Another apprentice. “What happened to them?” Serib flared her tusks at the odd lad and thrust her heavy staff towards him, noticing his skin mottled with white spots.
Painted. Burned. Scarred in daylight. Several wounds still open or packed with medicinal pulps of herbs. She thought he looked starry with his painted spots from a tribe she did not know, holding his smouldering longsword not in defence against her but by his side. His long hair floating as though the air was water to him.
∞
Sunlight passed its patterns through the moving leaves as he answered, and from one leg to the other he shifted his weight:
“I know it’s strange, but dear Old Gada’il is the least of our worries! Your sister and her prince even less so. My name is Konisoki.” He had no scabbard for his sword, he sheathed the smouldering blade towards his hip and it disappeared into smoky shadow, similar to how Woid never seemed to carry his weapon with him.
Serib was disarmed by her master’s name - not that his name was not legend to many - something familiar in the lad’s intonation: “You know Gadail?”
Waiting for him to answer, she hoped there would be some law or pattern to when Day and Night exchanged their places, that perhaps the thicket of trees was key. Could she go back? The curve of every tree was a potential hiding place for infinity’s runes. Alas she found none nearby; through her staff Earth spoke only nonsense to her as she tested this and that. Going in and pacing out of the same trees in much the same way as before, all the while keeping her eyes on Konisoki who was staring at her, most amused and then concerned:
“I know too that Time is not simply missing, I know who tried to murder them and the part you played in it all.” The thicket of trees around them hushed in the wind.
Serib’s eyes sparkled almost pleased and ashamed that she was pleased, hearing what she wanted to hear: “Then Time is not coming back? They were murdered?” she asked eagerly, keeping secrets from herself.
“Now that is the greatest of our worries! …that the dark spirit has tempted you with Fear’s rewards.”
∞
“Then you know who I am, as well.” Serib had heard too much already - she wanted to go back to the campfire, her head on Shay’s shoulder. Gadail’s words in her ears. Watching Woid be himself.
The weight of her staff reminded her. And so with it she took a moment to try and ground herself, her heart still racing. Standing tall, breathing deep and low through the drought-surviving moss, those civilised clumps watching the many-of-seasons come and go, indifference or resilience their stance. She took inspiration from her sister, her industriousness and unrelenting focus. Heeding Gadail’s lessons, Serib took her fear somewhere gentler.
Though halved since The Greatmount, into Serib and Dark Minim’Syrib, she knew her future was not behind her.
She could not protect Gadail, Woid or Shay from here. Their duels were their own.
∞
And so she measured the problems she faced as was a shaman’s reckoning - she knew the reach of her arm against the reach of her dreams - she focused on what she could change about herself foremost; unable to see all she had done well.
∞
She came back from her contemplation with Calm by her side. The death of Patinya, the trials of Earth and the angelic city her guide: “I have questions.”
“I hope I can answer them.” Leaves crunched flat as Konisoki sat tired from his own path.
Serib asked, standing over him:
“Why are you here… how do you know who I am?”
Konisoki watched her and then away from her, as though her words into air had gone visible to him. After, he looked up at her with his bloodshot eyes:
“I’m here because even you do not know who you are… and, you are interesting to me. There are two of you separate in extreme when there should only be one - just like me and the Silence that chases me. I know who you are as I was once The Lord of Light and Shadow, and so of Secrets and Illusions thus…” Hearing this, Serib did not look convinced - leading Konisoki to expand his answer: “…from our home at Star Lake, my sister and I watched The Universe. Stars and their Humanity, your sunrise-light among those lights. I seek to be Lord again in this life, and regain what once I knew. And when my task is done I will swim in my sleep, hoping never to wake again, to know nothing again having returned to my proper place.”
∞
Serib growled frustrated with his dense answer, having never heard of such a lord. The only two souls she knew to live in myths at Star Lake, itself a mythical realm, were Entropy and Time. It seemed to her that Humble stood with Konisoki despite his lofty claims. When that quick frustration lost its grip, she even envied or admired Konisoki’s willingness, that certainty of himself and his purpose that he shared with Gadail and Ahlzvyr. With Patinya, even, and her moonlit rage. In that moment warm under Summer’s trees, Serib missed Iron-Chest and the doubts common between them.
“In this life…” She repeated Konisoki’s words back to him, looking at his skin and the stars there painted over still healing lacerations and burns, openings more she had not seen, cauterized into keloidian scars.
∞
The Hunter Lord’s words came back to her. Just as she had met Ahlzvyr in a woodland, perhaps it was being among trees similar enough that prompted her to ask:
“What is your sibling’s name?”
Konisoki moved his fingers over the crispy foliage that may once have been grass, pale as straw against his star-dark fingers:
“To pages, to scholars, her colder name is Entropy. Long before Humanity named her she was nameless as was all of Nature, itself without name. When we watched over all things at Star Lake, names came to us, carried by the watery winds that move The Universe. Books washed ashore. We warmed their frozen pages curious by our fires and we learned what you would call language. Not one, but many tower-lost. Lillian was a name my sister read and liked.”
∞
“If your sister is Entropy, then you must be Time.” Serib saw straight to the heart of it. “How are you here, what are you? There is no place for you in my understanding… in none of my master’s lessons are you mentioned as a being with bones, words and heart your own conscious. And yet, how else could one try to murder you, if you did not have a form as ours…”
In his bloody eyes she saw sorrow, most of all a wretchedness. He watched her as light observes its moths, as she comprehended aloud his wretchedness, his place:
“I am sorry that I have wished you gone… that The Spring-Sworn’s actions have helped to harm you. I am sorry that even with you here before me, a part of me still wishes you would remain gone.” She thought of campfires not long ago, the porridge and candles of her childhood, and of Argus sitting wounded by a fireplace. “You bring everything, and take it all away.”
“You are not alone in that wish.” Konisoki smiled, and there in his mouth a twisted tusk was small - filed small, as though to hide his shamanic blood. “My ‘being’ of bones and heart as you say, is a misstep. A mistake of origins I have puzzled myself mad trying to understand ever since it happened to me; and Humanity puzzled itself far longer than me, I read. I see it in your eyes as you wish me gone, there is a willingness to accept my presence, for now in me you have a face to curse, a voice to choke... my flesh to torture with your desecrated glee of all that could have been if only, to extract revenge from my screams and meat to impale for all to see. A name, and shoulders across which all the blame of the universe can sit. And were all suffering things of my deliberate ordering or misordering, I would understand your verdict just, and of those that have already done as they wished to me. Though your Truthdom cured such grievances and misunderstandings of Falsehood, if I have read well the books that washed upon my sister’s shores. ‘The Bludgeonings of Chance’… of ‘Luck’s Surprise’… these are the origins of all things, not me! I am human for now and can only say as I have seen: to find in your heart a hatred of Time, is to put Nature itself on trial. And it is not far from there that even siblings turn on each other, and spears can be as harpoons or staves as mauls or crowns as cages. Those that did to me as they wished, they walked from my brokenness broken themselves.”
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
Serib listened as one entranced, her hand covering her tusks and sobbing. For in speaking he had detailed why he was so scarred, hiding perhaps that he too was scared of further persecution, his task far from over, as we all must go on. Sobbing for she remembered the tent where she, Shay and Woid first met Lillian. That molten plane they found after Argus and Gargarensyr’s mortal duel, towards the ending of that tome, Shadows of Amneshay its name from Payn. Lillian was tending to a child, wounded about his neck as though he had been hung, and not weighed enough to quickly die on our gallows we have made.
∞
A bird dashed through the trees above, startling Konisoki’s intrigue; gazing upwards he revealed his old wound where the rope’s pattern was raw.
In meeting Konisoki, Time though wounded and human, Serib had the first of Fire’s lessons. For much prosper came from Fire’s discovery, for in those first primordial flames Humanity found inspiration, imagination, migration to colder climes unthinkable without flame to gather around. ‘Spark’ the word that some scholars and shamans use. ‘Courage’ even older than that. Looking at his wounds, Serib knew in much of what human nature does, building shelter, wrapping our weakness with armour or clothes, demolishing ‘rogue’ stars that do not serve our purposes, our nature spoke against Nature not good enough, as to pad our own finity and fragility. All that - to imitate Nature’s other forms - the home a bear finds in caves, its fur one with its world.
And yet, much the grace and charity therein has been found, the will to do good and to be free among them, for there are few simple human things. Wounded Time said to Serib:
“Thank you for playing games with the stones… I don’t know if you remember that. When all else seems dark it is a fond memory for me eclipsing others. Long and strange has been my life, and lives since then.”
∞
He reached out his hand to her. Though he had sheathed it into shadow, his steel longsword was his totem and so the trials of Earth must have been known to him. In touching Ahlzvyr’s hand and Iron-Chest’s paw, Serib had better known them, as was Earth’s tactile way, just as one knows justice best when injustice is all around them.
It seemed to her that was Konisoki’s intention twofold: he even knelt before her to show he meant no harm and even more so his palm faced the ground as he reached out to her. Her hand she placed tentatively atop his own and trembled immediately away from him, having seen only Fire and Silence in that small touch.
His infinite journey through the stars cut short as his tail fell from him, Time’s form a whale to her understanding. Persecuted cruel for a crime not his, and yet in his eyes there were not the scrapes of bitterness sharp but the grace of courage to go on, an understanding of justice deeper, of wisdom always far. All this he learned from us.
∞
She leaned on her staff for support and before she could ask he tried to lighten what was dark:
"Why do you lean on your staff like that? You’re not old.”
So human. So strange had Time become.
“I once met The Black Angel.” Serib thought the stars on his skin were moving. “I was with Woid… we were in Imirka, the township where Shay lives.”
“I know it well.” Wounded Time was patient as the apprentice remembered slowly what had been hidden from her, from one story to another.
“In Imirka, I touched Silence and ice bit back at me… I hold you and it is Fire I see, so why do you remind me of Silence? Why was The Black Angel chasing you? What are they?”
“Timelessness blurs it all and old things happen now. There were only myths. Ideals. They have become true, been made to be true by violent wishes. War has become a person, a soul. Peace as well. Disease and all the rest, myself among them. Because - how can Time ‘die’ otherwise, unless it has flesh to bruise, blood that can be spilt? A mind to break into confessions untrue. What proof would there be else… what sever of triumph on a spear…” Konisoki paused to take a deep breath: “Silence accepts Timelessness, chases me because that is what I will become. It remembers being chased.” He said uneasily. “Silence is trying to stop me from going on as I always have - stop himself - but I know what must be done. Silence I imagine is what there was ‘before’ me and my sister, without name or form as it has now. Though too it has always haunted Courtdom in its own way, ever since Falsehood fell. I have ‘looked back’ and I have read: purpose was clear as never before, though meaning as never before had been lost, having never once been found, every claim whence a lie. Silence one of the louder replies to those questions, the void now of form answering Timelessness.”
∞
Serib knelt with him and dared her hand towards his own again. In that second touch she saw Fire unbearable once more. Though beyond she stared just long enough; Fire was but a tool to Time in this life, shamanism much the same.
“I have been on a long journey, Serib, and I wish to go home… a home I never wanted to leave, a home Silence has abandoned. I remember a spear in my flesh… ‘a harpoon’ many cried as it was thrown at me or have they in afterthought and projection? I bled throughout all dimensions, and at once awoke in many places. One such place was here in Ehl’yiteth.”
“And Anaxagyr’il, The Firelord, found you?”
Konisoki took his hand away from Serib, knowing his touch was causing her pain:
“She did. My blade should be flaming fully, though I am only an apprentice now - without my master Anaxagyr’il I am learning again or rather: remembering what once I knew. What I have been made to forget. I have been dethroned, a Lord no longer, being reborn into this strange life is a cycle I must break. I remember just enough to keep me going, and in the end all will be well again with Truth. I have found great comfort in Truthdom’s fundamental optimism, you know.”
∞
“It has its ways.” Serib conceded. “What happened to your master?” she looked out to where Silence had been duelling Gadail, and an image came to her from which she quickly turned for all it could mean: “The Black Angel killed her?”
“Or tried to kill her, I do not know… and soon began chasing me.” He remarked then at her staff, quickly changing course. “You have your Earth totem, an impressive heft! Where was your master taking you next - to learn of Fire?”
“To D’neath, under the mountain.” Serib confirmed and started to mimic: “’Where embers can still be found in The Dune-Kilns of Aner Ba’hyt’ Gadail once told me. But he was not taking me there, as such. I suppose we would have parted ways back at the campfire, eventually. Eventually.”
“Ah, very traditional! Well, that’s where I am going too. I know the route well. Shall we together?”
∞
Serib was taken aback by his abrupt, almost childish switch or change of course:
“In worlds or tales between Fate and Payn, can I trust our paths overlapping? And how does my journey help yours, Time?”
“Konisoki is best here.” He encouraged before admitting: “I do not know yet… the premise of charting uncertainty seems integral to Truthdom, and to being human as I have become. Why else would Payn or Fate seem such an affront? I do not know if you have words for what I was before, but I am human now, and this uncertainty I mentioned… powerlessness. Acceptance. Impermanence. All intricate in Courtdom’s literature, its traditions mirroring the Nature they are from. My answer is that I follow my gravity when Truth is unclear… what you might call grace… for my blood is spread in many places all at once. Having too long been pushed or pulled by Fate and Payn. Now when I feel drawn I allow myself to go. I must become one again, to see Timelessness run out and Silence return to sound.”
∞
Perhaps before, Serib would have accused him stubbornly and wisely at this point, for if he was once Lord of Secrets as he proclaimed, what trick could he be playing? Why would he know well the road to D’neath of all the roads there are? That would have been before knowing his persecution, his wretchedness in which she had played her part, and so she tried to ask softly:
“Lord of Secrets and Lies, you said?”
“You distrust me? So would I. Secrets and Illusions.” He corrected. “That was my role in Shadows of Amneshay, though that may have been more your sister’s focus. In one of my minds I am still sitting at my hard-earned desk… lighting candles with my fingers. One of my blood-spread lives. Within that dark place where the darker sorts of souls find their place or purpose in Courtdom, between the ages of Need and Greed, I too found my own.”
“That was you… I thought it strange, then, a shaman in such a club.”
Serib now further along than she had been, considered again if it was strange at all, a shaman skirting the ages of Need and Greed, helping direct the most difficult of souls. ‘Criminals’ under Falsehood’s view given and finding true justice in Greed’s creation; in that strange-between where shamans and criminals alike knew they were helping create a world that would not need them. Konisoki’s reply took her from the daydream:
“I am a master in that story, far from my childhood here.”
“Perhaps you can share your rise to power with me, if we ever make sense of all this?”
“A good way to spend firelight and tea.” He agreed.
∞
Words ran their course, and with answered questions Serib still was troubled that she did not understand the proper workings of these infinity runes, sending her and others around Timelessness. Could they quicken their pass to D’neath, and so speed her thoughts away from Gadail keeping Silence at bay? Instead of a long road on foot through difficult thought.
“Rest here a while longer.” She encouraged Konisoki, despite wishing to leave Summer’s thicket where shade and sunlight played.
There Serib studied being her own master and her own apprentice. She practiced with her staff the martial strikes and forms Gadail had shown her with a broom’s handle. In those quiet motions she forced herself to be still and face her mind, as the earth must face all else without escape.
∞
Konisoki remained patient with himself, sitting against a tree for so long that he fell into a deep nap. Perhaps from a nightmare he coughed heavily in his sleep. Serib woke him from his perdition as tears began to stream from his sleeping eyes. Knowing the Syrib in her heart would have watched him thrashing she helped Konisoki up from the parched ground; helped the Time that had chanced her to share a life-so-far with Gadail and the same would take his life as it had been given: destined and unanswerable.
∞
Flies nearby over the carcass of a fawn and was it running from wolves or drought, tiny in this woodland, such a creature already frail? These each in Time’s hands or passing neither had been chosen; a bludgeoning of chance that had the potential of both until one over the other. That a wailing doe had borne such a witness to life and sworn a curse of rope around the neck of Time there shining in the sunlight a braided scar? No. The doe long gone had sniffed and went on, with a semblance of what we name grief, when truly we simply seek ourselves out in all things believing the mirror has said all it can and our fear keeps us from turning around to find our own carcasses we cannot face. The doe goes on but not in grief, and neither the drought nor the wolf or any other Nature of that circumstance had taken pleasure in the fawn's last. Serib hid her tears thinking of her mother. An ache in the girl's jaw that she was not a fawn nor a doe nor a flower nor a cloud.
“Let’s go.” Her steps were heavy with defeat and worry, her staff ringing on the ground with each, at once glad she woke Konisoki and wishing he could have rested longer.
