Servants and Followers
The Legends of Arria: Volume 2
Courtney Bowen
Smashwords Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
events, and places either are the products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.
SERVANTS AND FOLLOWERS
Copyright © 2014 by Courtney Bowen
Cover image: Woman on the stairs by Caspar David Friedrich
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced without written permission
from the author, except in cases of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First edition: 2014
For those I do not know and those I do
Who would take a look inside and see
What they might find. Many thanks.
Table of Contents
Part One: Coe Anji
Chapter 1: Day and Night
Chapter 2: Fato
Chapter 3: Walking Duck Inn
Chapter 4: The Warehouse
Chapter 5: In Between
Chapter 6: Joining
Chapter 7: The Story
Part Two: Coe Aela
Chapter 8: Welcome
Chapter 9: Night Encounters
Chapter 10: Harmless
Chapter 11: Gnat’s Run
Chapter 12: Man of Principle
Chapter 13: Revelations
Part Three: Coe Wina
Chapter 14: Together Until the End
Chapter 15: Fire on the Mountain
Chapter 16: Cacophony Chaos
Chapter 17: A Purpose
Part One: Coe Anji
Chapter 1: Day and Night
What do we lose when someone leaves us?
Do we lose a piece of ourselves, gone forever?
Do we lose our sense of place, our focus on others?
Or do we lose nothing but the person’s presence?
--Loss, Mirandor
In a quiet room, which once had been full of laughter, Habala sat down upon the empty bed and opened up a book entitled Legends of Arria, from which she read:
Night and Day Origin Myth:
Day and Night first appeared as two birds: white and black, dark and bright, though there was nothing to tell them apart. They were the same to each other when there was no light in the world, no sun, and no moon to reflect the sun in darkness. There was not even darkness either, just mist, when darkness could not exist without the sun and light to detract it. Day and Night could not see each other in the mist, nor could they see the ocean and the sky that surrounded them, as these were the only places that existed in the world when the land had not risen yet. But they could feel, and Day and Night flew through the sky side-by-side when they could sense one another, and knew that the other one existed. They loved each other for that reason.
They dived down into the ocean, side-by-side with each other, to fish out what little remnants they could find to eat. One day, Day or Night went down first to catch whatever was beneath them. For whatever reason, the other did not wait for its partner, did not realize that its partner had not followed it forward, and so remained in the sky and continued flying. By that point, they were lost to each other.
They could not sense where the other had gone, for though their senses might have been accurate enough to catch traces of each other, they kept on flying as rapidly or as slowly as they had before they lost each other. They flew constantly, and could not stop and rest now to search for each other from afar, and to think about what to do next, because there was nowhere to stop and rest without land, nor any light to guide them.
Day and Night fell and rose in search of one another, went left or right, went backwards or forwards, and never met. Sometimes they missed each other by a few inches or a few seconds, going past one another in opposite directions as, whenever they did sense where the other one had been before, they went straight there and did not pause to wait for the other one to catch up with them eventually. Day went down to look for Night, and Night came up to look for Day, both at the same time.
The distance grew between them as their constant flight meant they had to keep going in whatever direction they took, and the opposite direction was eventually the one they took. Soon, they were at opposite ends of the world, the furthest they could ever be from one another.
Finally, they turned toward one another, they sensed each other across the vast distance of sky, and sped toward one another at the point where the water met the clouds on the horizon. Eager to be reunited after their long separation, they did not slow down, and Day and Night collided in mid-air. The impact of their mating shook the sky, and the sun and the moon spiraled forth from their collision. The stars and raindrops pattered down like semen from their embrace, and an egg was dropped from one of them that would become the seed of the world.
Light came into the world from the sun, shining through the grayness of the mist, which was dissipating for the first time. The ocean and the sky were shown, with all of the colors now visible as the sun started to set, and then the sun rose for the first time with darkness in between. The magnificence of the sunset and the sunrise were in honor of Day and Night.
Day and Night saw each other for the first time as light came into the world, and marveled at each other and the differences in between, for Day was white and black with different shades of color in between, and Night was dark and bright with different shades of light in between.
However, Day and Night had been cracked with this union. For though they were joined end to end, with the sun setting or rising in between them, they were separated by the barrier of the sun and the differences between them. They could not coincide anymore without an eclipse of the sun, or some other strange phenomenon in the sky.
So they parted as much as they were able, with the sun shining bright and the darkness in between, yet they longed to join together again, as they had before the sun, without anything in between them. So they continued, Day and Night meeting each other with each sunrise and sunset, Day mimicking Night, and Night mimicking Day as much as they were able to, but it was never the same as it had been before light came into the world.
Habala sighed to herself before she closed the Legends of Arria book that had belonged to Basha and stored it back on the shelf beside the bed that he and Oaka had shared for so many years, ever since she and her husband had first started tucking them in at night. Basha would not want to have this book misplaced. She hoped that Basha and Oaka might come back here, to sleep in this bed and read from this book again. She shook her head. It had been several days since they had left, but still she could not shake off the feeling that they might come walking in through the front door of the inn, laughing at the prank they had just pulled, how they had just spent several days camping out in the woods a few miles outside of town, with Sir Nickleby watching out for them, instead of lost out there in the world, with Sir Nickleby as their only guide.
She trusted the knight just as much as her husband did, when he was a good man who had watched out for her sons while training them, but he was just getting so old. Would he always be there to watch out for them? Would he always be able to protect them? Would he trust them too much, thinking that her sons were able to fend for themselves without him? She knew that he was a good man, but she did not trust him enough with her sons’ lives, especially when they were going to…she didn’t even want to think about it. The Wastelands were such a desolate, dangerous place, occupied by Doomba and all of his creatures, and no human had ever returned
from that place alive, as far as she knew of.
She stormed out of her sons’ bedroom, wiping away her tears as she shut the door tight behind her, to seal in the memories and seal off the passage of time, the desecration of such memories. She went down the hallway to the back door, out into the stable yard and into the shed that she claimed as her own, where she fixed and made clocks of all types, just like her father had done in the farmhouse that they had once lived in together.
She picked up one of her clocks and stared at it, fixated not upon its features, which she had recognized immediately and had memorized already by heart for having created them, but upon her memories instead. She remembered those happy times of childhood, the tricks of the trade that she had learned sitting upon her father’s lap, the goats that they had raised in the barnyard, until the darkness had descended upon them and they had been forced to leave the farm behind, moving away from the forest to Coe Baba. Her troubles in life had begun then.
Ever since she had married Geda, and they had started to raise Basha and Oaka together, she had retreated to the shed every once and awhile, just for a few short hours to tinker and mend and create her clocks, away from her sons and her husband. A few short hours of peace and privacy for herself, it was nothing much, to remember her past before she was wed. Geda had rolled his eyes at his wife’s hobby, and the noise it caused when all of the clocks struck at once, but he had left her alone during those hours, knowing it gave her some comfort, and he watched over his sons while she was away.
She had thanked him for that peace and privacy, but she wished now that he had not been so generous. Geda had taught his sons to avoid their mother’s workshop as well when they had started tottering about and knocking things over as babes, and they had continued to avoid the workshop even as they grew up and older. They understood it was their mother’s refuge, and that they might get into trouble if they disturbed her there without good reason. Habala had been thankful for the most part that her solitude had continued unabated, although now she wished that she had taught them, perhaps Basha or Oaka if not both, what she had learned from her father all those years ago when she had been so young.
Clock making and repair had been her mainstay for all of these years, useful and practical when she could afford to spend the time upon her hobby and earn a small wage from it, thanks to the efforts and considerations of her father and husband. If only she had extended the courtesy and kindness of her knowledge to her sons. If only she had been more open, more generous of her time and of herself, shared what she had so enjoyed for all these years, but no, she had retreated, blocked herself off from her husband and her sons, and had avoided them in the shelter of this shed, away from everything but the ticking, tocking, chiming, chirping and ringing of her clocks.
She had nothing else but this place now. She stared at the clock in her hands, and realized now that it was burning, that a portion of its mainframe, a corner of it really, had caught fire, and was slowly starting to spread across its structure, almost to the heating point of melting it. She did not understand how this had happened, as focused as she had been on her anger at herself, and on her love for her husband and her sons. She had just been sitting here, and suddenly the clock had started burning? In any case, she had to immediately get rid of this clock before she burned herself.
She looked up at the far wall of her workshop, covered in clocks hanging from hooks, and realized the years of work and effort she had put into all of this, all for nothing. She hurled the burning clock at the wall, and watched for a moment as it all caught on fire, the flames from one clock igniting the varnished wood of the others, licking up the covers and exposing the metal gears and innards inside, creating a furnace that stared to melt the clock faces.
The glass cracked in another clock before she turned around and left the smoking workshop behind her, oddly satisfied for a moment, but it was just a moment. She would regret it later, in the dark of the night, the loss of her refuge and mainstay. She would have to start all over again, and that frightened her more than she could say. Could she really rebuild from what had been destroyed, what was once her life’s work but was now flaming wreckage?
She managed to make it out into the stable yard just as her husband went out the inn’s back door. “Habala!” He cried, running towards her. “Are you hurt? What happened?” He asked, wrapping her in a hug and escorting her away from the burning workshop. For a moment, being held in his arms, she thought that she could do anything, rebuild and start all over again, but it was a fleeting moment of comfort and warmth in the midst of an overwhelming, raging fire that ended quickly. They were both too cold to the touch and too hot in their situation and temperament that they could not find a happy medium. Could they ever be the same with each other as they once were?
Several men from the bar, including Hermer, Morton, and Smidge, had followed Geda, and now they went to work trying to extinguish the workshop and lead out the horses from the stable nearby, in case that building also caught on fire. Habala watched them for a moment, stunned by what she had done. Had she caused that? What had happened to her? The clock had caught on fire, and she could not have done that without any flames or flint nearby, yet it had been in her hands. Where else could the flames have come from? Not for the first time, she wondered if something was wrong with her.
“I do not know.” She told Geda. “I was just working, that’s all, I must have left a candle burning, or something. Must have been careless.” She muttered the last.
“You could have been killed.” He said. “I did not want to lose you, too.”
“I’m all right, Geda.” She said, pushing herself away from him and shaking her head. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not,” He said, staring at her in a grim manner that concerned her. “Not really.” Did he worry that she might hurt herself? She did not feel like she could, although he might think otherwise.
“Geda, I’m…” She sighed. “All right, I haven’t been fine for days now, but I’m not hurt right now.” She said.
Geda hugged her and she cried again, just as she had been doing off and on for the past week or so, but this time it was different as the cry was dry and silent, as if the fire had dried her tears, and the flames that had swallowed the clocks and their sounds had swallowed hers as well.
Crouched in the corner between two intersecting gables on the Smiling Stallion inn’s roof, watching the conflagration below, the Old Man shook his head and turned away, sighing to himself as he gazed up at the smoke rising into the early morning sky. Losing the ones you love always hurts, and it never completely goes away. That doesn’t change as time goes by. It goes deeper, sometimes, sinking and lodging at the bottom of your heart and weighing you down; or it floats away lightly, like a feather, until a half-forgotten thought or feeling brings it back to cut you again.
It should not have to come to this, he thought to himself, it should never have to come to this, the loss of a child for…‘the greater good’ was the best term that he could think of at this time, but it was just too harsh and cold, as if there was any greater good in the world than a child, especially to their parents and relatives. It was no comfort for them, grieving as they were, to think of the boys as making a difference. What care had they for the world after losing what they had valued most? Was it worth it in the end?
The Old Man pondered that thought for a moment. He thought that it was necessary for the boys, especially Basha, to go out and change a few things in this world, especially as it seemed to him that they were the only ones capable of making such changes, especially in regards to Doomba. Was it dangerous? Was it possible that they might not come back? Yes, it was, but he thought that it was necessary, that it was time for these changes to be made in deposing Doomba, before Doomba could do any more damage, after thousands of years of waiting for the right opportunity to come along. He had kept watch for all of this time, and now that the opportunity was here, he had to pounce upon it before it was too late, before Doomba or h
is minions could make a move that might end any chances he had.
Kala certainly had felt the same way, he knew, in how she came all the way to Coe Baba to protect her unborn son Basha, and died giving birth to the boy, before her ghost came to the Old Man to tell him that Basha was the Tigora’l, the tiger of light. She knew that Basha had a dangerous mission to fulfill, and she tried her best to protect him for as long as she could, yet even she acknowledged that it had to be done.
And the Old Man had to do what he did, in pushing things along and nudging people into the right place, so that the opportunity could unfold as it was meant to do. Was he responsible for pushing Basha and by extension his brother Oaka into leaving Coe Baba? Yes, but it was the right thing to do, it was meant to be this way, so why did he feel so awful about it? Perhaps he felt guilty, now that he could see the harm that he had caused Habala and others, and he felt some small need to justify his actions, to make up for them in a way that said at least he had tried to make a difference in this world, at least he had tried to do some good in the world, before it was too late. Perhaps that was why he felt like he needed to make peace with himself, and with those around him. Perhaps that was why he felt the need to challenge Doomba, and say that at least he had tried to destroy him in his own way. Maybe Kala felt the same way.
Perhaps he feared that he had made a mistake in sending these boys out to their deaths at the hands of Doomba or his minions, and nothing would come of it, no changes would be made in this world. He was afraid that they would fail, especially as they knew next to nothing about what they were supposed to be doing out there, really doing, and not just searching for Tau’s Cup.
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