Part 2: "Beyond the end of all things"
There is something monstrous about a dimensionless world where nowhere was remote, where nothing was kept secret and there was no hidden knowledge and no walls that could not be conquered. No mind that could not be penetrated, no body left unbroken. Something that no rationality could overcome.
Such was the world during the Apocalypse, but men have forgotten, as men inevitably do, the horrors endured by their forefathers.
-o-
"Despair at last found the King, cradling a dead woman on his lap.
"The Avatar is dead!" the King cried, seated as he was on bloody, foamy mud. "The Avatar is dead!"
An unearthly roar hammered his ears and the King whirled, raising his hands against the titanic shadow that covered the sun. So abyssal was the darkness, so blinding, that it deadened the very light of the eyes.
Cries of dismay and terror rifled the air, then a pillar of golden fire washed over the him and the dead Avatar, overwhelming his army. For the soldiers, there was no time to scream. Teeth cracked in pain and heat, bodies tumbled like coals from a kicked fire. The King stood amid a field of smoking black husks, pyramidal, billowing gusts shielding him, staggering those still standing, waved the arms of those fallen.
The King rose and laid the dead Avatar on the ground, whispering words that held no more meaning, not during the Apocalypse:
"Turn yourself away from the world so that your heart might be broken no more..."
With the grace of a floating lily but the force of a toppled tower, the Shadow of War thundered to earth, her descent yanking dust and ash into mountainous veils, wings of smoke stretched out like unnatural cascades. The might and dread of War was gleaming in her eyes.
"War has tasted the Avatar's passing," she howled for the world to hear. "It is done!"
"Not while we still draw breath!" the King cried, surging with newfound courage.
Laughter, like the wheezing of a thousand moribund men. The King regarded the ghoulish woman and shook his head in disbelief. How far could some fall when despair and madness took the lead.
"You speak truth, wise King. So long as men live, war is never done."
The King found the heart to stand taller that before, facing such devastation. "No, child," he said. "Only so long as men are deceived."
Her laughter trailed off into a sigh, and into a scowl.
"Your kingdoms have been shattered like dashed pottery," she maliciously spat. "The rivers and lakes boiled to steam, forests turned to War-machines only to serve my Master. Will you not end this humiliation? Will you not bend the knee and bow the head if only for your people?"
"So that we die at his hand? So that we turn slaves, as you have become? Never!"
"Those who grovel before my Master shall find peace."
"And it is you who brings peace, Dark Emissary?"
The lights of her eyes flickered. A blink.
"I am not a God..."
The King jumped into a battle stance.
"Neither is your Master!"
A shriek from her lungs, as deep as the starry void and piercing as the wailing of a beast. A great scythe fell from the sky into her hands..."
...and Sarnai woke up gasping for sober air, the breaking of bones, cries of men, screaming still resounding through his soul. Yet another nightmare of the Apocalypse. He felt subtly transformed every morning, as though he'd been shown a needed, yet undesired, example of something profoundly inner. Insight, or perhaps confirmation, of things that he already knew. However, he also knew that insight was often snuffed by ordeal.
Lying awake in his bed, he dreaded going back to sleep. As they increased in frequency, the prospect of suffering the nightmares yet again seemed unbearable, traumatising. To see the Apocalypse with their eyes would have turned any man into a whimpering mess.
Sarnai began trembling, shaking with a horror he'd never before experienced. He begged into his pillow:
"Please, not the Apocalypse... Please let me die before... before..."
It would be unendurable! He hugged his shoulders and rocked in the blackness of his room, mumbling "no!" over and over again.
Beyond the walls of stone, men and women slumbered, dreaming of glory and fortune in war, and they knew nothing of what Sarnai feared. Fools who confused their play at war with War itself. For them, war was only battle and they could not comprehend such an atrocity.
"We are too weak..." realised Sarnai and for the first time in many years, he wept.
-o-
Beneath Si Wen town, in the arena known as the Dark Below:
"So," he said, carefully balancing his tone between many things, anger, hope maybe, sarcasm. Yes, mocking sarcasm was the very thing that defined him. "The great Mister Gold."
There was something strange with the boy, Javaid had decided, something in his tone and body movement, a certain aspect that betrayed a betrayer.
"What are you doing here?" he snapped.
He had sent Suli, his girlfriend, away and now stood with Javaid in the torchlight. At least Javaid stood, and he did not take a seat, which inexplicably irritated Farid more than his presence. Gold wasn't exceptionally tall, and stood quite slim beneath his fine clothes, too rich, too fashionable for the Below. Save from a tiredness in his eyes and a dryness of his lips, he was exactly as Farid remembered him.
"I had hoped that you would talk to me, Farid. I prayed you would, in fact."
The breeze of movement and energy, of competitors fighting in the arenas, sifted through the dark edges of his hair. After so much time spent away from the crew, Farid found himself struck by memories of Kwon, Javaid, even Grishma. Memories of happier times when he let allowed himself to not be afraid, to not mourn for his mother and sisters, when he let the crew become his family... and he cursed himself for it.
But could he forgive Gold?
He rubbed his eyes, dragged fingers through his unkept hair. Shaking his head, he said:
"You look like a mess, Gold. Let me get you a drink."
Javaid dragged a chair, carefully touching it with only four fingers, but Farid held out a hand as though to interrupt him, then slowly lowered it, at once conscious of his unwanted antagonism. "But you never answered me. Why have you come?"
"Let's say I want you back in my crew."
Farid snorted, but he felt needlessly cruel. If Javaid took any injury though, he showed no outward sign.
"Are you sure?" asked Farid, his expression as blank as his voice. He knew he shouldn't have said those words even before he finished speaking. He suddenly became old with exhaustion and shame, as young as he was. In a blink he had seen it all, written in the language of his soul. He apologised to Javaid, only to later realise that he had never spoken the words out loud. Javaid never kicked him from the crew, from his family, and that made it all the more painful. Gold killed Kwon, but Javaid protected the family. Gold feinted disinterest, but Javaid came to search for him, for Farid, the orphan, the Survivor.
Javaid had suffered much for killing Kwon, that much was obvious, but it was just as obvious that it filled him with newfound power, and a willingness to sacrifice himself for the family.
Hope surged trough Farid.
"I remember you brought me an apple..." said Farid, his voice trailing off, lost in the memory.
"And you haven't seen one before, so you smelled it, and kept smelling it until I asked whether you usually eat with your nose."
Laughter.
"How I used to dream of becoming the spearhead of an army..."
"But your motivation has always been dark," responded Javaid, to which Farid nodded.
"Children like me..." he said.
"Children like you," repeated Javaid, as if it has been demanded.
"We have nothing to live for but revenge, for our dearest, for our family. The horrors of this world is what makes us men."
Though he had dreamt of being a powerful bender so he could enact revenge on those who have destroyed his tribe and turned the desert into a sea if blood, the possibility of working as an agent of a warlord had never occurred Farid. "Professional" simply wasn't part of the vocabulary of children raised in the heat of the desert, within the cradle of its tribes. For him, the world possessed two dimensions. There were good men and bad men, places nearby and faraway lands only acknowledged as some sort of legend, there were benders, people with power, and non benders, weak people. The family that he had always knew, and mighty men from far away, name after mysterious name. This and that warlord, this and that master, the Avatar him or herself though the small mind of child Farid could not truly grasp at the notion of such a godlike figure, and so on. Names and events that added to mystery though were of no importance.
The day Lord Shen's father marched through the desert swept much ignorance away from little Farid, though instead of adding more depth to the world, it reduced it, collapsing it to one single dimension.
Lords were as vulgar, depraved and cruel as the most base of the criminals, those banished to aimlessly scour the sands away from the tribe. Faraway nations and cultures no longer possessed the quality of being exotic and beautiful, but were rather shallow and grubby, men as unwashed as ever and words as filled with lies as ever. Ever the recent became just a repetition of the ancient.
The reason, the rule that made his life rational in his own eyes was vengeance.
"Before I say anything else," carefully began Javaid, "let me say that revenge only leaves scars. For you, them, the world."
"Scars are all I have."
This gave Javaid pause. He felt that fearful emotion leaking out of Farid as if he faced Grishma then and there. The promise of blood.
"There is power in fear," continued Javaid. "You would drown the world in the sands of your hatred, would you not?"
But for Farid, it meant less than nothing, the opinions and wellbeing of others.
"Why have you come?" he asked again in the steady tone of those whose patience ran thin, and for the first time in that evening, Javaid looked straight in his eyes.
"Yaran is marching together with Zino. I have come to offer you the chance for deliverance!"
-o-
To give was to lose. This simple arithmetic truth had plagued Yaran's mind since Kurashiki left in the service of Zino.
For the greater purpose, he had repeatedly told himself.
Kurashiki has always been the strangest person Yaran had ever met, and perhaps that's why he felt such a sense of safety around her. There was an unearthly hollow inside her, where human sentiment should have been. She had never cried, never choked with laughter, never reached out for the touch of a man.
Perhaps that's why she only smiles and grins, thought Yaran. Smiling, he realised, was the only emotion that she could mimic. He had once laughed with his generals and captains that she would rather starve than ask for food.
"Maybe that's why she's thin to the extreme," said Samiramis, his Elemental advisor.
"Like a misshapen tent over the woodwork of her bones," joked another, a captain.
Laughter, forced in the way men do at the expense of another, of perhaps a higher status. Deeper, they all felt it, the absurdity of what she represented, and cowered in awe. Where men fought for survival, she battled much more profound demons. Even diminutive as she was, Kurashiki never failed to intimidate men forged in war and made by the hammer of conflict. A will of iron among hearts of bread. She seemed a fish too great for their flimsy nets. Something about her one eye, of her voice, whose flawless edge called attention to the cracks and twists of others'.
So drunk are they on masculine virtues, that they can't recognise the immensity of her, like fools who can't see the forest for the trees, Yaran often pondered
Not only her utter allegiance to War has made Kurashiki the Royal Emissary, equal in station and politics to Yaran himself, her presence has become a source of comfort, even sustenance. He looked forward to her returning, so that they could talk. She was wise in all matters concerning warfare and conflict and, although never quite human, it always struck him as more piercing and understanding, as if her one eye allowed her to see the world of men and her empty eye socket gave her insight into their souls.
Over the course of his reign, Yaran had told himself many things.
In the end, he could never truly lie to her, only lie to himself that he lied to her. And she would lie that she has been lied. Did he love her? He wouldn't answer, even to himself.
"But why, Kurashiki? After so much blood and fire, why would they raise arms against me?" asked Yaran before he had knew truth, before witnessing war. He was so young then, both in body and mind, and Kurashiki had been just a single eye, always watching from the darkest recesses of his human psyche. He half-believed himself to be mad, talking to nothing but a ghost, yet it gave him understanding and prowess in warfare.
"The well of fools has no bottom," Kurashiki hissed. "You best believe that for every Lord opposing you openly, there are a thousand men and women who skulk in the shadow. The world of men thrives on conflict."
"How I hate this world!" admitted Yaran. "Show me Kurashiki, show me your true face."
Then he saw the fist of her shadow slacken and part. Saw the shadow woman walk without resistance through places where everyone and everything could not, a silhouette so sharp that it cut his eyes sideways, cut into the very cloth of reality and pass through. He saw her eye as though it came out of unseen waters, sun-swallowing dark and deep.
"Be still, Lord Yaran," said the shadow, now turned woman. Her new voice crawled like beetles out of an ancient heart of things.
"You..." he gasped.
"War has come, and the demons of this world will be driven to their doom!"
Then the woman vanished, sucked up like smoke from the opium bowl.
He sighed at the memory, so distant but ever fresh in his mind, and turned his gaze upon the gigantic walls of Yong Da, painted white and blinding. Kurashiki was somewhere deep in the citadel, mantis-like both in patience and predatory instincts, hunting for the demons that would see ruin to a world everyone hated, but nobody wished yet gone.
No, not hunting, Yaran decided, so much as she watched and waited. The perfect assassin.
He regarded Yong Da one last time.
What did they know of giving?
-o-
The mountainous citadel of Yong Da, widely considered the most populous city of the world, was ancient. Built during the opening hours of the Apocalypse to serve as a stronghold against the ever invading hordes of slaves, by all accounts it had been one of the most successful military outposts of the north, surviving the fall of the Earth Empire, the cessation of War and the endless winter that followed.
It grew in size as more and more enrolled in the constant battle against the northern beasts of the Water Accord, and very soon it reached the world's capital cities in importance and strength.
But for those initiated in the citadel's deeper mysteries and history, Yong Da was little more than a towering fortress reaching up to the skies, an impressive behemoth. Massive in scope and scale but buildings, bricks and stone and men as caked in dirt as anywhere else. The true importance of Yong Da lay in the oppressive maze of mines and catacombs underneath, the infinite abyss known to those few as the Womb of the World, where the Apostate Kings are said to have hidden away from the world above that was drowning in its own blood, tied with the strings of war.
Granted, the World survived its end only through the cowardly actions of those Apostate Kings, who became the ancestors of many warlords today, so their names held positive connotations to Sarnai's mind. Somehow...
Of course, nobody alive today knew any of it, only he, witnessing the end of the world through nightmares.
Sarnai led his retinue across a barren hall toward the Womb entrance. Their sandalled feet echoed through the hundred columns, adding a strange melancholy to their sporadic conversation. Sarnai said nothing, concentrated on holding his head high despite the ominous feeling in his gut, the balancing twitches and accompanying anxiousness. It seemed he wore his revelation rather than the silk robes of his revered station, so palpable it had become. He could feel it billow about him in winds that only souls could sail. Immortal attire, thus revelation had been. He was certain the others glimpsed it, even if their eyes remained ignorant. They glanced more than they should, more quickly than they should, the sidelong appraisals of the envious and overawed.
A broad trench yawned before them. Forced to descend the earthen ramp in single file, they momentarily crowded the edge, flummoxed by the delicate question of precedence. Sarnai ignored them, reached the bottom before the first of them had dared follow.
As perhaps they should, thought Sarnai.
Planting his feet firmly on the floor, Avatar Sarnai strode into the shadow of the ancient sandstone lintels. He entered the World Womb, descended into the company of his long-dead kin, the ones spirited away from the world above, with its fickle history.
-o-
The subterranean cemetery wound deep beneath the ruined foundations of the halls above, level wheeling and spiralling beneath level, making a vast viscera of the earth. The light of his fire revealed an endless series of recesses that honeycombed the wall, each packed with urns or papyruses, some so ancient that the script could not be read. For hundreds of years, since the very beginning of the Apocalypse, the Old Soul had been brought here to slumber, condition itself, learn, prepare... All for the sake of the world above.
"The Apostate Kings were not fools nor cowards," Sarnai found himself talking. General Hideaki glanced up at Hoynar, and he could sense the awe in him, or rather, see it so plainly painted upon the skin, muscles, tendons of his face. He walked in a kind of awestruck stupor, as though delivered to the truth of his calling. For a straightforward, uncompromising man such as himself, there would be no higher cause than that of the Avatar.
Only second-general Yuu dared affect boredom, and he looked at Hoynar with a form of disappointment, or ever jealousy.
Sarnai held on to his thoughts on the legend of the Apostate Kings as he guided the men into the void that was the Womb.
"This is a mad endeavour," finally said Yuu. "I don't believe anyone has been alive within these halls for millennia."
"Perhaps, but know that one can not raise arms against what has been forgotten."
Yuu frowned in the way Sarnai discovered he does when the meaning alludes him. "Speak sense, Sarnai."
"I should," he replied on a lighter tone.
Hoynar stepped forth. "This is about your dreams, is it not?"
Sarnai turned, his eyebrows raised. "Do you know about my dreams?"
"I don't, not exactly, but madmen chase dreams and finding anything of importance in these forsaken catacombs is, as my friend has already suggested, a mad endeavour."
Sarnai nodded. He knew he couldn't glance around Hoynar's uniquely angled mind, wrestle with the beasts of his arguments. He respected that.
"No army of slaves had flooded these halls, general Yuu," eventually replied Sarnai. "No furnace-hearted Emissary of War had pulled down the Womb's mighty gates not had she passed through these walls. The Womb of the World was the secret refuge of the Apostate Kings and no one, not even the mind behind the Apocalypse, could besiege a secret."
"I see. And what are you hoping to find here?"
Sarnai paused, staring pensively across the darkness that was made even darker by his fire. Such is the treachery of light, to illuminate a circle by darkening the world around. His thoughts were stricken by the burning of cities and wailing multitudes. When the wind howled through the hallways, the Apostate Kings gripped the uncaring stone, reminded of war horns. Glancing back, they traded reassurances. Darkness threatens as well as it protects. They had eluded their pursuers. Where else might a man survive the end of the world?
Together they huddled and cried and made peace with themselves.
"There are no crimes," the Kings said, "when no one is left alive."
For a moment, the Avatar could only stare at Yuu. Then awareness came back to him:
"I hope to find answers. The Apostate Kings celebrated their strange fortune," Sarnai said. "They cried out not to any gods, but to themselves. They had survived death, they have fled from the Apocalypse to a place where the wounds could be tended, muscle be trained and mind be enlightened. Here, in the Womb of the World, they have found shelter against the end of all things, and have been reborn, made anew..."
"Or rather, the world forgot them for a thousand years..." Yuu said as though his conscience pushed by an unseen intelligence.
-o-
What do you remember, Kurashiki asked herself, seeing the Old Soul struggle with its nightly terrors. It had to be asked, for the dreams of one merely represented the memories of another. But now her memory faltered, unable to express its message.
An odd hesitation to act, as though to the syncopation of an inhuman heart. How It raged that night, the way only War could rage.
Things, strangers, other times. All of them heartbreaking and horrific.
She nodded. She remembered it all as well, but why it should cause her such sorrow, she did not know. Perhaps she wasn't human after all. How could such a cavernous soul inhabit a human body?
Seeing the Avatar relive ancient history every time the present world was made unseen in the night, it pimpled her skin. She knew all of it, the burning cities, the streets made rivers of blood, the slaughtered masses, the mad hordes of slaves, skies painted in smoke and flame. She had tasted the ash and burnt bones. She had grinned and laughed, her mind uncomprehending...
Yes, his' were only dreams but hers' were memories. This made her unique among men, the fact of her consciousness to have lived the span of generations, flung across the millennia, her life straddled a hundred human generations. She had lived the entire breadth of those nation-decaying ages, from then to now, from the dawn of the Apocalypse to the world of warlords who didn't know any better, birthed from a womb of earth and stone, with no memory and history and culture, only their will to survive. Water, earth, fire and air. Only the elements remembered.
The elements and Kurashiki...
She grinned that large-toothed grin, for she was once in the presence of the Old Soul, the Avatar, master of all elements, another one who remembered, and she couldn't cut him. She smiled because she hated him, because she was awestruck, because she hadn't killed him there and then, in his own bed. She smiled because she cried, because he made her feel whole.
"But no more," she said, extending the arm holding the unholy scythe of war, the reaper of souls
I remember, the shadows spoke in a pleasant voice marbled with intonations alien to the human vocal range. There was the voice of the woman, Kurashiki, but it was as though the tones of a deformed monstrosity had been woven into it.
I remember!
-o-
For watch after watch, second-general Yuu trudged alongside an anxious Sarnai, Hoynar and general Hideaki. He walked with the rigidity of those proven wrong by circumstance, holding his own hand, pressing the impossible blister of conceit on his palm. Hoynar crept across the ground in the near darkness, his breathing broken by a periodic cough and wheeze. When they'll be through, Yuu decided, he would tease the man for puffing like an old woman.
The sounds of the party subsided, drew out and away until the second-general could almost believe that only himself remained, solitary on a trampled, featureless plain. There was, it seemed, a moment of absolute silence, a moment where every heartbeat hesitated, every breath paused, and the numb immobility of death fell upon all things.
He asked it to take him, show him!
Then he heard something, his instinct and senses taking over as those of an animal would. It was almost too broad to be distinguished from the quiet at first, as if wings, spread too wide, simply became the sky. But slowly, contours resolved from the background, a kind of porous howl, something without a singular origin, but rather born of many. For a time, he could not place it, and for a panicked moment he even imagined that it was born of his mind.
Then in a rush he realized… it was the swift haste of blade through air, and the wheezing, shallow gulps of a man whose throat has been sliced open.
"Behind us!" he cried as he whirled, throwing a barrage of bullet-like rocks toward the darkness, carefully avoiding the dying man. They were all swallowed by the gaping emptiness of the dark hallway.
"General Hideaki!" yelled Hoynar rushing forward, only to be promptly stopped by a slashing motion. It barely missed him as Sarnai raised a stone shield in front of him.
"Stand together!"commanded Sarnai, his voice booming and echoing for the longest time. Yuu fell back and Hoynar, staggered by how close he had been to dying, pressed his back on the wall closest to him.
"We do not know the extend of her power, whether she's a bender or not, and the element she's bending..." said Sarnai.
Hoynar fairly jumped and pressed his back on Yuu's back. Sweat already ran down his forehead.
"Eh...elp..." gasped Hideaki as he collapsed. He held his throat but blood came rushing as a river of crimson.
"Hold tight, Hideaki!" yelled Hoynar. "We'll get ya..."
"Is this the Shadow you have been talking about?" asked Yuu.
"She uses darkness as an armour, cloaks herself in ambush and deception," whispered Sarnai. Both warriors nodded in acknowledgement.
And there she appeared, first as a point that spiked outward, and it grew and sparkled, chattered with incandescences that possessed intensities beyond the gaze's conception…
Before them she stood, terrible and otherworldy, exactly as Sarnai remembered her from his dreams.
He remembers, and she grinned.
Kurashiki's face was sunken, so that the edges and the irregularities of the skull beneath pressed clear through the skin, making edges of cheeks and pitting the sockets. But, as she stood, she struck Yuu as formidable, muscles like thin ropes on her bare feet, stretching and twitching beneath the skin. She carried herself with an audacity, bearing no armour, no footwear nor clothing aside from a hooded robe loose over her body, carrying the massive, wicked scythe on her side. She radiated a prowess, an aura of assassination and deadly intent, her tone seemed to condemn all humanity.
Her confidence, they all understood, was simply the outward marker of power.
Spirits save us all, Yuu found himself uttering despite himself.
There was a mad density to her aspect, a hoarding of reality that denied the world the sharpness of its edges and the substance of its weight.
"Who... What are you?" asked Yuu. He knew the stories and legends, of course, but nothing could prepare him for it.
"I am the dancer and the singer," she replied, voice echoing inhuman vibrations. "But War is the one who writes the play."
-o-
Sarnai nearly lost his balance gazing into her perfect eye. The eyes are a portal to the soul, some said, and if it had any truth in it, then the hatred had long ago burned away the impurities of hers, the pathetic pageant of rancour and resentment that so often make fools of the great. Hers was the grinding hatred, the violent outrage, the unwavering fury of the conflicted and the maddened. The hatred that draws tendons sharp, that cleanses only the way murder and fire can cleanse.
If the eyes are a reflexion of the soul, then her single eye reflected a perfect soul.
Their every sinew, it seemed, tensed about their frames, cramped about their bones in anticipation, as well as emotion regarding the Shadow. Sarnai was rendered utterly immobile out of fear, memories from the Apocalypse flooding his consciousness. Yuu was petrified in his battle stance, countless rocks floating around him, watching the enemy intently but stealing furtive glances toward general Hideaki, bleeding helpless on the floor.
"What should we do, Avatar?" whispered Hoynar. No response. "Avatar!" he hissed again, voice lowered though Kurashiki's grin made him feel like a fool, thinking that she could hear them anyway.
Visions of the past cowed Sarnai into silence. All present was forgotten as it should be when the mind was wrecked by the Apocalypse. And it weakened his knees, again, as the Apocalypse should.
His legs crumpled and he staggered, leaning against the wall.
"Sarnai, damn you," said Yuu, whirling to catch the Avatar as he was about to fall. "Come back into your senses!"
But he didn't answer.
Sarnai expected many things, knowing that a day will come when he had to face War as his ancestors did, but he was quite unprepared for what he beheld. Curses filled the silence, both inside the Womb and inside his mind.
"I am sorry," said Sarnai as reality rebuilt all around him. Clarity filled his eyes, strength ran anew through his limbs.
"Concentrate on the task. We need to rescue Hideaki..."
"The fact that she's not attacking concerns me," said Hoynar.
Because of War's arrogance, thought Sarnai, but he didn't voice his opinion.
"What are we doing here?" Kurashiki finally asked. The blade of her scythe loomed over the general's neck.
The following silence persisted longer than it should. There was a heartbreak in the furtive way they regarded her, a childish anxiousness that made the ancient accomplishments and heroics of their forefathers seem iron heavy, nigh invincible. Men today were scratches on stone where the heroes of old were sculptures! Sculptures!
The Shadow shook her head in mocking disbelief.
"You are obviously the residue of a lesser race," she said, pointing at the fallen general, whose shallow breathing brought moisture to Sarnai's eyes. "Why, only looking at Yong Da, and the monumental scale it hoped to accomplish. Even today, half-ruined, there is too much, too much beauty, too much detail, too much toil, a grandeur made wicked by the demands it exacts on you, simple souls. Yong Da and the old world begged to be challenged, overthrown." Her smile seemed to imply that the world today was not worth nearly as much struggle.
"You," she said again, "are a lesser race, one whose triumph over War lay not in the nobility of arms and intellect and courage, but in cowardice, treachery and the perversities of fortune."
Sarnai trembled at the intensity of her words and glare. That much was true, he knew. Humanity only rightly survived because of the Apostate Kings and their treacherous followers, who ran and hid inside the Womb of the World.
"I pondered how could you have survived the Apocalypse my Master had enacted. Old Soul, how did you survive War?"
"I don't know," admitted Sarnai. "It's why we came to the Womb, to seek answers and the truth left behind by the Apostate Kings." His answer seemed to satisfy Kurashiki.
"Have you find any?"
"No," admitted Sarnai, again.
"A shame, because I also needed to know, more for my own contentment than for anything else."
"How did you find us here?" asked Yuu, stepping forward, boldly crossing the incorporeal boundary that seemed to hold everyone else back. He was the one man who did not fear War. He became stronger of it.
"A fair question begets a fair answer," she simply said, and for the first time Sarnai felt something else other than dread. He felt some sort of expectation, a sliver of hope. Arrogance, audacity, impertinence. All of these things accurately described War, but there was something else in Kurashiki, a newness that astonished him outright.
She's not the same one from my dreams!
With a start he understood that although War was the writer of the play, Kurashiki was only the performer. She said it herself, those very words, as if she begged to be rescued from it.
From the clutches of War.
Sarnai knew, there and then, that Kurashiki was simply a human possessed by War, and her original personality seeped out at times. Kurashiki was not War!
He could use this, her willingness to talk, her addiction to her own voice, to draw out a plan.
"When the Avatar escaped the judgement of War, we scoured the length of the world, horizon to horizon. We soon discovered that nothing can lay judgement on those that do not exist and a secret, by definition, does not exist for those not privy to it. What secrets are hidden in here, makes you wonder." She warred against the savagery of her grin, as though not to taunt, not to give cause for the men to attack, not just yet.
"...so I asked myself: what can you remember, Kurashiki? When the world of the living holds no answers, one turns her eye to the world of the dead. And do you know upon which conclusion I have stumbled?" A single drop of sweat ran down Sarnai's brow. He swallowed as Kurashiki's grin widened. Her eye twitched between Hoynar and Sarnai, and when Hoynar instinctively stepped forward to reach Hideaki, she made a hand gesture not to, pulling the edge of her scythe clorer to the fallen general, hugging his already slashed throat as the Father of Death should.
"You shall let him drown in his own bodily fluids," Kurashiki said, raising her voice and pointing her twig finger at the earth bender.
"Stand down, Hoynar," whispered Yuu. Like all veterans, he looked at the world with the arrogance of someone who had survived, without truly comprehending the greatest depravity circumstances could offer. For him, men were children. "Look, the cut is shallow," he continued with a nod. "Why do you think she didn't kill him yet?"
"So, so..." continued the shadow, holding the wicked blade of the scythe at Hideaki's throat. The wheezing of his breathing, the shallow gurgle in his throat sent rods of anger and rage through Sarnai, tensing the muscles, sharping the mind. "Avatar, tell me, what have I discovered as I searched with my mind's eye?"
"The Womb of the World..." he responded. "Beneath Yong Da, the only place humans could have hidden so many ages ago."
"The Womb of the World, of course," she said. "I failed War once... or twice, I can't say, and then you ran away. You ran again, as you ran countless ages ago to escape execution. You utterly disappeared, again! Ahh... there was much strife within me, much punishment."
She laughed but Sarnai and the others felt drained, as though everything had been hollowed. They weren't witnessing a human, they all realised, but War merely in the form of a human.
"I saw you sleep and dream, I could have killed you before! You have eluded us for the last time..." she said in the end, severing Hideaki's head with a single horizontal draw of the blade. They heard a kick resonating through the hallway. Something, like a cabbage, hit Yuu in the chest.
"Keep him," the shadow said.
Yuu had understood then, looking into the glassy, half-closed eyes of the general, that he truly had no real comprehension of what was to come. Yuu the talker, the asker of questions, had died along with Hideaki. He had been blind to Sarnai's pleads and warnings, and the world made him forget that men could die so ignominiously, like dogs skulking into the weeds to pant their last. The image of headless Hideaki simply refused to fade.
Was this the proof that he had been looking for when he joined Sarnai in this expedition, through the very bowels of Mother Earth?
Did Hideaki's lame death made the Apocalypse an undisputed reality?
He nearly recoiled as the stone pillar flew past his head, toward Kurashiki. All time slowed down to a crawl. The pillar rammed clean through her head and into the wall behind.
-o-
Fear was a curious emotion, a form of bodily faith, an intoxicating rush of terror and certainty at once, something animal and original, as alive as anything could be. It ran through body and mind in equal measure, cowering and giving reckless courage.
"It... can't be..." uttered Hoynar. The stone cylinder that he used as a weapon flew through Kurashiki's head facing no resistance, as though through air.
She leaned in tsk-tsk commiseration.
"Come now, little bender," she said. She hoisted her scythe, spinning it with a comfortable flourish and aimed the blade toward Hoynar's throat. "No matter, you shall die here, in the Womb from which humanity was reborn after the Apocalypse!"
When was it that I began to wait for my enemy to attack before acting, reflected Yuu.
He rushed in with a barrage of sharpened rocks before being joined in by Hoynar who raised an earthly wave. All attacks ran through Kurashiki who advanced with the softness and grace of a silken cloth carried by the wind.
When was it that we began disregarding the fallen, forget the dead, Yuu asked himself as the general's body was mangled and swallowed by their attacks.
Our ignorance, he continued as Hoynar summoned two massive palms in order to crush Kurashiki, is what spelled our doom today. Ignorance and disregard. Kurashiki walked out of the dust, indeed as though a fish would swim through water. He stole a glance at Sarnai. Can you forgive me, Avatar?
"There's no mistaking it!" said Hoynar through laboured breaths. "She can completely pass through anything!"
He barely finished the sentence when her pacing increased, turning the walk into a run, then into leaps. She rushed like the wind, her robes dancing behind her, into a full stop before swinging her scythe at Hoynar. The action was abrupt in elegance, more like the fluidity of a spring than attacks meant to kill. Sarnai raised a stone shield, blocking a second attack while Yuu sent forth a rock pillar to squash her.
Hoynar jumped back and directed a stone fist to catch her unawares, but it darted through her.
Time and time again she leaped in for the kill, dodged attacks or let them charge right through her as though he was made out of smoke, dissipating in the wind and compressing back into form.
Sarnai had no water to bend with, and could not reliably bend wind, so he depended mainly on earth, accompanied by fire attacks.
He blocked a slashing attack with a rock gauntlet and, as Yuu directed a stone spike at Kurashiki's head, he saw the blade fall through his arm, shoulder, ribs. It all moved so slowly, he felt felt, watching the blade pass vertically through his body, and through the ground.
At the same time, he saw the stone spike shoot through her forehead and come out through the back of her head.
Quickly he regained his stance and breathed out a gust of flames, flooding the entire hallway.
"Hot, so hot!" yelled Hoynar, raising his hand against the high temperature.
Through the intensity of the inferno unleashed, Yuu saw Kurashiki slip through a wall.
"Could be that heat affects her as it affects us, even if the fire can't burn her body," he exclaimed. Sarnai nodded, roaring a veritable tsunami of fire. The whole hallway in front of him gleamed red and molten.
"Guess again," a voice called right as a massive scythe blade pierced a wall nearby Hoynar.
Time was compressed to its utmost limits, Hoynar and the rest barely following the afterimage of Kurashiki's attack as she projected out of the wall, scythe in hand. Out of instinct or perhaps pure ability alone, Yuu hurled a bullet-like stone at her as the wicked blade connected with Hoynar's arm.
Everything seemed to stand still, Sarnai couldn't even turn his attention fast enough.
As the blade cut Hoynar's arm, the bullet shot by Yuu dashed at her and it hit, flying through her hip and hitting the wall, marking it with blood.
Blood, as human as it could be, as mortal, as red and gleaming.
Hoynar screamed, his voice echoing and dwarfing everything.
That's it, determined Yuu. Sarnai quickly pulled Hoynar aside and blasted Kurashiki with an infernal cascade, but she quickly hid back inside the wall.
"My arm... My arm..." repeated the earth bender incessantly. "My arm..."
"Sarnai, she needs to make herself tangible to mount an attack! As far as I can tell, the action is instant, allowing her to slip in and out of shadows as she pleases. That's the only motion she has that far surpasses our speed and attacks!"
Sarnai applied a fire-heated palm on Hoynar's stump to close the wound and stop the bleeding. His scream was ear-wrenching, pulling at their souls like the wheezing of a dying man.
"Such a power could prove quite useless in battle if not trained," continued Yuu, seemingly ignoring Hoynar's pain. "She seems to be a regular human too... This power may very well allow her to defeat us, under careful use and guidance..."
Sarnai finished closing Hoynar's wound, and stood up.
"Trying to figure how she does it is useless," persisted Yuu although he appeared to be talking with himself. "It would have required choosing a path that defies all reason..."
"As is war," added Sarnai, to which Yuu nodded. Hoynar passed out. "Fighting her and keeping Hoynar safe will be impossible..." Yuu nodded again.
"Fifteen.. Perhaps twenty years of training, and the entire time she would have to focus on mastering this power alone."
"Such is the nature of bending, is it not?" said Sarnai. "That's how much we say it takes for one to master an element..."
"And she can't be older than that, judging by her appearance..."
"War is millennia old, though the body of this Kurashiki is likely not the original War used," reflected Sarnai. "For her mind to be inhabited by such a presence..."
"It's safe to assume she's mad," agreed Yuu, as though reading Sarnai's feelings.
She appeared again, at a distance from the men. Blood ran down her left leg.
"I recognise your prowess, general Yuu," she said, holding her balance with the scythe. "As well as the raw power of the Old Soul."
After all that she's barely been scratched, concluded Sarnai, looking at her and turning his eyes at Hoynar, who lay behind them. Not that I expected any less, I suppose.
She hobbled slowly across the hallway to the middle, away from the walls as if to boldly face them.
She even knows my name. She must have spied on us for years, surmised Yuu.
"The race of men have battled War for aeons. Very, very few managed to wound me..." There was a pause and she grinned. "No game is as thrilling as war, no action as pure as to kill. I have made lament of songs, cries of cheers, husks of men. I have made a barren pit of wombs..."
Sarnai clenched his fists at the memory that scarred his soul and mind. The Apocalypse must not be repeated... "General Yuu," he called.
Yuu looked up.
"Please take Hoynar somewhere safe."
"I have made men murder with both arms and words..." Kurashiki continued, seemingly oblivious.
"Sarnai, you can't. We need the Avatar in these times... I will not let you sacrifice yourself..."
"General Yuu!" yelled Sarnai again, whirling to face the man. "I have no wish to revisit the carnage of the Apocalypse, so please, take Hoynar. Go where is safe, and allow me to end War here..." There would be no more words now, only righteous battle. As Yuu picked Hoynar from the floor, Sarnai turned to face the shadow.
"Well done..." she said after a pause. What she couldn't have known, Sarnai guessed, was the true nature of his bending. Before the Apocalypse, the Avatar would be reborn in a cycle out of every element. Fire, air, water, earth.
"You nave earned my praise, and a swift death," Kurashiki continued, raising the scythe up in the air and levelling the blade at Sarnai's throat. "That is more than could be said about those other fools. Their shrieking will be almost as uncontrollable as their bladders..."
What she didn't know was that Sarnai was a true earth-born Avatar.
"A slave to War..." he said through clenched teeth, interrupting her, "should not talk down to humans!"
-o-
A column of stone hurled clean through Kurashiki. She leaped without prior notice, her scythe extending, only to be blocked by a wall. Sarnai crumpled the wall and waved a series of short ranged attacks. Then he raised a stone fist around her, through which she slipped again, vaulting over the wall he instinctively raised, sweeping the blade in a wide arc. Sarnai dodged and set flying a barrage of rock bullets, Yuu's specialty, each passing through Kurashiki.
Repeatedly, attack after attack, every time Kurashiki lunged for the kill, Sarnai would launch his own attack to keep her intangible and harmless. Again and again she repelled his attacks only to recover with no downtime and jump into a new attack, each movement flowing after the one preceding it, in a perfect dance of endurance, reaction and willpower. No matter the intensity and scale of his attacks, she recovered immediately and moved to counter.
Kurashiki's strategy was quite simple. Keep attacking. If the only action capable of affecting the flow of her martial prowess, Sarnai's mastery over earth bending and the ability and speed with which he reacted to her, could do next to no damage to her, she would have no cause for fear, no need to relent. She would bombard the Avatar with slash after slash, attack after attack, storm him with overwhelming strikes.
The hallway metamorphosed under the strain of their battle, being recognisable no more. A labyrinth of stone columns, cubes, spears, spikes, pillars, displaced rocks and bricks.
If I attack from an angle he can't anticipate or can't block, it's game over, reflected Kurashiki as two rock walls closed around her. The combinations of attacks are nigh infinite. I can't possibly exhaust them all.
She went for an easy cut on his waist only to be rammed in the gut by a rock flying at a low angle.
His competence in earth bending is commendable. I have not lied when I praised him. What pushed him over the edge, though? The fact that I wounded his ally? That I insulted humanity?
Sarnai pushed a massive stone block clean through the hallway. Kurashiki phased through it but as soon as she came out, Sarnai closed in the distance and kicked her in the wounded hip, kneeling her. He nearly split her head open with a rock when she became intangible, just a moving shadow running through him.
I can't force him to reveal a vulnerable angle. Not as wounded as I am, anyway. Did my arrogance... but the flow of thoughts stooped the moment Sarnai grabbed her and hurled her into a wall. The kick was so strong that her head hit the cold rock with a loud crack.
Pain. Not the bodily pain, but the pain of being proven wrong. What was my error? Where have I made my mistake? I shouldn't have taunted them, as it worked less in my favour.
She slipped through a wall only for it to be opened wide by the Avatar's bending. He extended teeth-like protrusions out of the edges and began gnawing at her. She quickly turned intangible again but the wicked mouth of stone followed her movements.
But every individual is biased and has a proper rhythm that ultimately dictates and shapes one's identity.
She carefully avoided a projectile and spun, slashing his forearm, blood spraying wide. Without much of a thought, he sealed the wound with fire and kept on unleashing attack after wall-shattering. A stone column hit her so hard that it flung her across the hallway.
As is with launching a barrage of smaller strikes in order to keep me intangible and raising a wall to block my following move on him, something I have quickly recognised in his fighting style...
She recovered and jumped off a wall, releasing a tempest of slashing circles, becoming a whirlwind of metal blades. Sarnai enclosed himself inside a shell of rock but Kurashiki phased through it, wounding his back.
If I can identify this personal rhythm, I have a fair chance of guessing the order of actions as a reaction to what I do.
He shattered the carapace and sent the pieces flying. They all dashed through Kurashiki.
I will find a pattern, a single correct path. To find that one single unconscious error in judgement, that niche in the human mind, is all I need to pierce his heart.
It will be difficult...
She grinned, revealing a set of large, almost animal teeth, and burst into laughter.
Old Soul, please do not die just yet!
-o-
Who am I compared to this?
This was the question Shen could not help but ask whenever he looked to the shield line of the horizon. Men! Wherever he turned his gaze, he saw more and more armed and armoured men.
The great host of lord Zino's army, marching for conquest.
To be continued.