by Vitaly Zykov
His stiff body was aching terribly. His neck was aching a lot too. The skin on the left side of his neck was as if tightened with glue mask. It was horrible to open eyes. The eternity that had been spent for learning now seemed to be a mirage, a disease of his inflamed mind… Why, if you had doubted yourself once, how can you be sure that your present being is real?! Was he real at all?!
– I think, therefore I am! – The ancient proposition, for some reason, was uttered without befitting confidence. Sharply, as if rushing into a pool, Yaroslav opened his eyes…
A pretty heavy drop hit right into his eye as if it was specifically waiting for that. The water was at least clean. Forgetting all spiritual experiences, he sat down and began to furiously rub his eyes. A quiet and so familiar impish laugh rustled on the verge of earshot. Yaroslav turned from side to side.
Soft light was illuminating the interior of familiar, but already well forgotten old ruins. Rain was drizzling through a hole in the roof. Of course, Yaroslav was lying right under the hole. The statue of raptor-man was standing alone on its pedestal. All fears faded away. Yaroslav laughed happily and came up to the stone figure.
– So, it because of meeting you I dreamed such glitches? Well, well, you are a strong man… – There was no respect in Yaroslav's speech. A scary and terrible dream should be bid farewell with laughter, mocking your fears.
On a wave of this joyful enthusiasm Yaroslav flicked with his finger at the lizard's forehead. The reaction came at the same moment. The stone hand, motionless a moment before, spurted forward and Yaroslav's right arm was caught in a hard grip, just like his neck had been the previous time.
– It seems to me, that I have promised a name for you, puppy? Saigal[16]!! – The familiar hiss sounded in Yaroslav's head. His lips, at once turned icy trying to utter a sound in vain. – I hight you your True name. Be worthy of it, Saigal!
At the end of this speech the other hand of the statue caught Yaroslav's right arm above his wrist. The stone fingers closed. Yaroslav smelled the scent of burning. The pain came after the smell. His facial muscles already tensed for a scream, but were immediately relaxed by the cold words of the statue:
– You will die, if you scream!!
Yaroslav kept silence, believing that unconditionally. The hellish pain from his charring arm was tearing the strung ropes of his nerves. But he kept silent. Blood flowed from his bitten lip. And the statue was smiling a happy smile.
Searching for escape from the pain, his thoughts sorted hundreds variants. There should be an exit, and it was found.
«If everything is real now, the dream was real too!!» – His consciousness seized upon that idea, as his last hope. His Inner eye habitually slid into the deep of his consciousness, and the universe rushed to meet him again. But it was already familiar. His memory that had been sleeping for a while now helpfully gave ready options. His Inner eye moved to the wounded arm, and the feeling of distraction habitual for the followers of Sat'tor almost got a crack. Something unimaginable was happening in his arm. Natural flow of energy was entwined with some unusually aggressive substance. In some places, the main internal channels were broken, and it was unclear from what end he should start work. It was already useless to pick off those hunger sprouts of alien energy flows. Clearly, Yaroslav wanted a different practice!
His inner eye began to wander distractedly along the body suffering from the pain. Then it hooked upon something. There was a kind of area in the solar plexus in which all the energy channels of the body were converged. Evidently, it was that very source of energy, which Yaroslav had been thinking about previously. Now the spark of this source was barely smoldering. In Yaroslav's opinion he needed to add fire there. But where could he get it? His thoughts came back to his crippled arm. The hostile flows had absorbed some channels of the body already, but the chaotic tangle could not be unraveled. Now some evil pulsation appeared there… Yaroslav understood that his time had almost come to an end. The decision came suddenly. What would be if he nourished his own source with the energy from the alien flows?! He had never done anything like that… So what? It is never too late to learn!
There was too little time to think, it was necessary to take risks. As was said, the biggest profits mean the gravest risks. A thin probe of his consciousness caught the thinnest alien sprout. The touch was scorching. The pain that had before dwelled somewhere beyond his consciousness began to seep inside. Stoically, gathering all his will, Yaroslav pulled the alien energy into his solar plexus. His smoldering flame, got feeding, began to flare up. A shiver ran through his whole body. Encouraged by this success, he began vigorously pull the remaining energy into his own inflaming source of fire. The tangle in his right arm was decreasing rapidly. Finally, there was only one small point that he could not pull away. It was somehow similar to the source in the solar plexus…
The Force was boiling in his blood. The flame was beating into the hastily built barriers of will, trying to escape. His body was not ready for the source of Force burning so violently. He should release the surpluses. Yaroslav repaired hastily the damaged channels in his arm involuntarily connecting them with the strange shimmering spark, which already had become native, and removed the barriers. The liquid fire poured in all directions – the energy was boiling, seething, seeking for an exit.
Yaroslav opened his eyes. It turned out that he had been free for a long time already. The unknown creature stood like an immovable statue. The greenish sun was shining. The rain had stopped. Everything was exactly the same as before. Everything but Yaroslav. The fire was burning in his blood. The wave of heat had been rising, until, finally, it covered Yaroslav above his head. That little knowledge about the Force, received from the unknown creature, appeared in his memory. The earlier inexplicable laws became clear, the twenty-eight hieroglyphs of external energies that he had not been able to use previously, began to light up in his memory forming a ring bursting with energy. When all the signs were put on their places, the circle was closed. Everything became still. But something was missing. Frowning in concentration, Yaroslav began to recall the signs of internal energies in his memory. Each sign fell into its place in the new ring. Finally it was closed up too. The stream of roaring energy poured into the ring of twenty-one signs emptying all the reserves of his body. It was shining before Inner eye of Yaroslav with searing white light. Acting intuitively, he placed the smaller white ring into the large one. The rings connected. The resulting structure trembled, swayed as if under gusts of wind, and crumpled into a ball that hung like a weightless clot in the depths of his consciousness.
A severe nausea came to his throat. Yaroslav fell on his knees. Vomiting spasms were shaking his body. It seemed that his stomach began a slow climb up the mountain of his esophagus. At the same time, his arm started to hurt, as if a small squeaking bug was moving along its length towards his brain. The consciousness struck with a guess slipped to the painful areas. The flame from his solar plexus and the alien spark from his arm began slow movement toward the rings built from the signs. Yaroslav could only wait for result.
And the result came, and a great one! The two different sources of energy met, as the two rings had met before, and devoured each other. And from their death, a new previously unseen piece of light rose like a phoenix from ashes. It perched on the back of his mind filling the whole body with strength and confidence in future. Yaroslav knew somehow that this spark of Force would stay with him forever.
The warm pulsation somewhere behind his eyes was incredibly enjoyable. Yaroslav looked over himself with his Inner eye. The Force flows were smooth, all his internal organs were in order, only the sparks of fire disappeared from their places. His common vision could not detect any changes except one – on his right arm, above the wrist, there was a new scar in the form of a strange sign or maybe just an ornament. Yaroslav tried to go deep with his mind eye but found no problems there. It seemed that the scar looked completely natural.
– So that's what you are, the True nam
e, – said Yaroslav, stroking his wrist with his left hand.
He looked around, then stood facing the statue and bowed respectfully. Bowed like a student, showing respect to his teacher, mortally dangerous, but still a teacher. After that, he turned and went outside. The world of new feelings and possibilities was opened before him. For the first time since he had found himself in this world, Yaroslav felt joyfully calm. However, there was a question about a new direction of his movement. Yaroslav looked around, using his new skills. The mountain in the form of the fist threatening to the sky, now seemed filled with Force.
– It's enough experiments with magic for me – Yaroslav said vigorously and moved to the south, (at least, he was internally sure that it was the south there) without doubt that he was moving away from any source of magic…
CHAPTER 6
For the second day already Yaroslav had been walking through a stony desert, strictly following the direction, chosen at the temple. And during these two days he ate nothing. What could he eat, if there were bushes of grass looking like skulls with needles and nothing more? He even feared to come close to them! His new knowledge hinted, no, shouted that that grass did no good. In those hard conditions his organism survived only through the internal resources. But an inspection of its resources had shown that they would be exhausted soon. The spark in the depths of his mind was barely smoldering. The only thing that gave him a hope was that the grass became much thicker than before. It meant proximity of water and richer soil. Yaroslav already dreamed of fruit with peel of orange and taste of apple, they collected at the fountain. And a gulp of pure water would be the best finishing of such a feast. In that unimaginably distant, almost fairy-tale world an ad claimed «Obey your thirst. Image Is Nothing». It turned real, image was nothing and thirst was everything. What image did Yaroslav had now? Scraps of torn pants and equally torn shoes with soles promising to fall off. Other tatters had slipped very easily from his shoulders and he had to throw them away. So his body was almost naked. However, it is usually named «torso», but Yaroslav and torso were incompatible things. Torso is the body of Hercules, while Yaroslav was the same, but a very shrunken version.
If people could see him, they would take him for a vagabond or a thief or another representative of society underclass, burdened with no morals… Of course, if there lived any people even remotely similar to Yaroslav. Hope for that was rapidly decreasing. The appearance of the statue from the ruins, or not a statue, but a living being and a mentor (Abyss knows who he was, but clearly not a human), inspired pessimism. The way the creature had treated him, Yaroslav did not want to remember at all. The result, of course, was achieved, but the methods to achieve it… Before that Yaroslav could not even imagine such victimization of his mind and body!
With such sort of uncomplicated thoughts he was moving in the chosen direction. Finally he decided to make a halt for rest. Rest meant just blissful stillness of his body lying on the rocks. At that moment, Yaroslav applied all his new skills to relieve fatigue in his tired muscles and to convey some crumbs of the rapidly decreasing energy to them. Then were minutes of laziness and he remembered the rest breaks with Oleg and the girls. Yaroslav remembered the weave of multicolored lines that enmeshed his body during the ritual. He plunged into Sat'tor with pleasure, and began to recollect all details associated with that memory. Shocked by a sudden guess Yaroslav tried to call the similar state and to look for such lines around him now. Darkness enveloped him from head to toe and nothing worked. He was straining the Inner vision to the bitter end, but the result was always nil. The already familiar excitement of researcher seized Yaroslav again. And something began to work out. The surrounding darkness stirred a little. The weightless net of vaguely familiar threads of external energies began to appear. But Yaroslav did not stop there. He continued, straining every sinew, scenting an extra chance for survival. Finally, the flows of Force unseen with usual eye, appeared before him in all their glory – just reach out and take it. So he did. Yaroslav reached with all his senses to the Force in the surrounding world and began to draw energy so needed for life, replenishing exhausted reserves of his body. It felt as if he had found an icy spring in a hot day, he drank and could not stop.
The steel-gray ball of his own Force began to pulsate happily. Namely a ball, because at first his spark had grown into a fire, and then into a small ball. Yaroslav opened his eyes and sat up. He wanted to sing and dance, life became beautiful. His body still required microelements and vitamins and fiber, but now he could live without all that for much longer. Fatigue had passed. Yaroslav bounced on his feet and continued his way walking briskly.
Yaroslav settled for the night about four hours later. The air was much fresher, and the soil had changed too. Rocky areas became rare, they had been replaced with usual soil with grass. However, there was still little grass, but the trend was encouraging… So Yaroslav went to sleep with anticipation of a new day.
The next morning he continued to move sooner than ever. The islands of vegetation very fast and quietly merged into a single cover, even some trees began to appear. However, no plant was familiar, but it was not important, the main thing was that rocky desert was left behind. Tall trees were surrounding Yaroslav, and he proceeded to walk through the forest. There was no silence pressing on psyche now. The Forest[17] lived its own life. Small beasts were leaping from branch to branch, little animals were hiding between the roots. The inexplicable joy seethed in his heart. Yaroslav even began to bawl one of his favorite poems of a traveler, wanderer, poet and soldier Nikolay Gumilev:
I am a parrot from Antilles,
But living in a wizard's tiny parrock
With papers, globes and retorts,
With old man's cough and striking of a clock…
At those words, he fell waist-deep into the ground, as the land, surprisingly, turned into a swamp full of cold water, mud and small (and not small) animals. All these thoughts swept like a whirlwind in Yaroslav's head, then an angry shout shook the swamp and all the surrounding forest, and gradually turned into no less angry tirade. It contained a lot of information about the swamp, forest, weather, world, dragon Roshag and most about Yaroslav himself, who had managed not only to be born, but also to get into this world with dragons, into this swamp, and so on…
Swearing, he got out onto dry and firm ground. That was relatively easy. But he had no more shoes, and the remains of his pants became completely pathetic, thus with the loss of the pants his confidence in the future was lost as well.
Frozen and trembling from cold, Yaroslav was sitting in despondent mood at the foot of a tree similar to baobab. To tell the truth, he had never seen a baobab, but according to his ideas, it should look like that.
With another sigh about the clothing missing forever, he plunged into Sat'tor and increased blood flow to his muscles. It became much warmer and the tremor ceased.
– Oh, it's much better this way! – Thinking aloud had become usual. – Eating something would fit me as well.
Yaroslav picked up a pretty weighty bough from the ground. It would be enough for the first time, but it would be better to find something more formidable. His ears detected some noise of animal origin nearby. Having determined its direction, Yaroslav became to steal towards the sound. He was sneaking so quietly, that crackling of branches underfoot could hurt ears. It was strange, but the animal sounds did not cease, and even increased, enriched with the whole range of screams, bumps and clacking. Yaroslav went up to the bushes and looked through the branches. On a small open glade were two fiercely fighting lizard-like animals of a poodle size. Yaroslav stood with his mouth open. The spectacle was mesmerizing. Evidently, the battle was nearing to its finale, one opponent prevailed over the other. Drops of blood were scattered a yard around. The larger animal grabbed the opponent's throat with its teeth and was violently tearing the open abdomen with its hind legs. The front paws were firmly pressing the defeated creature to the ground, preventing it to get up. The tails of the animals were
entwined in a deadly dance like strange snakes. Finally, movements of the animal pressed to the ground, became chaotic, filled with panic and turned into death throes. From the torn throat came either a scream, or a sigh, and everything became quiet. The winner walked away from the dead enemy and howled triumphantly. It made Yaroslav's blood creep, a branch under his feet crackled loudly. The beast turned toward the man, its eyes were obscured with rage.
– What a brave beast, – Yaroslav muttered, coming out of the bushes and lifting up his club in a good backswing. – Get out, you bastard!!!
Though, the sharp scream had not made any impression on the beast. It just growled louder and rushed at the man. The creature was clearly intending to jump on the chest and grab the throat, but Yaroslav hit it by his bough, aiming at the head. It was impossible, but the beast twisted in mid-air and sank its teeth into the weapon. The bough broke out from Yaroslav's hands. He stepped back in awe. And the beast, looking straight into the man's eyes clenched its jaws, the dust spurted in all sides and the bough was no more…
Yaroslav was seriously scared and moved back to the bushes, hoping to hide there, but the beast did not let him get away. It jumped… and Yaroslav defensively, did something unexpected. As if trying to push away the attacker, he abruptly threw his right hand forward. And the hand made an invisible whip, which hit the animal. Yaroslav unconsciously, reflexively repeated the blow, that Hisser used to punish him, the one he once had managed to learn. The lack of experience and wild fear mixed with rage led to a strange result. Yaroslav imbued into the whip of Nergal so much Force that it simply boiled the blood of the beast. Yaroslav only had time to notice when the green blaze cut through animal's forehead, its black eyes flashed and fountains of dark blood shot on the grass, after that he had to jump aside lest the body of the beast fall on him.