Majutsu-shi no Chikara loosely translates to "Sorcerer's Power"
CHAPTER NINE: Blooms of Spring
...
Prende was silent that whole morning, her light extinguished and her smile not even a shadow of itself. Her presence diminished, both in the feeling of the survivors of South-wold and in her physical manifestation. By mid-day, light shone through her as though she were little more than a thick accumulated vapor holding humanoid shape -- and her shadow was scarcely visible. Akuji, alone, had dared approach her in the early light of day and tell her that Matta was clearly dead. From then, she sat motionless even as Akuji bundled the ancient sorcerer's remains with all the reverence he could muster and carried that fragile cargo to the place where they had built their many funeral pyres.
None helped him, until he asked who would gather the wood to build the pyre. Then, as in times before, many hands made light work and most of Matta's shack (broken and scattered all) was gathered and made into a crude bier, with a few fresh saplings and one old poplar giving the pile a stately semblance... perhaps a last nod of respect.
Ginga busied herself with others who put their grief aside to tend the eerily-vibrant crops -- shoots of various grains already too high for the season and threatening to flower or seed early. A few exploratory diggings in the root-fields gave fair warning, as beans and potatoes were already forming where they should not. Whether cruel joke or boon growth, the prolific burst of South-wold's fields gave the residents a sense of wondering dread. How long could such a blessing last and would it be too much for too few? A flood now just as dangerous as drought, in its own right.
Already, many of the goats were being split into smaller herds and a quartet of older, childless men were taking a dozen up the road toward Renks Cairn in hopes of selling the beasts early and reporting the attack. If the fires had not been warning enough, no runners had come to investigate the goings-on of South-wold in the days that followed, and Akuji was restless to find some hope for their recovery. If Matta's death would bring no aid from the surrounds or the city itself, then he feared South-wold lost.
As fire kindled in the bier, Akuji could find no voice to offer the rites of the dead. What little he could recall and pieced together from other mumbled accounts, he could not bring himself to sing Matta's soul to the afterlife. He couldn't even justify to himself that the demented ancient deserved such consideration, after the carnage of Matta's defense of the village. So many dead -- burned by fire and lightning, crushed by boulders of ice, or seeming to have dropped dead of no visible injury. It did his heart no good to think on it but, as the smoke billowed into the sky in black and white braided clouds, Akuji found himself without distraction and was adrift in a current of despairing grief. His wife and son now dead, he had no reason to remain... save that he had been elected as Head-Elder the day before.
The flames were larger now, swelling out and up around the pyre to obscure Matta's tiny, shrouded form. As the wizard burned, Akuji imagined he was burning the remains of Kaida and Damon alongside the small bundled corpse. He wept. It was not the first pyre to serve his grief -- perhaps it was not to be the last. The heat washed over him, flushing his skin painfully as the flames burned too hot too quickly. For a moment, the white-hot core of the pyre threatened to spill outward over the narrow bank of stones surrounding it. Akuji's eyes went up, to look for signs that any of the embers might settle into an outer field or further off. The wind blew from the south and west, the plume of smoke rising swiftly toward the heavens and streaking as the swiftest raptor across the sky.
Painting the sky with the smoke of Matta's funeral pyre, Akuji let his grief climb up the trunk of smoke into the flat, finger-like branches now streaming across the mostly cloudless blue. Let the whole of the world see the proof of his loss, and all the vastness of the sky smearing with the gray-brown stains that echoed the bleeding ache in his chest that hurt all the more sharply with each beat of his heart.
He wanted to remember Matta fondly -- but too many of his own flesh and blood had fueled South-wold's pyres in the days after the attack. Who was left for him to blame for all this death? The orks, to be certain. If any of those damnable creatures survived Matta's last curse, he only hoped it was with the full knowing that it was the humans who struck back at them from the grave. With the phantom of his own rage demanding such a reckoning, he imagined one such beast before him -- broken and humbled, wrapped in coarse rope... better still, in chains.
Cold iron that would dig and cut into the skin, rubbing raw at the wrists, ankles, and neck, as the wretched thing looked up with knowing pain -- waiting for the slow, agonizing death that must follow. He wanted such a scene desperately, but it was not to be.
Instead, his ire went up with the smoke and trailed into nothingness over the sky, cutting halfway from South-wold to the horizon before it became too thin to see. Without Prende's soothing, many of the survivors stood at the yawning gulf of their loss, newly confronted -- not by the specter of grief, but its horrific, empty form made manifest in the spaces between people... the silence clinging between words and hovering just at their backs where once there had been conversation, warmth, or laughter.
Those who had the strength had set themselves the task of working, the spare buffer remaining that tomorrow would not wait for them while they cried and mourned. Those who could not stir their hands nearly joined the dead, such was their loss. They were the ones left in the darkness of their sorrow, having lost brother and sister, father and mother, lover and friend... They were the too young... and Elder Shaum, who was too old.
It was the bitterest of smiles that tugged with a tailor's needle at Shaum's lips, for his wrath had been satisfied... left hollow and rotting in the fields of memory between Shaum and Matta with no-one to set it on a pyre to burn away and become only a memory. As the clank and thunk of metal, stone, and wood rang out from the fields, no work-songs carried over. No children laughed or played. South-wold cast its own shadow upon the world and fled -- leaving only that ghostly image of itself in its wake. Akuji's fists clenched, knuckles and tendons cracking loudly, and his jaw creaked, and the stinging tears in his eyes were dammed behind welded lids while the steaming hiss of his breath sucked into his lungs and gusted out like a bellows.
"What now, Akuji?" Nurcan, a few years older than he, with eyes as haunted and grief more tempered, stood near him as Matta's fiery grave collapsed into itself with several loud snaps and a great upward rush of sparks.
"I want to burn everything." Akuji's voice choked in his throat, too dry or too wet. "I want to hunt them all and kill them. I... I want..."
"I want them all back, cousin." Nurcan's hand caught briefly on a fold of his tunic, just behind his arm, but did not stay there. "We all want them back."
"I know, but Damon..."
"Blood for blood." Nurcan's jaw was set, and her eyes shone gray against the fire and smoke as Akuji turned to look at her. "That was
your
demand, much as anyone else."
He only nodded, warring with himself for that choice, too. Had he known how many had died, would he have felt the same? Would he instead have offered himself to become the instrument of bloody vengeance? Such things sprang forward and were laid low before the scythe of time.
"It doesn't matter, now." Akuji took a breath to steady himself and met Nurcan's gaze. "What matters now is getting help from Renks Cairn. If the goats cannot be sold, or they do not return -- I will lead a group to seek aid from the city."
"And you would leave who to stead your place? Me? My father?" Nurcan shook her head, even as Akuji swallowed hard and considered the alternatives. "You should consider we may need to leave South-wold in ashes, and move everyone."
"Meadowbrooke is too small to..." but he knew the look in her eyes, felt the twisting heated blade in his guts. "You mean to scatter us."
"If no help is coming, that may be the only road that sees any of us through another winter." Nurcan sighed heavily and looked at the dancing flames. "South-wold is gone, now... we are its death-rattle, here."
"I will remain." His dark eyes narrowed, the angle of his jaw and nose striking mountainous contrast against the ash and embers drifting by. "Alone, if I must."
"Brave bulwark against the orks from the south? Trading graves is not a leader's way." Nurcan snorted derision, but she nodded at Akuji and patted his shoulder. "It's not a decision we must make right now."
"What of her?" He pointed at the distant, nigh invisible Prende -- or what remained of the nymph -- who wavered like candlelight or heat-shimmer in the shallow bowl where once Matta's home stood.
"I don't know." Nurcan could only shrug in apology, wiping the smoke from her eyes and coughing tiredly against the ache in her chest. "Can such a creature die of sorrow? I would say that is her fate, but I ken nothing of her kind. Mayhap she will vanish as she appeared: silent and without notice."
"Then best she get on with it." Akuji stretched his back, rolling his shoulders and rubbing his hands across his face to smother his own sorrow. "If I must draw breath today, then South-wold is a place for the living."
