by K M McGuire
“Do you yield?” Andar breathed heavily.
The Tastin attempted to look around the quiet ring. The king now lay in checkmate. Andar pressed the blade a bit harder, pricking the surface of the Tastin’s neck, and a waxy droplet leaked from the cut. The Tastin gulped, slicing his neck a bit more. Finally, the Tastin grunted his yes. Andar’s sword slid back up his arm and released his wrist from under his foot. He extended his hand to the fallen Tastin.
“Come on, you need some medical attention,” Andar said kindly.
The Tastin stared at him, his good eye became tight as a bead. He finally took his hand, and Andar pulled him up.
“You shouldn’t feel the need to help me,” the Tastin said meekly. He walked beside Andar, face swollen as he held his chest. “I was going to kill you.”
“I have no issue with you,” Andar responded. “I was always taught to fight as though the world is against you. Know when there’s room to learn, give that until there is no longer any room left.”
The Tastin’s face became a gamut of thought, wordlessly glancing over Andar as if waiting for the punchline of a joke, or perhaps he was trapped in the words Andar said, almost forgetting to move. They made their way out of the ring, the excitement returning with the unexpected turn of events. The Tastin was met by his companions, already trying to comfort him. He brushed off their comforts, unwilling to hear them. Razar greeted Andar, holding back his smile. He hugged Andar and gave him a proud nod, acknowledging his faith in him while Voden tried to find a way to describe an ounce of how he felt. He still felt the throb in his chest, but Andar smiled, appearing thankful his friend was even there.
“Hey,” the Tastin called from the throng separating them. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Andar Mathe,” he called back.
“They call me Jaka Edan,” the Tastin nodded. “I am in your debt for your mercy, Andar.”
Andar separated from his friends and walked over to Jaka. “Show the same mercy to others, and it will be paid.” He extended his hand to Jaka. Jaka stared at Andar a moment, like he still waited for the punchline, and then nodded and snatched his hand.
“It will be paid in full by my last breath.”
The days crept into weeks, leading deeper into the wintery season of Forux. Voden and his friends had spent much of the coming season curled inside Razar’s shop near the fire, where Vec spent nearly every day grumbling about how he wished to be on the Shattered Coast, basking in the warmth of the alcohol to sweeten its shores. But it seemed that Vec just needed something to complain about; at least Voden thought he was being a bit sensitive. He rather enjoyed the snowy landscape, layered by the dark, veiny shoots that held shelves of white, tucked drowsily in the crook of the branches. But now, the city was bustling again as the full moon grew closer. The citizens began decorating their homes and shops with candles and any remaining bit of green they could find, stringing together ropes of garlands around the tree-bridge’s banisters. The blue lights made the mounds of innocent fluff look as if the angelic had flung off their clothes, the hues glinting as though the stars had descended and settled among them, though Vec complained the light deepened the cold.
Voden was glad they had not left to find the Lady of the Lake yet. Andar had been antsy to leave since his fight, but Yael protested, “You have to wait until after the celebration of the Zemilia!”
This was usually followed by a rant about how she would be bitter towards them for the rest of her life. Voden suspected she wasn’t quite lying. Since Andar’s skirmish, they had not been back to the fields, spending much of their time now with Yael. He seemed to have guessed at what Voden already knew: Yael had almost no friends. It would have been hard for someone like her to have the only people she connected with to never return, and perhaps much of her urgency for them to stay was like a child grasping at a wilting flower, whispering it was okay. She was stalling them, and Voden could not blame her.
Voden had found he didn’t need to protest much about continuing his journey, though he would occasionally feel pangs of guilt when he thought of his family. He knew, eventually, the fairytale played out with Yael was to end soon. He crammed as much togetherness as he could dedicate, pushing off their duties to Vec and Andar so they could go on their secret excursions. He, too, could not let go of that flower of a memory that was surely coming to an end.
On many of these walks, she showed him her favorite places. One of these places was in the Eternal Tree, which always bustled with sages and proletarians alike, trying to manage the affairs of the common person. Most were complaints and disputes the sages had to settle, while other diplomatic services were pursued with much more diligence. The more decorated sages organized meetings and debates for legal recourse. But it was all more or less a blur. Voden and Yael tried to look as though they knew what they were doing, wandering around the halls of the tree.
The walls seemed to be drenched in succulent drama, where very prominent Scales scurried about the halls, whispering snidely to one another or shuffling off to send falcons. Voden only caught small fragments of conversations, but the speaker usually caught him listening and stared with thorny eyes, holding her tongue until they were no longer near.
“They are saying the time is nearly approaching,” Voden heard one day, as they neared a corner of one of the empty corridors. He held out his arm, stopping Yael from taking the left. “He claims the final piece is nearly set. He said to make your decisions quickly, once the dome falls, there will be swift changes. You must choose our side. And, I might add, what we have accomplished recently, well, there will be no stopping our soldiers when all of the pieces are in play.”
They heard nothing else for a moment, and then the other party responded. “You know there is no side other than the victor, and it sounds as though they will need the bankers of Foth to move their plans further. Such ambitious changes require quite a bit of money. But you say you have total control over them? Ah, so that is key to it all! I am curious to know what it does beyond light up and spin. No wonder your investments have been placed in those Uskarian mines! I suppose if there be something greater, pick the lesser of two evils, but I will tell you, many have been rather wary to give more, knowing their investments have been going to those foreign barbarians. But, all in all, it seems you have much of it planned out, enough for me, anyway. I will make the proper arrangements. Send word to him that he has our support. When should your research with the Azucrepyhs—” The man’s voice paused, offering a curt greeting to whoever walked past.
Voden grabbed Yael’s arm, and they, too, began to walk begrudgingly down the hall, nearly bumping into the person walking swiftly towards them. He muttered an apology as he passed the human sage. Voden looked nonchalantly at the two men he suspected talked in secrecy. One was a Scez who looked as though he did not belong to any part of Septium. He was wrapped in his tight, white cloak to cover his head (though his bauble of head was still distinguishable with the hood). His spherical glasses glinted as he looked at Voden. The other was a Tasmian Scale, who must have been in one of the higher tiers. His clothes were brilliantly designed with patterns befitting a king. The Tasmian’s hair was set white and faded back to black, combed astutely across his almond head. His eyes pierced Voden’s thoughts and gave him a curious look.
His smile was toothy, as he greeted the two. “Taking a courtly walk up to the observatory, I assume?”
“Yes…” Yael said nervously.
The man nodded, his lips still tweaked upward. Voden looked at the Scez. He wore a strange brooch on his right chest, flashing violently in the light of the corridor. It was made of intensely black onyx, shaped into a slightly flattened hexagon, where the top angle stretched nearly double the size of the other lines, making an isometric teardrop shape. At each of the angles, gold filled the lines of the facets, running into the center and around the diamond of sapphire set in its core. A line was cut from the top edge of the teardrop and down to the center, splitting it into an elongated
U-shape. It felt familiar to Voden, though he could not point to where it rested in his memory as he squeezed Yael’s hand. Voden watch the Scez’s hand shift inside his cloak, noting the dull illumination coming from the form he quietly tried to hide.
“Well, I would hate for the two of you to tarry too long in these halls,” he said curtly, tilting his head down the hall. “Off you go.”
Voden quickly obeyed, knowing there was much less to hear from them anyways.
“Boy?” The Scez called them back.
Voden paused, as if the Scez had summoned up a wall he could not pass, and a retching fear rippled through his mind. He turned to face the Scez.
“What’s your name?” he asked, his eyes focused to beams, as if he already knew it.
“Voden, sir,” he answered, shuddering at his own response.
The man nodded and flicked his hand, his expression returning to that odd smile. His attention moved back to the Tasmian. Voden drug Yael forward without speaking further. They turned down a few halls when Yael looked at him.
“What was that about?” she pried. Voden didn’t know and shook his head in response, but whatever it was, Voden could feel his time in Septium was falling to an end.
∞ ∞ ∞
It was up in the top of the Eternal Tree that Voden truly found his comfort with Yael. It was here he could find beauty without trying. There was much to look at across the dormant crooked spindles. Here, the air was cooler, but it breathed more pleasant, like the water from a spring on a burning summer day. The light bloomed out of the Eternal Tree, as if calling to the smaller blips of blue that chirped in response from around the city. He could watch the river wind away from the mountains, like a serpent of glass, slithering and cutting across the earth in search of something that would satisfy its travel.
“This was where I came when my mother died,” Yael said somberly, looking out over the rolling earth, as the clouds shivered in the salmon-colored sky. Voden looked at her. She smiled kindly, a gentle twinkle glistened beside her eye, ready to drop the globe of memory. The sun glowed on her cheeks, becoming rosy with evening. “The vastness of it all seemed to take some of the pain from me. I’ve always found nature knows more of what to say to me than any person. It’s loud when it needs to be, whistling to cheer you up, but like now, it can be quiet too, like it wants to listen. It embraces with more than just sound. It fills your heart with colors you forget in your darkness, when colors faded from you mind. Depression always drowns the colors out. Colors seem to be forgotten or alone this time of year. I remember mother the most during Forux. The season of the return—everything returning to Zagala, to share in spirit what she had lost. She’s not so far removed from us, you know,” she said to Voden. Her eyes trailed across the city. “She feels things much like us; sorrow and happiness, love and loss…she toils so hard to fix what Pylea corrupted, and one day it will be set right. We just need to be patient.” She looked at Voden, who silently shook his head. “What about you? I know you see things differently. What helps you through life?”
Voden looked up at the stars flickering above him. The firmament vibrated with light but gave little to collect his thoughts. “That there’s a way through the suffering. I can only imagine a small portion of what could be the Beyond, but in the smallest thought, it is further from suffering, draped in mercy. It becomes hard for me, I guess, staring at my own pain, knowing my own unbelief and trying not to think it’s all without reason. I want to hope for something, but I almost worry that my hope is without answer. I want to have something to believe, but everything I have believed in became upended. I’ve learned nothing in either direction of whether I’m right or wrong, just that there is only faith, and it suffers for an answer. I’m trying to come to terms with the idea that everything I once believed in holds no merit. I don’t really know what helps me. If there is any kind of help, I hope whatever is Beyond provides the answers I need and that I have the wherewithal to hear it. There is one exit. Now I’m finding we know nothing of life to begin with because we need to learn about death first. We haven’t even stepped foot on that journey! We learn opposite because we sentients are stubborn. We are so predicated on finding out what life means that we neglect the more looming knowledge of death. We turn our heads further around the closer we get to it because it’s hard to look it in the face!” He paused a moment and looked at Yael. She was listening well, sitting close to him, wearing a compassionate expression. “I guess I still believe in the Beyond,” Voden sighed quieting himself a bit, relieving his distress. “I just don’t know if my definition has become larger or smaller.”
“I suppose it’s better to have questions,” Yael said assuredly.
“But when do we finally take root in an answer?” Voden asked. “I can’t imagine we would still not know years from now when we look hard throughout our lives.”
“I would imagine the answers are large enough that if you found it that soon, you didn’t ask hard enough.” She smiled and pointed out across the world. “I mean, if you think you could have answers for something this beautiful, you’d feel a bit cheated, wouldn’t you? It may be hard, wondering what answers could be found and getting little more than scraps, but would there be much will to go on if there wasn’t any more to it? I would think, that if the Beyond or Zagala is real, there are answers even eternity would struggle to pose.”
∞ ∞ ∞
He thought about that shared moment with Yael several times—right up until the celebration. He felt something had grown in their relationship, some sort of bond that was far deeper than the one he shared with Andar. Some thread of similarities made themselves twine together in some unspoken revelation, and Voden knew how deeply he wanted to discover more about her. But now, his heart had grown heavy, wanting her to come with him on the rest of the journey, but he knew it was going to be too hard to accept her saying no. He didn’t know how he would ask her. He prepared his bag for the journey, filling it with some clothes and snacks, staring at the red cube that stared back at him. He saw his reflection in the shapes, his face older than he remembered. He hoped there was some sort of answer trapped inside the solid, semipermeable block. A moment passed, and he threw another shirt inside the bag, unchanged by the moment he spent staring, almost angry at himself for giving it a thought.
Yael swung herself in through the door of his room, smiling, her own bag held tightly in her hand. “You about ready?” she asked with fond excitement. She wore a rather long brown cloak, pulled snuggly around her body with its hood draped along her shoulders.
“Yeah,” Voden responded, latching his bag shut. He paused to look at her, holding onto the swirl of everything he wanted to say, but his tongue grew dry. “Hey, Yael?” Voden said, hoping to muster his words. Her fac perked with attention. “When-when all this is done, are you…” He couldn’t say it. He sighed, fighting against his own nerves to spit something out, something he truly wished to say. “I think leaving here is going to be hard,” he said, praying she knew what he meant.
“We’ll figure it all out before you guys leave,” she said, brushing it off, waving her hand at him mindlessly, “You’ll have to come back here anyway. At the very least, to say bye to father.”
Razar had told them he had no intention of going to see the Zemilia. He had once found it enlightening when he was young, but the experience to him now had become dry, and he no longer felt it worth his time to participate in something that held little pleasure for him. Voden accepted the answer with a nod, and they walked together down the stairs where Vec and Andar waited for them.
“Hope you’re not forgetting anything,” Vec mocked, bumping his elbow into Voden’s rib.
“I hope not,” he said as casually as he could. It was nearly midday, which meant they would be at the grove by dark, according to Yael. Razar greeted them in the living room, wishing them a final goodbye.
“Please mind yourselves,” Razar said, giving Yael a stern look. She scoffed and rolled her eyes. He laughed a m
oment and shook their hands. “I’ll see you when you get back.” He opened the door for them and nearly pushed them out, giving them a look as he smiled. “I’m long overdue for some peace and quiet!” He chortled and waved to them as he tapped the knot that closed the door, leaving them to the tree bridge.
Vec turned to Yael. “All right, lead the way.”
She nodded and pulled her bag tightly upon her shoulders. “Follow me.”
∞ ∞ ∞
It was a rather cool day, even for Forux, but they offered it little attention, caught up in the excitement chattering around them on the trail to the grove. The path took them to the other side of the Eternal Tree and followed a corridor of trees that wound alongside the northern river, flowing through Septium, sliding under the thin sheets of snow-covered ice. Voden had not seen many individuals as old as Vec, which made Vec feel slightly uncomfortable and irritable. Not to say there wasn’t anyone his age, but many appeared to be travelers who had never been to Septium before, and they struggled to blend in with the crowd.
Vec had not taken kindly to standing out. The breeze had captured notes of pine and damp earth, flicking at Voden’s nose. He sniffled at the raw moisture, and he tried to bind his cloak more firmly around him. The sky was dulled by the haze of winter, greyed by its indecision on whether it would snow or allow for the sun to take the pale blankets away. It seemed only Voden had taken a small portion of his attention to glance at the deep melancholy of the sky.