Avengard: The Fall of Senvia

Chapter 19 - Kinstone

The light was blinding after so long in the dark. I could barely bring myself to squint. It felt like I would be able to see perfectly well with my eyes entirely shut, and when I did shut them, my blindness was bathed in a slight glow of orange and yellow.

I turned to where I knew Jenny was, prepared to thank her, but instead, her palm collided with my head and I reflexively sank to the ground.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" she demanded. "I save your life, and you just sit there waiting to die? Oh, look at me, I'm Xera and I have arms. Look at them, they're so pretty and strong and OH YEAH, I'M GETTING EATEN ALIVE. Oh well, who cares, because I HAVE ARMS. LOOK AT MY FASCINATING ARMS!"

I opened my mouth to speak, but as I managed to open my eyes and peek at it for a half-second before the light got to be too much, I noticed her arms. She was covered in bite marks. She'd nearly been clawed apart by the shades. I looked down to see if I looked the same. The bites on me weren't as bad, but there were so many of them. Thousands, I guessed, littering my skin like I was sick and covered in blisters.

The bites were small, tiny enough that they could have been made by mice, but the shades had been about the size of people.

"Sorry," I said at last. "I was a bit surprised."

I still couldn't open my eyes enough to see her properly, but it looked like she mouthed a hiss at me before sitting down on something that looked like a log.

"Are you alright?" she whispered.

"Are you?" I shot back.

She didn't answer.

Eventually, I was able to open my eyes enough to look at our surroundings. It was a small space, a tiny pillar of light surrounded by Hunak. We were still in the forest, as the earth was covered in last year's fallen leaves. Jenny was sitting on an old fallen tree, and we were surrounded by medium-sized grass and a small shrub at the edge of the pillar. The source of the light at the heart of the pillar was a kinstone: a statue of a man long forgotten.

There were thousands of them scattered around Avengard. One of the mysteries of the world.

This one looked exactly like all the others, identical in every way: a large, burly man, one knee planted into the soil, both hands clasping the handle of a two-handed greatsword planted into the ground in front of his bare chest. His face was shaven, and quite ugly, though some people who had a greater appreciation for the fine arts claimed him to be attractive. Covering his shoulders, which he held with proper posture, were scraps of dented, battered armour. He'd been in many fights, this man, and emerged from them by having every single blade swing exclusively at the tiny pieces of armour on his shoulders rather than his bare chest or thinly-clothed legs.

Maybe everyone wanted to decapitate him, to get away from that face.

The only difference between this one and the others was a tiny chip on one of his fingers. Beyond that, he was pristine. Where they were worn, he was worn. Where they were polished, he was polished. It was the same statue, transposed over the continent.

Some elders claimed that the statues used to be different — a hair out of place there, a slight move of the index finger here, like they were moving or shifting with time, but they couldn't even agree between them what those changes were. There were some paintings of the kinstones, but only as many as there were of chicken coops. The expression could be taken quite literally in this case: if you'd seen one, you'd seen them all. Besides, any artist rendition was never perfect, and they all wanted to add their own interpretations and twists. Whether the kinstones changed with time or not was an unanswerable question.