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Pressed Flowers

Page history last edited by Volkes_Wagon 11 years, 6 months ago

This is LP chapter who-knows-what, smth that I've been planning for a long, long time but I've finally decided today to get it over with, because I seriously doubt I'll ever reach it in real life.

 

     The sword bit through air like a fang through flesh, and if you listened close, the wind almost seemed to be screaming.

     "Magnificent," Mu Bootis cried, clapping his hands. The sword came to a gentle rest. "Truly beautiful, young Luna Acamar. Only our current Luna could match your skills."

     The boy sheathed his sword with a smooth, quiet motion and turned to face Mu Bootis, deep black eyes and pale lips smiling vaguely. His long black hair and his blue ribbon flowed in the wind. "Thank you, teacher," he responded.

     "If only your sister could be as talented as you. It is truly unfortunate."

     "Yes, teacher."

     "Speaking of which, have you seen her lately? It will soon be time for her daily lessons, and I'm afraid she may refuse to show herself yet again."

     "I will make sure she comes, teacher," he said softly.

     The village was gently humming in the day, filled with cooking and washing and mending. When the sun was still shining, the only difference between this village and any other was the pervasive sound of metal against whetstones instead of plows tilling the earth: no farmers in this village, only swords sharpening. Acamar slipped into the broken ruins of the Old Village that formed the periphery of the village, where he knew his sister would be.

     The girl noticed his footsteps and turned. "Acamar!" she called from the top of the Weeping Wall. She waved, hair streaming against the blue sky. Her clear black eyes shone.

     "Keid," he answered.

     "There's a bird nest up here. Do you want to see?"

     "No. That's okay." He sat down at the base of the ancient wall, where tall wild grass grew, and closed his eyes. He would rest for now, for just a little while, here in the quiet wilderness with his sister. Weariness seeped into his face.

     "There's a brother bird and a sister bird here, I think. Just like us."

     "Mmn."

     "That's weird, there's an egg that still hasn't hatched. Maybe the mom bird needs to sit on it more."

     "Mmn."

     "By summer these little birds will have grown wings and they'll be flying around in the trees. They'll be able to go anywhere they want with those wings. Acamar?"

     "Mmn?"

     "What's it like to have wings?"

     "Mmn...must be nice. The wind might be too cold, though."

     He heard the crumbling gravel shift overhead and opened one eye. Keid's shadow fell across the green meadow, her arms spread wide as if to embrace the wind. And then it dropped

     Acamar leaped to his feet. She had jumped--no, not jumped, more like stepped off the wall backwards and let the sky spread wide above her. She wasn't going to brace herself for a landing. Silently yelling in alarm, he dove towards her and caught her in his arms.

     "What was that?" he snapped. "Throwing yourself off."

     His sister pushed her wildly tangled black hair out of her face and grinned at him, eyes bright and excited. "I wanted to know what flying was like. It's awesome, Acamar! You should try it!"

     "But you can't fly. You haven't got wings. You'll hurt yourself if you do that again."

     "Yeah, but I knew it'd be okay because you'd catch me." She grabbed him around his neck and squeezed.

     He abruptly dropped her to the ground and stepped back.

     "Ow! Hey, what'd you do that for!?" She got to her feet, rubbing her back.

     "Mu Bootis wants you."

     "Aw, I hate that guy. Do I have to go to lessons?"

     "You don't have a choice," he said quietly, and left.

 

     Keid waited by the bird nest for a while longer, anyways, because she wanted to see the mother bird. It was long past noon by the time she gave up and went to the training grounds.

     Mu Bootis was waiting for her. "You're late," he scowled.

     "At least I came," she spat. "Fatty."

     "You undisciplined girl."

     "Wannabe bald."

     "Wildcat."

     "Stiff potato."

     He gave her a funny look and shuffled to the warehouse in a huff.

     "Hah! I win!"

     "You did not! I simply have no time for children's games." His keys jingled. The door to the weapons warehouse opened with a click, and he beckoned her inside.

     "Now on to your training," he said, as the walked across the long, dark building. Swords and battle gear lined the walls, and books of war tactics filled the shelves. "Today will be a little different than usual."

     "Oh, really? Meaning I'll be firing my nonexistent 'aura' at tofu instead of leather bags?"

     "No. You understand that tomorrow you and your brother will come of age, yes?"

     "Oh, that. Bah. I know." She stopped. Strange sounds were coming from the far corner of the hall.

     "Thirteen is an important year, young luna Keid! Great preparation and ceremony must accompany it. Do not belittle this tradition."

     "Right." The sounds had died down. "So what're we doing?"

     "By this age any magical ability should have manifested itself in your training. But in your case, it is apparent that you have absolutely no talent in that area."

     "Oh, gee, thanks." Of course he was right. But Keid couldn't think about it too seriously; if she did, it would drive her mad.

     "Thus we will focus today on a different criteria, an essential criteria of a Fanged Wolf warrior that even our least talented children can fulfill. Come."

     As they approached the end of the hall, the sounds rose up again. It made Keid strangely uneasy. Mu Bootis reached up and switched on a lachory lamp, and light pooled into the corner of the building.

     A boy was lying on the ground, both arms and legs bound by rope so tightly his hands and feet were turning blue. Through the tattered foreign clothes she could see wounds festering. A blindfold covered his eyes, and he was gagged. Upon noticing the light his moaning escalated to a desperate muffled scream.

     "A captive from the remnants of the Vulpes tribe, but this one speaks Northern," Mu Bootis explained didactically. "We've already extracted the information we want from him. Your task is the simplest and easiest: end his suffering."

     He waited for a response, but Keid gave him none. She was remembering all the times she had been instructed to use magic, the frustration she felt each time her teacher sighed and shook his head, murmuring "Such a simple task, and yet..." while she roared from the depths of her soul and tried to figure out what was so simple about it.

     "Draw your blade, young Luna. Your fang is in dire need of tasting its first blood."

     Keid stared. Backed away. Turned and threw up.

     "Young Luna!" Mu Bootis cried. "Are you well?"

     "Won't do it," she croaked, spitting and wiping her mouth.

     "What?"

     "I said I won't do it!"

     It wasn't the blood, she was fine with blood. Even the stench of torture and fear and impending death barely fazed her. But removed from the hot rush of a battle, cold-blooded slaughter is illuminated in a stark and pitiless light. There was something inextricably sick about this lesson.

     "I won't do it. I'm not your slave! I'll ditch my class when I want to, even if the rest of the world says no."

     She drew her dagger and sliced the ropes away from the boy. She tore the blindfold and gag off his face. He stared around him blankly, too stunned and confused to be relieved.

     "Young Luna Keid!" Mu Bootis boomed.

     "I'll do what I want to do!" she screamed back. "You can't make me do anything!"

     "Take that back. Please. We can't have an heir who refuses to kill."

     "Then I won't be an heir! Who wants to rule this tribe, anyways!? It'd be a prison! A cage! We go around our whole lives waging war and killing, but what's the point of that!? Don't tell me what to do!"

     He looked at her with eyes full of condescending pity, and Keid wanted nothing more than to bash his brains out. Now this was reason to kill. This was blood lust. She pointed her dagger at him, daring him to speak another word.

     But he didn't. He simply tossed her aside with a deft wave of his hand, his magic forming a giant claw in the air, and then sliced down. It tore through the farm boy's heart. Surprise flickered across his face--and then he knew. His eyes died before the rest of him did.

     "You are not well," Mu Bootis said calmly, wrapping up the body in rags before its blood could soak into the wooden floorboards. "Please return to your room and rest. The ceremony will begin soon."

     He turned the light off and shuffled back along the yawning hallway, disappearing into the light of day, and Keid seethed inside herself from the corner of the dark.

     And a monster inside her ached to plunge her dagger into his throat.

 

     "Hello, Mother Luna," Acamar said softly as he entered the chief's tent. Its lush curtains closed behind him. "You called?"

     "Acamar," his mother cooed. She stopped combing her hair and held out her hands to him, drew him close. "I haven't seen you in so long, and yet the first person you went to see after your return was Mu Bootis. Where did your father take you?"

     "Luna Lupus took me to the river, to hunt."

     "Did you catch anything?"

     His eyes wandered. "Two days ago we caught a young male Fox [as in the basically wiped out Vulpes tribe, which Runo is a member of. I think he's the last one, but now that i'm all old and boring there are too many "last ones" in this story for my taste, so this may change], but it was impossible to bring home any other game. They slit their own throats upon our arrival."

     "Ah, such a pity." She dismissed her servants and began to comb her hair again. "Tell me, how is she doing?"

     He knew. "She is doing very well."

     There was an entire drawer in his mother's chest dedicated to storing hair accessories. She opened this and ran her fingers over the shining, delicate jewelry. "Tomorrow, you will come of age. You are ready, I know it."

     "Thank you." 

     "Do you remember the story of your birth?"

     "Yes." But there was deep sorrow in his voice.

     She began to tell the tale again, anyways, as she had done so hundred of times before. "I still remember it vividly, that night. All our children are born at night, you see. But that night Ara came and said a magnificent star had lit the sky and come to earth in a ball of flame [aka meteor]. It was well known already that I would have twins, but he said that star was telling of an unprecedented future for them. And I knew the Kristing had chosen them to be magnificent successors of our Luna."

     She finally selected a jade ornament and began weaving it into her hair. Acamar watched silently, patiently, but the sadness welled up inside and swirled in the darkness of his eyes.

     "You were a son, as we had all expected. But your twin was a daughter. I watched over the growth of you two children, and you sprang up from the moment of your birth like saple weeds. At first our Luna and I had hoped you both could succeed our noble lineage, even though she was a girl, and lead jointly after our current Luna falls. But as the years passed, we all could see that the girl was an unacceptable candidate. She had no magic; her thoughts were those of the strangers we do battle with, of foreigners. If it wasn't for the color of her eyes, she might have been from the other side of the Weeping Wall."

     And then the words changed.

     "A son and a daughter born under the same fateful star," she whispered, her face beautiful and emotionless as a marble statue, but the slightest quiver in her voice betrayed something more; "one child blessed with talent only matched by your father; the other cursed with no magic and a weak spirit. What could it mean? Not all children of the Luna succeed the title, but then what would remain for her, who has no claim of her own except her disappointed blood? What would that make her, except a curse and an ugly reminder of all she could have been?"

     She'd failed the test. Acamar knew, and he knew, and he knew. Keid had failed the test.

     Orange, marble, and more jade beads joined the hair ornament, and a necklace to show her status as the chief's beloved wife. Lastly, with steady hands, she took a long strip of silver ribbon from the top of the chest and styled it carefully onto her hair.

     "None of us cut our hair, you understand," she said quietly. "Nor do we part with our ribbon until we die. The hair is respect; the ribbon, a symbol. Loyalty to family and tribe are more important than life. Understand this, my child." She finished, and sat straight, gazing without seeing at the mirror. She took another ribbon, a scarlet one, from inside the chest. "Tomorrow we will finally grant the girl her ribbon. Your father hadn't wanted me to give it to her before; but it's alright now."

     Acamar gripped his arms to himself--he knew. Without changing her gaze, Mother Luna Azha said to her son:

     "On your thirteenth birthday, we must offer the girl as a sacrifice. It is the Kristing's will. You will take her life and become the Luna."

 

     Keid stumbled into her and her brother's tent, then collapsed onto the soft beaver-skin mat. She was exhausted. After leaving the storage building she had screamed at the Weeping Wall and practiced her swordsmanship until the sun went down, and the rise of the moon had brought her to her senses.

     Acamar, of course, wasn't in the tent. It was rare for them to see each other these days, especially because of the ceremony preparations. Their father always managed to make Acamar help him with everything, from cleaning swords to hanging posters to leading armies, without even showing the back of his head to Keid. She only knew what the Luna looked like from what Mu Bootis sometimes deigned to tell her. Keid rolled onto her back and slowly, painfully, detached her swords from her clothes and tucked them into a corner. Parting from them made her nervous sometimes; like they were a part of her arms and mind, or something.

     Outside, it was silent. Heavily, nervously, broodingly silent. But Keid was too tired to care. Without even washing her face properly, she rolled onto her side and fell asleep.

 

...and in the night, the moon cried as her child ate his own...

 

     "Keid."

     The one voice in the world she didn't mind waking up to. She opened her eyes and turned blearily in the darkness, searching for her brother's shadow. "Hrrmmmmn?"

     "Our mother wanted me to give this to you."

     Something soft and light landed on her cheek. A piece of cloth. She grabbed at it irritably. "Hrrmmmn."

     "Keid."

     "Hrrmgh, what?"

     "Let's run away."

     She lay still for a few seconds. Sat up. "What?"

     "Let's run away. Let's leave this place." He was standing in the doorway, lifting up the tent flap so the moonlight formed a triangle around his silhouette. "Just the two of us. You'll be free. We'll be free."

     Her mind worked at the question slowly, bewildered. But at the mention of freedom she grabbed her swords excitedly.

     "Well, yeah! Let's! It's what I've always wanted! We'll go somewhere amazing, somewhere they never tell you what to do or who to be, like--like that Path place! The one around the center of the world!"

     "The Path of Angels and Demons. Yes, we'll go there." She could hear his smile, and it opened that spring of happiness she had missed so badly that day. She chattered on.

     "I wonder who we'll meet. We can tell them we're from, from the North, and show them our swords, and they'll be impressed, unless maybe they're stronger--but I can't imagine anyone stronger than us when we're together. And we'll share stories of heroic battles. And we'll have--we'll have new names, because you've gotta have new names if you want a new life. Eridani is too much like a Fanged Wolf."

     "I always saw you as a Tsubaki."

     "Tsubaki? What's that, Southern?"

     "It's Southern for Camilla, a kind of flower. A beautiful, bright red flower."

     "You want me to be a flower? Gross!"

     "I think it suits you. I'll be Kuchiha."

     "And what's that? Stop asking me to translate things!"

     "'Kuchi' is an adjective for 'wilted.' It's what happens to a flower after its roots are cut."

     "Huh?" She was still excited, still tossing her sword up and down in her hand happily.

     "You're not at fault; you can still bloom. Out there, you can be something more. I'll protect you. Because that's all I can do."

     The wind picked up from the South and blew to the North, and the stillness was broken. The stench of blood blew into the tent, of blood and tears and built up rage released like a tidal wave. She caught the sword and held it still.

     "Acamar?"

     "Keid, I did it, finally. I killed them all. Mother. The priest, Ara. Mu Bootis. And then I had to kill the lesser priests and the warriors, and everyone who had seen me, because they would fight back. And then I had to kill their wives and their children, because they were seeds to fight back. And then I had to kill the other witnesses, and their wives, and their children, and their friends as well, because they would fight back. And then I killed the whole village, because that's all the village can do and will do; fight back."

     She stared at him, not comprehending the words or the scent. His long black hair formed a mane on his back, blood still dripping from his drawn swords, and his eyes and his swords were the only things visible against the full moon--shining, wild, overflowing with sadness turned into venom.

     "I killed Father, Keid. I came to him last, and he wasn't even afraid. He fought like I was just, just more prey to hunt. But I was stronger, and I killed him. Have you ever seen his face? He looks just like me, just like you. When I stabbed him I felt like I was stabbing you. Keid, please. Come with me, Keid. Don't leave me alone, with only the screams of the dead to keep me company. I need to protect you."

     She drew her swords close, and the ribbon from her mother tangled into her hands. "Acamar?"

     "I'm not Acamar anymore, Keid--no, you're not Keid either. Who am I? Who are you? What have I done? Let's run away." He reached for something behind him, then stepped forward. A head swung from his hand. "You never saw Father's face, did you? You said you wanted to know what he looked like. Here."

     Somewhere inside her she was still convinced it was all a dream. Acamar had never talked about freedom before, he had never talked about killing; he wouldn't. Acamar was her brother. She knew her brother.

     But then she looked.

     And the truth came crashing down on her.

     "Why!? Why'd you do this!?" she screamed.

     "I didn't have a choice." He looked trapped. "I can't--I can't tell you why."

     "How could you!? Why would you ever do this!?"

     "Please, shh, shh, it's okay. I would never hurt you, Tsubaki, I--"

     "No! Don't call me that, you--traitor! Murderer!"

     "Then what should I call you? You're not Keid anymore. You're not a defect; you're something beautiful."

     "You're lying!" she sobbed. "You--you're the one! You're the Tsubaki, and you're dyed with the blood of Kuchiha's roots. I'm wilting! I'm wilting!"

     She scrambled to her feet and slashed out the back of the tent and pounded, pounded her feet down to run. She put her entire soul into her legs, running towards somewhere, anywhere, but home. Between the thunder of her own heartbeat, she heard her brother call once, twice--and then silence. And with every corpse she tripped over, every gutted out tent she passed, other voices came, crowding into her mind: Mu Bootis. The girl who sometimes cleaned her room. The merchants. Her mother, from long ago, when she still sang lullabies and held her in her arms.

     When she reached the Weeping Wall she turned and looked back. The image was ingrained in her memory forever, every shadowed on every stone, every reflection in every dark pool, like a pressed flower frozen forever in one moment of time.

     The Fanged Wolves were gone. Destroyed. Slaughtered by its own children. And those two cursed children still walked the earth.

     She fell to her knees and bowed to the ground for a long time, muttering a half-hearted prayer to nothing in particular until she couldn't hear her own voice anymore; and then just crouched there, numb. She didn't hear her brother's voice again.

     The stars traveled slowly across the sky. They came out clear that night, sharp, brilliant next to the moon. And then the ones at the corner began to blink out; hang there for a moment as they paled, but ultimately disappear. The paleness spread, gradually at first, then with a soft rush of faded blue across the sky. The moon dropped over the horizon. And then the sun rose, at last, and cast its warm rays down on the ruins of the Old Village and the ruins of the New Village, and the rest of the world stirred.

     From on top of the wall, two baby birds sang. Their mother flew to them and fed them worms.

     She dragged herself up to her feet. Her limbs were stiff as those of a corpse, but the sun was breathing life back into them. The ribbon was still in her hands; she must have held it against her sword handle by accident. The color came out fresh now--a brilliant, deep red.

     She grabbed it tight. He would have left by now; where was it they said they would go? The Path. He would be there, definitely. She needed to find him. Pay him for what he had done. Find out why. She tied the ribbon into her hair to remember.

     Then Kuchiha began her journey.

Comments (2)

Volkes_Wagon said

at 1:26 pm on Aug 11, 2012

All of the Fanged Wolf Tribe's members are named after stars--thus the strong superstitions regarding stars. And obviously, the title Luna is after the moon.

I used http://www.naic.edu/~gibson/starnames/starnames.html for reference. Eridani means "river"; Acamar means "end of the river" and Keid means "broken eggshell". Mu Bootis is also called Alkalurops, or "shepherd's crook"; Bootis means "oxherd." Ara means "altar". Azha means "the hatching place." and of course Lupus means "wolf," which is the only Eridani name that isn't actually part of the Eridani constellation.

I like infusing meaning into these sorts of things. I chose Eridani as the tribal chief's name before I knew what if meant, but I like that the bird theme somehow snuck its way into the river. Maybe Gemini would have made more sense...

Volkes_Wagon said

at 11:54 pm on Sep 14, 2012

right. now that was intense. i sometimes wonder about the kinds of things that i used to see in my head as an airheaded middle schooler. i seemed to particularly like making whole villages be brutally murdered with only one or two very special survivors. and the reasons are just plain wacky.

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