Excerpt: Dark Storm Rising

Lost and Found

The dim light of the four moons that hung in the night sky over the remote forest that lied between Garnoth to the south and Mackenar to the north fell through the canopy of the trees and cast a shadowy, speckled pattern upon the ground below. The gentle, evening breeze blew through, barely strong enough to make the leaves stir. The night air was cool, crisp and scented with the distant odor of a wood fire, the scent just barely presenting itself to anyone who cared to notice it. A noise startled the young man who sat on the remains of an old, fallen tree, holding his head against his hands, elbows on his knees. He looked up, squinting to see what may have caused the noise that disturbed his private despair. The man, though he was barely old enough to be called a man, tugged at his tattered clothes and scratched slightly at the area of his chin under the matted down, dark black beard. Seeing nothing, he settled back down to his former position, face in his hands. Another sound came and this time he did not look up. This time… he ran.

He ran faster than he had ever run before, leaping over the sharp, jagged rocks and broken tree limbs, ducking under the tree limbs that were not broken enough to be under his feet. He was moving too quickly to actually see the rocks and limbs that he was dodging, yet he leapt over things or leaned around them as he came close to any objects that were in his way, as if his body knew, instinctively, what was coming ahead of him even though his eyes could not see much in the dim moonlight. He felt the breath coming into and out of his lungs, cold air stinging his throat and feeling like it would explode out of his chest, warm air forming a cloud around his head as he exhaled. He shouted loudly when a stick snagged in his dirty, knotted beard and caught tightly, causing him to wrench his neck badly until he could break the stick, leaving the portion that was caught in his beard right where it had stuck itself. He gave another growling shout when another branch snapped against his bare shin.
Yet, still he ran.

A sound filled his ears and he forced it out, refusing to turn his head to look back or around or even straight ahead to find out what it was. Instead he focused all of his energy, every ounce of mental and physical strength he had, on watching where his feet were going to plant themselves next and watching his arms and hands as they pushed brush and branches out of the way as quickly as possible.

As he approached the edge of the forest, the light brightened a little and the path became free of most obstacles. Sensing that every muscle in his body was about to rebel against him, he allowed himself to slow his pace slightly and straighten his back up a little. He turned his head back toward the direction he had come from, looking for any followers. He saw none and slowed to a fast walk.

He looked up at the sky and saw the Four Moons, all lined up, casting their cold shadows onto the land. Further out, along the horizon, he saw the edge of the Fifth Moon, just starting to peak its way into the sky. This should not be, he thought, though it was more of an instinctual feeling than a logical thought. Not for another generation, at least, and really, not ever again.

A sound from behind him startled him and he began to run again. He turned his head to look behind him this time, to see if he could spot just what it was that he was running from, but he saw nothing. He squinted and looked all around, behind and beside him and –

He fell. He let out a long, rumbling, growl of a scream as his bare foot kicked into a rock that protruded from the path. The impact caused him to trip and he rolled forward awkwardly, slipping down and off the side of the path. He skidded on the damp, moss-covered slope, coming to rest face down at the bottom of a damp, muddy ravine. He heard a footstep and leapt to his feet, ignoring the searing pain his left foot felt and the glop of mud that dropped off of his beard and slid, slowly, down his bare chest. Looking around, he was surrounded by a several dozen figures dressed in black from head to toe.

His eyes shifted back and forth quickly as he assessed his situation and looked for an escape route. He slowly turned around, growling in a deep, low voice with every effort he made to turn on his damaged, quickly swelling foot, looking for any openings in the wall of people surrounding him. Seeing a small gap, he lunged toward it, intending to push his way through the opening at all costs. As soon as his weight was on his left foot, though, it gave out and he landed, once again, face first at the bottom of the ravine.

He pushed himself back onto his knees and tried to catch his breath, stifling the scream he wanted to let out due to the pain he felt in his foot. The sound of a stick snapping behind him startled him and he spun around on his knees. Four arms reached out and grabbed him, trying to pull him to his feet. He yelled something unintelligible as he struggled against their hands and arms, causing them to drop him back into the mud.

He remained there for a moment, face down in the mud, completely still, considering his options for escape. When he could no longer hold his breath, he turned his head slightly to expose his nostrils to the air, blowing the mud out before taking a long, shaky breath and then turning his face back down into the mud. He heard movement again, this time from the area he had been planning to escape through. Looking up slowly from his prone position, he saw that the opening in the circle of his captors had gotten wider and a woman, dressed in bright white, was walking toward him. Reaching him as he craned his neck to look up at her with his eyes wide with fear, she smiled and bent down, leaning closer to him. He stared at her, frozen with fear, unable to will any of his muscles to move him in order to get away from her. She reached out and touched his cheek gently with the back of her left hand as she touched his injured foot with her right hand. Warmth flowed through him as a glowing light spread, first down the woman’s arm and then into his foot and lower leg. He felt the pain melt away from him as she stood up and took a few steps back and he did not resist as the men dressed in black grabbed him and helped him to his feet.

He grunted again in an unintelligible way that he hoped would convey gratitude and the woman smiled. "You are very welcome," she said quietly. She did not move her lips as she spoke, yet her words filled his entire being, consuming him with emotions and understanding. "We’ve been waiting for you." She nodded at the pair holding him and they shoved him slightly to try to get him to move. He turned his head to snarl at them for being too rough and they backed off. "I don’t think you understand," she said. "You must be ready, for they are coming…. They are coming!"
A bright flash crossed the sky, followed by a scream that sounded as though the land, the air, the water and everything cried out in agony. He could no longer see the woman or the black clothed captors that were surrounding him. He put his hands to his ears to block out the sound and fell to his knees, crying out, his agonized voice joining the cries of the rest of the land.

And he awoke.

He was covered in sweat, the powdery, gray dirt from the cave floor caked into his beard and hair. His heart was pounding as he recalled the images from his dream. How real they had felt. The woman… he knew her and yet, he did not. She was beautiful. She was important. She was all that had mattered to him. She was… nothing more than a distant memory.

He shook his head in a weak attempt to clear his thoughts. He had not thought of her, of anyone, for so long. For many dozens of lunar cycles he had simply thought of shelter and food and hiding places. Survival. It was the only thing that kept him going – a basic, instinctual, desire to survive. Memories of people or things from his past would not help him survive, they would hinder him, hold him back.
He could not afford to have memories.

So why now, after all these years, would his mind dredge up something from his past, something wonderful and painful and buried deeply – something… human?
An animal scurried in the trees just outside the cave mouth and he instinctively looked up and caught his breath, listening hard for any sound of movement. Hearing none, he stood and stretched, stepping tentatively on his left foot because the memory of the pain in his dream was still with him.
He walked over to the shallow pool of water at the edge of the cave and splashed some of the cool water onto his face, letting out a low-pitched growl as the water’s temperature shocked his skin while it refreshed his mind. He stared down at his reflection in the rippling pool of water, dim as it was with the little moonlight coming into the cave. He brushed the pool with his hand to make the water ripple more and he crossed up his eyes, allowing his memories to fill him again.

He saw himself, there in the ripples of the pool, as he had been so long ago. He had been young, strong, clean. His eyes had been bright and lively. As the ripples subsided and he looked at his real face, there in the cave, covered in muddy, knotted hair, his eyes barely open, his skin wrinkled and rough, he felt despair at all he had lost.

He punched the water and grunted. This is why he buried his memories. Feelings like this would not help him survive. They hindered him and slowed him down. They hurt. He put his face to his hands, elbows to his knees and sat motionless, peaking through at his reflection and staring at it for a long time.

"Olas!" came a voice, from a distance, yet inside his head. He shook his head, trying to shake himself out of the memories he was trying to suppress again, but fear started to well up inside of him again.

"Olas!"

It was a voice he had not heard or felt in so long. A beautiful, wonderful, terrifying voice, calling the name he once used as his own, when he was part of humanity. But now he had no name. He was just another creature of the forest. He was an animal.

"Olas!"

The voice was louder now, stronger. He felt his brain tingling and the muscles in his neck twitched. His legs and feet tingled from being pinned beneath his body for so long, yet he ignored them, covering his ears as if that would stop the voice inside his head.

"Olas!"

It was as if the whole world was shouting. He couldn’t take it any longer, he had to go, run, get deeper into the forest and further away from the life that had abandoned him. He slapped the pool of water again and screamed, a scream so primal and loud that it echoed through the entire forest and shook the walls of the cave. He turned around to leave and stopped in his tracks.

A woman, dressed in bright white clothing, stood at the mouth of the cave.

"Olas," she said, this time outside of his mind. The sound tickled his ears and he closed his eyes as he tried to calm his breathing and remove the hallucination from the cave mouth.

"Olas, do not fear," she said. "All is well. We have been looking for you."

Olas opened his eyes again and saw that she was still there, still standing in front of him, only closer to him now as she had entered the cave.

"A- Asor," he said in a deep, gravelly, growling sort of voice, stumbling over the formation of the woman’s name, for he had not spoken to anyone in so much time.

"You remember me," she said, smiling. "I am honored."

"Th- they," he started, stopping to swallow hard and then growling. The animal within him wanted to run, to find a place to hide. "They said… you were dead."

"I fear a lot has been said," said Asor. "Much of it is likely untrue. For instance, I am very much alive, more alive than I have ever been. I have tried to reach out to you, Olas, over the past five years, but you have blocked me out. It was not at all easy to find you."

"You are outdoors… on the surface," said Olas, blinking his eyes and clenching and unclenching his hands as he tried to make his brain move fast enough to comprehend what was going on.

"Yes, I am," said Asor.

"And…" Olas rubbed his eyes and ears and stretched his arms out to his side before letting them drop back down with a dull slap against his sides. "… you are speaking. With your voice. You… said you can't… do that."

She smiled. "You gave me a gift, Olas, many gifts actually, gifts which no one had ever before given or received. Gifts which my people had never experienced before. You gave me the gift of sight, Olas, so now I can see as you do. You gave me the strength to be out here, in natural light. You gave me the gift of… understanding. Things are changing. Well, I should say that things need to change. But I will explain everything on our way back. For now you should get ready so that we can be on our way. We need to get back to the village, your village, before –"

"Wait," said Olas, holding his hand up, hoping it would slow the whole conversation down so that his little-used mind and vocal chords could catch up and keep up. "Wait. I am not going anywhere."

Asor looked at him curiously. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I am not going anywhere with you," he said blankly, feeling the ability to use words coming back to him. "That should be simple enough to understand. If the words are not clear, feel free to read my mind. I– I give you permission to do so, Asor. I am not going back to a place where I am not wanted. I am perfectly happy and safe and secure right here."

He turned his back and walked over to the spot on the floor where he normally slept, hoping that when he turned around he would be alone once again.

"Are you, really?" asked Asor. "Are you really safe and happy and secure out here, hiding in the forest? I will not be reading your mind, Olas, even though you have given me permission, for I do not need to do so to know that you are lying."

Olas curled up further, pressing himself closer to the wall and squeezing his eyes shut more tightly. He tried to convince himself that she was not really there, that he was in yet another dream, a nightmare of old, unwanted memories, and it would all end soon.

"Olas," said Asor, quietly. "There is terrible suffering on its way. Surely you’ve noticed. You’ve seen the moons. All five are in the sky right this very instant. It is not supposed to be this way. Something is wrong. And there isn’t much time."

Olas grunted and tried to force the cave wall to swallow him up. Couldn’t she see that he did not care one bit about the moons or the suffering they might be bringing? Couldn’t she see that time did not matter to him? Moons and time, they would not provide him with food or clean water or fresh clothing.

Why wouldn’t she just go away?

"Do you remember what you said to me, Olas, five years ago, when you came to me in my hospital room, the room in which I was supposed to spend the rest of my life, unconscious and essentially dead? Oh, you may think I did not hear you, but despite what the idiots in the Council might have told you, I could hear and was aware of everything that was going on and I was very much alive. You said, Olas, that the only thing that mattered in life was that people were free to be living it. You said that the only way to be truly alive was to serve others with no motive other than to help them. You told me that you were tempted, greatly, in the Cave of the Elders, tempted to take more and more power, to essentially take my life force as your own. And you did not. In fact, you gave it all back to me, completely. And that is why you, Olas, succeeded where others failed. The Council was not truly dishonest with you when they said that I had died. They believed that I would die because that is what has happened to all of the other Sources, to all of the other people of Aerophilla who gave their strength to The Chosen One of Garnoth. But you, Olas, you figured it out. You changed the world. You challenged the Fates and found that they are not infallible after all. You, Olas, are a true hero."

Olas spun around quickly and stood up, feeling as if fire was going to shoot out of his eyes as all of the anger he had buried so deeply for the past five years came out all at once. "And what good did it do?" he shouted, causing the surprised animals outside the cave to scurry deeper into the forest. "What good came of it? Maybe I saved the world, maybe I was a hero, but did it matter? Did we move forward in a new way that was better than the old ways? No, Asor, we simply went back to our old, stupid, easy ways because that’s what people do. I won the battle with the Fates, but the war was lost long ago, many generations ago. I came home to find that people were afraid of me, scared of me. Yet, they wanted me to fix everything, to use my super Chosen One Powers to make everything better. But that was not my role and even if it was, it was not a role that I wanted. I never wanted it. I gave it back! And even then, it was not enough, for you, they said, were already dead. I waited, Asor, for days, weeks, right by your side, waiting for you to get up and be alive. It didn’t happen. Then, when I returned to the surface and looked around, I saw that the world had already gone back to its petty ways. No one was helping their brothers or sisters who had gotten hurt in the war with Mackenar, no one was working toward making life better for everyone, no one was teaching the children anything except the old ways. The war continued and there were those who wanted to open a battlefront with your people as well. I offered my services, to try to help make things better, but I was pushed aside – there was no need for a ‘filthy twin’ in the schools or in the government… or anywhere. They told me that I should be executed for the crime of being a twin, but they could not justify it to their consciences, given the circumstances of what I had accomplished. So, instead, they handed me a bag of clothing and sent me away, Asor, told me never to return. So, in the end, was I much of a hero after all? I should have just let the world end, for it sure does not seem like it was worth the effort to save it."

"Oh, my poor, dear, Olas," said Asor, trying to adopt a calming tone. "You have been gone a long time. Things have, in fact, changed. There is peace between Mackenar and Garnoth now. It is fragile, yes, but it is still peace nonetheless. In fact, there are talks of unifying the two nations under a single king. Aerophilla is involved as well, though we will continue to be self-governed since our Council is too set in its ways to consider any power sharing. You may remember the new king. He was your best friend."

"You were my only friend," said Olas quietly, staring at the floor of the cave.

"Oh, no," said Asor, smiling. "We had, and have, a special bond, Olas, but your true friend, Rallik, has been made King. He is struggling with the role a little, having had it thrust upon him suddenly at such a young age, but we feel that he will be alright in time. Assuming, that is, that we can get through the approaching storm. Olas, the bond between you and me still exists, even if we have not used it in a long time. I know that you, as The Chosen One, must feel the storm that is coming."

"I was never The Chosen One," said Olas. "I was the replacement one that got the job on a technicality. Of the two of us, you were the one fulfilling your destiny, as the Chosen One’s Source. I was filling a role and nothing more."

"Who are we to claim knowledge of what our destinies actually are or were supposed to be, Olas?" she asked. "We cannot know, for our destinies are written in the stars and in the lands and what we are now or what we may have been in the past may or may not be what we will ultimately become."

She watched Olas as he sat back down and rested his head against the wall of the cave, closing his eyes. He took a deep breath and said, slowly, "It hurts so much."

"Are you not well?" asked Asor.

"No, no, I am fine," said Olas, with his eyes still closed. "It is just a headache." He paused for a moment, wishing he could just go back to sleep. When he spoke again, eyes still closed, Asor had to lean in to hear him, for he spoke in barely a whisper. "You are correct that I have felt it for some time. I hear it, Asor, the land and the air are screaming as if they are in pain, louder each day. It hurts my head. Do you hear it, too?"

"I do hear it," said Asor. "I cannot escape it. It will not be long until all of my people hear it, as well, since our race is so in tune with the land. You and I, given our special roles, have a stronger bond with the land and can hear it earlier. What is worse for me is that I can also see the anguish of the land and air and everything else. It is part of the sight you have given me. I am sure that you can see it, too."

He took a deep breath, opened his eyes and nodded slowly. Looking at her without focusing he said, "I am going to need some time, Asor; I cannot go back to Garnoth looking like this. And, you can fill me in on what I need to know as we head back to Garnoth."

"We will be stopping in Aerophilla first, Olas," she said. "I have taken a great risk in coming out here to find you and the Council will be very displeased with my actions. But you were lost, Olas, and now you are found, and in the end, this is what matters most to the world."

"I have always been a risk in their eyes," said Olas. "And I am certain that they will not be the only ones displeased to see me." He paused and looked at her. "So, I am not the only one who can hear the anguish of the land?"

"No," she replied. "You are not alone, Olas. You are never alone, remember? You and I are always connected." Asor motioned to the black clothed men who had accompanied her and one of them presented Olas with a bag of clean clothing. "We will wait for you outside," said Asor. "Please hurry, for my guard is at risk when the daylight comes, even fully covered as they are."

Olas nodded as they exited, and he began to clean himself up, all the while trying to find a way to escape from this destiny he knew was ultimately his. While he was relieved to know that Asor could hear the screams of the land as well, he still felt alone in this burden.

He was alone, for he knew what the land was saying.