“Good to know.”
“How’s your training coming along?” Altan asked as he led me down the hallway with rooms on either side.
There were elaborate frescoes painted on the ceiling, and the smell of incense was heavy in the air, thick as smog.
“It has been interesting,” I said, recalling having to fight Saruul and then the meditation experience that had happened afterward.
I wanted to talk to Lhandon about it, but I needed to test it out again before I really put any confidence in what I’d discovered.
“That’s good to know,” Altan said as he led me into a different room than Bobby had been in the last time I’d visited.
“Nick?” Bobby asked, looking up from his bed. Lhandon, who sat in a chair near Bobby’s bed, immediately stood, offering me the seat.
I took it, my focus only on my old friend as I brought his hand into mine.
“Damn, am I glad to see you,” I told him, my words barely able to contain the excitement I was feeling. It was Bobby, the same Bobby I had grown up with, albeit thinner now, his skin slightly loose around his jowls, the whiskers of his beard slightly white.
“I can’t believe you brought me all the way up here…” Bobby said.
“He knows where we are?” I asked Lhandon.
“The snow lion people were some of the earliest inhabitants of the Kingdom of Lhasa. The debate on their existence stems from an origin story still popular in the east through a song sung by the cat people of the Forbidden City of Trongsa,” Bobby explained, much to my surprise, “which starts off with a verse that goes something like this: The snow brought lions, their furs white and bold, above the clouds they drew their strength, never to turn to the land below.”
“How…?” I looked to Lhandon for an answer.
“It appears that he has come through the portal with a gift as well,” Lhandon said under his breath.
“Amazing.” I wanted to reach forward and help Bobby, but he looked frail, and I had questions, so many questions that I barely knew where to begin.
“I can sing the second verse if you’d like,” Bobby said, his movements a bit loopy, “but I am guessing by the look on your face that we have more important things to talk about. Also, I’m feeling a little sick to my stomach, so if I point at that bucket,” he said, nodding to the bucket by the side of his bed, “please hand it to me.”
“Anything, and no worries, man.”
Bobby smiled. “Lhandon has caught me up on a few things that you already know, that we came through the portal, and that each of us has been given a power, that we’re all technically Golden Ones according to the lore of the land.”
“Yes, and what is your power?”
“It’s going to sound very egotistical for me to say this, but my power lies in here,” Bobby said, bringing his finger to his temple. “No, I’m not a telepath, but for some reason, I’ve been given a profound knowledge of this world, and I’ve been able to mix it with some of the science from our world.”
“Like your smartphone?” I asked, recalling Sona saying that Lhandon had the device.
“Early on, that helped me show people I meant business, as did my fluency in some of the regional dialects of the kingdom, but I’m trying not to rely on that type of tech. It took about a week to really understand what I could do with my power. The problem is…” Bobby licked his lips, his eyes darting left and right, and at that moment, I saw a side of him I’d never seen before. “I can’t turn it off,” he said, grinding his teeth all of a sudden. “It doesn’t stop. My thoughts, the information, the connections. The connections, Nick. I can’t turn them off. I can’t turn them off.”
“Please, just take a deep breath,” Lhandon told him, “as I showed you.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying, I’m trying.” Sweat appeared on Bobby’s brow as he sucked in short breaths of air.
“Relax, dude,” I told him.
“Yes, dude,” Lhandon said, trying to take my tone and use my word. “Relax.”
Bobby and I locked eyes, both looking to Lhandon at the same time. We cracked up like it was old times, Lhandon not sure why we were laughing.
“Do you even know what that word means?” Bobby asked Lhandon.
“Which word?”
“Dude,” I told him.
“It’s a term of endearment, is it not? Sorry if I misused it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bobby said. “And thank you, Altan and Lhandon. Thank you for taking care of me. Anyway, to answer your question, Nick, that’s my power. And it never goes away. Not like yours.”
“Start from the beginning for me,” I told Bobby, focusing in again on the important details. “We got separated, and you became their prisoner. Start there.”
Bobby nodded. “But I have something else I want to tell you, something else I need to show you…”
“Let’s just start there, and work our way up to that point,” I told him.
“Okay,” Bobby said with a nod. “Makes sense. They took me prisoner, and it was a day or so before they brought me back to Nagchu. It was during that trip back to the city that I exhibited my ability for the first time, which made them bring me straight to Madame Mabel.”
“What did you do? How did you exhibit your ability?”
“We came across a series of trees that attacked us, if you can believe that.”
“I can definitely believe that.”
“In our world, at least in fantasy gaming, dryads don’t usually attack people,” Bobby explained, “but we aren’t in our world, and once they attacked, I started speaking to the plants in their own language.”
“You can speak the plant language?” Altan asked.
“It just came to me, almost as if I were in a trance. I got the plants to free the men, and rather than take me to become a slave, where I would have met you…” he said, looking at Altan.
“Wait, how do you know he was a former slave?” I asked Bobby.
“Because he has all the markings of a slave. Do you see how his ears were once pierced?” Bobby asked, referring to the earrings that Altan had since taken out and the indention they left behind. “Only her most elite slaves were allowed to wear those. Even the townspeople of Nagchu don’t wear jewelry like that. While he no longer wears it, I can tell that it was once there. In fact, Mabel’s whole strategy of control was based on having power over a class beneath you, a hierarchy system. That’s why people were loyal to her. They always thought that they were a class higher than someone else, even the slaves.”
Altan nodded in agreement.
“But back to my story. It became evident relatively quickly that I had a gift with knowledge. In my first week there, I helped her civil engineers figure out a better system for irrigation. I was also able to translate some of the text utilized for those practicing the Path of Possession that was once thought to be lost. It was Sona who brought back the text from a monastery they happened to come across. I believe you know her.”
“Yes,” I told Bobby, remembering the scantily clad woman and her powerful sword.
“And it was around that time that they introduced me to…” Bobby licked his lips again.
“It’s fine, you are better now,” I told him. “It’s going to take some time.”
“I know, and I’m sorry…” Bobby said, his eyes lowered. “Have you tried lotus?”
I quickly told Bobby about how I’d lit the lotus fields on fire, inhaling it as I escaped the plantation. He listened eagerly, his throat quivering at times.
“Then you know its power,” he finally said.
“What about Evan?” I asked him, wanting to get off the subject of lotus. “What do you know about him?”
“Aside from the fact that he’s a fat piece of shit who we were right to have never liked, and a man who Tom should have deleted from his life years ago?”
“Yes,” I said with a chuckle. “Aside from that part.”
“He showed up in Nagchu about two weeks after I first got there. I
don’t know how he convinced those guys to let him go on patrol with them, but he had, and in the meantime, he had truly honed his skills.”
“And what are his skills exactly?” I asked him.
“Evan has been given this ability to hit any target he likes with any object. He simply has to focus on it and he hits it. I’m talking he could make a paper airplane, and throw it off a mountain into a teacup. His power is phenomenal. Naturally, he has taken to the crossbow, because they don’t have firearms here. He did speak to me a few times about creating firearms, but…” Bobby shook his head. “I didn’t do it. Even though I know how they would work, and I could theoretically draw the schematics for one, I didn’t want to give him an advantage. So I played dumb. And to play dumb, I got high…”
“Damn, man,” I said, again recognizing the shame in his eyes.
“I know that you guys are planning to go to the Island Kingdom in search of Hugo and the reincarnation of the Exonerated One,” Bobby said, nodding to Lhandon, “but you had better be prepared for how the Kingdom of Lhasa will have changed once you return. Evan and Sona will continue the war with Madame Blanche, Madame Darwina on their side. If there was a mutiny, I’m going to assume it has been squashed by now. And Darwina would be foolish to go against Evan and Sona.”
“We will be ready,” I assured him.
Bobby bit his lip. “It may not be as easy as you think it will be.”
“I am certain it will be difficult.”
“Good, just so we’re on the same page. There’s another thing I wanted to talk about. So you are familiar with the five Immortals, who came here in two separate portals.”
“Yes, two thousand years ago.”
“Another group tried, a thousand years ago, but they were killed relatively quickly, so yes, I’m referring to the first five, the main five. Haven’t you figured it out yet?” he asked suddenly, looking at me in a very lucid way now.
“Figured what out?”
“The language, the runic characters, the names of the cities…”
“What do you mean?”
“You aren’t really big into world history, are you?” Bobby asked me.
“I mean, it’s been a while since I took a history class, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He waved my statement away. “The naming convention of this kingdom and the other four kingdoms all come from three basic language groups, Tibetan, Bhutanese, which are related, and Mongolian, which isn’t related, but does have a connection with Tibet and the Buddhism practice there and in Bhutan. The script itself also borrows from Japanese. Let’s take this kingdom, the Kingdom of Lhasa. In our world, ‘Lhasa’ is the capital of Tibet, and it is still an important city, even if China now rules over the Tibetan Autonomous Region with more oppression I would care to discuss at the moment. Regarding the meaning of the word, ‘Lhasa’ itself means ‘seat of the God,’ ‘lha’ meaning ‘god’ and ‘sa’ meaning ‘seat.’ With that understanding, this kingdom is the seat of all gods, even if the word doesn’t translate the same way we would translate it in our world.”
“This is blowing my mind…”
“Ready to have it blown even more?” Bobby reached for the piece of parchment, his hand trembling as he scribbled something out. “Are you familiar with this?” he asked me after he showed me the characters.
“I can’t say that I am,” I told him, still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that all the names here actually came from our world.
“Om mani padme hum, the popular Tibetan prayer which is generally meant to be a prayer to the Dalai Lama, where the speaker of the prayer is asking to take refuge in the bodhisattva of compassion, or His Holiness. Actually, as an aside, the name ‘Dalai Lama’ is a combination of Mongolian and Tibetan, the word ‘dalai’ being the Mongolian word for ‘ocean,’ and the word ‘lama’ translating to wisdom. Ocean of wisdom. I could get into more detail than that, but I won’t. The point is, do these characters look familiar to you?”
“They sort of look like…” My eyes went wide as I looked at what he’d written.
I noticed that there were six main characters, with subscripts on the last two characters. The first character almost looked like the letter W, while the characters that followed had similar styles and curves to the script I used for runes.
Bobby smiled. “You get it now, don’t you? The characters here are based on the characters used in Tibet and Bhutan.”
“Not Mongolia?”
“No, Mongolians currently use a script called Hudum Mongol bichig that looks like vertical Arabic. They actually used a horizontal square script designed by Tibetans years ago, but that was for only a hundred years. Anyway, I digress. Kenzo, who helped design the script, clearly was from Japan in both his name and the Japanese influence in the characters. Let me give you an example. This reads ‘excuse me,’ or sumimasen.”
The Japanese script was a lot lighter than the Tibetan script, with similar lines and fewer markings above the characters. I also noticed there weren’t any stacked characters like the Tibetan script exhibited.
“So, if you didn’t know, the Japanese people actually came from China. But this was thousands and thousands of years ago, and since they were technically Chinese, they utilized the Chinese script, which made up the Japanese script known as Kanji, of which there are something like twenty thousand characters. This was simplified by a monk into Hiragana, which was later simplified into Katakana to spell out foreign words. The script I’ve written here is in Hiragana. All this to say: the characters used in the Kingdom of Lhasa and the other kingdoms seems to be a mixture of the Tibetan and Katakana. Are you following me?”
I glanced between Lhandon and Altan, neither of them certain how to interpret this information.
“Never mind. It gets complicated. I need to read the Book of the Immortals,” Bobby said suddenly. “I need to read every book in the library here at the temple. But for now…” He took a deep breath in, clenching his jaw shut. “I need to rest. I can feel a migraine coming on. I’m sorry. Thank you for stopping by, Nick. Let’s meet again before you leave tomorrow. Again, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry…” He kept repeating himself for a moment, occasionally twitching his head. “Sorry…”
“Let’s step out,” Lhandon said, coming to me suddenly. “It is important that your friend gets some rest. I’m sure we can learn more from him tomorrow, and once we return to Dornod, once he is better.”
Chapter Nineteen: A Journey Begins
“I wish you the best of luck,” Jigme said, bowing his head at us. Roger, Lhandon, Tashi, Saruul and I sat before him, Altan still upstairs taking care of Bobby.
Jigme had just finished an elaborate ritual which involved tracing up a few runes of protection using the smoke of an incense stick, the smell of sandalwood heavy in the air. He wore several prayer beads around his neck, and also had a string wrapped around his arm.
The back doors swung open.
A few of the younger lion monks filed into the space carrying large packs with them, and an assortment of gifts.
“You shouldn’t have,” Lhandon said, bowing again.
“Nonsense. I told you that I would help you prepare for your trip across the Great Plateau, and I meant it,” Jigme said.
One of his monks brought forth a stack of folded gray scarves.
“These scarves have all been blessed, and they will help you face the terrible tundra that is the Great Plateau,” Jigme explained. “You are about to enter a world of extremes that most citizens of Lhasa would never dare to cross. You will need to protect yourselves from the elements.”
The young lion monk distributed the scarves to us. They even had a smaller one specifically designed for Roger with a hole in it, allowing the scarf to fit snugly around his thick neck.
“Not bad,” Roger said as I helped him put the scarf on.
“It is unfortunate that we, as a people, have forgotten the ability to trance-walk.”
“Trance-walk?” Lhan
don asked as he took the scarf from the young monk, also offering the man a polite bow.
“Perhaps you have heard of it, Tashi,” Jigme said, looking to the fire spirit.
“I have, and I’ve actually seen it in action,” he explained. “There was a time when the only way to reach Sarpang was by crossing the Great Plateau. People attempted going there by sea, but the boats weren’t very sturdy, and they generally had to send two ships knowing that only one of them would arrive. So yes, I have crossed the Great Plateau before, and I’ve seen trance-walking in action. It was morning, and we were packing up when we saw a cloud of dust heading our way. There can be dust storms out there, you know, so we assumed it was one of those, but one of our men who had crossed the Plateau shouted for us to move aside. It was a trance-walker.”
“You actually saw someone doing it?” Lhandon asked, his eyes wide with amazement.
“Yes, Exalted One. And it was absolutely phenomenal. The man simply floated past us, his feet barely moving. He was whispering a mantra, a wave of energy spiraling around him, his hands pressed into a prayer position in front of his heart. We were told not to disturb him, to simply stand still. It was only a moment later that he passed us.”
“So it is a form of fast traveling?” I asked.
“An enlightened form of fast traveling,” Jigme corrected me, “one that has mostly been forgotten about.”
The way the lion monk was grinning at us told me that there was more to the story, and it wasn’t but a few seconds later that he slowly placed his hands on his knees, a flicker behind his eyes. “Perhaps it isn’t completely forgotten. Perhaps there is a hermit who has taken refuge on one of the cliffs surrounding Lion’s Peak. Perhaps he would be able to teach us how this power worked.”
“Someone still knows the skill?” Lhandon asked. “Because if that is the case, we must go to him.”
Jigme considered this for a moment, an indecipherable look on his face. Finally, he spoke: “I agree, but first, I think it is best for you to return to Dornod, to give me time to send out some scouts to see if he is even willing to teach us. The journey you are about to undertake will send you through the Plateau to the Island Kingdom, and your return quest will likely be through the eastern part of Lhasa, which may prove to be incredibly fruitful when it comes to new concepts learned, powers discovered, and perhaps abilities mastered,” he said, focusing on me.
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