A Place To Bloom

Elder of Elders

I laid down in the barracks, alone, watching a small, green spider weave its web across the soggy window frame while a slow rain pattered into the grass outside. All around me in the thick, muggy air, the empty bunks where my friends once slept, and the spider finished one spiral only to start on another.

The belongings of the dead were taken elsewhere to be processed. Common clothing was broken down and re-spun, coins were returned to the registry, and anything personal was packaged and returned to his Naveris back home.

Their names were crossed out from the book.

Standard procedure.

There was a loose board beside the vacant bed where Faren once kept his things. Hidden beneath, a small burlap bag containing his orca pipe and stash of happy cabbage waited for him to survive this war.

I took my cane and hobbled over to the library; Renou had said he would meet me there. When I arrived, he was enthralled in a giggly conversation with a young Goloagi woman who had circular burn scars where a number once was. I didn't want to interrupt, so I waited around the corner for a good ten minutes, only for them to keep at it. Upstairs, Indictment was gone. Someone (Faren) had taken it out of the city and brought it to Praying Mantis. So, I found another book with a long-winded title: The Daenma Schism: An Analysis of the Rift Between the Imperial Goloagi and Eastern Orthodox Daenma Churches.

I sat in a large bag chair on one of the balconies overlooking the tall towers of the inner sanctum reaching into the cloudy sky, staring at the cover. Polished green leather with delicate patterned engravings all around the edges stared back, and I couldn't will myself to open it.

Miyani was busy doing her thing at the Lake of Doom. So she was there, and I was here.

I could have gone to the church. And feel empty and alone there, instead of here.

That was wrong. I should have sought God's presence.

The hundred-and-something-year-old woman had told me I could come by at any time. So, I got up and limped my way around the library, between stone-faced buildings with shops on the ground floor catering to denizens, mostly women, buying jeweled trinkets and stuff that smelled good. Around the back of the high stone walls of the inner sanctum, Ta'o was talking with two Na'uhui women, one of whom twisted a lock of white hair around her finger while the other giggled at everything he said and rested her hand on his muscular chest. He looked up and maneuvered himself in front of me, planting one arm on the wall. "What's up?"

"I wanted to see Peyumi." Images of him bare-handed wrestling that four-hundred-pound throat-ripping lizard with three-inch talons to the ground to where she chirped out for mercy flashed through my mind.

"Not a good time, bro." He shook his head.

"Oh." I lowered my eyes. "I don't know if you know what happened..."

He slapped my shoulder, and his yellow eyes smiled with the rest of his dark-green face. "You survived Jungle, bro! You don't know what that means to these people! But seriously, another time."

"When's a good time?"

A shrivelly, old woman's voice came from around the corner. "Is that Caleb of Gath?"

With it, sounds of children chatting hushed, and slow footfalls shuffled through the grass. Ta'o turned to her and answered. "Yes, ma'am."

As short as I remembered, she scarcely came up to my chest, but that permanent smile etched into her wrinkled face filled the world. "I'm so happy that you came by!"

I glanced at Ta'o and back to her. "You are?"

She bent her knee in and touched it with her hand. "Oh!"