Majutsu-shi no Chikara Ch. 09

Majutsu-shi no Chikara loosely translates to "Sorcerer's Power"

CHAPTER NINE: Blooms of Spring

...

Prende was silent that whole morning, her light extinguished and her smile not even a shadow of itself. Her presence diminished, both in the feeling of the survivors of South-wold and in her physical manifestation. By mid-day, light shone through her as though she were little more than a thick accumulated vapor holding humanoid shape -- and her shadow was scarcely visible. Akuji, alone, had dared approach her in the early light of day and tell her that Matta was clearly dead. From then, she sat motionless even as Akuji bundled the ancient sorcerer's remains with all the reverence he could muster and carried that fragile cargo to the place where they had built their many funeral pyres.

None helped him, until he asked who would gather the wood to build the pyre. Then, as in times before, many hands made light work and most of Matta's shack (broken and scattered all) was gathered and made into a crude bier, with a few fresh saplings and one old poplar giving the pile a stately semblance... perhaps a last nod of respect.

Ginga busied herself with others who put their grief aside to tend the eerily-vibrant crops -- shoots of various grains already too high for the season and threatening to flower or seed early. A few exploratory diggings in the root-fields gave fair warning, as beans and potatoes were already forming where they should not. Whether cruel joke or boon growth, the prolific burst of South-wold's fields gave the residents a sense of wondering dread. How long could such a blessing last and would it be too much for too few? A flood now just as dangerous as drought, in its own right.

Already, many of the goats were being split into smaller herds and a quartet of older, childless men were taking a dozen up the road toward Renks Cairn in hopes of selling the beasts early and reporting the attack. If the fires had not been warning enough, no runners had come to investigate the goings-on of South-wold in the days that followed, and Akuji was restless to find some hope for their recovery. If Matta's death would bring no aid from the surrounds or the city itself, then he feared South-wold lost.

As fire kindled in the bier, Akuji could find no voice to offer the rites of the dead. What little he could recall and pieced together from other mumbled accounts, he could not bring himself to sing Matta's soul to the afterlife. He couldn't even justify to himself that the demented ancient deserved such consideration, after the carnage of Matta's defense of the village. So many dead -- burned by fire and lightning, crushed by boulders of ice, or seeming to have dropped dead of no visible injury. It did his heart no good to think on it but, as the smoke billowed into the sky in black and white braided clouds, Akuji found himself without distraction and was adrift in a current of despairing grief. His wife and son now dead, he had no reason to remain... save that he had been elected as Head-Elder the day before.

The flames were larger now, swelling out and up around the pyre to obscure Matta's tiny, shrouded form. As the wizard burned, Akuji imagined he was burning the remains of Kaida and Damon alongside the small bundled corpse. He wept. It was not the first pyre to serve his grief -- perhaps it was not to be the last. The heat washed over him, flushing his skin painfully as the flames burned too hot too quickly. For a moment, the white-hot core of the pyre threatened to spill outward over the narrow bank of stones surrounding it. Akuji's eyes went up, to look for signs that any of the embers might settle into an outer field or further off. The wind blew from the south and west, the plume of smoke rising swiftly toward the heavens and streaking as the swiftest raptor across the sky.

Painting the sky with the smoke of Matta's funeral pyre, Akuji let his grief climb up the trunk of smoke into the flat, finger-like branches now streaming across the mostly cloudless blue. Let the whole of the world see the proof of his loss, and all the vastness of the sky smearing with the gray-brown stains that echoed the bleeding ache in his chest that hurt all the more sharply with each beat of his heart.

He wanted to remember Matta fondly -- but too many of his own flesh and blood had fueled South-wold's pyres in the days after the attack. Who was left for him to blame for all this death? The orks, to be certain. If any of those damnable creatures survived Matta's last curse, he only hoped it was with the full knowing that it was the humans who struck back at them from the grave. With the phantom of his own rage demanding such a reckoning, he imagined one such beast before him -- broken and humbled, wrapped in coarse rope... better still, in chains.

Cold iron that would dig and cut into the skin, rubbing raw at the wrists, ankles, and neck, as the wretched thing looked up with knowing pain -- waiting for the slow, agonizing death that must follow. He wanted such a scene desperately, but it was not to be.

Instead, his ire went up with the smoke and trailed into nothingness over the sky, cutting halfway from South-wold to the horizon before it became too thin to see. Without Prende's soothing, many of the survivors stood at the yawning gulf of their loss, newly confronted -- not by the specter of grief, but its horrific, empty form made manifest in the spaces between people... the silence clinging between words and hovering just at their backs where once there had been conversation, warmth, or laughter.

Those who had the strength had set themselves the task of working, the spare buffer remaining that tomorrow would not wait for them while they cried and mourned. Those who could not stir their hands nearly joined the dead, such was their loss. They were the ones left in the darkness of their sorrow, having lost brother and sister, father and mother, lover and friend... They were the too young... and Elder Shaum, who was too old.

It was the bitterest of smiles that tugged with a tailor's needle at Shaum's lips, for his wrath had been satisfied... left hollow and rotting in the fields of memory between Shaum and Matta with no-one to set it on a pyre to burn away and become only a memory. As the clank and thunk of metal, stone, and wood rang out from the fields, no work-songs carried over. No children laughed or played. South-wold cast its own shadow upon the world and fled -- leaving only that ghostly image of itself in its wake. Akuji's fists clenched, knuckles and tendons cracking loudly, and his jaw creaked, and the stinging tears in his eyes were dammed behind welded lids while the steaming hiss of his breath sucked into his lungs and gusted out like a bellows.

"What now, Akuji?" Nurcan, a few years older than he, with eyes as haunted and grief more tempered, stood near him as Matta's fiery grave collapsed into itself with several loud snaps and a great upward rush of sparks.

"I want to burn everything." Akuji's voice choked in his throat, too dry or too wet. "I want to hunt them all and kill them. I... I want..."

"I want them all back, cousin." Nurcan's hand caught briefly on a fold of his tunic, just behind his arm, but did not stay there. "We all want them back."

"I know, but Damon..."

"Blood for blood." Nurcan's jaw was set, and her eyes shone gray against the fire and smoke as Akuji turned to look at her. "That was your demand, much as anyone else."

He only nodded, warring with himself for that choice, too. Had he known how many had died, would he have felt the same? Would he instead have offered himself to become the instrument of bloody vengeance? Such things sprang forward and were laid low before the scythe of time.

"It doesn't matter, now." Akuji took a breath to steady himself and met Nurcan's gaze. "What matters now is getting help from Renks Cairn. If the goats cannot be sold, or they do not return -- I will lead a group to seek aid from the city."

"And you would leave who to stead your place? Me? My father?" Nurcan shook her head, even as Akuji swallowed hard and considered the alternatives. "You should consider we may need to leave South-wold in ashes, and move everyone."

"Meadowbrooke is too small to..." but he knew the look in her eyes, felt the twisting heated blade in his guts. "You mean to scatter us."

"If no help is coming, that may be the only road that sees any of us through another winter." Nurcan sighed heavily and looked at the dancing flames. "South-wold is gone, now... we are its death-rattle, here."

"I will remain." His dark eyes narrowed, the angle of his jaw and nose striking mountainous contrast against the ash and embers drifting by. "Alone, if I must."

"Brave bulwark against the orks from the south? Trading graves is not a leader's way." Nurcan snorted derision, but she nodded at Akuji and patted his shoulder. "It's not a decision we must make right now."

"What of her?" He pointed at the distant, nigh invisible Prende -- or what remained of the nymph -- who wavered like candlelight or heat-shimmer in the shallow bowl where once Matta's home stood.

"I don't know." Nurcan could only shrug in apology, wiping the smoke from her eyes and coughing tiredly against the ache in her chest. "Can such a creature die of sorrow? I would say that is her fate, but I ken nothing of her kind. Mayhap she will vanish as she appeared: silent and without notice."

"Then best she get on with it." Akuji stretched his back, rolling his shoulders and rubbing his hands across his face to smother his own sorrow. "If I must draw breath today, then South-wold is a place for the living."

"Tell her that. If you dare." Nurcan gave a sly smile and shake of her head. "I need to make sure Deedra isn't... well, isn't going mad with grief and magic."

"Could one so young?" Akuji watched her shrug, shaking her head.

"Who would know? Ask Prende. Who else is there left to ask?" Nurcan walked away from him. "I'll take her to my father, if you come looking for us."

He nodded at her back, not that she could see it. Rather than watch her retreat to find the youngest surviving apprentice in South-wold, Akuji turned his attention back to the nymph -- still just barely visible against the brown, hard-packed earth that had been a path around the hovel. Where sunlight shone on grass, her image all but vanished in a yellow sheen.

"Prende?" When he thought he was close enough that he could speak in a voice she would hear, he tried to walk into her line of sight. "Can you hear me?"

"I hear you." But the words did not come from her mouth, and they hurt to hear. Her voice carried as the labored, bloody fingers of a minstrel too long on the strings. The hair on Akuji's nape was on end.

"I do not know if you are dying. If you are, be done with it." He spoke with far more strength than he felt. That she was little more than an apparition emboldened him.

"South-wold is for the living, this day." Akuji crouched down at the lip of the bowl, still towering above the nymph where she sat. "Either join us and help rebuild what we can -- or join the dead."

"Why?" Her "voice" cut his ears like a hawk's cry, but it did not echo or carry properly.

He considered that one word a moment, realizing she was looking at or through him. He wondered, also, if magical beings like nymphs were capable of love... of growing old and dying... All the old stories and songs told of how magically alluring nymphs were... how rapacious and carefree, eternally young...

"Have you never loved another?" Akuji remained crouched, flicking a pebble to one side as he examined the void between them. "What do you know of death?"

She stared, and he couldn't tell if her expression had changed -- if anything, she was harder to see now than before. Perhaps she truly was dying, as some immortal beings were said to pass from the mortal world like smoke. If she had answered him, it made no impression on his mind and stirred no air near his ears.

"You must have known he could not join you in eternity. He was human." Akuji raised an eyebrow at her in question, but could still not gauge her reaction. "Are you not immortal as the sky? What is a human life to you? We are just..."

He looked over his shoulder and saw the flames dwindling somewhat. No longer leaping well overhead, they still blazed angrily with a searing white core deep within.

"We are the embers of flame rising over the pyre, and you are the heart of that flame." Akuji nodded, thinking the clumsy comparison suitable for the moment. "You will outshine every ember long after they are cold ash. Or say that you are the ocean, and we are falling rain... or humans are the winking stars, and you are the burning sun..."

"What?" It felt like his ears were bleeding with the sound, but a tender probing with his fingertips met with no blood.

"I mean that..."

"No." "No." Prende's voice was real and imagined, conveyed to his mind and ears alike -- much to his confusion.

"I don't..." Akuji was about to stand up, walk away from her -- her presence felt enormous, and made no sense. In one moment, she was vapor or smoke: nearly invisible. Now, she seemed to be everywhere at once, and his head hurt from looking at her.

"What did you say?" and she was small again, diminished. Her voice a cradled whisper like a distant birdsong of morning, and he could see that her fingers were tracing over her lips as she spoke. "Rising... falling... sun..."

To his alarm, her eyes shone with light and her body became more solid. Not so firm and vivid as before, but somewhere between the near-invisible and the tangible. The green light sparked only briefly, and when she spoke again, he could hear her clearly.

"Rising. Rising...Rise. Sun...Rise. Falling."

"Sunset?" He offered, not sure of what to do. He stood up, shaking his feet awake and looking around to espy Nurcan or Deedra before the nymph carried-on.

"Some...sun rise. More fall. And more." Prende's eyes scanned the small circle of stones that had been the fire pit in the heart of Matta's residence.

The nymph's mad grin frightened him, even as she ignored him entirely and whispered to herself, fumbling words past her lips with one hand while her other hand gingerly caressed each bit of blackened rock and began to twist and turn them about.

"Buck. Back... Black. Black. Black-sun..." and Prende's hand closed over a rock and hefted it, but it would not move. "Black-sunrise."

"Black...?" Akuji was not paying much attention, taking a step away from the nymph who now dug determined at the earth... her nearly-intangible grip on the soil made for slow digging, and she kept repeating the phrase as more of the stone was revealed.

"Black-sunrise. Black-sunrise. Black-sunrise." Her hands worked faster and faster around the fire pit and Akuji saw a shining ivory glow as sunlight struck bone long-buried.

One of the stones of Matta's hearth looked to be a shank of bone, big around as a man's fist, stabbed into the ground and blackened on one end. The other rocks were just that, rocks nestled in formation with this but a single stone in the perimeter of the ring.

"Help." Prende gasped, still unable to clutch the bone shard with any real strength. "Help!"

Her voice was a small, squeaky sound -- a parched-throat whine of some small street cat coughing -- but it grabbed Akuji's legs and pulled them left by right closer until he hopped into the shallow pit to help her.

"What is this?" He asked as his hands shooed Prende away and his belt knife lanced into the earth to cut free the sandy clay prison. What had looked to be a bone shank was a great sliver or wedge, the smoothness and curvature an unmistakable tooth-shape.

He wiggled the tooth loose of the soil, grimacing as the snapped root of the thing began to scald his hand. He wondered how it could still be warm, and remembered every time he'd ever heard someone talk about dragon's teeth in Matta's ring of stones. Instead of one gargantuan tooth, it was a single fang. Nearly a cubit from blackened root to point, the fang had a polished surface and a steady curve. The inside arch was narrow and jagged, blade-like compared to the fat outside edge that sloped outward in a crescent moon of white-yellow. The point of the tooth was likewise jagged and rounded by turns, each marrying seamlessly at the apex such that Akuji could not tell where the smooth outside curve met the jagged inside ridge until the flesh of his thumb tested it and came back with a drop of blood welling out of a wound he couldn't even see.

"Black-sunrise." Prende's hand laid against his arm, and he could feel its weight. "He knew."

Akuji gave a flat stare at the nymph, the female's eyes wide with delight and her fiendish smile so intense the human shied from her.

"A dragon's tooth is this 'black sunrise'?" Akuji examined the curved fang again, wondering how such a blunt-looking tip had barbed his thumb so easily. Rather than test it again, he laid it on the ground. The painful heat of it had been great, but not so terrible as to raise blisters. His palm throbbed and shone angry red blotches, but was otherwise undamaged.

"No. From Black-sunrise." Prende giggled, which sounded a bit like shattered glass in an avalanche. "In the tongue of dragons, it is a name meaning 'the moon's total eclipse of the sun at sunrise'."

"So, a 'black' sunrise." Akuji blew lightly on his hand and shook the limb to ease the ache. "Why does that please you?"

This time, when she grabbed his arm, her fingers pressed into his skin with strength that left no doubt in his mind that she was manifest -- even if some light still cut through her in places and her voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere further than right next to him.

"Because Matta told me this, last night." The tears in her eyes did not match the brilliant smile of her mouth, and Akuji thought with some surety that she was every bit as mad as the ancient human had been. "Over and over... over..."

She withdrew, muttering and looking confused -- which Akuji took as a good sign to leap away from her craziness and seek counsel with Nurcan... or a priest in Renks Cairn.

"Nurcan!" He shouted, bounding out of the bowl of Matta's hovel to run full speed toward her family's home. "NURCAN!"

The two met several paces outside her house, and Akuji slid to a stop before her.

"She's lost it -- gone, crazy..." Akuji panted, emphasizing his point with both hands waving to either side of his head. "She was almost gone, then I said something and now..."

"Tell me what happened." Nurcan put a hand on his chest, ignoring the sensation of his heaving chest and focusing on quieting the growing panic in her mind.

...

"We must send someone to meet with the Eclipse Dragon." Prende nodded resolutely, now fully-fleshed and glowing faintly. Though she was again shrouded with a human tunic, her light made the garment eerily pale in the late afternoon. Her fiery hair was disheveled and filled with soot from when she had picked through the ashes and glowing coals of Matta's pyre to recover a few bone fragments. When she had asked Akuji for a leather pouch, he had all but thrown his own belt pouch at her just to be done with the matter. Scattering the ashes of the dead and laying their bones to rest in the growing fields was the proper way, and Prende's strangeness continued to rankle at the edges of his very human sense of decorum. Not outright blasphemy, for he knew some human cities and entire religions kept mementos of the dead (or else buried them in tombs, crypts, and sarcophagi of wood, stone, or metal).

"We're not sending anyone anywhere." Akuji held his hands up, palms forward and pressed at the air. "What 'prophecy' are you talking about?"