3-62. Losses in War

When Otter had used Thread of Fate on Rua, it’d knocked them both on their ass for hours in a strangely intimate moment of near-voyeurism. They’d peered into each other’s souls, and while they hadn’t seen details, they’d gotten a general shape of what the other person was. 

When Otter had tied her and Rua’s fate to Vex, it’d been like they’d been sucked into a black hole. Vex had, at that time, been empty as a person, and it’d been like the two of them had filled her up. It’d been weird, and kind of painful, but worth it.

There was no baseline to how this ability worked. No pattern established. So Otter wasn’t particularly surprised when she found herself standing in the sunlight, the sand under her toes.

She was in a good mood. She had that feeling in her chest, like she’d been laughing very recently. But everything felt off. Like she wasn’t in her own body. 

A hand clutched to hers, and Otter looked down. A little girl, with a face so ugly it looped right back to being adorable, a smile so wide it could reach for the horizon. She looked five, maybe six. No, she was six. Otter knew this girl. Knew her, because she was her daughter. Kuani. 

But that wasn’t right. Otter had a daughter, and sometimes she went by Sunny, and sometimes she went by Vex, and she wasn’t Silayan from birth like this child was. 

Otter scooped the girl up in her arms. She hadn’t thought about doing it, hadn’t commanded her body to do it. It just happened, and Otter dimly realized she wasn’t in control. She was riding a memory. Sureya’s memory. 

“Do you want to go for a swim?” she asked in Sureya’s voice. A younger voice, one that wasn’t tinged with anger and bitterness. 

Kuani shook her head, suddenly bashful. She’d never been a brave girl, and her mother was just fine with that. The Islands had many brave people, most of them fearless idiots. Kuani’s gift had always been a clever mind, a passion for puzzles. She was more intelligent than children twice her age, and she’d be a gift to the Islands when she grew up. A mother knew these things about her children.

Kuani shyly pointed to a stall on the beach, a merchant smoking freshly caught huati. The large lizards were both a pest and a delicacy, their meat very tender and sweet. If you didn’t cull them every few years, they’d overpopulate even outside their own control and eat every fish in the ocean until they starved themselves and everyone else besides. By hunting them so zealously, the Silayans did the oceans and the huati themselves a favour. 

It also helped that they were delicious. 

“Anything for you, my little sunbeam.”

Otter… Sureya… carried Kuani to the stall. He had a sign up, with items listed and prices beside them. His glyph-etched smoker would allow him to cook many types of meat in a variety of ways, and to heat up flatbread in a compartment on the side. 

“What would you like today?” the merchant asked. He was an older man, his hair grey and beginning to bald. His hands were rough, likely from calluses built up from a lifetime of pulling nets. 

Kuani shyly pointed to one entry on the list, not willing to speak in front of a stranger. It was her way.

“And you…” he trailed off, as if only just now recognizing Sureya. “Ah, apologies, Seat. Whatever you’d like is free.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. 

“But custom…”

“Custom doesn’t rule everything,” she said with a smile. 

He gave her an odd look, as if she’d just said the sky was green. But it was true. For too long, the Silayan people had been buried by tradition. They were falling behind the other peoples. The Mikovians and Criobani were both making amazing strides in glyph writing. The Virturians were mapping out the world with numbers, and the Nguarians were studying the stars themselves. The Dereshi were claiming they’d come up with techniques to make Mythwalkers non-hostile, much like Ashborne. 

It just felt like everything was a race these days, and the Silayans hadn’t even put their shoes on yet. 

But that was going to change. The deal with Aevah and the Criobani Empire was working well. They’d just brought in a few more ships, one captained by one of their more influential merchant princes. Sureya’s job was to make sure that while all this progress was happening that their people’s customs and ways were not forgotten. 

The merchant handed a pair of flatbread wraps, filled with spiced huati meat, and flavoured with jaffa and soonoo fruit. It made for a riot of flavour, of tangy sourness and hot spice, along with the sweet and smokey meat. Sureya had to put Kuani down to accept them, then made sure to pay the man a few extra Tidings to show her appreciation. 

Kuani was much too messy to be able to eat and walk at the same time. She spotted out a nearby flat rock close to the waves, and gestured for Kuani to follow her. The girl hid in the fabric of Sureya’s sarong, holding it up to cover her face so the merchant wouldn’t see her. Sureya let out a delighted laugh, and it felt odd to hear for Otter, this sound of genuine happiness from the woman she knew was now incapable of it.

The two sat on the rocks, and shared their meal. Kuani was much too small to eat all of her wrap, and threw pieces of meat and fruit and torn off flatbread into the ocean when she was too full, delighting in seeing the fish coming to feed. The waters were calm, still and clear enough that you could see the little fish darting about, and Kuani pointed at them and named each. She’d taken to reading about them, her clever little mind memorizing all the different species, and which were good for eating, and which were good for harvesting oil from, and even the three that were good for medicine. 

On the beach, the merchant was packing up his stall in a hurry, gathering up his little smoker and loading it up for transport. Sureya never thought to wonder why at the time, but Otter, in this moment, could see things Sureya did not pay attention to. A man strode the beach, a small retinue of soldiers behind him. He had the self-important look of someone who’d been told too often that he was a special little boy, when in fact they should’ve been disciplining him for being a little shit. He looked to be about in his thirties, but somehow he still seemed to lack maturity, a cockiness to his steps. His brown hair was long and lightly curled, his clothes expensive-looking, and he held a mace at his side like it was a royal scepter. 

Every single one of them were armed, and all of them had the telltale green eyes of the Criobani. 

Elsewhere on the beach, another, smaller group was approaching. One led by a Silayan woman. These also had weapons at the ready, hands holding spears. The Silayan woman was short, short even by Silayan standards, and she held onto a sword nearly as tall and wide as she was, the blade a seafoam green, and looked to be made of glass. The handle was long, longer than any sword Otter had ever seen, and tipped at the pommel was another seafoam green blade, like a spear-point. 

But somehow, that wasn’t what drew Otter’s attention. It was at the person standing next to the leader. The person was a blank spot. A form and figure that Otter knew was there, but her attention kept sliding off it. She couldn’t make out any details. It was like a person-shaped hole had been cut out of the scene. She knew they were there, but it was as if they’d been edited out, and only a jarring nothing remained. Someone who was No One. 

The Criobani reached Sureya first. They noted the approaching Silayans, but didn’t seem to care. They had the numbers on their side. 

“You are Sureya Asuega, yes?” he said in a slightly accented voice. It sounded like a weird mix of Scottish and French to Otter’s ears. 

Sureya finally paused, realizing something was off. She looked up at the man, and then noted the soldiers next to him. Something uncertain flickered in her. And Otter knew where this was going. She already knew how this story ended.

She tried to say something, tried to do something, railed against the body she now seemingly inhabited, but this was a memory. She wasn’t actually in the past, just reliving it.

Reliving it, because that was what Sureya did every day.

“I am,” she said, a bit of hesitation in her answer, unsure what was going on.

There was a noise, and it came out like static, and Otter realized No One was speaking, and she couldn’t understand the words.

But the people in the memory did. 

“You are too late,” the leader of the Criobani said. “You can’t stop this.”

“No, but we can stop this one instance,” the Silayan leader said. She held out her sword threateningly as she and her warriors came within range. “Leave, Rovarra.”

Rovarra’s guards looked nervous. A few, who were armed with crossbows, readied them. Others got ready to draw swords at their hips. 

“You don’t scare me, Lunara,” he said with a sneer.

Lunara. That was Rua’s father. The pelanoa who was now viewed as a traitor by the Silayan people. 

“I should,” she said in a deadly calm voice, one that sounded almost bored. 

“You know the deal Aevah made–”

“I do. And I know you pissed all over it and altered it when no one was looking.”

“I have the king’s ear–”

“You could have his cock in your mouth, and I wouldn’t care. This doesn’t happen. Leave. Now.”

“What’s going on,” Sureya numbly asked, though she knew. Deep down she knew. 

No One said something again, something directed at Rovarra. The words were unintelligible, the meaning lost. 

Rovarra answered, “As if I care for your opinion–”

A noise came out of Rovarra’s mouth like static, a piercing sound of fuzz and confusion, as if No One’s very name had been expunged from the record. 

No One took a step forward. One of Rovarra’s guardsmen panicked. He squeezed the trigger on his crossbow by accident. He wasn’t even aiming at anyone in particular.

And somehow, he struck the one target on the beach no one had wanted him to hit.

Kuani had been shyly hiding nearby, afraid as always, but in her typical level of fear. The one that told her to hide, but in such a way so that people could still see her. The kind that dared people to find her, but told them she didn’t want to be approached. She was half behind a rock. But half-hiding wasn’t nearly enough hiding.

Something in Sureya snapped.

The memory became jumbled. A dozen retellings of it told all at once. In some, Rovarra pleaded forgiveness. In others, he berated the guardsmen for his poor aim, and ordered the others to loose bolts at the Silayans. In another, he hoisted the body up like a trophy, and said this was the price for defying him. In one, Sureya leapt at the man who’d loosed the bolt and clawed his eyes out with her nails. She bit his throat like a wild animal and tore into him, but no matter what she did, he just wouldn’t die.

In most of the retellings, Sureya held her dead daughter, weeping, while others fought all about her. 

Otter didn’t know which memory was true. She didn’t think even Sureya herself did. 

It ended the same way every time. No One pried Kuani from Sureya’s hands.

He said something, but it was unintelligible nonsense. Sureya felt a hot surge of anger. “No! I can’t leave her!”

More static. Lunara barked something about needing to move fast, all while violence happened all around them. Sureya could only watch in horror as she was half-carried from Kuani, her dear Kuani, her little sunbeam. And as they retreated, she watched as Rovarra picked the dead girl up, a smirk on his face, and thrust the corpse into the hands of the man who’d killed her.

Otter gasped, and she was on the ship again, surrounded by Silayan warriors. Sureya was on her hands and knees, also struggling for breath. 

Otter could feel tears falling down her own cheeks, though she had no memory of crying them. Sureya also looked similarly shaken, though she did not have the burden of grief that Otter did. 

The sun hadn’t moved. Dawn was still just touching the horizon. This time hadn’t taken hours, like before. It hadn’t even taken minutes. Everything had been distilled into one moment.

And in Otter’s head, next to the general awareness she had of Rua and of Vex, there was now a new presence, one she could feel just as strongly. But this one wasn’t welcome, wasn’t a guest. Wasn’t family. It was an intruder. A violator. Someone who’d come in uninvited and would now never be able to leave.

Otter yanked the spear point pinning her hand to the decking, and let out a sharp sound of pain. She conjured a bandage with her Thread of Sanctuary, wrapping it tightly. 

“You forgave her,” Sureya said, stunned. And then repeated, more angrily, “You forgave her.”

“And you have no forgiveness in you,” Otter said. “I’m sorry about Kuani. She seemed… special.”

Sureya shook, her bitter face turning to dark laughter. “She was.”

And the two exchanged a look. They understood one another a little better now.

But it changed nothing. And the two slowly stood, facing one another again. And then went right back to trying to kill one another.