War priest the complete.., p.69
War Priest: The Complete Series, page 69
He was glad that it hadn’t come to this as of late.
Breaking focus, Arik tilted his head back and looked up at a purple sky full of glittering stars. For a split second he heard the beautiful music of harps and other stringed instruments that they used in some of the performance halls of Ezochi. Once, during an internship, he had attended one of these performances over the summer. The music had been amazing, yet it had been the light show above that had truly impressed him, the concert timed by weather whisperers to coincide with a strange occurrence in the north. It was a particular day of the year in which the sky turned clear and the temperature dropped rapidly, later to be accompanied by a rainstorm, and finally, snow.
A Summer’s Snow, was what northerners called it, and for much of Arik’s life it happened yearly. As he sat there in meditation, he began to increasingly think of the rare weather phenomenon as a metaphor for what he needed to do.
A Summer’s Snow, a completely random yet inevitable event, one that was as surprising as it was sudden. Every Summer’s Snow that Arik had experienced had come and left in just a few hours. Many people ended up sleeping through it, waking up in the early afternoon to find that the ground was wet and quickly drying. But children knew. And some adults did as well. Some stayed up overnight to make sure they didn’t miss it, the snow falling into the early morning hours, the purple, pink, and marigold dawn making it even more of a wonder.
This memory was the inspiration Arik needed, but at that moment, he didn’t know why.
****
There had been an opportunity back at the military installation for Arik to press forward and kill Nobunaga. He would have attempted this had it not been for Hojo’s death, regardless of Nobunaga’s agents, the traitor Master Guri Yarna, or any surprises the warlord might have had in those final moments. In his speech to his men, Nobunaga had mentioned holding a northern girl that would unite the realms, that he would marry her to his son. Arik took this to mean his sister, Mori Ehara, and he would do everything in his power, cross any desert, to protect her.
Your brother will be there soon, Arik thought as he neared the end of his meditation. Even if he didn’t think it was possible, he slowly loosened his hands, mentally releasing his chi in the direction of the Crimson Realm. He hoped that it would somehow travel far enough to reach her, that she too was staring up at the same night sky as Arik, unaware that her brother lived and would come for her soon.
Arik sensed a presence as Tayaura approached. She sat down next to him, her knee just a few inches away from his. She leaned back on her hands and looked up at the sky. “Aren’t you supposed to be meditating?”
“I am. Err, I was.”
“You seem too restless to be meditating. What were you thinking about?”
“My chi.”
“You lie. Correct me if I’m wrong, but by this point in your study, you are beyond the stage in which you have to continually cycle your power.”
“You seem to know a lot about Revivaura for an illusionist.”
“I don’t know anything about Revivaura, but I do know about Chimaura, everything my father taught me, as well as some lessons from Hirokuni himself.”
“And Thunderaura, you know about that.”
“I do, but it isn’t as authentic as what they study on the other side of the border.”
“That doesn’t make it any less powerful,” Arik told her. “I saw…” He wanted to say that he had seen how strong her father’s attacks had been, that skills like the One-Count Strike couldn’t have possibly been taught or practiced by someone who didn’t have an understanding of the Crimsonian interpretation of chi cultivation. Yet he didn’t.
He had purposefully been trying to avoid speaking about Hojo in a way that could lead to either of them feeling remorse. Arik knew it wasn’t the best practice to bottle his thoughts and his feelings, yet until he truly understood how Tayaura felt, this was what he would do. But since he now had her alone, Meosa currently sitting around a fire with Nyoko and Istvan, Arik decided to finally ask the illusionist a question that had been at the back of his mind ever since Hojo’s death.
“I’ve been wondering about something. It relates to Johmar de Avarga.”
Tayaura shifted forward as she brought her knees into her chest. She stared down at the ground, some of her hair falling into her face. “I don’t know if my father has a double or not,” she said, as if she’d been reading Arik’s mind.
“Who would we ask? Who would know? Maybe an itako?” Arik remembered the young woman who had helped him with the message of the Whispering Sword. Seeing her cut herself wasn’t the most appealing visual, but her guidance had been spot on. “There’s one in Moonagwa,” he told Tayaura after she didn’t say anything. “She’s the one that helped me get the Whispering Sword. She’s good. I think. Actually, she’s only the second one I’ve ever visited, the first being an older woman near Mount Osore.”
“Then maybe we should pay her a visit,” Tayaura said, half-surprising Arik. “We should reach the city by tomorrow morning. Do you remember where she was?”
“The itako? She was inside the interior of Moonagwa, not on the outskirts. We had to sneak through a tunnel to get inside.”
“Sneak through a tunnel? I don’t want to waste time doing all that. I will get us in, don’t worry.” She finally looked over at Arik. “You’ll soon understand that I am not like my father. I’m not afraid to use the techniques I have learned to my advantage, and I’m not afraid to share what I have learned with others. Why struggle? Why would I spend my life studying these things if I wasn’t actually going to use them, if they were just going to die with me?”
Arik didn’t have an immediate response. He didn’t know enough about the causes of Hidden Warrior Sickness to state with certainty that whatever Tayaura planned to do could trigger it prematurely. Whatever Hojo had suffered from clearly came from the man’s Chimauric powers. Arik had never seen a Revivaura user experience anything like the sickness; it had to do with the illusionistic interpretation of chi. Rather than offer a shallow warning, Arik changed the subject: “It will be good to return to civilization.”
Tayaura pressed back even further, her eyes tracing across the stars above. “It will.”
.Chapter Two.
“How you spend your day is how you spend your life.”
–A quote attributed to Hidden Warrior Sorgus de Moonagwa, as told to his last student, Boten de Moonagwa, who later founded the Katano School of Illusion.
The only other person awake when Arik rose the next morning was Nyoko. The Jadean woman was crouched before the fire, her shoulders and head covered by the hide of a mountain lion as always. She motioned for Arik to come forward, and once he did Arik saw that she was cooking something beneath a collection of glowing red embers.
“People eat these when there is no food,” she said as she moved the embers aside revealing a beetle easily three inches in length, its body an electric green, underbelly black with yellow stripes.
“Really?”
“The Jade Realm has improved over the years, since the childhoods of my grandparents. There is more food, more abundance, but those old-timers remember some of the famines and the crop failures. They were forced to improvise during those times.”
“Crop failures? I thought your people were nomadic.”
“Semi-nomadic. When I was a girl, my family moved three times a year. There was a spring and summer location for the growing season, and a canyon we went to for fall and winter. We would slaughter a pair of sheep right before the freezing temperatures came. This was supposed to last for the entire winter. Luckily, it was always below freezing outside, so we could simply keep the meat stored away from the camp.”
Luckily? Arik thought, not a huge fan of the cold.
“But sometimes we would need more, or someone in our group would get their rationing wrong, or perhaps the lunar new year celebration went for too long or got too wild. When that happened, we would eat these beetles.”
“You could still find them in the winter?”
“They stay beneath rocks, near the canyon walls where it is warmer. As kids we would fan out and try to capture them during the day.”
“I see,” Arik said as she quickly pinched the beetle and lifted it from the fire.
Nyoko plucked its limbs out and tossed them to the side. “It was during the time of my grandparents that they really relied on these beetles. To us, they were a delicacy, or an end of winter treat—our group always able to find more meat or trade other goods before we ran out of meat. But to them, to the old-timers, they were the only thing that kept them alive during the harsher days.” Nyoko took a bite of the beetle. She offered the other half to Arik.
The disciple felt that creeping sensation he normally did when Meosa joined him, a prickling of his skin. “Eating insects already?” asked Meosa.
“It’s good,” Nyoko assured Arik. “You should try it. I have another one.” She opened her other palm to reveal a dead beetle, one that she had been clutching tightly.
“We have led very different lives,” he finally said.
Arik imagined what Nyoko must have looked like when she was a young girl. He knew that his prejudices and what he had been told about the mountainous nomads of the Jade Realm likely skewed his vision, but it didn’t seem far off from what she’d just told him. Compared to his earlier existence, starting his training at such a young age, his room at the Academy, all the rituals and experiences he had taken part in, the two couldn’t have led more different lives.
Arik took the half-eaten beetle from her. He raised it in Nyoko’s direction, grinned, and tossed it in his mouth. Crunching down on it, Arik immediately noticed its hard shell followed by a taste that he would describe as similar to eating a concentrated pellet of mud. He tried not to wince, even as Meosa ribbed him. Arik finished the beetle and swallowed it down.
“Good, right? Want more?”
“Maybe it’s an acquired taste,” Arik told Nyoko, as he waved her offer away. He saw a pot of boiling water from the previous night and quickly went for it, the disciple drinking it all up to wash away the flavor, even if it burned his tongue to some degree.
“And now you are eating bugs—ha!—what a life we live,” Meosa said. “But I suppose humans must eat something. We can’t all simply exist like myself.”
“Through Yokaura.”
“Yes, that would describe it.”
Arik glanced over to the water spirit, whose form was barely visible in the early morning light. Even so, he could see Meosa’s outline, and he knew more or less what he looked like. “Where can I learn more about that?”
“Not from me,” Meosa said as Nyoko put the second beetle under an ember. She licked her fingers and quickly placed another glowing ember on top, Arik hearing a soft sizzling sound as Meosa continued: “You may have noticed that I am not an expert on the various ways that chi is cultivated, disciple. Revivaura, Thunderaura, Chimaura, and Yokaura are as much a mystery to me as they are to you in certain ways. Sure, it is what fuels me, but that doesn’t mean I completely understand it. That said, you seem to have Revivaura under control to some extent. But you get what I’m saying. I’m not the type to try to decipher how the sausage is made.”
“I’ve never been healed by someone like you,” Nyoko told the disciple, apparently only picking up on the Revivaura part of their conversation. “I always wondered what it felt like.”
“Many people do, and hopefully, it’s something that you won’t have to learn.” As these words left his lips, Arik recognized his statement as something beyond him, a sage wisdom to it. It sounds like something Hojo would say. And like a response Hojo might receive for something profound, Nyoko didn’t reply. The Jadean woman merely looked back down at the embers, licked her fingers again, and moved them aside to see how her beetle was cooking.
****
It felt strange for Arik to have two swords sheathed at his waist, even if there were several ways to do so. He had seen his combat instructor, Master Nankai, keep both his swords together, one sheathed on top of the other, which provided somewhat of an armrest when the man was standing. Others, most notably the late Altai Masamune of the Double Sword Academy of Combat Arts in Mogra, had his weapons sheathed on either side of his body.
Neither seemed right to Arik. Having one sword was more than enough to take care of. And even though he felt completely honored to inherit the weapon from the master illusionist, he didn’t yet know how he would use it.
The Whispering Sword was a considerably powerful blade, one that gave Arik an instant advantage. In using Hojo’s dark blade, he would have to rely on the techniques that he had already learned, like the various initiatives, or the three forms of the Autumn Leaves Strike.
Body Replaces Sword, Sword Replaces Body—these two sword concepts made the most sense with the weapon that had once been used by Coro Pache himself, especially with their interpretation that the wielder became the weapon. The new way Arik used his whip sword freed him of the restraints of the past, the lessons that he had poured himself into without truly understanding what they meant. He was a disciple; even if he had now dabbled in Thunderaura and Chimaura, and perhaps whatever Yokaura was, he had grown up with the rigid instruction which matched his previous knowledge of the blade.
The Whispering Sword shattered all his preconceived notions with its fluidity, its speed. Yet now he had a new blade to contend with, Hojo’s sword, one that clearly had something unique about it based on the way it felt, the quality of the blade itself, and the mysterious power of its previous owner.
The only problem was figuring out the best way to honor the gift and go with what worked best.
If done right, facing an opponent with two swords would certainly be a challenge, especially if one of those weapons was the Whispering Sword, which required Arik’s full focus. To get to that point, to get to a place where he was comfortable wielding both would require a ton of practice, not to mention the trial and error necessary in augmenting a new skill.
Arik was afraid he didn’t have enough time.
****
They rushed the next morning, Tayaura hoping to reach Moonagwa by nightfall if possible. Their group also needed to get to the road that Istvan and Yoko could use to head south to the border city of Omoto. Arik enjoyed their company, and part of him wished they weren’t splitting for the time being. Nyoko and her survival skills were always fascinating, and while Istvan could be boisterous, the northern fighter had a good heart, and the flaming nature of his weapon plus his limited healing capabilities made him fearless.
Once the group split, Arik would be able to spend more time with Tayaura, and with the absence of Hojo, it was the closest he could get to a man he was increasingly beginning to miss. It seemed like only yesterday that Arik had stepped into a carriage to find Hojo seated inside, the enigmatic illusionist in his conical hat, just a sliver of his face visible. It was only when their carriage was attacked that Hojo had revealed his true power. And as Arik soon learned, this was only the tip of the iceberg in regards to what the man was truly capable of. Now, all that knowledge was lost. The tragedy of the Hidden Warrior’s death was twofold—his absence and the knowledge he took with him were voids that would be impossible to fill.
It was faint, but the hat that Arik now wore smelled like the deceased Hidden Warrior. It wasn’t the original conical hat that Hojo had on his head when they’d first met. It had been in his initial fight against Sengum Minamoto that he had lost that original hat, Hojo picking up another one from a trinket merchant at the cemetery where they planned to place his body. Yet it still had held his scent. The only way he could think to describe it was the smell of a cold wind.
Arik truly hoped that Hojo had used his power to leave a double behind, anything to see him one last time. Not only that, he hoped that Hojo had gone to the place that he had spoken about, a land with no name, a place where he could be himself, where the temperature was always perfect, food plentiful, a land without war, without trauma, and sans conflict. Even though Arik knew that Hojo had been suffering, that this mysterious land that the master illusionist dreamed of couldn’t possibly exist, he wished for Hojo’s sake that it did.
The master illusionist deserved as much.
While Hojo had been swift when action was necessary, he had clearly tried to leave a light footprint wherever he went. All of Taomoni could learn something from someone like Hojo, and it was an utter tragedy how quickly his death had happened, regardless of the fact that the man may have seen it coming. The thought of his former instructor also made Arik wonder how many others like him were out there, now and in the past, those with good hearts who didn’t seek absolute power, those that couldn’t fathom trampling on history and destroying knowledge. People unlike Nobunaga, or the late Sengum Minamoto, and their followers.
It was the kind of question that he knew better than to ask. How many out there have good souls versus bad? And who was to judge where their soul fell without casting the first stone?
The disciple had been so lost in thought that he hadn’t noticed any signs of civilization for quite some time. It was only when he nearly tripped on something that had fallen off a wagon that he realized how close they were to the road where their group would split.
