T'aakshi

Awareness came back to T’aakshi in fits and starts, piecemeal burbles of conversation breaking through the fog as though he was listening to them underwater; hazy light bleeding through into the murky black without ever really coalescing into an actual image.

Pain was the first sensation he truly recognised with any clarity. Waves of needle-point jabs rippled across his skin and under it, travelling from toe and fingertips, through tired muscle and straight into the space behind his eyes. He hissed, body reflexively hunching up and curling in on itself, but the feeble defence was of no use against internal pain. 

What in Ain-ou’s name had happened? There had been fire—that was the only certainty his scattered thoughts could grasp with any firmness. Fire, but it hadn’t burned him. He knew that for a fact, though how he knew, given the white hot pain still pulsing through him, he couldn’t say.

“…’s shaking agai…”

What—who—had that been? A warmth bathed his left side. It was the familiar, comforting warmth of fire. Different to the fire he remembered, better.

“Lad… Can you hea…”

Whatever it was, it was nudging his shoulder, sending fresh needles rushing through him. T’aakshi flailed a weak hand, hoping to swat the presence, and keep it back. It worked, but the movement had brought him to another level of awareness. The muted crackle and hiss of their blubber fire came steadily from the direction of the earlier warmth, and the smell of cooked fish filled his nostrils. His stomach groaned desperately, urging him to move towards the potential meal.

Fish. His heart skipped a beat. There was fish. T’aakshi’s eyes shot open, even as he strained burning muscles, attempting to drag himself to his feet. Daylight struck him like a physical blow, blinding and white, and his muscles gave way underneath him. He slumped back onto the blanket he could now feel separating him from the snow, vision swimming.

“Go easy, lad.”

T’aallin’s low voice broke through the haze, and his lined, grinning face faded into view through the blinding white, followed by the backdrop of stone-grey clouds.

“T’aallin?” he said, voice rasping as though he hadn’t spoken or drunk anything in days. “What happened?”

“You’re likely the only one of us that could answer that, Shi. You burned through the ice easy enough, but right as you reached water there was a flash like lightning, and by the time any of us could see again, you were on the floor.”

T’aakshi blinked slowly, trying to organise the chaotic half-images of what had happened in his brain. He remembered burning through the ice—the sheer triumph of knowing that the call to find the lake had been the right one. He remembered his flame, how it had burned stronger than he’d expected and how he’d been able to handle it fine, until—

The last piece of memory slid into place, and the weight of icy dread settled upon his chest, each breath suddenly a gargantuan effort. The beast’s coal-black eyes flashed through his mind once more, and he knew with frightening conviction what he’d felt before was the truth of things. Those eyes were no figment of his imagination, no splinter of trauma left behind to haunt him long after the fact. It was aware of him. Wherever it was, the beast had known the moment he touched self.

T’aakshi sat up and looked around their makeshift camp. S’aari and Jiro knelt several feet away, hunched over the hole in the ice he had made, fishing lines bobbing in and out of the frigid lake water. Hota sat beside the fire itself, laying a pair of silver-scaled lake fish onto a flat stone propped up over their fire by three larger. They hissed and crackled as they touched the plate, and T’aakshi realised that this was the sound he had heard coming from their usually silent fires. Kachi sat beside her twin with another fish in her hands, its scaled brown and charred, eating directly from its side. 

“How long have I been out?” he asked, heart racing.

“A few hours at the most. S’aari and Jiro have already eaten their fill, and we’ve caught enough for the rest to do the same. Now we’re preparing for the rest of the hunt.”

A few hours. That wasn’t much at all, and they certainly deserved at least a little time to rest and prepare. The sane thing to do would be to stay, but T’aakshi couldn’t shake the sensation of awareness he had experienced whilst channelling self. His own awareness of the beast, and far worse, the beast’s awareness of him. 

“We’ll stay for a few hours more and gather what we can. Then we need to put as much ground between us and here as we can before nightfall forces us to stop.”

“Why the hurry, lad? T’aarak might have some ground on us, but that doesn’t make much difference when none of us know where the damned thing is.”

T’aakshi hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the complaints of his burning muscles, and made an attempt at stretching them out. He couldn’t afford to allow the stiffness he could feel now slowing their progress. As he did this, he met T’aallin’s confused stare with as much iron as he could muster.

“It saw me, T’aallin. When I channelled. I don’t know how, or even if that is definitely what happened, but it’s what I felt. I’m not willing to take any chances that I’m right. We get moving in a few hours, or at the first sign of bad weather. The beast followed closely behind a storm both times we’ve seen it—I don’t think that’s a coincidence we can ignore, either.”

T’aallin stared at him for a moment, unmoving, before swallowing heavily and straightening up.

“I don’t know enough about how that power of yours works to distrust your instincts, lad. I’ll prepare things for a quick exit,” he said, as Hota approached with a cooked fish, steam pouring from any part of it exposed to the frigid air. “In the meantime, get some food down you. Sounds like we’ll all need our strength.”

T’aakshi gratefully accepted the fish from Hota, and began to eat as T’aallin moved off towards the camp to pack up everything they didn’t need for catching fish. The first bite drew a satisfied sigh as he tore away a warm mouthful of meat with his teeth and savoured the taste of it before swallowing it. He ate the whole fish, picking carefully around slivers of bones, hardly stopping to breathe. 

Finishing the first left him inexplicably hungrier than he had been when he had started, and he had never been happier to see a fish than when Hota brought him a second and third. Fortunately, they rarely fished waters this far into the Wastes, and the fish that dwelt there had little reason to be suspicious of a free meal.

S’aari and Jiro took full advantage, dragging them from the water faster than they could be eaten, and soon, they had dozens of silver-scaled meals tied to fishing lines ready to be strapped to their packs. The frigid temperatures this far north would stop them rotting whilst they travelled, and burying them in snow when making camp would ensure they remained frozen until they were ready to be eaten.

It was as though a great shadow had been lifted from the group, even with T’aakshi’s warnings. The sounds of laughter and conversation once again cut across the perennial dark of the Deep Wastes, and the sourness that had been creeping into all of them over the past several days had, at least for now, disappeared.

Despite this, T’aakshi couldn’t help constant glances above, searching for any change in the weather that might indicate an imminent storm. Soon, the nagging dread in the back of his mind became too much, and no matter the anxiety of marching them away from a steady source of food induced, T’aakshi knew it was time to move. 

The words stamped out what little good humour food had kindled, like the last embers of a fire. But, to their credit, nobody muttered a word of complaint as they hauled packs freshly laden with fish onto their backs once again. Each of them bore the marks of exhaustion in one way or another. All had dark shadows under their eyes from a lack of sleep; the twins half-stood, half leant on each other as they waited to walk; T’aallin had eaten the least of all of them, claiming that men at his age did not need so much food, and now his hands shook, visible even with the heavy hide gloves he wore. T’aakshi did not think it was from the cold.

“We’re heading north,” he said, feeling only slightly awkward at how his voice filled the uncomfortable silence. “For now, we set a hard pace and get as far away from here as we can manage, then we can rest properly. Tomorrow, we’ll set off later, giving us a little more time to recover some strength.”

“Where are we actually headed?” S’aari asked, and T’aakshi saw the others turn back to him, intent on an answer.

“We’re heading to the hunting grounds. It was the last place anybody has seen the beast besides the village itself, and is our best chance of finding some way of tracking it.”

“And if we can’t?”

T’aakshi winced but met the woman’s questioning gaze, regardless.

“Honestly? I don’t know. The hunting grounds are our only chance of finding something tangible and definite. We go there and search the place. We’ll only know what comes after once that’s done. What I do know is that if we’re going to kill this thing, it won’t be by letting it ambush us again. We need to be the hunters this time, not the prey.”

It wasn’t a reassuring answer, but it was the most honest one he had. A true leader, his father, would have a back-up plan ready to ease her worry. Would know what to do and do it with conviction. All T’aakshi could do was feign the same confidence—pretend, and hope that things went how he needed them to.

S’aari, for her part, only nodded and fell silent. T’aakshi wished he knew what she really felt. Had she appreciated his honesty and understood why he couldn’t give her a plan as she asked? Had the others? Or had their confidence in him, surely brittle and crumbling already, disintegrated even further?

No other questions came, so T’aakshi squared his shoulders, turned north and began to walk, hoping they did not see through the facade of certainty. More than ever, the spear strapped to his back, and the answers the jewel embedded in its haft could provide, called to him. He felt sure that somewhere within the generations of his forebears’ stored memories, he could find the answers they needed. 

His jaw tightened, and he fought the desire to turn back and look at the tanae’s faint cerulean glow. Instead, he kept his eyes locked on to the horizon and stalked forward. A touch of ice brushed against his exposed nose, a singular snowflake he brushed away with a gloved hand, as others lazily fluttered down around them. The stone-grey clouds above had darkened, and a chill breeze, gentle but sharp, rolled across the snows. The first hints of an approaching storm. 

He bit back his insecurities and protesting muscles and quickened his pace. There were few set in stone certainties in life, but one of them, T’aakshi knew, was that he had no intention of being anywhere near that storm when it hit.