The open field was dark and somber, lit only by the feeble light of the moon. A harsh night-bird screeched far off, making me jump. It startled me so strongly that I forgot what I was searching for.
I frowned as a sick feeling tried to crawl down my throat. Time was running away from me, slipping backward and sideways as I swam against the vicious force of its tide. The darkness of the night was smothering me in hot blankets and beating at my eyes.
Then I saw the Sun.
She rose from the reeds, wide swaths of light piercing the shadows like a glowing mane of blazing fury. She was made of gold, but her eyes were the sapphire color of a mourner's tears. The Sun stood above the thick, waving landscape as glorious as the Dawn itself. She approached slowly, heat and light throwing away the night.
She held out a hand to help me stand – I had not known I crumbled before her.
She opened her golden mouth to speak.
"Get up." Her voice was coarse and old. I blinked, hesitating to take her hand."I said get up, idiot."
I opened my eyes to find Genkai standing next to my head.
I was in bed.
In the Temple.
"Ya tozhe rada Vas videt," I muttered.
"Come on," she summoned. "You have five minutes."
She left without further ceremony or delay, barely bothering to close the door to my little guest room. It didn't take me five minutes – I was a low-maintenance person, and it's not like I had a ton of fashionable options. I pulled snarls out of my hair – how much can one person toss and turn in their sleep? The coarse brush tugged unpleasantly at my scalp, but it helped to wake me up a little more.
"Where are we going?" I asked her as I caught up, slipping on my shoes as we exited the Temple in quite a hurry. The Shuttle was swiftly cloaked beneath my sweater, humming good morning against my skin.
"I have to take care of something in Spirit World and I'm not stupid enough to leave you here alone. I'm sure I'd come back to a smoking hole in the ground."
I repeated it under my breath. Spirit World. "And… how do we get there?" I asked hesitantly. "A plane?"
I didn't have to see her face to know that she was rolling her eyes at me. "Could you have asked a more idiotic question? We're going through a portal – which you won't be able to see, so this is going to be extremely unpleasant for you." She glanced back at me as she slowed her pace. We were approaching the far side of the Temple, where trees sometimes brushed gently against the rooftop. "I would recommend closing your eyes, and just following instructions."
I nodded, biting back what was probably another stupid question. Genkai smirked, and directed me to grasp her shoulder. "Close your eyes."
It was unpleasantly disorienting to walk, trusting that Genkai wouldn't let me walk into a tree just for laughs. She seemed to take it seriously – or she was strapped for time – because I think we traveled in a fairly straight line after turning the corner.
I could hear a rushing of air, and a high-pitched whine like some giant mosquito flying towards me. "…Genkai?" I asked, my voice trembling more than I would care to admit.
"Stay calm," she ordered, and the steadiness of her voice was a bare comfort. 'It's about to get a lot worse."
She wasn't wrong.
A sudden feeling of vertigo overcame me after a command to "step up," and my inner ear kindly informed me that my balanced had been completely fucked up. The rushing and whining sounds had grown so loud I thought I could feel them in my chest.
"Walk, Novak," came Genkai's steady voice.
I complied, and each step brought me further from the rushing, whining, disorienting feeling. Without a reference, my body was still managing to acclimate step by step. I felt nauseated, but Genkai didn't snap at me as I moved slowly, so I figured she understood.
"How much further?" I asked once I was able to hear my thoughts again.
"We're about halfway there."
"Oh, good, I-" interruption in the form of a resounding screech rending both the air and my brain in half. I gasped, clutching at my ear with my good hand and planting my stump as best I could over the other. It also had the added, unfortunate, effect of losing my grip on Genkai.
Thankfully, Genkai had much more experience with… whatever that was, and grabbed hold of my sleeve. I think she yelled something but I couldn't hear her over the screaming. My body shut down, trying to shut it out. The Shuttle was on fire against my skin, blazing with a message I couldn't hear over an endlessly tortured cry.
I felt a buzzing sensation on my skin, under my sweater – the Shuttle was shaking, buzzing. I pulled at the cord around my neck, trying to pull it out from under my baggy clothes. I kept missing, pulling instead at the edges of my sweater. "Stop it!" I yelled at the Shuttle.
I needed to get it off of me. I needed to throw the Shuttle into the abyss and let the screaming follow it. I needed to escape.
"Breathe, Novak!" Genkai was shouting at me, her hands suddenly covering my grasping fingers.
"Get it off of me!" I was gasping, unable to catch my breath and hyperventilating.
Genkai grasped me firmly above the wrist and pulled, hard. I stumbled forward, eyes blinking open as an autonomic reaction to the movement. I clamped them shut again as another wave of screaming washed over me – more powerful and agonizing than before. It was only a moment, but I remember what it looked like. It was… an abyss. Darkness, with thready mist leading tantalizingly far into the distance.
I stumbled as a third wave washed over me – it was Death, I was certain. Someone was calling for Death. Just before I was pulled down and out of that hellish landscape, the screaming stopped.
And it was quiet.
I lay face-down on a hard surface, catching my breath. Genkai hadn't bothered trying to catch me when I stumbled out of the portal and I was a little grateful. I wanted cold, hard surfaces, and silence.
"Are you still alive, Novak?" the old Master asked. "If you're going to die, here's as good a place as any." She snorted at her own joke, "Your soul wouldn't have far to travel."
"Nu naher," I muttered into the ground. "How – what – is it always like that?!"
Genkai's feet crunched into the stone beside me as she took a step to the side. "Generally live humans don't travel to Spirit World. I'm guessing your presence was not appreciated."
"I mean the screaming –what was screaming?" I rolled over onto my side, staring the process of standing.
Genkai stood, arms clasped behind her back, concern hidden far, far behind a cold expression. "You were the only one screaming, Novak."
"I'm not crazy." I sighed deeply and pushed myself upwards, bracing my forearms on the… "This is not seriously a yellow brick road."
I looked up and around as I stood and in nearly an instant regretted it completely. The mountains I was used to should not have been packed that tightly together, and they most certainly shouldn't be that shade of pink. Neither should the sky have been pink either.
"Sure; you're not crazy. Close your mouth before they think you're an imbecile," Genkai chided, and I closed my mouth with a click of teeth.
Further inquiry was interrupted by a fast-approaching figure. "Master Genkai, so good to see you again!"
He was blue.
He had a little white horn on his balding head.
He was blue.
My brain struggled to compute and came up with nothing better than a confused mental shrug. Does not compute. Error 404: reference page not found.
Genkai provided no introductions, "No time for pleasantries, Jorge. I need to see Mishka."
He paled to a lighter shade of blue, and glanced at me. "She can't come down with you." He looked at me a little longer. "You're not dead! What are you doing here?!" He seemed quite distressed that I wasn't dead. I was almost insulted.
"She can go anywhere she damn well pleases," Genkai interrupted. "This is the Tkadlec."
I wasn't familiar with the power of my title before that moment, but Jorge's reaction gave me a good indication. The Ogre paled to a faint baby blue, then a deep purple blush. He bowed deeply, repeatedly. "My apologies! It's an honor to meet you!"
"Er, thank you," I replied, bowing in return.
"Oh stop it. She'll stay above while I'm with the prisoner. Take her to see her family's records or something." The Ogre hesitated a moment too long – waiting for formality's sake in case Genkai had a further comment – and Genkai snapped a harsh word. "I don't have all day!" Genkai barked, and the Ogre jumped to comply.
"Of course, Master Genkai!" Jorge bowed to me a few times. "Follow me, if you please, Tkadlec. I'll leave you in excellent hands."
"Excellent hands" it turned out, was a yellow ogre. There were ogres everywhere. I wondered for several long moments about what that meant for my vision of an afterlife. The ogre was too skittish to even introduce themselves, so I didn't pester them by asking.
The insides of Spirit World's.. palace? Temple? Office building? Office. The insides of Spirit World's Office were not nearly as impressive to me as the pink landscape outside, but I still got a crick in my neck from attempting to look in every direction at once. Yellow didn't seem to notice, and if he had I'm sure he wouldn't have said anything.
I was led to a very dusty room with a row of bookshelves that were crammed to bursting with parchment in various states of decay. I leaned around the edge, my eyes following a line of bookshelves back and back and back and… I got dizzy and stopped staring.
I returned to a large table that was next to the door and sat down, trying to avoid yet another bout of Vertigo. My yellow ogre friend jogged past me down the line of infinite bookshelves, returning swiftly with a heavy-looking piece of parchment that had been tightly rolled. The yellow ogre unrolled the scroll gently and reverently out across the table.
Before I had the time to lean over and examine it too closely, the ogre and gone and was already returning from the stacks with a handful of loose papers and a tightly rolled, sealed scroll. I looked closer as the roll loosened a little on the table – it had been sealed, once, but someone had pried the wax drippings up from the surface. They dangled loosely at the end of the twine wrapping.
"T-Tkadlec, p-please don't hesitate to ask if any- if you need anything else." he stammered, bowing deeply.
"Thank you," I replied, and the ogre fled from the room in an instant.
The silence was heavy.
I reached for the once-sealed scroll and pulled at the end as gently as I was able. I was a little surprised to see an elegant Japanese script. What were you expecting – Czech? I laughed at my own ignorance in my head,
It took me a long moment to translate in my head – "The Tale of the Line of Dusana". I set the scroll down. I didn't need to struggle to read that story – I knew it by heart.
My grandmother's voice drifted through my memory. "It is time you learn our family's history." I could hear her shuffle across bare stone floors; her slippers making a familiar shuff-shuff in the dusty air. "In a time before recorded years, our great ancestor was a weaver in a village in a field long lost to time, where weaving began. She was the greatest and most beautiful of weavers, and her works were prized above all others for their quality and strength."
My grandmother withdrew from her pocket a tiny bronze shuttle, no wider than the span of her hand. "She was given this shuttle by a man who deeply treasured her. He spent most of his youth trying to make it for her. Shuttles were usually made of wood, but he wanted to give her a gift to last an eternity – like his love for her."
She cleared her throat before speaking to ensure she was heard. "Dusana was her name – remember that name, June." I could hear the old familiar smile in her voice – a fondness for an ancestor that transcended time and space. "They were paired – this was before real 'marriage', you understand – and Dusana used the shuttle in all of her weavings. She found that when she weaved with the shuttle, she could wish good things into the material, and they gave those who received them good luck, or fortune, or health. Dusana started to do this with all her weavings, and her skill and strength with the gift grew."
I remembered the sweeping arc of her arm as she dove further into the story. "One morning, when Dusana lifted her shuttle to weave, before she could touch the threads at her hand-loom she caught a glimpse of the weavings of the World – the threads of spirit and energy that bind the world together in a great tapestry of infinite complexity and grace."
She had sighed, wistfully. By then, she had started to lose her connection to the family gift. "Dusana was the first in a long line of Tkadlec women. Our line stretches back for millennia, June. The shuttle passes from mother to the first daughter, as she is taught to Weave the World."
"In this time, the world was dangerous; demons and spectres lingered at every turn. The King of all Souls approached her in the twilight of one Summer's evening and asked for her help in weaving a barrier between the Worlds. He could no longer stand to see his human children suffer so. At first, Dusana refused." My grandmother would always pause there to let me gasp in horror before continuing.
"Dusana would not leave her newborn daughter, for fear of what could happen in her absence. The King of Souls declared he would wait by the river's edge until Moonrise, in the event that she changed her mind." By that point, I was always bouncing up and down in my seat. Grandmother would gather the blanket closer. "That night, Dusana dreamt of a world poisoned by fear and woke shortly before moonrise knowing she would need to Weave the World. She struck out into the cool night, wrapped in her best-woven shawl, and met the King of Souls at the river."
My grandmother would never tell me the part about the actual weaving – that is part of training, that comes later – but would fix me with her no-nonsense stare. "You will carry on our line; bear a daughter, and she will carry it after you. It is a sacred duty."
"Why not a son?" I had hoped that I might have a sibling who could take that awful responsibility, but I was an only child.
My grandmother had only shrugged. "The shuttle goes untouched by the hands of fathers and sons. It has always been so."
I set the story scroll aside and resisted the urge to rip it to pieces. It would do no good – she was long, long dead. Dusana, I thought. Dusana, did you know?
I stood from my seat and walked around the huge table to look at the very end of the huge scroll Yellow had rolled out. At the top – the first text ever written on the scroll – it said Tkadlec.
Me.
My family.
The history of our curse.
All the way at the crunchiest and most ancient end I could very faintly read a name: Dusana. No family name; she was simple Dusana.
Ink one iota darker, a branch led to the side for a sibling, and I could just barely read it. Dusek. He had a marriage line, Svetla. But it looked like it ended – no children.
Dusana and her partner – Arnost – had a conjoined line that led forward in time to their daughter – Lada – and her daughter after that was darker still, as the record grew younger and younger.
I traced the line with a hovering finger – down through history, to me. Tkadlecs appeared to have other children, and I enjoyed following a few lines of distant cousins and aunts. A few of the names I even recognized as the more recent family members my mother had appealed to when I was so very young. She has the Weaver's Hands, she had insisted.
How right she was.
I traced the line back through history. From me, marked as living, to my mother, living, to my grandmother, deceased (14h7d2m56y). Her entire life had been summed up in a neat sequence of numbers and letters. Fifty-six years, two months, seven days, and fourteen hours.
I followed the line with a delicately hovering finger, seeing the effects of modern medicine as lifespans grew shorter and shorter the further back I went. There was a great-great-grandmother (16h4d10m39y), and her grandmother before her (7h26d2m32y), and back and back and back to Dusana, deceased (1h19d11m23y).
Dusana had lived until she was twenty-three years old, almost twenty-four. A quick glance down the Line confirmed that Tkadlec women now lived about twice as long with the help of modern medicine. But nothing can reverse the toll of the Shuttle, I thought. Those same distant aunts and cousins lived much longer than their Tkadlec siblings. It was also easy to see where the Shuttle skipped a generation – as it had done with my mother – that same extended lifespan visible in one who should have been cursed with our legacy.
I moved across the scroll to her sibling as something caught my eye. There was a smudge under Dusek – deceased (3h23d5m22y) – like someone had started to drawn a genealogical line for a child, and then watered down the ink to erase it. I leaned closer, squinting.
"Tkadlec?" The voice scared the living daylights out of me.
"Yes?" I replied, my head jerking up to put distance between me and the scroll. My cheeks burned as though I had been caught misbehaving.
Yellow stood barely half in the doorway, his expression fearful. The ogre wrung his hands. "Master Genkai is asking for you in the Tombs."
"Leave this out for me, would you? I'll be right back." I pointed down at the scroll and accompanying documents.
He nodded and bowed. "Of course, Tkadlec."
The Tombs were appropriately named – a steep descent down slightly damp stone stairs led into the dark heart of Spirit World. I grasped for a handrail but found none – Spirit World seemed to ignore basic safety rules, it seemed.
I braced my hand against the wall – also damp, but it was better than tripping – and tried to will my eyes to adjust faster to the gloom. The Shuttle warmed against my skin; I could help, it meant. Fuck that, I thought.
It wasn't hard to find Genkai – whatever cell had been her goal was apparently just at the bottom of the stairs. I wondered if that meant the prisoner was high security due to proximity to the guard station at the top of the stairs, or if she was low security because she was closer to the exit.
"You called for me?" I asked, announcing my presence.
"Could you compel her to talk?" Genkai stood before the dark cell, staring at it intently. There weren't any bars – it looked more like an alcove in the wall. My hairs stood on end on my arms, like a heavy thunderstorm was approaching.
I blinked, glancing into the alcove a little harder. There was a yellow-green ogre sitting in the alcove's shrouded darkness, staring off into space. He was drooling a little. I was pretty sure it wasn't female, so Genkai's question confused me. "I could probably make someone speak. Who are we talking about?"
Genkai shot me a glare. "Her, stupid." She jerked her head into the dark space.
I stood right next to her, following the motion of her head. "The… the ogre?"
Genkai frowned at me and seemed to decide I wasn't trying to be funny. Her gaze followed mine, seeming to fix on an empty space not quite where I was looking.
She let out a harsh battle cry, thrusting her arms forward in a sudden wrists-together and palms-forward move, and the tingling feeling on my arms evaporated as the wall in the alcove suddenly cracked inwards, sending the ogre tumbling to the ground. I jumped backward as dust flew everywhere.
Genkai's vision focused on the dazed ogre. "Oh, fuck."
A/N: Looooots of really great stuff here, folks. A little history of the Tkadlec lineage, a little intrigue, ya know.
Many thanks to my reviewers: Redpanda923, FireDancerNix, and Sanguinary Tide!
PLEASE REVIEW!
