Chapter 23: Chapter 23: The Cave

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Further inside the cave there was little light, but not pitch blackness. Past the first few curves a litany of mushrooms and snaking tendrils lit the way, another reason for which site was named holy to the Light. Both glowed an ethereal blue. It wasn’t enough to see beyond where the fungi grew, but it gave the caves a glistening feel, like stars hiding behind the moon. 

With the limited light, the forks in the road were invisible without a torch, but when Janurana sprinted into them the darkness was no impediment. She flew down the first fork in the path following the noise made by the monks which was clear as day to her. It was her only target as the blue glow was too similar to her mother’s ghostly skin for her to bear to look at.

The group’s voices echoed along through the labyrinth and after a final sudden sharp turn Janurana crashed into the cave wall. The group shouted in fear as she flailed to rip off the mucilaginous glowing vines as if they were her mother’s hands. 

“It’s okay! It’s okay! It’s just cave goo. Are you hurt?” Neesha reached out, but retracted when Janurana swatted her hand away. 

Janurana didn’t calm, but she slowly stopped flailing enough for the young monk to gently peel off the vines and brush off dust and pebbles from Janurana’s chest.

Neesha was illuminated only by the tiny fraction of Light emitted by Diktala. He had a miniscule ball of golden Light floating above his finger as a torch, barely enough for them to see each other’s faces and a few paces in front of them. This Light being so pathetic, Janurana was unaffected.

“Mmnn,” Janurana muttered. She wrung her parasol, not even noticing she had been holding it. Getting up, she saw a spider and cave centipede she had knocked from the wall skitter off into the darkness. 

“Who cares??” Jura yelled. “We all saw it! She’s a gwomoni! She belongs to the Outside as it is!” 

“Whatever that was wanted her, right?” Chahua added. “It’ll leave us alone if it gets her! Right?”

Neesha bit her lip. “G-guru Brachen was fine with her.”

“So?” Jura snapped.

“You question the Guru?” Diktala joined in, his jaw dropped and the group descended into squabbles.

Janurana looked down, held her parasol in one hand, and fisted the other as hard as she could. Then she walked right past them.

They all jumped back, taking protective stances in their surprise before they looked at each other, and began moving again. Janurana let herself fall to the back, both to let them lead the way, and to stay further away from the Light in everyone’s shadows. Diktala’s orb had still yet to burn her, but she didn’t want to see if it would begin to sting over time.

Not long after, a series of rumbles shook the caves. The monks all ducked, Diktala and Neesha threw up barriers above them and Janurana flung open her parasol like a tortoise retreating into its shell. But there was no cave in, although soon there was the far off sound of collapsing rock. The group didn’t move, expecting the monster attacking their temple to charge through at any moment. Janurana broke their freeze by rapidly smacking Neesha’s leg and they dropped the barrier. 

Sucking her teeth, Janurana got up from under her parasol. “She won’t reach us for some time. Mother was never good with mazes.”

“Mother? That was—What’s she got, an army?!” Jura snapped.

“She’s—” Janurana sighed heavily and closed her eyes for a beat before continuing. “She’s a spirit now.”

That sent a silent clamor through them.

“Guess it’s good we didn’t go to the war,” Diktala joked, but no one laughed.

Janurana watched the young Ascetics as they began moving again. They would have been old enough to have fought when the war began, though only just.

‘I just met them,’ Janurana thought and picked at her cuticles. ‘This has to be a record for you, Mother.’ 

She silently scoffed and tried to think back to when that record had last been set. At first she thought it would have been the warriors she remembered earlier who had died the night they tried to kill her on the hill. 

‘No. That trader,’ she remembered.

Janurana had bumped into him in the dead of night before the war, long before, if she remembered properly. He had a few mercenary guards, and he reasoned that he could make it a bit farther with his escort before making a fire. He would have been correct as one of his guards was pulling a spear out of a lion when Janurana ran into them. But her mother was no simple beast. 

‘Every time. Every time.’ Janurana repeated in her mind. 

“ENOUGH!” She screamed.

The Ascetics threw up another barrier, making Janurana shield herself again. She seethed.

“Um,” Neesha began.

“Of my mother. I-I’m so sorry this happened.” Janurana bent at her hips and brought her head as low as she could toward her knees. “I didn’t mean to bring hardship to you. I truly didn’t. I’m not here to hurt you or cause you trouble, I’m sorry.”

The ascetics looked at each other silently as Janurana straightened up. 

“I accept your apology.” Neesha bowed dutifully, if awkwardly.

Jura opened his mouth, but Janurana already knew what was coming.

“I’m not with them either. They started this, killed Mother. Made me this way.” 

“With who?” Jura asked.

Janurana groaned, remembering that Dhanur seemed surprised that she knew about the gwomoni, then remembered the times she had mentioned them being in charge in all her years and how nearly every person was just as confused. She squeezed her parasol.

It cracked.

Instantly the domineering aura of anger faded. Janurana brought it right to her face, seeing the tiniest fracture along the handle. 

“Oh, no.” She desperately caressed its well-worn and familiar grooves, its baked in stains from years and years keeping it close. She fell to her knees, clutching it to her chest like a mother and child. “No no no. Not now.”

Diktala looked down the path and gave a motion for them to continue.

“I’m sorry, Janurana. That was your name, right? We keep stopping and we really must be going.” Neesha helped Janurana to her feet. “It’s only a small crack. It can be filled. There are other parasols if not.”

But Janurana couldn’t stand up. The parasol kept her weighed down like a stone. With unfocused eyes she saw every memory the parasol had survived, fumbling through trees as she first got used to her gwomoni strength, fighting off a grieving rhino to feast on its dead calf, every monster she had defeated from lions to rompos to kalias, every person who had died by her fangs or her mother’s claws. The world itself burned and her sari was barely held together, but the last piece of quality Janurana owned had stayed strong.

Diktala called them from further down. Neesha groaned and dragged Janurana to her feet, pulling her as she barely responded.

“I hate this,” Janurana muttered to herself as tears started to fall. Neesha curled her lips as she struggled to catch up and listen to Janurana. “They did this to me. I didn’t ask for it. Mother was cruel sometimes but I don’t deserve this. The dowsing gwomoni, they did this to us. Now mother—” Janurana wheezed, losing the strength in her legs making them both collapse.

“Janurana, please.” Neesha fell to her knees in front of Janurana who fell face first into the cave while clutching her parasol. “Please, I understand you are grieving but we must move!”

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Janurana coughed and nearly gagged, then screamed with the effort of simply standing up with Neesha’s help.

“She’s gonna get us killed! That spirit’s gonna know exactly where we are!” Jura threw his arms up in exasperation.

“She needs help!” Neesha shrieked back, dragging Janurana. 

Diktala stepped between Jura and put a hand on his shoulder. “No Clan Spirits have hearing that good. The most there is are Clan Moth’s Clan Spirits. They can hear better but not in an echoing cave.” 

Jura sucked in a breath and turned to Chahua, who was barely catching his breath, but gave his companion a thumbs up. Since both northerners agreed Jura scowled and stormed ahead, stopping a few paces in since Diktala still held the light. Janurana and Neesha finally caught up and the group continued. 

Since she had started moving, her years of instinct took over and Janurana mechanically put one foot in front of the other. Her breathing was ragged and her mind was becoming blank, losing the energy to keep having active thoughts.

“M-Mother… She… She looked like a monster,” Janurana blurted out.

“Was this—” Chahua coughed. “Was this, the first time…”

“Have you seen her on the mortal plane before?” Diktala took over for his fellow northerner, barely taking his eyes off the path.

“Yes.” Janurana barely squeaked out.

“Some people become spirits because of some hate or sadness they’re holding onto,” Diktala said softly and stared forward. “If they don’t resolve it and instead stew in that, they can become a monster. It’s rare back home since the other spirits in the clan can get revenge or put the malevolent spirit down like a rabid animal. But I guess it makes sense for a southern spirit. No clan, no friends, shunned by the Light, no help. All alone, no one can even see you.” 

Through all the years, Janurana had never seen her mother in full relief. There were times parts of her silhouette became clear as she nearly crossed over the planes. Often she could make out the blue shimmer was not some quirk of the planes interacting, but her mother’s own skin. But other nights she could plainly see the dress her mother had, the last one Janurana had seen her in. The night she first saw her mother’s face clear enough to make out more than a head shape was one of the first times her mother had gotten so close as to cut Janurana. A scar on her left forearm was nearly healed over, looking no worse than a small clip from a thorn bush, and not a nearly severed limb. Janurana didn’t remember exactly how she escaped but she knew she’d never forget finally realizing the identity of the spirit that was haunting her.

“She looks like a monster…” Janurana whispered again.

Janelsa Malihabar was a beautiful woman and Janurana always admired that. Even when she was a child it added to the awe she had for her mother that someone so powerful and commanding could be beautiful as well. When lounging on the pile of pillows she called a throne, Janelsa carried herself with a rigid posture and demeanor that Janurana felt in the pit of her own trained spine. Through her mother’s training, both stern but laced with a mother’s care, Janurana had acquired the same metal rod of posture and she was proud of it. She had looked at herself in her child sized bronze mirror back home, standing as straight as the gorgeous leader of her house. Janelsa Malihabar’s black hair had flowed in the wind of conquest when she took off her blood stained bull-horned helmet and commanded armies to carry out her will, but despite all her power she still held her little Shahzad on her lap while she worked to let her know what would be expected of her one day. 

It was a picture Janurana struggled to keep alive rather than be supplanted by the blue silhouette that haunted her. 

But the sight of Janelsa the malevolent spirit hunching in the open doors, face contorted with unnatural wrinkles, body scarred and fingers missing, hair as silver as an ancient guru, seething with the rage Janurana only saw from those Janelsa Malihabar had brought low, it was already erasing whatever was left of that memory.

“She didn’t deserve that. We didn’t deserve this. I don’t deserve this. They all have to die. Enough…” Janurana said and caressed her parasol. A sliver from the crack pricked her finger. 

The throng came to another fork, one that bore the only indicator, an angled rock directing them to the left. Diktala kicked it so it pointed to the opposite cave. Neesha groaned and kicked it further down the path so it was just another rock.

All but Neesha stared forward, not even looking back at Janurana. She heard Janurana mumbling to herself and slowly transitioning from empty despair to rising anger. While she needed less help to stand upright, Neesha stayed close to keep her arm around Janurana.

Tears cascaded down Janurana’s cheeks and a trickle of blood ran down her fisting hand, opening her tiny cut wider. In all the years since fleeing into the Outside, her parasol had endured, only fading with the sun or morphing to fit her hand better. It was practically unchanged since she first received it as a child, when she was old enough to follow her mother around the family manor. 

“I-I understand the Light didn’t shine upon you here,” Neesha said in the dark of the cave. “But if we cannot weather the monsoon, then we do not deserve the Light behind its clouds… and the night always fades. Always. You’ll be blessed once more and deserve your blessings.”

Janurana looked up at the silvery blue mushrooms and glowing tendrils decorating the ceiling. “When they’re all dead.”

Janurana scowled, imagining the screams of those who brought down her family’s house, the ones that had forced her into the Outside, and made her mother into a feral monster, an unrecognizable spirit that had destroyed the home of the person hauling her through a cave while she cried. For an instant, she saw the image of Janelsa Malihabar, the straight–backed, implacable ruler of the plateau and it instantly snapped in her mind to the spirit that resembled her mother. Janurana sighed again.

“Did Guru Brachen…” Neesha started to ask, looking back at the darkness and continued silence from above.

Janurana looked away. “I don’t know.” Her voice was hoarse.

Neesha uttered a slow prayer staring straight up.

Chahua clutched his chest and leaned onto Jura, who called out for a pause. They both plopped onto the ground, with everyone taking a sip from the water skin and a suck of mango one of them had grabbed while fleeing.

“Guru Brachen.” Neesha called out. “Him and Dhanur still aren’t here.”

“Right,” Diktala confirmed.

“Nice eyes,” Jura scoffed, helping Chahua through his breathing exercises.

“Jura. Enough,” Neesha and Diktala said in unison.

Jura panned over them and to Janurana. She didn’t even acknowledge any of their presence. Her face was limp, her mouth almost open, as if she didn’t have the energy or will to show any emotion. 

“... Sorry,” Jura replied meekly.

Janurana stroked the patch on her hip. If Brachen and Dhanur were gone, she didn’t even have a trinket of them to put in there. She regretted the few people from whom she didn’t take a memento when she lost them. She didn’t have a feather from Dhanur’s arrow, or a single strand of her unique, clay red hair. 

“I don’t hear them either,” Janurana said.

The group exchanged a shifty, instinctual look being reminded of the gwomoni’s abilities. But Diktala still asked, “Can we all still walk?”

Jura and Chahua groaned, the smaller monk still catching his breath, but they nodded all the same.

“I’m not hearing a no.” He thrust his arm in front of himself with an exaggerated smile.

A tortured laugh then sobering sigh left them.

“Let’s go.” The glimmer of his Light from his finger waved as he signaled the group to continue.

As they fell back in line, Neesha saw how laboriously Janurana was stroking the patch on her hip and how close she was cradling her parasol. She put a hand on Janurana’s shoulder, gently pulling her forward. “We’re a sanctuary, we serve the Light. If you need help, we must help you. Don’t let it be in vain.”

Janurana looked up at the young Ascetic, whose sternness couldn’t hide the fear in her eyes, and nodded. “Thank you. You already did help more than enough.”

“And you already did make that in vain. You and your dowsing, Light lost mother.”

“Jura! Enough!” Neesha shot back. “Guru Brachen will be ashamed when I tell him how you’re acting.”

It was an unnecessary comment and Jura meekly apologized again. Janurana already knew she would slip into the forest, away from the Ascetics on whose home she invited destruction. She would figure out how to put an end to it all after that.

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