The Reaping Season

by Sarah Stirling

  He was left with the distinct sensation of having lost part of himself; of having been cut open and left to spill out. Perhaps he was already hollow, just the empty husk where a man had once been. As he rifled through a hasty assortment of memories, he didn’t think this was quite true. He had never really been a man, so much as a vessel for others to wield as they wished, and it left him with the bitter aftertaste of regret.

  I want to be me.

  What is me?

  He did not have these answers. Still, he could not remember his name. Everyone and everything were supposed to have names, were they not? But for some reason he was not supposed to – for him it was a sin to bear a name. A sign of great arrogance when he had never earned the right to wear one. How he longed for one now. For something to rally around. Something to own, just for him alone.

  Selfish, his father would say, and cuff him over the head. Just to remember that memory was a light in the dark, a beacon guiding him back to some sense of self.

  Distantly he could hear footsteps grow louder until they were right outside the door. He had to rely on his other senses because his eyes struggled, only making out the barest of shapes. Bodies, moving towards him. Even though his heart thumped mercilessly in his chest he did not have the energy to move, simply trembling against the wall as two people were thrust into the cell next to his and left, gate clanging closed and then the door following, tombing him in once more.

  They did not move but he could sense life still within them, some faint hummingbird heartbeats sounding over the din of every noise around him, from the gulls circling overhead, to the cicadas creaking in the trees, the mice darting across the floor, tiny feet splashing in puddles. Alive, but perhaps like he. He could not remember how long he had been lying down here, trapped in his transient state. Who could say how long they would remain the same, leaving him to the incessant circling of his thoughts. He was lonely.

  The waiting continued for a small eternity. By then he had scraped the skin from his fingers raw trying to draw shapes and memories in the dirt of the cell floor, barely able to see what his pictures looked like with his fuzzy eyesight, like the way the horizon would melt in the heat when he stared into the distance, pulling his eyes away only to find them blinded by the reflection of the sun against miles and miles of endless sand. It was not this sight that he missed. It was The Sight. Now he possessed but a ghost of it, the faded imprints of feet upon the sand to be blown away by an evening wind. He could grasp some sense of things around him beyond the measure of an ordinary human, but the waves of energy from the otherworld had been hidden from him, leaving him bereft and cold.

  He would give the last of his human eyesight to have it back. He would give it all to have it back. But as another cough tore its way from his lungs, he realised he might be out of anything to give.

  “Sound like a smoker.” A raspy voice broke the stillness.

  Starting, he sat up, body protesting the movement. “I never liked tobacco.” It elicited a strange thrill within him, to know this fact.

  “I’d give the clothes on my back for some right now.”

  Despite himself, he snorted. “At least you will know your suffering is self-inflicted.”

  “Ah,” nodded the shadow of a man, leaning his shoulder against the bars that separated them as if he had trouble holding himself upright, “that is the best kind. Better to do it yourself and know you did it right.”

  “You are a very strange man.”

  He heard a sound between a laugh and a bark rumble from the man’s throat. “Heard that one once or twice.”

  “Have we met before?” he asked suddenly.

  Straightening up, he saw the man’s eyes shine in a stripe of weak moonlight. Clad all in black but ghostly pale, something about him reminded him of The Reaper. “We did. In a city north of here.” Then, quieter, “You don’t remember?”

  “I – sort of? Do you know – who I am?” Embarrassed, he was relieved it was too dark for the flush in his cheeks to show. “Who was I?”

  “Don’t think I can answer that one for you. Barely know the answer for myself.”

  Silence fell between them, the weight of their respective thoughts too heavy to be borne aloft on the fragile air. Instead, he shuffled a few paces closer, just for the sham sensation of intimacy after too much time alone with them. Once, he had shared his mind, but he didn’t know where his companion – the missing part of himself – had gone to.

  “They called you Seeker,” the man said finally. “You were a soldier of the Sonlin Empire, just as I was once. Think you once referred to yourself as Riftbreaker.”

  Riftbreaker. Seeker. The one who seeks. The one who breaks. Pain crackled through his skull as he remembered how it felt to have so much power flow through him at once. To be more feeling than person. To have such purpose. Unite the worlds.

  “Seeker was never supposed to be my name,” he confessed. “It’s just a – a –” he waved his hand around to fill the void.

  “Stopgap?”

  “I suppose.”

  The man hummed, tapping an unfamiliar rhythm against the bars. “In my tongue there is the word Ziko. It means something like, hm, respite after the storm passes. When the worst is over.”

  He blinked, trying to see the man’s face in the gloom. He couldn’t make out details; couldn’t assess his expressions on delivery. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I am Janus. Don’t know what it means. Don’t know that it matters.”

  “Janus,” he repeated, drawing the syllables out on his tongue. “You were given this at birth?”

  “Mm. Never cared enough to change it.”

  He let his hands to fall to the ground, suddenly unsure what to do with them. He wanted to say that he had never felt this lost in his life before but somewhere deep down he knew this wasn’t true. All his life he had been lost and he had never looked very hard for answers, content to drift on the tides that carried him wherever he was led. In truth, Seeker had never sought anything. Even if the name was not blasphemy, it felt like a lie.

  “You’re free to decide who want you want to be,” said Janus. “Can name yourself whatever you want. No one will care, believe me.”

  He glanced around him. “I don’t feel very free.”

  Janus huffed a laugh. “No, well. In spirit, at least.”

  “In spirit… I have lost my spirit. She is gone.” His voice fell to a whisper.

  “Gone?”

  “Gone.”

  Black beady eyes peered at him through the slits of the bars. “Shouldn’t be possible.”

  “And yet.”

  “And yet.”

  He didn’t understand how a caged man could be so calm. How his skin wasn’t crawling with the need to move, to rip open the bars and surge out. If only he could still call the storm to his fingertips it would be so different. If only he could still be a god of this world. Arrogance was nothing to fear when it stemmed from truth. He would enjoy telling his father that now, if he could. If he wasn’t so hopelessly pitiful, cramped and cowering.

  A moan from the mouth of the other figure lying on the ground attracted the attention of both men, heads turning in tandem to peer at the woman huddled upon the floor. She was the southerner with the frenzied signature, like the wings of the honey bees that fluttered from flower to flower in the high season.

  Janus caught him staring and he flinched away. “She’ll pull through,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s strong. Because she saved me. She will wake up and then we will get out of here.”

  He did not understand such loyalty. Had he ever possessed such faith in his heart? No, that is why father always resented you so. Never had he really believed, or desired, or dreamed, or hoped. It had taken an inconceivable chain of events for him to find himself here, finally realising he had always adopted others’ goals as his own.

  “You speak with such faith.”

  Janus’ head jerked up. “
Ha,” he breathed. “Always been faithless.”

  “And I’ve always been faithful but never so devout as I see you.”

  “We all need something to live for,” he replied, the smile in his voice evident.

  “What if we’re not really living?”

  Janus seemed to consider, that same simple rhythm plucked from his long fingers up and down the iron bars. “Then we fight for it. Fight until we find it.”

  “And if we don’t have the strength?”

  “Don’t think we’re supposed to do it alone.”

  It was a nice sentiment, one that made his weak heart tremble with promise. But in the end he had been left to rot here by himself, without hope, without spirit. In the end that was all there was. Himself and his loneliness to keep each other company before his body finally gave in, Pillars be damned. But even as he resigned himself to die, he couldn’t help but cling to the emotions inspired by Janus’ words. There could be a world out there, somewhere, where he had made different choices. Where he had been born somewhere else, had lived a life he could truly call his own, and was proud of all he had accomplished. The thought burned inside him, one weak candle roaring into a bonfire.

  In the cold, damp cells, he found the thought kept him warm.

  *

  Viktor was growing weary of candles. They had been piled around the edges of each tier of the fountain by some hapless servant who had to relight several as a faint breeze snuffed them out. His head ached from concentrating on each individual flame, barely able to discern one pinprick of warmth from another.

  “Our fire does not go out, Viktor,” said Fyera, her voice carrying clear and crisp from the balcony above. “Do not let the candles go out.”

  At least it was getting easier to tap into the pool of power that he had access to, drawing the crackling, burning energy through him until he could feel the fire in every breath he took, steam passing his lips on the exhale. But power wasn’t really the problem. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop himself from falling into the trap of such all-consuming euphoria and it took everything he had to pull himself back up the sheer side of a cliff. By the time he had come back to himself he found he had lost grip of the fire, blowing out like the same candles reflecting off the waterlogged lily pads in the pool.

  With a cry of frustration he kicked at a small pot of flowers, shattering it across the ground, soil spraying out over the stone. No matter what he did he still couldn’t get it right. Perhaps he was just a fraud. He wasn’t anything special; just a boy from the streets. Viktor couldn’t be this prince they wanted him to be, strong and refined and powerful. It just wasn’t in him.

  With his head bowed he could hear Fyera take the stairs down, the fluttering of her long red skirts catching his eyeline before he finally looked up at her calm expression. She was remarkably good at hiding her emotions; a talent he envied. Stopping before the fountain, she swept a hand over the candles and they winked out all at once, wicks trailing wispy curls of smoke into the darkening sky.

  “I think I’ve been pushing you a little too hard,” she said. “You did well today.”

  Viktor bristled. He had painted a placid smile upon his face before more nameless nobles that Fyera had paraded him in front of, listening to talk of war and revolution as if any of them knew what that would really mean. He had seen countless war and none of it had ever ended well for him. The revolution in Nirket had come and passed like a storm, explosive one minute, and then devastating in its destruction. But his inability to keep his mouth shut had helped them more than hindered them, apparently, for they had clapped happily and told him how it really was true, the prince had awoken once more, ready to lead to them to victory.

  “What are we doing?” he said. “Really, what are we doing?”

  Fyera gazed at him, green eyes stripping him bare. “You know, Vallnor was always terrible at control, too.” She had taken to referring to them as two separate people, perhaps because she sensed how uncomfortable he was with the entire situation. “He always struggled with it and our father used to lose his temper with him all the time. But I think the hardships made him stronger because he had to fight to overcome them. In the end, he was the one who was remembered more than I was. When the Sonlin forces first invaded he was the first one to fight back, to protect his family and his people.”

  She patted him gently on the shoulder. “I don’t know what you’ve been through up until now but I do know that you’re a fighter. We both are. It’s what makes us family.”

  Viktor nodded, watching as a large, balloon shaped riftspawn expanded and then contracted, the motion shooting it through the air. They were such strange creatures, these spirits from the otherworld, and now he was connected to them. Now he was a prince of them. He didn’t know how everything he had longed for could be so daunting when he would have happily snatched the chance up with both hands in Nirket. Mostly he felt like an imposter – not quite the prince they were all looking for but not quite the boy he had been, either. Things hadn’t just changed. The process was gradual, a constant evolution, as if his life was built on quicksand and he had to struggle to keep his neck above the line.

  “Perhaps there is another way we can try this,” said Fyera.

  He looked up.

  “The way for you to reconcile yourself might be to just let yourself lose control. Here, where it is safe for you to let go. Only then might you really connect with the phoenix and understand your place in this.”

  Viktor blinked at her, then turned away. When he leant over the rim of the fountain he could see his face, washed out by the white moonlight dancing in the black water. A lily pad drifted across one eye, blocking part of his gaze from view. Did she not know what happened when he lost control? What he had done when he had let himself fall into the feeling of raw fire and magic coursing through his veins, all thoughts burned away, turning him into a slave of sensation. It wasn’t simple reluctance on his part; his muscles locked up in fear. Of what he would do. Of what would become of him.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Isn’t it?” Her face joined his in the water. With her features softened and distorted by the rippling waves, she looked just like him. A twin soul. Suddenly her eyes began to glow with that familiar green light, sparking within him a rumble of energy. Like a melody he knew off by heart, his blood began to sing with it, fire rising inside him.

  Fyera slipped her hand into his and he gasped, feeling sparks on his skin. Gripping tighter, she murmured soft words into the night to calm him as his heart pounded so loud he swore she could hear it. He tried to focus on his breathing, counting each inhale and exhale of breath and the way the fire spread from his core, down his legs, up his arms, reaching out to his fingertips. It felt like his entire body was burning up but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It felt like maybe he could set the entire world on fire if he really wanted.

  The presence in the back of his mind agreed and just the sense of knowing something else could feel his emotions raised the hairs on the back of his neck. At least now he knew what it was. This was the phoenix. The firebird of legend. A guardian spirit that granted rebirth to those that it deigned to bond to by preserving one’s consciousness and putting it back into a new body when the old one gave in. In so many ways it made Viktor more than human. But once he began that train of thought he found himself thundering down the track, further and further from his old self.

  “Just give into it,” she said again. “Feel the fire.”

  When his eyes started to shine with green fire he pushed down the initial panic and focused on the image of the two of them in reflection – two dark silhouettes and four bright spots of light – narrowing down his vision so he would not get overwhelmed by the sights and smells and sensations that opened up to him, the world shimmering so vibrantly with colour. It was almost as if his normal eyes had been faulty, missing out on the ripple of excitement and danger from a bright blood red rosebud, or the soothing, rich tones of a velvety midnight sky. Going back
to the dull, muted colours of human eyes seemed impossible now that he had tasted the sight of a god.

  “Can you feel the phoenix? If you speak to it, it will respond to you.”

  Viktor frowned, squeezing his eyes shut as a great green eye flashed in his mind, focusing on that picture. “I can… command it?”

  “No.” Her voice sounded distant, as if they were no longer standing next to one another. “That power is a loan. An agreement between you.”

  “It’s strange. I can feel it there but it’s not actually there.”

  “The phoenix is one of the guardian spirits that acts as the gatekeeper to the world beyond. It is one of the strongest riftspawn there is and it is bonded to you. Wherever you go it will be with you.”

  Her voice faded as his vision tunnelled, the same green eye more and more concrete upon his eyelid every time he blinked. So much power was coursing through him he wasn’t sure how his body hadn’t burned up, every part of him searing hot. All around him he could feel the ebb and flow of energy and the riftspawn that zipped against his consciousness, able to tell how far away they were and how much power they possessed just by casting out his net. There was a lot of energy here – they seemed to be drawn to the two of them – and as he sucked in deep breath, smoke curling from his nostrils, he felt the ancient pull that drew more and more in towards him.

  As if they were on strings, he could tug at each one and feel them respond, eliciting a faint shiver down his spine. If he wanted to he could command them like his own personal army. They squirmed to obey him, cowing before the power of the phoenix. In his mind he felt a haughty flood of satisfaction. For it was only right they bowed before him when he could obliterate them with a simple flick of his fingers.

  The further he fell down the well of that power, the clearer the picture of his companion came. Next came the tremendous span of wings, flame feathers dancing in shades of turquoise and viridian, carrying with them the charcoal scent of ash. A long neck curled up into a small head with a sharp grey beak, two green eyes shining bright with the internal flame of the great firebird. Throwing its head back, it emitted a terrible shriek and he slapped hands over his ears as the riftspawn around him scattered in droves. Viktor couldn’t even feel his hands anymore, only vaguely aware of moving them on instinct, the world stripped back to its rawest components with the phoenix at its very centre.