Chapter 3: A Competition of Individual Talents

Jabari placed an object on the grass. It was an orb as large as his fist.

The action was without care for something so special. Though, it was neither careless nor careful. Rising to his full height, he took in a breath he didn’t need. The hem of his cassock billowed in the gentle breeze around his feet, the forest air gentle in the sea of trees as he waited. He liked the frock for its freedom and versatility. It was the reason he had over eight of them, crafted by the hands of a rune weaver many years ago.

Off to his side a snake the size of a massive boulder was coiled around itself, watching him almost discreetly. He spared it no attention but felt its trembling from where he stood. At over fifty paces, it still wouldn’t dare approach him. It wouldn’t dare meet his eyes.

It hissed quietly as it had been doing since his arrival and he frowned at the annoyance. It wasn’t a hiss of challenge as much as it was a hiss of complaint. He’d veiled his powers, suppressed it as to go undetected, but there were primal instincts existent in wild animals that humans never really could develop. This snake, large enough to fell a building if it put its mind to it, bore the same instinct. And in this forest that was its home, it warred between possession and self-preservation.

With barely a shrug of will, and tired of its noise, Jabari commanded the world around him.

Silence, he thought.

Reality went to work, bound by his thought. It was a simple working of will, a command as much as it was a request, and the air shook with barely concealed activity and events came to will.

First, the world pressed around the snake, snapping its mouth shut as it wriggled in protest. Despite how powerful its enemy was, despite how much fear colored its very being, it was against its nature to simply lay down and die. It was an animal instinct most humans had since lost. The beast would die, but it would not allow itself do so without any form of defiance.

Next, the world caved in on its flesh. Muscle and skin reinforced with reia were crushed and battered, constricted against themselves. It was a working the likes of which the snake had never encountered. Still, it fought, to simply lay down and die was unacceptable. But there was only so much fight it had in it. So when its physical existence failed it, the battle lost pathetically, it retreated into its mind. It had achieved a level of sentience years ago and knew when instincts were naught but the pride of the living; hubris to be cast aside as quickly as blades of grass vacillated to the touch of breeze.

In mere moments, its body was no more than a vessel disconnected from its owner.

Safely hidden away in the crevice of its own mind, it allowed its body suffer the wrath of the real world. Here it would stay until the powerful intruder was gone. Until it returned to its place as the apex predator of the forest. Its only hope was that it wouldn’t take too long.

Its body could only endure so much.

Jabari felt the moment the snake abandoned its body and almost smiled. Perhaps he had put too much will into his working, perhaps the beast was weaker than its rank claimed. It mattered little to him. He wanted silence and he had it. All else was unimportant.

His attention returned to the orb he’d left in the grass, and in a fragmented section of his mind, divinations fought themselves in a rondo of madness the likes of which would kill certain truth seekers he knew.

There, futures flashed, each one warring against the other as was the case with divinations.

Easily, as if measuring the length of his arm, he took each strand of the future and examined them, forcing divinations to order. If he wanted to see the truth, he merely had to look but that wasn’t the reason his mind divined.

What he sought was something else, and it wasn’t long before the notifications blurred into existence before him, bars of translucent white with words of pale blue.

 

[Time line located].

[Divination Inbound].

 

Off in the crevice of his mind he watched a child pick a small transparent orb with a storm of lightning at its heart. He held in his hand a complete soul where his world knew only of fragments and garnered the power of the soul from them, commanding and bending reia, the very essence of the world, to their will.

Time shifted, threading on the same line, and he watched the same boy stand with knees bent for combat. The child was a child no longer. His shoulders were broad, heaving with the silent promise of retribution without justification. In both hands he held one-handed axes with hafts as long as five feet and one sided blades as large as the head of two men put together. They were the color of dark gold that glistened, blood dripping from the curve of their blades.

Goldsteel, Jabari noted. He recognized them in any divination.

The boy who was now a man wore a green cassock, battered and bruised as much as he was. But even here, Jabari could see the man was healing where he stood, a single opposition to an army of over fifty soul artists. And after a moment, he took a step forward and roared in defiance.

Within the divination, the world roared too.

Reia ran amok, a promise of the madness the man knew he would wreak.

 

[Divination Complete].

[Time lock imminent].

[Calculating Probability…].

[Calculating… Calculating… Calculating…].

[Probability Determined].

[Probability: Inevitable]

 

Jabari returned his full attention to the world around him and took another breath. The only deviation—mild as it was—to this path was coiled a few paces away from him, hidden in its own mind. The snake might not know what the orb was, but it knew it was dangerous. In a few minutes it would try to protect a child from it.

Jabari couldn’t have that.

With another thought, he turned and walked away as reia responded to his unbidden will once more.

In the mind of the snake, a world where it was safe, the world worked on it, weakening it, bringing it a pain and suffering it didn’t deserve.

In mere moments its mind would all but break. Its gold rank would be naught more than iron, and it would balk at the barest of confrontations.

It would return to its rightful place in time. But for now, the timeline required it be nothing more than an iron in the body of a gold.

It’s authority obeyed moments before Jabari was out of its sight. In his wake was naught more than an iron rank beast in a gold rank body.

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The day was now hot. Scorching would’ve been a fitting word to describe it but exaggerations were not something Seth found himself caught in often. He was, however, willing to call it maddening. Its overbearing afternoon heat, coupled with the current situation he found himself in, truly gave heft to the use of the word. The silent ache in his head a cruel pantomime in the madness.

So, today, the day was maddening.

Moving as fast as his feet could carry him, he ran through trees and shrubberies, weaving through them with an adeptness garnered over years of traversing its entirety, the greenery nothing but a blur of motion left in the audience of his vision.

Hope was a distant thought as he fled, chased through a forest his father had warned him to stay away from on countless occasions. Each time he’d been warned, he’d promised he’d never neared the place. But much unlike exaggerations, lies were not strangers to him. Now, however, he wished he’d been saying the truth on each occasion. He wished he’d never neared the place.

The forest blurred into a cacophony of green and brown where there were trees and leaves. The sound of his shoes trampling on the grass and dirt beneath him was blocked out by the grating sound of his labored breaths as he darted around a tree, breaking a path to his left. A part of him screamed at the stupidity of it. Leading a giant snake straight to the house was madness, but what else was he to do. He didn’t want to die and his father was the only one that could save him now. His oldest brother could as well, however, it would cost him quite a lot. So he ran on, hoping Natalie would make it home safe.

Considering the things he’d seen the snake plow through, he doubted Derek, with his silver authority, would stand a chance. After all, while silver soul mages could crack walls and come out unscathed, he’d witnessed the snake crush an entire boulder that had stood in its way as it moved.

Seth heard the sound of slithering behind him and his panic grew. His legs worked harder, a feat he’d thought them no more capable of accomplishing, and was thankful for it.

Unfortunately, their increased speed did nothing to quell the sound that followed behind him.

At first it was slow, broken, as if unsure. Then it rose slowly, growing louder and precise. The search was over, it seemed to say, and the snake had found its prey. Madness fled Seth as his fear took place in the fiber of his being, like a king comfortable in his throne. Or perhaps the fear was merely a sycophant to its king that was madness, like a court jester, loud enough in its entertainment to overshadow the presence of the one entertained. Whatever it was, he didn’t know.

No! No! No! his mind cried, fear numbing it as he did the one thing he’d been convincing himself against since he’d started running; he looked behind him.

His fear turned into dread and almost froze him in his steps as his gaze met deep green marble eyes, each one as big as his head. He couldn’t discern the location of the creature’s nose and didn’t care to as a massive tongue slipped out of a space in its closed mouth, withdrawn with a terrifying hiss. Its eyes watched him as he ran and he thought he saw intelligence in them. Intelligence and promise.

He was glad survival was his body’s priority, and rather than give out beneath him, his legs bolted faster. He cut another corner around a grotesque tree. This one bore greying branches and dying leaves. Its color was just as grey from root to metaphoric crown.

It was a land mark in all his journeys here, one he used to navigate; to find his path back home. The tree was an assurance that he was not lost, and he dodged one of its low hanging branches, head ducking slightly, barely missing it as he passed.

Behind him the massive snake continued to give chase, slithering with the disgusting precision of a slaver’s whip.

The creature was terrifyingly large and long enough that Seth couldn’t even begin to guess at it, though his brain had no reserve energy to consider such thoughts. But he was certain it would be done devouring him long before its tail caught up to its head.

When he and Natalie had run into it, it had been motionless enough to be mistaken for a boulder, but its green eyes had certainly possessed life. Now, he wished he’d not allowed Natalie convince him to go further than he usually did in the forest.

At that time, he’d found himself more concerned with Natalie’s safety, focused on returning her home. In hindsight he should’ve fled with her, perhaps even before her. But he’d waited, his unnecessary protectiveness of her winning out on self preservation.

Fleeing so desparately, he had no illusion of being faster. He simply had a head start, better knowledge of the forest, and a small enough size to weave through the trees in his escape. And there was his determination to stay alive he hoped outweighed the massive snake’s determination to have lunch.

He looked back again as he ran, disobeying himself once more. The sound of the wind in his ears was muffling the sound of the snake, and not knowing made him more fearful.

He didn’t see the beast this time but knew better than to slow down. It was how the side characters died in the books Jonathan usually read. They always fell into a false sense of security when they thought they were safe and died in a way often most entertaining.

Mostly, their deaths involved a lot of gore and blood, perfectly descriptive in the author’s words. His mother told him that was not how most books were, though, the grimness a mere flash of eccentricity that was uncalled for in the author’s choice of depicting his tales. Apparently, it was just one of the things his mother called his oldest brother’s quirks, uncommon to most. He was inclined to believe her, considering everyone called his brother different: a genius, if he was to quote them verbatim.

But he had greater worries in this moment than what the world thought of Jonathan.

Before long his feet struck something, breaking the fragile and unconscious rhythm of his steps. The impact stumbled him, disrupting his path. Coupled with his speed, it was only a matter of time before his stumble became a fall.

He tripped over himself and tumbled gladly, flinging himself into it, forcing momentum to aid him. As long as he kept going forward, he could’ve been stabbed and still been glad, for all he cared. Escaping the snake was the only thing on his mind, and for that he needed to keep moving.

He protected his front where his pack rested across his chest, keeping it safe. Its content was almost as important as surviving the snake. After all, greater people than himself had been killed for things like it. Though he continued to wonder if it was even the same thing.

Everything turned over and under as he rolled through leaves and grass and dirt. The sound of dried leaves crushed beneath him each time his body hit the ground surprised him. That he could hear them and still couldn’t hear the slithering of a snake with a mouth wide enough to swallow him whole without need to open fully was oddly worrying.

As far and full as his fall seemed, it wasn’t long before it came to an end.

He crashed into a tree, his movement halted by the seemingly immovable object. His stomach took the brunt of it so that he seemed to fold around the tree.

Pain flared in his gut on impact, casting fear aside for the briefest of moments, and there he stayed for the length of a long sigh before attempting to remove himself.

He groaned as he moved, pain dominant with the action. He unwrapped himself from the tree sluggishly, grumbling as boys his age do, whispering cusses so descriptive he could hear his grandmother gasp. He rose to his feet gently, ears primed for the barest of sounds.

His side hurt from his impact with the tree more than his stomach and he held it with a gentle hand. He made certain he used his left hand, his weak hand. Because when he needed to move again, for whatever reason, he didn’t need it being the free hand that assisted him. For that, he needed an arm that would not fail him suddenly and without preamble. That level of sudden failure was the purview of his left arm. His right arm was his trusty arm, while his left wasn’t even qualified to be called the sidekick.

On his feet, and groaning from the pain spreading from his side, he pinned his back against the tree and scanned the world around him as he sat in the grass and waited, cradling the pain in his side. As he caught his breath, fatigue built inside him, poisoning whatever strength was left in him.

There was nothing but forest as far as the eye could see. The trees were massive with brown barks and they mocked him in their silence, concealing the predator that sought to make a prey of him. Their green leaves swayed with each movement of their undulating branches beckoned here and there by winds he could not feel. There were scattered sounds of chirping birds so few he was certain he could count their numbers in one hand. That there was no harmony in their chirping was not something unnatural here. Perhaps in other forests it was odd, but here it was just how they were; the worse discordance any symphony could ever tolerate. Still, he’d be lying if he said there wasn’t a single touch of harmony in their individuality. They were, in the simplest of definition, a competition of individual talents.

It was something any could see if they simply bothered to listen.

His moment of rest was short lived when he caught the faintest sound of something. It was not a slithering sound. It did not herald the arrival of the snake. It did not even prove a harbinger of anything dangerous. But the simple acknowledgement that he had no idea what it was sufficed to remind him of the sycophant that was fear.

He placed his hand against the tree, finding leverage enough to stand, and panned his view around. He needed exit and time, and he needed them now. He found the first but knew the second to be irrelevant. He needed to move, and he needed to do it now. With the knowledge, and a certain moistness between the fingers of his left hand he refused to look at, he ran.

With pain in his side and a now slowly growing ache in his head, the survival he’d thought possible was becoming a growing façade. He was closer to leaving the forest now, but fear was his running buddy, teasing his determination with the soft touch of morning dew on unsuspecting leaves.

Still, he refused to succumb to it. He would not die here.

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