by Claire Luana
“So you do have some humility in you,” it said. “This is a place of birth and life, not death. I will help your friend, and your seishen, of course. Give her to me.”
The elder wrapped its wings before it and Hiro transferred Emi to their feathered embrace. She had started to shiver and convulse. She didn’t have much life left in her.
The elder began to walk towards the lake. “Come, Ryu,” it said. “It is good to see you again, my child.”
Ryu limped forward, and together, the strange white seishen and Ryu walked into the crystal waters of the lake. Steam rose from Emi and Ryu as they touched the water.
The elder dipped Emi under the surface briefly, and when he lifted her up again, she gasped and tried to sit up.
The seishen elder carefully stood her on her feet in the lake.
“Woah,” she said, her eyes wide, taking in the incredible sight before her.
“Woah,” Hiro said, as he took in her form.
The wounds on her back were completely gone, though the old scars on her face remained. The lake had healed her, bringing new life and vibrancy to her cheeks.
Her hands explored the clean, pink skin of her back. “I remember…the tengu attack. I was injured.” She turned to the elder. “How is this possible?”
“These waters are sacred. Healing. It is said that the creator pulled the first sparks of life from these pristine waters.”
Emi nodded and swallowed, wading back towards the shore.
“Where’s Kai?” she asked, looking around. “And Daarco?”
A look of guilt flashed across Hiro’s face. He felt responsible for failing to keep their group together. He should have been able to protect them all.
“We don’t know,” Hiro said. “Kai ran off into the forest. We lost them in the mist.”
“You lost her?” she shrieked. “How could you lose her?”
Hiro stepped back defensively. “Magic lured her away. And you were dying; I couldn’t leave you to go after them. And the tengu attacked… Daarco made a stand so we could make it to the lake. We did what we had to.”
“Did Daarco make it?” Emi asked, her voice small.
“I…don’t know,” Hiro said.
Emi closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath. “You should have let me die,” Emi said. “If you had to. Kai is everything. What do you think will happen to all of us…the alliance…fighting the tengu…if she dies?”
“You don’t think I know that?” he asked, angry now. “You don’t think I’m terrified of what’s happening to her out in those woods?” His heart twisted. If I lost Kai… He shoved the thought aside. It was unthinkable. No. He refused to consider it.
Emi softened. “Of course you’re worried. I’m sorry. But we have to go find her.”
“Lay your fears to rest,” the elder said. “My children are telling me that your Kai approaches from the west. She is with her seishen and is safe.”
Emi and Hiro breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“Daarco?” Hiro asked. “Our other friend?”
“He is blocked from my sight. Still in the mist. He is on his own.”
CHAPTER 21
Kai and Quitsu collapsed on the bank of the island, panting. She rolled over on her back, exhausted from their swim. At least she wasn’t covered in mud anymore.
“I…hate…swimming,” Quitsu said.
“I know,” she said, patting his damp fur. “But it’s better than facing those tengu.”
She closed her eyes, letting the warmth of the sun leech the water from her clothes.
“We need to get up at some point,” Quitsu said.
“Yes,” she said. Her body was tired, hungry, and sore. Her mind was tired of forcing her body forward. “At some point.”
“Ahem,” a small voice said behind them.
Kai rolled over on her belly and looked up at the speaker. It was a small silver seishen. A stag.
“Hello,” Kai said, dragging herself to her knees. “We are here to see the seishen elder.”
“It is expecting you,” the seishen said. “Please follow me.”
They followed the stag up the bank of the island and into the temple grounds. Kai gaped at the effortless beauty of the island.
“Quitsu, this is…”
“Amazing?” he said, a smirk on his face.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s one of those things you have to see for yourself.”
The island seemed untouched by the drought Kita and Miina had been suffering from for the last year. Kai’s spirit felt buoyed, light. Here in this quiet place, Kai found herself believing that they could unlock a centuries-old secret, that they could truly find a way to defeat the tengu.
The strange power she had begun to access sang to her here, as if it was stronger in this place, closer to the surface of reality. She almost reached out to touch it with her mind, to draw the sweet white nectar into her qi, but she hesitated. She still didn’t understand it, and that scared her. Perhaps the elder could help her find answers.
The little stag led them into a large room with a tall vaulted ceiling. High along the walls were open archways that let in streams of molten sunlight, trailing vines and flitting birds. In the center of the room was a low wooden table surrounded by cushions, out of proportion with the cavernous space.
“The elder will be here in a moment.”
“Thank you,” Kai said.
The stag turned to leave.
“We were traveling with some others. Sun and moonburners. A lion seishen. Did they make it here safely?”
“They are here,” the deer said simply and left them.
A tremendous tension left Kai, and the tight knots in her stomach uncoiled. Hiro…Emi… They were all right.
The walls were rough-hewn stone, flattened to uniformity in regular intervals, forming panels throughout the room. The panels bore images of humans and seishen painted in silver and gold. As they waited, Kai examined them, marveling at the intricate detail.
The first panel bore a man and woman, beautiful, sitting on thrones in the starry night sky. Like constellations, looking over a small world below them. They wore crowns on their heads, and when Kai looked carefully, she gasped.
“Another long-lost relative?” Quitsu asked, joining her in front of the panel.
She shot him a look and shoved down the worry about Chiya that bubbled to the surface. What would Kai do if Chiya really was her sister? She shook off the thought. One problem at a time.
“Look at the crowns on their heads,” Kai said. Quitsu jumped into her arms and they both peered at the picture.
“They’re the solar and lunar crowns,” Quitsu said. “I thought the tale about their origin was just a myth.”
“Many myths are based in truth,” a smooth voice said behind them.
Kai whirled, and Quitsu jumped from her arms, taking a defensive position in front of her.
What she saw stunned her. A great beast of the purest pearly white with a body both—lion?—and bird. And his eyes. Red eyes that seemed to pierce to her very soul. But more than that was the power that emanated from the creature. The pure white light that she had tapped before—it seemed as if this seishen was filled with it, infused with it.
Before she could ponder this strange phenomenon, her friends emerged from behind the creature. Hiro, Emi, Ryu—even Colum.
Hiro crashed into Kai, his hug rib-crushingly tight. “Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he whispered, his sweet breath tickling her ear.
“I’m sorry,” she said, melting into his arms.
She saw Emi next, whose grave wounds had been miraculously healed. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” Kai said, grabbing Emi tightly in a hug.
Kai next knelt down and embraced Ryu, rubbing his shaggy golden head. “Thanks for looking after him,” she whispered.
Colum stood back from their group, set apart, observing their reunion with some discomfort. His bright blue eyes were unreadable, h
is weathered face blank.
She went to him and embraced him, and he first started with surprise, but then returned the hug, patting her back awkwardly.
“Thank you for taking care of my friends,” she said. “For seeing them here safely.”
“You’re welcome, my lady,” he said into her ear. Before he pulled away, he whispered, “We still haven’t talked price. Two words, Queenie: hazard pay.”
Kai smiled at him, suddenly sure that she had caught a glimpse into his lonely soul. The bravado, the talk of money and treasure and caring for only profit—it was an act. At least in part.
“Where’s Daarco?” Quitsu asked. Kai flinched at her oversight. She hadn’t even noticed his absence in her excitement at the reunion.
“I don’t know if he made it,” Hiro said. “He sacrificed himself so we could make it here.”
“My guests,” the giant white creature said. The elder, Kai realized. “You must be hungry from your journey. We have prepared a meal for you, and then we can discuss why you have come.”
They sat on the cushions around the table, except the elder, who rested on its haunches at the head of the table like the patriarch at a family feast.
Two golden seishen, a giant rabbit and a well-muscled boar, rolled in a cart with food. The rabbit managed to totter in on two legs, while the boar simply pushed the cart along with his snout.
“We have not had visitors in several centuries, and as we do not derive sustenance as you do, we gathered what we could for you.”
Emi sprang up and went to unload the plates from the cart onto the table.
The first plates were laden with bananas, apples, and some strange oblong fruit with a spiky skin. Another plate bore nuts and a third was filled with fresh greens. Emi finished by unloading cups of a sweet milky liquid.
“This is very generous,” Kai said as she grabbed food from the plates with her hands. Propriety be damned. “We had a difficult journey.”
“I don’t make this place easy to find,” the elder said. “None have been here since Colum last darkened our doorstep—almost twenty years ago now.”
“About that,” Colum said around a mouthful of banana. “I am still very, very sorry,”
“You were told never to return here upon punishment of death,” the elder said. “Yet here you are.”
“I’m here because the fate of the world depends upon this girl finding out everything you know about the tengu masquerading as Tsuki and Taiyo,” Colum said. “I didn’t think your vendetta against me was more important than the fate of the world…but maybe I misjudged you.”
“Please,” Kai said, glaring sidelong at Colum. “I begged him to come. He knew he wasn’t welcome, yet he risked his life to get us here. We need your help to free the real Tsuki and Taiyo so they can help us defeat the tengu. They are trying to destroy us.”
“And what makes you think Tsuki and Taiyo would save you?” the seishen elder asked. “Are you so certain you are worth saving?”
Kai paled. But Quitsu had said that the elder would challenge her. That she would have to convince him of the rightness of her cause.
“I don’t know whether I am or not,” she admitted. “But I doubt the gods designed a world of beauty only to see it returned to the fires and overrun by demons. The burners aren’t perfect, but we have managed for the first time in hundreds of years to overcome our differences and find peace. Despite the false Taiyo and Tsuki doing everything in their power to keep us at war. We are moving towards a future of enlightenment, prosperity, and mutual respect. That clearly terrifies the demons. And I would think anything that terrifies the tengu is something Tsuki and Taiyo would fight for. Unless they gave up and abandoned us by choice.”
The elder looked at her with its unsettling eyes, tapping one taloned finger on the stone floor.
“You talk of the peace you have achieved, yet even now, thoughts of war ring loudly in your minds.” He nodded towards Hiro.
Kai turned to Hiro, watching a look of guilt play across his handsome face. “Not me,” he said heavily. “But yes, my father. If the natural disasters continue, he will restart the war.”
Kai felt the sting of betrayal and her mind reeled. How could Hiro have known and not told her?
The elder did not seem surprised. “I suppose you deserve some leniency. There is so much you do not know. The tengu have done everything in their power to destroy the true history of what happened and to plant falsehoods to sow seeds of discontent between you.”
“Please,” Kai said. “Anything you can tell us… There is so much we don’t understand.”
“Come,” it said, rising on its huge haunches and walking to the painting Kai had been examining. The rest of their group rose and followed it.
“These panels tell the story of the formation of the world, but also the fall of it. When the creator made the world, he banished the dark to the edges with light from the sun and the moon. Taiyo and Tsuki were the personification of that light. But this angered the creatures of darkness, who resided in the vast darkness of the universe.”
“The tengu,” Kai said. This tale was sounding familiar to the scroll they had found in the library.
“Yes. The tengu are an abomination to this world. They are the opposite of its incarnation. And this world—and its inhabitants—is an abomination to them. When the creator banished the darkness and set up this world for its inhabitants, he divided the universe into three realms. The mortal realm, where we now stand. The demon realm, a realm of darkness and death, and between them the spirit realm, a plane that is a mirror of this one, where creatures of spirit and magic live. Gods like Tsuki and Taiyo. And me and my seishen. The spirit realm is also where your human spirits go when you first die—a place of transition. Sometimes spirits linger there longer.”
It was strange hearing the elder speak as truth what she had only heard in children’s stories. He went on.
“But you’re in this world now,” Emi said. “Why?”
The elder puffed its wings slightly, and Emi fell silent. They walked to the next panels as the elder told its tale. “The creator created the seishen as the guardians of the spirit and mortal realms. Originally, our home was in the spirit realm.”
At the word “guardians,” something stirred in Kai’s memory. Where had she heard that before? But the thought eluded her, and she turned her attention back to the seishen’s story.
“The creator set up strong walls and seals between these worlds to keep them apart. But over the millennia, the tengu were set on one goal: to break out of their dark prison and destroy the new world the creator had made. To return the world to a place where they had free reign over darkness and death. Eventually, the unthinkable happened, and the seals between the demon and spirit realm failed. Powerful tengu began to cross over, free now to travel back and forth. They were intent on killing Tsuki and Taiyo and plunging the world back into darkness. They were breaking down the walls to the mortal world as well and beginning to cross over. “
“We saw a similar story in a scroll we found in our library,” Kai said. “The tengu trapped Tsuki and Taiyo in prisons so they could have free reign over the mortal realm.”
“This part of the story is hidden from me,” said the elder. “I was in the spirit realm at the time with my seishen, and we were under a full siege from the tengu. It was clear to me that they were intent upon destroying every last one of us. As a final desperate move, I fled through the seal to the mortal realm with my charges and established this sanctuary, building strong walls to keep the tengu out. We cannot return to the spirit world. It is overrun with tengu.”
Kai thought back to her conversation with Hamaio, looking over her shoulder and pushing her forcefully out of the realm before something attacked. She shuddered.
The elder went on. “By the time the dust settled, Tsuki and Taiyo had disappeared into the mortal realm. I know there was a great battle, and the burners and the gods were able to push the tengu back into the spirit realm and at
least partially seal the barrier between the worlds. But perhaps in the process, Tsuki and Taiyo were trapped as well.”
“We need their help now,” Kai said. “The tengu are obviously breaking their way into this world again. Tsuki and Taiyo must know how to reseal the borders between the realms. Do you know where they are trapped? How to find them?”
“No,” it said.
Kai couldn’t keep the look of disappointment off her face.
“But I have something that might help.”
CHAPTER 22
It was a wooden box. Its dark surface bore crude carvings, as if it had been hastily made.
The elder had sent one of his seishen to retrieve the thing, and now he held it in his taloned hand.
“What is it?” Colum asked, leaning forward to get a closer look. Clearly, the prospect of some valuable antiquity was enough to stir him from his silent musings at the back of the room.
“I don’t know exactly what it is, except that it came with a message,” the elder said. “When my seishen and I fled from the spirit world to the Misty Forest, the tengu were engaged in a two-pronged assault. On the seishen in the spirit world, and on the burners and gods in the mortal world. A messenger from the burners arrived on our shore after the battle was over. He was near death and only lived long enough to tell me that the tengu had been driven back for a time, but at great cost. The burner king and queen were killed and the gods were gone. He said that this box was key to finding Tsuki and Taiyo.”
“May I see it?” Kai asked.
The elder handed it to her, and she turned it over in her hand. It was weighty and warm to the touch.
She looked up and found the elder’s keen eagle eyes watching her. “What?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious.
“The messenger told me one more thing,” it said. “That the box will only open to the heirs. I must admit, I was curious if it would open at your touch.”
“Which heirs?” Hiro asked, holding out his hand for the box.
“The true heirs to the throne of Miina and Kita. The moon and sunburners.”