- 2
- Posts
- 17
- Years
- Seen Apr 25, 2010
This is a piece I just completed. I don't have much more to say about it, but if you dislike blood and a little violence, stay away.
Hope you enjoy.
--
Lost – but still, I hunt.
The day had came and went, the night feeling longest. He had become sick with my dissent, lying in his own blood, and Toba could only watch. I feel this was the final day I lived, and I feel the sky had died afterward. For how can a thing so pure return without having died? It was not likely.
It was because of that day, that night, that I am lost, without a companion – it was because of my unskillful actions that I hunt.
As I remember it, there were no clouds that day, so the sun had graced us all and reminded us strife was distant; dead. The wars that shaped this planet were dead but their scent remained – their stain tainted. And I held that that very sun, on that day, was the sun to purge the memories and set us free to return to mundanity without fear. Sheer compliance, if not acceptance – a thing we missed.
So it was bright, and so were his eyes and smile; tufts of hair, careless in the wind, his gaze personal and longing. His shadow stretched just short of mine in the field, our skin crisp with the day's training. He had a little limp and a gash on the side of his cheek; one I hoped he would not soon lose. He would fall behind as I strode – I would not slow. He had to learn, he could just as easily be stranded to die with a gimp leg for many weeks – he would have to learn.
He came to my side that day, when I was sure the world was over. That feeling; it hung in the air once the sun had gone, and we, at last, shared a smile. He drew his blade to touch mine, and spoke, detachedly, determinedly:
"If I win at last, will you love me, brother?"
The steel of our blades gently hummed in the twilight. No wind stirred the grain. The birds fell mute; breathless, if they watched.
"I have always loved you, Alaz. I have always held you close. There were times when you were al—"
"No, Sona. Will you really love me?"
"...if you win."
Our swordplay flew across the evening that was without wind, evoking the twilight and playing with night in contained clangs of steel on steel. Our footwork echoed in the nearby hills; our feet, crushing the grain, could be heard from the village. We only vaguely drew breath: enough to allow us to move and dodge. I did not stop to scold him as I usually might have. He did not stop to apologize.
In the distance, Toba watched solemnly, a single yellow eye shining abreast a gnarled oak.
I would look to Toba amidst our fight, watching him watching, knowing that single eye studied more in our human movements than my two could glean from any amount of years of watching the clan spar and cut each other to bits. Scarcely would Toba blink; he seemed suspended in consciousness, entirely partial to analyze every last muslce twitch and tibia crack as we thrust and ripped at the air.
And so it was just that; the air would bleed if it could. The atmosphere would wail and release a death rattle, if capable. But no. For it was all we rended, in that hour. He ducked and leapt with the skill I beat into him; I flipped, twisted, bent and splayed with the skill beat into me. I smiled, at times, and he smiled back. Perhaps I could finally love Alaz.
We were blurs dancing with the fading and appearance of the moon. When it cast its bathing luminosity down, we would not dare be seen for more than a second. Toba's black pupil followed us deftly, seeing us flow in and out of reality almost, sparring in an almost dreamlike state. For that was what it was; our arms and legs and eyes did not form the actions and responses, and scarcely had our mind aided us; it was something almost in spite of those things, almost beyond their comprehension. We faded out of subjective consciousness as we moved in time with one-another, complementing the other's expression, turning the ordeal into something so much more holistic. It was not combat. I felt it had become the world; it felt the moon shone for it.
It seemed the culmination of Alaz's wounds and irreparable scars was this: his matching of my mind, my eyes. I had given him the same lash down his side that father had given me; that his father had given him. He seemed an iteration of me in the waving grain, spectral and fair, offering to me an inkling that he may surpass me in time. Tears my father had not felt welled in my eyes.
The darkness became more and more prevelant, the moon showing its jolly face only for a moment every now and then. We were physically aware of one another, then, streaks of white traversing the air between us, breaths uttered hushedly. Our steel crashed as we exerted our finest energies. I could hear the music of our people in my mind, as if echoing hallowedly from the other realms; the ones we pierced in our glorious art. My father sang for us, my grandfather smiled for the first time. All beyond my sight, all beyond my mind.
But then the strokes were fierce, and they were not what they had started as. The warship cloud came.
When the great warship cloud floated over the cat's eye moon, I had struck him. Down his arm, with the surest stroke of my life; one that fell with killing intent, to gorge and leave one to sputter on their back – but there he stood, stumbled, and regained his composure with a fevered sway. A wry grin toyed with me when the moon came back over him. I saw him smile, as if to disrespect the truth of my blow.
No, I would not drop my blade and hit him. It had transcended discipline, tutelage, and family; that grin he had thrown at me so carelessly highlighted his desire to be killed.
"So you believe your training is complete."
Tall was I now, and he was nothing in my shadow.
"Sona, I never –"
"It has come down to this, Alaz!"
My form was a blur tearing through the cold air. As I passed him, he must've felt the wind I wrought, as he shivered and fell to his knees. He was gasping, trying to warm his flesh, trying to squeeze his wound, childishly.
I had saved this wind, this harrowing gale, for only when I had been so challenged that killing was the only response. It came from the steel of the blade, augmenting the cold night and breeding wind of its nature. I had no understanding or control of the wind; the blade, veritably, controlled the wind and my hand.
Alaz was shaking as if I had yelled at him for the first time; I recalled when I was instructing him of the proper slashing methods on the hewn willow behind our village. He could not bring himself to cut directly on the face of the bark; he felt it would grimace at him for ever, and he always feared the idea of an insatiable enemy. He would drop despondently and bawl, burying his face into the trunk of the massive thing, his tears streaming down its crevices and cracks. In those days I would not lay a hand on him, as father was still bruising me on a daily basis with the hilt of his sword. Soon it had evolved into slicing and cutting, my body lacerated in burning ribbons. The stinging faded and it had soon taken its toll on my mind. I could feel my father in my voice, my hands, my mind.
I laid awake, cold in the nights, never sleeping – always seeing, thinking, understanding. I could not remember the last night I slept for more than an hour since I was a child. I was not respectful; I was fearful. Still, I am scared. Still I lay awake and curse myself, so perplexedly. My father must have wanted this.
And then I had forgotten all reason as I came down upon my brother with the instinct of a hunter. My father must have foreseen; this is why he had brought me so close to death.
I had my blade held back behind me, arched and high, in the ceremonial killing pose, assured to me by my grandfather to bestow honor even to the most lecherous of criminals. Alaz's dark, detahced eyes peered up at me through his veil of cold, the winds finally dissipating and brushing past Toba, who did not flinch. In a second's time I could have slain my brother; a single stroke, no sound, very little mess.
No more toying with him. No more waiting.
As my blade rang through the silence, there was a sound of stale air being disperesed rapidly and an ensuing wind that rushed out from all around us. Leaves spiraled up and fluttered off dreamily. Miles above, the clouds were torn apart and floated in either direction, revealing the moon, and we were enamoured.
I had not realized, until a moment's passing, that Alacrity, my blade ever crimson-tinted, had met the jagged scythe on Toba's arm. There the scyther stood before me, his long green appendage withstanding my blow firmly, his single intense optic piercing through me. His other had scarred shut years ago, Alacrity having carved it, and his body was knotty and broken-looking. He was ragged by age but stronger than even me, it seemed, as with one scythe and arm he eased me back. I stared at him, dumbfounded, having been wronged twice this very evening. I could not feel emotion or anything human in my stare.
The look he gave me seemed to be one of deterrence; one suggesting I need to back down, relinquish; toss aside my blade. One so feral, he might kill had I not accepted. I had taught him this art; the sutra of acceptance and compliance, knowing when to not endanger one's own life futilely. He had reversed the teaching, applying it as a beast to master, and I felt shamed.
Without thrashing he had sent me stumbling, but I stood steadfast after a few confused stomps.
So it was I, Sona, thwarted by my very own student, who sought to perpetuate the life of an insolent child.
Toba turned from me and did not gaze at Alaz, who was sniffling and coughing as if struck by pneumonia. His wings expanded, as if to shield Alaz from my sight for a few moments, and then he walked off, the arm he had brandished toward me twitching in what seemed like stifled pain. He returned to his repose by the tree, his single eye ethereal and ghostly in the gloam.
I breathed. Coming before my brother, whose little back was turned to me as he began to rock where he sat, his eyes shut and his mouth moving wordlessly, I did not dare reach out to offer comfort. Still, the idea of slaying him plagued me, but I knew Toba would have a scythe through my back as my stroke fell.
Still, I could not help but feel I had taught Toba well. The wizened beast's scythes blindingly glinted at me from afar. I nodded to him, and he did nothing.
"Brother, I.. you, someday you said I would feel the sky.. with you. Sona, you promised me, you had told me that no matter what, even if I fell under y.." he choked for a moment, and I had noticed his blood in dark pools beneath him, his arm and fingers coated in it, "even if I fell under your blade, we would touch the sky, trace it, feel it. Father would be back.."
My fist met the side of his head, and he slammed down on his side, crying out half in shock and half in pain.
"You will not speak of father."
I felt nothing.
"But.. you.. said we would touch the sky, Sona – you promised, behind the branches when we were in the tree, when we were having fun.. l..laughing, you told me—"
My foot met his side with sickening cracking noise; he writhed, groaned, kicked his legs once or twice. His back inclined as if he were fighting for life. I had easily broken one of his ribs. I shut my eyes, lowering my head and knowing the coming winds were ushering his death. The grain and leaves would cover him, leaving him in a superficial grave; the carrion would chew on his eyes as he rotted. Alaz had came and went in this world.
"Promised.. the sky... to me.."
Seeing him still breathe, still spit up blood, still avoid tears – he had unnatural potency.
I cast my blade down in the earth before him, and it pierced deep beneath the cold dirt. A shaft of light was cast over him, narrow and dim, and I turned, striding off into the darkness, passing Toba with no sound of acknowledgement. I did not feel his mind as I passed. He was somewhere else.
"Do not go help him, Toba, or I will kill you."
The beast said nothing, nor did I feel him.
"You will become my quarry if you go to him. If you feed him, I will hunt you. If you defend him, I will hunt you. You will become my prey. The legendary quarry of the last of the line. I am the last. You would do well to not become my prey, Toba."
There were not boundaries between myself and Toba anymore. They were blurred. He was no longer my student, my comrade. I looked down on him as if he were a wretch.
I passed out of this night and into the coming days, swallowing my words and vowing silence ever as I sought a purpose to that night. For it had come to pass that Toba and Alaz sank from my mind, and all minds, and reality. They had ceased to appear in any medium. None could find them, and I knew they had gone together. Perhaps now they were separate, but on that night they had tread the same path; a path that leads only away, in the opposite way of all directions, a way that cannot be traced. I feel now they are not one as Toba had desired that night, but perhaps Toba had given Alaz a means for survival, as I had done in my last moment of benevolence. Perhaps Alacrity has saved him more than once at this point; perhaps a brigand is using it to hold up his table.
Perhaps I am wholly wrong in thinking; perhaps I am mistaken in hoping. Perhaps Alaz had succumbed. But I had not returned to the fields since that day, knowing maybe his body would be strewn over with leaves and roots and grain. I would not see his eyes so lifeless. I would not see Toba, dead where he stood, as I knew he might be. He would die, standing beside the oak, torn between obeying me and saving Alaz.
But, this is what caused me to rise from petty grief, and hunt.
Half of my quarry was what I assured it it would be – a green, gnarled thing, deft and deadly, a beast capable of outlasting any man –
-- and what I know would now be a man, if he had lived, alongside his guardian –
I have heard, also, that Toba has come within the sway of a dark force – a woman, of terrible grace, as they have put it. One who chokes night, having strangled day – one who no man can draw breath near. Marionettes lifeless are said to dance about her on ethereal strings, her fingers working and twisting and bending their will –
She is a mistress of unfathomable power, they promise me.
If this is so, then I will hunt for three, by myself, and one of them will be killed, by my hands, bare and cold.
Toba, Alaz – I will find you both, though I am now lost, and I do not know the way.
And the third, the specter, the phantom – I will find you.
I will be maddened if I do not find you both.
I will not die by this, for I will not die until you are both at my side.
I must find the way you have taken,
though it is not a way any have taken.
Hope you enjoy.
--
Lost – but still, I hunt.
The day had came and went, the night feeling longest. He had become sick with my dissent, lying in his own blood, and Toba could only watch. I feel this was the final day I lived, and I feel the sky had died afterward. For how can a thing so pure return without having died? It was not likely.
It was because of that day, that night, that I am lost, without a companion – it was because of my unskillful actions that I hunt.
As I remember it, there were no clouds that day, so the sun had graced us all and reminded us strife was distant; dead. The wars that shaped this planet were dead but their scent remained – their stain tainted. And I held that that very sun, on that day, was the sun to purge the memories and set us free to return to mundanity without fear. Sheer compliance, if not acceptance – a thing we missed.
So it was bright, and so were his eyes and smile; tufts of hair, careless in the wind, his gaze personal and longing. His shadow stretched just short of mine in the field, our skin crisp with the day's training. He had a little limp and a gash on the side of his cheek; one I hoped he would not soon lose. He would fall behind as I strode – I would not slow. He had to learn, he could just as easily be stranded to die with a gimp leg for many weeks – he would have to learn.
He came to my side that day, when I was sure the world was over. That feeling; it hung in the air once the sun had gone, and we, at last, shared a smile. He drew his blade to touch mine, and spoke, detachedly, determinedly:
"If I win at last, will you love me, brother?"
The steel of our blades gently hummed in the twilight. No wind stirred the grain. The birds fell mute; breathless, if they watched.
"I have always loved you, Alaz. I have always held you close. There were times when you were al—"
"No, Sona. Will you really love me?"
"...if you win."
Our swordplay flew across the evening that was without wind, evoking the twilight and playing with night in contained clangs of steel on steel. Our footwork echoed in the nearby hills; our feet, crushing the grain, could be heard from the village. We only vaguely drew breath: enough to allow us to move and dodge. I did not stop to scold him as I usually might have. He did not stop to apologize.
In the distance, Toba watched solemnly, a single yellow eye shining abreast a gnarled oak.
I would look to Toba amidst our fight, watching him watching, knowing that single eye studied more in our human movements than my two could glean from any amount of years of watching the clan spar and cut each other to bits. Scarcely would Toba blink; he seemed suspended in consciousness, entirely partial to analyze every last muslce twitch and tibia crack as we thrust and ripped at the air.
And so it was just that; the air would bleed if it could. The atmosphere would wail and release a death rattle, if capable. But no. For it was all we rended, in that hour. He ducked and leapt with the skill I beat into him; I flipped, twisted, bent and splayed with the skill beat into me. I smiled, at times, and he smiled back. Perhaps I could finally love Alaz.
We were blurs dancing with the fading and appearance of the moon. When it cast its bathing luminosity down, we would not dare be seen for more than a second. Toba's black pupil followed us deftly, seeing us flow in and out of reality almost, sparring in an almost dreamlike state. For that was what it was; our arms and legs and eyes did not form the actions and responses, and scarcely had our mind aided us; it was something almost in spite of those things, almost beyond their comprehension. We faded out of subjective consciousness as we moved in time with one-another, complementing the other's expression, turning the ordeal into something so much more holistic. It was not combat. I felt it had become the world; it felt the moon shone for it.
It seemed the culmination of Alaz's wounds and irreparable scars was this: his matching of my mind, my eyes. I had given him the same lash down his side that father had given me; that his father had given him. He seemed an iteration of me in the waving grain, spectral and fair, offering to me an inkling that he may surpass me in time. Tears my father had not felt welled in my eyes.
The darkness became more and more prevelant, the moon showing its jolly face only for a moment every now and then. We were physically aware of one another, then, streaks of white traversing the air between us, breaths uttered hushedly. Our steel crashed as we exerted our finest energies. I could hear the music of our people in my mind, as if echoing hallowedly from the other realms; the ones we pierced in our glorious art. My father sang for us, my grandfather smiled for the first time. All beyond my sight, all beyond my mind.
But then the strokes were fierce, and they were not what they had started as. The warship cloud came.
When the great warship cloud floated over the cat's eye moon, I had struck him. Down his arm, with the surest stroke of my life; one that fell with killing intent, to gorge and leave one to sputter on their back – but there he stood, stumbled, and regained his composure with a fevered sway. A wry grin toyed with me when the moon came back over him. I saw him smile, as if to disrespect the truth of my blow.
No, I would not drop my blade and hit him. It had transcended discipline, tutelage, and family; that grin he had thrown at me so carelessly highlighted his desire to be killed.
"So you believe your training is complete."
Tall was I now, and he was nothing in my shadow.
"Sona, I never –"
"It has come down to this, Alaz!"
My form was a blur tearing through the cold air. As I passed him, he must've felt the wind I wrought, as he shivered and fell to his knees. He was gasping, trying to warm his flesh, trying to squeeze his wound, childishly.
I had saved this wind, this harrowing gale, for only when I had been so challenged that killing was the only response. It came from the steel of the blade, augmenting the cold night and breeding wind of its nature. I had no understanding or control of the wind; the blade, veritably, controlled the wind and my hand.
Alaz was shaking as if I had yelled at him for the first time; I recalled when I was instructing him of the proper slashing methods on the hewn willow behind our village. He could not bring himself to cut directly on the face of the bark; he felt it would grimace at him for ever, and he always feared the idea of an insatiable enemy. He would drop despondently and bawl, burying his face into the trunk of the massive thing, his tears streaming down its crevices and cracks. In those days I would not lay a hand on him, as father was still bruising me on a daily basis with the hilt of his sword. Soon it had evolved into slicing and cutting, my body lacerated in burning ribbons. The stinging faded and it had soon taken its toll on my mind. I could feel my father in my voice, my hands, my mind.
I laid awake, cold in the nights, never sleeping – always seeing, thinking, understanding. I could not remember the last night I slept for more than an hour since I was a child. I was not respectful; I was fearful. Still, I am scared. Still I lay awake and curse myself, so perplexedly. My father must have wanted this.
And then I had forgotten all reason as I came down upon my brother with the instinct of a hunter. My father must have foreseen; this is why he had brought me so close to death.
I had my blade held back behind me, arched and high, in the ceremonial killing pose, assured to me by my grandfather to bestow honor even to the most lecherous of criminals. Alaz's dark, detahced eyes peered up at me through his veil of cold, the winds finally dissipating and brushing past Toba, who did not flinch. In a second's time I could have slain my brother; a single stroke, no sound, very little mess.
No more toying with him. No more waiting.
As my blade rang through the silence, there was a sound of stale air being disperesed rapidly and an ensuing wind that rushed out from all around us. Leaves spiraled up and fluttered off dreamily. Miles above, the clouds were torn apart and floated in either direction, revealing the moon, and we were enamoured.
I had not realized, until a moment's passing, that Alacrity, my blade ever crimson-tinted, had met the jagged scythe on Toba's arm. There the scyther stood before me, his long green appendage withstanding my blow firmly, his single intense optic piercing through me. His other had scarred shut years ago, Alacrity having carved it, and his body was knotty and broken-looking. He was ragged by age but stronger than even me, it seemed, as with one scythe and arm he eased me back. I stared at him, dumbfounded, having been wronged twice this very evening. I could not feel emotion or anything human in my stare.
The look he gave me seemed to be one of deterrence; one suggesting I need to back down, relinquish; toss aside my blade. One so feral, he might kill had I not accepted. I had taught him this art; the sutra of acceptance and compliance, knowing when to not endanger one's own life futilely. He had reversed the teaching, applying it as a beast to master, and I felt shamed.
Without thrashing he had sent me stumbling, but I stood steadfast after a few confused stomps.
So it was I, Sona, thwarted by my very own student, who sought to perpetuate the life of an insolent child.
Toba turned from me and did not gaze at Alaz, who was sniffling and coughing as if struck by pneumonia. His wings expanded, as if to shield Alaz from my sight for a few moments, and then he walked off, the arm he had brandished toward me twitching in what seemed like stifled pain. He returned to his repose by the tree, his single eye ethereal and ghostly in the gloam.
I breathed. Coming before my brother, whose little back was turned to me as he began to rock where he sat, his eyes shut and his mouth moving wordlessly, I did not dare reach out to offer comfort. Still, the idea of slaying him plagued me, but I knew Toba would have a scythe through my back as my stroke fell.
Still, I could not help but feel I had taught Toba well. The wizened beast's scythes blindingly glinted at me from afar. I nodded to him, and he did nothing.
"Brother, I.. you, someday you said I would feel the sky.. with you. Sona, you promised me, you had told me that no matter what, even if I fell under y.." he choked for a moment, and I had noticed his blood in dark pools beneath him, his arm and fingers coated in it, "even if I fell under your blade, we would touch the sky, trace it, feel it. Father would be back.."
My fist met the side of his head, and he slammed down on his side, crying out half in shock and half in pain.
"You will not speak of father."
I felt nothing.
"But.. you.. said we would touch the sky, Sona – you promised, behind the branches when we were in the tree, when we were having fun.. l..laughing, you told me—"
My foot met his side with sickening cracking noise; he writhed, groaned, kicked his legs once or twice. His back inclined as if he were fighting for life. I had easily broken one of his ribs. I shut my eyes, lowering my head and knowing the coming winds were ushering his death. The grain and leaves would cover him, leaving him in a superficial grave; the carrion would chew on his eyes as he rotted. Alaz had came and went in this world.
"Promised.. the sky... to me.."
Seeing him still breathe, still spit up blood, still avoid tears – he had unnatural potency.
I cast my blade down in the earth before him, and it pierced deep beneath the cold dirt. A shaft of light was cast over him, narrow and dim, and I turned, striding off into the darkness, passing Toba with no sound of acknowledgement. I did not feel his mind as I passed. He was somewhere else.
"Do not go help him, Toba, or I will kill you."
The beast said nothing, nor did I feel him.
"You will become my quarry if you go to him. If you feed him, I will hunt you. If you defend him, I will hunt you. You will become my prey. The legendary quarry of the last of the line. I am the last. You would do well to not become my prey, Toba."
There were not boundaries between myself and Toba anymore. They were blurred. He was no longer my student, my comrade. I looked down on him as if he were a wretch.
I passed out of this night and into the coming days, swallowing my words and vowing silence ever as I sought a purpose to that night. For it had come to pass that Toba and Alaz sank from my mind, and all minds, and reality. They had ceased to appear in any medium. None could find them, and I knew they had gone together. Perhaps now they were separate, but on that night they had tread the same path; a path that leads only away, in the opposite way of all directions, a way that cannot be traced. I feel now they are not one as Toba had desired that night, but perhaps Toba had given Alaz a means for survival, as I had done in my last moment of benevolence. Perhaps Alacrity has saved him more than once at this point; perhaps a brigand is using it to hold up his table.
Perhaps I am wholly wrong in thinking; perhaps I am mistaken in hoping. Perhaps Alaz had succumbed. But I had not returned to the fields since that day, knowing maybe his body would be strewn over with leaves and roots and grain. I would not see his eyes so lifeless. I would not see Toba, dead where he stood, as I knew he might be. He would die, standing beside the oak, torn between obeying me and saving Alaz.
But, this is what caused me to rise from petty grief, and hunt.
Half of my quarry was what I assured it it would be – a green, gnarled thing, deft and deadly, a beast capable of outlasting any man –
-- and what I know would now be a man, if he had lived, alongside his guardian –
I have heard, also, that Toba has come within the sway of a dark force – a woman, of terrible grace, as they have put it. One who chokes night, having strangled day – one who no man can draw breath near. Marionettes lifeless are said to dance about her on ethereal strings, her fingers working and twisting and bending their will –
She is a mistress of unfathomable power, they promise me.
If this is so, then I will hunt for three, by myself, and one of them will be killed, by my hands, bare and cold.
Toba, Alaz – I will find you both, though I am now lost, and I do not know the way.
And the third, the specter, the phantom – I will find you.
I will be maddened if I do not find you both.
I will not die by this, for I will not die until you are both at my side.
I must find the way you have taken,
though it is not a way any have taken.