To Serve and To Lead; One and The Same

"When the Way comes to an end, then change - having changed, you pass through." - I Ching

***

She feels the call. The Keys blister her mind, arc through her blood, sear her with purpose. She runs to the Hall of the One Tribe--faster, faster!--thinks distantly of her students. But there is no time left for thought, only action. She places the keys with decisiveness, hears her voice whispering the incantations, pleading with this force to guide her, to guide all of the People.

She is floating, the keys are floating. Her body is pain, then isn't any longer; her name is Kailani; then isn't any longer; her mind is swallowed whole by the keys, then isn’t any longer.

The balance. She passes through.

***

"Good, good!" Juushiro says, smiling broadly at his eager young pupil. "It's good to see your earnestness isn't just noble boasting." He sheaths his blade, bowing, and the woman across from him -- no more than a girl of 15, but with feet newly blackened -- does the same.

She rushes across the floor of the open and airy dojo, crossing through long squares of late afternoon sunlight, and ladles water from a stone urn into a wooden cup. Turning swiftly, she offers it to her sensei with both hands, grinning cheekily. "If my infinitely wise and powerful and strong and handsome sensei permits, I---"

Juushiro takes the cup, rolling his eyes. "Hai, Setsuna, you are done for the day. Be on time tomorrow, please, and remember, early is on time, on time is late and..."

"Late is unacceptable!" She replies in cheery singsong, already scurrying out the door.

Juushiro shakes his head, drinking his water. "Kouhai," he mutters to the empty room, "so eager and yet so fickle". His mind returns to the missive rolled neatly in his flowing white sleeve; he touches it absently, not needing to read it, as the words are seared in his mind as surely as flame is into his feet.

"Elven war. Need new soldiers; fodder, skilled, it matters little. Expect you to bring two score of your students. This is not to be questioned."

He wipes the rim of his cup, sets it on the edge of the empty basin. The sun lowers further, cicadas singing their summer's-end songs. "It is a dangerous mind that asks no questions, Hime." He sighs, then adds another name to his mental list of recruits; Setsuna, daughter of Sul Isis. Skilled, hopefully not fodder.

***

Her fetter begins bleeding. The lifeblood of Ohana, of Rulu’um, is the only colour in this greyscale place. She staggers through the streets of this dark city, her fetter dripping its bright blue life onto skulls, femurs. She takes care to avoid crushing the bones of the fallen, but the air is thick with dust--their dust, their bones, this city!--and she drinks of them as they drink of her.

There is a temple, a vision. There is a need for a fetter, the falling water of her passion leaving her, sinking into the dust of life. She finds the temple, finds the Great Fetter, it is blood, her blood is falling, is pooling, she must heed it, the vision.

Her fingers find the knife, add the first new prints to it in centuries. She saws at her own ribs, makes an offering, any offering to stop the loss, the bleeding. Her gritted teeth cannot fully restrain a strangled, primal cry; the mother and the child in harmony as birth is achieved.

***

Setsuna closes her eyes, grits her teeth against the bile of fear that threatens to rise from her belly at any moment. The airship is tilting at an improbable angle, screams and desperate incantations filling the skies it sails in. Around her are the swirling ashes of her fallen brethren, choking every gasping breath she takes. In a moment of bizarre clarity that often strikes under duress, she begins trying to sweep their ashes into her flowing deep red sleeves; the sleeves of the student, there was no time for a proper uniform.

“In--in respect, there is victory,” she croaks, wiping ashes from her lips, brushing them frantically away from the corpses of elven soldiers on the deck, “One must...one must examine this all we---” the bile in her stomach erupts as the ship sinks further.

She awakens on the ground, aching and thinking of the dojo. Something is above her, reeking and heavy. There is little light, and the only sounds are the groans of those who are affirming if they are alive or not.

Hair gets stuck on a wound on her face. She moves to brush it away, then notices it is not her own yellow hair, but darker, coarser. Her eyes struggle to make out the figure above her, and it is that of a female elf, already bloating in death, her lips twisted into a rictus, the viscera from the death wound on her chest dripping onto the young soldier’s clothing, blending in with the student's dark red. Setsuna gasps and pushes her way out from under the figure, scrambling away on the ground as swiftly as her uniform will allow.

She eventually rises to her feet, trembling, and notices that the corpse is the only thing that prevented the jagged mast of the ship from turning her body to ash. She wipes her lips;blood and the ashes of the fallen mix there, gritty and sticky.

She screams.

***

The Grey Lady closes her lips on her scream.

“It is done.” She rises from the bench on that forgotten altar as surely as she’d come of age on its weathered and bloodied seat. The walls shake; the ground gives up its cloud of death-as-life, bones become air.

She caresses the long bladed weapon she’s earned with the gift of her rib. Crouching, she bares her teeth in a snarl at the collapsing wall, at the impossible mass of the Thing that breaks through it, its head a swirl of yellow eyes, its arms ending in three long claws.

“I am come, Weapon. The hunt begins.” She stands upright, and runs.

***

She feels his hand enclosing her arm and closes her eyes resignedly. Setsuna is pulled to face the man called sensei, General, Juushiro, perhaps “asshole” quietly and out of earshot.

“These are my orders, and you know them to be good, Setsuna.” His voice is harsh, the hours of barking commands taking their toll. “They tell you to lead the aggressing unit, I tell you that those in Murgatagh need us more.”

She opens her eyes, pulling her arm from his grip. “Hai, sensei, but to do so is to risk banishment from the Empress herself. She has ordered us to attack and let Murgatagh find its own courage. My parents, my sisters---will they not suffer if I act as you wish?”

Juushiro crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow at his pupil-turned-lieutenant. “What is the duty of a bushi, Setsuna?”

“To serve, sensei, but---”

“Hai. To serve. The people in Murgatagh, who wished only to go to market, to work, to live and dance and fuck and drink, they are our commanders. They need us.” He gestures swiftly with his left hand over the side of the ship, where, indeed, the elven fleets were closing in, the screaming from the city audible in the night air.

“I tell you this, Setsuna, because I know you will obey. You know what is right.” He leans in close to her, touching her facial markings almost tenderly. “You are the only one I can trust....General.”

Her eyes snap up to meet his, the fearful wavering eyes of the carefree girl, the student...and then suddenly they are firm. “Hai, Juushiro. If I am to be dishonored here, let it be as the torch of the skies that Murgatagh will remember burning for their lives.”

Juushiro watches her take command of his second fleet, and smiles. “If she is fodder, Hime,” he murmurs, “she burns true before she becomes ash.”

***

She will not become fodder for the Weapon’s claws.

She stalks the street, occasionally talking to herself, but mostly thinking, just thinking, because noise could give her away. She no longer cares for the bones around her, besides using the sharper splinters of wrist and thigh to whet the blade of her weapon. She packs every scrap of anything resembling food into the tattered pouches at her waist. At some point she had taken a belt of armour from one of the dead, reasoning that even if it failed its former master, it would not fail her.

She was the only master here, now.

The ground shakes beneath her. Smiling lazily, she waits for it to break through, to cast its swirling gaze on her, before sprinting away.

Once, she was of water. But now, water came to her parched mouth in a trickle, fire lit the darkest alleys, the earth below her became flat as she ran, and the air cleared the dust of the dead before her, danced across her heated limbs.

“They are warm with blood”, she thinks to herself as she runs, smiling, feral. “The mother of mother fetters runs within me.”

***

She tastes blood in her teeth. In her haze, she is not sure if it is from a beating by a prison guard or from poor nutrition. Her yellow hair hangs unbound before her eyes, lank and greasy; her stout strong form reduced to a sagging husk in its shackles.

A tall female guard approaches, shimmering in Setsuna's blurred vision. “Does the daughter of sul Isis wish to drink?” the guard says, untying her hakama. “Then perhaps she should drink deeply of my dry well!”

There are cackles of laughter from just beyond the guard. Setsuna flexes her wrists; how many years have passed? Why am I punished for serving? But she already knows that she is being punished for serving life over ego. She had indeed saved the lives of the folk of Murgatagh, but in doing so, had become disgraced in the eyes of the Empress.

She can see the guard’s triangle of pubic hair in a wavering line of torchlight. She thinks to utter a clever insult, something of deserts and shriveling, but instead loses consciousness, thinking only of the stone water urn in a faraway dojo.

***

She hums to herself in a coarse, forgotten voice, lacing up sinew from something unknown to her around her legs.

Water drips from a stone nearby. She abandons her wrapping and dives under it, her mouth open, trying to catch any drops she can.

She thinks of the plunge in the caldera, feels a skyshark tooth stuck in her throat, knows it's impossible, a dream, swallows anyway.


***

Setsuna is ronin, a masterless, honorless wanderer. The clothing of the General that she once was, she keeps in good repair. She spends most of her days serving petty thieves for meals, questioning the nature of honour, speaking about it at length to her blade Tomomi, the Beautiful Companion.

Every so often she examines her reflection in the steel of Tomomi, taking care to apply her markings even if they are minimal, cleaning her teeth. More often than she cares to admit, she uses it to wipe away her tears, to make sure that her shame is not visible to those who may be the source of her next meal.

She is strong; she is bushi. She serves. But she often questions why she ever bothered serving.

***

She had always served, but not like this. Kailani had become Kore, the Empty Vessel. No longer full of passion and impulse, she waited to become what her people needed.

“My people.” She says the word out loud, her voice a dry husk of its former self. “All of those people...Hastings...but it has been so long...”

Indeed, her hair had started to grow gray, so long had she been here staving off the Weapon. She clung to memories of those back home in New Haven, a place that now seemed to be a cruel dream that the Clawed One had created.

But she knew that even if ten years had gone by---checking the scratches in her thighs that she used to approximate the days---yes, ten years, perhaps some will be there who remember me.

She hefts her weapon to her shoulder, and this time, when the rumbling starts, she sets herself into stance, and finds she is completely detached from fear, hunger, thirst, thought.

It was time to hunt the hunter.

***
“General Setsuna, must I plead?” Juushiro is already pleading, but leaves that unsaid. “I have already lead you to years of disgrace, I do not require your service any longer.”

The woman kneeling before him is much different than the girl who did so some 35 years ago, but the yellow hair and confident posture hadn’t changed. “My lord, if you will--”

“Enough with the “my lord” business, Setsuna, you are my equal.” He holds his hands palm up, and kneels across from her, his white sleeves billowing in the otherwise silent room.

She smiles. “Hai, hai, but if this one does not serve, my lord....” she looks away, cringing, “this one is shackled and meaningless.” She looks back up to the distraught sensei. “Please, permit me to serve, to take down the Empress and her demon. I would fight alongside my lord until the ash takes my hair.”

Juushiro sighs, then slumps, defeated. “Unti the ash takes our hair, then, General.”

***

She knows it has hit her face, but Kore is a vessel, and finds herself able to ignore the strips of flesh and arcs of blood around her eyes. She is filled only with purpose.

Screaming her kiai, she plunges her bladed spear into the side of the beast...


...and is floating, again.

She passes through.

***

The Lady of the Wave had subdued the Empress; the Ulsuma scattered like roaches under a torch.

Setsuna and Juushiro kneel near the port of Brinna, sharing tobacco and silence.

“You are to go see these Seoban who can achieve unity across the elements, Setsuna.” Juushiro nods thoughtfully. “And you are to especially offer respect to the Lady of the Wave. She has done what we could not; if she had not succeeded, we would be lucky to be embers in the home hearth, if not somewhat worse off.”

Setsuna smiles. “If my very handsome and very kind and very wise sensei would---”

He snorts. “Yes. I permit you to leave. What will you do there, Setsuna?”

She stands and bows, proper and precise. “My lord knows that I will only ever serve the worthy.”

She leaves her shard, and passes through.