The Magic Hour

Chapter 36: Jinsaih, Sojasin, and A New Vision

 A CLANGING SOUND reached her, of metal on metal. Under a copper sky the land was a dull green and thick with forest.

    Iela ran quickly, her bare feet inured to the branches and stones on the ground. Her swiftness was often praised. Would it be enough now to help Daniel?

    Lightning crashed down around her. Whole trees were split with the force of it. To her right the mountains rose high, their summits covered in an eternal snow, but where she was, the heat pressed down. She had to find him.

    “Daniel!” she shouted into the wind. “Daniel!” and she wondered at the strength of the sound that came out of her, when it had never showed itself before.

    She stopped running. To her left was a grove of trees that had risen long before she had been born. To her right the plain stretched to the horizon, which was obscured in the sweeping curtain of rain now only a few miles away and advancing rapidly. She had no time to reach her mother in the caves.

    Ahead of her lay the gorge. As she watched, a vast cone of light thrust itself up out of its depths into the sky.

    There was no way Daniel could hear her voice over the wind and cacophony of metal striking metal. It had resonated for miles. She had begged him to stay away, had known what would happen, but she had also known he wouldn’t listen to her.

    “You women are filled with your portents,” he had said, laughing gently at her. “I can’t live my life based on things I can’t see, Iela. You know that, too.”

    His words had surprised her.

    “What are you talking about?” she had asked him. “This is your way as much as mine. We have shared the portents and rituals together all our lives. If you don’t listen to them, you’ll be on the other side, away from the truth.”

    “Hernot has shown us a different truth.”

    “Daniel, listen to me. What he wants—I don’t know what my father wants. I think he has lost his mind. He has turned against the way that has been in our blood forever, don’t you see that? He wants to destroy the shaman!”

    “I have no need of what is old, and neither do you,” Daniel had said. He would not listen.

    A massive cracking sound warned her and she veered away from the path as one of the giant trees was felled by another bolt of lightning, its topmost branches landing directly on the place where she had just been.

    She turned back to the path and even though her legs were burning Iela kept up her pace, the edge of the gorge coming ever closer. She would reach him before the deluge, warn him of the floods, so that he could not dismiss her. Already the patter of the rain was spitting around her on the ground. He would feel it by now, too.

    “Daniel!” she screamed again as she finally reached the north end of the gorge, grabbing onto the sharp rocks and boulders that lined the cliff edge. Now she could look inside and ahead to the other end—she could find him, help him.

    “You don’t see it,” he had said to her. “This balance you treasure so much, that the shaman insists is the only way—it isn’t useful anymore. We need someone to show us the new path.”

    “Into what?”

    “Our own power, not hers.”

    “Jinsaih has never tried to control any of us. Everything she does has been out of love, out of the unification.”

    “When what we need is freedom. That is what Hernot understands, what he has shown us. Oh, Iela, think about it. To choose your own path, without having to follow her rules.”