Darkness Beneath the Dying Light

by R. T. Donlon

  A cloaked Highlands guard came running through the open doors and abruptly stopped at the stairs just below the throne. He bent exceptionally low from the hips, maintaining eye contact through a kinked neck. It was an exaggerated minjori bow—one seemingly fit for a just king.

  “My Chief,” he barked a second time. “Should I usher our guest in? This is something you will want to hear.”

  Ultara nodded a single time, hesitantly.

  “I shall retrieve her right away.”

  Her, Ultara repeated in his mind. The messenger is a female?

  Several minutes of silence passed, then the light thud-thud-thud of bare feet against clay ground resonated through the room. Two Highland guards approached the throne with a worn, overtired girl clutched firmly between them, holding her up by the meat of her arms.

  “THIS IS KING ULTARA!” they grunted in synchronicity. “PAY HIM RESPECT.”

  The guards released her and, immediately, she wobbled drunkenly trying to regain her balance. Even in her over-fatigued state, she understood what the guards had truly meant when they barked their orders—bow or be forced to bow. She composed herself long enough to bend heavily at the hips—as far as she could muster. She could only hold the minjori bow for so long. Even as she reached the peak of the movement, she felt her knees buckling.

  “That’ll be enough,” said the Chieftain.

  His voice thundered through the breath of each syllable. Kyrah had never heard the Chief’s voice spoken so closely. She was present at the Highlands Speeches ten years ago when the election of the new Chieftain took place in the capital, but she had only been a little over eight years of age then. The words of a newly elected Chieftain do not always resonate with an eight-year-old girl, but older now and hearing his voice this time, an unexpected wave of surprise met her head-on.

  “Why do you approach me in such disarray, young one?” Ultara asked.

  There was no malice in his voice, just a stern bit of curiosity.

  “Chieftain, you will have to excuse me. I ran here from the Northern Lands in respect for the dead,” said Kyrah.

  At the mention of the word dead, the King perked slightly. His forearms never left the armrests of the wooden throne, his chin never fell, yet the slightest movement in his shoulders gave way to intrigue.

  “Tell me, Warrior,” Ultara continued. “Who has died?”

  “Velc Tahjir. He took his own life.”

  She told him the entire story from start to finish, confessing every word her teacher had spoken in those fateful last minutes on top of the plateau. The Chieftain remained calm, breathing against a heartbeat that wanted desperately to accelerate.

  Velc Tahjir? The famed Elite of the Northern Lands? he thought. My best friend.

  It had been years since the two had talked and, even then, the conversation had only consisted of politics and small talk. Ultara had felt the pangs of loss before—many times, in fact—but not like this. This felt different.

  “As is customary, a death as prominent as Tahjir’s must be reported immediately, so here I am,” said Kyrah.

  “And rightfully so,” Ultara responded. “Thank you.”

  When the Chief saw the anguish in Kyrah’s eyes, he probed further.

  “What is it?” he asked the girl. “Every detail is important in understanding why a warrior of this caliber would do such a thing.”

  Kyrah stirred slightly. Her eye contact did not waver.

  “Something was off before he died. He smiled, my Chief! I have never known Velc Tahjir to smile, let alone allow his emotions to take control of him like that.”

  “Emotions?” Ultara asked, prodding further. “Velc Tahjir was a master of taerji. Emotions were never a factor with him.”

  “I cannot undo what I have seen with my own eyes,” Kyrah continued. “I hope you can somehow believe what I am telling you. It makes no sense.”

  Ultara shifted in his seat, forcing the legs of the throne to shift under his muscled weight. Suddenly, he felt more like a fish out of water than the Chieftain of the Portizu Tribes, so he stood and stretched against the midmorning air, staring down at the exhausted girl at the edge of the stairs.

  “Can I be honest with you, Kyrah of the North?” he asked.

  Kyrah nodded.

  Ultara cleared his throat. He forced his voice into vivid clarity.

  “If you were the only witness to the death of Velc, how can I ever know for sure that you are telling me the truth? How do I know that you are not a murderer?”

  The question caught Kyrah off-guard. She had half-expected him to wonder exactly that, but to actually speak of it? To actually say out loud what they were both thinking? It sounded wrong. It felt accusatory.

  “I hope you do not think I would betray—” began Kyrah.

  The King lifted a hand, stopping her from continuing her ramble.

  “Of course not,” he said. “I don’t believe for one second that Velc died by your hands, but people will ask. If I don’t have an answer, they will call for blood. You are one of us, but the Portizu will hang your head from a stake if they feel you have killed one of our own. So, with that said, is there anything you are not telling me?”

  Kyrah thought past her weariness and remembered.

  “When he was dying, there was…a sort of…blue in his eyes. It was just a glimmer—like a flash of sunlight—but I know what I saw. It was blue—unnaturally blue.”

  Ultara stiffened. The air in his lungs disappeared.

  “They were like shards of glass,” she continued. “They looked like they were floating in the gray of his irises.”

  The rumors from the West, Ultara thought. He attempted to keep the shock hidden away in his chest, but the girl’s expression confessed that he had failed. If the Prophet is here…

  “Is there something I should know, Chieftain? Your expression is—”

  “It is none of your concern. Thank you for the report of your teacher’s End, but it is time for you to go. You have a long journey ahead of you today before the Great Hunt begins. You must return to your village.”

  The Highlands guards appeared on either side of her once again. Each firmly grasped one of her arms.

  “PAY YOUR RESPECTS,” they spoke simultaneously.

  She did.

  The exaggerated minjori bow stretched her tired muscles and offered hope that the run back to the Northern Lands would not be as bad as she had originally thought. Her father would be waiting for her return and the Great Hunt would commence shortly thereafter. It would be a long few days, but not enough to break her. She closed her eyes and thanked Turisic for that.

  The guards pulled her away, but she managed to turn once more and catch a final glimpse of the Chieftain, who hunched against his shoulders, deep in tense, unfaltering thought. She wanted to call out, but the foreboding way he had stared at her moments before increasingly filled her mind with doubt. He knew something—something he could not tell her, would not tell her. The leader of the Portizu Tribes—the head of the most guerrilla of warriors across the Great Range—had been left to flounder in the idea that his small pocket of the world could, indeed, be in grave, mortal danger.

  The guards dropped Kyrah at the entrance stairs, then dropped back into the shade of the palace and locked the giant wooden doors behind them. An older man wearing a similar warrior tunic to that of Chief Ultara met her at the edge of the palace perimeter. His hands folded in front of him, bulging strangely large forearm muscles against a pair of haughty shoulders.

  She knew this man by sight.

  “Kyrah Laeth…in the Highlands. Why am I not surprised?” he asked.

  Curala Shuth held many names—the Ruthless, the Dagger, the Awake—but none truly compared to the name he had received when he became Right Arm of the Portizu Chieftain—the Forgotten. At the peak of his prime, Shuth had been one of the most feared of all Portizu warriors. He intimidated even his own kind, but as time wore on, he lost the thirst for blood, the rush in pleasing Turisic,
the camaraderie of tribal bond. Instead, he weakened. He invested his livelihood in serving a political up-and-comer, a young man by the name of Al-We Ultara from the Flatlands that would one day become Chief. The Ultara election became Shuth’s prized possession. He worked harder than anyone behind the scenes, but watched his Chief take the credit. Some said if it wasn’t for Shuth, the Ultara reign would have crippled under the weight of Portizu pressure.

  “Shuth the Strong Arm,” she spoke respectfully. “I made my counsel with the Chieftain brief. I mean no trouble.”

  Curala paused as if to decipher whether Kyrah held truth in those words, then held a hand at his chest with his palm facing outward.

  “And yet I find you here, dawdling amongst the Highlands guards,” Curala persisted. “Your kind is not welcome here. Ever.”

  Kyrah scoffed, finally revealing a bit of pent up frustration.

  Dawdling? she thought. Had he even seen how the guards had thrown her to the ground as if she were a rag doll?

  Even still, she maintained complete composure.

  “By Portizu custom, I am obligated—” she continued, but Curala’s sudden blurt of words stopped her from continuing.

  “Custom or not, the insolence and disrespect your family has brought upon the Portizu name must be contained. We have bad blood between us,” he spoke. His arms shifted back to the fold of his chest in front of him. “You are not welcome here.”

  Kyrah had never been fond of Shuth, mainly due to the stories of her father’s quarrels with the Right Arm long ago. Both had worked alongside each other in hunts—Jae, being from the North, and Curala, being from the neighboring Jungles. It only made sense that they would collaborate in hunts among their joint lands. Both, unlike most of the common Portizu Warriors, had been acknowledged as top candidates for stature among the Portizu people and maintained impeccable reputations among their peers, yet—despite all of their combined achievements—they bickered violently about their starkly different Portizu beliefs.

  Curala—being of the Jungle—understood fear as a catalyst. Spending long, lonely nights above the jungle floor, swinging from hammocks among the canopy, snapping one eye open at the sound of a popping twig or rustling in the shrubs. Those things force the men and women of the Jungle into a state of constant attentiveness. If they lose sight of it, death would surely be lurking closely behind. In the Jungles, there is no time for god-praising, no time for celebration, no time for wavering. Warriors of the Jungle focused only on the kill itself.

  “To drain a predator of its lifeblood,” Curala had once said, “is both pure and primitive. It speaks more than any ritual or custom our Tribes will ever embrace. To kill is to gain strength. That is all. Our god is the kill.”

  This was not the way of the North. What Curala believed was blasphemous for all Portizu. Jae held true to custom and praised Turisic—the god of pain and suffering—so to appease him. That was the way of a true Portizu.

  Curala and Jae Laeth consequently challenged each other to countless violent duels on the matter of Portizu custom, each deeming their beliefs to be virtuous. They battled hour upon hour intermittently for years, only ceasing by way of familial truce struck by the villages involved. The Jungle Territories and the North had grown accustomed to tension by this time, avoiding each other when altogether possible. Night after night, her father would drag himself to the straw bed in the corner of his room and sleep uncomfortably as his wife—Kyrah’s mother—dressed the wounds with xylitonem berries and anesthetic.

  Kyrah never slept during those long nights, wondering if her father could really toe the line any closer between Xan and mortal sleep.

  Now, as he stood before her as if he owned the Highlands, she swallowed hard to keep herself from throwing a verbal jab of her own.

  “Whatever grudges you still hold for my father are pointless,” she said. “I’m here on official business. Portizu tradition decrees it. That is all.”

  In one of the fastest maneuvers Kyrah had ever seen, Curala Shuth rushed toward her, towering above her, only inches from her face. A single index finger pointed forcefully in her direction, parallel to her eyes.

  “Your father is a fake!” he spat.

  “My father,” she replied, “is a hero.”

  The muscles rippled through Shuth’s arms as rage bubbled through the pores of his face. For a second, Kyrah thought of nothing but the pain he could inflict if he threw a single punch.

  Do I even stand a chance against him in battle? she asked herself.

  “Look at you—fighting your father’s battles for him. Your bloodline makes me sick,” Shuth growled. “Everything about you—”

  He was beyond rage now, yet Kyrah stood tall against Shuth, straightening her shoulders and angling her eyes so that they matched perfectly with the deep brown irises of his.

  “Stop,” she said, mouth pinned into a straight line, “before this becomes something that it shouldn’t.”

  There was a hidden evil lurking somewhere behind his eyes. She noticed it almost instinctually.

  “Tell me,” Curala continued. “Did he watch your mother die?”

  That was all Kyrah needed to hear. Everything once present in the lines of her face had now changed. Curala had pressed the hidden switch in her mind.

  All she felt was pain.

  “It must be frustrating,” she groaned, almost in a whisper, “knowing you were once one of the greatest Portizu Warriors who had ever lived.” She smiled, showing a wide set of teeth. The insult dug deep into Curala’s face, like a dagger through his eye. “And now, all you are is,” she hesitated before saying the final word, knowing quite well, it could be the final straw between them, “forgotten.”

  Curala’s eyes darkened. Veins surfaced across his neck. He hadn’t wanted to, but rage now compelled him. A fist shot through the air. It connected with Kyrah’s jaw and sent her flailing to the ground. A batch of stars spread across her field of vision, splattering in shapes that rattled her brain. The speed of the strike surprised her more than anything. She hadn’t even had enough time to calculate the twist in his hips, the trajectory his arm took to reach her chin, and, most importantly, the way his feet shifted as he built momentum. Instead, it all seemed to blend together into one, fluid movement, nearly impossible to track.

  And the strength, she thought.

  Kyrah slowly picked herself up onto her hands and knees. The right hinge of her jaw popped, then fell back into place. She lifted a supporting hand to it and listened to its throb just under the skin of her temple. She closed her eyes, relishing in it, absorbing it, knowing it was her ticket to inflict some of her own damage.

  Curala scanned the courtyard for witnesses, then marched over to the girl. She had not yet rose to her feet and he knew he had hurt her. That meant nothing to a Portizu, however. Pain turns to strength, especially for those in the North.

  The two of them were alone. Curala bent one knee to the ground, dropping his giant frame so that Kyrah could see him clearly in the midmorning sunlight. He reached a violent hand to the back of her scalp and pulled a handful of hair backward so that it arched her neck, exposing her face, a bloody lip and an already swollen cheekbone.

  “I could kill you with one punch,” he grunted. “One.”

  “Then do it,” said Kyrah, grimacing. “I’m not scared of you. Give me to Xan. I welcome it.”

  Curala released the knot of hair from his fist and, immediately, Kyrah fell backward, breathing through the whistles of a closed mouth.

  “Too easy,” he said. “You’re not worth my time.”

  There was a moment of silence while Kyrah caught her breath, then as if a giant weight had been lifted from her, she jumped to her feet, holding her hands up in the weri attacking position.

  Hands horizontal with the eyes. Knees bent. Eyes focused on the opponent. Lock them. Do not move the vision. In order to defeat an enemy, you must give him your best attention. Give him everything, then take it away, she thought.

  T
he voice of her teacher rang true in her head. It stirred memories too fresh to dwell on, but also a bit of strange comfort.

  Curala descended deeper into a pool of fury.

  “Be careful,” he mumbled. “You have no idea what you are asking of me.”

  Kyrah refused to answer, so he attacked, connecting with a few swings, but not with the same force as he had before. This time, he had all he could do to avoid her swift kicks and jabs. He had not expected her to be this fluid in her movements, this skilled in her pattern recognition. In fact, it was impressive.

  Still, she is so young, Curala thought. How is she this strong?

  For a string of tense minutes, the two warriors dueled with only their fists and feet, craning against obscure angles and whipping limbs forward in hopes to somehow end it, but neither budged until Kyrah felt a surge of something strange in the center of her chest. She had felt it before—more times than she could count.

  Adrenaline? she thought.

  No. Adrenaline was more of a gradual build. This was sudden, even abrupt.

  Endurance? she asked again.

  No. This kind of strength towered higher than most.

  Then what could it be? she asked. The Darkness within her.

  The name of it did not matter, only that it had now begun to grow within her, inflating like a balloon and matching her breath with each of her exhales. It continued its expansion until she had harnessed the power of a thousand Portizu men. Clarity defined the edges of her eyesight. Curala was no longer something quizzically fast. Each punch the Right Arm threw sliced the air with the same amount of force as it had before, but Kyrah’s newfound presence trumped it all. In fact, in this state, Curala almost appeared weak.

  What’s happening to me? she asked herself.

  She was in a heightened, near-euphoric panic, but before she could answer, she had pinned Curala to the ground by his neck, pushing her knee temptingly against the bulge of his collarbone. With each increment of pressure, she felt the creak of the bone closer to snapping.

  “That’s enough!” he yelled. “That’s…” Cough. “Enough!”

  She wanted to do it. She wanted to hear it snap, but despite the glaring desire, she released him, shook through the strange power, and backed away into a slight daze. Curala stared at her through a screen of unexpected shock.