Forgotten Wings

The recent fantasy challenge inspired me to try and write a longer story than my initial entry. I appreciate you taking the time to read it. Feed back is most welcome.....

Forgotten Wings

Part 1:

Chapter 1:

“It’s nearly sundown pop. We should really be getting back.” The boy’s tone carried more concern than command.

“Nonsense, boy. I have been fishing these ponds for decades. I can find our way back from habit, with or without the full moon tonight.” The Father’s tone carried more assurance than assertion. “Besides, the best time to fish for Pond Trout is at night. Ever since the valley dried up, it gets too hot during the day and the fish go deeper down and wait for the insects to come out of hiding. That’s the secret of fishing. You have to do what the fish want. A real fisherman doesn’t need to seek but wait.”

Naphan’s hands always animated more when he spoke of his craft. Tapping the air as if playing some invisible keyed instrument. Even more so when speaking to his oldest, Kyrin. His legacy. Having only the one boy and three daughters, Kyrin was his only chance to pass on the trade of his forebears. The only one who might inherit his rod and tackle, net and secrets given to him by his father. His thoughts drifted to the past for a moment. Marking the change in the landscape over the decades since his first outing.

The pools have shrunk a great deal, both in size and number as the hardpan and Steel-glass grew over the Green Vale floor. Naphan’s father grew up in the last days of the Old Serpents. Their firefights had waned, and the change of environment was well underway. By the time Naphan was born, the fifth of six boys, the wildlife population had already begun to fall well below the carrying capacity of all the villages in the Caldera.

Once a place of water holding diverse and abundant population, only the deepest pools in the Pond chains fed by the Crystal River would survive the following decades. Naphan’s father knew the beauty and providence of the valley growing up, while he and his brothers only ever saw its decline. Never having seen the Dragons fight, they would mature during the times when it was the people that made war in the shadow of the Sage Mountains. Fighting over empty fishing holes. Airable land for farming. Steel-glass veins in the hardpan.

Even today’s standards of destitution are a relative calm compared to the violence he remembered. Three of his brothers were cut down over the desperate disputes of hungry folk. The same squabble that cost him two fingers and his wistful sense of humor. The space that once was home to his laughter remained dark when it abandoned him. But it was not empty. Naphan filled it with hard realizations. Truths about the fragility of tribes. How their stability was never a measure of ethics or compassion, but proportional to size versus resources. And with the death of his father, he and his two remaining brothers learned what it really meant to protect one’s tribe. However, it was not the lessons he learned that kept that once chamber of laughter dark, but shame.

But these times now, as unyielding as they seem, are not filled with such phantoms. Kyrin only ever had to gut trout with his knife and Naphan would see to it that it remained so. The fishing was difficult enough these days and would only get more difficult despite the supposed ‘Stabilization’, as it was called. A proud dad and master angler, Naphan never had time to study and never learned the term ‘Euphemism’. But he knew horse dung when he heard it.

“Stabilization, Gaww!” he muttered, drawing a quizzical glance from Kyrin, who had been struggling to retie his lead in the failing light. “Peoples are like fishes son. They do fine when there’s a lot of everything else around. Why do you think there are only Pond Trout left in the pools?”

“Because there wasn’t enough food for all the other kinds of fish?” Kyrin had already begun to accept that he wasn’t going to manage the retie. Even a child can sense when they are beaten by circumstances. Perhaps better than adults can. Cold fingers and a setting sun would demand a kind of muscle memory he hadn’t yet developed to finish his task.

“True,” said, Naphan, “But why did the Pond Trout survive? Why not the gillies or the greenfins?”

He hardly expected a real answer. Kyrin had never seen any other fish besides those awful bulky trout, much less tasted one. His grandfather would make this pan-fried greenfin that could cure any sadness. The right balance of spring onion and tubers over herb-buttered long rice. Naphan often thought that the disappearance of that dish coincided too suspiciously with the growth of despondency in the Green Vale. Gilly stew with purple carrots and lemongrass was a close second that also disappeared and took the fall harvest celebrations with it.

No wonder times seem grim. He thought to himself, almost out loud. All that was left in the shrinking ponds were those damn trout. They tasted exactly how they looked, grumpy.

“I don’t know pop. Why?”

“Because they aren’t good eating. Fishing folk never used to bother with them at all. Tough to clean, more bone than meat. They have yet to grow an herb that beats back their taste. It took a long time and a lot of hunger before we even began to try and eat them.”

“That’s dumb. Food is food. That’s what you always said.”

“That’s how I know. Things are different when there isn’t enough of what you are used to. The trout taught us that. Just like they used to teach us where to set our lines.”

Both had quietly begun to pack up their gear. Naphan acknowledged his son’s difficulty, but rather than force him to practice, he shifted to paternal lecturing to salvage some use of their remaining time before returning home.

“How did trout teach you where to fish?” Kyrin was nearly finished packing his lures and rod.

“Like, I said, Peoples are like fishes, they do fine when there’s a lot of everything else around. Gillies and Greenfins were stronger swimmers. They could get to food quicker than the trout. The trout do better when there are less of them to eat their food. If one pond had too many trout, a good fisherman would know there wouldn’t be a good catch there.”

“The trout told you where better fish were? That’s why they are all that’s left?”

“That and nobody wanted to eat them anyway. They used to be called peasant trout. Once we all became peasants….” Naphan stopped himself. An instinctual line in the sand he learned to draw when speaking to his children. Allow enough of that darkness in him to help them see, but not enough to infect them with his cynicism. To their eyes, however, their father just simply wandered into his head every so often, and each had a story or two about how they learned to just leave him be until he returned.

“Time we started home boy, Your mother’s already worried, I’m sure.”

No response. Kyrin’s gaze was fixed upon the pond. His eyes growing wide. For a second, Naphan thought his son was learning to keep his internal monologue buttoned up as he had. What a small favor that would be. Getting him to be quiet and focus on his line and rod had been more of a challenge than he thought it should. Maybe he just let it slide out of gratitude that he never had to teach his boy to hold his breath as raiding parties passed by. But this was not that. He wasn’t lost in his thought. He was looking at something. Something unsettling.

In one fluid, well-integrated motion, especially for a man with eight fingers, Naphan gently put his basket, net and rod down on the dried grass at the pools edge. A lifetime of handling these tools made them so much a part of his outfit, he felt off-balance without them. He rested them, perfectly balanced without even a glance as he turned his eyes from his son outward to the pool.

It was barely noticeable at first. The roiling. Subtle enough to be mistaken for errant ripples in the moonlight. But it grew quickly once both had set their gaze on it. And then, all at once, it was audible, like the grumbling one hears in a pot just before it simmers. The roils gave way to bubbles and pops as the noise became less muffled.

Both Kyrin and Naphan took reflexive steps backwards, both grabbing their gear as they did. Had the unfolding scene on the water not been so disturbing, Naphan might have been proud that his boy thought to grab his rod and tackle. Instead, his instincts gave no room for pride, but only protection as he took Kyrin by the arm and pulled him along as they continued to back away from the tumult in the pond. By the time they turned to run, it was almost deafening. They could feel wet heat at their backs as steam pushed at them. A brutal fog rolling over the Steel-glass hardpan. Fuming and threatening to overtake their breathing.

There is a point in any intense situation where the flight response demonstrates its utility. Fright defeats wonder when the body must do the work of the mind. Shock is good for pain management, but not for safety. That is the province of instinct. The first intelligence. The knowing that existed prior to contemplation and awareness. The memory of the flesh That place in the ancient mind that guides without speaking or seeing. That guide that relies on the imprints on the body as it travels in this life.

Naphan would find no pride in his boasting about finding the way home in the dark. No gratitude for the lifetime that carved that path into his legs. At least, not until they were back in the hut. When the need for flight subsides and the awe abates. Then the mind can reassert. Then the questions it requires to regain control will come. In this case, the same questions echoed in the eyes of a fisherman’s son, still panting. Shaking. Scaring the hell out of his mother.

What in the Old Serpent’s Belly was that?

________________________________

An otherwise clear night: still Matia’s view of things was nevertheless, somewhat obscured. The constellations were bright enough and the stories long ago constructed around them equally so in her mind. Even the day’s lessons on soil agronomy and distribution logistics she taught still held firm in her memory. The comings and goings. The big and small talk. Everything that runs through an unremarkable cycle from morning to evening was still in attendance as she considered the kind of person she had been today. As she considered how she might be better tomorrow.

Of all the lessons she tried to imbue into the fresh and hopefully moldable minds, it was this practice; this nightly meditation of hers she believed to be most invaluable. Moreso than earning the rank and robes of a Witness. Moreso that earning the knowledge and skill to maintain the forges or structure the rationing of dwindling resources. Even moreso than mastering the flow of residual energy left in the steel-glass by the Old Serpents. Moreso than all of this, was the simple question asked in earnest of one’s mirror, “Was I a good person today?”

Matia noted internally that any answer to this question that wasn’t complicated probably lacked honesty. But this fog over her mind was not difficulty in answering. Nor was it any type of exhaustion or specific stress she could identify. Nothing overt or subtly peculiar in her interactions. The initiates were surprisingly well-mannered today--even with their anxieties and excitements of the upcoming presentation to the Apostates and their possible ascension if they did well. The orphans were well-tended and did their work without much hassling from the Initiates. Even her conversations with the other Witnesses were less contentious than usual. All of this amounted to the entire Tower focused on the presentations that would begin with the arrival of the sun over the Rim in a few hours. So why this veil over her thoughts? Why the slight but significant wavering in focus?

She briefly likened the sensation to a failed attempt at Temple bonding in her youth. The inability to focus one’s consciousness properly while wearing the tempula ring causes a similar haze. As if everything was a few hairs of its normal center. Not a complete confusion. Everything just has to be re-oriented slightly before understanding. An extra blink or breath to get a hold on the present. At the time of her fourth failed attempt at this, Matia had likened the experience to being either a split-second ahead or behind the present moment. She would be shocked to learn later on that some of her fellow initiates did this intentionally for entertainment. Even some of the wealthier citizens of the Caldera spent considerable resources procuring or quietly commissioning a tempula ring, purely for the novelty of it.

As she thought on it, the physical sensations where not altogether the same. A fact which gave her hope of avoiding the headaches she also remembered from following what ever this feeling was. In fact, the real similarity was not in the accompanying wooziness at all, but the noetic quality of it all. Simultaneously acknowledging that there is something to be perceived and the recognition that it cannot be. Not yet. The tingle of anticipation peppered with the reality of its unknowable source.

“Something is coming,” she whispered to the stars she had been so absent-minded about gazing at.

Immediately, Matia dismissed the notion. No stranger to intuiting things or having visions, she assumed this to be some kind of holdover from yesterday’s temple bonding in the forbidden apse. Having long since mastered using the ring to elevate her studies and commune with the Marrows more directly, this could easily be explained by some kind of energetic residue from overuse. Perhaps she left herself a little too open and allowed some of the initiates’’ eager foretastings to take up space in her awareness.

Perhaps it was her own yearning for the next step. Too many spare nights in the apse and with the scrolls. Too much esoteric exploration at the expense of rest and meditation. But she was so close. So close to finding whatever is hiding in the hollows the of Old Serpents’ bones. Whatever they buried beneath their inscriptions inside the cavities of their skeletons. Something the words and symbols that adorned the outside could only ever fail to represent. And it was right there. Just past the precipice Matia kept coming to each night she pushed her awareness outside her mind and into them. Right there.

Yes, this was it, this was the source of her present psychic jitters. The fuzziness. She needed to take a break from the rings and come back to the right here and now for a bit. Ease back on her searching in the deep mysteries. But how? How does one just slow down when everything inside them is urging them forward?

“Your focus is not yours alone,” she muttered again to the night as her eyes drifted down to the Green Vale below, the homes and buildings of River Crest at the foot of the Grand Steel-Glass Stairs.

This realization, as it often did, shook Matia from deeper contemplation. One of the oldest, simplest, yet still most opaque aphorisms from the Marrows. Commonly understood to mean that everyone is connected by their experience of this world. That one’s attention and intention help shape that world, individually and collectively. Amid the litany of discourses written over the generations on this, Witness Matia came to believe that the implication contained within was a simple one and the bedrock of her nightly meditation.

If we are generating and experiencing this plane together, then we are responsible for being the best person we can be for everyone’s sake. Hence the question she asked herself as each day wound down. But tonight, the answer was in flux, now that her contemplation had shifted from whether or not she was a good person, to whether or not she was too obsessed with communing with the Marrows of the Mountain.

“I will be better,” she concluded. “And I shall start by being more present at the presentations tomorrow morning.”

That affirmation offered a small comfort and with it, a dissipation of the uneasiness around the sensation that led to the line of thinking in the first place. Perhaps it was all the passing flutter of an overstretched mind. A bit of wildberry tea was called for. She momentarily contemplated for a moment that if she had finally regained the calmness of mind to consider making the tea, it’s effects would be redundant. Immediately after this thought, the recognition that she was framing a cup of tea as a psychological paradox suggested it was still the right move. Besides which, the act of properly brewing wildberry was an easy enough exercise in focus to help her regain her center.

Turning to a small, ornate, lacquered end table, just behind her off the balcony, Matia noted the ripple of the sheer curtain between herself and the cracked, crimson streaked steel-glass pot and cups that sat atop it. A beautiful tea service set. A gift at her ordination meant as a prod from High Witness Augen. Learning to connect with the dark red swirls in the glass in order to slowly, evenly heat the water within was easy enough for any Apostate. But the gag was in the forging of the pot. A hidden line of crimson under the black of the handle meant if the user couldn’t maintain focus on all of the red steel-glass with precision, the heat would find its way to anyone foolish enough to pick it up. The crack near the bottom and spiderwebbing around the curve of the pot came from Matia’s first use of the pot, as did the small wry smile whenever she recalled dropping it. An unpleasant and necessary reminder to keep some of her focus on that which could not be readily seen. A final lesson from Augen, after earning her status as the only woman to ever become a witness. But the fond, if not mildly painful memory and its accompanying smile faded at the sight of the almost ethereal silk gently swaying. There was no wind this night.

And then the sound. Rumbling, almost a hum, she thought, before it reverberated off the steep granite walls of the Caldera rim. It was building. Building quickly. Louder and louder even in the brief moment it took her to turn and scan the Vale below for its source. Instinctually, Matia took out a small blue circle of steel-glass and gently held it to the center of her forehead.

Within a moment of concentration that belied years of practice and no more than a single deep breath, the steel-glass affixed itself to her and began to glow faintly. Matia’s eyes flung open and the subtle light from the circle retracted as if into her mind and found its way out again through her eyes. In only seconds, she scanned the vale floor in its entirety and could better sense the disturbance.

Focusing on a small nearly dry pond on the southeastern edge of Hardpan, her minds eye helped magnify her vision, and she saw the boiling water and a two panicked fishermen turning to run from it. Immediately she peered even closer, tracking them as they fled across the dry packed earth towards River Crest. It was Kyrin and Naphan!

At this close an attenuation to them, Matia could feel their pounding hearts and footfalls, both shaking her own body. Any closer and she might very well be overtaken by the fear radiating off of them. Her hands gripped tight to the railing of her balcony as the internal shaking began to escape in shivers throughout her body.

“Run!”

She was only partially aware of how loud she shouted. Enough to disturb the adjacent residents of the tower, but hardly anything anyone below would hear. Except, for the two desperate ones she directed her plea towards. And she could hear her own voice in their ears. She had to turn her focus away. What were they running from? What is that noise?

When in a state of hyper-focus while using a sight stone, all other steel-glass has a shimmer about it. If one is casually scanning the Green Vale floor at night, it would appear to me a mirror of the night sky. Or at least it should. It was not until Matia regained a measure of distanced control over her senses that she noticed it. The whole valley was dark. No flickers from the deposits in earth. No vibrant sparks or streams from the ever-running forges or the lantern posts that sparsely dotted the streets of any of the five towns. Nothing. Nothing beyond the concentrated light coming off a boiling, nearly depleted fishing hole.

It was as if all the ambient energy in the whole caldera was being siphoned to that shallow dot in the landscape. The boiling intensified as did its emanating light. Pure, white light pulsing its way out from the water’s agitation. Again, the trembling in her body returned, but it was not panic as it was with Naphan and Kyrin. It felt like struggle. Like yearning. A determined emergence. She could feel intention under the swell of energy. So engrossed in this, she didn’t notice how her breathing had begun to rise and fall in rhythm with the pulsing of the energy gathering below, nor had she noticed herself begin to float several inches off the balcony’s floor.

Even more astounding to Rayen than the levitation was that fact that Matia hadn’t seen him enter or felt him lunge to grab her feet beneath her robe for fear that she might float over the railing. He knew she was in deep with her sight stone. He had seen her in stout meditation before and oblivious to the world around her. But this… this looked further out on the serpent’s wing than even she dared travel. But his concern was short lived. As he made contact with his master’s feet and sought to anchor her, his concern rapidly morphed into something else altogether. Terror.

He immediately felt the overwhelming pulse that had conquered Matia’s external awareness. The warmth and tingle in his eyes as his vision grew exponentially more acute. The beam of light beating its way upward from the ground far below might as well have been right next to him. So jarring was this, Rayen couldn’t even think of anything else, not of the impossibility of using a sight-stone vicariously through someone else, nor the very real possibility of banishment for doing so, and certainly not the fact that he too was beginning to levitate.

Higher they began to rise, just at the pillar of white they perceived thrummed louder and grew taller, nearly at ordinary eye level with them. Then, suddenly, it retracted. Nearly invisible under the still boiling water’s surface. For a brief moment, Matia’s senses returned to her surroundings, and she felt the boy’s hands about her leg, gripping it as she had the balcony’s rail just moments ago. They were still levitating but stable and when she looked down, she could see, just for a second, the scared and distant look in Rayen’s eyes.

With more time, she might have said something or tried to sever the connection safely. She might even have had the presence of mind to realize that such a connection wasn’t possible. But the noise from the boiling pond was so loud, and its echoes bouncing back and forth across the rim compounded the volume. She could feel the swell of energy still. It had not retreated but compacted and again she could feel the pressure. So could Rayen, she knew only as his grip on her tightened.

The intention buried inside the pulsing returned. The seeming recoil was merely a gathering of strength for a final push. She knew it was coming. She knew as it was coming, but not enough in advance to cry out or brace herself. When the pool erupted, the release severed her connection, forcing her awareness back into her body just in time to feel herself and the passenger holding her ankle being thrown off the balcony and into her chambers.

The final roar of the pond’s eruption was so loud and so long that it met its own echo off the caldera walls before disappearing into the night. Before she lost consciousness, Matai saw three things. One, that, Rayen had been thrown free of her and thankfully landed on a small, padded armchair, now toppled over. Two, the warm and wet trickle down her cheek that suggested she struck her head on the stone floor. And three, a new crack in her tea pot. She must have brushed off the table when she was airborne, now in pieces on the floor not far from Rayen.

~Figures,~ she said to herself, ~Your Focus is not your own.~

And then, blackness.