by M E Wolf
“I must teach you what you must know from me, as you may realize that you have your mother’s knowledge and her power will come in time. Your real name is Alexandra, as you know from when you were hatched. We have to hurry because you will soon come into your mother’s powers.
“Because you happened to be the last of her children, as is always with us Dochani, her powers get transferred to you. This means that you will gain her memories and all that she was and ever would be. But with Dochani, we live longer and maturity may take many eons to come about.”
Genshen and Alexandra talked for a long time. Her father telling her about the way her mother enjoyed and celebrated life. Alexandra’s mother was a very vibrant woman and in many ways she resembled her mother. She had learned that her father was more than sixty five thousand years old and that her mother was his three hundred and eighty-second wife. Tomorrow would bring another day, and the beginning of her three hundred years of Dochani training.
CHAPTER FIFTY THREE
Alexandra did not know what to make of things. She was here on her mother’s home world and most of all she was with her father. The training that he was putting her through was almost impossible to get through. Jentus’ training routines were nothing compared to these. First the training was instructional and informational. Alexandra wracked her brains on trigonometry and geometry.
It was all about the angles and the spacial economics of magic. Hours and hours of mathematical computations her dad made her go through until it was second nature to her. Logical constructs were gone over as well as symbolic logic and geological constants within planets and the universe. Alexandra found it rather complicated, but her father said that it was necessary.
He instructed her in this stuff until her brain felt fried and then kept going. Alexandra’s head hurt from all of the information that her father was giving her to put in her head. Information overload is what she felt and a few years of this gave her nose bleeds. It could have been longer than a few years as it was hard to tell sometimes how long it actually was taking when you are deep into the studying of things you don’t notice the time going by.
She was throwing-up most of the first three years and her head felt like it was going to explode for the first seventy two years, but she continued to train and be trained. Her father had said that this training should have been done quite a long time ago. If done then, it would have been easier on her and progress would have been smoother. As it was they barely had any progress at all for the first one hundred and fifty years and not much more in these last one hundred and fifty years.
Her father was very frustrated and wanted to help her in her transition to coming into her inheritance, but she knew that his patience was growing thin. She was not the daughter that he had wished her to be. Genshen gave her nice gifts on each of her birthdays in the last three hundred years, but Alexandra knew that he did so reluctantly. This day was the second day after her six hundred and seventy-ninth birthday and her final test before she was to graduate from her training.
It was like any other day except she was very sick. She knew that this was normal at this time of the month, but she did not want to disappoint her father. Today would be the end of her three hundred years of Dochani training. In the past three hundred years she had learned many things, but she had not mastered any of them. Keeping up with her hand-to-hand combat training and weapons training was hard, but it seemed to be the only things she almost mastered during the last three hundred years.
Genshen seemed to be adept at everything while she, being his daughter, was inept at learning what he wanted to teach her. The only things that seemed to stick when he taught it was teleportation, a simple light, a simple shield and a simple fireball. Everything else that Genshen tried to train Alexandra in seemed to fail or harm herself. Today she was to have a combat simulation against her father. He had hoped that this would bring out the natural ability in her that had been laying dormant for far too long.
She had done nothing yesterday in preparation for today’s combat and most of the day was spent in meditation as per the instructions of her father. Wearing only her apprentice robes that were tied at the waist with a cotton belt wrapped around her tiny waist three times and knotted the same way one ties a belt for most styles of martial arts, she was almost ready.
Her robe had a quilted appearance to it and was made out of a heavy enough material to fend off the average blow from your opponent. Red was the colour of the apprentice robe and it was always too hot to wear anything beneath the robe. Her waist length black, with red highlights overshadowing the black, hair was tied back with a red ribbon making a long braid. The ribbon intertwined with the whole length of her hair and a white kerchief speckled with various geometric shapes of different colours folded in half was wrapped over the top of her head to keep the hair out of her face.
His robe was a pitch-black colour as was customary for a master of the Dochani art and the cloth belt was tied the same way as Alexandra’s except the robe had legs instead of a skirt style even though he was not wearing a sword. His hair was short and cut close to the scalp. They faced each other and the combat commenced. Genshen put up his shield that did not allow things to come in contact with him, but allowed him to send things through it. Alexandra followed his lead, but her shield did not allow her to fire anything upon him.
She saw the flows of energy that he had used to create his own shield, but could not duplicate it. It was not because she did not know how to do it, but because she did not have enough karma as her father had termed it to perform a task such as this. Her shield would have to do even though turning it off and on at the right times could prove to be difficult, if not impossible. A white glow enveloped Genshen’s hands as he raised them above his head.
The glow grew and slowly began to encase his whole body and then suddenly gathered back to his hands to form a sapphire blue sphere that waved back and forth, licking and crackling the air like a bonfire being pummeled by a light wind. Genshen twirled the sphere in his left hand and tossed it in Alexandra’s direction like a discus thrower. Before the ball of blue fire reached its intended target, Genshen was preparing another and another.
Two more blue balls of fire were sent in Alexandra’s direction before the first had time to reach her. All of the training in this world or in any world could not help her at this point and her instincts were her only refuge. She strengthened her shield as much as her karma would allow, even though this could turn out to be a fatal mistake and leave her defenseless against her father’s seemingly limitless karma.
Her father had told her that there were many ways to augment her karma, but it was something that he would not teach her because it would mean that he would be teaching her to rely on the unpredictable. Relying on the unpredictable could mean the end of a life. Alexandra was not sure that her father used any of these unpredictable sources of karma or knew how to use them.
During her training she always felt that her father was about to teach her something and then change his mind. It was like he chose what she should know instead of teaching her everything that he knew. Almost like his training was tainted to one side from too much bias over the years and too much heartache experienced by her father. What happens though is the opposite of what was meant to be achieved. Denial only brings one to want something more, instead of just showing the negatives so that one could learn of what could happen.
It was a major failing of many societies not teaching the young all that they needed to know. Eventually knowledge that is needed won’t be there in the next generation. It was the not knowing about something that could get someone hurt, or killed even. Something that was very unfortunate for her, especially since she had used up all of her available karma. Available karma was deemed as local karma and her father deemed unavailable karma as external karma.
Local karma was predictable and external karma was unpredictable. Alexandra felt the threads of her shield shimmer and then tear apart and her mind reeled with pain as she felt the
fabrics of her power being twisted to the breaking point. Her body was seared with fire, her mind was absent of any thought or memory of what might have been or what might be and her power shimmered and dimmed from lack of karma to fuel the hunger.
The sinewy threads of her power almost died and fell apart but had found instinct, her instincts. The instincts of soul can be very powerful and thus, this is the reason that Alexandra will survive and her father’s hopes of her reaching her potential being fulfilled. Threads of power, guided by Alexandra’s instincts, found what was needed like a plant spreads out its roots to find water. She became linked to the earth, water, air and fire at the core of the planet and was fueled by it.
All of these changes took place within a few seconds and the last two balls of blue fire were absorbed into her newly formed shield, which added to her already greatly expanded karma. It was the first time that she had felt alive in all of her life. Somehow she knew that her father knew of her change. The flows of his shield changed and Alexandra knew that he had strengthened it in anticipation of her attack. Alexandra’s body began to glow a dark crimson as she waved her hand in her father’s direction.
Three red fiery balls visualized halfway between her and her father. Her father sent three identical balls of fire, except for their colour, which was blue, to meet hers. She saw a look of surprise on her father’s face as her own red fireballs absorbed his fireballs.
CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR
Genshen’s shield was not enough to stop him from being pummeled by Alexandra’s balls of fire. The glow around him ceased and he lay motionless on the ground after being flung backwards a few hundred feet. Saddened by the sudden turn of events, Alexandra let go of her emotions.
Tears rolled down her face and her sadness darkened her eyes. She crouched by her father and ran her fingers through his hair pulling him in close. After so many years without a father, to find out that she in fact had one, and now she had none once again.
“Nooooo!” She screamed, while the tears continued to flow.
Alexandra searched in her mind for a place that held pleasant memories and found only one. That one place could be a refuge for her in her recovery from the death of her real father. It was unfortunate that that place was not here, not even on the Sevle planet, but on a different planet that she had spent several months on long ago. She felt that she needed to go to this refuge, this place that smelt of lilies where the water was fresh and she could get some peace.
It was by accident that she had arrived at this place before, when she was a mere three hundred and fifty odd years old, well over three hundred years ago. She wondered if her teleportation skills were good enough to transport her there, since she had gotten there by chance before.
Her father had not had a chance to instruct her in the specifics of how to teleport to another world and she was not sure of how to do it. Alexandra knew how to perform normal teleportation, which was done with a location that was familiar to her. She began her process for achieving focus of a location. Remembering something that happened when she was very young would prove to be difficult, but not impossible.
Countless hours were spent into the darkness of night in her meditation for capturing the memory. The memory was of a shore she had reached after swimming fifteen long years in a pond with only water and lily pads as sustenance. That was the memory she needed for her to teleport into that world that she hoped would bring her peace. Energy flowed through her body. She began the teleportation process and before she had finished she was sprawled backwards onto the ground, unconscious.
Genshen shook the dizziness out of his brain that was keeping him from getting up. He did not know what had happened and despite his efforts to see where his daughter was, he could not see her. Instinct and a deep sense of foreboding told him that she was running her fingers through his hair, but he did not know why he had felt that. It was strange to feel something like that when she was nowhere in sight.
This disappearance of his daughter worried him. Then it dawned on him that she might think him dead. He dared not try to sense her power signature because something as natural as automatically sensing his own was not there. Genshen did not understand out of all of the eons that his power was with him that he would lose it when he had needed it most.
He knew that his karma had been wounded, which was probably the reason that he had no sense of power. Alexandra, somehow he did not know, wounded him beyond his knowing. At least he had his senses back and most of his bodily functions were returning, including his urge to vomit every so often. It was not the smell of vomit or the forest that made him do so, but the smell of power.
Raw power is what injured his karma and that was what his daughter had used. His lungs burned with every breath that he took until he had realized what had made him so sick. The raw power that his daughter used was laced with silver and now the only thing left in the air from the raw power being used was the silver.
He was alive because there was only a trace, but it was enough to stop his power. Crawling to a safe place was difficult, but he was able to barely manage it. Almost dying on the way a few times and almost giving up many more, but he did make it.
Genshen could now sense his power signature, at least most of it. He tried to sense his daughter’s power signature, but could not because it had changed. One thing he did sense was of a teleportation request, but he could not tell if it was successful. Fatigue took over and he fell asleep. His karma would need a lot of dedication and work to be recovered. Sleep would be his best medicine.
CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE
Dazed she shook her head from side to side to clear her mind of the clouds that she felt were keeping her from thinking properly, having paws did not help her much and only confused her more. Was this a dream or was this real, she was not really sure at this very moment. After a very long time she was running through the forest with the wind passing over her thick course hair that extended all over her entire body.
At first she was thirsty and smelt water far off to her left. Judging by the amount of moisture she felt on her nose it had to be a lake, a fresh water lake. Darting towards it she felt her powerful hind legs burn with the force of her run. Tire, she would not. Sense and feel this she could. The moon was high in the sky above the trees and she raced it to the lake, howling on the way. Fun and free, without the hurt she felt in humanoid form. Lapping up the water in the lake, she could see her reflection.
Alexandra had to be ten feet tall at the shoulder, covered in course hair from head to tail, black as the night sky and crystal blue eyes with a long snout. The nails on her padded paws looked sharper and larger than the grizzly bears that she had seen in the books she read in the town, Bannian. Between fifteen hundred and ten thousand pounds she considered herself to weigh in this form, but with all the hair and the fact she was light on her feet it was hard to tell.
After drinking her fill, she felt hungry. Everything in this form was very vivid and exhilarating. Things tasted different to her, like she had never tasted anything at all before. Her hunger was beyond anything that she had ever experienced in her life. She felt very magical, but unsatisfied. Hunger was the only thing not satisfied and she was so hungry that it was making her feel crazy.
Gnashing at the teeth was what was happening and her snarl could be heard from a great distance. Pee from frightened animals and people were smelt on the wind as their fear got the better of them. This sent her into a slavering rage that just made her hungrier. Alexandra fed on the many animals that were no match for her hunting prowess. Her teeth ripped them apart and it was so good to eat when so hungry.
Oh the taste was so good and ended so quickly that she was left with wanting more. She practically swallowed them whole. Bones, fur and clothing. It all did not seem to matter to her. Alexandra ate whatever was too close to her mouth. Blood dripped from her teeth as a strange energy flowed through her body and darkness was about.
Something appeared before her and spoke,
“
You have awoken to the animal within. It has been a long time since someone was able to truly be trained as the assassin. It is obviously not a L’art’o trait. Truly I tell you that you will come to like the wolf, but others will not like it much if at all.
“I can teach you how to control it, but for these people and animals it is far too late for all of them. Either they are dead or they will become a beast and eventually lose themselves in the beast. This is what you see when you are a beast, it is the beast world which some call Sanhedrin.
“In a lot of cases we are just in the beast world, but that is not today. Today we are in the beast world, but are interacting with the outside world. In your case you ate some people and some livestock. It happens that the coyotes sometimes take the blame for us in this universe and other universes.
“Right now you kill the innocent by accident. I know when you come to the real world you will try to justify killing the people that you have killed because of what they have done, but in the long run more innocents are killed and eaten than the guilty.
“As a wolf you have fur but you are naked, just like all animals are naked. What happens to you here will manifest itself for you when you are yourself. Technically you are always yourself, but right now you believe and reason it out that this wolf is not you and that means that you believe that you are not guilty for what the wolf does.
“It is still you regardless of how you decide to deal with it. Before you took the ceremonial pipe the L’art’o told you about another Dochani thousands and thousands of years ago that smoked the pipe and ended up killing half the tribe.
“Well that was me, I am really old you see. Before they had captured me, tortured me and ate half my body I was more than six hundred thousand years old. Your snarl says that you do not believe me. There are some that have lived longer than that and none of us know why.
