Interlude 2. The Ones Left Behind (Patreon)

Another Plane, Another Time…

Dorian ascended. He was a rapture of light and blistering fire, a newly-born star rising to take its place in the firmament. He was the only light in a dark, splintered world. Then he was gone, rushed to another realm. The darkness dropped again.

The sky was a thick, mournful purple. Black splotches, void of light or color, blotted it down its length—where chunks of the very soul of the world had been punctured in the battle. But now things had settled, and the fighting was done, and there was a winner and many, many losers. The winner was now gone. The world was left to rot.

Shriveled corpses of the losers peppered the ground, stretching as far as any eye could see, up and down high mountains, washing down vast rivers, corpses of all ages and sexes and species, drained of life. Stuck in all poses and positions: faces slack, eyes wide, mouths hanging loose, hands reaching for the heavens. The land was a grisly mausoleum.

One loser was the clan which had ruled this land. A mining clan, cruel and powerful, it had held a stranglehold on the production of spirit steels; it was a maker of war. Now it’d been shattered utterly. The once-great palace, a miracle of marble spires home to a mighty Patriarch, was beheaded; its huge, intricate dome lolled on on side, severed from its base. The steps leading up to the home were littered with the dead. And on these steps, kneeling on a carpet of bodies, was a boy no more than twelve years of age. His lips trembled as he worked. His eyes were ringed with thick dark lines. Streaks marred his face where tears had dried. He dug through the corpses slowly and carefully, checking the faces of the dead one by one. Then he’d drop it, quivering, shake his head softly, and move to the next.

The boy was named Jez, and he was the son of the Patriarch of this clan. The clan was domineering, devilish as they came, but he was too young to know the extent of it. All he knew was that the man in the sky took mother and father away. All he knew was that he’d seen his little sister, scarcely past her fourth year, seized screaming from his arms by that mad storm of qi. Now he was alone. Numbly, he kept searching.

Then he moved up to the top of the stairwell, sniffling, and took hold of a heavyset body. There was something familiar about it, but he couldn’t quite place what. Straining with all his little body, he brought it up and pulled it loose from the corpse-pile. He gasped as he palmed the face. It was Ulrick, the head of his father’s guard! Shrunken, withered, his great heaps of muscle drained like a dried grape, but unmistakable. His jaw, always so quick to a jibe, was almost severed from his face. Jez flinched away from it.

Ulrick always kept close to the Patriarch. Which meant…

The boy scrambled up, checking the corpses beside Ulrick’s in a frenzy. Guardsman. Guardsman. Another, frozen with his desiccated jaw gaping. He was getting closer—he could feel it. His fingers tingled, an awful weight settling on his chest.

Then he saw them: two corpses holding tight to one another, shrunken, blackened by soot and scarcely recognizable. It was their clothing which caught his eye first: fine silks, night-time wear. They’d barely risen from bed when the attack began.

He clambered up and brushed the dust from their faces. He looked, his heart dropping to his stomach. He knelt there for a long while and stared, blinking. Just yesterday mother had used those hands to comb out the tangles in his hair; father had tickled Jez with a grizzled beard, cackling loudly. Now they looked black as the rest of the dead.

He was choked with emotion but also felt outside himself somehow, unreal. Only now did he notice that his whole body was trembling uncontrollably. He almost believed this was a very bad dream, the kind he’d wake up from in the middle of the night, running to his parents’ bedroom with tears in his eyes. He could imagine it now. Father would scoff and chuckle—“We’re steel men, son; we fear nothing! Chest up, eh?”— with a wink and a hearty hair-ruffle. Mother would shoot her husband a death-glare then hold Jez tight, stroking his head ‘till he’d melted in the warmth of her embrace. She’d give him that soft-lipped smile—crinkle-eyed and warm, the one that made him feel cozy all over and oh-so-safe. “The Saints watch over you,” she’d whisper, nuzzling his cheek as her stray spun-gold hairs drifted over him. “Sleep, mi ame. All will be well in the morning.” She always knew what to say.

“Mother?” He croaked. There was no answer. The fantasy dissolved. She was gone; her body was spread-eagled, broken. It looked almost pathetic, nothing like the mother he’d known. Father was gone too, drained to near-nothing; it was a vicious sight. He could hardly bear to look at them.

The air was heavy with a ghastly quiet. The sun, too, had hidden during the massacre. Now it peeked nervously over the horizon, spreading pale, hesitant rays. He was the only one who lived to see the morning. This was real, and it was dawning on him at last. It’d all happened so fast—out of nowhere. Where were the Saints?

There is a special kind of loneliness in being the only living creature in a sea of the dead. It was not a weight he was ready to bear. He was too young. He was on the verge of cracking open.

Then, at the very head of the corpse-pile, he saw a familiar face.  “Maia?” He whispered, voice breaking. He crawled over to get a better look. He felt like his heart was shriveling up.

His little sister had been hollowed out. Her teeth had been torn out of their gums. There were no eyes in those little black sockets. Her mouth hung open in a horrible dark o. Her left arm had been severed at the elbow; it lay limp a few feet away. The wave of guilt that struck finally broke him. He felt like his chest was caving in.

“Maia…” he whispered again. She’d always looked to him with a starry-eyed love only younger siblings had; she looked at him like he could do no wrong. Father said he was her protector. Then she died, and he couldn’t stop it. He’d let her go.

“I’m s-sorry,” he said again, sniffling. The tears were coming and he couldn’t stop them either. He felt so very small. He picked up the withered blackness that’d been his sister. He clutched it tight to his chest as he sobbed. “I failed you,” he choked out. “It s-should’ve been me.” And he shuddered, and cried out, and felt like his whole body was opening up and spilling out his insides. The only thing crueler than killing off a whole clan was to leave only one of its sons behind. Why had he been spared? Why him? There were no answers.

So far, Jez’s story is very common. It is unremarkable, especially where gods like Dorian were involved. Jez and his family were simply collateral damage—they had the bad luck to stray in the path of higher beings. Unfortunate but uninteresting. Does the man think about the plight of the ants on the road as he steps on them?

Sometimes in tales like these, the boy takes his own life. Most often he fosters a hateful vengeance in his heart. He vows revenge; he trains, grows stronger, enters the Jianghu… and dies, just like all the others. The road to the top is narrow and plagued with pitfalls, after all. The world moves on.

As the tears were drying up, still sniveling, he set his little sister down gently. Then he reached for her severed arm with a blank gaze. He brought it back up to the elbow-joint. It did not stick back together. He tried again, eyes glazed, but the limb fell down once more.

For a while he sat there, unmoving. He could’ve been dead himself.

Brushing back his tears, he gingerly picked up his sister’s body. He was a talent for his age—already at mid-Origin—and he was strong enough to haul even grown men. But he wouldn’t need all that strength here; her skin had been drained paper-thin, her bones hollowed out. She was sickeningly light. He took her, trance-like, and walked.

There was an empty valley some distance away; he remembered it filled with cherubs and lined with big, shady trees. Ulrick used to take him and Maia here to play; they’d spend hours climbing, picking red-green spirit fruit or splashing, laughing, in the crystal pools. In the space of a night it’d all been leveled to slag. He set her down gently on a soft ash-pile, then stuck a resolute hand into the ground and yanked up a shower of dirt. In this manner, he began to dig.

It took the best of two hours to finish the grave. Gently, he lowered her in. Tears dribbled down his face, but it wasn’t like before; now he felt like a faulty faucet, leaking emotions. His hands had steadied some now, and it was with careful, slow movements that he piled the dirt back over her. He covered her face last of all; he took a long pause to imprint her every feature in his mind. He whispered a heartfelt prayer. Then the dirt piled on.

He carved a gravestone for her, a small, crude memorial. He tried searching for flowers, found none left, and returned to kneel at the side of the grave. He prayed. He pressed his head to the dirt in a deep kowtow. He stayed there, unmoving, reliving his memories of her until late in the day. He saw him teaching her her first martial forms; he saw them playing hide-and-seek in the orchard and feeding her night-time broths. He remembered the first time she’d called him ‘brother,’ her warm brown eyes adoring him, her little baby mouth making a mess of the syllables; he remembered feeling his heart swell at the sight.

At dusk he left the gravesite. He returned, hours later, with the body of his mother. The process began again. Then he went back for his father, buried him beside them, and drew a hammer from the rubble to mark the site. He did it all with a mechanical numbness. After it was done he knelt there silently for three days and three nights. He let the sun and the stars wash over him. At the end of it he was still swamped by grief, but he no longer drowned in it.

The intruder had taken nearly everything—but not his Interspatial Ring. Nor the Interspatial Rings stashed away in the rubble. In them were enough fasting pills to last him years. He could kneel here as long as he wished.

Then the boy did something peculiar. Something which set him apart from all the other ants.

He went back to the corpse-pile and took the body of Ulrick. Slowly and meticulously he dug him a grave. He lowered the body in, engraved the face in his mind, and kowtowed. He soaked in his recollections of the man. He made certain he’d never forget. Ulrick would live on, if only in his memory.

He went back for the guardsmen, each of them. Some he knew by name; some he didn’t, but he performed the rites for them anyways. He imagined their lives had this fateful night not happened; for those he didn’t know he made fantasies of them as he buried them. He liked to imagine them happy—laughing with their children around a fireplace, sharing tales with loved ones. The sun rose and set and rose again. Still the boy went back. There were bodies to bury; many, many more. He lowered each corpse to the ground with love.

It was perverse. A boy as an undertaker? Why did he do it—return each day for another body, even for ones those he didn’t know? The bodies were legion, too many to count. Perform the rites for each of them, as though for a family member? A survivor’s guilt, perhaps; a duty he felt as the only living among the dead. But really it went deeper than that. Jez was a strangely emotive boy. He’d always been one to pour himself into others, and others into himself. He was too empathetic for his own good; he might not’ve known them but they were humans, and they were capable of love, and that was good enough for him. He let their deaths enter him, hollow him out. It was, in a way, a very long act of mourning.

Soon he settled into the rhythm of the act. Each time he did it he felt his heart beating a little stronger; he felt a little more whole. It stretched on weeks. Then months. By now the winds had scraped away the dusts. Little specks of greenery took hold over the forgotten lands once more, some even sprouting atop grave-sites. The cemetery expanded to cover the entire valley’s face. Still Jez dug, mired in this valley of ashes, under a thick blanket of death. He moved under a strange compulsion—a duty. It bore him through all this darkness.

In the year that passed since the incident, no man from the outside came to visit. But at last, a year in, a few songbirds were tempted to brave the badlands. Ferns sprouted on the land. The early-morning sunshine, the small stubs of new saplings, the intermittent twitters of birds greeted Jez every morning, but his duty was the same. As he dragged another body, sometimes he teared up. After a year stuck in ashen blackness, any life was gorgeous beyond words. Every chirp meant the world to him. He broke down at sunshine sparkling the dews on early-morning grass. As he mourned the dead, he felt himself falling in love with the world anew.

The days marched on; the weeks marched on; the months marched on and still he stuck resolutely to his task. It’d become more than habit, a part of his identity. Some part of him knew with a heavy certainty he wouldn’t be complete until the task was done.

Three years. That was how long it took to give each of the dead a proper burial. He’d grown to fifteen now, burly from his years working the dirt, and in that time he’d made peace with it.

He did not hate the man in the sky, and that was the most remarkable part of all. He did at first—but it was as a sort of blanket anger at the world; the kind of anger a man has against a natural disaster, or fate. He didn’t have it in him to hold onto that anger very long. It was not a healing emotion. Instead he was filled with a deep and abiding love—a love for those who’d left them; they’d died, and he loved them more. He found himself loving those he didn’t know too. He found himself loving the dew on the grass, and the sunshine through the young, lush-leafed trees, and each twitter of each little song-bird, no matter how small. He couldn’t help it. It was a tempered one, tender yet strong. He’d seen the depths of the cruelties this world could offer; he loved it anyways.

In the end, he came to a resolution.

He loved the world too much. He wished to make it a place where everyone could love each other, and be free, and live in peace—without suffering under the whims of passing tyrants. A fierce will to protect and heal blossomed in him. The third year passed, and he left these grounds at last. He vowed change the world.

It was the most peculiar thing about him: he chose to do it with love.

That’s what made him so dangerous.