Sachihiro

We spend the next two ten-days resting as the tribe prepares for an All-Meet.

An All-meet is when all the tribal villages meet to make important decisions that will affect everyone's future and the future of the Norse. Of course, the chieftain makes the final decision, that's his job. But here is a platform for any and all that have proven themselves in the battle to question him.

I have been spending a fair bit of time with Teá and Ava. In my one-armed state, there is not much for me to do except take walks, daydream, talk to Devan, a childhood friend who has recently taken a mate and follow Ava around. Da has been encouraging me to learn to use my left hand better. You don't really realise how much you use your dominant hand for everything until it's gone.

Dee has spent hours with the seer. Apparently, the dungeon core is just too spiritually active to be kept hidden from him and they have both been studying the thing and learning from it in exchange for feeding it. It worries me a little. There is something about the constant need to be fed that seems unnatural to me, like those people in ma's story.

Om has been training like a madman, training with ma and da. I didn't even know da trained, but these past few days have been a whirlwind of revelations. That ma and da train together explain a few things though. I have always attributed our family’s strangeness to ma's foundling status. She may not remember who she was, or so she still claims, but she remembered how to speak and other basic things.

I assumed the little wisdom and seemingly silly skills she passed down to Dee and I was a form of training.

We, all three of us who were in contact with the hag, four if you include the core went through a cleansing ritual at the night zenith a few hours ago. It involved a lot of induced puking, shitting, staying in a steam hut naked while trying to commune with the spirits of the ancestors, and then being wash by the seer as he mumbled enchantments under his breath.

For me, the worst part was definitely being washed by a creepy old man scrapping my skin raw with a bubble rock. But strangely enough, I do feel cleansed somehow. Like my body has dispelled whatever bad things it has been holding on to. Or it has unclenched after being wound too tight for a long time. Maybe it was that second enamel that did it but I feel... free? Unburdened.

Spending time with Ava and Teá has been both entertaining and educational. I have never had a female friend and I realise that's what Ava has become. It's probably 'cause of the urinating incident but we are both more comfortable as friends. Teá is not the person she pretends to be in public at all. In public, she seems strong, confident, and indifferent to the many looks admiring men give her as she spars and interacts with people. In private she worries and is plagued by doubts about herself.

It's a very strange experience for me who thought himself perceptive. I still find her extremely attractive, but I think I will keep my cock away for now. She just complains too much.

Barbarian villages are very communal and we all know each other or know of each other. The longhouse in the middle of the village is the biggest structure as it has to accommodate the entire village. Once every ten days there is a feast of magical beast meat hunted from the Dawn Forrest, fruits, herbs, bread and mead. Almost everyone in the village attends and gets drunk and fornicates.

The longhouse is made from the oldest timbers, has a deep foundation and a high thatched roof, it even has a cellar. There is a huge fireplace that keeps it warm during winter and a back room dedicated to baking and preparing food. The longhouse is further decorated by climbing plants that are allowed to grow along the walls on the inside to provide a pleasant scent when they flower and a decorative pattern when they don't. Broken shields and old weapons line the upper portion of the walls as a testament to battles won and lost, and heroes discovered and legends made.

The rest of the houses are sparse in comparison. If a new house is needed for a mated pair or an adult wanting to leave home the villagers can have the house built within a day if the materials are already gathered. Barbarians are cathemeral beings, which means they are neither most active at night or during the day but active both night and day evenly.

Legend speaks of places with nocturnal creatures so dangerous that the humans there have adapted to only being active during the day and finding shelter at night. I pity then, a barbarian would die to fight rather than be kept caged in such a state.

One of the little quips our family practices is meditation. Ma taught Dee, da and me when she got back from wherever she went 10 or so years ago. She made it fun and both Dee and I were better than da at it. This resulted in us doing it more often. Being better than your da at something gives boasting rights and is very encouraging to a child. I eventually stopped when I discovered this wonderfully controlled fighting the others called sparing.

Dee never stopped as it gave him an excuse to spend time with ma. This is an activity that I have taken up again, which I am currently immersed in.

To meditate is to centre yourself into the universe. I am one with the world, we are at the same frequency. I breathe in and breathe out. I find meaning in things beyond the split moment between moments. I breathe in I breath out. I know the meaning of life. I breathe in I breath out. All the while I'm at stage two of my meditation, which is the stage I observe my breathing not direct it.

I watch myself without the push to learn myself, without curiosity but just watchfulness. Questions push to limit our knowledge to what we want to know instead of what we could know. I observe and I absorb nothing, that is the goal. For it to go through me, for the knowledge to use me like a sieve and not a destination.

I am almost giddy with the knowledge of being a servant of the universe grants me. I breathe in, my body holds it a bit longer without my direction. Natural breathing isn't rhythmic, it's erratic and always trying to play catch up. It's like we were all born in tune with something or at a specific frequency and somewhere along the way of life we lose it and our bodies have been trying to get it back ever since.

After observing myself the next step is observing the world. This I am unable to do with any success as of yet, but there have been great strides since I began meditating again.

Ma obviously isn't normal, or usual or mundane. I know this, I know it more than most but we tend to overlook the special things we have. Not that I take her for grunted often, but it's only now that I've slowed down a lot more than my usual pace that I see the reverence with which she is treated by the other women, and of course Ava also pointing it out helped. When I found out that Dee had taught Harold and Om to meditate years ago it all clicked for me. How they got their memories first, how Dee has such high spiritual energy. So high that he was able to shield other people during a fight with a night-hag, apparently that's what we fought.

They are all witches to me and they must die. After that incident in the forest, I asked myself, 'what if ma is extremely powerful and I'm too close to her to notice?' I then started meditating again, trying to remember all her other wisdom. I struggled to get into it the first few hours I tried, but one suddenly the second day I was in the zone like my mind and body remembered everything.

There are three forms of meditation ma taught to us. The first is the most difficult for me, to quiet the mind. The human mind is never truly rested, it is always working overtime on everything being constantly stimulated by every twitch of the body, every errant thought, dream, itch. After a certain number of years, it starts slowing down, regardless of how resilient it is.

Have you ever seen a senile humanoid? It isn't pretty, and it usually happens to the brightest and most imaginative of people. At least, according to ma's notes. So to quiet the mind, to reach true mindlessness for even a second, has exponential returns. A rested mind is a mind that can learn a new language much easier than an adults mind just to name a potential benefit, a rested mind has unlimited potential.

The second form of meditation is to follow a mantra or to meditate on a specific subject. If you have a worthy subject great, if not it's a waste of time. According to ma's notes combat forms that imitate animals were discovered by meditating on their forms and to improve on said forms, one has to meditate on them. Where did ma learn this outlandish idea? Combat forms?

The last form of meditation is the one that comes easiest to me. A sort of combination of the two but distinctly different. It's almost like a form of listening. First to directed breathing, then natural breathing, then the breath of the world. It goes deeper and eventually focuses on other things but breathing is all I've managed and focused on so far.

I open my eyes. It's time to travel.

* *

The trip to the All-meet is exciting because it's a trip and a lot of famous warriors and descendants of famous warriors will be there. Da is walking beside me, Bjorn on his back and a long dagger on his waist.

He stands nearly 7 feet tall which isn't unusual for a Barbarian, in fact, it's the expected height for a warrior of his reputation. He does sometimes make me feel small walking beside him at 6 feet. He is literally a head and almost shoulders taller than me.

"Tell me more about you and ma," I say suddenly. He grins, his lip twisted from an old scare making the grin look sinister and intimidating. I'm used to it of course but Ava and Teá suddenly have somewhere else to be. I grin at the effect he has on others, Damage the Norse he is called. An earned name, which is an important distinction for any Barbarian warrior. His given name is Damage van Billiard, son of Billiard the Terrible.

"What do you have in mind?"

"I'm realising I know very little about you outside the homestead. Even less about ma really. I know about your exploits." He grins again and then tries and fails to suppress it.

"Tell me what you know about my exploits as you say."

Da is a true Barbarian. A boastful, drunkard, who loves to fight and fuck. All it takes for him to start telling stories is a belly full of mead and a little stroking of his ego. "I know the story of how you got your name fighting the Vikings, I know you are famed for holding the line against the three Savage Sisters as the battle was disengaged when I was young. I heard they offered to wed you after that raid." It's a funny story because da never tells that part in ma's presents, but he tells it often among the other warriors at the sparing fields.

He grunts in the affirmative. "I think I see what you want to know. I had two mothers growing up, 8 sisters and only one brother. We lived in a village that no longer exists in what is now mostly Savage Tribe lands."

"My da was a spear and axe wielder and his Rage was terrible to behold. It was so quick to surface and so destructive only other berserkers were willing to mate with him. Thus both my mothers, Helga and Abigail were Norse warrior women, we had a big house that kept being added to as the family grew. When the parent's blood was up and they fought or fucked we'd camp out a ways from the house to avoid the sound or damage they could cause. It was a good home at times," he says with a nod.

"This was about 40 to 45 years ago. In those days the Jotnar tribe still sometimes raided for women and my sisters and ma's were considered great beauties." He says with a grin, reminiscing.

"A warrior of a victorious tribe in a battle may force himself onto a woman as spoils victory, or a woman on the defeated tribe's young men. But to think after that some would have the gall to keep that woman? Spirits beyond, that level of stupidity is just asking for a knife in the kidneys," he grumbles and stays quite a moment. "But the Jotnar had a tendency of taking the women away as spoils.

"Anyway, long story short is we were raided by a combined force of the Jotnar tribe youths and the Scavenger tribe youths. There were hundreds of them, but because it was mainly youths it wouldn't have been sporting if the veterans faced them. So our force was mostly youths and a few of the unnamed warriors. It was a good fight, but we were losing. Da lost it when my sister Helda went down. Axe in hand he cleaved his way through friend or foe in his Rage. The elder warriors of the other tribes started joining the fray as well. But da decimated them. What we hadn't realised until da fought through their lines and us following in his wake was that they were raiding for women."

"The back of their lines had dozens of shackled Barbarian women that looked to have been used terribly. Among them was my eldest sister who was mated to a Norse tribesman in another village. I had thought I knew the limits of the berserker but da showed us all flames. He was much in the Rage that he Awakened. No one knows how but one moment he was dealing out death and destruction, the next a miasma of blood mist was around him like a cloud. He went from bellowing to quiet very quickly. He then kissed Helda on the head before he cut her in half."

I stumble, stunned. To kill your own child? It is unheard of in our society even with the Rage.

"The bastard systematically started killing everything in his path including the rest of the captives, some no more than young girls. Very few Savages escaped alive that day. But da had to go from the tribe, ma'Helda followed him into the Titan Mountains after his banishment. Ma Abigail stayed with us till her death. My sisters scattered, you know where your aunt Helena and uncle Brian are." Da shrugs nonchalantly. When I asked for some answers this is not where I imagined the conversation going. The rest of the two-day journey is spent with only occasional small talk from da and me.