The Prodigal Mom Returns (Zak)

[Zakita]

Grateful for Mina’s quick and correct suppression of the less-than-observant Basalom, Zak didn’t even shy away as the girl reached out for her. Beyond allowing her hand to be held, there wasn’t much of a reaction. In reality, she felt the warm glow of allies. Even Basalom, who she was sure would flail out in defense of her at a moment’s notices. Hopefully after waiting for the shrewd Mina to offer him some direction. Even after he got knocked upside the head, he earned a shy but pleased smile from the sunburned girl. “We’ll need to come up with some kind of signal,” the gangly girl quickly added to Mina’s plan as they flanked her and led the way. Their trek was smooth, Zak nudging them this way and that to avoid any obstacles that normally would have been hidden by the dark. Immediately, the grassland sign popped to mind, but was just as quickly abandoned. Similarly, various sounds native to the Sea. “How about if I say prunes? He’ll never guess I was talking to anyone else and they’ll never know you helped me out so you won’t get beat.” A vague fantasy of somehow escaping the tent before it fell, trapping only the inquisitor played out successfully in her imagination. The three of them would rendezvous and go over the events in the tent, or maybe they’d have to wait until morning when they could meet up. Though these new friends fortified the courage her new goal, the mysterious staff, had given, the clear departure from the friendly confines of the encampment unsettled her once more. They found themselves leading her along progressively slower the further behind the bleating of small domestic mammals fell. Of course his tent was situated apart. He wouldn’t want to wake or disturb anyone with her screams. The silhouettes all took on menacing origins and the uncomfortable sound of a thick swallow disturbed the unnatural quiet of the area. So far away seemed the friendly lights and songs of camp. Perhaps the strengthened presence of the shadows with only one disruption nearby would have been more comfortable had they not mulishly refused to speak to her. They knew things, she could tell, that would help her. They only ever got this quiet when they were keeping secrets. The loitering girl jumped as Mina collided with her, the unexpected touch testament to how deep her reverie had gone. Drawing herself up, Zak took three deliberate steps toward the tent. She stopped, glanced over her shoulder at Mina and Basalom. They looked ready to rip the tent down at a moment’s notice. “Does he always pitch his tent this far away? Or is it just for…tonight?” Heavy and black, carved like a viper, and… Resolved, she peeked through the opening, frowning at the greasy illumination that sent shadows skittering to hide from close observation. She hadn’t taken close enough notice of the caravan to see that his belongings were finer than the rest, but had she the reason clearly would have been that he provided an important ‘cleansing’ service to his people. Just as she had bravely accepted her mother’s decision to see this man this afternoon, she would never show how scared she truly was. Heavy and black, carved like a viper, and… Boldly, Zak stepped into the old man’s tent, gray eyes stormy in a scowling, cherry red visage. “Methusah? My name is Zakita, Shrahri sent me to you.” The girl, carefully not touching anything and eyes taking in absolutely everything harmful, or related to what she knew of the spear, within the area, lifted her chin.

[Cantrip]

Mina gave a shrug, though as she began to speak a heady gust made the strings of her hair spill over her face, the scarf threatening to jerk from around her ears. There was a terse snort, braised in a marinade of indignation, as she found herself eating her own hair. Deft finger quickly swiped them away. “Methusah is Methusah,” was her cryptic whisper. “That man does what he does, and nobody says anything. That’s a benefit of being crusty, I guess.” Basalom’s chin jerked up. “Thought it was about snakes,” he said, brow creasing. Zakita, having already gleaned the courage to duck under the flap, mightn’t have heard the murmur. Inside, the tent was larger, more capacious of sundry bales and trinkets than it had before appeared. There was a strange musk, though the whiffs didn’t emanate from a pair of sadly dented censers, their bronze cages hanging from the center pole just above the glass case of an oil lamp. The grit was covered over by rugs, mostly worn, their patterns muted by the passage of years. The cushions were piled high, fading silk and damask that had seen finer days, the majority of plainer fabric, and a low folding table of darkly carved wood held a pewter tray with the remnants of a meal. Methusah regarded her through rheumy eyes. The elder wasn’t quite so daunting, all wizened joints and short, spiky white whiskers. He was balder than an egg, through snarls of hair curled from the depths of his ears. His skin was coppery, stretched tautly over the sunken bones of his face. When he spoke, she’d surely find that he was devoid of many molars, both upper incisors. “What d’you want?” Methusah gave a tug. The edges of his mouth creased. He began to speak, and his she’d find that his voice was rough, rasping like a file over rusty iron. “No, don’t answer that. That name, Shahri. There’s a familiar slur, but I must confess, I’ve forgot what she wanted.” “They’re always rushing around.” Methusah shifted absently on his bed of cushions. “The hasty fools. That’s hardly good for the digestion. Take a seat, girl,” he jerked long fingers at the cushions. Zakita, if she neared, would find her nostrils infused by the cloying scent of honeyed cloves, which if she’d any insight she’d identify as a rub for aching joints. Methusah reached for a bundle wrapped by canvas. “Don’t say why just yet, all right? There’s more abstruse ways of finding why you’re here, and I’ve got nothing better to do. Prune?” The jet of his chin indicated a clay bowl with a few dried, vaguely withered fruits. Zakita would find a the shadow of a grin on his lips, but even as he spoke, her skin would surely feel as thought it was crawling with the imagined sprawl of a thousand insects. The laces of the canvas came away, revealing a section of the black spear’s shaft, but that wasn’t why he’d undone the leather thongs. Methusah held up a drawstring bag, ready to pour a jumbled array of bone discs painted with strange glyphs into her relucant palm. “That’s right, indulge my mumbo jumbo,” he urged. “Throw the bones, and let’s see if they don’t deceive us.”

[Zakita]

Shadows darkened and fluttered as the fierce little thing moved a step further into the tent, the lamp’s light appearing to weaken and cower. Had it not been for the mystery of the staff, it would have taken considerable will not to vacate the odiferous premises immediately following the old fart’s admission of ignorance. Ten ticks into the encounter and he’d already proven himself to be useless. She couldn’t even respect him for being capable of carrying out the simplest of all those things she didn’t want him to do to her. The censers and lamp and table appeared to be the only threatening objects within the tent. And the darkness rallied around her, strengthening her resolve to see this inane practice through. Strange how similar yet disjunctive her two heritages truly were, tents, nomads, yet completely opposite lands and outlooks. Unable to help it, grey eyes rolled as the crimson girl braved the musky aura surrounding him to perch warily upon a cushion. Not wary of any physical danger, for his eyes hinted at poor vision and his scent of mostly useless limbs, but rather poised to avoid any gross old person expulsions. Prunes included. She shook her head in refusal, and he continued on blithely. Besides, however grudging the observation, he seemed easy going and benevolent, even with that toothless smile. Her nose twitched, and toes curled, as though something tickled them. Lip hitched up in disgust, she accepted the bones in one limp palm. But for long moments after his final directive, the girl examined the inadvertently revealed staff. Her other hand, lifted halfway to the damaged flesh of her face and poised to scrub viciously over it, froze. With a growing expression of consternation, the frightened girl eyed the appendage as though it wasn’t her own. Growling, the glyphed discs flew from her palm, scattering over table and pillows. She surged to her feet, a child towering over a senile old carcass, fists clenching as her shoulders twitched under the hitherto unknown sensation of insect feet. Akajia's hand on her shoulders, firm, distinct, warm, had left an indelible imprint on the girl, a perennial assurance of physical pleasure. This new sensation, skittering, chilling, malevolent, was not an acceptable mate. “Stop! Stop it now!” For a moment it looked like she would lash out, kick the table over into the elder, and it wouldn’t be the first time this trip she’d lashed out in her temper. That had been the difference that brought her up short a moment ago, moving imprudently out of anger and being completely ignorant of a movement were two different things. The shadows surrounding Methusah thickened, their fluid grace edged with hard menace as his belongings disappeared within their murky depths. Now her hands slid over her face, trying to dislodge the cause of the sensation even as the excessive pressure of her unfelt palms stretched and distorted the flesh, leaving long white streaks that stood out starkly against the dark red of the burns. Soon it turned to scratching, blunt nails digging in to dislodge and scrape away whatever it was she felt over her neck and chest and arms. Streaks started white, filled a mottled angry red, and finally beaded with blood. Her silhouette writhed on the faded cherry cloth for a few ticks that stretched on like eternities before the girl whirled and stumbled through the entrance, the flap catching in her legs and sending her sprawling into the sand. Grunting, sand lodged in the mangled dent of her forehead where she’d bonked both censers on her way out. Though her mind was preoccupied with escaping, it tentatively solved pieces of the puzzle. Methusah was touched by a God, of which that staff symbolized. A Goddess, actually, a little voice corrected, Akajia’s voice, Siku.

[Cantrip]

Zakita’s frenzy didn’t evoke much of a rejoinder, for having bided through a greater part of the dust of dreams, Methusah was inured to such hasty displays of fear, passion, yelling. There was a sedate pause, the crinkling of lips and the vaguest hitch of a bushy brow. He keenly took in this disgorging of sentiment, intrigued by the raging scope to which his innocuous intimation had disturbed the girl. There was something wrong with her, clearly. That was why she was clawing at her face. “You probably shouldn’t do that,” he grunted. “You’re young, and you might not know any better, but that sort of self defacement usually leaves marks.” The tone was calm, measured, level. Though the shadows crept around her, overwhelming in the intensity of their embrace, he was a stable pillar of reason amid the burgeoning chaos. There was a greater perception, furtively hiding under the rheumy glaze of his eyes. There was veracity in her fears, grains that shifted and guided their purpose ever beyond that youthful grasp. Though he barely gave a twitch, there were whispers sloughing from the wrinkles and creases of his slack, waxy flesh. And then, quivery fingers were descending, deftly plucking a single glyph that had tumbled into the folds of his robe. He turned it over, tracing the lacquer. There was a vague hunch of shoulders, and then he was staring at her. The fragment twirled around, displaying a serpent of jet eagerly consuming the form of a woman, crested by a glyph. Shadow. Methusah ruminated, sucking at his gums. “You’re clearly seeing things,” he offered, judging them neither real, nor false. There wasn’t any use in being hasty. However, the girl clearly hadn’t developed that inherent wisdom, for she abruptly went blundering out into the night. There wasn’t any noise beyond the flap. The silhouette sat in a hush. Mina hastened to her side, on swift, tiny feet. “What did he do?” she hissed, clearly flustered, her eyes bulging like a bug’s. Her fingers clutched at the other girl’s shoulder.

[Zakita]

In the calm of the dark, a safe distance from that man, with Mina’s presence hovering nearby, his words took up a loathsome cadence in the back of her mind. Long strands of inky hair splayed over her face, stuck to her chapped lips, Zak rolled onto her back, slowly pushing further away from the tent with Mina at her side. “I don’t know,” she husked, tearing stormy gray eyes from the streaks of damage on her arms to Mina’s dark, startled gaze. “It’s gone. It was, it, I felt,” she stuttered around heavy breaths, finally giving up and sucking in huge mouthfuls to soothe her panic. “He was looking at me, and I felt, I felt…I felt,” the gangly, roughed up girl choked out eloquently, assured by her new friends concerned presence. “He gave me these bones to throw, said they would answer his questions. Then he gave me this sickly grin, he was babbling, and my skin started feeling things. And I told him to stop but he just told me I was seeing things and stared and kept doing it. He’s not an old man, he’s something else, something more,” she froze abruptly, sitting like a lump in the sand. “Where’s Basalom? Is he going to drop the tent on that old snake?” Not a day went by when she didn’t wish she had been born normal, but she wasn’t going to let people force unpleasant sensations on her willy nilly. But her curiosity wouldn’t let her walk away from the twisted old man. “I want to know what he meant, but I don’t want to feel that way again. Do you ever feel weird around him? Have you ever seen him use those bones?” she demanded with youth’s tact. Abruptly, her face closed up in sly conspiracy. “If we get them,” she whispered, “we can find out what they are. We can use them to answer things like he does. You’ve snuck in to see his staff, he keeps them in the same bundle.”

[Cantrip]

Whatever she’d felt, it only lent credence to a burgeoning hysteria. The head of children, however clever they might be, were seldom emptied of snarled doubts, crazy visions. Mina’s shoulders bunched, neck trying to sink into her body as might a tortoise, and she wrestled the other girl down, behind the rocky slope of a dune. There was shock in her eyes, the chary recognition that an elder she’d been convinced was harmless was, in fact, a dangerous person. The empty rumors, formerly lacking substance, came rushing into her tousled head. “Bones?” The word was strangled, her throat bulging in a gulp. From the way she kept staring at Zak, it was plain that she was envisaging magic boiling at the other girl’s skin, leaving her with welts over the burns. However, her brother had kept his wits about him, even if he’d been too cowardly to venture near enough to the tent to yank out the poles. He rushed from the dark, throwing his skinny frame over the drift of sand. Then he tumbled, grit getting in his hair and robe, to the girls’ hiding place. “What happened?” Basalom risked a furtive peek at the tent, so caught up by what he half believed was a charade that he didn’t even notice the blemishes on Zak’s face. “Methusah didn’t even move.” “Shut up,” Mina snarled, scared and reluctant to comply with the word’s emanating from Zak’s mouth. There wasn’t anybody else to vent on, and though Basalom got sulky, he was too excited, too distracted by his vigil to offer a rejoinder. Mina let go of Zak’s arm, which had surely gone white from the vice of her grip. “We can’t go back there just yet,” she hissed. “What if he’s angry?” “About what?” “Shut up.” Her lips gave a twitch. “Methusah is just a creaky old man who enjoys telling strange tales. I mean, that’s what I thought. I don’t know, he’s just different from the rest of us. I didn’t think the rumors mean anything, ‘til now, at least, when you went in there.” Basalom crept back to them, reaching for the sling that he’d thrust into his belt. “We can come back later,” he urged. “He won’t be going to sleep for a while, and we’ve got to pretend like we’re sleeping, too, so they don’t coming looking for us. Then we can slip away, join up back here.” Mina’s curiosity had reached a feverish climax, though. “What’s so unusual about you?” she demanded. “Did you do something?”

[Zakita]

Zak’s body reacted lethargically to the sand rat’s urgings, but once Zak got the idea, she eagerly tumbled behind the dune with Mina. With baited breath, they waited for Basalom to finally join them, letting him position himself with his head in prime position to peek over the crest to the loathsome tent. In the dark, she could see their reactions, expressions as clear as day. They vindicated her response to the old man’s assault. “Rumo-“ Zak tried to get Mina to elaborate, but fell silent as Basalom interrupted, eagerly absorbing what little tidbits they were spilling. Every piece, no matter how small or vague, contributed to the illuminating the puzzle. “I didn’t do anything wrong! My mom feels like I’m not religious enough, that I don’t show Eywaat the proper respect. That’s why she wanted me to see Methusah.” Her voice, squeaking with puerile fear and indignation, dampened in the night and hovered over the hunched children. Her gaze solidified on them before she suddenly scooted further down the dune and turned away, pulling up the flowing hem of her white top. “See the triangle in the middle of my windmarks?” She tilted her back and shoulders to the moonlight, knowing the dark heavy lines of the geometric shape would stand out. Especially in the dark, the shape of Akajia’s claim seemed to flutter, alive compared to the imprinted ink. “Akajia did that to me when I was younger, and ever since then my mom has been insisting that there’s something wrong with me.” Her tone got a little sulky at the end, even though there was unmistakable pride there. “It doesn’t give Methusah a right to attack me like that!” Her fingers tentatively reached up to brush over her cheeks, dislodging pink granules of sand that had caught in the bloodied welts. Knowing the other kids couldn’t see as well as she, she didn’t ask them how extensive the damage was but she did pull out the head wrap from earlier and twist it nervously. Eyes skipped to between their faces, Zak wondering if they were going to react as her mother had, as Methusah had. For now, they couldn’t leave until Mina’s curiosity had been sated, because until it was, Zak wouldn’t get any answers of her own.

[Cantrip]

They crowded her. They brushed, with tender, sweaty fingers, the mark that’d been placed on her, with a sordid, if justified curiosity. The paralysis of doubts, riding before a wave of fears that transfixed their ignorance. Mina’s eyes were bulging again, for though she’d rarely glimpsed Yahal’s sigil inscribed on a few of the city’s guard, and even Makutsi’s on an elderly weaver whose flesh was burnt nut-brown, this was different. Akajia. Though the deity was known to her, what that particular deity did was the stuff of myths, the shred of a rumor, laced by a tang of distrust. “Akajia is shadow, right?” Basalom tugged at the downy flesh of his chin, as might a priest at luxuriant whiskers. He was taking this in stride, certainly. “Can you do anything? I mean, you’ve got a mark, couldn’t you have some power?” His face betrayed a twist of jealousy, melding with the scar of a deeper, trenchantly seizing ambition. And then it vanished. “She just gave it to you?” Mina’s voice was that of a jaded skeptic, but her cloud of worry was thinning. The girl before her wasn’t a bugbear. There’d have to be more convincing, surely, but her doubts were yielding. As though for the first time, they began to look into her eyes, to see her. And in so doing, they saw the bloody weals. “What’d he do to your face, Zak?” Basalom’s jaw gave a pugnacious jut, his fists bunching as if he wasn’t just a slightly pudgy boy, but a warrior of the temple. “I didn’t see him beat you,” Mina grunted, pursing her lips in an expression of sour worry. “I didn’t hear you say it, either. I mean, you said he used sorcery on you?” The utterance flung from her lips, laden with black, dripping bile. The use of djed was anathema, a curse that’d once smeared and tainted a great wizard, and had inevitably become despised in the desert wastes, forsaken by many potential practitioners. Feared, above anything. Mina’s dread was palpable.