by R. T. Donlon
“There’s activity to the West,” her father said. “Out to sea. No danger in it for us.”
Kyrah shook her head, clearly frustrated by the news of more turmoil surrounding her tight-knit Portizu village. News of Darkness infiltrating the Light lands had come from scouts toward the sea, but no one had really taken the threats seriously. It had been nearly a century since Darkness had broken the truce between races. They had given no need for the Light to start taking precautions against them—at least not yet.
But why are we hearing about more attacks? she thought.
It was strange and, honestly, it left a solemnly bitter taste in her mouth. The jungle could be a menacing place, but to her, it was home. If it were suddenly to be threatened, she would fight until every bit of Darkness had died in the name of Turisic—each in its own slow, painful death. She pushed the bubbling anger in the base of her throat downward, collecting her thoughts and shifting shallowly into traji.
“You’ve been out protecting the wall, haven’t you?” Kyrah asked.
For the first time, she noticed the deep, fatigue lines under her father’s eyes.
“They’ve been quiet. Even at Relu’s Wall, they are keeping behind the Eldervarn” he said. “You are lucky we live in a time of peace.”
Too quiet, Kyrah thought. In fact, she hadn’t heard of a disturbance at the Lines for over a week. And peace? How could there be peace with Darkness lurking out to sea?
These thoughts, however, simply sifted through the sieve of her meditation, flowing out of her mind as quickly as they had infiltrated it.
“If there is Darkness out there, I cannot find it within myself to sleep,” she spoke. The stern expression plastered to her face hardened. “Not after what happened.”
“Well,” Jae Laeth continued. “If you aren’t going to sleep, then I will. These tired eyes only wear with age.”
He rose to his feet with one quick, fluid movement and bowed heavily towards his daughter—the minjori genuflect—a sign of undying love for another being. Kyrah returned the affection with no emotion, only a simple nod in the direction of her exiting father. She felt warm—loved—in these fleeting moments. Even in a world of overheating emotions and angry kings, the Portizu understood unmitigated control.
One can love without showing it.
We must, she thought, because no one else does.
“It’s been years, Kyrah. Every moment is hard without her, but she would want us—need us—to move on.”
He walked back into the village, speaking no last words of comfort. Fires burned from inside huts in the distance—the warm and welcoming kind. Each one sent its own plume of dispersing smoke up into the cool of the morning air. She watched as the silhouette of her father melted into the fabric of the land before falling back against the makeshift pillow below her head. The stars were still very present, although she noticed that some of the usual twinkle had dissipated against the early hours of sunlight. Another day would soon be upon the Portizu village and, today of all days, was of particular importance—the Great Hunt.
“Enough thought,” she spoke out loud to herself. “I must make my mind right.”
She knew where she must go.
She thrust herself onto her feet and sprinted into the thick webbing of the outer jungle. Vines seemed to reach out, attempting to catch her in flight, but could not. The motion of her legs kept her upright as she dodged uprooted stumps, hanging plants and dangerously sharp barbs. She understood the outlay of the land better than the pattern of her breathing, better than the way her heart beat against her chest. It was a part of her—a part so big that she felt completely connected to it, completely immersed in the sights and sounds surrounding her.
The jungle opened into an expanse of field lands, bristling with stalks of grass against changing winds. Fifty yards out stood a single natural cut of rock. She knew it as Hammer Rock.
“Why is it called Hammer Rock?” she had asked her father on a day trip through the Territories.
Only the corner of her father’s mouth raised ever so slightly, but he was smiling.
“If you look closely,” he answered, “it appears as if the gods had beaten it with a hammer.”
He swung his arm down as if holding one, forming the word boom as his fist made contact with the top of the plateau. She had never forgotten her father’s explanation, nor had she ever forgotten that day. She cherished those kinds of moments. They seemed to be few and far between.
She ran fast, but took her time, and when she reached the base of the plateau, she smiled—not because she had climbed this particular cliff face more times than she could count—but because she was alone, not another body in sight. She closed her eyes, imagined soaking in the warmth of the sun at the plateau’s top, allowing only for the perspiration to evaporate, leaving her body from each individual pore across the surface of her skin.
And yet, the thought of the gods, for one reason or another, having their eyes on her clung to her thoughts. For once, Kyrah Laeth was the center of attention. She felt, at the very least, a minuscule sense of enjoyment in that thought, but also a clear sense of worry.
The rock face rose in front of her in a near vertical tilt. She placed a set of fingers in a rising crack to her left, then propelled herself horizontally onto a rock ledge about four feet from the ground, landing gracefully onto her side with only the slightest of thuds. She rolled over onto her backside and sat there—at the edge of the miniature precipice—with her legs dangling over the edge.
Several huntsmen had attempted to free climb this particular rock face year after year, all failing for a multitude of reasons. Only Kyrah had accomplished the feat, training in the midst of the Portizu’s greatest warrior—Velc Tahjir. An amazing feat for anyone, yet no one could ever know.
“You must keep your abilities secret,” Velc had preached.
The hard features across his forehead, eyes, and jawline remained completely void of emotion. If Kyrah hadn’t been training for so long under him, she would have sworn that he possessed no heartbeat, no sign of life.
“Why?” she had asked. A bit of frustration had clenched itself in her brow. “Why must I keep it a secret? I’m better than—”
“Listen to what I say,” Velc interrupted. His voice deepened almost into a groan. “There will be a time when your skills are needed, but if you reveal them too soon, there will be consequences. They will look at you differently, at first. Then they will hunt you. No longer will they respect you. They will fear you instead.”
She had known better than to ask too many questions. Velc had always expected nothing more than a nod from his apprentice in conversation like this, but she had bent into the full minjori pose in a moment of surrender, surprising him.
“As you wish,” she had said. “I trust you.”
And that had been that. Velc had silenced the issue with nothing more than a stiff glare. If she had ever believed that she stood a chance against her teacher in this debate, his stern demeanor showed her otherwise. The emptiness she saw in his eyes was not really a void at all, she figured, but something more like a mysterious rage just waiting to be unleashed, waiting for a reason to unhinge. Kyrah had never wanted to be that reason. Never.
She climbed each jut in the rock until she found herself halfway up its face, clinging to a pair of handhold crevices at the far end of a particularly nasty angle. Her feet could not find a place to set here, so she pulled herself up using only her fingers, giving herself enough momentum to jump upward to another jutting piece of rock. The movement should have exhausted her. Her breath should have been choppy and quick here, but it seemed only the exact opposite occurred. It had calmed her, almost serenely distant from the danger of falling to her death now, and although sweat poured down her arms, drenching her clothes in a triangle of damp fabric at her chest, shoulders, and back, she understood completely that this was where she needed to be. This was what she needed to be doing.
She propelled herself upward for a
second lurch, each time finding the smallest of ridges in the rock to insert her fingers. She finally reached the lip of the upper edge and hung there by one arm for a few moments, enjoying the way her arm muscles stretched against the weight of her body, and basking in the sensation of being alone—a feeling she could not experience all too often. Moments like these—sunrise—seemed to be her only real chance to escape. When she had had her fill, she flipped her torso over the edge, picked herself up onto her feet, and brushed the dirt from her tunic.
Sunlight had already begun its quick ascent into the sky, evaporating the stars from her field of view. Suddenly, the horizon shifted from a canvas of spilled ink into a foray of rainbow-like colors. Before long, the haze of the Portizu jungle would consume them all, leaving them once again dense and dull, but in these moments of natural clarity, every color—even the faintest of indigos and pinks—exposed themselves.
To Kyrah, this was paradise.
She kicked dust into hovering clouds as she walked, sending the particles into the sky around her. They danced elegantly from left to right, then upward, daubing the air in a slow, calculated wisp. She sat on the Eastern edge with her legs positioned under her, wrapped in a traditional traji meditative pose, and when the dust settled, she enjoyed the rushing heat of the morning pushing gently against her face, the way the sunlight felt against her eyelids, the tightening of her leg muscles fixed in traji. Everything seemed safe—comfortable, even.
“Still aching for silence, are you?” she heard a deep, male voice project from behind her.
She knew better than to flinch in surprise, yet she nearly succumbed to the response anyway, despite her traji stillness.
“Teacher,” she spoke. “What are you doing here?”
Her meditative mind had ventured too deep into her subconscious to converse with any sort of clarity, but she attempted to do so anyway. Her state would have to suffice, though. When a Teacher speaks, the student responds.
Velc Tahjir stood ten feet behind her with his arms crossed against his chest. He wore a thin warrior’s robe that danced in the heightened breeze. He had aged significantly since the last time they had met. She noticed this in the way his voice projected through the air, into her ears.
“You are wondering why I am here, are you not?” he asked.
Think, Kyrah spoke to herself. Speak coherently.
“I did not hear you climb after me. Were you already here?”
She could almost feel Velc smile inwardly.
“Indeed,” he continued. “You have a knack for finding me in my most secluded settings. You are a product of my teaching after all.”
It was a valid point. Among the warriors of the Portizu Tribes, Kyrah had generally been considered one of, if not the best, of the best—not by her own standards, but by the standards of the Portizu Tribe-King, Al-We Ultara. He had always been considered a distant ruler of sorts—upholding the tradition of the Portizu Tribes behind closed doors—but his mark was left anywhere among the lands the Portizu lived. His legacy had been left to the minds and hearts of his people for generations.
Suddenly, as Kyrah was coming to, she noticed a distinct difference in the air between the two of them. It seemed quieter, colder.
“What is it, Teacher?” Kyrah asked. “What’s wrong?”
Finally unraveling from the traji position, she turned to witness a far-off look in her Teacher’s eyes. A bubble of fear rose to the cusp of her throat.
“The sunrise,” he began. “It’s darker than it’s been.”
Darker? Kyrah asked herself. It looks the same to me.
“You would never know by sight alone,” he continued, almost as if he had forgotten she was there. “It’s more of a feeling, really, like something is off, like something is displaced. I can’t really explain it…”
Velc’s voice trailed off. She had never heard this sort of hollowness in her teacher’s voice. The pallid look in his eyes seemed nothing like what she remembered of him from all of her years of training. It had been years since her last lesson, but this frailty she was witnessing overwhelmed her like a tsunami crashing into a shoreline. The person she most feared and most admired suddenly appeared weakened and turbulent.
“We have lost ourselves somewhere along the line. We’ve become soft…even us…even the Portizu.”
“Teacher,” Kyrah mumbled.
The words he spoke could easily be taken as treason if overheard by the wrong ears. He had sworn against this type of speech, beyond any other lesson.
“You must never be caught with words unfaithful to the Tribes. This is King Ultara’s most important rule,” he had said, “but me…I see clear now. I see clear.”
She clung to how he had spoken the warning. It was definitive—bold, even—but the look in his eyes had been completely enigmatic, filled with furious mystery. She attempted to relax her shoulders, drop quietly into tansij to calm her beating heart, but instead, she stood stiffly opposite her aging teacher at the edge of this towering plateau, his words sending a bitter chill through her bones.
“You do not seem like yourself, Teacher. I have seen you in many forms, but this…” Kyrah spoke.
Her own voice trailed off before she could continue. A small crackle in her voice formed where her throat met the back of her skull.
Velc suddenly redirected his eyes, veering them backward toward Kyrah and made eye contact. Immediately, the distinct concentration she knew of him returned. He bent into minjori.
The minjori bow? she questioned. Did Velc just commend me as equal?
Velc performed the bow again. A rush of odd surprise coursed through Kyrah.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked. The look in his eyes fell away once again. “You must be feeling the change by now.”
“There’s something,” she said, “but I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. It feels more like—tension.”
Velc turned toward the expanding horizon, which forced her to do the same. She had lost track of time being in tansij, but as she stood with him, the clarity of reality came pouring back.. Half of the sun was now spilling heat across the jungle in waves. The air blurred in it. The sky, in turn, stretched into a cobalt blanket, leaving nothing in its wake, not even clouds. The beauty of it nearly drained the oxygen from her lungs.
“Tension,” Velc murmured. He suddenly appeared nothing but weak, fragile. “You must change your scope of thought before you come to terms with your destiny.”
So now this was about destiny? she asked herself.
“Teacher,” Kyrah continued. “If you wish for me to understand—if you are here for a reason—you must tell me now.”
What happened next stirred the deepest kind of fear within her—Velc grinned.
He approached, now only inches away from her.
“You are stuck too far into the literal. You are too centered in the body. Think inwardly. The core of our being resides there. It is only there that you will find your true self. It is only there you can truly understand what I ask of you.”
The core of being, she repeated.
The words stuck.
Velc took several steps backward, maintaining the stiffest of postures against awkwardly bended knee. Kyrah kept fixated. The grin had yet to recede from his face. It clung to it.
“It is not that simple,” said Kyrah.
“Correct,” he responded, “but nothing good rises from the construction of virtue. Only in disillusion and despair do we truly understand how to overcome to things we fear the most.”
So much of what Velc had offered her in her teachings scared her, but the words he had just spoken gave birth to a new breed of fear.
“Every moment, every word, every action, has led you to this moment. Whether you choose to believe in your own fate or you choose to ignore it, I warned you there would be a time when you can no longer hide. All Portizu Tribes of this world will know who you are. They will know you are more than what you appear to be.”
An arm shifted underneath
Velc Tahjir’s robes. Only a trained Portizu warrior could see it as more than the gentle, heated breeze of a summer morning. The grin vanished from his face and, likewise, the blood vanished from hers.
“Tragedy breeds exception, Kyrah. You will know fate.”
Then, in the half-second it took Kyrah to blink, Velc rose a dagger to the left side of his throat and slid it hard across the skin into a perfectly clear, bloody gash. Fresh waves of blood pulsed from the wound, spilling down the collar of Velc’s robes and soaking into violently, dark splotches. His knees buckled and, as if suddenly overcome by gravity, fell to the dirty plateau floor. Kyrah was there to catch him. She eased him to the ground, thought about screaming for help, but knew it would do no good. Velc attempted to speak once more, but a fresh wave of blood gurgled up into his mouth, ceasing breath and voice simultaneously.
She kept her hand behind his head and watched the life drain from his eyes, but as his body collapsed against the weight of Xan’s calling, she thought she had caught a glimpse of blue flecks swirling in the irises of his gray eyes.
The palace of Al-We Ultara could not really be classified as a palace at all. The Chieftain sat rigidly against the back of his chair with his chin tilted upward, staring at the palm fronds layered into the thatched roof above him. He never needed what the other kings needed to rule their lands. He took pride in the fact that he could attend to the necessities of his people with such little resources. His people understood their means, the Tribes made do, and the Great Range persisted onward into their fateful ways of existence.
It made his Kingdom stronger. It made the Tribes stronger.
“Chieftain!” spoke a voice, echoing through the long passage beyond the Throne Room. “We have urgent news from the Northern Lands!”
The Northern Lands, he thought. What could be so important that the Northern Lands would bring word?
A nervous sensation crept steadily into the Chieftain’s chest and tightened the muscles around his ribs.