Tristan's Tale Pt. 04

The class ended and I was pretty much scared shitless - all my impulses were telling me to not go to the Mind course. I had no idea what was in store for me, and this place was pretty fucking unpredictable. I didn't come from a place of being punished, ever. I mean, you know, reprimanded in school for turning in something late, that sort of thing. But I had the impression that this was going to be an order of magnitude more serious.

Kiara picked up on my fear as I got up from resting on the ground - we'd been focusing on feeling the body - and approached me as I made to walk out.

"Hey, don't be too worried, okay?" She put a hand on my shoulder. I felt a little better, if only for the human contact (or was that just Kiara's touch?).

"What, me worried?" I said, my voice quivering slightly.

She looked at me sympathetically. "You know, it'll probably be good for you," she said. "The bruises will fade in time."

"What?" I exclaimed. She grinned devilishly and walked away.

"Fuck me..." I muttered.

"I wouldn't mind," said a cheery voice behind me as I walked out into the hallway.

"Sorry Alice," I said, "I'm just not in the mood right now."

She walked up next to me. "Why? What's going on?"

"I was late to breakfast."

"Ooh," she said, wincing, "This your first time?" I nodded. "Well, good luck!" She said, patting me on the back affectionately. "Try not to cry. It's not a good look, though, I mean you've got that cute boy thing going on, but still."

"I'll keep it in mind," I said, and walked to Jet's class.

I sat down in the front row. No point in hiding. Might as well get it over with quickly. Jet was at his podium, looking out into the people filling the desks. He glanced at me once, but didn't pay me any more attention than anyone else.

Sailor sat next to me. "Hey dude."

"Hey." I was a little too terse - not really in the mood for talking. I was steeling myself for the future.

"Woah, okay, somebody woke up with a stick up their ass," he said, raising his arms defensively.

"No, the stick came later," I replied.

Jet called everyone to attention. "We will begin class this morning with a brief exercise. Tristan." He gestured beside the podium.

I stood up, and moved to the spot as Sailor muttered an "Ohhh" under his breath. Jet instructed me to face the window, so I did, observing the other side of Moleh, and the middle of the Arch over to the left. It was a bright day outside still.

"Tristan was late to breakfast. We need to consider what it is to be late. Why is it that this is a bad thing? What is it to be punctual?"

The questions hung in space with no answer. Jet continued. "Naturally, in a social world, for things to function properly, there must be harmony between all the moving pieces. Frankly, it doesn't matter if you are late to breakfast."

"But it does matter if you are late. It implies a laziness of the mind, and this is unacceptable. Harmony within, harmony without. If even the smallest piece begins to erode," he gestured to me, "Then the whole suffers."

"To that extent, some of you will find beneath your seats a small cloth sack." The sound of chairs scooting and people bending over sounded in the room.

"Now, we can make a simple analogy. What is it for an object to collide with another object?" he asked. From my peripheral vision, I saw him pick up a pen from his podium. He lifted it up, and then dropped it, and it clattered onto the wood.

"It is a fairly simple thing. For the two objects to collide, they have to be brought together. The same is true for being on time. If two things do not meet, then there is nothing. If Tristan misses breakfast entirely, then he misses breakfast entirely. Do you understand?"

Silence in the room. Jet adjusted his glasses. "Perhaps a more physical demonstration will suffice. Remember, we are illustrating the principles behind being on time, and this is a metaphor to draw out the principles."

It was a bit of a stretch to my mind, but I thought I understood what he was talking about. If you're late, what was possible by being on time is no longer possible. Simple cause and effect, really.

I tensed my back, anticipating being pelted by whatever was in the cloth sacks. I couldn't decide if it was better or worse that I couldn't see behind me, but either way, I was pretty fucking scared. But it was that kind of fear that comes with having given up resistance - there wasn't anything I could do to stop what was happening, so I was pretty much resigned to my fate.

And then I saw a flash of green out the window, over toward the left. Something had swooped down from the Arch.

"Prepare to throw - yes, that means you have to stand up," said Jet. The sound of scraping chairs and the shuffle of people standing. I swear I heard Derrik snickering something to Tori.

"On my mark," said Jet.

And then the entire room shook as something impacted into the wall below the window. Jet turned around, ever stoic, and glanced at the window.

"One moment," he said, walking over to it. I stayed frozen. What the fuck had just happened?

Jet approached the window and rapped on it. Immediately, it rotated open on invisible hinges, the bottom tilting into the room. Through that gap snaked... a tail? Was that a tail? The room erupted into gasps and chatter.

The tail was thick as a small tree trunk, and covered with dusty green scales. The end tapered into a sharp point, on which was impaled a small note the size of a postcard.

Jet walked briskly over to the tip of the tail, and removed the note. He tapped the tail twice, and it slithered out of the window. Jet reached up and shut the window, at which point the rest of the creature flew up. It was too fast to get a good glimpse, but it was big, blotting out nearly the entire view outside. And then it was above us, out of sight.

Jet peered at the notecard, reading it for a few moments. Then he sighed, shaking his head. "I can't stand the man sometimes," he muttered, and walked over to me. He handed me the note, and then walked back to the podium, smoothing down his hair.

"We will continue with this exercise at a later point. Come up to the front to receive your materials for partner practice."

I read the note. In scraggly, barely legible handwriting, it read: "For Tristan: Please come to the Arch at your earliest convenience. Well, now, really. Come now. Thank you."

I looked up at Jet, but he didn't pay me any notice.

"So, I can just go?" I asked him.

He glanced at me. "Yes." Then he turned back to the front and began distributing boxes and pieces of clay to the students.

I passed Sailor on my way out. "Dude," he said excitedly, "That was Dante's wyvern! I've never seen it before! That was nuts! What does the note say?"

"I'm supposed to go to the Arch now, apparently," I said. "I could barely read the note."

Sailor looked at me like I was dumb. "He's blind, you know. Not very polite of you."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, leave it," I said.

"You gotta tell me what's going on later, okay? Promise?"

"Cross my heart," I said, and walked up the stairs toward the exit.

I passed Derrik on my way out. There was no trace of a wound, I noted. Medical had done a hell of a job. He hefted the sack in his hand. "Hurry back, bro," he said, grinning.

"You know, I was actually going to take my time on this one," I said.

"Put it off as long as you want, bro. This shit hurts, it's fuckin' designed to leave marks."

"I assume you're speaking from experience," I said, smiling. His expression darkened, and, taking a page from Alice, I blew him a kiss before walking out of the class.

I walked out of the courtyard and down to the Arch. I first noticed the wyvern - a huge, scaled beast of more or less the same dusty green color. Its head was slick and pointed aerodynamically. It was curled up on the ground, and its eyes were closed, its pointed ears flattened against its head. Leathery wings were flat against its body, a darker, more brown shade of green.

The second thing I noticed was the stone giant. It was the biggest one, standing a little more than half as tall as the Arch. It cast a shadow on the wyvern and down the path I was walking. The crunch of gravel beneath my feet seemed awfully pitiful compared to the magnitude of the creatures before me - comically small. Crunch, crunch, crunch as I walked - I felt like an ant.

Thankfully, there was another ant to keep me company - an older man standing next to the wyvern. He had deeply tanned skin, weathered with wrinkles, dark black hair kept short and combed neatly in an old-fashioned style. He leaned slightly on a white cane, idly stroking his goatee. And he was wearing a fucking bathrobe, striped red and black. The hair on his broad, muscled chest was visible in the v which the robe didn't cover.

"Took you long enough," he said as I approached. His voice was incredibly deep, without being gravelly, and his words felt like they'd been chosen with extreme deliberation. His eyes were closed.

"I came as soon as I got your note," I replied. "Dante?"

He nodded. "Tristan. Good to meet you," he said. "We've ourselves something of a situation, here. Cinderblock over here," he said, "Won't budge, no matter how many times I ask. Said he wasn't going to move until he saw you, said it was important."

"Okay, so, first off, you can talk to them?" I asked.

He looked at me incredulously. "What, you can't? It's easy." Keeping a hand on the wyvern for support, he got to his knees and put his ear to the ground. "Come here, listen."

I got down and, eying the enormous stone figure before us, put my ear to the gravel below us.

Dante grumbled something low and incomprehensible. His lips barely moved.

And then the earth spoke back. I had no idea what it said, but somehow, it was absolutely clear that it was speaking. It vibrated below me - faint, but unmistakeable. I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't had my ear right next to it. Feet wouldn't pick it up.

"You heard that, yes? I heard it. You must have."

"Yeah, actually," I replied, astonished. "But I don't know what it meant."

"Oh, you're new, aren't you? No language classes yet?" he asked.

"Yup. This is my second full day of classes, actually."

"Oh, right. The sleepyhead. You missed a lot of class, you know, that's not good." He stood back up, and dusted off his knees. "Anyways, that was a hello from our friend over there." He nodded toward the stone giant. "Go over to him, we want him out of here. It's not proper for them to be seen so obviously, and besides, it's bad manners to keep someone at the door."

"Right..." I said. I walked around the wyvern, giving it a wide berth. Dante chuckled. "It won't bite, or swipe, or claw, or really anything. She's sleeping. Though she does sleepwalk sometimes. Don't you? Don't you?" he said, apparently forgetting that existed.

I stood in the shadow of the stone giant, looking up.

"Um. Hi."

Okay, so it wasn't the best introduction. Give me a break - the thing was fucking huge. I had the impression that if it sneezed, boulders would fly out its face and leave me as nothing more than a pancake on the ground.

It tilted its head curiously, and then lowered its hand until the tip of its finger - roughly the size of a small office desk, was right before me. Less a finger, though, and more a small protrusion from the boulder which I called its hand.

It was beautiful, in a way, the grace with which it moved its hand. A lot more precisely than I would have imagined - I'd expected more large, sweeping motions without care for my feeling-very-squishable-right-now body. But there was nothing clumsy about its movement.

The surface of the finger was a rough, gray texture. I looked at it, and then back up to the eyes, which had an expectant quality to them.

I glanced back at Dante, who'd moved around his wyvern as well. "Any ideas on what the fuck is going on?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied, and gave no indication that he was going to continue the sentence.

I sighed. He was an Odieh, after all. What was I thinking, that I'd just get an answer? Just like that? Nooo....

I glanced back at the extended finger, looking at it more closely. It was then that I noticed that there was actually a square shape on the surface, outlined by a lighter gray than the surroundings.

"Ah, you'll never get it," said Dante, walking over to me and using his cane for support. "And the stone giants are dense as rock." He chuckled to himself. I suspected he didn't get out much.

"You're actually being presented with a great honor," he said. "You are being invited to be one of the stonekin."

"Stonekin?" I asked. "And, how the hell do you know what's happening, anyway?"

He smacked me in the leg with his cane. "Don't swear in front of company! You'll give us a bad reputation, and they will think we are inhospitable."

I rubbed the spot gingerly. "Geez, sorry."

He continued as if I hadn't said anything. "These creatures speak mostly in feeling. The rumbling talk is only for outside communication. I don't know what you did, but this guy thinks you're worth stone. So show him yourself, but as a feeling. Whatever that means to you."

I looked at the extended finger, at the square in it. Okay, I could go along with this.

I pressed my palm against the rough surface, right in the middle of the square.

To my surprise, my hand sunk in a few inches, and I felt all of a sudden deeply connected to the ground, as if my entire being had been thrust far underground, and I could see somehow all the space around me, the soil and the worms and the rocks. I found it very strange, all of a sudden, that I had ever thought myself to be behind my eyes.

And what I was touching above, in the air space, the gray brother that I had always had but never known, he was beaming with joy to have found another member of the family. He was accepting me into it, and I sent him my thanks - no words, of course not, those clumsy sounds that never captured what was true. I felt my thanks and as I did, so too did the Earth and, as he and I and the Earth were one, he knew me and my gratitude.

He withdrew his hand and the feeling faded. The connectedness I'd had to the ground and the awareness of it all below, the sight and the Earth all disappeared from me as if leeched back into the soil from which they'd come. Where I'd touched him, inside the small box, the imprint of my hand remained. He brought this to his center - the largest rock at the core of him, the one that was truly him. And though the connection was gone, I still knew what had happened - though that knowledge too was fading. I'd be remembered by any and all stone giants as a friend and a brother.

Dante sniffed. "Yes, very touching, wonderful, my sight is restored with the beauty before me, I was blind and now I see and all that, now could you please ask your girlfriend to leave?"

I looked up at the stone giant - not at his eyes, of course. I wasn't that dumb. We stared at each other for a moment and then he turned, sliding back toward the grove without so much as disturbing the grass he passed over. I still didn't understand how that was possible, but, then again, I'd just sunk underground and seen from the Earth's perspective. The longer I stayed in this strange world, the more I realized that I could not draw lines in the sands of sanity. The unknown would forever remain the vast desert I now knew it to be, with all of its mirages and curious impossibilities.

It was better that way.

Dante clicked his tongue. "You're a peculiar fellow, you know that? Sinking into the ground, moving yourself out of your body without training. Let's cut to the chase, eh? What are you?"

I looked at him - he was looking a few feet to my left, perhaps imagining I was standing there - and asked: "What do you mean?"

He jabbed at where my forehead would have been with his cane, shouting to the space beside me. "Don't lie to me, boy! I know you're hiding in there, now come out! Out with you! Out!" He was screaming at the top of his lungs and I cowered, covering my ears with my hands as if before thunder.

"I don't know! Fuck, the stone giant brought me down, I didn't have anything to do with it!"

"Oh." He calmed down, putting the cane down and resting on it calmly. "Well, let's return, yes? No time to waste." He walked over to his wyvern inside Moleh, which was as asleep as ever. I followed him - he put a hand on its neck and scratched the scales, eliciting a low, threatening rumble.

"Did you learn how to speak from this thing?" I asked.

He grinned. "That's right! Fantastic voice coach, wyverns. They really know how to resonate."

I shook my head. "Can I just share how fucking ridiculous that is? Voice coach from a dragon? What the-"

"Wyvern," corrected Dante as he pointed his white cane straight between my eyes. "Dragons are no more."

I blinked. "What?"

"Hmm, she's getting hungry," he murmured, lifting an ear and peering inside. "Would you like to eat this young man here? I'm sure his bones are very juicy, and the meat tender, he's still got some chub on him."

"Hey!" I said, defensively covering my stomach. Then it occurred to me that that was not the worrisome part of what he'd said. "Um, Dante, please don't feed me to your wyvern," I said. I didn't think he really would, but then again, I could never really predict how things would go with the Odieh.

"Okay," he said, turning away from the wyvern and staring into space a few feet to the other side of me. "I will do this for you if you do something for me."

"Sure," I said. "What would you like me to do?"

"Have lunch with me!" he exclaimed brightly. "I've got to hear the story. How in the name of the Ancients above did you bring out a stone giant?! They haven't given anyone stonekin, at least, not these ones."

"So there are others!" I exclaimed. "I got that sense, that that was the whole point. I'd be recognized by the other ones."

He stroked his goatee. "Mmm, yes. Exactly. And yes, there are others. Met a few myself!"

"Are you stonekin?" I asked excitedly.

He shook his head. "No, not me. You'd have been able to tell by now. No, it was a close friend of mine. A better man than me, to be honest, though he'd have my head for saying it."

Something fell into place. "You don't mean Jed, do you?" I asked.

He swiveled to me and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. "How the hell do you know Jed?" he exclaimed.

"He owns a coffee shop in my town! I knew it! He named it after you!"

Dante grinned from ear to ear and blushed, which was only barely discernible from beneath his weathered, tan skin. "Aw, no he didn't. Did he? Really?"

I nodded vigorously. "Yeah, it's called Dante's. I worked for him for a while, he was like my mentor."

Dante smiled. "Ah, then we have more to talk about than I'd previously thought. Lunch won't do, not at all. Come have dinner with me - I'll prepare a feast for us. In Jed's honor."

"I'd be honored to have dinner with you," I said. "Thank you for the invitation."

"Honored?" he said, raising an eyebrow. "Don't give me that - a friend of Jed's is a friend of mine. Drop the Odieh business, tonight, we are just people."

I smiled. It was so refreshing to talk about home. In a way, I didn't really miss it all that much. I didn't exactly have a lot to miss. But Jed was one of the few people I treasured, and I was excited beyond belief to meet someone who knew him.

"I appreciate it, Dante."

"No sweat off my whiskers," he said. "Or hers." He tapped the wyvern, which still hadn't moved, and scratched its neck idly for a moment. Then he swiveled back, staring at me once more. "But after we have dinner, you have to remember to have the fear of God in you when you hear my name, yes? Thunder and lightning and a plague or three will befall you otherwise."