Featherkisser
6
Easa R'ha lit the end of the ceeol stick and let it rest into a full burn. He flicked off the plasm-tip and laid it on the prayer matt beside him, waiting, as a tiny, green flame no bigger than his thumbprint began to dance on the top of the little spire.
The pleasant scent of the herb began to waft past his snout. It was fresh, and crisp, like the air of the Sulubann Mountains where the ceeol plant was endemic to. Very quicky, it filled the majority of the chamber, blending with the deathly silence in perfect synchronicity.
Easa exhaled very slowly and let his eyes shut as he linked with the booming din of the temple. A bird of prey cried somewhere over the distant peaks, and its song echoed down several of the garden tributaries lining the meditation chamber's exterior. Caught in beams of shimmering, blue light from Ulasa's moon above, Easa did not even appear to have heard the slight disruption.
The open, stone skylight allowed the incense bowl to catch the moon's silvery tears in its center. The ceeol stick, floating in the small bit of water erected itself silently for his judgment. Easa bent on his backward knees, until his forehead was almost touching the little flame. He began to murmur softly through his mandibles, finding a tranquil sort of brotherhood with the very darkness and the moonlight enveloping him.
The bowl was placed at the foot of a large shrine forged from silvery metal. Vines overgrow the shining arms of a Sangheilian warrior, posed as if striding from a recent victory, or towards a fresh fight. Skirted armor descended down his torso and hips. His arms were bare and scripted with the traditional tattoos ritualistically engraved in the flesh of all able-bodied men in his clan when they reached war-age. Looking at the statue made his limbs itch, as every single inch from his wrists to the tops of his collar bones was riddled with round reams of text depicting the clan's history and his childhood rearing. His father's crest had been ritualistically scarred across the hunched flat of his back, and his mother's across his stomach. Easa was the prime of what every R'ha warrior strove to ultimately be.
He was over eight feet tall, streamlined with impeccable muscles that wound beneath his gray, scaly skin like enwrapped chords of titanium, and he was a living book. His body could be read like the history scrolls kept in the Chambers of the Ancients. He had served in three major conflicts and was tactically brilliant. One day, when his own sons grew to be of war-age, his crest would be marked upon their backs too. They would inherit his lineage, and he had no doubt that they each would go on to do extraordinary things for the clan.
"Mur'rootha R'ha." He finished a cant in a hoarse whisper, leaning back and staring for a moment at the large champion's statue overlooking the temple's interior. The statue of Muroostho R'haee, the settler of Ulasa, their homeworld.
"It is on my watch that this transgression dishonors you, lord." Easa mumbled, his eyes slowly trailing down the statue's legs, until they fell on the little green flame of the ceeol stick in the water bowl between his knees. "Let my solitude here act as testament to the disservice I have wrought. Blood will drown out the offense."
Easa's robes swept from under him as he stood. He tapped his two fingers against his tongue, and pinched the ceeol's flame to a swift demise before striding from the temple.
It was only in tradition for a lord to undergo the Stance of Balance in times of failure. Easa's war record may have screamed of the opposite of such doings, but the news as of late had shaken him.
Whenever it was so that the dead may be desecrated, it could be taken as nothing more than bad omen.
{👾}
Easa crossed the beautiful flower gardens surrounding the temple's grassy hillside home. Through the moonlight alone could he see the spanning view of rice paddies extending far out into the Ulasaian countryside, intermittently speckled with cottages, barns and earth-homes, their windows like with dancing, green firelight.
His sandal-wears were quiet as they tapped down the stone steps. He was staring at his heels and clenched at his brow in the wake of his visit to the shrine.
In truth, Easa R'ha was exhausted. The hour was much unpleasant, and his fatigue was only held at bay by the immense floods of dreadful anger welling in his gut.
That statue was but a scion to what was going on two star systems away to the galactic north, not far from the R'ha agriworld of Baramuse. The tombs far beneath the surface of the desert world known to his people as the Darken Cleft had been breached, and now, the very burial transport of Teha R'ha- an elder who had recently passed through his Night of Death –was communicating reports of engaging hostile ground and air assets.
The ranks of this desecrating faction were reportedly staffed by Kig-yar and humans.
Easa R'ha had no specific qualms with the latter, but that did not mean it made them worthy to traverse the hallowed graves of his ancestors.
"Kaidon." One of the gate sentries was standing in the center of the path exiting the temple's grounds. The shorter Sangheili's tabard was kicking in the cool night wind as he bowed to his lord. "Preparations are complete."
"Is there more?" Easa's voice was a feral growl. Some had jokingly compared his throat to the guttural gruffness of the Jiralhanae.
"Lord Soyljuk, sir." The sentry stepped aside and revealed a second figure on the misty road. Easa's mandibles creaked into a slight grin as the hunched, massive form of Soyljuk closed the distance meekly, and bowed to his Kaidon.
"I'm coming with you." The old man croaked without even addressing his title. Easa laughed at him, loudly, making the sentry twitch.
"Of course you are." The Kaidon said. "But not while you're wearing that." He gestured to the robes and hood adorning the elder's massive body. Soyljuk grinned and clucked his mandibles in agreement.
"I knew you would not deny me this." He muttered.
"It would not be my place to." Easa waved the sentry off with a respectful nod, and fell into step with his old friend on the road. "You garnered a sentry for your passage through a few family farms?"
"They treat me like a wandering head of cattle at the Keep." Soyljuk huffed. "The younglings gather around my knees, asking for tales, and even advice, like I am their birth-uncle."
"Whelps can see what their eldest sometimes cannot." Easa wisely reminded, folding his claws behind his back. "If there is a light in the eyes of a true one of passion, children and potential wives are usually the first to see it. Generals see it usually too late for it to matter for them anymore."
"…Were you undergoing the Ritual of Balance? Inside the temple?" Soyljuk looked at him.
"Yes I was."
"But you have not sinned, Kaidon."
"But I have. Our dead are being rifled through as you and I speak. The R'ha have kept alive a Carakian tradition that even the fathers of Sangheilios herself have failed to maintain.
The rightful placement of those lost shedding their blood for their homeland. What shame have I brought upon the clan as being the first to let that divine perfection slip through my fingers?" Easa grumbled. "It is a mockery of everything we stand for. No less committed by the hands of lowly criminals."
"If humor would serve you," Soyljuk attempted a mandible grin. "Teha always did wish to meet his end taking retribution to our enemies. He can afford that now."
Easa half growled as he chuckled. He wasn't sure whether to find it funny or horrific.
The winding road ended in a large courtyard at the foot of the Keep of Aral. The spanning series of old stone spires loomed just beneath the chin of the moon to the north, blackened, highlighted at their edges with blades of blue and silver.
Ten Dromon-class Dropships were hovering over the courtyard, and warriors were filing into them in organized trios and pairs. The night sky whooshed audibly as a Tarasque heavy-fighter swept over the landing site and rose as a black dagger into the stars, stationing in orbit to escort the warband alongside the Immaculate Host, a Man-O-War waiting to deploy the brigade and bring retribution to the grave-robbers on Darken Cleft.
"I will erase this stain entirely." Easa stated as he and the elder passed through a few sentries who stood aside for them. Laborers rushed past every now and again carrying weapons, pieces of armor and pull-carriages. "I demand the trespassers be made as an example. We shall hang them from their ankles and gut them, decorating our forefather's tombs with their eternal vigils."
"May I remind you, Kaidon," Soyljuk risked. "you have not sinned."
"Don your mantle, elder." Easa dismissed, trudging towards one of the Dromons. "We will spill blood yet."
"Before you get onto that ship, Kaidon," The old Sangheili's voice etched through the night, making Easa slowly turn and study him. "Jeiel would not let me leave without telling you to go to her. Before our departure."
Easa's shoulders rose and fell, and his deepened sign likened itself to the hissing embers of a volcanic crater's depression.
"See your wife, sir." Soyljuk gave another of his mandible grins. "And I beg that of you. My niece is not one for being left behind."
{👾}
Most of the Keep was as still as a crypt. The comparison, unfortunately, roused Easa's temper.
Damn the Gods, many would have said. But Easa did not see much of a point or merit in that proclamation. He had not sacrificed his very skin to the pages of history just to undo his own teachings.
Potted flowers hung from squeaking chains along window sills. Oil-fed lanterns flickered in the dead of night, and candles were still burning in many studies and bedroom lofts. Tonight was a strange night, in that the inhabitants of the Keep were caught between a vital hour of sleep, and yet an entire detachment of able-bodied men was being sent into the stars.
Easa walked the crowded streets of his home alone. He spotted some of his own citizens, peering out of windows, gazing from cracked doorframes, their features highlighted green from their home's sconces. Each one of them whose eyes he met immediately planted their pupils to their own hooves. Men bowed, women lowered their necks, children stared with fascination at the towering warrior they had heard mentioned in the Common Rooms at the Keep's very heart. The latest descendent of their ruling caste. Even through the robes, could they see how powerful he was.
Easa was at least humble in that regard. He liked to remember that Jeiel had come to him not because of his own flaunting, but because he had worked long and hard to convince her of his own good intentions. It would never have happened if she wasn't the niece to his best friend, and one of the more respected elders of the state.
The sentries at the gates to the R'ha Spire let him through, and up the regally carpeted steps he trudged, through story after story of chambers lavished with tapestries, interior gardens and wide murals made from paint and colored cobble. Sangheilian anatomy had been captured by the ancient R'ha artisans in painful detail to make the spire's innards. There was not a statue here that did not suffer brisk contrast and fleshly realism.
To the quaint doors of the Royal Ward, and through there to the quiet expanse of the Kaidon's Chambers, the Library of Ak'Thoona, and finally, one last, wooden frame.
Easa paused before he entered his chambers. Inside, he could hear the crackle of torchlight, but he could feel the presence of another. She was like air in that room to him, living, breathing air. Pure, unlike so many of his men.
"Jeiel?" Easa nudged the door open and stood in the archway. His eyes met those of his wife, who was standing blankly over the Kaidon's desk, her eyes a blooded crimson to compete against his emerald green. "You summoned me."
"Would you have come here if I had not?" Jeiel stung him, despite the innocence in her raspy tone. The Sangheilian woman stepped forth, her evening, translucent robes clinging greedily to the curve of her form in the torchlit dark. She was radiant, even with the slight touch of weathering that aged her jawline and brow. Easa had to quell a plumage developing in his breast as he stepped into the room.
"The night is yet young, and for where I am going, I did not fear the propensity of losing a moment of time with you." He hummed. "I hunt rodents, my wife. Desecrating rodents who have spit upon our name. I will crush them and return to you."
"A battle is a battle." Jeiel crossed the distance between them, and Ease craned his saurian neck lower, allowing her to merge their foreheads. He was over a foot taller than her, his shoulders dwarfing hers. Jeiel was always peculiar in these situations. She ran her claws down his bulbous arms, reading the stories chiseled into his skin with her fingertips. "A husband may not come back, or a son may be lost."
"I will come back." He soothed, his mandibles pursing as he placed a delicate kiss upon her brow. "Mur'rootha R'ha, my wife. Our people's strength is with me."
"I am weary of your foe." Jeiel admitted, digging her fingers into his biceps. "What evil digs up the dead? I feel wrong about this. I heard the reports myself. You go against humans with formidable weaponry."
"Of limited number." He jeered. "Fear not, I say. This will be a scalpel's kill. A stab to a small and insignificant heart."
"…All I request is that you be careful." She sighed. "All I request is that you do not… you…"
Easa thundered a deep laugh and stroked her shoulders.
"You should not worry." He bobbed his snout at her. "Your lunatic uncle will be there to watch my back. No human could escape his sense of smell, much less a disgusting Kig-yar. I promise you, by tomorrow's morning, I shall bring you a polished, cleaned, human skull. One for our chambers. I will put it on my desk and present it to you as us'thaa, Jeiel; a second request of your hand."
"Easa~." Jeiel fluttered, pushing against his broad chest as she bit into her thumb. "It is too long into our lives to relive such times."
"It is never too long." He kissed her forehead again. "A human skull. I will bring you a human skull, my love."
{👾}