“Jump!”
Desperate for an alternative, Kayu cast her senses about her. To her right the trail stretched towards the Kalev Highlands. Given two desolate days of trudging through treacherous snowdrifts, it would take her back to the ruined temple where Touma had betrayed her and Tsuru had saved her life. To her left it led downwards and southwards to lands less wild if no less hostile, but these lay a week distant. Above her, blotting out the wan sky like billowing cloud, an avalanche of churning white cascaded downwards. In moments it would consume the trail for leagues in both directions, and Kayu along with it.
Her only means of escape lay behind her. A precipice, concealing a sheer drop to the blanket of fine mist far below, and the deathbed of jagged scree that doubtless lay beyond.
“Jump!” Auntie Tsuru barked again. The ancient crone proceeded to heed the command, laden wicker backpack and all.
Kayu’s heart pounded in her chest. Her breath steamed before her wide eyes. Her mind froze, as white as the sheets of ice encasing the rock crags. The thunder from above reached her ears, heralding her imminent doom. To hesitate was to die.
She turned, and she jumped.
Her legs left solid ground. Her stomach leapt into her mouth. Acrid bile rose to the back of her throat. Panic gripped at her heart like a vice of cold iron. She had one instant to exult in the pure, unfiltered fear pumping through her veins. Then gravity took hold.
She fell.
Frigid air tore at her face and her hair, ripping the scream from the depths of her lungs. Her robes swelled in her wake like the sails of an Alerian airship, her fingers taut in a death grip upon her staff. She couldn’t even hear her own thoughts, so loud did the wind howl in her ears.
In the span of a heartbeat she plummeted into the sea of mist, leaving the avalanche far behind her. Instead of burial by tonnes of crushing snow, she had chosen to dash herself against an unseen mountainside that might impact her at any moment. Fear flushed anew throughout her limbs, not as sharp as before but pounding and paralytic. Her lips tried to work themselves into the semblance of an incantation - any incantation - but nothing she knew would help her now.
She braced for the worst.
Something warm and immaterial arrested her fall. Never once disturbing the curtains of obfuscating cloud, it coiled around her like the living incarnation of a spring zephyr. She felt her downwards momentum slow, then stall. Her stomach returned to its usual location somewhere in her belly, and at last she could savour the sweet adrenaline racing through her blood. The keen winter chill, honed to the finest of edges by the altitude at which they travelled, seeped from her travel-weary bones. Almost as if the cloud itself had taken pity on her plight, and had welcomed her into its warm and muffled bosom. Almost as if...
“Is now a good time for a first lesson then?” Tsuru’s harsh cackle echoed from all around her, distorted by the fog and by the numbness still receding from her ears. Kayu fought to regain control over her concentration. If only the capricious goodwill of her new mistress lay between her beating heart and the cold rock below, then she had better pay close heed. “Spirits are?”
She breathed.
“Spirits are the imprints of a mortal’s soul on the Anti-Firmament,” she recited from rote. As she spoke, she cast her gaze about her, once again seeking purchase on her surroundings. The clouds, so calming only moments ago, now pressed in upon her clammy and claustrophobic. “The greater the mortal’s deeds in the Firmament, the stronger the imprint their soul leaves behind when it passes beneath Yama’s gaze through the Gate of Death.”
Inhaling of the cloying humidity, she reached tentatively upwards in the same desperate instinct that helped drowning swimmers kick for the surface. To her surprise the warm wind about her person responded to the touch of her mind. Gentle at first, then picking up speed, it carried her through the veil of blinding grey. With a small cry and an upraised sleeve, she shielded her face against the needle-sharp droplets of cold water.
“And you are?”
Now Tsuru’s voice came from behind her and to her left, as though it kept pace with her fear-fuelled flight. Slow down, slow down, she tried to will herself, but the swelling panic refused to relinquish its grip upon her throat. The world rushed past at breakneck speed, almost leaving her body behind in its rush to carry her to freedom. The clouds solidified behind the dirty cotton across her face, fighting to stop her from passing.
And then she burst free of their clutches, and the wan sun once more beat down upon her ragged shoulders. The winds that carried her came to a halt as abrupt as her emergence. Her head whipped forward with arrested momentum, rattling her mind within the confines of her skull.
“I am a spiritweaver,” she gasped, once again clinging to the words of truth. Perhaps they could somehow anchor her to reality as the ground so far below could not. “I draw upon power incarnate, the chi of myself and those who ally with me.”
From the corner of her eye, where the mists unravelled and dissipated far below, Kayu caught sight of patches of brown and green. How much altitude had they lost from where they had jumped from the trail? How far south had they travelled already?
The beat of a hundred war drums sounded in her head. In search of answers, facts, anything that her mind could latch upon to steady itself, she turned back towards the Highlands from where she had come. But before she could do more than gape at the roiling banks of cloud that obscured her sight in every direction, a shadow fell over her from behind.
“Straight from the scrolls?” Tsuru laughed, her face - shrivelled like a dried plum pickle - leaning in from above and breathing stale fish into Kayu’s. “The words of your teachers?”
A flick of her bony wrist, and the winds supporting Kayu’s weight gave way. Mouth agape in a breathless soundless scream, at least this time the young spiritweaver remembered to project a shaped barrier in front of her face to deflect the water droplets. It would do her little good when she hit the ground, but then the warm embrace caught her once more to speed her on her way.
Now and again she caught wind of Tsuru’s hearty cackles from behind. She swore on all kami large and small that one day she would repay the favour. One day, perhaps, when she didn’t cling to the guiding winds with all her incarnate might.
Closer and closer they edged to the ground, and further and further south. At length they broke free of the malevolent shadow of the Kalev Highlands and the cloying clammy clouds. A barren tundra of wintry white spread out beneath them, broken only by the occasional copse of evergreen or cluster of jagged grey. She could no longer make out the trail amid the undulating drifts, though now and again a glistening ribbon of water wound its way from foothill to plains. Long plumes of chimney smoke, bowing before the winter sky, soon made their destination clear.
True to her thoughts, the winds brought them to a poised halt above a roof of dirty thatch. The longest of a cluster of such buildings, it nestled alongside its brethren at the base of a rocky knoll. Upon the crest of the hill, dominating the village below, stood a mausoleum of seamless marble construction. Quite unlike the granite churches of the Sway, or the temple of ancient sandstone buried in the Highlands, or even the wooden pagodas of her homeland, it reminded her of the Ivory Spire at Tor Elythis where Archmage Ecthelion plotted Raiaera’s rebirth.
Who had built such a magnificent memorial, here in the middle of nowhere? For whom had they bequeathed such honour, such magnificence? The entire knoll seemed to glimmer in her eyes with suppressed incarnate energy, as though all the spirits from leagues distant gathered here to pay their respects. It hurt her just to gaze upon it, and not only from the pure white snow that reflected what wan wintry light filtered through the overcast heavens above.
But before Kayu could give voice to her questions, before she could even catch her breath to calm her thundering heart, Tsuru leant in close once more.
“You call yourself a spiritweaver,” the crone whispered, her voice like dry rice husks rubbing against the grindstone. The adrenaline fled from Kayu’s veins, and in its place raced cold chill. “And yet you can call upon not one ally to champion your cause?”
Tsuru’s barb bit deeper than the boreal winds that savaged these distant fringes of civilisation, these wild wastes where Salvar met Berevar.
She flicked her wrist again, and sent Kayu crashing through the roof into the inn below.