Chapter IX: Those Who Went Before
Look, Gemmie said. Even her thoughts seemed loud amongst Farān’s lonely streets. There she is.
Maya said nothing but approached the marker Gemmie had just spotted. It rose from the parched grass on the eastern roadside just outside of town, a rude wooden cross with an extra diagonal support intersecting both the left arm and the bottom. About the left arm, tied together, hung a pair of what at first glance looked to be tiny gloves. Closer inspection showed they were bloodied, weathered war-claws, the characteristic weapons of ferrets for whom fighting was life. Unlike the natural claws of ferrets, the sharp metal claws were designed to slash rather than dig and scrape. And slung across the cross’s right arm was a small garment of hardened leather plates carefully stitched together.
Never thought I’d see the fool again, Maya said as he stepped forward.
Gemmie hung back, hesitating.
She stayed to fight, convinced us to all to fight. But why? He wandered irregular circles about the grave marker, weaving through the tall, dry grass like a snake.
He continued to talk, more to himself than Gemmie. Because it was right? We all knew we’d die fighting humans. ‘Better to die fighting than cowering.’ Ha! Better to live a coward than see your body broken! He paced restlessly for several minutes, ignoring Gemmie, lost in thought and memories of the past. The dead animal in the ground said nothing.
Gemmie decided to give him some space. She wandered off along the paved streets, tracing the familiar roads of what was once home. No longer did they hum with the soothing murmur of people, bearing with them curious scents from the Acharn region to the east, Sumarana and the other towns further west, and the Big Ring dirriwan drives from the south. Only birds nesting amongst the empty, blasted buildings made a sound. The only scents, dirt and ash. Dark windows of whatever tall buildings still stood surveyed the peace, ever mindful of the violence they had witnessed years before.
Without realizing, or perhaps knowing her destination all along, she found herself outside what had once been a butcher’s shop. The big, gleaming window that had framed delicious food was gone, broken and scattered throughout the shop. And the tasty meat was all gone, too.
I hope he got away safely, she said as images of the man who had worked there flashed in her mind. He gave me a good name. And kept my tummy full. Even before she’d met Maya, while living as a scruffy stray, one human had shown her kindness. To him she was a little Gem. To her he had been father.
They’re not all bad, the little ferret mused, but the ones that are… they’re very bad. Her mind fell quiet for a moment and she eased herself into a secure ball of sable fur amidst the glass. She did her best to avoid the blood splatters that even time had not yet erased. If Farān wasn’t attacked, we never would have met Stefi. Realization began to mount, waking thoughts better left buried. If we never met Stefi, she never would have gone on her adventure, tried to change the world for the better. So why, she thought, barely moving, did something so bad have to happen for Stefi to try to make so much good?
She found no answer, either within herself or the butcher’s shop. But sleep found her, and she accepted it with a weary heart.
Cédes awoke to the smell of thin, rain-cooled night air, a smell of a night unlike that of home. For a moment she began to panic, but at last another smell reached her. Stefi. She relaxed. “Where am I?”
“In bed,” came Stefi’s reply.
“Bed!” her brother Radus echoed from nearby. “Much worry.”
Cédes eased herself up. Her body ached terribly and her joints moved reluctantly. “What happened?”
“You gave us quite a scare,” Stefi said. “One minute you were screaming and carrying on, the next you went all still and quiet. I don’t know what was worse!”
“Oh, that,” Cédes said, remembering the searing vision of heat and death. She suddenly felt very cold. Chilled, even. She pulled her blanket tightly about her.
“You frightened all of us. Especially that angry Elder cow who kept calling you a demon. I thought she was going to have a heart attack.” Stefi laughed, more from relief than anything.
“Cow?” Radus asked. “Moo moo?”
Cédes burst out laughing even though each breath jarred her aching body. “I see my brother has yet to learn some of the human expressions I have. I am sure both he and you have different meanings for that word.”
“Not moo moo?” he offered. “Meany? Moo-eany?”
Cédes nodded.
“He’s learning well,” Stefi said. “He’s very eager to learn Common Language, and…” she added in a whisper, “kinda cute too.” She blushed and turned away even though Cédes couldn’t see.
“Might I say,” Cédes said, pain forgotten for a moment, “that you have a crush on him?”
Radus shot his hand up and answered with a resounding, “Yes!”
“Perhaps…” Stefi admitted with a whisper and hurriedly changed the subject, although rather clumsily. “Wouldn’t you like to have a Radus that bath made… Rath that Ba… You know damn well what I mean…” She sighed. Was it the giddiness or tiredness that made her words so jumbled? Worry for Cédes? All three? Whatever it was, a low wave of exhaustion swept over her and she found herself longing for a bath too, if only to soak her weary body for a while. She could barely remember the last time she had had a real wash, not counting the occasional jump in a river or the sea. And she knew, looking over herself, that it showed. A change of clothes wouldn’t go unappreciated either.
It seemed Cédes could read her mind, for she suggested just that. “How about we take one together?”
Stefi accepted, and despite Radus’s insistence that he join them, she politely declined his offer. Of course she could tell he seemed to like her. Nearly obsess, even, like Ifaut over Sansonis. She didn’t care; the attention helped to ease the loneliness that hung over her, to fill the chasm left by the ferrets. It was a loneliness brought on not through lack of friends on her journey–she could hardly have wished for better–but a lack of real closeness. Male attention, the kind that Cédes, despite all her compassion, couldn’t provide. And unlike the last guy she had liked, this one liked ferrets. Even if nothing developed, which she thought most likely, the distraction was nice enough.
Stefi took Cédes’s hand and helped her to her feet, while Radus took her other hand, his touch cool yet pleasant.
Together the three, trailed by Kei-Pyama, descended a spiraling staircase and traveled down a long corridor. For such a large place, Stefi thought, there sure were a lot of empty rooms and stairs, and very few people.
At length the air began to feel heavier, thick with a warm humidity that seemed to seep from the stone walls. It carried with it a delicious smell, warm and earthy, that delighted Stefi. She sniffed deeply, and her nose detected another smell: the clean, almost forgotten, scent of soap.
Releasing Stefi’s hand, Radus opened a pair of heavy doors at the end of the corridor and unleashed a stifling wall of steam. Once it had cleared, a large round room and Radus’s wide grin were revealed. “Stefi and Sister bath!”
Stefi looked about to find that they were in a round room built entirely of stone. In the middle was a bath, though it looked more a pool than anything Stefi was used to, deep and steaming and fragrant. A ring of columns stood guard about the bath, made of a strange stone that gave off a faint blue glow like dim twilight. In their gentle light the clouds of steam seemed almost to glow as they drifted about.
“Enjoy and make relaxation,” Kei-Pyama said and placed a bundle she had been carrying on the ground. “New clean cloths for you when finished.” She bowed slightly, turned, then hurried away.
“Help?” Radus asked earnestly.
Stefi smiled, her heart fluttering. “No, but thanks for the offer.”
He cocked his head quizzically. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Stefi echoed.
Then he too left, following Kei-Pyama, but not without one last hopeful look over his shoulder as h
e shut the door.
“He likes you,” Cédes said.
Stefi started. “You think so?” she asked, feigning surprise.
Cédes nodded. “I doubt it is me he is eager to assist in bathing,” she said with a laugh. “However, we are both more than capable of soaking and relaxing.” She let her dirty robes, now more brown than white, slip from around her to the floor. She moved to take off her shirt. She hesitated. “As much as I like you,” she said shyly, “would you mind not watching me? I promise, in return, that I shan’t look upon you.”
“I won’t,” Stefi said. She took out her bloody and dirty bandana, rinsed it in a nearby basin, and tied it about her eyes. “Comfortable now?”
“I shall be more so in the water.”
Stefi waited until the sounds of splashing had subsided before joining Cédes in the warm water. “Lavender,” she said, enjoying the scent of the water as it eased her aches and washed the dirt from her body. She floated towards the center of the circular pool, unseeing, an island cast adrift on a fragrant sea. Something soft bumped against her back. It squealed.
“Sorry!” Stefi spun around, hands held out defensively. They came to rest upon two soft objects. Realizing they belonged to Cédes, she shot backwards, face aflame, too embarrassed to say anything more.
They both backed away to opposite ends of the bath, wrapped in awkward blackness and silence.
Several minutes later, Cédes spoke. “That was… somewhat awkward,” she whispered, arms crossed over her chest even though nobody could see.
Stefi let out a nervous laugh. “You think so?” She turned towards Cédes’s voice. “Imagine if Radus had seen that. I think the poor guy would get jealous…”
“With him I can at least empathize.” Like she had said, she’d found it awkward. But not unpleasant by any means.
After a few moments, almost unconsciously, she found herself drifting in Stefi’s direction, feeling almost weightless in the steamy water and lavender-scented air. She came to rest on the stone step beside her. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“About before…”
“I-I’m really sorry about that,” Stefi said.
“There is no need to apologize,” Cédes said. “Accidents happen.”
“Yes, but not like this!”
Cédes said nothing and launched herself instead into deeper waters. For the longest time they remained apart, letting their cares and worries soak into the water and drift away on the steam.
Like she often did at home, Cédes drew in a shallow breath, held it, and let herself sink to the bottom where she sat in muffled, embryonic silence. Her thoughts washed back, unbidden. Stefi, the Fieretsi, destined savior of her world, her best friend, had touched her. And yet the shame that gripped her was not of the embarrassment of the situation. No, she had enjoyed Stefi’s cool touch. And that was the worst part. How wrong it was, she thought. But how very nice. A warmth welled up inside, rising through her body to her left shoulder where it sat, burning brightly.
She surfaced with a gasp.
“Boo!” Stefi giggled as Cédes’s head broke the surface, draped in white hair. “I see you.”
“Sarcasm,” Cédes said with a smile. Still, she turned her back on Stefi.
“In a way,” Stefi said, her voice taking a sympathetic tone. “But what’s wrong? You feel… hot.”
“That would be the water,” she said curtly to cover her embarrassment.
“It’s not that,” Stefi said, her voice concerned. “I can see you. Or your energy, anyway, if you know what I mean.”
In reply there came a muffled blast underwater, followed by a hiss of steam. Stefi seemed to know what it was, saw what it was. “Raphanos.”
“Yes,” Cédes said as another flash flared in her hands and died in the water with a whompf and a hiss.
“But how? You don’t even have the stone. You’re not angry, are you?”
“No, no, I am not angry,” Cédes said. “Just a little confused. And scared.” She told Stefi of her earlier vision, how it had ended in her falling to the ground, her life consumed by the flame within. She only hoped Stefi couldn’t see through the story to the other +truth beneath, that it was something else upsetting her.
When she had finished, Stefi, without thinking, reached out her hand to the dim glow just beyond the reaches of her vision. It leaped back, singed.
“That tickled.” Cédes giggled.
Stefi displayed no such mirth. “I… touched him,” she said.
“Who? Raphanos?”
“Yes.” Stefi’s voice wavered. “He’s scared, too.” She said it as if her own words surprised her. “And confused. He burned me, but it wasn’t with heat or anything. More like… sadness.” She shook her head and continued, “I think that he just wants to be whole again.”
Cédes remembered what the Elder had said: she had been fashioned as a weapon of war. Then it all made sense. The mixture of two bloods, the torture, her natural abilities, they alone had not made her what she was. No, the Elders and Alzandia had done something far worse, no less wicked than what the humans had done with Fairun. They had extracted power from Raphanos and placed it inside her. And slowly, yet oh so painfully, the sadness of the fire elemental was consuming her from within. All he wanted was a way home. But like the flightstones holding Fairun’s essence, she knew this vessel of flesh and bone would have to be destroyed so Raphanos could be whole.
Not quite knowing why, Stefi extended a hesitant hand towards the warmth, unsure if it was her or Raphanos who willed it. Her hand rested on Cédes’s shoulder. She felt heat and a longing sadness flare beneath the Furosan’s skin.
Cédes flinched, setting countless shimmering rings fleeing across the water. “What are you doing?”
“I… I don’t quite know.” As easily as if she had dipped her hand into water, she felt her touch slip beyond reality and into Cédes herself. The heat grew suddenly hotter. Scorching, even. But it didn’t touch her flesh. It only ignited a latent determination sleeping inside her. Cédes remained silent, her breathing nearly stilled.
The next moment Stefi’s fingers alighted on the source of the heat, and it seemed the world of light exploded beyond the confines of her bandana, erupting in fire and Furosa. At once Cédes’s outline bloomed before her, shining golden threads of light woven together into a living tapestry. Amongst its threads twined those of a burning red, radiating like a spider’s web from her shoulder and throughout her body.
“What!” Cédes’s scream shattered the steamy, scented air. She said nothing more Stefi could understand; her mouth let loose jumbled strings of syllables, the meaning of which Stefi couldn’t even grasp at. As Cédes slumped forward, still jabbering in a knotted tongue, Stefi saw her own hand begin to take hold of the source of the fiery threads. Her fingers closed about the seething mass of their own will.
A shock wracked her body, and as if from very far away she heard Cédes scream as the fiery threads slowly withdrew, writhing back into the mass as they disentangled themselves from the Furosan’s own life force. Searingly painful, it looked, Stefi thought vaguely. Yet colorful and somehow soothing. Pretty. Colorful
With Cédes’s screams echoing far away, a flare exploded in Stefi’s eyes and faded to a darkest black in an instant. Everywhere sprawled a blackness so thick she felt as if she could touch it. The light of Cédes had gone. She reached out her hand but could see nothing, not even traces of fire or Raphanos, as she waved it right before her.
A small star bloomed in the darkness and streaked towards her like a meteor, a shining spark loosed from the heavens. In the time it took for her bath-muddled mind to process the sight, it flashed past. Her eyes followed it as it rocketed through the inky night, sparked in the distance, then disappeared.
Stefi, it seemed to call in a voice of echoes and whispers. I return.
With a scream of her own she tore the bandana from her eyes and tossed it aside. As her eyes adjusted to the bathroom’s dim light, a stark-w
hite figure came into focus. It seemed to glow in the steam-muted light of the columns. It turned to face her and Stefi gasped at the crimson splatters that marred its face and chest.
“Free…” Cédes whispered, oblivious to the blood that trickled from her mouth and stained her lips a brilliant scarlet. Her equally red eyes fluttered, still seeing nothing of the world. She drifted backwards until she found one of the stone steps, where she came to rest and closed her eyes. “I am my own now, aren’t I” she said.
Stefi floated alongside her and sat down, only then realizing her fist was clenched. Her fingers curled open to reveal a small stone, a pebble more than anything, that threw a light like a dim sunset into the shifting clouds of steam. She took Cédes’s hand and placed it in her palm. “I think this belongs to you.”
Cédes sighed contentedly, keeping her eyes closed. “No, it belongs to Raphanos. And at last my body is wholly mine, although I never really knew why I felt otherwise until now. I only hope ‘Thank you’ is an adequate way to express my gratitude.”
Stefi leaned backwards and closed her eyes, only now realizing that she was panting with exhaustion and her hand throbbed dimly with vestiges of heat and emotion. “You could say that’s one you owe me!” In that moment she thought she caught a glimpse of a familiar face with a toothy, lopsided grin sitting at the opposite end of the bath. A sour, sharp feeling rose in her throat. “I miss them.”
Ifaut’s first night with the new Sansonis, the new Saun, had passed without her fears of ghosts being realized In fact, she had slept soundly the whole time.
Saun. The name seemed so fitting for him, more so than Sansonis. And it felt so very right. Of course he wasn’t the same Saun whose broken body she had wept over many years before. Yet there was the glint of familiarity, a reflection of mannerisms and quirks. But no, they couldn’t be the same. Souls depart for the Bridge or linger on lost, as Cédes had often told her in her grief. They don’t find other bodies. And if they did, surely he would have recognized her.
She opened her eyes to find sunlight pouring through the cracked window of the small shack. Dust motes danced upon the golden rays. So tiny. So fun. She wondered idly if that’s what the Furosa that Stefi could see looked like.
After a few minutes of watching them and thinking, she sprang from the small bed, woke Saun, and prepared a breakfast using some rice she’d found. She did her best to make it appetizing, spurred on by a bubbly, drifting happiness, and seasoned it with grass and dandelion leaves. At the very least the green leaves masked any mold the rice had sprouted. Not that Saun noticed.
“Today, we explore!” she said, pushing her empty plate aside. At least here she didn’t have to do any dishes. “That book you read me,” she said, fixing Saun with sparkling eyes, “it suggests there’s something odd going on here. And we need to find out what.”
“Odd?” Saun, for that is how even he labored to call himself, said. “You mean like ghosts?” He’d expected her to jump. Squeal, even. Instead she revealed her sharp teeth in a grin.
“Ha!” She laughed confidently, jumping to her feet and slapping the table for emphasis. “I didn’t see any ghosts. Whoever wrote that must’ve been confused by fog or something.” The clear sunlight had burnt away all fear, dissipating the ghosts as easily as if they were a light mist. Even Shizai’s words of warning and her kamae’s behavior felt like little more than a fading bad dream in the light of a new day. “C’mon! We’re going exploring!”