by Ben Galley
Trinka wiped her snout on her sleeve. “The thing I’m looking for is Hathis. I have spent more time in the jungle than I have with people because of what it can show me. Around every tree, beneath every leaf, inside every bush mouth is some new thing buried beneath its shadows. Yet, like with every place, it too grows stale over time. I want to see something new.”
“So you come to the Flaw to sightsee?” said Baji, her eyebrow raised.
“There are wonders in the city, ones I only scratched the surface of before I was run out by the vermin now pervading it. I returned with a group to help me see the rest of them.”
Baji shook her head and returned to her seat upon the ground. “Jungle-divers. The strangest group I’ve ever met. Just make sure you’re not too in awe of the place to help me lift these jewels you speak of.”
With the threat of violence done for now, Scrap returned to his own seat upon the cliffs. Tama leaned closer to him.
“Some crew you’ve assembled.”
“They’re the best I know. I’d trust each of them with my life.”
Tama nodded. “Just remember, they’ve trusted you with theirs too.”
A cackle emanated from Hathis as if Tama had told a joke. At least something other than Laughs finally had a sense of humor.
They cut down the vines overgrowing the lone, underused path leading from the cliffs to Hathis. In some places, it grew so thick that it took minutes to hack down the vegetation and find a way through. It felt like the forest was doing it on purpose, trying to stop them from going any further.
But Laughs assured them that wasn’t the vines’ intention. “All they’re doing is looking for a hug,” he said over and over again.
But it did little to quell Scrap’s suspicion. Despite what he told the others, despite what Trinka had assured him, the Flaw unnerved him.
His great grandmother had told him that Hathis was invincible. That no matter what darkness attacked it, its light would shine. It’s people, the brilliant trailblazers who brought Chilongua totems of unimaginable strength and grew plants never seen before in any other part of the world, would continue to warm the world like another great fire that had fallen from the sky. The streets would stay aglow with the spirit stone mined from the very cliffs they had descended from. But Tama was right, darkness always finds a way.
And that light, the one he had seen in his head for years upon years, was a fraction of what he had pictured. It was still there, but it was dying by the minute, thanks to the Flaw and the evils it unleashed inside the once great city. He only hoped he could salvage a piece of it, nurture it, and expand the warmth Hathis was always meant to foster by finding the item he had always dreamed of.
His family’s totem.
The face of an aru bird cut into amberwood. An etching capable of mending flesh, one he had never been able to replicate ever since he picked up his family’s tools and carried on their legacy. No matter how many totems he had made to help his customers, no matter how detailed his great grandmother’s description, he had never been able to make the one that brought his family fame in Hathis. But a replica of it still lay in the halls of the Thendradi; Trinka had confirmed that. And he would retrieve it. With the help of the friends he had recruited at his back, he would dive into the darkness and find the light his family was always meant to shine upon the rest of Chilongua. The Flaw would not stop him. His fears and suspicions either. Nothing would. Not even Tama’s insistence on turning back.
“You don’t have to find it, you know,” said Tama as they came to another vine-made impasse.
“What are you talking about?” Scrap barely afforded him a glance as he watched impatiently as Laughs talked the vegetation into slithering away.
“This totem. You don’t need it. Dust Break already thinks of you as the finest totemist in all the Nine Nations. What will learning how to carve one more do for your reputation?”
“Tama…”
“What?”
“This isn’t for my reputation. This is for me,” said Scrap.
“For you? Or for your family’s legacy?”
“Aren’t we all but the sculpting of our families? What’s the difference?”
“The difference is you’re still alive and they’re dead. They can’t see what you’re doing from the darkness above, nor do they care.”
Scrap shook his head. “You’re wrong, my friend. They watch everything we do. Do you think our families don’t converse and rejoice, even now that they see their children returning home?”
Tama snorted. “Rejoice? More like deem us fools. I can hear my own mother calling me a trit for following you on this venture.”
“Did you not hear what I said to the others? No one forced you.”
“The boy who cleaned my tusks when my arms were broken from my fall. The one who smuggled me my first taste of beer. The man who put the totem on my chest that stopped the Gogazzian arrow from piercing my heart… He tells me he is going to the Flaw and expects me not to come and watch his back? I sometimes wonder if you’ve etched a bad totem in your brain.”
“If only brains were as malleable as wood, I’d have carved the best I could to prevent your worries.” Scrap put a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. “I’ve carved thousands of totems in most every type of wood brought before me. Some have taken me weeks to make right, others have taken me years, yet they have always worked. But there is still one challenge that alludes me…”
Tama sucked at his tusks. “Your hubris, this need to prove to yourself, it will be your end.”
“No it won’t,” said Scrap. “That’s why I have you.”
Tama spat, and Scrap knew he had found his way beneath his old friend’s skin by speaking the truth. Tama always protected Scrap. Ever since he had found him broken and bleeding beneath the window of his family’s home, pushed out of it by a thief that claimed his parent’s lives, Scrap had made him a totem that he said would ward away evil. Which was partially true. It was only a simple totem that would repel an attacker that came for his heart. After that, once Tama’s hands healed, he never left Scrap’s side, and soon, the Boarling’s size and strength proved to be an everlasting ally against the constant stream of thieves and hooligans attempting to take advantage of his prowess as a totemist. Even when the Boarling fulfilled his obligation as a soldier of Dust Break and was sent to the frontlines of the Wooden Wars, he left behind a reputation of defeating anyone who may try to harm Scrap or steal from him.
There was no way he would let him go to Hathis alone, and there was no way he would let any harm befall Scrap. It gave Scrap comfort knowing he at least had him as protection against the darkness.
Trinka’s machete fell and Baji gasped, taking Scrap away from his thoughts. He pushed to the front of the line and there, staring back at them, was a frozen stampede.
A thousand bodies of some faceless, four legged beasts had been carved into a wall three times the height of Tama. The kalawood it was made of looked yellow beneath the light of the great fire. Scrap stared in awe.
The Wall of Tears.
Never could he imagine so many perfectly carved totems working together on one construction of wood. He marveled at the careful, delicate cuts the totemists made to achieve such a seamless transition from one figure to the next, how they followed the pattern of the wood with such precision to unlock all of its potential. He couldn’t imagine the headaches and disorientation the wall would have caused, the powers that gave the wall its name, if not for the lone fracture breaking the totem’s power.
Something had rent a crack down the center of the wood. The wall’s debris lie sprawled upon the forest floor before it as if one of the wooden beasts had vomited. A broken chunk of wood etched with a charger’s head stared up at Scrap, its perfection decapitated by whatever thing was strong enough to fight the wall’s defenses and penetrate Hathis.
Scrap felt his ow
n pack of totemic bullets hanging from his hip and was aware of how weak and useless they felt beneath the gaze of such a ferocious wound in a construct much more potent and brilliant than his own.
Yet he could not show the others his concern.
“Trinka was right, they’ve paved a way through the wall for us. Come on.”
“Paved?” said Baji. “Don’t you mean pulverized?”
“I believe our fearless leader has enough humor to make a warkenbark giggle,” said Laughs, smiling.
Scrap took a deep breath, climbed over the rubble of splintered wood, and entered Hathis.
The soft glow of the spirit stone in daytime met his eyes like the great fire was glinting off the ripples of a lake. Everywhere he looked, he expected to see life. Everywhere he looked, he expected to see the citizens from the stories, the ones with garb as bright as the stones he stood over. But the city was empty, at least of its population, those who had fled to nearby Dust Break and Yonassi because of the Flaw. The light that still glowed there was hollow. What good was illumination if there were no eyes to appreciate it?
Scrap felt sad, but exhilarated at the same time. His home was gone, but there was still a piece of it left somewhere in the shadows that persisted behind the light.
He heard the others shuffle through behind him.
“Look at it,” said Baji. “It’s like we’ve arrived to a tavern too late.”
“This is it,” said Tama, gripping his axe as he scanned the nearby buildings. “Everyone be ready.”
Scrap put a hand on his axe. “Tama, we’re home. Would you walk into your house with your weapon drawn? Hathis will think we’ve come to make war.”
Tama did not put down his axe. “Our home is Dusk Break. You’re a fool if you think it’s here.”
“The Boarling is right to have his guard up,” said Trinka. Her and Scrap’s eyes met.
Scrap sighed as the others took out their weapons. Baji, one long slender blade. Laughs, his gnarled, rottenleaf club. And Trinka, the machete Scrap had made for her many years ago when she came to him and offered him all her money in order to craft a blade that no tree could stop. She called it Miracle for she never thought she’d find a tool so valuable before she went to enter the Deep.
And now she held it tightly in front of her, the totem of the face of a capybara Scrap had etched into the blade facing the rest of the city as if it were a vanguard for exploration.
Scrap unwound his sling and slipped one of the totemic bullets of wood that he had carved before leaving on their journey into its pocket. This nugget had the eye of an Eclectun, the bird people who often found homes in the high peaks of cities or mountains. The wood would explode on impact, though he didn’t know if it would stop whatever awaited them inside the city.
The group crept through the street, their footsteps alternating between taps and thuds as they walked across stone and moss alike. Though the jungle was loud on the other side of the wall, the city was quiet. It was as if the shadows were voids, swallowing up sight and sounds where they passed.
They made it to an old market where long abandoned stalls lay dilapidated against the buildings that once propped them up. The downed canvases that were their roofs ruffled quietly in the wind, ripped and dirtied, flapping like flayed pelts over the bones of wood and beams used to keep them upright. There were clutters of debris gathered into corners, most likely remnants of the goods once sold from the stalls now tarnished, shattered by time and the creatures that now called it home.
His heart broke as he thought about all the inventions that now lay crushed to the dust they now kicked up beneath their feet, but there was little time to mourn.
From a nearby building came a snicker.
“What is that?” said Baji.
“I promise I didn’t tell a joke,” said Laughs.
“The Flaw is already welcoming us,” said Trinka.
More snickers followed, and then movement in the shadows. A pair of eyes glittered in the darkness like lost stars. Another set opened beside them, and then came the others until Scrap counted twelve sets in all, blinking and jittering as the snickers grew louder.
“What are they?” said Scrap.
Trinka bared her teeth. “Dire monkeys.”
Flames flickered in the shadow illuminating the dire monkeys’ faces; pale, gaunt things with patches of crimson fur curling off of them like veins attempting to run away from their mouths. And that is where the flames came from.
Their tongues. Small whips of fire, lashing out into the air as their snickers turned into cackles and maniacal hoots that echoed between the stones as if a hundred more monkeys were answering their calls.
Scrap watched breathlessly. Though he had heard Trinka’s stories, though he knew the tales of the Flaw and the hell it unleashed, he was unprepared for the wretchedness of the creatures as they swung out of the shadows and into the light.
They scatted out on the stalls and building sides, hanging from them like spiders that had lost limbs, their two shaggy arms and two shaggy legs splayed out as their tails whipped back and forth with agitation. They howled, and yet none of their eyes left the group.
“What are you waiting for?” said Tama, snapping Scrap from his daze. He tapped his hand that held the sling.
Scrap wound his weapons, hesitating, unsure of where to fire first. The monkeys skittered about. Jumping forward. Climbing backwards. Confusing the group. Trying to bate them into a costly mistake as their tongues continued to lash out.
“Do it!” shouted Tama.
Scrap picked the closest monkey. A great beast that rivaled his own size that hopped up and down on the torn canvas of a nearby stall. He let loose the totemic bullet. It sailed just over the monkey’s shoulder and connected with the building.
It sounded like thunder.
The side of the building erupted into a shower of stone. Though Scrap had missed his target, the building’s shrapnel did not. The dire monkey rolled forward, dead, its head crushed and its fiery tongue lolling out of its mouth causing the stone beneath it to sizzle and smoke.
Scrap had little time to savor his victory before the wild calls of another monkey grabbed his attention. It roared and hopped about the ground with a splinter of wood lodged in its arm. It licked it with its tongue and a gout of flame turned the shrapnel to ashes, cauterizing its wounds in the process.
It turned its attention to Scrap and screamed.
Scrap backpedaled. And with the creature’s noise ringing his head he thought, I was a fool to come here.
The monkey charged, and the others scrambled down from their perches to join it. Scrap fumbled in his pouch for another bullet, but the monkey came so fast that by the time his sweaty fingers found one the creature was already upon him. It lunged, reaching with claws more red than its fur.
Scrap grit his teeth and raised the bullet to strike the monkey with his fist, but it was swiped down from the air. Tama stepped in front of him, and pulled his axe from the monkey’s head.
“Stay behind me!” he yelled, not bothering to look to see if Scrap would oblige. And Scrap did, as always, keeping Tama between him and the other monkeys as he loaded another bullet into his sling.
The others crowded in beside them as the dire monkeys charged. The first came for Baji. She sidestepped the beast as it lunged for her neck and brought her blade into its back. It rolled over in agony, taking Baji with it and pinning her onto her back. But Trinka was there in an instance and decapitated the monkey with one strike from her machete. She pushed aside the monkey’s carcass and helped Baji to her feet just as two more monkeys lunged.
“Bn bo blath!” yelled Laughs, and from the other side of the wall at their backs two vines reached over and lassoed the monkeys around their necks. They screamed and bit at the plants, but could not break free before they were torn away from the street and flung overhead, far into
the jungle.
Another two monkeys came for Tama and Scrap. Scrap shot his sling at their feet, exploding and sending them end over end into the air. Tama met them both with two successive chops, splitting one at its belly and the other at its neck.
“Bn bo-aghh!”
Scrap’s attention turned back to Laughs who was now pinned beneath a snapping monkey, its claws held at bay by his club, but still long enough to grab the Kodo’s tongue as it flickered. Laughs’ gums turned black and he spat. The monkey reeled, Laughs’ acidic saliva causing an audible sizzle in the process. He came to his feet and struck the monkey with his club, dropping it where it hopped about in agony.
“Behind you!” Baji yelled, just as another monkey tried to flank Laughs. She met the dire monkey, driving her blade into its gut before it could reach the botamancer.
But it did not finish the monkey.
The creature sunk its claws into Baji’s wrist, penetrating the lightleaf jacket she wore. She grunted, but the noise was paltry compared to when the monkey brought her arm to its mouth and licked it.
Her arm sparked into flame. Baji screamed and kicked the creature off of her so she could fall to the ground in an attempt to snuff out the fire. Trinka was there in moments, striking the monkey’s nape with her machete, the hit cleaving straight down into its chest.
Scrap wanted to go to Baji, but the other monkeys kept him cornered. Everywhere he looked, a new monkey appeared over the rubble his totems had caused. A hellish family without end.
He loaded his sling and prepared to shoot it, this time with a bullet that would catch fire, but a sound greater than Baji’s anguish rose from down the street. It sounded like a waterfall slowly gaining strength.
The monkeys stopped. The primates’ hoots turned to scared mewls. Suddenly, they retreated into the shadows of the broken building, their tongues lighting up the darkness like dying candles, not one looking back at the group before they were gone for good.
“Gati moda!” Baji swore in Wet Tongue above the rising sound of the waterfall. She rolled over the stone, cupping her left arm which was now entirely darkened and charred. Scrap was surprised she could even move it at all.