Avishraa Reloaded

After everything, he was still following.

The xtauh had been easily evaded, Evrith told An-uxhwi; she had been able to provide Hyd'natt with early warnings, and they could simply hide the book in a tree trunk or a crevice where no random inspection was likely to find it. But Ynudh was still out there, looking for them; and once Evrith had begun going through the book, appearing on Avishraa again, he was able to track her as he had before.

He was in a worse position this time, of course. His followers had been scattered by the attack, and he could not see the xtauh like he could Evrith; he had to spend more of his time hiding or fleeing. But once all of them had gotten out of range of the xtauh sentries, she said, he'd started gaining on them.

An-uxhwi's gradual recovery had been a source of relief for her on her daily returns to this grassland world, but Ynudh's persistence seemed to be weighing heavily on her spirit. She stared in gloom at the fire Shyriath had made as she spoke, and concluded with, “His master must want me badly, for Him to drive His servant so.”

“Maybe if you were to tell them where you wish to go, Hyd'natt, Tikke or Unitti could be the ones that primarily move the book, while you minimise your time back home?” An-uxhwi reasoned.

Evrith wriggled uncomfortably, glancing over at the others. Hyd'natt, tired though she was after the daily excursions, appeared to be serious about staking her claim in this world, and had been scouting around the base of the rock outcropping looking for sites for a proper tent before Shyriath had made the mistake of mentioning his ability to shape rock. He had, rather grudgingly, been drafted into Hyd'natt's plans for creating a home, and via Unitti she was presenting him with a long list of things she wanted. Tikke was watching them with an impudent grin on his face.

“The trail is easy enough to follow without me until we cross the mountains,” she replied, “but that is not so far away now. Ynudh must suspect by now which direction we are going, whether he can see me or not. And the pass sees many takma travelers, from whom hiding will not be easy - they may let xtauh through unmolested, but they may not.”

Evrith expelled a long, nasal sigh. “And once we get to the other side, my search will begin in earnest; I will have to remain on Avishraa. I'm not sure that hiding here now will accomplish much.”

An-uxhwi considered their conundrum in silence for a while. Then he mused: “If Ynudh is getting help, perhaps we can do the same? Is there an entity that might aid us in a similar way if we ask?”

The slow change on Evrith's face was interesting, and rather concerning, to behold; from gloom, to shock and surpise, to utter incredulity, increasingly tinged with bitterness.

“If you have a reliable way of getting in touch with your goddess,” she replied, struggling not to put sarcasm into her words, “I would be happy to have her help. But the Siathar will not help me; they have not forgotten nor forgiven. No less an 'entity' would suffice. The being behind Ynudh is-”

She clamped her mouth shut, as if afraid to say more, but then continued, almost in a whisper: “In that dream of yours… you saw Him, through the lens of His touch. He is the End; He is Doom. Because I am trying to thwart an end of the world, I have placed myself in His path without realizing it, and now He sees me…”

Her voice trailed off into silence, her expression filled with dread.

“Hmm, perhaps, but there were others in the dream, and at least some expressed an interest in stopping Him,” he continued, as though there had never been antagonism in the air at all. Admittedly, they had also revealed that direct meddling was something they avoided for their side-effects, or something along those lines - he didn't have perfect recall, so it was muddied to him.

“Though what do you think there is to forgive? It seems strange to me that a god of such magnitude would hold a grudge to a single mortal, even a very powerful one such as you.”

Evrith recalled the words that had been drummed into her head long ago, about the nature of the gods. “The Siathar,” she said, “they are the… the guardians of civilization. Of the way people behave toward each other. And some relationships are sacred, so that a crime against them is a crime against all people, and against the Siathar, and I…”

She glanced over at the others again, to be sure they could not hear. In a barely audible voice, she said, “And once… I tried to cause a death, I tried to use my foresight to arrange a death, not in self-defense but out of anger… and he was kin.”

Even given the sometimes vast cultural differences between Evrith and himself, the Flitting Hargh People among whom An-uxhwi had been born taught that shedding the blood of kin was a horrendous crime, a thing that placed one in the furious gaze of the Burning Eye.

It did cloud An-uxhwi's face noticeably, and the silence that followed was perhaps not the most comfortable for Evrith. But after some consideration, he said: “It may have been a transgression, but I will be blunt with you: I still cannot imagine that the gods would care. They have not struck down peoples that have gone to war, or the people who enslaved us in the mines.” A pause.

“And the way you speak of it implies you did not even succeed. May I ask why you planned it?” The question was open to, but not necessarily fully expecting, a defensible answer. An-uxhwi remembered being quite small, and he remembered the stupid things he used to think when he was, and that it had been good for him that he was not always able to act on those thoughts. Not to mention the variety of injustices they'd encountered, which, while they might not necessarily warrant lethal response, could certainly alleviate the guilt about employing such drastic measures.

Evrith squeezed her eyes shut. The words would not come; there were too many of them, logjammed in the river of her mind.

Instead, hesitantly, she placed a hand on An-uxhwi's, and he saw a torrent of images, one srcribbling itself over another in endless succession, of a rusty-red girl and an older boy, dark brown. In some, he was but an adolescent and she a young child; in others she herself was the adolescent, and he a young man; and they could be seen in all ages in between. Words both angry and chilly passed between them. Arguments were had, shouting and screaming. Words that were delivered with sharp heartfeltness and could not be taken back.

And then, a scene. The young man, bleeding and broken, lying in a forest grove. Nearby, the teenage girl, her face smeared with horror and self-loathing, and with the vomit that lay on the ground next to her. She crawled over to him, whispering, “I'm sorry. I shouldn't've. I'm sorry…” And the young man, between gasps, whispered… “Sorry?… You… sent me into that?…”

As the vision dissolved away, the words of the motherly voice in his dream returned to An-uxhwi: 'She wishes not to see things that she is unable to avoid seeing. It does not help that she was taught to blame herself for many of them.' 'She was hurt, and learned by example to hurt herself.' Were these part of what he had just seen?

Evrith withdrew her hand, and stared at the fire in silence.

Exposed to Evrith's self-loathing as encoded into her memories of it all, the immediate emotion was of anger. Of course he would be angry at her for doing such a foolish thing, the same way she was angry at herself for doing such a foolish thing. Of course he would be desperate at the bleeding, broken body, the same way she was desperate as she saw it again. Of course he wanted to lash out at her, the same way she wanted to lash out at herself. It was inescapable, intense, and mercifully brief.

Nothing he had seen had technically been new information. He had seen the kin. He had seen how she had tried to arrange the death. And he had seen, vividly, how she was hurting for it and had been hurting for cycles, and it was empathy that was driving him to want to hurt her in turn.

So, instead, he took a few deep, slow breaths, finding himself again in the churn, the calm waters that lived at his core, and he said, by way of prompting for the rest of the story: “But he survived?”

Evrith stared dully, even vacantly, at the ground in front of her. “Yes,” she murmured. “Barely. He had been badly beaten, and needed nursing, but once he understood that I had sent him into a trap, he didn't want me helping, didn't want to cooperate. He told me to go away and leave him, and once I was able to move him where he would be found by people who would help him… I did.”

She was silent for a time, and added, “But repenting of harm after you've caused it doesn't impress the Siathar. They saw what I did. Any wicked enough deed condemns one's soul to be eaten by- by the One you've met…” She choked her way past the words, still afraid to say the name. “…but for one like that, they saw fit to punish me in life as well. I think, I hope, that averting the danger of the figure in white will weigh against what I did in the judging of my soul by Ba'uk. But the living punishment I think I am required to endure.”

An-uxhwi shook his head. “Have they told you this?” he asked. “I maintain that gods of such magnitude would simply not care to punish you, even if they were to care enough to disapprove, when there are entire wars and enslavings that are left unchallenged.”

Evrith looked at An-uxhwi with an exhausted sort of bafflement. “They speak only to priests. Anyway, the punishment has been laid down; what better telling would there need to be? It was there from the moment I rescued my brother from his danger. They made sure I felt its first effects, and they put its continuation and end in the future where I could see it. Before it happened, there were many paths; afterward, I had a fate appointed to me.”

An-uxhwi crinkled ever so slightly - not in the manner of being chastened, but rather from a different kind of empathy than the one of minds touching each other. With softness, he said: “If you must ascribe intent to the gods without hearing it from their mouths or minds in person, it would be best to build a consistent narrative, rather than one optimised for your self-flagellation.

Let me ask you this: If the Siathar wished you ill for what you considered doing with just one life, why would they entrust you with the fate of the world? And why would they at all grant you someone who loves you?”

Even the most skilled of Oracles - and Evrith was far from the most skilled - had so broad of an attention span, only so many things she could witness and process at once. So wrapped up was she in her woes that she had been failing to anticipate the conversation ahead, and the end of An-uxhwi's question came upon her unawares. She couldn't say she hadn't known it might happen, but not now, not so soon…

And the voice, the hated voice in her head that spoke in her own voice but used her brother's sort of words, the voice she could never silence, rose to fill her head with silent raging: He doesn't know what he's getting into! You should not have him! You don't deserve him! You will ruin his life like you ruined Uruth's and your own, like you ruin everything!

She lifted her head to look at him with a mix of longing and fear that was painful to see. She tried to speak, but the clamor in her head seemed to render he tongue thick and unwilling to cooperate. “Anuwi…” she managed, but got no further.

She became aware that An-uxhwi's face was blurring, and that her face was damp.

An-uxhwi felt the shores of the calm river at his core fold in like an avalanche: Frustration, affection, concern, all meshing together in a hot mess. Why won't you answer the question? Why can you see so much, but not your own nobility? Why must you be this way, broken pieces of a demigod flinging themselves at trouble to appease imaginary forces? Why must you? Why? And he leant over and licked the tears from her muzzle cautiously, driven by some faint equivalent of parental distress - the tears should not be there, they were a sign something was wrong, and they had to go. It wasn't a conscious choice, just a deep urge manifesting itself.

Evrith closed her eyes, but made no move to stop him, simply sitting still with her breath ragged. At last, she said, slowly and thickly, “Everyone I have ever cared for is gone. In one case chased away; in nearly all the others, dead. I fear the same will happen to you. Ynudh has already tried to take you from me.”

She shuddered violently, then opened her eyes, fixing him with a gaze full of horror. “Do you understand? He almost took you from me! In a thousand futures, he did take you from me! All the while I was trying to get you out of there - there was such a narrow path in a maze of futures made of your death, and to make it through I had to keep watching it happen!” Her shivering became more violent; she curled in on herself and rocked back and forth. “Your throat was cut, you were run through with a spear; and more than anything you were just… dissolved away into black mist - I watched it over and over again…”

Gently and affectionately, he was pawing at her neck, nuzzling away more of the tears. “But we did make it through. I'm sorry you had to see all that; I'm deeply sorry I didn't handle it better than I did. But the Siathar did not prevent you from navigating that gauntlet. From what you say, it would have been easy for them to let me end - you say there were many more worlds where I could be gone. But I'm still here. We're both still here.”

“For now… but the sight lives in my nightmares. And it could still come true, we are still being chased. And Ynudh may not be the only one. How many servants does Dark-Eyes have to set on my trail?”

She slowly leaned forward and buried her head into An-uxhwi's neck. “I thought of sending you away - driving you away, to keep you from what was coming. I could see that nothing less would convince you to go. But I couldn't make myself. I didn't really want you to go. And it would have hurt both of us.”

Evrith's words were drifting further away from the topic of the religious justification for her self-flagellating, though if anything this seemed to be calming her down - and least to a degree. But it was hard to escape the conclusion that, at least so far, she hadn't really been persuaded away from it.

Over by the rest of their party, Shyriath, turning away from the nascent and involuted architectual discussion that had sprung up between the three xtauh - one of whom had never seen a permanent dwelling in her life and all of whom were speaking in a language he couldn't understand - looked over at An-uxhwi and Evrith. Though he could not hear what they were saying from this distance, he began watching them closely.

“Remember,” An-uxhwi said, gently. “That if it weren't for you, I would have perished in those mines. You have already gifted me so much life. If I am to die, I want you to know that I do it without regret. Do you understand? I don't seek it out and I will fight to live, certainly, but do not think you do me any injustice by taking me into danger. I want to be with you - and I want to help you succeed.”

Without lifting her head from his neck Evrith enfolded An-uxhwi in a tentative embrace which, given their relative sizes, was a somewhat engulfing feeling for An-uxhwi. There was a brief silence, and then she asked, “And should we succeed… what then? There are very few places we would be welcome. The takmar would not take us because I'm a witch. The Citadel would not take us, because you aren't. And most xtauh would not, especially if we came as a… a pair.”

There was another pause, and she added, in a slightly grating tone, “Even some members of our current group might have concerns about certain kinds of relationships between different kinds.” She lifted her gaze slightly to glare at Shyriath over An-uxhwi's shoulder. Shyriath hurriedly looked away.

At this, An-uxhwi glanced over to Shyriath and the others - the ragtag, oddly loyal band of misfits that they'd collected so far, their personal community - then smiled back at Evrith. “Let them have concerns, as long as they don't interfere. Though I must admit, in any case, I'm not worried about that now. Let us revisit the question when we have achieved your goal. I know it is your nature to worry about the future, but I think you're right to focus on the biggest obstacle.” A pause. “I'll be there with you, wherever this journey takes you. You don't need to take it alone.”

She thought about bringing up how her journey was overwhelmingly likely to end. Aside from irregular bouts of illness and exhaustion and the results when she tried to teleport things, her condition was not intruding itself heavily yet, but it was only a matter of time. The fate appointed to her was still there. Their journey together, no matter how successful it was, was likely to be short.

But not now. Just for a moment, they could take comfort in now.