4.2.25 - The One to Become the Third pt 6

PARABLE VI: Under Ash and Moonlight

Zarash and Soet trained relentlessly.

For six hours, they held stances. Focused. Breathed. Stored. Released. Their movements became slower, then sharper. Soet practiced hardening muscle and skin, building endurance in his hulking frame. Zarash focused on containment—harnessing his medra instead of letting it rip through his limbs unchecked.

No food. No water. Only breath, sweat, and dirt.

Their muscles screamed, but they didn’t stop.

They had been through worse—under Cauma, survival meant ambushing caravans while starved, pilfering from bloodstained mud, always on the edge of death or disgrace. This? This was discipline.

Epsul sat on a kamak stone, watching.

She observed their flaws. Zarash had an overflow of medra but lacked control. Soet could contain energy but struggled to summon it. Size and structure played a role, she suspected. But her memory of runetheory—flickering and fractured—offered only guesses.

“What was that bird?” she mused aloud. “We’ve been eating its shit for months. That’s what makes the meat taste like smoke.”

Soet nodded. “And no one’s mined this field? It’s all kamak… all of it.”

He dug at the earth with his hands. Beneath the surface, black stone shimmered—compact, compressed, solid. “The boulders fall and crack, pack into the soil. This whole meadow is a kamak bed.”

Zarash looked around. His gaze swept across the broken craters and uneaten chunks of obsidian rock.

“We can’t harvest it,” Epsul said suddenly. “We’re too small. We don’t have the status. If a clan finds out we discovered this, they’ll kill us. Or worse—Cauma will take it. If any of the big three get wind of it, they’ll own the Isle.”

Soet stood, brushing dirt from his hands. “Then we keep some. For cooking. For trade later. We do what we came to do.”

They packed a few kamak shards and moved on.

The far edge of the field gave way to a drop. They descended into a lower valley—hidden from above. An ashen forest spread beneath them. Trees with sapphire leaves, trunks laced with golden bark. The shimmer-dirt here sparkled with flecks of ruby and topaz. The air was dry. Pure.

Epsul blinked. “Zarash… how did you find this place?”

He stepped carefully over a root. “Drujina said… person who dropped me at her door… told her about it. Called it ‘Freedumb Fortress.’ I found it one sycle ago. Gruhanas live here. Stay in trees—holes high and low.”

He pointed to carved-out nests along the tallest trunks.

Soet’s brows lifted. “The crater path we used… it hid the whole forest. That means the treetops are level with the kamak field.”

They pressed on, finding a small stream that spilled into a mossy hollow. There, they made camp.

Soet cleaned the dox with precision, gutting and skinning it over a sloped wedge of stone. Epsul gathered wood and tried to replicate Zarash’s rune-weaving—focusing medra in her hand, thinking of heat.

Nothing.

She changed her hand-sign—thumb to ring finger instead of middle. Her index finger sparked. She yelped and shook it, the flame landing in the fire bundle.

Zarash laid out their beds, stuffing pillows with guanco wool. His mind churned—not about comfort, but about progress. He wasn’t satisfied. Not with his growth. Not with what they were. Not with what they had.

Epsul watched the flame crackle, her hands still warm. She turned to help Soet bury unused dox parts and cover the cave’s entrance with a guanco hide to contain the scent.

Later, Zarash stood outside. Moonlight silvered his skin. He assumed his runedance stance beneath the stars, eyes locked on the pale gem in the sky.

Epsul joined him at the mouth of the cave.

“Beautiful, huh?” she said. “They say the moon is a gem. That Eluna lives there, watching. Her siblings—Pyu and Akah—are always fighting, shaping our world. That’s why we’re always at war.”

She didn’t expect a reply. He didn’t offer one.

“My caretaker used to say we can’t see Eluna with our eyes. That the moon is a mirror—only the mind sees the real her. That’s where beauty lives. In what we carry.”

Zarash didn’t move.

Soet’s voice echoed from the cave. “Need help with the skewers!”

Epsul turned back. “Come in when you’re ready. Food’s almost done.”

Zarash returned just as Soet began roasting. Chunks of dox meat, organs, and root stacked on sticks. Kamak dust sprinkled over with animal fat and a splash of blood.

“Looks like market street food,” Zarash muttered.

“It’s called a dox-a-chunk,” Soet said, proud. “Market folks use bred ebeks, but ours will be better.”

The smell hit them—roasted marrow, charred bark, spices.

Epsul draped a piece of dox skin over her back, the head hanging like a hood.

“So,” she said, “we’ve got warmth. Water. Food. Tomorrow we hunt. Then we return. But before that—we talk. We need to review the plan.”

Zarash nodded.

The fire lit their faces in gold and shadow.

The night, silent. Waiting.