By: Brianna Lee Hubler
Copyright © 2024 Brianna Lee Hubler. All rights reserved.
A Sea of Shadows
__________Kimio kicked the carriage door open. Since his stay in Glaiven’s fishbowl prison, he ailed of entrapment as starkly as he ailed of cabin fever. He gripped the doorframe and leaned out the doorway, until only the tips of his toes met the floor. The moist spritz that hitchhiked across Zaliradai, via its chilled winds, pelted Kimio’s uniform in prickly droplets. Delivered at the exhilarating speed of charging horses, the watery acupuncture revitalized him. For the first time since his kidnapping, Kimio felt lively.
__________Then Glaiven halted the carriage abruptly, and Kimio slipped. He flew out the open doorway and tumbled off the road, into a freshly dug ditch. Soft, loose dirt cushioned his landing, but the aloof digger of the ditch, demoralized and zombified from many hours of mindless labor, failed to reattach his senses to the disrupted scene before him. Kimio crossed his arms over his face, as the indigo-skinned, dark-haired boy brought a spade down upon him.
__________“Aegis of spiraling currents!” Kimio shouted. An umbrella of rushing water shielded him from impact. The spade crashed into the umbrella. Its magical currents ripped the spade out of the digger’s hands and flung the spade elsewhere.
__________Suddenly awakened from his stupor by the snatching of his spade, the digger’s red eyes widened, and he gasped.
__________“Loistrus look out!” he warned, but it was already too late. The spade smacked into the third boy, toppled him over, and pinned him, backside down, in another ditch.
__________“Seep into the soil,” Kimio commanded his shield. The umbrella collapsed, drenched his uniform, and then rolled off him into the dirt. Kimio scrambled to his feet.
__________They’re going to kill me, he assumed, if Glaiven doesn’t beat them to me.
__________Trapped Loistrus grabbed the spade in one hand and held his stomach with the other. He hurdled the spade back to its owner, who leapt over it, spun around, and caught it.
__________“Get back to work, Zayven,” Loistrus growled, as he climbed out of his ditch, as sluggishly as the dead disturbed.
__________Zayven glowered at Kimio. “You aren’t from around here, are you?”
__________Recalling his lessons in Zalirkatheer etiquette, Kimio laughed. “What tipped you off?” he mocked. “The glow or the gills?”
__________“Those waves,” Zayven replied.
__________“A little slow on the uptake, adepts?” Glaiven asked. He leapt down from the driver’s seat of the carriage and meandered about the scene. He skirted around the holes in the ground, and eyed the boys, like a border collie shepherding his master’s sheep.
__________From across the field of pitfalls, several boys answered, “No, Sir!”
__________“They’ll say anything to save their necks,” Kimio remarked.
__________Glaiven nodded, and then returned his attention to the crowd. “Out here digging your own graves to save me the trouble?”
__________Again, the crowd replied, “No, Sir!”
__________Glaiven gestured to the field. “Then what is all this?”
__________“Gardening,” they answered sheepishly.
__________“Who put you to work planting flowers?” Glaiven asked. “You’re supposed to be exchanging blows!”
__________Kimio knelt beside the nearest trench and glided his fingers across the leafy heads of recently planted sprouts. “Your hospitals must be full,” he determined. “These are medicinal plants.”
__________Glaiven examined the sprouts and nodded. “The hearty few that can endure the sunless sky of Zaliradai,” he replied. Then he patted Kimio on the back, “and today we see if you can be counted among them.”
__________Kimio’s eyes widened. He jumped up and rolled aside. An ambush of Dark-elf trainees missed him and tumbled into the ditch. They groaned and climbed to their feet.
__________“It isn’t cunning to crush the crop,” Glaiven disapproved. “Try again.”
__________Kimio’s ears twitched. Two others approached Kimio from behind. Their footsteps were nearly as silent as shadows, but when they reached for the close-combat daggers that hung from their belts, their toes sank into the moist soil. Kimio heard the squishing of displaced soil, of soil that was dampened by his element.
__________Kimio anticipated his assailants’ premediated strike. With each of their steps, he judged the distance between their feet and his, by the droplets of water they displaced. When they came within range to strike, he reached behind his back, grasped their wrists and turned their daggers upon them.
__________They growled, tackled him, and wrestled to retrieve their daggers from him. The pair received a series of reckless stabbings before Kimio wrestled them back far enough to reposition his feet. He kicked them back with a thrust of his legs, and then swung his legs over his head to somersault backwards into the ditch behind him. Then he rolled to his feet and fostered a dual-wielding stance.
__________His gaze darted across the field. He counted the Dark-elf trainees within sight. There were twelve, and that made him, the Sea-elf outsider, who sought to join them, an unlucky thirteenth. Clearly, Glaiven had stacked the odds against him. These blades are shorter than I like, Kimio complained silently. Fruyr and I shared a pair of sabers.
__________He turned his wrists and tightened his grip on the hilts of the daggers. But this stance is mine, he considered. I can still fight.
__________“Slippery Little Selkie, isn’t he?” Glaiven suggested. “Bathe him in a sea of Shadows!”
__________Whether it was by the magic of the trainees’ and their trainer’s unified bond to Zalir (the Element of Dark) or the primordial magic laced in spoken Elferan, Glaiven’s order dissolved Kimio’s combatants into plumes of shadow. The plumes swirled together like the winds of a tornado, combined as a cloud of judgment, and smacked Kimio against the earth, like the mighty hand of a livid idol. The cloud engulfed him when it touched him, and the trainees’ shadows pounded him, like ocean waves. The pressure of the cloud peeled open Kimio’s deep-sea sight. Since his eyes had recently acclimated to the endless nightscape, the brightness of his enhanced sight blinded him.
__________Kimio dropped the daggers. He saw no reason to slice at shadows. They could not be cut, and he could not see. He would look silly when he needed to show strength. He was not here as a jester but as a soldier. This was his initiation trial. It would progress to his inauguration as one among the Zalirkatheermor or one beneath them. Like the flipping of a coin drawn from Fate’s purse, this determined whether Kimio served Glaiven until he silenced him or vice versa. Kimio asked himself: What can I do?
__________He considered his and Fruyr’s alchemical experiment and his parents forbidden union of opposing elements. He smiled mischievously. We’re not limited to our bonds, he determined, and everything likes to blow up in our faces.
__________He ducked his head, pointed his chin towards his chest, and thrust his hands forward in the cloud of shadow. He approached the cloud like the sea it mimicked, and he backed the action with all the physical and magical strength he could muster. “Blast them apart,” he enacted, “like smoke on the Wind.”
__________A gust of wind, as primordial as the pulse of the heart, slammed into the cloud. The two collided with the force of a large, round boulder crashing into a much smaller stone and smashing it to smithereens. Like the stone, the cloud was blasted apart, and its pieces—the trainees’ shadows—were scattered throughout the pitted field. The shadows settled on the ground and resolidified as the twelve injured and unconscious trainees. They were sprawled out unceremoniously and unharmoniously on their sides, backs, and stomachs. Some of them slept in the trenches they dug, like the belabored zombies they appeared to be when Kimio arrived, or the corpses Glaiven threatened they would become.
__________Similarly, the backlash of the unbound wind spell exhausted Kimio. The brightness borne from his outstretched, deep-sea pupils faded to a rich blackness, as dark as the endless nightscape appeared to Kimio when he first entered Zaliradai. His arms flopped down against the moist soil, and he passed out, as the others before him.
__________Glaiven laughed ferociously, exposing his brilliantly white teeth to the blackened sky and adjusting his scarlet eyes to gaze at Zaliradai’s humongous, ornate moon. He declared silently: Here in the shade of our shadowed canopy, he who falls with his stricken brothers, rises with them.
Endlesslore 