Neripha - Part 1

by Olivia Ratcliff

  “Thank you. I just… had a really bad nightmare. It feels better to get some fresh air.” He rubbed his wrist. ‘Too much stress’ he thought to himself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I’m home,” Chase said as he entered his house. He set aside his bag and gears on the floor by the table. At one corner of the house, a beef stew was boiling. Chase finally realized that he was hungry.

  “Chase, how was the hunting?” said a voice from the upstairs.

  “I got my hunt but it wasn’t a very good one. Can I eat now?” Chase said.

  “It wasn’t a good one? Are you okay? Are you hurt?” the voice said with a hint of concern.

  “No, I’m fine. It just didn’t go as I’d expected,” Chase answered, sitting at the table.

  A face popped up over the wall. Her full red locks were slightly messy, as they usually were, but her bright green eyes sparkled, which somehow matched so well with her unkempt hairdo. It was Hazel, Chase’s mother. She put down her tools back to the right places. Chase must have entered the house while Hazel was working on her latest project. After a bit of clinking, Hazel came downstairs. Her sinewy limbs and smooth skin were elegant even in her worn leather worksuit. She often worked on her weapon designs for her armory, conveniently setting a pot on the stove at the same time. She burned many pots that way but she wouldn’t stop multitasking.

  “I can’t say I caught this one because I had someone else shoot it for me. Where is Dad? I’m starving,” Chase said.

  “You know where he is. He’s at his workshop. Well, I’m relieved that you are safe home. Tell us more about it during lunch,” she said as she scooped out a ladleful of the beef stew. Hers was the world’s best, in Chase’s opinion.

  “Ash, come have lunch with us!” Hazel yelled for Chase’s father. After a while Ash appeared through a wooden sliding door. He had very short hair just like Chase’s and a big build for his age. His calloused hands were black with soot and whatever he carelessly smeared with his hands was also dirty. His gray shirt was so thinned down by excessive use that it had holes here and there, which to Hazel’s dismay didn’t bother Ash.

  “Chase, you’re back in one piece! How was your hunting? Any luck?” he said cheerfully.

  “Yes and no. Someone else caught it for me and basically I just took his kill,” Chase replied, wrinkling his nose.

  “Hm, you are not telling me you stole someone else’s, are you?” Ash said as he wiped his dirty hands on the pants. Hazel eyed at the sooty hands as though she wanted to say something but she only shook her head.

  “No, I didn’t steal it,” Chase continued as he chewed a piece of beef, “I had no trouble getting to the cliff but when the swarm hit the area, my arrow was too slow and weak to even reach them, let alone pierce them. Then this strange old man came out of nowhere and shot one down with a tiny little knife. He just threw it in the air with his bare hands and it was so much faster than my arrow.”

  “And he let you have it?” Ash asked after swallowing a mouthful of the stew.

  “Yeah, he said he was just a researcher and he wanted to help me out. I asked him how he did it but he said he couldn’t teach me. I’d have to go to the capital and ask one of his friends or something. Kevin at the Central Inn… he said.”

  At this, Hazel looked up dubiously.

  “A researcher? That’s such a vague description. What does he research, did he tell you?”

  “No, I didn’t ask any further. I think he was probably using Vito,” Chase replied carefully.

  “That could be,” Ash added, “because you can’t use Vito, there is no way of telling if he did use Vito but even if he did, you want to avoid learning it from a stranger.” Ash’s eyes turned stern, the way they always did whenever Vito was mentioned.

  Vito was a form of energy present everywhere in space, albeit with a drastically varying degree of density and configuration. Some people could use Vito readily without much training at all but most needed extensive training. There were also some who were incapable of even feeling the presence of Vito, whereas some could produce their own Vito in large amounts. It was a versatile energy that expanded human limits. However, there weren’t too many who could use it properly. Chase had heard many accounts in which Vito was improperly taught and utilized, destroying the users’ bodies, in extreme cases, killing them. As Vito users were rare, the government actively scouted Vito users in Sarum, and that was what made Ash so cautious. Ash himself was a Vito user, which helped him further his career as an armorer, but he insisted that knowing something and teaching something were completely different, that he couldn’t teach Vito.

  ‘Once you learn it, you can’t go back; you won’t want to go back…’ Ash rested his chin on the arch of his interlocked hands, looking at his son. Chase was quite used to Ash’s reaction. Though he didn’t agree with his father, he just kept quiet. If his father wasn’t going to teach it to him, he had no option other than to look elsewhere for a teacher. Chase was sure that Ash knew this in the back of his mind.

  Ash leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  “What do you think, Chase? Do you believe him?” he asked.

  “Even if the old man was lying to me, it doesn’t matter. I have always wanted to explore other places so I feel like this is a good reason to go to Central City. He was without a doubt a superior hunter. I have a feeling I will be able to meet people like him there. Maybe I can learn something from them,” Chase replied.

  “What will you do there? What if he lied to you? What if this guy at the Central Inn doesn’t exist?” Hazel asked with a motherly concern, knowing Chase’s tendency to make his decisions a little too quickly and keep with them.

  “I don’t think he lied to me but even if he did, Central City has a lot of hunter agencies and markets for weaponry so I should be able to do something as a last resort,” said Chase, shrugging.

  “So are you going to go then?” Hazel asked.

  “Is that okay with you? I realized that I need to step outside my hometown and experience a new world,” Chase said.

  “Well, before we talk about that, let me see what you’ve got there.” Ash pointed at the bag of the Rockbacker bat with his spoon.

  Traditionally, Sarumese houses were a combination of family home and business. A family business didn’t necessarily pass down from one generation to the next, but while the current generation ran the business, they all lived in a building which functioned both as a home and a business. The separation between the two spaces was clear; normally, they occupied different floors or either half of the house, for example, the left half of the house a home, and the right half of the house a business. This allowed for everyone in town to identify who everyone was, what business one’s family owned, where they lived and so on. It also meant that the businesses were small. Larger firms didn’t have this traditional structure, especially in a larger city. However, the size of a business didn’t equate to its profits, at least in Chase’s family’s case.

  Chase’s family, the Dunnabels, owned the Dunnabel Armory to which Ash and Hazel had dedicated their lives. They had been customizing weapons and armor for decades from Chase’s grandfather’s generation. Though their armory was in a small town of Salozara at a remote part of Sarum, their craftsmanship was so renowned that even nobles from different kingdoms came to get customized weapons and armor.

  The Dunnabels’ two-story house had two identical spaces divided by a supporting wall that held up the rafters. The Sarumese roofs were peaked with a gentle slope and were normally covered with plants such as grass and vines. The Dunnabels’ house had an ivy-covered roof which bloomed cherry-red blossoms in spring.

  There was a sliding wooden door that connected these two spaces in Chase’s house. As it was part of the Sarumese architecture, the traditional style wooden door was embossed with figures. It had a big serpent embossed with great detail, wrapping around the periphery of the door. The serpent’s diamond-shaped head stuck out to form a handle for the door with a sm
ooth texture of well-finished and well-used wood, which, with a slightly cooler temperature upon contact, had a strikingly similar texture to a live one.

  When Ash opened the sliding door, Chase’s favorite room came before him. It was the connecting room between their home and the armory, which was used as a workshop as well as a temporary keeping place for the finished products, waiting to be picked up. The room was often cluttered but that was one of the reasons for which Chase liked the room. The familiar scent of steel, leather and sweat rushed out to him. Directly opposite to the door from his home was a celestial clock much older than Chase. Made to impress, its large hemispherical face was as bright peach as the sky outside, almost as if the clock transported a piece of the sky to the workshop.

  The sky of Neripha was heavily affected by its two other moons, Zania and Fienor, the planet Tellis and the star Metilda. These created different phases of the sky with rather complicated numbers for people to remember. The Sarumese were the first to devise the celestial clock, which was now used everywhere in the world. It consisted of four beads and notches corresponding to the beads, together which told various phases such as time until the next Fienorian night, lunar eclipse, solar eclipse, and different seasons. These beads moved about in the pearly liquid of the clock face with a striking resemblance to the four heavenly bodies: a blue bead being Metilda, an ombre green bead with a little belt being Tellis, a red, white and black bead being Fienor, and a tiny golden bead being Zania. The liquid in the clock changed its color according to the locations of these beads, turning black at night, peach during the day and red on a Fienorian night.

  Ash’s workshop was a square shaped room with three walls as his work bench space and one wall as a glassed-in showcase, reserved only for high priced items and some of Ash’s prized possessions. At one corner of the room, opposite to the showcase was the Everlasting Flame of the North enclosed in a fireplace.

  “Let me see the bat now,” Ash said curiously.

  Chase put the bag on the work station and unwrapped it. The bat’s sandy, bumpy wings were neatly folded with no damage to them at all. Ash opened one of its wings and tapped it with his finger. It was very thin and light yet resilient and impenetrable. The translucent and bumpy piece of skin bounced Ash’s finger right back.

  “This ought to make good gloves,” Ash said, satisfied. Ash and Hazel had received a rather difficult order a while ago. It was to create gloves with claws that could spring out at the user’s will. The gloves were to be designed so that the user could wear them at all times, which meant they needed to be as compact and light as possible with the maximum durability. The claws, because the client wanted them for combat gloves, needed to have both absorbing and emitting elements.

  All elements in Neripha were categorized into three big groups: absorbing family, emitting family, and neutral family. For absorbing family, the elements had an affinity for absorbing and retaining energy while emitting elements had an affinity for releasing energy. Neutral elements weren’t inclined either way. Infusing emitting elements with neutral elements would enable the claws to react to the user’s Vito. This part of the job was the hard part. The clients all wanted unique features in their weapons and to customize them like so required top notch skills.

  Ash flipped over the bat to examine the wound. “This is his knife?” Ash asked. There was the little knife that Jovani had thrown at the bat in the center of its chest.

  “Ah, that’s the knife he used. He didn’t even give me time to return it to him.”

  “It’s a very clean throw. It’s straight in, not drawing a drop of blood,” Ash commented.

  Chase pulled out the knife. The shiny blade came out with no blood at all.

  “It looks like it’s coated with Harper tiger’s oil. Let me see it,” said Ash.

  Chase handed it over to his father. Blades with Harper tiger’s oil smeared on them would pull out from a wound as clean as new. Harper tigers were relatively small, living at high altitudes along the mountain ridges in northern Kshandya and Decarta, a tribal nation and a kingdom south of Sarum. Harper tigers had stocky legs, large paws and a long tail, all of which made them excellent mountain climbers as well as ambushers. Harper tiger’s oil was sold for a high price because it had to be imported from either Kshandya or Decarta. However, Kshandya had no foreign relation with its neighboring countries, so Sarum’s stock of Harper tiger’s oil was solely dependent on the imports from Decarta.

  Ash squinted and examined the knife. He found a mark at the bottom of the blade close to the grip. Its style wasn’t common in Sarum. The maker of this blade had made a little depression, shaped of a shield, and then filled it with different material to give it a different texture and color. The shield mark on the blade was tiny but was unbelievably precise.

  “I was wrong. It’s not Harper tiger’s oil. The blade itself is made out of Harper tiger’s tooth. Feel it in your hand. It’s not an alloy. It’s a bone, you should be able to tell that,” Ash said, giving Chase the knife to re-examine. The blade was immaculately white, which looked more like one of many alloys commonly used for a small knife, but it was too light for that.

  “I have to cheat a little,” Chase said and tapped the blade. Then he could be sure that it was a bone.

  “It was either imported as a whole or someone used an imported Harper tiger’s tooth to make this. The filled-in mark is atypical here. One thing for sure, the guy who had this probably knows a bit about weaponry and can afford having this.”

  The use of Harper tiger’s oil or tooth wasn’t entirely uncommon, especially among nobles who could afford it. However, it had been mostly associated with being assassins’ must-haves because they tried to avoid carrying their victims’ blood on them.

  Chase couldn’t see Jovani as an assassin. ‘That strange old man,’ Chase thought to himself.

  “Dad, so what do you think? Don’t you think this is worth looking into?”

  Ash just examined the knife without replying Chase.

  “I think I should go,” Chase said with suppressed excitement in his voice. “Also, I think I should give this knife back to him if we meet in the capital.”

  “It’s your call. Your mom and I will support you no matter what,” Ash replied. “I don’t mean I don’t approve of your going to Central City. There are liars and thieves out there and they know newbies. There will be people who try to take advantage of you and you will learn your lessons the hard way most likely, but running into them is inevitable.”

  Chase looked up at Ash. Ash’s facial expression was serious but encouraging. He put his large, calloused, sooty hands on Chase’s shoulders. Ash seemed much taller and bigger at the moment, Chase thought.

  “Your mom and I shouldn’t try to keep you here forever. Don’t trust people right off the bat. Well, you’re my son. I’m sure you will be just fine.” Ash gave him a little squeeze on the shoulders. “But as I’ve told you before, do not learn Vito from anyone unless you’ve thoroughly evaluated his expertise and personality. Once you learn Vito the wrong way, you can’t relearn it. If Vito was forced over your limit, you could die from it. Remember that.” Ash gave him a firm look.

  “Okay, I will always keep that in mind,” Chase replied.

  “There’s something I’ve been keeping for you until now. I think this might be a good time to give it to you,” Ash said as he opened the showcase door where he kept all the weapons that belonged to him. They were the ones that Ash had collected, received as gifts or made by himself, which he cherished very much. After opening the glass door, Ash stepped back and gestured at Chase.

  “Pick one you like.”

  “Out of these?” Chase asked in disbelief.

  “Yes, this is my gift to you, celebrating your oncoming adventures.”

  “Well, then, I will take your Black Gancus.” Chase pointed at a plain-looking black sword that leaned on the wall.

  “Sure. Grab it,” Ash replied.

  “Really? I was just joking. You will give m
e your very favorite sword?”

  “Yes. I can give it to you only because it’s my favorite sword. I’m sure it wants to be used instead of gathering dust in my dungeon,” Ash said, urging him to go and grab it.

  Still uncertainly, Chase reached and grabbed its handle.

  Gancus, the white furry beast was now a thing out of a legend; its long feline body, more graceful and agile than puma’s, was snow-white; its tail, a whip of electrocytes which generated an electric shock, was covered with ample fluff, which stood up when it was charged with a high voltage. The most noticeable feature of its streamlined face was its sapphire-blue eyes, cold and harsh with bestial animosity to its beholder. These beautiful beasts had been, however, hunted and captured in efforts to domesticate them, which not only failed at its attempt, but also wiped out the Gancus population.

  Named the Black Gancus due to its metallic black color, the entire sword was made of a black alloy; its blade featured Gancus’s fierce eyes subtly inscribed to reflect light at different angles. The interesting thing was that this sword didn’t have a proper guard. It just had a piece of cloth wrapped around between the grip and the blade. It probably had that shape because the entirety of the sword was uniform. The length of the sword was about three quarters of a regular long sword. The whole design was for simplicity and speed, which appealed to Chase’s taste. At the very bottom of the blade, close to the grip, was an etched mark of a Maroa, its branches making right angles. The Maroa tree was the mark of the Dunnabels. Of course, out of so many armories in Sarum, some used the Maroa as their etched marks but each one had a slightly different shape and technique which made differentiating quite easy to experts. This one had been done by Chase’s grandfather in his prime. Ash had a number of weapons in his collection but this was the only one he had kept of Chase’s grandfather. Maybe that was why Chase had always been fond of it.