The Ella Chamber

[Roht Mirage]

“Roht! Roht!” Raylene screamed as she ran the circumference of the dome. Her eyes snapped back and forth, her brown hair flipping in turns to cover her burn scar like wind-blown curtains. Audience members parted before her. They didn't offer any direction, but the nauseous swell in their faces indicated that her friend lay in the spot they looked away from. “Roht!” she squawked one last time in confirmation, then drew in breath sharpy.

A few running paces behind her, Master Kotra slowed and sighed. “Tabin, keep the others back,” he commanded while turning his head just enough for the lanky teenager to see the morbid cast in his face.

Tabin, glaring over his master's shoulder, caught a glimpse of the submerged body. It bobbed, misshapen and lifeless, like the remains in an untended aquarium. Above it, a splatter of blood ran down the inside of the dome. He could almost make out the shape of her striking it. “Horseshit,” he whispered so quietly that it was lost in the muffled roar of the rain. He had worn a scowl the whole match, straining it tighter and more bitterly every time he had seen Roht falter. Now, his face was slack and unbelieving.

“I want to see,” little round-faced Dahvim shouted as he broke from the remaining students and darted past Tabin. He radiated excitement, his childish enthusiasm so opposed to the Cell's reality that some of the patrons balked and started to move away.

“Brother! He said stop,” Tabin scolded, grabbing his younger sibling just below the shoulder.

“But, she said she'd wi-”

“Sit your ass down!”

A narrow-eyed Akashiman sword-woman stepped away from her entourage among the trees to help him restrain the boy.

Kotra turned back to Raylene. One of her small hands was pressed to the dome, fingers spread, as if the body might kick back into life and reach out for help. “We should go to where they'll be reviving her,” he said with a sternly-measured dose of sympathy as he gripped her wrist and eased it down.

“She's going to be so mad when she wakes up,” Raylene said with a small smile. The humor didn't reach her wet eyes.

The master shook his head. “No, I don't think she will,” he said, his voice hopeful but very hesitant.

One week ago, she had appeared on the doorstep of his school, all fury and bloodlust. She never did say what drew her there. Perhaps the sign, “The Hawk of Zaileya - Martial Arts Training”, had appealed to something; a yearning for Fallien, or just an opportunity to fight. He doubted she was there because of the school's reputation as a collector and protector of strays. Roht Mirage was no stray, not in her own eyes.

What she had been... was dangerous. He knew with absolute certainty that her affliction was the very same he had seen in his youth, when his tribe went to war and “unbound” their strongest -and most dispensable- warriors for the slaughter. Fate, it seemed, had brought her to the one place where the most broken of society's chaff could find a home, and the one man who knew enough to temper the force of a soul so wildly uninhibited. That, he had been willing to take on faith; a chance to, in some measure, right an ancient and irrevocable wrong. He could not bring himself to feel the same joy for her sudden change, which he saw not in the loss of skill, but in the loss of ego. She had appealed for sympathy. She had taken another's aid in combat. She had been cured by... a miracle?

It was too kind of fate, and he had never known a font of kindness that did not have a dark, scheming mechanism at its core.

“Let's go,” he said softly as he placed a hand on Raylene's back. She nodded, patted her cheeks, and turned from the body that, in more ways than one, was no longer Roht Mirage.

End