Siinji - Or, Ankūro and the City of the Golden Boughs

6

Part 2
6

Somewhere different,
Spending precious time alone,
Waiting a return.
- Momiji.

Her father had come to her, many months before, as excited as she had ever seen him. Not since he had found the ancient Kannai city, in wastes of the Great Desert, had he seemed so happy. Of course, that city, when he had travelled there, had become little more than lumps of crumbling, weathered stones with no sign of its great history remaining. It did little to quell his enthusiasm.

She had grown up around her father's lust for finding traces of the ancient Kannai civilisation. Had found herself drawn to it, too, but, to her father, it was a passion. Searching for remnants of a society that had passed into history over two Upheavals before, thousands of years ago.

He had always maintained that the Kannai had once held a place in the world that had, at one time, rivalled that of humans and Other-Kin. He felt certain that Kannai had not always sat at the lowest rungs of society. Had not always suffered as slaves. It was his one, true purpose to find evidence that Kannai, too, had strode the world with pride.

Even finding the tiniest fragments of clues could make her father as giddy as a child in a fashion that Yurivno had always found infectious. So much so, that she had chosen to study languages and cyphers in order to help her father. Whenever he found anything from an ancient culture, she would translate any writing, work out any clues. It made her happy to make her father happy.

Then he had arrived in Tarkar's Bridge inundated with scrolls found in the library of Adrasusk. When asked how he had managed to remove them from the learned institution, he had demurred, telling her that some things were best left unknown.

Despite that, they had both spent many days poring over the scrolls, many of which held little of interest. All of them, in fact. Except one. One spoke of an island and a city. A city of the Kannai, forgotten as the centuries had passed. The scroll spoke of many things, but said little of where this island city was. Only a passing reference to markers that would lead the way.

It took weeks before they managed to find the first marker, hidden in a forgotten village, deep within the Shivering Desert. A tablet that held nothing more than a poem, written in the ancient language of the Kannai. Yurivno, however, saw more to the poem than first revealed. The poem spoke of an island and a great treasure. An island to the south.

Her father, of course, jumped to a conclusion. He decided that Kaguta was that island, for no other reason than he didn't know of any other islands to the south. And so, Yurivno found herself carried across the seas, from the port of Villeta, where people that despised Kannai overcharged them for passage, to the island of Kaguta.

She had never seen the like in her life. A place so different, so strange that she could hardly believe it existed in the same world. The culture fascinated her. The people and the clothing. The traditions and the landscape. All were nothing like she had ever experienced. And she loved it.

No-one mistreated her because she was a Kannai. That mattered little to the people of Kaguta. The only thing that mattered was station within the society. Of course, those high in the society's hierarchy looked down upon those below them, but not because of their race. The peasants, the lowest people, did not care at all whether she came from Kaguta, or that she had fur and a tail. For once in her life, she felt accepted.

She travelled with her father from the port city of Yarukushuma, in the north, down the eastern edge of the island, to the city of Akāi, and, from there, her father set off alone to try to find the second marker. He had insisted she stay and search for any mention of the city that they searched for and, although she worried for her father, the opportunity to search through the writings of Akāi's archive had filled her with much anticipation.