Mortal Lands

Koida breathed deeply and focused on the pair of Ros sharing her heart center. Her rebellious life force hung to one side, its violet rings snapping occasionally with bright sparks around a core of denser amethyst. At the center, Raijin’s deep jade Ro shimmered with tongues of white lightning and misty shadow like a peaceful forest pond catching rays of the morning sun.

Without the glass moon serpent’s pain-killing venom in her blood, Koida could not take hold of Raijin’s Ro outright. Even with the help of the little adder, doing so caused her eyes and nose to bleed, which Hush claimed was a symptom of the damage being done to her brain. Koida’s cultivation would have to grow much stronger before she could even touch Raijin’s life force without hurting herself.

She couldn’t bring herself to just abandon it, however. The few times she had taken hold of the jade Ro, she had seen Raijin. Lysander, Hush, and even Cold Sun suspected that these visions were just a symptom of a bleeding brain, but Koida couldn’t stop thinking about them. Seeing Raijin had been a lightning strike to her heart, reviving what had felt irreparably broken. On their journey south from the Uktena’s encampment, she had already dreamed about him twice in that land of blue-gray smoke and incense.

On the one hand, this seemed like a good thing. She had stopped having nightmares of her sister hacking nobles apart and slaughtering Batsai. On the other hand, Koida couldn’t help but feel she had traded one obsession for another. She wanted to see Raijin again so badly that she turned to meditation and cultivating whenever she could, trying to regain sight of him. She wanted to ask him how he had come to be there, whether he was truly still alive or his body was dead and it was his spirit she saw. But she couldn’t do that if she avoided his Ro altogether.

Cautiously, she approached the jade pool like a stable hand slipping up to the side of a wild horse. A chill crept over her. The hiss of heavy rainfall filled her ears, and she heard a distant roll of thunder.

Still she saw only the shimmering depths of the jade Ro.

Koida stole closer. Icy fingers wrapped around her bones, and the hiss of rain intensified into the drumming of hail. It pelted her head and shoulders, not large enough to injure her—yet—but large enough to sting.

If she had been alone, she might have tried to bull her way through the injury and pain, but Hush and Cold Sun were both in resting meditation with her. Koida doubted Hush would put up with much more of her fits while cultivating, and if she wanted to advance, she couldn’t afford to lose the silent master’s training.

She remained where she was for several long breaths, willing Raijin to appear. His unruly black hair, bright jade eyes, stony features breaking into a boyish grin. It felt as if an invisible hand were reaching out from her heartcenter, grabbing blindly for him, but he remained out of reach.

Sharp knuckles rapped on Koida’s breastbone. She opened her eyes to find Hush staring at her. The silent woman's dark almond eyes were unreadable over the linen wrappings masking the lower half of her face.

“Are we finished meditating?” Koida asked.

Hush nodded, then gestured to the hulking Mass of Uktena warrior standing over them.

Cold Sun gave her a shallow dip of the head and shoulders, his tribe’s version of a bow.

“Until Lysander returns from the port, let us focus on building a Stone Soul capable of controlling your lavaglass,” he rumbled.

“Let’s hope I make some progress.” Koida stood, carefully holding out her left arm so she wouldn’t cut herself. From the elbow down, the appendage was a wickedly spurred moon broadsword so black that it appeared to absorb the rays of dawn sunshine that made it through the edge of the forest. The left side of her body was littered with cuts, scrapes, and punctures, all self-inflicted from her own incompetence with her new blade arm. “I think Master Physician Hush is growing tired of patching me back together.”

Across the clearing, the silent woman sent Koida a friendly smile, her eyes crinkling above her white facemask, then she returned to her own training. Koida watched the slow, deliberate movements of the Path of Hidden Whispers. It hardly looked taxing, but Koida had seen Raijin practicing the same techniques. The training had left his hair and sun-burnished skin soaked with sweat and his voice even rougher than usual, as if his throat had been scoured raw.

A wide shadow filtered through the leaves, flickering over the grass and dirt. Koida glanced up to find the huge demon ray which had been following them since the battle at the boiling pools—possibly even longer, as it was almost certainly Raijin’s demon mount. The beast never swam in close enough for Koida to touch, perhaps wary of provoking Pernicious or Cold Sun’s strangely even-tempered war ram, but she often found the ray circling high above their encampments as if keeping watch for danger.

“You were improving before you began using the glass moon serpent,” Cold Sun said, bringing her attention back to the earth, “and your Stone Soul did not abandon you during the trials, or you would have been judged unworthy of the lavaglass.”

“But my unbreakable truth no longer works,” Koida said.

She had built her first Stone Soul on the fact that her illegitimate half-brother Yoichi had murdered her family, a fact which Cold Sun’s father, the Chief of the Uktena, had said her emotions were too deeply invested in. It had worked during the trials, but abandoned her shortly after, when she thought Lysander had killed Yoichi. Though she believed Hush and Lysander that a Water Lily master like Yoichi was probably not permanently dead, seeing how easily her chance at revenge could be stolen had shattered any effectiveness Koida’s hollow Stone Soul had once had.

“Then you must find a new one.” Cold Sun moved to face her, towering over her as he did everyone else in their small traveling party. “A fact central to your life, which is true in all circumstances.”

Koida searched her mind. At the moment, everything in her life seemed to revolve around her desire to see Raijin again, but a desire was not a fact.

Yoichi’s crimes felt too brittle to base stone upon. Her father, sister, and Batsai were still dead, but that fact seemed less central to her life and more like a glimpse of her own narrowly avoided death. Or perhaps not death, but fate. Yoichi had said he planned to revive her with an antidote and make her his empress while he taught her the Path of the Water Lily. If Raijin hadn’t drank her poison, she would likely be trapped in Yoichi’s clutches.

Koida shuddered.

“A fact that causes such a violent reaction is not an ideal foundation for your Stone Soul,” Cold Sun said.

“It was a fate avoided, not a fact.”

“You are supposed to be thinking of a fact on which you can base a powerful Stone Soul,” the huge warrior rumbled in his blunt way. Irritation crept into his voice, though it didn’t show on his face.

She nodded and forced herself to focus. She couldn’t save Raijin’s body from a Sun Palace full of Living Blade masters and potential Water Lilies without mastering her lavaglass blade arm. She needed an unbreakable fact.

Though she wanted it to be true, Koida couldn’t say for certain that Raijin being alive was a fact. Maybe especially because she wanted it to be true.

She shot an accusatory glance at Cold Sun. His Uktena logic was rubbing off on her. He waited, face as stony as his father’s.

One thing she could say for certain was that Raijin had saved her from Yoichi’s schemes.

“Raijin saved me,” she said. It was the reason she was alive and free, and she liked the symmetry in the idea that this fact could be the one that ultimately helped her save him. “That’s my unbreakable fact.”

“This does sound like my brother.” Cold Sun raised his left arm, shifting it into an enormous lavaglass machete with a wavelike, undulating cutting edge. “Retreat into your unbreakable fact. Allow it to fortify you. Now cover it in layer after layer of stone.”

Like an oyster growing a pearl, Koida surrounded her unbreakable fact with layers of conviction and certainty. As she did so, the ache in her heartcenter for her lost sister, father, and the father of her heart dulled. It still hurt, but it was no longer debilitating. A new strength surpassed the exhaustion from the predawn hours spent conditioning her body and training with Hush. She would go on training for however long it took—she could because Raijin had sacrificed himself for her, and that would give her the strength to save him. Even the constant nagging wish to see her betrothed again, to speak to him or hold his hand or just know he was alive, faded to a bearable level.

Seeing the change in her face, Cold Sun continued. “Feel the lavaglass of your blade arm. Shift your focus into it, in the way you shift your focus into your heartcenter. Follow its contours, feel the sharpness of the lethal edge. Trace the curve of the spurs that culminate in deadly points. The lavaglass beneath the sacred boiling pools is alive, like your Ro. It chose to serve you and gave itself to you to do your bidding. Command it to retreat into your arm.”

Retreat, Koida thought. Become an arm again.

Nothing happened.

She frowned. “It won’t listen to me.”

“You must speak in its tongue,” Cold Sun said. “Living lavaglass does not communicate in words, but in sensations. You know when your blade is going to emerge by the feeling of motion and change in your arm, correct?”

“And prickling,” Koida said. Though that was perhaps not the best description of the movement of lavaglass beneath her skin. It was almost as if her muscle and bone were melting away in a low, smoldering fire.

Cold Sun nodded, the red clay-smoothed ropes of his hair sliding over his shoulders. “Do you remember how it felt when you first received the lavaglass?”

“Awful,” Koida said, grimacing. Then she shook her head. “Well, no, I can’t remember the specific feeling of that pain, only my shock at how intense it was. And immediately after, it felt as if everything from my fingertips to my shoulder was stronger, fortified, as if the bones of my arm couldn’t be broken.”

“It would take a blow stronger than most men can deliver, even bolstered by the Armor of the Stone-Souled Warrior,” Cold Sun said. “Feel that sensation again, focusing on the bones of your arm. Your memory of it will help the lavaglass to remember.”

Koida took a deep breath and let it out, feeling once more the immovable power of an arm reinforced by living stone. She felt the moon broadsword shifting. She opened her eyes and the transformation faltered, stopping with her thumb midway reemerged from the blade and her elbow just beginning to reappear where the moon broadsword’s haft would have been. Quickly, she reclosed her eyes and began again. This time, when she felt her arm shifting, she kept her focus on the sensation of a whole arm.

Finally, the flesh and lavaglass stopped moving.

Koida looked.

“It worked!” She grinned, holding up her now matching hands.

Cold Sun’s lips turned up at the corner, an expression she had come to recognize in her Uktena friend as a beaming smile.

“Hold to your Stone Soul,” he cautioned her. “If you let go of it, you will lose control over your lavaglass blade.”

“But it’s still an arm,” she said, looking to him for an explanation. “I thought if you lost your emotionlessness, that meant you had dropped the Stone Soul.”

“A misassumption outsiders often make. Emotionlessness was never required for a Stone Soul, only a fact that remains unbroken in the face of those emotions, one strong enough to take refuge in from their storm. With an unbreakable fact to start from, you are free to assess the world around you with clarity and react logically no matter how distressing the situation.”

While Koida was still digesting this, the underbrush rustled on the far side of the clearing. Behind her, Pernicious lurched to his vast brimstone hooves, eyes burning with fiery orange Ro, ready to attack.

Lysander stepped out of the trees. “It’s just me, you bag of rotting demon meat.”

Pernicious snorted angrily and tossed his massive midnight head.

Flitting along behind the foreigner like a flowing cape was Raijin’s enormous river ray. It worried at his shoulders and the back of his head almost playfully.

Without looking, Lysander swatted at the ray. “I haven’t got any fish. Swim off.”

The ray made a quick circle around him, then snapped its wings down and shot back up through the branches and into the sky. Leaves and a few small twigs broke off and fell on Lysander. He cursed and dusted the bark out of his hair close-cropped yellow hair.

Koida smirked. At least it wasn’t only her who couldn’t get along with the foreigner.

Cold Sun’s lip was twitching as well. He turned to Koida.

“This seems an appropriate place to end our training for the day,” he said.

“Thank you for the lesson, teacher.” Koida pressed her palm to her fist and bowed over them, keeping her eyes on Cold Sun’s to acknowledge his martial strength. Then she held up her blade hand and wiggled the fingers. “And the progress.”

Cold Sun returned her courtesy with the customary shallow Uktena bow.

At the center of the clearing, Lysander scraped dirt onto their fire with a stick, glancing occasionally at Hush as she flowed through the slow, deliberate techniques of her Path, Hidden Whispers.

“You two royal highnesses gather up whatever you’re taking with you,” he said, pointing the muddy stick at Koida and Cold Sun. “I want to ride out as soon as Hush is finished with her moving meditations.”

Koida raised a brow, surprised that the usually impatient Lysander was allowing Hush to finish her training. But, she supposed, no one could be rude and abrasive all the time.

“You found a ship willing to let us work for passage to the northern coast?” Cold Sun asked.

Lysander nodded. “A cargo junk headed to make port in Nishutu Iri—one whose captain doesn’t ask questions and has made it through the Seven Hells Strait at least a dozen times. Luck won’t shine on us this bright again. They sail out of Takate Iri Harbor this afternoon, so call your ram in and be ready to go.”

Cold Sun nodded and went to the edge of the clearing, clapping his huge hands in a peculiar rhythm. Somewhere in the distance, a deep trumpeting call answered.

Pernicious’s ears perked up and his nostrils flared.

“Some other day,” Koida said, vaulting onto the half-demon’s back while he was distracted. It was easier to control the destrier from on top, and she was less likely to get crushed under-hoof if she lost control when Cold Sun’s war ram rode into the clearing.

Pernicious danced and sidled, but didn’t attempt to fight her. His ears twitched and turned, and his eyes rolled with flame as he searched the tree line.

“I don’t understand how going halfway around the continent via sea is faster than making a straight line overland to the Great Library,” Koida said.

At the edge of the clearing, Hush stepped into a relaxed stance, closed her eyes, and released a long breath. When she reopened them, she bowed gratefully to Lysander.

He returned the motion. “The Great Library is surrounded by the Desert of Blushing Embers, Princess. The trip down from Nishutu Iri requires less than a day’s travel through the desert. From the southern border of the desert to the Library’s oasis, the shortest distance is still more than three days without a drop of water in sight. It’s time saved in not dying of thirst. And I think you’ll find there are a lot fewer mouths on the open sea looking to blab where the fugitive second princess went than if we cut across half your empire.”