Tristan's Tale Pt. 05

I'd get it if you asked me to, I thought.

No, I really fucking wouldn't, I replied to myself. That necklace is keeping me safe from anybody doing whatever they want to me.

It's the reason you failed today.

"So?" asked Jet.

"He's hearing voices," said Jade.

"I am," I affirmed.

"So?" asked Jet.

"Well do something!" she practically cried out. "Your stupid Art has made a mess of his head! Fix it!"

Jasper hopped off the table. "You can't fix what can't be broken," he said mildly, and walked out the door. Incongruously, I noticed his footsteps made no sounds.

Jet sighed. "What did you do, Tristan?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, to be honest."

Jet smoothed back his ponytail, and stood up from his desk. He took a few brisk steps over until he was right in front of me. He grabbed my chin, and I stared into his dark eyes.

"Speak," he said, and his voice was low and layered, as if ten of him had spoken at once. I felt like he'd taken out all the air from my lungs. It was suddenly very hard to breathe. The air around us grew strange and still.

And then something snapped abruptly, and everything rushed together. "Wow, great form! This is dumb. How did I miss that? Fuck I'm an idiot. Wow, she's gorgeous. I can't believe we have sex. I can't believe she likes me. Fuck this is scary is he going to nearly kill me again? Why. Won't. This. Door. OPEN!" I tried to stop the talking, but it just ended up coming out like a hiccup. I looked at Jet, my eyes wild. His had only grown deeper and more dark, and his hand had never left its vice grip on my chin.

It kept going. Trying to stop the talking was like grabbing onto a slippery rope. "This guy is such an asshole! Fight me! I wonder what they're thinking of me? I wonder if they like me? Is he mad? Oh my god he's dead, he's dead, oh my god, oh he's alive oh thank god. Thank god they don't shit themselves. That'd be nasty as oh my god this screaming, I can't stand it, it's awful. I wish it would just stop, please, just stop, just stop, just stop, just stop, just stop the dying. The dying. Dying, dead. Death. Dying. Am I a bad person? I'm not a bad person. I have to do this. That's what a bad person would say. Shit."

It took minutes. Minutes of me spewing words. All the parts of my mind I'd shut away and closed off so I could train. I felt the walls start to crumble, and everything rushed back into place, competing with itself to get out of my mouth. A lot of it wasn't intelligible. A lot of it was very embarrassing. My fears, my reactions.

Eventually I lapsed into silence.

I mulled the shape of the silence over in my mouth. "Okay," I said, finally.

Jet didn't move for a moment. His dark eyes searched mine, and I felt I had been laid bare before him. Then, he nodded, as if he'd seen something that had satisfied him, and walked back to his desk.

"I'm so sorry, Jet," said Jade. "I promise I won't make it a habit, I didn't mean to interrupt you."

Jet waved a hand dismissively as he sat down. "There are always exceptions. You did well to bring him here. Goodnight."

We left. I was about to sweep her into a long hug, but she planted me firmly on the ground with her hands on my shoulders.

"Again," she said.

"Again?" I said weakly. I didn't know if I could take that. "Do we really-"

"Again."

It was a command. I looked into her eyes, and she Saw me.

When it was over, she nodded, satisfied. "Good. You're right where you're supposed to be." She frowned, and wiped a tear from my eye. "Don't cry. Why are you crying?"

How could I explain it? There was simply no way. "You get this look when you Look at me," I said. I shrugged helplessly. "It's, like, heartstoppingly beautiful."

She swatted my arm. "None of that. You don't need to say these things to me."

"You asked."

She paused, then nodded. "Fair enough." She gave me a searching look. "How do you feel?"

"Don't you already know?"

"Seeing doesn't tell you everything about a person," she said.

"I'm okay," I said. "I'm really disappointed. And I'm a little tired." I blinked. Tired. I needed to down my vial for tonight.

Among other things.

"Come with me?" I asked.

~

I drank my vial, and pulled as much Clay as felt safe to pull from the wall. I added the Clay to the stuff I'd pulled...God, when had that even happened? Months ago? It felt like it.

I added the two together, willing them to meld, and then brought it outside to Jade. It was heavy — you could carry it, but it was quite a lot of Clay.

She gasped when she saw it. "Tristan!" she exclaimed.

I smiled and passed it to her. She accepted it without much strain. It was too easy to forget how strong she was. Not big by any means. But a year of fighting will round out all your muscles. Fighting is so varied that it's hard to miss a muscle group.

"You need work on your Clay shaping," she remarked, looking at the heart I'd tried to etch in the top with my mind. It came out a lot more squiggly and uneven than I'd pictured it.

"That's your business," I said. "Not mine."

"What will I even do with all of this?" she marveled.

"I have a suggestion, actually," I said.

She raised an eyebrow. "Is that so? I'll trade you a suggestion for a suggestion."

I looked at her, curious. "Okay. You first?"

"Shower," she said.

What? "Shower?"

"Shower," she repeated firmly. "You smell really, really bad. Terrible."

It had been a while since I'd showered. It hadn't even occurred to me. My trips to the bathroom were brief as I could make them, and I'd been replaying fights, or imagining different fighting scenarios while I was there. I smelled myself.

You know how they say you can't smell your own body odor?

"Wow," I said with an expression of disgust. "I can't believe I didn't notice."

"You did have other things preoccupying your attention," she said. "You probably noticed, but didn't pay any attention to it."

"Maybe," I said. I smelled myself again — call it morbid curiosity. "Jesus!" I exclaimed. "I can't believe you had sex with me!"

She made a wry smile. "Well, I had other things preoccupying my attention."

"Is that so?"

"Yes," she said. "It is. But I have my limits, and won't hesitate to shape some quarantine tape out of this Clay to wrap you up if you don't go get clean." She smiled sweetly, but with seriousness behind it. I did smell pretty bad. "Now what's your suggestion?" she asked.

And so I told her.

~

The next two days before the Tournament were mercifully calm by comparison. There was none of the pressure to get my Chi. I had it. It came out smoothly, and always felt right in my hands. Perhaps I ought to have been worried about my lack of familiarity with the other peoples, but in the end, per some prompting from Emmit, I decided to stop worrying about it. All I had to do was train. Whatever happened, happened. There was only so much I could do.

People came to the free time practices. A lot more people than I'd imagined would. Word got around, and a fair amount of folks wanted to practice with the guy who'd felled well over half of Moleh. Derrik wouldn't train with me anymore — he was gone the next day anyway, with the rest of the top twenty.

The result was there weren't that many great fighters for me to train against. Getting my Chi had suddenly put me miles above the very people I'd been learning from just days before.

So instead, I taught. It was challenging, as I didn't actually know what I was doing. It's true — fighting just came as naturally as breathing when my Chi was out. So to teach anything of substance, I had to figure out what I was doing — well enough to put into words. Strangely, it's possible that teaching taught me more than training could have. People even started showing up to the mats early, while I was training before breakfast.

I watched Emmit shoot, alone in an archery range upstairs. I'd been surprised to find no targets at the end of the long hall. Just bales of straw.

"Doesn't that infuriate you?" I asked. "No reward, no accomplishment."

He smiled, and drew the bow. It was a pure, smooth action.

"I am shooting at myself," he said, smiling, and let the arrow fly. It buried into the hay.

I thought I understood. But then again, I was in Caer'Aton. It was hard to know for sure.

But the most exciting thing that happened during those two days occurred when I was pulling more Clay for Jade, in preparation for all the people that approached me about wanting to be in Lotus.

And when it happened, I got so excited that I lost the Clay I was pulling. It fell right back to the wall like a water drop into water, lacking only ripples.

It didn't matter. I was already running to find Jade.

~

"I'm calling it Welding," I explained, gesturing to the Clay I'd brought. I'd had to catch her before she left Moleh for the night. We were outside. It was late — after the hour of post-dinner training. The sky had darkened to night at some point in the training. Jade had watched for some of it, but had spent most of her time (somehow) still whittling at the bird. I don't know what kind of detail she was going for, but I'm pretty sure it was beyond microscopic at this point. Either way, she wasn't signed up for the Chi competition part of the Tournament. She was a Clay shaper.

"Welding?" she asked, dubiously.

"Uh huh," I said. "It's how all of Moleh is put together. I bet it's true for all of Caer'Aton, too."

"Tell me again?" she asked.

I adjusted myself on the ground next to her. "Okay. So normally when you connect to Clay, it gets colored and you can shape it, right?" The five potato sized pieces in front of us on the grass were all colored my blue-green, and glowed faintly, casting light onto our legs.

"I know that," she said.

"Well here's the thing — I noticed that the rug had a feeling to it. The same kind of presence that the Clay did. I tried to open up to it, to let its being fill my mind, but I couldn't. Or, rather — and this is the point, here — I could, or felt like I could, but just wasn't able to. It was possible, just not doable."

"The problem was that it was too big. It was all of Moleh. Or maybe just the rug — past a certain point you can't tell. But it wasn't set! That's the thing. It wasn't set."

"So Shae could still shape it?" she asked.

"Exactly," I replied. "And once I figured that out, that it wasn't set, but was static, I started wondering, and playing around with it. " I gestured to the pieces of Clay. "It's hard to control a bunch of different things. You can get attacked in five different places. It's also hard to hold control of one thing if it's too big. You can't put much energy into defense if all your will is put into maintaining control of it in the first place."

"But what if you could move back and forth between the two, depending on what worked best for you? Think of how you could use that in class, when you're fighting with another person over the shaping of Clay. You'd have a huge advantage." I gestured widely, smiling. "Ta-da! Welding."

I opened up to all five pieces. They were all there, separate in my mind. Then, I bound the two closest to me.

"Okay, send out your awareness," I said. "Check out those three," I pointed.

She focused. "You're occupying them at the moment."

I nodded. "Right. And you get a sense for how big they each are?" She nodded. "Well what about these two?"

She shifted her gaze, then blinked in surprise. "They're...twice as big. Each. No, wait." She furrowed her brow. "They're the same thing." She looked at me quizzically. "What did you do?"

"Welding!" I exclaimed. "The problem with holding the being of five things is it's harder to defend them all against someone trying to shape them. Perceiving something's very existence is strange enough, but five times? You've got to split your attention among them and hold them all at the same time."

"But if you weld two things together — which is really just like braiding them, or squishing them together — then you treat two things as if they're one thing. And so does everyone else."

"And it's extremely hard to wrest control of one thing from a person," continued Jade. "We've all practiced so much at it. All the higher level Clay shaping classes have you and your opponent with five or ten different pieces of Clay. And you're both trying to change them all into something else." She laughed. "You lose track. Which one was supposed to be a rabbit, and which one a cat? Meanwhile, the one you're trying to make a rabbit, they're trying to shape into a tree. That whole back and forth, but for every piece of Clay, all at once. It gets crazy."

"Wow," I said, impressed. I definitely wasn't on that level yet. "That's too much for me," I said, and made my voice low and grunt. "Tristan swing sword. Tristan smash. Tristan no good at...bunny-cat-tree shaping."

She laughed. "I'm positive you'd pick it up like you do everything else."

"Maybe," I acknowledged. "But, go on. Try it!" I released the pieces of Clay, and they soon started to glow like flickering embers. She scrunched her face. "Welding..." she muttered to herself.

As it turns out, it isn't something you can just pick up out of nowhere. It had taken me a while.

But Jade was fast. She'd won the Tournament last year. It took her about twenty minutes, when she finally said "Oh, wait, you mean like...this?"

I reached out my awareness to the Clay. All five pieces were one.

"You did it!" I exclaimed, and bowled her over with a hug. We rolled around, laughing in the grass. Somehow, in that tangle of laughter and dirt on our clothes, we ended up kissing. She ended up on top, a curtain of hair framing her face. She bent down, and her lips were eager and inviting. Her body was warm and soft and full of life.

~

That was the first night. The second was a bit different.

Tired from constantly training all week, I'd left training exhausted. I'd just taken my last of Alice's orange vials. I'd felt better, but there was a peripheral fog to my awareness and movements. Just a little bit. I wanted to lie down, if only to take a break from the non-stop practicing with my Chi, and with other people.

But Jade and I had made a plan, and so I downed the healing brew I hadn't used that day, on a hunch. It was warm and almost spicy as it went down. Thankfully, it not only helped with my aching muscles, but brought me back to a more full awareness. I felt a little more awake for it.

I met Jade at the fountain. She looked incredible, as she had for most of the day: her clothes were exotic, and stunning. She'd made them from the Clay I'd given her. The amount of detail that had gone into them, the patterns, the vivid greens and reds and deep, warm browns, the soft, silky texture of her loose scarf...she looked like an idealized version of a gypsy, the flame of her hair adding her own personal touch to the outfit. Everyone would have seen her. Everyone would have wondered: I don't remember seeing that in the supply closet.

That's Jade for you. When she makes something, she makes it well.

We regarded the fountain for a long moment. I took out my small lump of Clay, set to my color. She already had hers in her hand. The fish scattered when we dropped them into the water, and sank. And thus, we were signed up for the Tournament.

Something itched at my mind. Something distant, evoked by the memory of an object in the water. Something I'd seen, and wanted to remember. But I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was I was thinking about. When was the last time I'd even been around the fountain, or the water? When I saw Tower signing up for the Tournament?

Whatever. It was probably nothing.

We made sure nobody was around to see us, and left Moleh. The sparse grasslands to the left were empty — people had long since gone back to the Set village.

"Can you see it?" asked Jade curiously.

"What?"

"The village."

I looked around, squinting far in the distance. But the horizon was flat as ever, and nothing marked the ground noticeably except for the occasional small shrubbery.

"No," I admitted.

"I'd thought so," she mused. "That's amazing, how she can hide a whole village from you."

"Where is it?"

She laughed. "I won't spoil the surprise."

"I'll take off the necklace soon," I said. "I promise."

"Good," she said. "You should. I built my bed for two."

My eyebrows shot up, as the idea did interesting things to my blood flow. She just laughed, though, and began walking. Not to the Set village. I followed her to a distant clump on the other horizon, to the right when you leave Moleh.

Though it was the end of the day, the sun was high in the sky, which did nice things for my mood. It was a pleasant walk to the Stone Giant grove. Jade and I talked of a hundred small and secret things on the way there. Things that had nothing to do with Moleh, or the Art, or anything in particular. We were as ready as we would be for the Tournament — this was the calm before the storm. It was a good calm. Just being with each other, enjoying each other's company, finding all the beautiful, hidden sides of ourselves in places we hadn't thought to look.

We had been swept by each other. It was marvelous — the beginning of things. Everything we did together was bound to work out. Every kiss we shared was a small, personal revolution.

We passed through the trees, taking it as a good omen that there were no fresh scratch marks. Jade touched them as she walked, looking amazed. The trees had natural grooves in them, long stretches that varied in size and shape but always ran vertical. And at different lengths, the grooves were differently colored. I'd hoped for the world to grow dark — you couldn't really see the glowing of the wood when it was day because it was so faint.

But it was magical nonetheless. Storybook. Like we were walking through a fairy tale.

We came to the perimeter of the grove. There were no metallic birds. The Stone Giants were tending to their trees, examining the bark, peering curiously at leaves, looking like ancient guardians of a lost world.

Jade's breath caught in her chest. "I don't think I could ever get used to this."

The littlest one spurred over to us once we stepped out, gliding in that strange way across the earth, so deeply connected to it that they didn't even need to step.

Two pinpricks of yellow light glowed from within a crack in what could conceivably be called its head. The creatures weren't smooth or perfectly symmetrical. They were conglomerations of large rocks that had somehow fused together on contact. The only distinctive similarity between them all was in their face-stone. That one was always cracked, scored with deep grooves.

The young one turned from me, to Jade. Then again, back and forth. I got the sense that he was excited.

On a strange whim that felt like I was obeying a custom, I knelt, and lowered one palm to the ground. The old, good Earth. I smiled at the touch. I'd been inside too often, of late. Jade looked at me curiously.

I extended the other hand out, and the small Stone Giant didn't hesitate — he met his hand with mine. As mine ran through me and to the Earth, intuitively, I felt the thrum of the ground that connected us. Stonekin. My brothers — and they were that. Somehow I knew now that there were no female Stone Giants in this grove. I knew it in the same way that I'd known how they shook hands.

Jade took a nervous step forward, and reached out a slender hand. The Stone Giant looked at me, then back to her, hesitating. He removed his hand from mine and made halting advances towards hers. Like it was a kitten unsure if it could play with what it was pawing at.