BOOK VI, CHAPTER 6 (Part 1)
19 Jan 2012 2 Comments
in 2nd Volume: Night and Day, Book VI: The Voice of the Dawn Tags: adventure, animal, anthro, exile, fantasy, fiction, forest, furry, hanami, kemono, mammals, outcast, Tasakeru, the voice of the dawn, web fiction, web serial novel, zero
CHAPTER 6, PART 1
Listen closely now
Can you hear her whispering?
The voice of the dawn
“I can’t say just why I stopped running. Something inside me just changed that night… apart from the obvious, I mean. Just like that, I was different than I was before. It wasn’t that I wasn’t afraid anymore, not at all… I was terrified out of my wits the whole time I was facing her. It was more like I found something stronger than fear…”
[An excerpt from Hanami’s journal]
Zero stared from Hanami’s face to her outstretched hand and back again. Questions raced through his mind, not many of which he was proud of: Where did this come from? was one. Has she gone crazy? was another. And a third, which derailed the other questions entirely: Gods, has she always been this beautiful? No, Zero, not the time for that! he admonished himself. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and took her hand, and the first thing he said was, “I’m sorry.”
Hanami blinked. “Huh?”
Inside, Zero screamed curses at himself. How on earth had that slipped out of his mouth? Gods strike me down, I should just cut out my tongue with a kunai right now… But against the frantic protests of his brain, his mouth continued talking: “I’m sorry for how I’ve treated you. I know I hurt you, and I don’t expect you to forgive me, but…” And somewhere during the next few sentences, his brain stopped arguing… “I care about you. Everything’s different when you’re around. Not just different, better. You… you keep me upright, and I’m just afraid I’ll lose you.” He swallowed, feeling that the flow of words was finally trickling out. “So I have to keep you safe.”
“Zero…” Her face was unreadable.
“It’s…” he began again, feeling something else bubbling up to the surface. “I have all this power now. As the keshin, I’ve been given something incredible, something amazing… and I have no idea what to do with it.” Tearing his eyes away from her face, he looked down at his hands. Underneath his fur, he knew there were still faint scars on his palms from the fight at the Black Rose Tower, from when he had beaten uselessly on the black stone wall to try to save her. Was it really only a few short weeks ago that everything had changed? It felt like another lifetime… “What do I do, Hanami?” he asked, hoping desperately that the question made sense. “Should I try to be a hero to everyone, or just a few people? Who do I save? How do I know what I’m doing is right? What on earth am I supposed to be?”
She pressed a flower into his hands. Sun-bright sculpted petals flared outward from a blossom that rested on a thorned stem. “A yellow rose,” she said softly. “for forgiveness. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, Zero… you were just trying to do what you thought was right. But you don’t have to take it all alone, you know?” She smiled with a curious mix of emotions: fondness, sympathy, perhaps a little bit of exasperation. “We can carry it together. I may not know what it’s like to have the powers of a God… but I know you, and I’ll always be by your side whenever you’re unsure of yourself.” Taking a deep breath and mustering her courage, she continued. “As for what you’re supposed to be? I don’t know. All I can tell you is, just be. Trust that what you’re doing is right, and deal with the consequences later. And if that ever gets to be too much for you…” She spread her arms. “Like I said, I’m right here if you need me. I trust you.”
“In Sankami, the words ‘I trust you’ are sacred. In this context, ‘trust’ is not merely faith in another… that would be far too simple a concept to express the meaning. The phrase indicates a deep bond, a willingness to follow a person to the Beneath and back. It is no less than the bearing of one’s heart.
“For all that I have issues with fox philosophy, their opinion that the phrase ‘I trust you’ is the most romantic thing one person can say to another is a beautiful one, an idea that I can wholeheartedly support.”
[From The Past, The Present, and What Lies Beyond, by Ashpaw Longstripe]
He only hesitated long enough to set the flower down, and then he embraced her, holding her to himself. Zero felt her arms wrap around him, her chin rested on his shoulder, and all the doubt and all the worry and frustration of the past few weeks melted away with the heat of her body against his. They rocked back and forth, their tails entwined, neither needing to say a word. The only thing Zero could think was how Godsdamned lucky he was, to have this beautiful, amazing girl as a part of his life… just being here and holding her like this would be enough to make the Gods themselves envious.
And as Hanami rested against him, she suppressed a blissful shudder. It’s a good start, she thought, closing her eyes and savoring the feel of his arms around her, the scent of him, the gentle sound of his heartbeat. Maybe we still don’t completely understand each other, but this is fine for right now, isn’t it?
Hours could have passed that way. The Silver Order and Militia would have faded away, along with everything else except the room and the two entwined souls inside it… but reality had other plans. The embrace was broken, the moment shattered along with the glass in one of Woodhaven’s windows as four arrows sailed into the oak tree cottage, embedding themselves in the wall behind them.
From his position in the bushes outside Woodhaven’s clearing, the fox called Zaroff grinned. Through the broken window, he could see two figures break apart and drop out of sight… perfect. “Second volley, prepare to fire,” he said to the four archers crouched behind him. “You don’t have to score a hit, so long as you flush them out. Remember, she wants them alive and relatively unharmed.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The lead archer, Rainsford, nodded and stood up again with his fellows, the four of them notching shafts to bowstrings in a perfectly synchronized motion. Each of their wrists bore a silver bracelet identical to the one Zaroff wore…
“Mange!” Zero swore as four more arrows streaked in through the window. He and Hanami knelt behind the couch. There was no immediate danger of being hit from this position, but now they were pinned down. “How the hell did they get here this fast?! I thought for sure we would have more time…”
“So much for that!” Hanami took a risk, peeking up over the back of the couch just slightly before ducking back down. “I can’t see anything from here. How long does it usually take archers to reload?”
“It depends on the type of bow,” said Zero. “Why?”
Hanami smiled, a slightly wild gleam in her eye. “If I can get close enough to the window, I could lay down some roots and-”
“Hanami, no!” A rock dropped in Zero’s stomach as he grabbed hold of her hand. “They’ll shoot the second they see you move! You can’t be reckless like that!”
“Why not? Being reckless seems to work for you often enough…”
“I-” Zero opened his mouth and closed it again, stymied. “That’s not- it’s a different-”
“So what should we do?” Hanami stared him straight in the eye. “That was my plan, what’s yours?”
The buck grimaced and wracked his brains. “Tactics were never really my strong suit…”
Another quartet of arrows struck the wall.
“Can you use your power?” said Hanami anxiously. “A few archers shouldn’t be a match for a God, right?”
“Theoretically, no,” said Zero, placing a hand on his scabbard. “But still, I can’t. If that’s the Order or Militia out there, they won’t take kindly to seeing the Shogun appear to defend two Outcasts…”
“Oooh,” said Hanami, wincing at the thought. “I hadn’t even thought of that…”
“Even if I did transform, I don’t think I could maintain it very long… and when the backburn kicked in, I’d be useless to you.”
“Right. We should only use that as a last resort. What about your boltpath stone?”
“This?” He fished the spellstone out of his sleeve and squeezed it between his fingers. There was still plenty of power thrumming within the sigil, more than enough to transport two people. “That could work… They won’t know I have one unless they heard me when I came here. Where would we go, though?”
“Campfire Rock. You said you thought Faun and Ashpaw were already caught, right? There could already be troops at their homes; it would be better to go where they’re not expecting us.”
Zero nodded. “Good idea. It won’t exactly be subtle; they’ll hear the noise when we land, but we should at least have time to get our bearings. We may be able to surprise them.”
Hanami grinned from ear to pointed ear. “See? This tactics stuff isn’t so hard.”
Despite himself, Zero grinned as well. “Tell me that next time I’m losing to Faun in shouri. Hold on just a minute.”
“What are you doing?” Confused, she watched as Zero dropped to his belly on the floor and crawled forward, keeping his tail low. Slowly he inched toward the spot where they had been standing when the window broke. His hand reached up for the endtable where he had set the flower down, and snatched it just as yet another arrow came screaming through the hole and buried itself on the spot, missing him by an inch.
“Got it!” Tucking the yellow rose inside his jacket and being careful of the thorns, he scrambled back over to Hanami and brandished the spellstone. Both of them laid their hands upon it and closed their eyes as Zero shouted, “Release!”
A thunderclap echoed through Woodhaven as the two squirrels vanished, setting the leaves and petals of Hanami’s many houseplants fluttering in its wake.
Outside, Zaroff’s eyes narrowed as he heard the muffled crack of displaced air rushing into the void that the Outcasts left behind. A boltpath stone, he thought to himself. Damn. Now what do we do?
Mere seconds passed before the answer was given to him. “Rainsford?” he said to the todd on his left. “Get one of the mages on the scroll. Tell them we need a trace.”
Hanami had never traveled by boltpath before; she immediately saw why Zero hated it so much. She desperately wanted to scream as she felt her body being stretched to infinity… but she held her tongue. I have to be strong, she thought as her end snapped forward, rushing back to meet the rest of her at light speed. Clinging tightly to Zero’s hand, she was completely unprepared for the sudden stop as the two of them came out of transport and dropped onto the hard, snow-covered granite of Campfire Rock’s surface, landing sprawled in a heap. Nor was she prepared for the sudden, drastic shift in temperature; until the window broke, it had been warm and cozy inside Woodhaven. Now abruptly, they were outdoors in the winter night with no time to grow used to the chill… and landing in three inches of snow did nothing to help. A cry escaped her lips, one that she couldn’t hear over the echoes of the thunderclap, and she clasped her arms around herself and shivered, curling into a ball in a desperate attempt to warm her sodden fur.
She felt Zero shake her shoulder, first gently, then again with far more urgency. The ringing in her ears was slowly fading, she began to make out words…
“… have to get up, Hanami! We have to go, right now…!”
Slowly Hanami opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was a blur that she was able to identify as Zero, down on his knees next to her, with one hand on her shoulder and the other holding his sword at level. It took her a moment to realize there was someone else speaking, another blur standing some feet away.
The second blur gradually resolved itself. It was a ferret, female, elderly, wearing midnight blue robes adorned with jewelry, white hair pulled into a severe bun. There were fireflies floating all around her to either side, at least ten of them… Hanami blinked. Those weren’t fireflies.
Standing behind the jillferret wearing the mage’s robes were ten armored Silver Order Knights holding lanterns, and each of them were now drawing their weapons, having quickly overcome their surprise at seeing two Outcasts drop out of the air in their midst.
“… using the authority granted me by Grand Mistress Lily of the Silver House,” the jillferret was saying, “I, High Mage Pearl of the Clan Bellenmore, place you both under arrest. You are hereby bound by law to surrender and lay down your weapons.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
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