spent the night next to her mother’s body, staring deeply at her settling face, her drooping mouth. She prayed to Turisic over and over in hopes for contact. Silence was all she found.
At dawn, she carried her mother’s body back to the village. She arrived while most slept. Only her aunt met her at the gates. Crying had swollen Kyrah’s eyes, but Shara took no notice of them, only the body in her niece’s arms.
“It is time to let her go,” said her aunt. “We must give her the proper rituals.”
Shara reached for the body, but Kyrah withdrew.
“Please,” Shara continued. “It’s time.”
It took several moments before Kyrah allowed herself to part with her mother, but her aunt embraced her as they exchanged the body.
“All will continue,” she whispered, “and one day, you will see her again in Xan’s place.”
Somehow, these words comforted her enough to breathe.
“Where is—?” Kyrah asked, but the words caught in her throat.
“Your father is with Velc,” her aunt said. “It will be weeks before he will break taerji. Can you handle his village work? The village needs someone—”
Kyrah heard her aunt’s words, but chose to shrug them away.
“Kyrah?” her aunt repeated. “Can you?”
Kyrah nodded only to appease her aunt, then walked away toward the commune in the center of the village square. She sat there erect with her legs crossed, drifting in and out of tansij. She thought of her father in taerji, leaving nothing in him but empty thoughts. It would be the only way to forget the woman he had cherished for so many years, but he would have to return
eventually and face his fears of life without her.
Velc will help him through, Kyrah thought. Velc will keep him from losing himself.
But her own tansij seemed to be failing her. Her mind had grown too strong for it. Amidst the thoughts of her father, she could not stop the tears from falling.
Dawn turned to day, then shifted into evening. The villagers circled her. Her mother, now dressed entirely in black, returned in Shara’s arms. She placed the body delicately on the pyre of the communal fire pit.
The villagers waited.
Jae Laeth, escorted by Velc, joined them at the front of the crowd. His eyes had glazed over. The strong Warrior jaw had tightened. Skin had drawn pale and almost opaque, weakened by trauma. Kyrah stood from her cross-legged position, but dared not join her father at the edge of the pit.
“Tonight,” Velc began. “We say goodbye. The rituals have been completed. Turisic has released Taris from her Portizu burden and offered her being to Xan. She has found her place in another world.”
Jae watched the body as if waiting for it to move.
“Jae will not be speaking tonight. He must remain in taerji, away from here. The pain he feels will only make him stronger in the end, but I ask that another of the Laeth bloodline offer some words of warmth.”
Velc held an outstretched hand in the direction of Kyrah, who awoke from her strained sense of tansij. She scanned the pyre and the villagers beyond.
What am I supposed to say? she thought. What do they want?
Kyrah cleared her throat, stood tall, and closed her swollen eyes.
“Tonight I have said the most difficult goodbye I could have ever imagined. How can I ever forget tonight—how I felt, my father—” she paused, took a moment to breathe, then continued. “However, I am still Velc Tahjir’s apprentice and, one day, I will be your Warrior Elite. For that, I must cease my grieving, accept my life’s fate, and press onward into a greater future—one that my mother saw very clearly, one she needs me to see through. Her memory will live on in me as it will with all of our people.”
Did she believe her own words? Could she believe such a contrived speech? The villagers obviously believed it, bowing their eyes, nodding through the sadness of their own distant loss.
