Chapter 13: Dragonfly rune

The cloudy sky interlocked heaven and earth together in elemental storm energies.

Crack!

The sky flashed abruptly and a bolt of lightning cut across like a blue dragon, then in an instant it was gone.

The caravan of efayan refugees had already woken up to set out on their journey, cleaned and rejuvenated by the rain. There was an endless stream of shouts and bustle rising and falling and the atmosphere allowed them to travel safely during the day. After stopping to rest for the night, it was time for the efayans to leave their country and follow the path along the border, then head north to reach Yasha'Lafiq.

To protect their goods as well as themselves and prevent them from getting drenched wet by the rain water, the refugees who had the methods, potions and mana to spare, showed off their abilities.

One of them raised his palm up and allocated his clear spring mana to a grade one golden shielding palm vraja potion. A sunny brightness floated away like an umbrella from his palm and covered a wide circular area with warmth and light, repelling and drying up the droplets.

Many other efayans used a wide assortment of grade one plant branch vraja potions whose effectiveness was increased by the rain water and the light shining from the golden shielding palm. Among these potions counted the bushy canopy vraja potion, weed shade potion, silky grass potion and frond ears potion. It was clear that this town specialized in the plant and root branch of potions, which gave someone the power to manipulate, create or use plants and rapidly grow them from the ground or change their bodies. It was a popular branch of potions throughout middle Alyriam, particularly the lush and fertile area surrounding the god river Na-jid. While this path was fairly undemanding in materials and the means of brewing were cheap and affordable, it still offered a balanced mix of offense and defense, a generous selection of supporting abilities such as trapping, path-making and transportation, and it was straightforward to use and excel at.

The disadvantage of plant branch vraja potions lay in the fact that they had many clear weak points. The terrain greatly affected the efficacy of a fighter who depended almost entirely on the creation of plants, plus the plants themselves usually had a natural weakness to metal, fire, decay, blade and ice branches. Ice, blade and decay were uncommon to be found across all Alyriam, but the metal branch was perhaps one of the most popular, with many high level fighters using it. The grandmaster of the fire branch was none other than the former first princess Iriazel, so advancements in the fire branch have been made over the last century, it was a deeply studied combat path.

"The rain is heavy, take note of the slippery stone!", the refugees yelled and gave out instructions.

"Better open your eyes wide so that we won't get ambushed in this confusion!"

In this weather, the trail along the border between countries became even more difficult to traverse and even though many had useful and strong potions to use, they were still of humble beginnings. Once their bodies were drenched by rain and coupled with the intensive labor, they would easily get an illness. If they encounter wild beasts or izzii on the road, they might all easily lose their lives, or get injured or lose themselves from the caravan. Other than natural disasters and beast ambushes, there could also be other packs of refugees, or traveling merchants or even groups of bandits who committed robbery. They have been lucky this time to chance upon Jayaza's expedition, but others might harbor criminal thoughts.

Eventually they all met to bid each other farewell.

"We're leaving," Jayaza saluted the refugee elder.

"Take care of yourselves, brave warriors."

"And you too, lord elder, and may we meet again in Yasha’Lafiq so maybe we'll have a chance to talk over a glass of water and enjoy a nice meal."

"We would like that very much."

Reluctant to see this party of martial fighters leave in the opposite direction, the rest of the caravan gathered to send them off with their gazes. Many had complicated expressions, recognizing well the dangers ahead.

"Whether it's them or us, the road ahead is unforeseen. Out of those who will get to return home, how many of those present today will be left?"

"In these hard times, how can we be sure of the day tomorrow?"

"You're right, it's hard even to make a living inside the large cities, let alone travel the desert."

As the expedition force left further and further, the refugees began talking and debating. The cheerful and light-hearted atmosphere of last night gradually disappeared and was replaced by burdensome emotions.

***

The last hike into the mountainous terrain of northwest Efayan proved more arduous than anything the expedition force had ever faced. The trail heaved and plummeted, the ground simply shifted between bare stone, sheets of dislodged ancient rock and sharp pockets of pebbles. What's more, the weather atmosphere turned more violent with each step, as if the winds themselves rose against the expedition force, to turn them away in their tracks and leave them breathless.

That afternoon on the eighth day, a stop was called at the base of a rock spire. Nobody yet knew the cause for the break, but everybody remained incurious and aloof, too beaten up into submissive tiredness. They sat down and unburdened themselves with little or no conversation. The refugees were already forgotten, the sky gradually cleared of clouds and began to shine like a coin. The air became dry and still, with nary a proof of the rainstorm that very morning.

Yamsoor was the first to notice that they walked upon the ruined remains of an ancient stone road, but soon all the nanza-cats recognized the signs of cut stone and the arrangements of craft.

There was almost no enthusiasm in the discovery.

Jayaza ordered for an assembly with Yamsoor, Derdal and Fagan, while Ran, Shan and several other more prominent nanza-cats stood looming at a distance to listen. When the expedition leaders concluded their arrangement, Derdal sent Shan to communicate to the rest what had been decided.

Shan's noble countenance scraped across the nanza party as he shouted for numbers.

"We shall settle here and leave the unnecessary supplies at the entrance for when we return…"

"What's the problem?" shouted Sielo who stood in the back.

"We have reached the tomb of Ba, it is just beyond the far end of the valley," answered Shan while pointing a distance away at a towering mountain spire.

"This is it, we're finally here…", whispered Ssyba to Zioz, who collapsed to rest a couple of paces behind her.

He, Lorgo, Tidja, alongside a few other conspirators of Zioz' entourage have been punished to carry many of the supplies and ease the burdens of other more obedient types, who were regarded as better soldiers.

"So what now?" Sielo asked Shan, a distance from Ssyba and Zioz.

"The expedition has come to an end. Here we rest for the last time before we enter."

A drawn silence, filled by the hissing banter of the nanza-cats. The end of the road seemed to trouble the nanza-cats somehow, as if the desert and mountain wilderness offered some reassurance and comfort to them, where the works of men only laughed at them.

Zioz leaned his head towards Ssyba and his tone seemed to be a sentence to death:

"That's not all, listen."

"What do you mean?" asked Ssyba.

"He's my brother, I know he's reluctant to speak further but the leaders talked about something else which agitated Shan."

Ssyba did not understand Zioz' disquieted tune until she turned her own attention to Shan and saw the intense glare with which he regarded the nanza-cat troupe.

Shan continued:

"Lord Derdal thinks something big hides in the tombs, at least as big as an entire izzia flock or a behemoth. According to lord Yamsoor's initial estimations, we could face up to a hundred izzia rock-jaws, grunts, lean stalkers and so on…"

As he spoke, Shan watched the feline faces trying to find the appropriate expressions. He could tell they were frightened by expectations to the point where it almost seemed comedic. These raucous, vicious beasts acting like lost cubs, watching with the same timid sincerity. Battling even one izzia grunt was considered difficult enough, so the possibility of facing hundreds of them genuinely concerned the nanza-cats.

Because of this, the lionesque Shan couldn't find it in him to hide the information from them despite the fact that Jayaza had instructed him to only disclose the absolute necessity in terms of information.

Curses filled the nanza troupe. Some murmured, some roared out loud, most were afraid but not in any debilitating way.

Ssyba clutched at her chest. When Fagan first mentioned the mission into the arcane depths of the tomb, Ssyba had thought only about potential gains, only about unspoken power retrieved from within the bowels of the earth. By the time Shan had finished talking, all those ideas had evaporated and the implications of what they were about to attempt assaulted her psyche. For the first time in her life, and she imagined in the lives of many of the nanza surrounding her at the moment, they truly arrived face to face with the most horrifying enemy of mankind in the Alyriam desert belt buckle: the izzii. There were fewer things she could imagine more gruesome than being hunted and massacred in those dark catacombs. As much hunters as the nanza were, the izzia hive mind had created an abominable existence. The princedom of Yasha'Lafiq couldn't cope with it, how could mere nanza-cats?

The nude truth was that few things in Alyriam could match the threat posed by the izzia swarms.

But Ssyba had no inferiority complexes regarding her own personal power. Not even counting the yet unused right eye polearm gaze vraja potion, Ssyba was as strong as an adult human male and had enhanced body density, which further increased the durability of her bones, skin, muscles and even the softer organs. She knew that if need be, she'd have a better chance at survival than any of the other nanza, including Ran and Fagan and in niche situations, she could fare better than the three humans, of course depending on what strange vraja potions they had at their disposal.

Ssyba pondered with a dark expression, her face merely a black hooded oval out of which two large hot iron eyes sparkled:

"Strength acts weirdly upon the body of an animal, it enhances every physical aspect in untold ways as the different biological constituents work off of one another. Although the base bodily strength can be naturally increased by a margin through diet and training, each muscle group is only as effective as biology allows them to be and they generate only as much force as the physical reality enables them to. The strength vraja potion acts as an extraneous source of strength, outside of the physical reality, it adds a flat amount of strength and acts as an exponent to the base strength. In other words, the result is greater than merely the sum of its parts. In my case in particular, it repeatedly multiplied the effectiveness with which I can navigate the terrain and the mastery of my natural combat abilities. But why? Take a human for example. Unless arduously trained, a human ten times as strong is still a human with the finesse of a human, but we the nanza have intrinsic competences which can not be duplicated. My tail is as lethal as a steel whip, my claws are a set of razor sharp knives, my fangs can crush bone, my legs allow me to jump across distances and my inborn agility is heightened. I can execute feats of athleticism that no human could ever hope to accomplish, regardless of how strong they are. One should imagine the size and strength of a brawny man with the quickness and efficiency of a feline."

Yet, Ssyba's line of thought ended with a heartbreak resembling the end of childhood. However strong she was, this journey humbled her with its iron intensity, and all of her over-ambitiousness seemed buffoonish. The unpatterned fact of her existence was a caricature compared to the powers set loose upon this world in ancient times, a residue of other existences.

Ssyba walked on with a heavy mind, thinking that her triumph lay not in nobility or prowess or cleverness (like in Fagan's case), but in the perversity of luck.

From that moment of the initial rest and assessment, to the moment where they eventually reached the entrance of the tomb proper, another few hours of hike had passed and the night descended quickly with the speed of a hammer.

They had some difficulty scrounging for fuel, but eventually the expedition managed to get a fire going. Jayaza had insisted they not use vraja potions again unless forced in combat.

This filled the troupe with dread for some reason.

The tomb was awe inspiring and huge.

A high vertical wall towered over them, a gargantuan monument cut directly into the mountain's stone. At the base, supported by majestic pillars as thick and robust as water barrels but hundreds of times larger, mawed the enormous gate and entrance like the stylized opened jaws of a serpentine flood dragon. The night in these mountains was dark indeed, but the impenetrable pitch blackness of the tomb looked like an obsidian portal into a nether region of the world, a precipice between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

The expedition gathered on the platform beneath this monument, strained their necks looking up and having their mouths open and eyes wide. They had all expected many awful or terrible things, but were caught unprepared at the greatness and aura of mystery surrounding the moment.

"See the serpent reliefs radiating away from the entrance, it clearly resembles traditional tso-men motifs. It's like this whole place was made in offer to them," said Jayaza.

"To his tso-woman queen…," added Yamsoor.

"Or maybe it was made by them. Have a look at this," ended Derdal beckoning the others to observe.

Much to everybody's astonishment, the stone wall had been so masterfully cut, that it was as gleaming as polished glass. In fact, the delicacy seemed more like a reveal, as if the mountain stone was mud rinsed away to reveal the sculptures beneath. And the reliefs clearly depicted serpents and waterways, or had sea and river and water elements added one on top of another in a mad braid of meaning and art, so that everywhere one looked, there were entire narratives and stories to decipher. Each and every single portion of the wall surrounding the entrance was sculpted in this fashion, interlocking floods and dragons and sea monsters.

Derdal shook his head in mock acceptance of something long denied:

"This is no human craft."

"Didn't you say that this place has once been king Na'calial's treasury?"

"It was. As far as we know, there hasn't been any sizable tso-man society in this area of the belt buckle, so why this?"

"Yes, it makes no sense for tso-men to be building over some ruins in the middle of nowhere," agreed Jayaza.

Yamsoor walked away from Jayaza and Derdal and crouched at the base of the entrance, palming the ground and feeling the manufacture with his fingers. He did so as if checking a corpse for heat or a pulse. He lingered over the sculpture of a dragon, then looked back significantly:

"This is the alien design of tso-men hands alright. There is no rhyme and reason to read into, no conventional beat to go by."

The other two looked up the monument in a different light now. There was too much beauty and grandeur, it did not entirely resemble the place of hide and rest of a fugitive and his tso-woman wife.

Even as they discussed and argued over the history and the construction of the tomb, some nanza-cats wandered forward inside, effortlessly crossing the invisible boundary that seemed to hold the humans back.

"As expected of lesser beings," Ssyba wordlessly murmured.

She had gained some appreciation of the greater scopes over the past few weeks since uncovering the mysteries of the soul, but her fellow nanza-cats were obviously past their awe. The dimensions escaped the grasp of their minds, they could do nothing but laugh at an incomprehensible world.

There was comfort, Ssyba assumed, in the smaller things.

To them, such works represented nothing but a shrine to human intellect and heavenly power. At the base of all things, it had nothing to do with the intentions of the nanza.

Sibaud, meanwhile, also theatrically entered the scene, walking past the expedition force with his sword drawn. Despite his stature, which was taller and leaner than the average male, he seemed a frail sliver before the draconian maw about him, like a knight facing off a dragon. Only the gleam of his scimitar, a crescent moon against blackness, bespoke his might. It seemed to say: this nanza-cat is beyond nanza-cats.

He turned his gaze across the tomb, ostentatiously scraping a rune with his blade on the entrance wall as he did so.

"I don't think it's a good idea to disturb it," boldly intervened Ssyba.

The act of a nanza touching the tomb seemed venal, obscene, as if mere contemplation or the touch of a finger could dirty and soil this artwork.

The cowled darkness that was his face turned to regard her, held her in scrutiny before lifting skyward as though studying the law of fate across the night sky. He raised two paws and drew back his leather hood.

Sibaud's face was cut open during the clash with Zioz and later Spill, his left cheek split into a gruesome smile that astonished Ssyba.

"This is marked palace,"

"You marked it, you fool," said Ssyba, to which Sibaud smiled.

"Does that frighten you?"

"It does not, but it does flaunt our presence to unknown eyes. It almost begs to be investigated."

A disapproving pause.

"I suppose it does," admitted Sibaud.

Very little conversation still punctuated the silence, and no one took it upon themselves to address the whole expedition force or make declarations. Jayaza had imparted some basic orders for the morning and a few other things. Yamsoor made a point to make his bedding nearest to the entrance and keep watch, making sure dread did not take hold over the others.

"See that snake there? I swear it looks like me prick, eh?" Sielo was always quick to make a fool of himself, eyeing each female of their nanza-cat troupe.

Some laughed, but it was controlled and it died quickly. Oppressed by the draconian eyes hanging above them, a sort of anxiety encircled everyone.

All talk soon sputtered out as weariness and lethargy possessed them, and the expedition force unrolled their mats and sleeping bags across the smooth stone of the platform. The curious moon watched them for a time.

Few fell asleep but were to fatigued to say or do anything other than trace the stars. Fewer slept well. The black mouth of the tomb seemed ready to snatch them away.

The morning light revealed more desolation and melancholia than the majestic brilliance of last night. The sheer wall was cracked, the snake and dragon sculptures were eroded by the caprices of weather and the passage of time, the waters were worn into little shapes resembling dunes. What they dreaded in the nighttime became a fragmented and gouged piece of rock during the day.

Still, it was huge and imposing and it commanded a level of solemn reverence only tall monuments could. The troupe broke their fast in relative silence, made the camp ready for their hopeful return, some brewed coffee with what little remained of their fuel. Jayaza had left some vraja potions behind and Yamsoor had discarded every material piece and ingredient that he had acquired by killing izzia grunts. The expedition paused to wait for Derdal to scan the entrance, then they conferred in low tones to outline a basic plan in case they got ambushed by izzia stalkers: four nanza-cats per izzia grunt and the team formations as well as the order of attack have all been previously established.

After that, they entered the black tomb of Ba Busal with not a word, no fanfare, not even a passing comment typically attached. They simply assembled in a file and followed Derdal and Yamsoor.

Ssyba glanced at the pale blue sky one last time before joining the string of figures vanishing into the oily darkness. By chance, her eyes caught the mark inscribed by Sibaud the previous night. It was the symbol of a Na-jid dragonfly, it seemed, and perhaps due to some eccentricity of light and the rising heat of the day evaporating the last few drops of dew, it appeared to her that some clear spring mana lingered over the symbol.