(USFB): Twenty-Three: Lingering in Time

Night had come by the time Pulzar returned to his typical perch. So far above the city, nearly as tall as the bell tower, it was the easiest place for him to transition between air to fur once more. Yet, despite how high either structure stood, they paled in comparison to the great tree. His trip to the ostentatious monolith had been, however, terribly uneventful. But Pulzar had only himself to blame, thinking that whoever had raised the tree to its height would still be lurking in its shade.

The sky-piercing greenery was nothing to shake off, that much the leopard could admit. Reaching further into the clouds than some mountains in the north of the jungles, it defied all he had ever known of flora. Even the spindle trees, utterly absent from what he saw in his time in the east, were confined to a particular amount of space when alone or in a thicket of easily sapped plants. What was more astounding were the organic steps that wound their way up and down the shaft, seemingly from the base to its top. Pulzar hadn’t quested too high but had crept down at the sight of light and life.

Around the base stood a rough-looking company, not in that they would put up a good fight but that they had seen their share of action. Judging on their armor and the gray haze of mane that had grown sparse about their features, they likely were the haggard veterans from the Western March. The spears below had undoubtedly been directed by Orin I himself as they pushed every clan of tigers further and further into the desert hollows. They would put up little fight if engaged, but Pulzar saw no point in blood then. Instead, he nestled into a groove of the bark and listened to the murmur that rose with lazy trails of smoke.

“Do you think then he’s alone?” asked one of the soldiers.

Another, an ancient looking man so wizened he was barely more than fur and bone, answered, “Alone? Yes and no. If he’s the only one, zipping around, here and there, causing troubles, yes. If you’re meaning he’s the only one capable of doing tricks, then no.”

“I’m just glad he’s on our side.”

“Side?” the old man twisted to ask the slightly less aged man, “You think a troublemaker takes a side? Hardly. Someone like that is only good for as long as he’s good for. The second he sees a way to turn on the Warlord, he’ll do it. Suppose the younger has the brights to see through him, but if he can afford to is another thing.”

“Why wouldn’t he?” the first soldier asked.

Crooking his neck back only to pause with his gaze at the fire, the weary-looking lion muttered, “Too many out there see the Kammherit’s heads as prizes. The young Warlord is going to need that boy to do a little more before he can get rid of him. But I don’t think he’s got the time for that much.”

Pulzar could lean no closer nor glean more from the surface level. After the veteran’s final remark, the group fell into silence. They were detached and likely a day or so out from reinforcements or news of any kind. What they knew or didn’t know was dated information, to say the least. It was still possible Orin II had been taken by a shade or assailant or even in a charge against the natives of the region. Still, what could be taken away from the eavesdropped communication was that Orin was counting on someone else to rub out those opposed to him, undoubtedly including himself. Whoever they were, they were not trusted. To rule out Amirot would be foolish, but something in the men’s words didn’t strike Pulzar as painted the caribou culprit. 

Before the leopard peeled away from the deep rut within the bark, he considered what he might do to those men below. If he were of Thera’s temperament, he’d wipe them away like nothing more than grit on an old stoney-backed mirror. Yet, if he were of a mind with the tigress, he would not have restraint enough to have listened to their conversations. A duel sense of duty to crush any opposition to his newly gained position and the notion of honor, to allow these relics of war to fade in peace without undo attack, warred in his mind. After a moment, Pulzar tossed himself again in the air, feeling his muscles and will protest to this third alteration of form, only to permit the change that would siphon the last drip of Pulzar’s energy from him.

When he returned home, he was too spent to do more than those most basic physical labors to bring himself down from the monolith. Though it was completely separate from that pool of energy the body draws on to go about its day, the flow of Erkinan, the spiritual molecules gifted onto him by the ancients, would draw on that other power. It wasn’t so much that he had over-exerted himself, though he had, but it was the travel that had sapped him so. Had he conjured storms enough to flatten the entire rain forest, he might have felt a pinch tired, maybe more so if the Erkinan began draining his physical faculties, but he hadn’t yet hit that point. To go so far, so fast, was not something he had done before, and only once had made more than a single trip through the airwaves in a day. Pulzar, despite himself, permitted a grim sense of satisfaction for pushing himself all the further and risking more than he should have.

As he made terra firma once more, the Quetal stalked into the hall beneath the shattered peak. Late into the evening, when even sconces were no longer ignited to guide the wayward paths of travelers and revealers alike, he did not expect to find anyone there. Though his home now sat empty, it was within this hall he had come in the past to find solace, removal from everyone but his own thoughts. Home was a desolate place now, and though her spirit could no longer linger there, Pulzar could not help but expect to run headlong into his final sibling’s likeness in the form of spirits. He would take his mediations in the silence of the hall, but as he set foot inside, he realized there would be no peace of mind.

Within, the clattering of shattered pottery boomed louder than the lightning storm beginning in the west. The Quetal’s night vision was well enough but not hardly on par for the complete abyssal shade of the hall. Searching with his disfigured paws, he found the brazier that was always first among those lit. Beneath was a compartment housing an igniter that had been abandoned long before his people’s arrival. He struck it once over the oil-dampened platter and saw the room grow bright as the snaking line about the hall permitted the other pots to come alight. With his vision no longer clouded by dark, Pulzar saw the totality of what had come to pass.

It looked to him as though an uproar had taken apart every piece nestled within the hall. There was no sign of violence besides that against the ceramics holding so many rains of salvaged water, fermented roots, and sun-dried sundries. This did not mark ruin for the village, but it would be a painful setback. What irked the leopard more was what became of those hardened and sun burnt idols that had been set into the walls.

Though it was not every alcove in the hall, there were enough of the fifty spaces that had been exhumed by force Pulzar could not justify. The walled-in bodies of great leaders and warriors had been desecrated. That much was enough, but how the savages who had done so removed the bricks before them with such ease and little rubble remaining confounded Pulzar. As he pressed further into the place, he found that though the extraction was done with precision, the assault on the honored dead was haphazard at best. Mummified flesh had been split with a crude blade and punctured with a raw point. These were not the signs of the Legion or another force beneath the Kammherits but some other rogue entity that could hardly be expected to have the decorum to throw down a proper challenge. As Pulzar studied the bodies that would soon meet the divine flames, his eyes lighted on a living blaze that rumbled up from a ruinous position.

Neusthera looked haggard and confused. Her fur was matted in sections with dried blood, and had she not been lying beneath a shattered urn of salt, Pulzar might have believed she was the cause. Blood-cursed minds would do such strange things when not simply feeding on live flesh that the destruction could easily be taken into account. But she was not the force behind this mess but another victim.

Thera stumbled over the remains of tables and stepped barely inches from the jagged edges of ceramics, “Pulzar, I saw him. He slipped away, I don’t know how.”

“Did you see his face?”

“No, he wore a mask. He tore through here. I don’t know why. When I came in, he had already broken so much of this… I failed you. You set me to guard home, and I have failed you.”

Pulzar knelt and sifted his paw through ancient ash now peppered with shattered ceramics, “You tried to stop him. That’s enough as I measure it. This isn’t good, but you did all you could. The elders. I’ll insist you were taken unawares by your assailant. Now, how did he look? How did he get away?”

“Short, maybe the height of a fox. He was wearing a mask that looked like gold, and he was wrapped in all these coils of material that were darker than black,” she pulled a fragment of a pot from her forearm, “I came in, and he moved like nothing I’ve seen before. He was there, and then he was here, and before I could do anything, like I had lost a few seconds, he was gone.”

“He moved through the shade?”

“I don’t think so. Everything was alight here when I came back in.”

The purported size of the man had been alarm enough, but to know that their assailant had not become one with the shadow, that he might, in fact, be some other than a fragment of his servant in the east, terrified Pulzar. Worse still, it sounded as though someone within the empire, a fox if Neusthera had the right of him, was working at odds with him. It could be easily supposed that the blade behind his sister’s death was the same that had shattered urns and shredded tapestries within the temple. But how they had come and gone so quickly eluded and frustrated the leopard all the more.

Dismissing Neusthera, seeing there was no cause for a defender nor to keep her from a needed rest, Pulzar stood in the slowly darkening hall of the elders. There were such wastes of antiquated remains that could never be replaced. Stepping into the night, the air and call of thorn snakes in amid the trees intoxicated his mind and whisked away the specters of generations gone past. He felt drained, not only of that precious Erkinan but of his spirits. They had incurred too many losses too quick, leaving the only solution as more losses. Yet, loss was not a net negative. There were quiet, furtive marks of beauty in each life completed.

Though every step pained him worse than walking the sun-baked stone paths on the high roads leading into the desert, Pulzaricati entered the circle about the pit. At the heart sat the dull, soot-stained earth where little more than a skull, equally stained with smoke and cinder, sat. He stooped low and found that the tiny piece of bone, without even its jaw stuck fast, was all that remained. The elders would have their final word on it, and hardly was she vindicated as anything more than a martyr, but Pulzar could think of nothing better for his favorite sister.

With steps that even the wind would never know, he traced his path back to the hall and set the remains on a previously unoccupied pillar, split at the middle. It was an austere place for a face that was in life as much death unadorned by any degree of honor beyond the shared kinship of the Quetal. Yet there had been in so many times before the brothers and sisters of the exalted leader who were little more than she and still those less. Set onto a place with the high honors of the central dais or a pedestal beside a forgotten hero or saintly figure, Pulzar figured she would live on unnoticed but in high esteem to less diligent passersby. It was a quiet, dignified place of honor Pulzar wished would be bestowed upon him in the end. Low how even Neusthera might begrudge him a want for obscurity, but there seemed no higher honor to one so worked, now passed, than to be forgotten in peace.