One More Scar

Etched Upon This Heart I Hold

~𝖀𝖓𝖒𝖊𝖎~

𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝖐𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖊𝖓 is dead, washed upon the shore of its cove. 'Tis a bad omen as well as disgusting. Its reek stings the back of my throat as I approach, hands weightless on the stygian rock of the cliff. I leap from one crumbled boulder to the next, avoiding the sand and the footprints it would record.

As the rumors say, the pile of rotting flesh bears the lash marks of electricity.

They say I killed it, and its curse will be upon me. They say it has already begun. The southern duke beyond the mountains with armies in the millions and calvaries of giant beasts wanted my sister. He believes we killed her to deny him, and father has yet to send word from their meeting at the base of the mountain.

My sister is dead, my father likely, too, and now this kraken. I could not save the first, too weak to save the second, but the third is not my doing. Had I killed the guardian of the shore, I would have done it sooner, before it devoured my friend, the brother of my heart.

That is why I need to know who did.

With a hand in a boulder's crevice to steady myself, I stretch the other as far as I can and touch a spongy tangle of tentacle. It firms beneath my palm, rewinding through the night and the day before. It spasms, lashes reversing, unmarred skin in their wake.

As the last wound disappears, the limb takes the position it held before its destruction. It coils around something no longer here, something the size and shape of J­ōzu, my friend.

Hope breathes across the back of my mind. 'Tis fog rippling down the mountainside. I should cast it out, keep a clear head, yet as I pull the tentacle forward in time and reverse it again, the sequence is unmistakable. This kraken still held Jōzu when its demise began. It released him and died.

My friend never uses his Affinity, always spouting nonsensical excuses. He would not even use it to save my sister, but to save himself? Not consciously, but as a last desperate instinct to live?

We watched from the cliffs as he plunged into the sea, wrapped in chains. Through the churn of waves, we saw the kraken's arms carry him down below the realm of the morning's young sunlight. When bubbles rose, some clapped.

Jōzu was gone.

Father had barely tolerated him, and he left the cliff with a blank expression. My knees collapsed. My heart brother was gone, and my sister whose death this was somehow supposed to avenge was still dead.

Yet, those bubbles. Had my wits not been smashed by the load of sorrow and guilt, I would have realized they were much more than would have escaped when a hanged man tore open. Jōzu must have called for the air to aid him, and it heeded his summons.

I release the tentacle, and it falls, whole and unblemished but still devoid of life. I have two half Affinities—a joke Nature plays in response to my mothers' deceit. My lightning would not have been strong enough to kill the kraken. Nor is my grasp on Time strong enough to heal it or anything alive.

I rush back up the cliff and slide several times in my hurry. I run to a secret place, a valley beyond the cove's inland wall. The waterfall is a trickle. The snowmelt that feeds it rests beneath autumn's chilled hand, so the pool below shines like polished glaze with only the tiniest ripples to distort the pines' black reflections.

Jōzu once showed me a tunnel in this pond. He claimed it connected to the cove, but I could not hold my breath that long. I knew better than to test the kraken anyway. Now beneath the waterline, charred fragments of chain contrast the pale sand.

Jōzu was here. He lived long enough to get this far.

I seek broken branches and disturbed leaves. Where I lose the trail, I sink into the past until something moves at the behest of feet no longer here.