Chapter 267 - Hawk Connection

Before Nilya had rounded the corner, Yuzu already read his future in the strings. The appearance of the young boy triggered the hawks, who immediately started crying out and swooping down to attack.

The ruckus alerted the other hawks on the mountain as an entire flock of grand basalt hawks dive bombed the young boy. The nearest form of shelter was a doorway fifty meters away, which Nilya barely managed to reach. Scrambling into the ruins, Nilya found himself pursued by the giant birds as they frantically snapped at him with their beaks.

Yuzu’s eyes darkened as she only read a few minutes into this future before she extended her hands toward the strings.

~

A few moments later Nilya descended the stone staircase and rounded the corner. His mouth opened in awe as he took in the majestic sight of the cliffside monastery, with its crumbled staircases and broken facades that somehow still seemed to be perfectly in harmony with the natural flow of the rocks.

A shimmer of moonlight caught his eye as he saw a hawk flying peacefully in the distance, swooping down to capture some unseen prey. This shook him back to the present as he remembered where he was, standing completely exposed on the side of the mountainside.

Something in his gut told him that he needed to get out of sight as quickly as possible.

The staircase leveled out into a narrow path that ran along the cliff, before reaching a small alcove with a doorway that lead inward. Nilya’s spiritual intuition triggered as he quickly ducked into the doorway just as the shadow of a hawk passed overhead.

Something heavy hit the ground on the balcony outside the doorway, smacking against the stone with a wet thump. He pressed his back against the doorway as he heard the fluttering of giant wings and the clacking of talons on the stone outside.

An ear splitting squeal caused Nilya to jam his palms against his ears as a struggle ensued on the other side of the door. The sound of tearing flesh was punctuated by terrified scrambling and the hoarse cries of a beast. The sound of a whip smacked heavily outside the doorway, and Nilya scrambled further into the ruins as a leather-like tail whipped through the open door, smashing against the spot where Nilya had just been hiding.

The tail flailed a few more times, quickly losing vitality as a thick pool of black blood oozed in from the balcony.

Nilya shuddered as he heard the weak, final cries of the beast as it died in the talons of the hawk. The experience of death was not new to him, Nilya had seen many an animal fall prey to a predator in the wilderness around his village. However, though this fight had taken place around the corner out of sight, he felt each strike, each wound, each heartbeat of the hawk and beast with vivid intensity.

He felt fear and pain, hunger and excitement. He felt the intimate connection of life and death in a visceral, tangible way that he had never felt before.

As the life force of the beast faded, Nilya felt the grand and dignified presence of the hawk radiating out at him. His heart beat rapidly in his chest as he quickly retreated further into the ruins, understanding that the hawk would be able to sense him as well.

The light from outside was weak and did not penetrate far into the ruins, and Nilya could not see in the dark. Even before Nilya made it into the next room he was stretching out his hand to the wall and using it to guide him through the doorway.

Only once he had put a full room between him and the hawk did he feel safe enough to relax and reflect on the experience.

The spiritual plane was the plane of connection, and the spiritual body was the body that was most in tune with its surroundings. The sensations felt by the spiritual body was the basis of spiritual intuition.

In this brief experience Nilya gained a deep understanding of the guru-chi’s teachings around the spiritual plane.

“She was… mourning.” Nilya muttered softly, trying to put his feelings into words. He didn’t know how he knew the gender of the hawk, but this was what his intuition told him. The hawk was hungry and was fulfilling her role as a hunter, and she was distressed and suffering from some recent trauma.

Nilya didn’t have any source of light that could help him navigate the darkness, and he didn’t feel safe moving deeper into the ruins, so he waited until the hawk had finished eating and flown away before returning to the doorway that he had entered from.

He carefully walked around the pool of blood, only casting a brief glance at the grizzly corpse of a giant rat before continuing along the cliffside path.

~

From her sanctuary, Yuzu carefully tweaked the strings, paying careful attention as she molded Nilya’s future.

From the balcony there were two hawk nests close by. Using ‘Fate Cycling’ she examined the futures where Nilya made his way up to the nests, taking note of the hawks that he encountered and whether he would find anything in the nests.

Finding nothing, Yuzu gently coaxed Nilya’s string so that he skipped those locations, saving him time and keeping him out of danger.

Throughout the visions she noticed a trend.

In one vision Nilya was climbing down a set of hardy vines, when he was attacked by a pair of hawks. He stayed on the inside of the web of vines, narrowly avoiding the hawks as they pecked at him from the outside and ripped up the plants.

At one point Nilya nearly fell off the cliff, just barely managing to catch a loose vine and swing his way to safety while the hawks lost track of him in the chaos.

“They were sad, too.” Nilya frowned, eyeing the screeching hawks with a look of pity. His hands clutched at his arm, blood seeping through his fingers as he winced in pain from a number of wounds around his body.

In another vision Nilya made it to a nest and knelt down, touching his hand against a recess in the crystal. He withdrew his fingers, seeing the black soot that remained on them.

“It’s still warm…” He muttered softly.

The screech of a hawk jolted him to action as he dodged out of the way of a talon. There was a mad scramble as he ducked and weaved around the hawk, who had returned to its nest as Nilya was investigating it. Using his small size to his advantage, Nilya managed to evade the hawk and confuse it long enough to escape to safety, only suffering a few broken ribs from being smashed against the wall.

Of course, Yuzu only saw these visions occur in the threads. In the end none of these encounters actually happened.

In this way Nilya explored the ruins, carefully moving down several levels. The pathways were fragile, crumbling, and often times Nilya had to find creative ways to make his way through the more broken parts of the ruins. As he descended he often wondered where he could find a hawk nest to investigate, never realizing that he had passed by several locations already that had been pruned from his future to save time.

Even after several hours of searching none of the nests which Yuzu spotted had anything in it. There was no sign of anything that could be a ‘hollow ember’, there was only nest after nest of aggravated grand hawks.

Finally, Nilya reached the bottom level of the monastery and a final set of stairs that had crumbled completely into a black pit below. The rocks here were rougher, filled with scars and deep gouges. Below, one could barely make out small plateaus and outcrops descending into the darkness.

Nilya frowned, feeling a chill breeze rising up from below, hearing the soft howl of the wind as it blew through the shadowed valley beneath the mountain.

He stood there for a long time, staring down into the darkness, wondering what he should do. He had come all this way and had not even seen a single nest, nor had he come into contact with any hawks or other creatures, aside from the first near-miss at the beginning.

Since he had no reference point for how the trial normally was, he could only assume that the trial was meant to be this way, and perhaps he had simply missed the clues. At the same time, here was the bottom of the broken staircase, and the cliffs that could let him climb down to the area below, where the guide had told him there could still be hollow embers.

He stayed for a long time because at this point Yuzu had fixed his thread to this location. She too, was staring down into the pit, currently at a loss as to what to do.

This area of ruins is full of mazes and hawk nests. There doesn’t appear to be any internal hallways, making it so that searching the monastery for a ‘hollow ember’ means the candidate has to travel in plain sight of the hawks. These hawks are huge and vicious, it’s hard to think that Nilya or anyone at his ‘level’ would be expected to fight them head on, so the goal would have been to sneak through the ruins and grab the ember without getting caught.

Based on the encounters which I’ve seen, the original trial must have been like this… The only problem is that it seems that all the nests are empty. Just like the guide said, it appears that all the hollow embers were destroyed… And as a result, the hawks are all agitated, making them even more dangerous that normal.

If not for my help, Nilya wouldn’t have even survived long enough to find the first nest.

Yuzu’s gaze darkened as she frowned. Destroying the embers couldn’t have been an easy feat. I wonder how that other guru-chi’s oji managed to pull that off.

As Nilya stayed on the bottom of the staircase Yuzu had to continuously pull away the golden threads of grand basalt hawks, who normally would have spotted him standing in plain sight. It didn’t seem to be a problem, since unlike Exalted humans, the hawks didn’t seem to notice or care that their fates were being altered.

Yuzu frowned, taking her time as she tried to extend her vision down into the depths below. She was accessing Nilya’s spiritual body thread through his thread in the physical world, greatly limiting her range, and also only allowing her to view strings that directly interacted with Nilya.

However no matter how she tried to use Fate Cycling, the distance was too far for her to glean anything of use.

She was just about to give up and influence Nilya to try climbing down, when she noticed that he had set his eyes on a hawk above.

This hawk was sitting on a perch on the mountain, looking for prey. It was one of the many hawks that Yuzu had ‘distracted’ from noticing Nilya, and from her point of view was no different than the others.

To Nilya, though, this hawk felt different than the others. Though he hadn’t encountered any of the hawks directly, he had felt their auras from a distance. They were all agitated and upset. They were sensitive and on the look out for threats.

“He’s so calm…” Nilya muttered to himself. Watching this hawk, he felt a sense of peace within him, a connection to nature that felt balanced and pure.

Yuzu’s eyebrows knitted together as she examined this hawk more closely. After a moment her eyes lit up, and she grabbed its string, wrapping it around Nilya’s own.

Standing on the bottom of the staircase, Nilya’s spiritual intuition suddenly went into alarm as the hawk he was looking at looked straight at him. They locked eyes, and Nilya’s sense of peace and calm vanished as it launched itself into the air, flying straight at him with its talons outstretched.

“Oh, no!”