The Southern Calt pt. 8

With survival on the line, Akashi and Celie travel northward to reveal the truth...

The weeks in the Calt were lost to the sands as time lost its meaning. Akashi and Celie made their way through, slowly, carefully, and methodically. They battled for survival in silence, avoiding supply convoys and patrols. They foraged fungus from the cracks in the mountains and leaves from the Astral earth. 

One night, Celie caught a small rodent-like creature. It skittered on three legs and its face was smashed in. Akashi couldn’t tell if those were its natural features, or due to Celie’s desperate hunger making her hunting sloppy. He turned away in disgust at the sight of the creature, but that didn’t stop him from eating it when she finished cooking the creature over her infernal fire. They scrounged to get by, fighting for every inch, every foot, every mile that they drug their bodies forward on.

When they no longer saw the desert sands beneath their feet, Akashi felt slightly more hope. Foraging became easier, and they spent less nights going to bed starving. He looked at Celie and saw a small woman with hanging skin, sinuous muscle and bone. He wondered what she saw in him. He looked down at his dried callused hands. His arms were bone and sagging skin. His veins were bulbous and if he focused just enough, he could see the blood pumping through his body. Heavy rains had washed away the blood and guts of the monster of the tunnels, but when he tried to sleep at night, he could still feel the sticky remains pressed against his cheeks and soaking through his cloth uniform. The feeling followed him in nightmares. 

Harrowing horrors of the night where the faces of lost soldiers stared at him in teal sandstorms. The faces screamed, piercing through the storm and up through his spine until he awoke in the night. The sounds of bombs in the distance ate at him. He heard them bleeding into the screams every night. On the worst of nights, he saw his mother. His father. His sister. He had to survive long enough to get the truth out. For them. All of them.

The longer they took to get home, the more people died. The thought ate at him as they saw more supply convoys passing them by, and heard more bombs in the distance. On a clear day, they could see that the bombs were falling not in the Calt, but in the vast desert beyond. Had they found the distant desert hangar? Could the people of the tunnels hold on just a little longer? They discussed finding transportation, but they could only walk. A caravan could kill them. Even if they could take over a caravan, the big lumbering all terrain vehicle would draw attention and they still wouldn’t make it. So they walked. They hid. They scrounged.

They survived.

Akashi and Celie spent most nights talking in whispers about what to do next. How would they get past security? How would they make it through to the broadcast tower? How could they make sure the transmission made it out?

Celie was put in charge of the datapad. She kept it under her fraying fatigues tucked into her shirt. The fear of it breaking was so great that in emergencies, they’d bury it just in case a caravan found them. They stayed safe and the solar charger was still holding up in the rough conditions of the Calt. It was designed for this after all. They continued onward, their bodies wilting away in the Calt. Their minds propelled forward by only their goal.

.

.

.

“Did you lose anyone?” Akashi asked one night as they came ever closer to the end of the Calt. Plans were being whispered in the cool nights as they trudged forward, but his mind wandered.

“What do you mean? That doesn’t have anything to do with the security detail. Look, the datapad has some outdated information, but it is information. Let’s just focus on what we’re going to do at the tower, yeah?”

“Yeah, but… you lost people, right? I mean, who hasn’t I guess but -”

“Akashi. Focus.”

“I am focused. More focused than I’ve ever been. We’re doing this for them, you know? We need to do this for all of them. Every soldier we lost. Every person who was lied to… my family - all our families.”

“That’s a good drive.” Celie replied.

“So what’s your drive? Who’d you lose?” She shook her head,

“Another day, maybe.” Akashi nodded. He understood. 

“Now, according to the datapad, they’ve got facial ID’s at the entrance, and a minimum of a dozen guards on each level. Mostly people from the Cain police force - office of border security mainly. You said your aunt is involved?” Akashi nodded. “Think she’ll give us a break?”

“Auntie Gee? The fiends would sooner kiss you, Celie. Besides, she’s a detective, not border security”

“Great…” Celie shook her head. “We could climb it…”

“Climb? We’re exhausted husks. You can’t be serious.” Akashi whispered. He flinched as the sky lit up from a distant bomb. “And if a storm comes…” The comm tower doubled as a sky-scraping lightning rod that stood over the important infrastructure of the collective’s military.

“The outside of the tower has scaffolding - should be safe on them if a storm hits. Probably. Look, we can’t get past the facial ID, Cain’s got the best tech in the west. We’re asking for trouble if we try to get in any other way. We can climb the scaffolds, upload your scope feed into the transmitter, probably get caught by the cameras and then -”

“Then what? We die?”

“If it comes to that, right? What have we got to lose?” Celie asked. 

Akashi thought about it. When he blinked, he saw their screaming faces. Shiv was so clear in his vision that it shook him to his core. The moment he saw her die was embedded so deep, he couldn’t escape it. 

He remembered his sister. He didn’t understand why she was trying so hard to get into a college outside of Cain when he was a boy. He did now. Thinking she never made it broke his heart. What was she going to do? What did she want to be? She could’ve done so many beautiful things. She could’ve made it out. He learned after she died that she was one percent beneath acceptance in her college entrance exams. She had studied for months. She had fought tooth and nail, and then with bloody declawed fingers to get away. What happened when she made it to the Calt? How did she die? How did the altar of lies impale her? 

What did he have to lose? If he fell upon the altar, he wanted to crush it. If he got the truth out there, nothing else mattered. What did Akashi Pacè have to lose?

“Nothing.”

.

.

.

“You know, I saw what happened with Rae-Lynd. You could’ve died.” Celie said as they trekked through the Calt on a particularly hot day. This close to the northern exit, there was tall foliage with thick leaves that barely shaded them from the sun that was trying so hard to melt them.

“Yeah. Yeah I could’ve…”

“But you fought. You reasoned with him. They say they’re unreasonable, you know.”

“They?”

“Yeah. People back home say the tunnel dwellers are unreasonable. Imagine that.”

“You heard what happened. What do you think?” Celie paused for a while, lost in thought.

“Seems like we may have been the unreasonable ones. As scary as it is to come to grips with - I feel like I have to say we - we are the problem here. We didn’t even know it. How sick is that?”

“Yeah… we’re fixing it now though.”

“Do you seriously believe that two people against the world can make a difference?” Akashi raised an eyebrow.

“Well, ain’t you talkative today.” He smiled at Celie. She had that same deadpan stare she always had. Even when her voice was full of emotion, her features seemed deadened. Her reddening brown skin had begun peeling in the sun. They didn’t seem hydrated enough for sweat anymore. Her full cheeks were shaved down to bone and her musculature cradled her skeleton like a parasite desperate to hold on. He couldn’t imagine what they must’ve smelled like - his senses had gone dull to such pointless things.

“Humor me.” She pressed. Akashi caught himself cradling a scraggly beard that he hadn’t realized that he had begun to grow. He dusted dirt and sand out of it and looked up at the sky. Even through all the pollution, through the dark purple scars, the intensity of the sun had broken through. Unwavering. Unbroken. He caught himself smiling so wide his lips cracked at the corners. It hurt more than he could ever imagine joy could hurt. He never thought the troublemaker from Cain would have to stand against anyone but his aunt. Now here this strange woman - who had become the most important person in his life - was asking him if he could stand up to the world.

“Well, maybe not against the world… but against a nasty city or two? I think we can stand our ground.”

.

.

.

On the day they emerged from the Calt, the rain came again. The clouds in the sky became illuminated with lightning. The thunder boomed from every darkened shape in the world. In front of them lay the familiar standing ground where troops used to be dropped off before the front was pushed all the way to the south. Over a year ago, Akashi stood there waiting to make it into the Calt and make it out alive one day. Now he was staring back, coming home in a way he thought he never would.

Akashi and Celie screamed. They howled with joy. They jumped in puddles. They felt the mud all over themselves. They hugged. They cried.

On either side of them, the cragged mountain walls made sharp curves opening Astra up to them. To their left it moved to follow the ocean. To their right, the mountain rolled on separating the forest from the rest of the great desert barrens of the south. Ahead of them was the dirt road the convoys had ridden on, leading soldier after soldier - children after parents after grandparents - to their death. He wouldn’t let their loss be in vain. 

The dirt road disappeared into the forest that separated Cain and Sant. The road led to the joint basic training grounds nuzzled just west of Cain. Just inside the security limits of Cain lay the collective transmission tower. They weren’t much further from their goal. Akashi figured in a couple more days, they would be there.

The journey wasn’t over, but they couldn’t help but think the hardest part was behind them. They were almost home. Akashi was almost home. They embraced each other one more time, bodies tired, eyes filled with tears, clothes soaked in rain and mud. Then they continued on, ready to see the next sunrise.

.

.

.

In the forest they found a lumbering willow tree. There were none like it anywhere else in the forest and Akashi hadn’t seen anything like it before. The roots rolled up out of the ground then dove back in, piercing the mud of the still wet earth with little care for what got in its way. The branches hung down, the weight of its own leaves forcing it to nearly touch the ground. Akashi leaned against the thick trunk and sighed as he slowly slid down the trunk and thumped into the ground. They were so close and yet he couldn’t imagine how they’d make it any further. He imagined this must be what they meant when they referred to the calm before the storm. 

He had seen many moments of quiet in the Calt, but he never experienced such peace as he did beneath the willow tree. He imagined that he could forget everything here and fade into the very bark, forgetting who he was or what he ever wanted. Then, Celie returned.

She had set up another one of her arcane fires and sat cross legged with a small rabbit-like rodent. She methodically skinned it then cooked the meat. Akashi had trouble watching. He preferred his meat lab grown in Cain, but this was what they had to do to survive all this time. When it was fully cooked, Celie handed him half and they both began ravenously eating. When they finished, Celie let the bones fall into the mud, then looked up at the tree.

“This is a special place.”

“Yeah? It is a nice tree,” Akashi replied, joining her in staring up at it. “Good back support.” Celie scowled at him.

“Not like that. There’s something about it. I don’t know how to put it but… it’s powerful. It's… I don’t know, honestly.”

“Like magic?” Celie shrugged,

“Maybe. Imagine that, a magic tree hiding in the collective forest.”

“Yeah, that’d be something, huh?” Akashi chuckled. “What does magic really even mean? I mean, you’re magic, right? But what is magic?”

“Don’t know. I guess you could say magic is anything beyond the average person’s capability, right?”

“I guess. But that’s a little broad. I mean, you feel something around this tree that might be magic. Is magic a feeling? Is magic just a state of being?” Celie thought really hard before replying. Akashi watched her face contort as she mulled over the words. She was trying to find the definition, as though the words were deep inside her and she needed to only close her eyes and see the answer plastered across her eyelids.

“It’s something fantastical that we can do that we can’t explain other than to attribute it to forces beyond our control.” She finally replied. “A god can endow someone with immense power. How? Because a god can do it. Some of us are just born with the powers of other realms coursing through our veins. How? Because a portal is inside us or something. Hand wave, hand wave, magic. The fact that we can’t understand it is what makes it magical. Or maybe that’s just because I don’t understand it.”

“And what about the tree?”

“Well…” Celie shook her head. “Some things just are, I guess.”

“Just like how some people are?” Akashi asked.

“Witches. That’s the word you're after. And I don’t know much about them. They just are, yes. They’re not evil though, you know.”

“I know.”

“Okay, just some people think that and -”

“I know.” Akashi said more forcefully than he intended. Celie shrugged,

“Okay okay. They can be dangerous, though. People are scared of them. They’re scared of themselves sometimes too. No one understands them, and they don’t understand themselves, but -”

“But they’re just people.” Akashi finished her sentence. Celie nodded.

“Yeah. Just people.”

The conversation wandered and they forgot about the strange powerful willow over their heads. As the sun fell low, the sky became a blaze of orange and pink that spattered the sky between the leaves over their heads. 

“We used to come out here and watch the sunset.”

“Really? Out here?”

“Well, not this far from Sant. But out in the forest.”

“You don’t say. My aunt never let me leave the city limits. I did a lot of stuff she didn’t want, but that was a line I never crossed.”

“My dad loved it out here…”

“So your dad, he -”

“Died. The wrap.”

“Oh. I’m sorry…”

“Mom died in the war. So did my brother. He couldn’t handle it when he came back. He’d bring me out here when I was a teen. He said it was the only quiet place in the world. The only place he couldn’t hear the sounds of gunfire. Screams… The most peaceful place in the world.” The silence between them brought a gentle breeze. High above them, Akashi could see the Fates beginning to peek out from the dark corners of the sky. Insects far away called out to each other, hoping someone would answer. Celie shook her head,

“They all died for a lie. All of them.” Akashi couldn’t disagree with her. They were the same words he repeated over and over in his head. He reached out to Celie and placed a hand on her shoulder.

“And tomorrow we’ll put the truth out there. For them. All of them.”

As they settled down to sleep beneath the willow, Akashi didn’t dream. There were no ground shaking explosions. There were no screaming faces of the dead in his dreams. There were no storms, no pain, no disruptions whatsoever. With his body contorted to avoid the roots of the looming willow, he slept like he had never slept before.

He knew he would wake up ready for what came next.

---

Gosh, here we are at the end of part 8! This is one of the shortest ones, but that’s because part 9 is one of the longest parts. I considering splitting some of part 9 into 8, but I decided to keep it this way for the sake of rhythm. Its funny because part 8 was probably the hardest section to write for me, but part 9 is my favorite part by far. I hope you’re ready because the intense is getting cranked up next week for the big conclusion. That’ll be followed by part 10, what I’m calling the fallout/repercussions of our protagonist’s actions.

I hope you enjoyed this shorter section and stay tune for next week - my favorite part by far!

Thank you as always, and I’ll catch you next week!

So excited to be in the home stretch!