by Jason Letts
Arching her back to gaze up into the night sky, she noticed a funny shape a few yards away from the rock, blocking out the stars. Realizing Neeko still climbed ahead of her, Mira got to her feet and put her hands on the first rock ledge. Jumping and pulling, she grappled its side. Kicking underneath it, she wriggled onto the stone slab and looked for the next platform to scale.
Her tender moment fueled a mindless resolve, a desperate hunger for the goal that waited above. Clawing at the rock as she pulled herself up, her body’s limitations and injuries fell mute in the face of her adrenaline. She jumped to the next ledge around the side of the spire, leaping over empty space and catching herself on the embankment just short of tumbling over into a fatal fall.
The muscles in Mira’s arms and shoulders propelled her weight through the black mist to the stars hanging precipitously overhead. The stone in which she had seen her sister already looked like a speck below her. Above, Neeko’s ghostly shadow blocked out a larger section of the sky. Clamoring onto another rocky ledge, Mira heard him straining to gain elevation.
The blood from the slice in her head dripped into her eye, and Mira hastily wiped it away with the back of her hand. Scaling countless tiny ledges and spiraling around the steep column, she worked through her tiring muscles. She told herself it would be over soon, reminded herself who she was doing it for. Above her, Neeko’s foot slipped off the side, spilling pebbles and dust onto her head.
Through the empty space in which Neeko climbed to the next ledge, Mira spotted the edge of the very top. His movements were growing sluggish. She couldn’t think of how she would overtake him, but her pounding heart reminded her of how close they were to the finish.
Pulling herself onto another ledge, she quickly hopped up and ran her hand through the air. She hit upon something hidden in the empty space and grabbed at it. Her pull flattened Neeko’s torso against the stone cliff, his legs dangling down below. Mira fought against his kicks, both of them growling and straining.
He snatched his legs away from her and pulled them onto the ledge. Mira hopped and stretched her hands to grab his ledge, but his foot slammed down on top of them. She fell back onto her feet, her raw fingers smarting. Mira remembered the tiny bottle of her mother’s tears at her hip and thought about using them, but she decided the chance of missing was too great.
Again hopping up and grabbing the slab of stone jutting out from the rocky shaft, she had her eyes looking out at the shadow this time. Seeing it standing there in the empty air, she waited for the foot to come down. Grabbing it with both hands, she supported her body against the rock with her elbows. She dug her nails into his skin and Neeko let out a pained yelp. Mira shimmied onto the ledge just in time to receive a strong kick in the stomach that sent her to the edge.
Feeling her hand out in his direction, he grabbed hold of her arm, but she pushed forward and knocked him against the rock wall. Fighting on the narrow outcropping, neither of them could climb to the final ledge before the top. From that last shelf, hanging ever so slightly above them, a simple hop would deliver her to the goal.
Mira elbowed him directly in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. Turning away to reach for the upper ledge, she felt Neeko push her forward. Mira caught the foothold with her hands to prevent falling to the lower level. Stretching from her raised hands to her extended heels, Neeko swung for the sides of her midsection, knocking her into the rock wall.
She fell back onto the ledge and Neeko took his turn trying to climb. Reaching into the air to grab him, her hands found nothing to grasp. Gasping, she watched his shadow slinking onto the last ledge. She let out a cry and quickly jumped up in pursuit, but it was too late. Halfway to the final precipice, she could hear his greedy laughter and see his dark reflection slide onto the peak’s plateau.
Mira pulled her legs onto the last ledge and let her shaking fingers rest on the mountain’s highest point, a flat and round plane no bigger than her living room. Neeko’s laughter bellowed as he jogged to the edge, hands upraised. Mira felt a cold shiver run down her spine. Her eye twitched through her dead stare. Her labored breathing carried an unceasing supply of frustration, contempt, and mortal rage.
Mira’s eyes still on Neeko’s shadow, jumping and celebrating with glee, her fingers crawled into the folds of her ear. Plucking out Corey’s blood stone, she set her eyes upon it for a moment before casting it over the edge.
“I won!” Neeko burst out from across the edge of the mountaintop. “You knew it! Get ready everybody, now that I’m here nothing’s ever gonna be the same! I won!”
“No one will ever know,” Mira whispered.
She silently slipped onto the plateau and stalked across the rock with the wary lunges of a hunter. Creeping toward her prey, the cloud sealed away all traces of the mountain below. Above, the glittering web stretched across the stratosphere, every brilliant strand illuminated by the backdrop of countless stars, as though they had shot into outer space.
Alone except for the web, the stars, and the moon, Mira tracked Neeko as he celebrated, unaware of what approached him from behind. His reflected image stood out in the air, and Mira calculated his location near the edge. Pumping his fists, he released another triumphant call.
Mira jumped on his invisible back, wrapping her legs around his sides and snaking her arms around his head. His hollers turned to spits and gasps, and he flailed spastically trying to knock her off while teetering near a cloudy abyss. Just as she was about to twist, Neeko fell over backward and landed on Mira.
The fall knocked her arms away, and Neeko tried to break free.
“What are you doing?” he coughed. “It’s over!”
But Mira still had a firm hold on him, and she forced her arm around his neck hoping to suffocate him before he could get up. Pulling her arm tight against his throat, a ferocious gleam lit her eyes and contorted her face. Neeko sputtered and choked. His true appearance flickered inside her arms in tune with his writhing reflection just steps away. Squeezing the life out of his pale skin and white hair, she ground his face into the rock from behind.
“I trusted you! How could you do that to me!” Mira screeched.
“You’ve lost your mind! What are you talking about?”
Swinging his arm back, Neeko caught her injured leg, ripping into the wound with his fingers. Mira wailed and lost her grip, and Neeko gasped and floundered, trying to get away.
“Are you crazy? I saved you from that lion! It’s over!” he uttered with a shrill cry.
He could not escape her relentless, murderous hands, which she pressed to his face to gouge out his eyes. Neeko slapped at her wildly, kicking and thrashing. He knocked her away, only to crawl back toward the edge in his confusion. Mira had a hold of his foot, and she twisted it violently. It became invisible in her hands, but she twisted it to the side, spinning Neeko onto his back.
In one swift motion, he extended his foot into her face. She lost hold of him entirely, tipping backward. Righting herself, she reached for him, but there was nothing there. Looking back, she saw his reflection drop over the far edge and descend the ledges. Still facing the opposite way, Mira sprang up and let her fingers chase after him, but the futility of it made her drop her arm. A weary, somber sigh passed through her lips. She collapsed onto her knees.
Looking at the web covering the sky, a painful tension tugged at her shoulders and neck. Alone on the mountaintop, she recoiled from herself in a hollow moment of recognition.
“What’s happened to me?”
The sun broke through the horizon at that moment, flooding light down on the land below. Out on the scarred and fallow earth, two armies of tiny specks drifted together. They met and agitated, lightning bolts striking down on them from a cloudless sky.
BOOK 3
THE STASIS
“For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the o
ld truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, hate into love, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is absolute ambiguity.”
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Chapter 1: The Equinox Festival
Turning the corner where the forest gave way to farmland, the returning shadows first glimpsed the stone walls of Corey Outpost and the small, adjoining village. For Vern, Aoi, Will, and Roselyn, the sight of their beloved home produced a wellspring of emotion in their hearts, arousing excitement and joy that their hardships during the Rite at Shadow Mountain had buried.
Laughing, Vern and Will spontaneously took off in a race along the forest’s edge, their bags bouncing over their shoulders, yearning for the pleasure of seeing their families and being home after months of training and hardship in the capitol city of Darmen.
“Aren’t they cute?” Roselyn mused to the other girls as they strolled in the shade of leafy branches on a bright and beautiful day. Aoi started to giggle when Vern, falling behind, latched onto Will, trying to get a free ride home. Beyond the boys, a few figures meandered near the large outpost gate. Though the girls looked back at Mira to share their good feelings, the grim look on her face made it hard to tell if she even knew they were there.
Though she had a bandage on her leg, Mira Ipswich marched forward clutching a large bag of supplies over one shoulder and a small bag of limes in the other. Seeing Corey Outpost, her first home after she stepped out into the world, made her purse her lips and turn her head. Though she carried a somber air, the others didn’t let her dampen their spirits.
“Looks like all that extra weight isn’t doing you any favors,” Will joked when he arrived at the gate and dropped his bag. Vern caught him a moment later, wearing a big, satisfied smile. He threw his bag right on top of Will’s.
“Yeah, well it’ll come in handy,” Vern said, slapping his pot belly. “I’m going to be out there demolishing any poor sucker who comes before me. Boom. Boom, another one down. Oh, you think you can touch me? Think again! Boom.”
Vern produced lightning-quick fighting gestures, felling imaginary opponents and simulating an intense battle. Will had to laugh, and he began choreographing his own martial arts demonstration, trying to top Vern with absurdly unrealistic maneuvers.
Will was caught off guard when someone came up behind him and stuffed a muffin into his mouth. Jerking back, he saw it was Nora, the town’s healer, who didn’t have a stitch of hair left on her head. Considering her hair needed to be eaten to produce its healing effect, there was only one place it could’ve gone. Will grimaced when he finally bit into the muffin.
“Eat this,” she ordered Vern, urgency in her voice. He also had a bandage on his leg from when a mountain lion had scratched him during the dangerous climb at the end of their apprenticeships for The Shadowing. Nora handed him another muffin, and he begrudgingly put it in his mouth. She had small bags of hair, which she stuffed into their packs. Behind her, Will and Vern noticed Natalie, Corey’s personal assistant, walking toward them through the outpost marketplace.
“I know they don’t look as appetizing as if I’d baked them into something, but they won’t go bad this way,” Nora said, and no one offered a response.
Continuing to savor their approach, Roselyn and Aoi passed the row of stone markers, each one bigger than the last, along the forest’s edge. From the little chunk of volcanic glass to the hefty marble boulder, each stone had a corresponding path leading to a small schoolhouse in the woods. Just a few steps amounted to ten years of their lives, and they remarked that a new school year at Dustfalls Academy would begin soon. Once the stones and their wistful memories were behind them, Roselyn and Aoi rejoined Mira, who had walked directly to the gate.
They were all immediately presented with a muffin containing little hairs that poked out in every direction. Before Roselyn could finish groaning, Mira had already downed an entire muffin. She took the bags of hair that Nora offered and stuffed them securely in her sack. Natalie stood patiently at the gate, waiting for her chance to speak while Mira hastily adjusted her belongings.
Another figure rushed through the outpost’s entrance. Recognizing Chucky, whose appearance had drastically changed over the course of his training, his friends cheered and clapped. Though they’d left him overweight and uncoordinated, he now looked strong and sturdy. His shaggy, curly hair, however, had not changed at all.
“What did you do with Chucky?” Vern joked.
“Why didn’t I go to work on a farm? What a dumb mistake that was,” Will lamented.
“Are you ready for some action? Things are about to get real rough,” Vern grinned.
“I can’t let you guys have all the fun,” Chucky said, appearing a little nervous around everyone. Though Vern and Will approached him, excited to catch up, Chucky held them off for a moment so he could get someone else’s attention. His hand reached to take Mira’s until he shifted suddenly to touch her shoulder. But when her head jerked around at him, he quickly withdrew it.
“Hey there, Mira! It’s so good to see you. I missed you terribly,” he beamed.
He opened his arms for a hug, offering the same caring embrace they shared when they parted six months ago, but Mira recoiled, nearly putting up her fists. She watched him with narrow eyes and a face of suspicion. Chucky’s smile dropped almost as fast as his arms. Shaken and confused, he stared at her blankly, looking hurt. Mira walked around him without any further acknowledgement, causing his mouth to hang open a little. From alongside the gate, Natalie took a step toward her.
“Corey requests your presence in his office underground,” she stated. Unnerved, Mira snapped at her before storming off into the marketplace.
“If Corey wanted to talk to me, he should’ve done so when I carried his rock in my ear!”
Natalie kept her composure, only reacting by glancing quickly at the others assembled on the grass near the gate. Most of them kept silent and averted their eyes. None of them had an excuse for her behavior.
“What happened?” Chucky asked, dumbfounded.
“That’s the first time we’ve heard her speak since she came down from Shadow Mountain. Something’s changed her, and not for the better. She had a bad experience, and it has robbed her of much more than her innocence,” Aoi rued.
Looking shy and out of place, Natalie sidled up next to them and cleared her throat to get their attention. Despite her penchant for remaining perfectly polite and professional, a little bit of worry weighed down her eyebrows.
“Excuse me, do you know what happened at the top of Shadow Mountain? How did the Rite end?”
Vern, Will, Roselyn, and Aoi—the four participants who had accompanied Mira—shared regretful glances before delivering the news to the elder’s assistant.
“We still don’t know how it ended, and we can only guess she lost. We didn’t see Neeko, but you can be sure he wouldn’t keep a tight lip if he won. As for myself, I dove from the cliff after Aoi was knocked off, so everything after that is a mystery,” Vern explained.
“I still feel bad you had to do that,” Aoi murmured, sheepishly gazing at his dark eyes.
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Vern said to her. “Next time it may be you saving me.”
Once it became obvious they had no information of substance, Natalie started to leave when Will called after her.
“Sorry, Natalie. I know you’re busy, but can I ask you a question?”
“I consent,” Natalie said, turning around to face him.
“It’s just that it’s so rare to see people in their twenties around because of the war, and I was just wondering why you aren’t there.”
A scarlet blush swept over her as she looked out at the small group that would become soldiers in a matter of days. Swallowing, she hid any nerves behind her professionalism.
“I obeyed every order, inclu
ding the last one that sent me away from the field of combat. My gift leeched not from my enemies but from my friends, and our commander deemed that reason enough for discharge. “
The shame she conveyed became apparent to all but Chucky, who recalled the only other person in their twenties that they knew.
“What about Yannick?”
From where they stood, they could see the spot along the wall near the Darmen Exchange office where Yannick plied his trade. It was empty now and certain to remain so.
“Yannick could not fight for a different reason,” Natalie explained. “As hungry as the military is for soldiers, the commander never fails to eliminate those who would undermine the war effort. Yannick was known as a criminal and thus deprived of the honor of defending our land. May he rest now where that reputation cannot follow him.”
Suddenly overcome with emotion, Natalie nodded to indicate her desire to depart and swiftly reentered the outpost. Her last remark left Chucky scratching his head, peering curiously at his friends. A painful silence swept over them, hanging there until someone told him the truth.
“Chucky, Yannick died,” Aoi said. “He gave his life to save Mira from her mentor, Flip Widget, and it is wrapped up in her change as well.”
Before Chucky could do more than drop his jaw and gawk, Mira returned from the marketplace. She carried food, and Chucky watched her with a heavy stare as she handed it out to them. They quietly took their shares, though no one ate. Mira stood in front of them, her arms crossed and the same stern expression fixed on her face.
“What now?” she demanded to know.
“It’s tradition,” Roselyn spoke up, “that the Equinox Festival begins when the shadows return to their leader and pledge to carry on the fight of our homeland. Since mid-morning has already passed, everyone will be expecting you in the town square. Then…”