Path of the Divine

by Harmon Cooper

  It did, however, ignite him. The man fell to the ground immediately as the flames engulfed his body.

  I could sense that Tashi was desperate for me to let him out, but I still thought he’d be better as a secret weapon, and I was glad that I had made this decision when even more of Madame Mabel’s guards tried to attack me, an overwhelming number of people coming at me all at once.

  I cut three people down at once, a burst of turquoise overhead as Roger collided with Madame Mabel’s crow.

  The birds slammed into the ground in front of me, flipping around, Roger getting the upper hand.

  “Nick, my dagger,” he screeched. He drove his beak into the crow’s neck, killing it instantly, a splattering of blood now on his turquoise feathers.

  I tossed the blade to Roger and he went for it, latching on to the leather tassel on its grip and rising back into the air.

  I traded blows with another one of the masked men, blocking his attacks with my own powered fist, eventually able to swing my sword at his leg and ignite him.

  Realizing this would be my only way to take down so many combatants, I swung my sword with both fists in front of me, cutting down anyone who dared to get in my path.

  They were fast, but I was able to do quite a bit of damage with my flaming blade, especially once the fire spread, a few ignited by their peers.

  Another blast of energy flashed in front of me as Lhandon took out a pair of elite guards trying to creep up on me. Altan was fighting too, the former slave beating one of the lion-masked guards with his own helmet.

  Roger brought one of the elite guards down using his blade, blood spritzing into the air.

  And for a brief moment, I really thought that we had it; I really thought that we were going to win this fight.

  But then an arrow struck me in the chest, stunning me, allowing one of the steel-fisted men to sink a fist into my stomach, all the air knocked out of me.

  The man was just about to stomp on my head when he was thrown off balance by another blast of energy from Lhandon. Altan charged forward as well, only to be blown back into a statue by a wave of force.

  Madame Mabel stood before us now, a furious look on her face as her skin started to bubble. Something began to rise off her form.

  It settled, and the woman instructed two of her men to disarm me. My sword was kicked to the side. I heard Lhandon and Altan grunt as they were also brought forward.

  “You had a chance to join me, and instead, you took it upon yourself to destroy most of this season’s crop of lotus,” Mabel said. “Notice, I said most. If you think this is my only plantation, you are incredibly inept. But you have done irreparable damage to my industry, and you would be foolish to think I would let you live after such disrespect.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” I told her, spitting blood.

  I was pushed onto my knees in front of her, a blade pressing to the back of my neck. Everything was a blur, but even in this state, I knew I still had some options left.

  I traced up the rune that allowed me to absorb three blows, keeping my head bowed. Lhandon was already starting to mutter a prayer.

  “Finish this.” Madame Mabel said, her voice tinged with disdain.

  The blade cracked against my neck and bounced off, as if my skin were made of rubber.

  She gasped. “How…?”

  I looked up to see a burst of color fly toward Madame Mabel.

  Just as Roger was about to reach her, an arrow was fired from the balcony of the plantation.

  The arrow struck Roger, tearing through his chest and bringing the bird straight to the ground.

  “Roger?” I asked, my train of thought interrupted by the sudden action.

  And that’s when I saw him on the balcony, Evan, the bearded fucker now aiming his crossbow at me, energy radiating all around him.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Distortion

  Madame Mabel began to transform. The skin on her back simmered, the once-powerful woman convulsing as boils popped on her neck and her arms twitched.

  She fell to the ground and let out her last breath, her skin oozing as a terrible creature with demon wings tore out of her flesh, the monster starting to grow in size.

  Tentacles formed on its body, razor-sharp teeth taking shape at the end of each appendage. And even though the monster had separated from her body, Madame Mabel continued to writhe, the back of her head slapping against the ground as two mouths formed on the demon’s chest, its face long and filled with black eyes.

  One of the tentacles shot toward me, and it would have taken a chunk out of my shoulder too had it not been for my ability to absorb another strike.

  My eyes flashed to Roger. Seeing him lying there on the ground, an arrow sticking out of his body, left a sickening feeling in my stomach.

  Evan.

  I glanced up to see that the man was slipping away.

  And it wasn’t quite rage that boiled through me at that moment. No, rage was unmanageable, driven by fear and anger.

  What managed to roll through me as I saw Evan escaping was a sense of inner calm tinged with targeted animosity.

  Time stopped completely, everything coming to a complete halt.

  It was as if I had stepped into a photograph. I’d experienced time slowing down before, but nothing like this—never had it completely frozen.

  It gave me a second to catch my breath, to take another glance around the battlefield, to form a plan. After tracing up Healing Hand, I brought my hand in my chest and pulled out the arrow, biting my lip at the pain.

  I immediately started to take care of the wound, and once it was healed I dropped down to retrieve my flaming sword. Reaching into my pocket, I found Tashi’s jar and unscrewed the top.

  Everything in place, I brought my sword to the ready, as time sped back up.

  Tashi attached himself to my blade, an incredible explosion shooting forward, igniting the mansion, a conflagration the likes of which I’d never seen before.

  “Go, Nick!” he said, fire danced all around me as he formed a wall of fire to protect Altan and Lhandon.

  I charged forward with the Flaming Thunderbolt of Wisdom, advancing on the demon that had been living inside Madame Mabel’s body.

  My blade cut through its first tentacle.

  I spun, cutting off another limb, growing closer to the beast, continuing to feed off my focused animosity. As I cut through another appendage, time slowed again, back to a standstill, the tentacle frozen in the air in front of me, blood just starting to burst out of it.

  “Do not forget everything you have learned,” a voice whispered to me, infiltrating my skull.

  My guardian angel stood before me, her white hair waving in a slight breeze that I could not feel.

  “They killed him,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Things don’t die the same way here as they do in your world,” Dema reminded me softly. “Find him again.”

  She was gone, just as I ducked under another one of the demon’s spiked tentacles, the creature lifting up into the air. Its wings affected the fire, blowing Tashi’s flames back some and kicking up wind.

  But this didn’t stop me from reaching it.

  Fully in control of my power now, feeling stronger than I’d ever felt before, I surged forward, simply stepping into the air.

  One of the elite guards flew out of nowhere with a kick, my arm coming up just in time to send her off.

  An arrow came right at my face and I caught it just before it struck me in the eye, throwing it to the side as I swung my blade forward, taking out another one of the demon’s tentacles.

  There was no ground, there was no sky, there was only this fight.

  Whipping through the air, a trail of fire spinning off my Flaming Thunderbolt, I cut through another tentacle that was seconds away from stabbing me in the chest. I shot forward, twisting under another limb and lopping it off as well.

  I caught sight of Tashi’s angry face pressing out of the wall of flames as he blasted
in front of me, burning through some of lion-armored soldiers.

  Another midair pivot and I met the demon head-on, one of its clawed hands coming out toward me and swiping me to the courtyard. I smacked my head against the stone, absorbing my last “free” attack provided to me by the rune.

  I still had plenty of fight left in me.

  I was up on my feet in a matter of seconds, looking over to Lhandon and seeing him hovering over Madame Mabel’s dead body, Altan protecting the monk as he performed what I figured were last rites.

  Altan waved me toward them, shouting for me to run.

  But the demon had to go first, and rather than turn back, I charged the creature, hitting the airwaves again and coming in with an attack across one of the terrible maws jutting from its chest.

  It tried to swat me down again, but this time I drove my Flaming Thunderbolt through its wrist, not cutting it off completely but nearly reaching its bone, its flesh partially igniting.

  I was flung backward toward the mansion.

  And I would’ve hit it too had I not focused my energy midair, coming to a stop and using it as a springboard to send myself spiraling toward the demon.

  Yet another one of its tentacles came for me. I managed to punch it aside as the tentacle’s teeth latched onto my arm and tore into it. I felt the sting, but by the time I landed on the ground I’d already healed it, and I leaped back into action.

  The power radiating through me was telling me something, and rather than just continue to try to cut down its tentacles, especially at the rate they reformed, I went with my next idea.

  “Tashi, give me some fire!” I shouted.

  Flames licked the air before me as I dropped down to one knee, my head bowed forward, one hand in front of me in prayer position, my flaming sword at my side.

  An energy began to oscillate through me, starting at my lower abdomen, and with my eyes closed, I could actually see the power, a blistering fire inside my skin, in the pit of my belly, which seemed to be maintained by keeping my hand in front of me.

  I could feel movement beneath my legs. It was only a few seconds later that I was floating, my Flaming Thunderbolt at the ready, both hands gripping the hilt.

  I focused on the demon’s chest, its two mouths, and finally on the monster’s dozens upon dozens of eyes.

  I saw more tentacles starting to boil out of its sides, spikes pulsing on its shoulders and arms. After one more breath in, I burst forward, fiery energy shimmering all around me.

  I tore through the demon’s body, right out the other end, its blood misting the air. The demon fell, purple plumes of fire all around its body as I floated back to the ground.

  I wanted to go inside, I wanted to find Bobby, to go after Evan, but I knew that escape was more important right now.

  My eyes fell to the ground as I started searching for Roger’s body.

  Lhandon yelled for me, as more elite guards and other soldiers prepared to brave the flames and attack us.

  Sheathing my weapon, I placed my hand over my eyes and cast the Rune of Distortion, projecting a cone of confusion before me that had people screaming almost instantly as chaos descended upon them.

  “Nick!” Lhandon shouted, Altan echoing his call. “Nick!”

  “I’m coming!” I roared back to them.

  I scanned the ground for Roger’s body, eventually finding it a few feet away. He was face down, and once I reached him, I dropped down and plucked a few of his yellow tail feathers.

  “I’ll find you,” I whispered to the tail feathers as I pocketed them. “You have my word.”

  The flames still raging, I took the jar from my pocket and called Tashi back to me. The fire spirit did one last sweep of the area as he returned to me.

  It was now or never, and I chose to take the advice of my guardian angel, of Altan and Lhandon, who continued to motion for me to join them, to escape.

  Soon, there would be a time for revenge, there would be time to ask questions and to seek answers.

  But for now, we just needed to get out of here alive.

  I reached Altan and Lhandon. We took off toward the mountains, to the secret passageway once used by treasure hunters.

  The inferno raged behind us, lighting our way forward.

  The end.

  Back of the Book Content

  Dear reader,

  I would ask you please review this book before you read all of this, just to get the review out of the way.

  Writing books feeds my family, and unfortunately, today’s modern writers constantly struggle with exposure, and without tens of thousands of dollars to throw at advertising, the only way to get exposure is through reviews.

  I would provide you with a longish description on algorithms and how they help a book’s visibility on the Amazon store, but I know you don’t care about all that, and it is a rather long-winded discussion. So I will spare you.

  All I ask that you take a moment to write an honest review, knowing that I’m hard at work on the second installment of this series.

  I’ll wait…

  Great, now you have reviewed the book. Let’s talk about some of the concepts and ideas that I’ve explored in this novel.

  Nothing new under the sun

  One thing you should know about me, which would maybe help frame how I conceptualized this novel, is that I lived in Asia for five years. While in Asia I studied the Tibetan language, I lived in India and Nepal, Mongolia, and then studied Katakana and Hiragana before living in Japan.

  The script I’m using this book is a combination of Tibetan and Katakana. If you are familiar with either, you will see how I developed some of the characters. The pronunciation would fall more on the Tibetan side, without the tonality that is exhibited in the Himalayan Kingdom. The Tibetan character “Nga” perfectly summarizes how hard pronunciation is.

  It’s not “gnaw,” nor is it “nah-gah,” but almost a sound made in one’s throat, created by curling one’s lip a bit and pronouncing the character as if you were trying to speak while the dentist was fixing a cavity.

  It’s a hard language.

  For those that have played around with, or understand some Mongolian, you will see that I also utilized Mongolian names for this book. The other names come from Tibetan and Bhutanese, the latter of which I will touch in a moment.

  While Tibetan Buddhism spread to Mongolia, they pronounce Tibetan words differently, so Tibetan names like “Tenzin,” also the name of his Holiness the Dalai Lama, would be pronounced “Danzen,” in Mongolia. I find some of this quite fascinating, but it may not fascinate someone who hadn’t lived in the region, or been touched by the people.

  So let’s get on to being touched.

  Touched

  In 2010, I lived in Kathmandu, Nepal. I did a homestay with a Tibetan man and his five-year-old son, both of whom were waiting to come to America to join the child’s mother. The mother had been beaten by Nepali police during a Free Tibet rally, and she had been allowed to migrate to America as a refugee, the father and son not yet receiving the same status.

  When I first met them, they had already waited for over a year to join her in America, which was a tragedy in my opinion, considering the mother and her son were separated at such a young age. I recall the father riding around Kathmandu on a motorcycle, his cell phone in his lap, hoping the embassy would call.

  Eventually, they did migrate, but that is his story for another day, perhaps the next back of the book piece I write for the Way of the Immortals series.

  Anyway, to make me feel more at home, they invited a cousin to live with them, who just so happened to be a Tibetan monk.

  There were times that I would find myself watching WWE with the monk on my left, who only knew one English phrase, “My God!” (which he would use whenever a wrestler slammed into another wrestler), the father, and the five-year-old boy.

  The monk didn’t behave how I assumed a monk would behave.

  He wasn’t always meditating, nor did he go around blasting t
hings, nor was he really all that active. Sometimes he would sit on the balcony making small tea candles that Tibetans use for rituals; other times he would just go on a long walk, his hands clasped behind his back, his saffron robes dancing above the dirt.

  I based Lhandon on an exaggerated version of this monk. Remember, we couldn’t speak to each other. I barely understood how to say hello in Tibetan, and the only English he knew was the phrase, “My God!” But I could sense that he was a good man, one that would do anything for a stranger regardless of if he knew the language or not.

  Sometimes we would hang out in silence, especially when the electricity went out and we wouldn’t have power for the night. That was another thing that made living in Nepal hard. Electricity only came on twelve hours a day. Six hours on, six hours off, six hours on, and six hours off.

  This was a time before they had backlit Kindles, so I would actually read my Kindle in the candlelight, if you can imagine that.

  Fast forward to rewind

  I suppose now would be a great time to give a briefing on Western understanding of Tibetan Buddhism. The West has known about Tibet since the 1800s. There may have been earlier mentions through traders, and certainly someone trading in China would have heard of the region, especially those who were trading back when China was run by Mongolians, (who practiced the Tibetan style of Buddhism).

  But for our purposes, for the purposes of understanding Tibet and the West, let’s go with the 1800s. During the 1800s, British explorers went to some of the furthest reaches of the continent, exploring places that other Westerners had never visited before.

  One of the places they would start their journey would be in India, and of course north of India was Nepal, followed by Tibet.

  Now, what I’m about to say may be one of the odder parts of publishing this series, and will make since why after I’ve explained.

  I actually wrote my senior thesis for my degree in history on Western fantasizing of Tibet, only to publish a progression fantasy novel a decade later…