NAGAMORI - II
the Border - the High Road - Homecoming
Shining glass and steel covered the ziggurat, ancient foundations of mud brick only seen from below. The dreams of its original builders inherited by Vale the Eighth and his colonials after the Ten Year War. Cranes and radar towers clamoured over one another, grasping in vain for the light of the sun.
A handful of dry rations, a water canteen and circus garments to cover up the supplies in a small wooden cart. She took modestly from the Troupe's remains and left with only a faint idea of the east in mind. It was where the Troupe had smuggled themselves in from, and it was also where her parents had gone as well.
She had eaten her brother in the womb. And they'd sold her off to join the Rising Sun Troupe's exotics for a pittance of a few thousand lien when she was still a month-old babe, so they could pay the toll to the white picket fences of blessed Vale. The girl could never be angry at her retribution, born of the primal love, to be taken into one's arms and cherished with all of one's heart. She heard the stories about ungrateful children who had run away from home, that a Chill would eat out their eyes and make them kill their entire village. With the Troupe gone she would have to find her old home, somewhere far to the east.
There was no flat concrete wall to be found upon reaching the eastern border. Rather, it was a labyrinthine expanse of see-through metal bars which confused any sense of who was being let in or out. Some were moving in lines, put through gateways with flashing lights. Others simply wasted away in fencing that looped around to form cages. Amid the haze of caged bodies she found one of many concrete pillars, stoic and certain. Her eyes followed it upward to see a massive shape floating overhead, four glowing circles blasting hot air down on the platform which put a roof on the entire cage system. The Troupe had landed here in one of these, a new-age airship.
The guards were of every race and creed, yet they wore the same fully covered face masks and tight uniforms printed with symbols she didn't recognise at the time. She reaches for a pencil to show me. Private security. Pantheon, Jotunheim and Takamagahara.
On one side of the hangar she saw a sharply dressed businessman alight with an envoy of people wearing white coats. More followed along with their luggage. She was only several metres away from the border on the other side. An overflowing garbage bin shielded her from the desperate eyes and outstretched hands of those entombed within the maze-cage. One of the uniforms barked out something in Cape Val, before reverting to Common.
"Please lady, you have to board now, it's dangerous to stay here."
"Officer, do you not see what is happening around us?"
"Don't worry, we've got it under control."
"Do you not see those bodies on the other side? In the barbed wire?"
"From Grimm. We've got cleaning scheduled later today."
"You should go home, this place cannot be good for you."
"Same to you, please board quickly."
"I fear for your soul. How can you live like this?"
"We are strong enough, it is our duty. Please board-"
The old lady broke into a violent coughing fit. The girl couldn't see if there was blood, but the officer quickly braced the lady against him while she eventually went slack in his arms. After that he sighed and dragged her toward a nearby elevator.
The girl passed the night between her wooden cart and the garbage bin. Those in the walls were reduced to shadows against the overhead lights that flooded out into the distant slums. Gunshots from above rendered her sleepless. She tried to watch the night sky, but muzzle flashes assaulted her eyes and made her lose sight of the stars.
She remembers all of this, now she understands with clenched fists. The goggles they wore to keep the sand out of their eyes, the exact make of the V-18 rifles in their hands with their three-sword insignias emblazoned on the side of the stock and the exact, four hundred metre line kept between the outer slums and the wall, that meant the guards had to at least bother climbing down before they could shoot the refugees in their own homes.
Morning sunlight shone through the glass tower, there was no long shadow cast for the common folk to hide in. Zinc rooftops and faded signposts seemed to glow white, and glassy mirages formed on the surface of unpaved sandstone road. Passing back through the slums beneath Shade, all of the clothes save the dregs she was wearing were taken from passers-by. Now only a water canteen remained in the cart, buried under sticks and stones.
"Spare a man some change?"
He slumped against the wagon, flies buzzing around his hands as he looked inside. On his left hand nothing but crusty and blackened stubs were left of his ring and pinky fingers, fishing through her things. She offered a greyed-out almond. The man ignored her, a manic look in his eyes focused on the hint of a container peeking through the garbage. He dug out the water canteen, the smell from his clothes and the gleam in his eyes suggesting he wasn't just expecting water. She grabbed the canteen first, cradling it in her arms.
"What's the big idea? You don't look like a drinker, taking for someone else? Daddy?" He chuckled. "Well daddy should get some for himself. C'mere, lemme take it off your hands."
The girl slapped his hand away. He pulled a knife, slashing wildly through the air as they circled the cart, the crowd forming a bubble around them. The man climbed over the cart and lunged straight for her, pushing her to the ground as she raised an arm between them. A red-hot flame bubbled from within her soul, threatening to consume her entire body under the threat of a mere dagger. She held it back as her forearm met his blade, letting her Semblance take over the moment it broke skin. The knife shattered, the man knocked off balance by the momentum of his own swing, before he charged again.
A pinprick wound sent a line of blood trailing down her arm. It would be enough to protect her, not letting the flame hurt anyone. The girl swung her fist in a wide arc, her backhand catching him from the side. She heard a familiar crunch of bone, and the man lay on the ground screaming, his lower jaw bent out of shape. He wouldn't even be able to beg anymore. The water canteen fell back into the cart as it sped away, leaving behind the horrified onlookers in a cloud of sand.
Out west, the borders were held together by few and far between checkpoint stations dotting the city limits. Stubby white walls shortly faded into wire fence, and vanished at the slightest resistance from a patch of foliage or a boulder resting by the hillsides. Going this way had her worried she would get lost in a shifting dune sea, but exploring the ruins of a railway station put those worries to rest. The road seemed to stretch off into the horizon. When she entered a storehouse from the back, she found stamped on some old cargo boxes side by side with the three swords of Vacuo, the laurel wreath and twin axes that marked the long-gone presence of Vale. Like a trail of breadcrumbs she followed the deserted High Road, decided that by some manner of faith the Light would guide her to the land so renowned for virtue and peace. That fertile soil on which the Ten Year War had ended.
The fabled Vacuo wastelands were behind north of Shade, leaving ample shrubland and even mountainous regions on the west end of the continent which served to guide the High Road as it was paved. The land was still too barren to feed the small townships the girl came across, who instead relied on expired canned food and cactus. Whenever she pricked her hands on the thorns they would shatter where her skin was stained red, so she rolled balls of cactus in her hands until they were smoothed out to eat and picked off the broken thorns from her palms and lapped up the excess blood. She wouldn't eat any animals. Come nightfall she had given up on seeing the stars. The cart didn't have enough space to fit her so she slept under it to hide from the rain, or any number of wicked things.
Just before the crack of dawn one day, she encountered a fork in the High Road where the mountain ridges pushed inward and onto the path ahead. The railway had gone around it and into a valley below, but down there she saw the Airavata brushing through the foliage.
A fortress of white tusks crowned their thirty-three heads, fused to one body, an immense fortress of black muscle. Four pillar legs trampled over tree stumps and steel fences alike, a mass of long trunks swatting aside anything that remained. They carried a small ivory shrine on their back, from which sprouted a vast white cape to shield them. Looking closer, the cape was formed out of a few hundred more smaller elephant heads, seemingly fossilised with their trunks curled into spirals. A few of them twitched in place, their shells cracking apart to reveal hateful red eyes boring into the girl. The rest of the colony moved on, unfazed. She turned away.
On the other hand, a smaller path for a horse or one of those new motor cars went straight ahead through the mountains. Beyond that stone wall she had never seen the coast before. Up in the distance, there was also an old white chapel built into the outcrop.
Mouldy carpet lined the chapel's main aisle. Rows of wooden benches flanked each side framed by stone pillars carved into exquisite arcs which joined together as one holding up a broken glass ceiling. All the seats faced forward and the searing morning sun came through behind them, illuminating a tall bronze statue of the Brother Light with his three faces and five remaining arms outstretched on all sides like a panopticon. He was coated in gold flakes only up to his knees where his believers strained to reach, and now one by one they began to drift off with the wind. Behind him sat the remains of a rusty pipe organ, gutted for parts.
She hadn't known what to expect from it. They had their daily prayers to the Light when seated in a circle with a slice of bread each, but it had always been led by one of the sisters. But in that desolate hall with the high open ceiling and rays of Light that loomed overhead, she didn't have her daily bread and there was no one to start for her.
"Come on, you don't think anyone besides us still comes here, do you?"
"It's still nearby, we can't ignore the possibility that a… storm comes and washes it downhill?"
"Do you hear yourself?"
"I'm just saying, it feels really… exposed up here. What if someone finds it?"
"Which is why we hide it inside-"
The large bag both of them were carrying hit the floor with a wet thud. On closer inspection it was nothing but a bundled tarpaulin bound together with zip ties, covered in mud stains on the outside. The smaller of the two reacted first, pointing a barrelled contraption toward her. He was a teen with a boyish face. Judging from the shape of the barrel which tapered off longer on one side and the ornate gold spirals which decorated the exterior, she knew they had been pillaging the chapel for a while.
His friend behind him spoke up. "Haven't seen you around these parts, got a name?"
"Don't try anything funny. I call this one the… Lightbringer. Mechashift, low caliber, but I don't need Dust to deal with the likes of you."
"Lud?"
"What?"
"I don't think she knows it's a gun."
"How?"
"Don't know, are you going to shoot?"
"I… can't we just…? Fuck, man!"
"Hey! Stop right-"
Pain lanced through her gut.
"She's got Aura!"
"She bled from that, we can take her!"
The girl scrambled back amidst a series of gunshots and took cover under the benches. Somehow when her hands ran over the wounds she found they were barely skin deep, flattened metal pellets dropping out of the holes. The girl couldn't help but pick up one of them between her blood-red fingers, watching as the metal pressed and warped, molten liquid leaking out and singeing the floor.
A hiss of steam above was the only warning she got before the entire row of benches was reduced to splinters. The wood bit into her heels and then broke under her feet as she struggled to regain her footing. The larger man stood by the back door, two-handing a long hammer with one end of the mallet glowing red hot, vents puffing out a thick vapour. Intricate gears and moving flaps shifted back and forth in a steady rhythm, snorting like a bull primed to charge.
"Jay! How'd you like the propulsion?" Lud, his friend, didn't get a reply.
"End of the line. Sorry, but you've gotta go. Chalk it up to wrong place, wrong time."
The hammer's nostrils flared wide and in the rush of adrenaline her hands flailed up between her and the hammerhead, closing her eyes and bracing for the impact. A veritable inferno erupted on contact but she felt nothing. Smoke caught between her eyelids and filled the back of her throat. She fell blind, screaming her throat raw.
Her hands searched around for leverage but as though moving through a world made of paper, everything she held crumbled in an instant. Her eyes stung but she held herself back from rubbing for the fear that they too would break if she touched them. Through the pain she opened her eyes, only to find her vision entirely tinged in red.
The ringing in her ears died down enough for her to hear both the men shouting, occupied with something else. A series of muzzle flashes in the dust marked where the Lightbringer was firing at something behind her. Before she could turn to look, the massive shape lunged over her toward the smoke cloud. A metal bar slamming down brought it to its knees, Jay holding it in place. His hammerhead was completely ruined, sizzling parts blossoming outward from both ends and still the man brought it down hard on the beast. The crude tangle of bent and serrated iron further broke itself against white bony plating, but enough of it caught between the thing's armour and bit through its black flesh. It roared in agony, a subsonic rumble that shook the chapel to its very foundations.
It got up and tried to shake the man off. Between the two, both the white armour and hammerhead gave way, sending a spray of metal and ivory shards into the man. A glowing blue Aura flared up around him, halting the shrapnel before it could pierce his face and neck. After Jay leapt off the beast his Aura flickered like a sputtering engine and he beelined out of its sweeping range.
The Grimm hadn't made it out unscathed either. Its right shoulder was now hanging on by a tendon and there was a gaping wound in the side of the neck where some metal parts were still lodged in and dripping with black ooze. Barely standing on its hind legs, the monster's back heaved with laboured breathing. It limped toward the other man shooting from a distance, carefully facing its vulnerable side away from the line of fire and cradling one arm in the other. Step by step it picked up speed. The shooter ducked a moment too late. A slash grazed his side and he was sent flying, his green-coloured Aura spiraled around his body as it redirected the force so his legs stayed intact.
Landing with a roll, Lud pulled back his gun barrel and revealed the Lightbringer's longsword for melee combat. Aura flashing, he sprinted round a pillar but the Ursa turned quickly enough for his sword to only strike a glancing blow. It swung wildly and the rubble hit him before he could reach the cover of a broken pillar. She saw the third flare of green followed by the sound of glass breaking. Still the girl watched as he darted out toward the one of the still standing pillars and ran vertically up four or five metres so he was level with the beast's lowered nape. The Lightbringer rifle rang out as he lunged.
He soared, in a straight line untethered from the world, with pinpoint precision toward the critical area his comrade had opened up for him. Time seemed to slow.
On impact, his blade burst into a flurry of silver and the Lightbringer severed clean through the Grimm's head.
Its skull clattered to the ground as the flesh beneath evaporated into a black mist pouring through hollow eye sockets and even the skull itself was beginning to slowly disintegrate. Lud stood there stunned for a moment, and after pinching himself he exclaimed,
"Jay! I-"
Crunch. A marble white claw appeared through the man's chest.
Without any warning his limp corpse was flung into the girl at breakneck speed. Still paralysed by fear she failed to avoid it, and the boy exploded on impact into a red splatter.
She kept her eyes trained on the monstrosity. The left arm was twisted a hundred and eighty degrees behind its back in a position that would have snapped its bones. If it had any. One of its legs shifted further up its torso, shifting its weight across three limbs. The headless thing turned to face her. It was doubtful if it even needed eyes to see with. The northern tribes know it by the name Ngoloko, but in Vale they call it the Ursa, the spirit hiding under the mask of a bear. It strode casually toward her, stagger absent in its new gait.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Thus far she had never killed in self defence, nor to sate herself with fresh meat from the wild animal. Before her journey had begun, the Troupe had absolved most of the bodies. Hundreds of them buried in sand. She thought back to the boy, chicken little. She hadn't meant to do it. Perhaps she had taken lives before. Not of her free will at least, for she had never been free. But the thing standing before her likely had more in common with a pebble than any other lifeform in the world of Remnant. She could let loose just this once.
The sleek figure sped toward the Ursa on all fours, bloodsoaked skin eliminating all resistance through the air. Each step accelerated her as she began to push off fragments of debris in midair like a red tipped spear. Inhaling sharply, she dove into its flesh as if it were a pool of water and a man-sized hole punched through the other side. The girl emerged, sliding across the floor until she found she could simply will herself to stop.
The Ursa was already changing, the beginnings of white bone spikes pushing outward from the wound to create a gaping maw where its chest had been. While it took its sweet time getting back up, blood clotted rapidly on her skin, flaking off like rose petals in the wind. At her feet there was a broken plank from one of the benches extending roughly an arms length, so the girl cut herself against one edge and with the time the Ursa had allowed her, sharpened wood against flesh as her blood flowed down to complete the blade.
It swept up debris, and sent them flying into still exposed flesh. When the Grimm began to take a defensive posture against the barrage, she moved in and cleaved through limbs and spikes and armour plates alike. All the while with the splintered hilt digging into her palms the blade was kept fresh. As soon as she ducked under the Ursa's body, its chest maw unhinged itself and lunged outward. Many of its teeth broke in the process, but its sheer size hit an unprotected side of her ribs and sent her flying. Somewhere in her gut she could feel the flicker of her Aura as it cancelled the impact. In that semi-conscious state she could hardly be bothered to notice its colour.
What she did notice was the body next to where she had landed. It wasn't pretty but an assortment of parts remained to be salvaged, and he had already been defiled to the point of being unrecognisable. Bone was her first choice, a good beating stick. However, as she poured more of her Aura into the bone, she felt her Semblance reach into the core of dry marrow. She threw it instead. The outer layer broke into shrapnel that lodged into black flesh while the inner marrow shot clean through, all in all tearing a large chunk out of a leg joint. She found more to repeat the process. When the bones ran out, she turned to a long ropelike organ, unwieldy at first glance. A whip came to mind, one she had been beaten with countless times before. In that she found her model, her inspiration to dispense divine justice. Releasing at the right time let it dart out like a serpent in a wide arc beyond the Ursa's reach, before its elasticity brought it back into her hands. Always on hand, not reliant on blood, bones, or the Aura from her soul, something she wouldn't lose. She didn't deserve something like that.
One strike sent it sprawling and another cut it in half. The smaller part began to fade away while the other grew from half a jaw into a five finger clawed hand. With drops of blood and black ooze splashing past her cheek, the girl danced in a circle around the Ursa until she took out the last limb it could stand on. In that moment she wrung out the whip to wet her hands and dove in to tear it apart.
The Ursa wasn't dead, but it may as well have been. No teeth or claws to fight back, no eyes to see, no mouth to scream. The girl gleefully ripped off chunks of tar-like flesh faster than they could fully form, searching in vain for a central weak point. Any kind of stone core or crystal heart she could crush between her nails and put an end to the nightmare for good. She dug and stabbed and tore and battered at the Ursa's fallen form until it accepted who the bigger monster was and left her sitting in a black puddle, refusing to mix with the blood on her hands. Even then she continued to hammer away at the white armour plates until they too became dust, the wisps floating away in the wind to haunt yet another unfortunate soul.
Surveying the wreckage, her cart had been lost in piles of broken wood, but the remains of Lud's Lightbringer and Jay's hammer shimmered through the rubble. She heard a shuffling noise. The remaining young man had stepped forward with one clenched fist raised in a defensive posture, his other hand faintly tugged on by a thread longing for his friend's brainchild. Loathsome eyes tearing up, he ran back home down the mountain.
Piece by piece she gathered most of the wood into a neat pile under the open rooftop. The hammer had been propelled by some kind of bright burning fuel which she might use to keep warm through the night. Only after all the debris was cleared did she accept that there was nothing left of Lud to be buried among the pools of drying blood and Grimm fluid. His family wouldn't get to see his face one last time. The girl, complete stranger that she was, had been the one to witness his final stand, to feel his remains down to the bone. She had no right.
Behind one of the cleared out pillars however, the girl found what both of them had been carrying up the mountain, still wrapped in the tarpaulin. The zip ties didn't hold as well as she first thought. With a bit of prodding, the tarp unfolded.
Immediately the smell of decay was released into the air, probably a day or two old. The little boy's face was still intact. He quite resembled Lud. His clothes were stained with a trail of red-brown droplets that fell on his chest from a small hole in his neck. In all likelihood it hadn't been self inflicted, probably a misfire or a low caliber weapon that left blood spurting out the wound as he slowly choked to death. All things considered it was probably the tamest looking dead body the girl had ever seen but she couldn't stop crying.
She spent the rest of the day shovelling up dirt in the courtyard and buried the boy a measly two feet underground, the tarpaulin dragged across the plot and held down by small stones on each corner. When she returned the orange setting sun shone through what remained of the stained glass window. Inside the hammer was charred black. There was no fire to be had.
Through the night she took the tarpaulin to keep warm but it wasn't enough. Too tired to open her eyes but too cold to fall asleep, the girl saw the final flickers of Aura like a dull red flame within. With tiny, childlike arms it reached out in a futile attempt to comfort even the smallest fibre of her shivering body.
She tells me the rest of the High Road passed in a blur. No supplies, no Aura shield, just the red and white striped construction tarp across her shoulder. Somewhere along the line the road had dissolved, blocked and split off into smaller and smaller paths by fences, exploded fissures, landslides… Inconveniences. Living off the land was easy when arid shrubland turned into woods with small ponds and streams. Bigger animals and Grimm also fought for their place near the water but she says that very rarely, if she was pushed far enough, she would gut a small animal and then with its blood, claw through anything that crossed downstream. In that haze of starvation and thirst she hardly noticed when she tripped over the remains of a loose wire fencing broken through by some wild hog. A chalk line in the sand.
Fading in and out of consciousness the girl walked some twenty or twenty thousand miles before the sound of barking woke her in the middle of a clearing. On instinct she grabbed it by the neck in one hand and felt something around the dog's fur. Leather, tied around the neck in a ring. A collar. Letters inscribed on it she couldn't read. A human name? Or a name given by humans?
She let the dog go and tracked its fleeing path. It had grown weak and complacent in captivity, short and stubby tracks painfully obvious as it left faeces by tree roots. The girl trekked down a smooth hill until she reached the edge of the woods. Beyond her lay a row of white picket fences. The dog leapt over them like it had many times before, and landed in the arms of a woman.