Wing & Nien

by Shytei Corellian

  Wing and Nien — A Novel

  Book 1

  Shytei Corellian

  Metaphysical Fantasy/Epic Fiction

  Copyright © 1989, 2009, 2017 by Shytei Corellian All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover art design, Julie Luke, Creative Manager. Map by Shytei Corellian. Map edit, colour, enhance by Julie Luke. Author Photo © Shane Morrisun

  Published by Arcturian Spacegate Imprints, SMC Park City, UT

  ISBN 9780615580272

  Dedicated to Wing and Nien. Your story is a remarkable one.

  Thank you.

  “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

  — Albert Einstein

  Introduction —

  A Meeting of Legends

  W ing couldn’t believe it as he looked down to see his arm caught in the metal jaws of an animal trap. The rusted, long-forgotten device was ancient and meant for what kind of creature, Wing couldn’t imagine. He lay just below the monstrous thing, its teeth biting down around his wrist. Long buried by leaves and growth and downfall, he hadn’t seen it until he’d stumbled and reached out to catch himself. The contraption had lost most of its spring so it had not snapped his arm in half. Also, he was small and his arm was small — his wrist fit between two of the giant upper teeth right where a lower tooth’s point had rusted away.

  Scooting up, Wing made a brief inspection, twisting his arm, working his wrist against the rusted metal.

  No good.

  On the other side of the trap, looked to be a release of some sort. Whether it would spring the jaws free or simply make it possible to pry them apart, he was unsure. Reaching over with his right hand, he pressed upon the long bar. The trap did not so much as creak under the pressure. Angry and scared, Wing leaned upon it again, as hard as he could, wincing against the bite of pain through his left wrist.

  Nothing.

  Sitting back, Wing saw that from the same side of the trap as the spring, a chain led. Scooting forward, he managed to pull the chain free of grass and roots and found a stake securing it to the ground.

  With a small but determined hand, he grasped the chain and pulled as hard as he could.

  The stake didn’t budge.

  He tried again but couldn’t pull back far enough without cutting his trapped hand against the rusted edges of the trap.

  Snarling as if he were the creature the trap had been intended for, he collapsed back gasping, heart hammering ferociously.

  Once he’d gotten his breath again, he gritted his teeth and, fueled by terror and pain, lunged forward once more and gave the tether-chain another hard yank.

  Still nothing. No slip, no budge, no settling or release of earth.

  Panting, he took a moment to look the trap over and considered the miraculous fact that the teeth had closed not upon his hand but around his wrist and directly over the one tooth of the trap that had rusted away.

  Wing laughed, a brief jolt of dismay and bitter appreciation that shook his small body. Such good fortune and such bad. He was a child, alone in the mountains — where none of his people ever went — and yet that small bit of luck did not escape him. In some malefic way, it was as if the trap were meant for him, so perfectly did the tangs match the width and curve of his wrist yet would not allow for the passage out of the brief expanse presented by his hand.

  Through the arms of trees overhead, Wing watched the sun step toward the horizon. It would be dark soon. His mother and fa would be worried now.

  Really worried.

  Nien, he thought, brother. Can you hear me?

  This was a situation his brother would have been more likely to find himself in than Wing. Nien was the one given to curiosity, exploration, and generally getting himself in trouble. Wing felt both sick and humoured that Nien would be proud of him, that he would find the whole thing rather exciting and adventurous.

  But Wing felt neither excited nor adventurous. He had not come up here, into the mountains, out of a sense of adventure. He’d come because he needed time to himself, his mind consumed with questions that weighed upon him, questions that, he’d been told, should not be on the mind of someone so young.

  Again, Wing worked at his wrist, hoping it would somehow slip through, if he could just get it to turn sideways...

  But this effort met the same fate as the last: the trap gave not at all, the fragile layer of flesh covering the bone of his wrist giving way all too easily. As blood from his wrist and thumb ran over the teeth of the trap, Wing pulled again at the stake and tether, grunting and growling with rage and frustration, trying to shut out the image of what he was sure would be his parents’ angry and anguished faces.

  Night fell. Through the trees he saw the silver-blue orb that lit their world sink slowly down the sky. He watched the rays slide by, feeling more helpless and lost with each tree branch that slipped the sun’s shimmering grasp.

  Upon the spot in the dark curl of trees where the sun had disappeared, he stared, the last vestiges of light creeping across his vision, forming patterns and shapes of mesmerizing complexity.

  And then the light was gone.

  Night closed around, dripping down through the trees, creeping up from the ground. It felt like a living thing, sincere in dark devotion, slowly sweeping aside all safety of the day.

  Terrified, Wing curled around the burning pain in his arm, and from the dark outside hid his face inside the small protection of his body. Exhausted with fear and cold, he passed into a brief respite of sleep. There he dreamed an odd dream, one in which he was not the object of the dream but its observer. From a place remote and intimately close, he saw a warm fire burning in a cozy cottage. Beside it sat a man and, at his feet, a boy. Upon the man’s lap was a large family copy of the Ancient Writings from which he was reading, his son staring up at him rapt with attention, mouthing the words as his father read them:

  “ ‘He fled. Darker than night were the shapes and shadows that followed him. In cavernous trees he slept. There was death in his dreams. Before him, the void. Behind him, ruin. When day came, I looked out across a strange land and found him again. Though the passing of time was hidden from me, I knew in my heart this was the Leader of Legend the prophets before me had spoken of.’ ”

  Firelight from the room’s wood stove burned brightly, casting lines of gold and orange across the pages of the book the father held in his lap.

  “Do you wish you could meet him, Fa?” the boy said.

  “Yes,” the father replied. “I guess I do.”

  Flame from the fire lit the boy’s head of bright red hair as a burning log split and cracked, sending tiny glowing sparks across the metal grating.

  “Well, that’s it,” said the father. “Time for bed.”

  “No! Just one more verse.”

  There was a look from the father — mock censure. “E’te, one more only.”

  He
adjusted the big book on his lap.

  “ ‘And the sun was born in the heart of a cold star. And in his hands, I saw a book and knew it contained the words I now write. Merehr would be that sun. He would be the blood of a new generation. I do not know if the length of my life will show me this, but into my long night has come a new hope.’ ”

  The boy’s small red eyebrows knit together. “Do you believe it?” Bright blue eyes shone hopefully from beneath the scarlet bangs.

  But there was something in the face of the father — worry? — as he looked back at his son.

  “Well, perhaps you can teach your fa a thing or two about faith. Now, off to bed with both of us.”

  A bite of cold wind woke him. It took Wing a moment to remember where he was, that he was not in the living room with the father and his son by a warm fire reading from the Ancient Writings, but lying alone in the dark, his arm caught in a metal trap.

  The wind blew again, rustling his clothing and hair, moving the leaves about his feet. He blinked a couple times, inadvertently moving his left arm. The pain of his torn flesh bit through him and he gasped and felt hot tears well in his eyes. A rise of frustration lit his cheeks on fire.

  And then he heard it, something in the woods above him.

  His head popped up, breath clutching hard in his chest.

  Branches and leaves creaked and bent beneath footfalls.

  Eyes focused, intent on a spot in the velvety black of the trees just up from where he lay, Wing listened as the footfalls came closer…

  — No, he thought in correction, paw falls. An animal.

  And not just any animal, for it was moving carefully, not making near enough racket to be a grazing fent.

  So, a predator then.

  Though Wing had spent very little time in the woods, he could tell the difference between the way a creature with four padded feet moved in comparison to one with hooves. The keen difference between the hunters and the hunted.

  He shook violently. His shaking rattled the trap, causing it to chatter like teeth in the mouth of some giant metal beast. He clamped his own teeth together, but that only made him shake harder.

  And then, through the tangle of brush above him, appeared a large, slanted set of green eyes. Bright as wet sea-stones, they gleamed in the night, as if lit from inside the creature’s head. The head in which those gleaming eyes sat was blacker than the leafed nighttime around it.

  It looks like me, Wing thought absently. Bright green eyes, black hair.

  The animal sniffed and took another step forward. Wing caught sight of its front paw in the moonlight. A paw nearly as big as Wing’s head.

  It’s so beautiful, he thought. And it’s going to eat me. In one bite.

  Oddly, the thought was one of pure logic, he wasn’t feeling what he thought he should be feeling — profound terror. Rather, he felt a rushing sense of inescapable wonder as the creature moved out of the brush toward him.

  Its body was long and sleek. Had Wing been able to stand, his shoulder would not have topped the creature’s shoulder. For all of its size, it moved with an impossible silence, its eyes fixed upon Wing’s own.

  Wing knew there would be no escape. The big cat had seen him, smelled him, and must have sensed that Wing was trapped. Helpless, all he could do was wait.

  Only a few steps away now, the cat paused, its front feet spread, revealing a jet black breast thick as a yearling colt’s, the sharp white of claw peeking through the black tufts of fur covering each toe.

  Wing looked up and trembled violently as the cat’s head came to loom directly over him. Eyes snapping shut, Wing coiled reflexively into a ball of entirely useless protection over his trapped arm. The scent and heat from the cat’s body penetrated this false barrier, filling Wing’s senses with the certainty of death.

  What was happening was impossible, the creature itself was impossible, and yet Wing plainly felt its breath upon his head as it sniffed at him, briefly raising the hair of his head.

  As the moments ticked off in nerve-shattering eternities, Wing noticed a couple very important things: First, the cat had not yet grabbed him with a spine shattering crunch, nor was it even growling.

  Very slowly, Wing raised his head just enough to see over his knees.

  Standing above him, he found the cat’s lips curled back from its teeth and thought he’d made a profound mistake in believing it may not want to eat him. The air warmed in the depths of the big cat’s belly wafted over him wet and feral. And then a low rumble started in the cat’s breast, its shining coat quivering as the sound rippled through it. However, what Wing expected to be a growl of anticipation, a precursor to the opening of the jaws that would rip Wing’s head from his body was, instead, a greeting.

  How was that possible?

  Drawing back its whiskered head, the big cat stared at Wing again, eye to eye.

  Looking at the cat, Wing felt a very strange sensation developing in his stomach. It rose up through his body, gathering strength, and emerged from his lips in an equally resonant growl that matched both the tone, feeling, and familiarity of the big cat’s.

  Wing had no idea he was capable of making such a sound.

  As the rumbling thrummed through his body, Wing forgot the trap that held him bound to the earth. He forgot that he was lost and alone and about to die. In the night, in the stillness, in the closeness between predators, Wing forgot who he was.

  The infinity of space spun through the mysterious inner workings of his body, coalescing between himself and the creature until there was only the presence, the moment, the space he shared with the big animal. There, lost in each other, emerald eyes to emerald eyes.

  It was unimportant, suddenly, whether he died in the trap or not. His death would not affect the where or the who of him in the least. All he could feel was a vast sense of belonging. A totality of essence, a completeness of adoration, a remembering of origin, a beauty so immense and a love so complete if felt sure to melt his bones. In the warm clear touch of tears upon his cheeks and the miracle of the animal-being that stood before him, the language between them was a long, low, rolling growl. Even the painful throb in his trapped arm was only an abstract comprehension.

  “Hello, shy’teh,” Wing said, in his human voice, and in that was an acknowledgement that this was a reunion of sorts, a remembering of kinship, that this was not a meeting brought together by an instinctual attraction of predator and prey but of messenger and receiver.

  Uncanny as it was, Wing knew that he and the big cat had intended to meet like this.

  The cat blinked at him and with a wrinkle of its nose and a twitch of whiskers, stepped back. And just as suddenly and dramatically as Wing’s fear had left him, it returned: He didn’t want the cat to leave.

  “Wait,” Wing said.

  The cat looked at him once more before swinging its massive head away and, turning a shoulder, stepped through the space between the trap and the grounded tether. There was a click and a snap and suddenly Wing’s wrist was free.

  Looking down, the black jaws of the trap lay open, somehow more sinister now for the dark breadth of them.

  Clutching his wrist to his chest, the jaws of the trap snapped back together causing Wing to jump.

  Gasping at the resurgence of feeling in his limb, he looked up in time to see the cat move off into the darkness. Huge as it was, it moved with incredible stillness, flowing with the night like a ghost, able to pass over the driest of leaves without a rustle…

  And yet it had managed to place a paw just upon the rusted release of the old trap.

  In the darkness, next to the trap, Wing watched as his saviour vanished from view with a flick of its raven black tail.

  A ghost.

  An angel.

  A creature of night with gleaming eyes and midnight fur, leaving as unassumingly as it had come.

  Cradling his arm, Wing glanced about the place where the trap lay, where he lay, where the cat had come, and where it had gone, and saw it all with ne
w eyes. No longer was it the small, hated space where he had been trapped, waiting to die, but a sacred place of connection and reunion.

  Climbing to his feet, Wing stared into the abandoned dark beyond his eyesight —

  Was the shy’teh there, a part of the wild, of the mountain? Or had it truly been a messenger, materializing in order to save his life before returning to whatever ethereal realm from which it had come?

  Wing wished he could know. He wished, also, that he could thank the big cat.

  For a moment of intense longing, he continued to look in the direction the cat had left, suppressing the urge to run after it. Whether the urge was to find it again and be in its presence, or simply assure himself of its reality, he wasn’t sure.

  At last, Wing turned and began to make his way down toward the valley.

  His feet crunched through the thoroughfare of leaves as he went, munching comfortingly beneath the soles of his boots. His wrist throbbed where he cradled it against his chest, but he hardly noticed, there was only the smooth, cool sensation of the night air in his lungs, the clean shower of moonlight overhead, and the glowing pearl of the valley below.

  He would be home and in bed in no time, there to dream and wonder over what had happened, grateful and amazed, sad and wondering: If the big cat had been real, would he ever see it again?

  Breaking free of the tree line and the dark-limned forest, he entered the fields that were his home and knew he moved here just as the shy’teh had moved in the mountain, green eyes bright, alert, feet moving fluidly, melting through the leaves and downfall of the forest as he moved through the grasses of the fields, neither leaving any more evidence than that of a passing breeze.

  In a way, the shy’teh had felt like his closest of kin, proof of the mystical in the physical, that there was something magical about the world, a sense of things that seemed as impossible as their own meeting.

  But the shy’teh, Wing knew, had the advantage of not having to explain. It found and traveled the secret paths in the physical world without need of definition or reason.