Dreams of the Quill

Trial and Conviction

The girl turns but all she sees are trees. All I see are trees. Two more of my eyes have disappeared and now these two are focused on the darkness of the thick forest. The juggler has gone up into the sky.

He reappears and the girl’s eyes—my eyes—refocus on him.

He opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything. She opens hers but can’t find it in her to say anything either. For a brief moment, I resist laughing. It’s precious! It’s actually entertaining! Jeuni Huros. Jeuni Huros. He’s a juggler, all right.

And the girl! Why does she care that he’s sad?

Hahahaha!

He wordlessly takes her hand. I feel his warmth against the girl’s mittens. He wordlessly turns from the girl and wordlessly they start running. Once again, I feel the rush of energy as she is dragged through the briars and thickets of the forest. Once again, I wish that the juggler would treat her with more care. They move so fast that I feel wind pass by her cheeks.

Through my eyes, I have seen that there’s some kind of hope in leaving your home behind and running as fast as you can. The juggler is holding onto that as tightly as the girl’s hand. Maybe he’s trying to tell himself that he wasn’t going to go back anyway.

—

Jeuni Huros and Kihara ran south with reckless abandon, neither stopping to orient themselves nor needing to. In their minds, there was a straight line from their origin to their destination. They knew what they had to do: head south. They were running in one direction when they started and so long as they kept running in that direction they would eventually reach the frozen south.

Jeuni and Kihara said nothing to each other. He didn’t need to tell her what he’d seen. She knew.

No, Jeuni realized. She had known. She had come to take him away from the Golden Swan and the town altogether because she had known that the town was going to be destroyed. Byhr wasn’t empire building with Jeuni’s home town, Byhr was getting revenge. Its forces’ only mission had been to kill and burn. There was no way any amount of persuasion on Gyurot’s part could have saved the Harnecians. Even if the Harnecians had surrendered unconditionally, they probably would have been slaughtered mercilessly.

Jeuni saw no point in bringing up the town’s fate. Kihara knew, of course. All that mattered now was getting away from Byhr. He’d been forced to return because of his poison, and once there he had fallen into the world of books; he had feasted on fantasy. The last year of living in Byhr hadn’t truly been a year of living in Byhr—though he he had physically been there, it was not the same lifestyle he had led before encountering the Holders. The room in the Golden Swan had been so different from his shack and the tavern—the sum of his life prior to meeting the Second Holder—that he’d almost managed to ignore the fact that he was back in the country he hated.

Now he could ignore that no longer. The border was still hours away and Byhr wanted him dead. The second part hadn’t changed for nine years. Byhr had wanted him dead since he’d deserted with Gyurot. Now, Byhr was finally acting on its wishes. Now, Kihara was with him, and the two were wanted for undermining Byhr’s program of ameliorating the world. The Second Holder, the beastman, had already fallen to Byhr, killed for being the main criminal to whom Jeuni and Kihara were thought accomplices.

One by one, Jeuni’s allies were disappearing. Second. Gyurot. The town.

Now all he had was Kihara and his shattered dreams of the South. No, he knew he had two more things left. The first was his magic and the second was the barrier he’d built in his mind to block all of his memories from before he turned twenty.

—

Jeuni and Kihara passed over the border with no trouble and ran for days and days without stopping. They didn’t sleep much and they ate while moving. It felt good to be headed somewhere, to be doing something. Jeuni had loved his quiet days of reading and rest but now, as he ran, he remembered that this was what he had longed for. He had always wanted to be traveling somewhere.

Two weeks passed and the two found themselves out of the trees. Jeuni didn’t remember the land between the forest and the snows because he had been unconscious, but he couldn’t believe it had been the way it was now. Strong winds buffeted him from all sides as he inched forward across the snow-covered plains. The sky was thick with flurries of white and he could barely see beyond his nose.

“Are we going in the right direction?” he yelled, hoping that Kihara would hear him through the blizzard.

“Yeah!” she responded, her voice muffled by the wind and snow.

“Are you okay with this cold?”

“I’m fine! Remember, I love the South!” she called back.

It was too stressful for Jeuni to keep up conversation when doing so required yelling, so he closed his mouth and decided to wait for the storm to pass.

The storm didn’t pass. The two traveled for another four weeks at a snail’s pace, trudging through deep snowbanks and stopping for long rest breaks. Jeuni found that they were consuming the food he’d brought at an alarming rate. The terrain was rough and traveling was tiring, and even as he told himself he should ration their supplies he couldn’t help but gobble down large portions of food in order to keep warm. They huddled together at night, combining their warmth to resist the dreadful blizzards which somehow grew colder when the sun was down.

After those four weeks, the weather finally took a turn for the better. The sky seemed to clear up miraculously and the snow on the ground thinned. As the storm died down around them, Jeuni noticed that something was wrong and he addressed Kihara. He stumbled over his sentence as the words were the first he had spoken after traveling silently through the blizzard. Clearing his throat, he started again:

“It’s really, really cold here,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” Kihara smiled, her nose red with the cold and her eyes alight with excitement.

“You can tell that it’s really cold, can’t you?” Jeuni asked.

“Yeah,” the girl responded, smiling even wider. “I love the cold.”

“Then the reason the storm is dying down is that we’re here already,” Jeuni hissed. Kihara’s eyes widened. “For it to be this cold, for the sky to be this clear—the sun! We can see the sun—for it to be this clear, we would need to be someplace incredibly cold… colder than the snowy region between the forests and the place where we met your god.”

“… yeah,” Kihara replied, her voice shaky. “What are you trying to say?”

“What I’m saying is that we’re out of the snows already! That… The Pessimist. I didn’t see a single sign of it…”

“The what?”

“The Pessimist. That obelisk! The big-ass obelisk! Didn’t we name it so we could find it again and know what it was? Isn’t that what you said?” Jeuni wasn’t exactly sure why he was upset over something like not seeing a landmark. It wasn’t as though there would be anything new to admire on a second viewing, and it also wasn’t as though he had been so enamored of the obelisk that he would consider his life incomplete without another glimpse of it.

They continued walking as they talked, leaving the blizzard further and further behind. Looking back over his shoulder, Jeuni could clearly see the darker sky, the clouds, the massive flurrying of white, gradually growing farther away.

“Oh right, now that you mention it, I seem to remember something like that…” Kihara didn’t seem to care too much, though she was watching the juggler with intent curiosity, much like how a scientist examines his specimens.

“How can you just shrug like that? Wasn’t it important to name it?” Jeuni asked.

“If we had found it again, I suppose we would have just renamed it,” a nonchalant Kihara responded with another shrug. “No one trip to the South is the same.”

“Renamed it?” Jeuni repeated in shock. Separating the obelisk from the name he’d come to associate with it made clear to the juggler what was disturbing him. It wasn’t just the deaths of the Second Holder and Gyurot and everyone else in his hometown. It was a gradual disappearance of everything he’d known. He realized that the chain of disappearance had begun with the Second running into him in the street a year earlier. With that encounter, he had lost the enjoyable solitude of his old way of life. With that encounter, he had no longer been able to live with only juggling and gambling and drinking. The Second’s appearance had forced him to use his magic for the first time in…

Jeuni shook his head as he walked.

And then he had met Kihara and lost all love he held for living. He knew that her original task had been to kill him. He didn’t know why that had been her task or why she hadn’t when she had had plenty of opportunities, instead saving him multiple times. But he knew that she had needed to kill him. It had been written in her eyes and he had forced himself to accept it.

Then he’d lost his home, destroying it himself in order to cut his ties to his hometown.

Then he’d lost his safety, fighting Byhryn soldiers on the border and reminding the Empire of the fact that they’d been trying to kill him for years.

Then he’d lost his will and used his magic repeatedly, leveling large sections of the forests in order to kill Tomora Ynthon.

Then he’d lost his sense of touch when deadly poison coursed through his veins.

Then he’d lost his rationality when he discovered that the dark god actually existed.

Then he’d lost his newfound freedom when he returned to Byhr.

Then he’d lost his companion when the Second was executed by the Byhrate Council.

Then he’d lost his best friend and his hometown when he fled Byhr a second time.

Now, he had lost one more thing: the obelisk and its meaning. It was supposed to be a landmark, something that he could look for to orient himself. It was supposed to be a milestone: this is how far we’ve come, the heart of the South is so far that way and Byhr is so far that way. Its name was supposed to be a means of identifying it. Now that that name was being stripped of it by the girl Holder, its purpose was fading into the same white nothingness that had hidden it from Jeuni’s view.

“What more do you want me to lose?” Jeuni blurted out, to no one in particular.

“Jeuni…” murmured Kihara, her curiosity replaced with worry.

Jeuni fell silent and stopped walking. Kihara reached out to pat him on the shoulder and he made no motion to stop her. Her mittens danced lightly down his upper arm and then she pulled herself to him and drew him into a hug. The juggler’s arms hung limply as though attached directly to his neck.

After several minutes of this, Jeuni clenched his fists and took a step back, away from the girl. Kihara, choosing not to be thrown off balance, let go of him.

“Jeuni. Let’s… let’s keep going, okay?” as she asked this, the girl took a step as though she were setting off south again.

“Going where, exactly?” demanded the juggler, not budging an inch.

“South,” Kihara replied simply, looking back over her shoulder..

“We’re here, damn it,” Jeuni argued, “I don’t know why, though. Why did we come this way?”

“It was the only way to go,” Kihara explained, her voice soft and golden. “East was Harnecia, north and west were Byhr. We had to escape the midlands, right?”

“We had to travel,” Jeuni said.

“Weren’t you the one who decided to head south?” Kihara asked.

“At the time, it seemed like a good idea… no, it felt good. To be headed somewhere…” Jeuni paused. “Look, Kihara. There’s nothing here. Even if we meet your stupid god again, what’ll we accomplish? He can’t feed us or keep us warm. We’re at the end of our provisions. I’m tired. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I need to bring you to the god,” Kihara said. Jeuni was shocked; Kihara had never before given hints as to what her task was. “I need to bring you to the god because King died. I need to finish his job for him…” Oh, realized Jeuni. That’s why she’s being so open—it was the Second’s task, not hers.

“I didn’t know the orders could transfer so easily,” Jeuni said, betraying a hint of his interest. “And it seemed like you couldn’t talk to your god without being near him.”

Kihara didn’t reply.

“So do you still want to bring me to your god, or do you want to be content that you’ve accomplished your own task? I’m here, I’m in the South. I’m going to die here in a few days at most, either of dehydration or cold, whichever strikes first.”

“When we were here last, the god gave me the new task to keep you alive—”

“That doesn’t matter!” exclaimed Jeuni. “He gave you that task to avoid conflicting orders, right? I was there, I heard your conversation. I may have been slightly dumbfounded by the fact that the god was real, but I’m not stupid! I can understand words and implications… your god wanted me for something, and so he asked the Second to bring me. Whatever stopped you from acting on your original orders is in the past. The Second is dead, his mission failed. Whatever reason you had for keeping me alive is now obsolete.”

“But—”

“I know, damn it. Reason and logic aren’t big factors for your stupid god, eh?”

“Not particularly, no,” Kihara replied meekly, bowing her head.

“Fine, then. Let’s just forget about this task thing, shall we? I’m going to die—that’s inevitable now, whatever your orders were. Are you going to fetch your god? Or are you going to stay here with me?”

“I should really—” Kihara fell silent and didn’t take a single step in any direction.

“Then, I have some questions. I know it’s pointless, because I’m going to die and all, but… I’m kind of curious, almost as curious as I was on day one when I couldn’t figure out who all the damned freaks popping up around be were.” Kihara nodded. “Do you know why he wanted you to kill me?” Kihara didn’t say anything. “Then, do you know what your god wanted with me?”

“Probably only King knew the whole story, but I know it had something to do with your magic powers. They’re the strongest I’ve ever seen and they’re the strongest King had ever seen, which means that they’re probably incredibly strong. I think the god wanted your ability for something, something that our Holder powers could not accomplish. I don’t know what.”

“You seem much more keen on discussing that second topic,” Jeuni observed dryly. “Well, whatever.” He didn’t need to tell Kihara that he knew she was hiding something from him—he’d known that from the start, and it was obvious that she had been aware of his knowing. Every time that the issue of her task had come up she had been uncomfortable, unwilling to speak and reserved in expression.

Throughout all of his interactions with Kihara, however, Jeuni had noticed that she almost always showed some kind of concern for him. She had saved his life multiple times, putting herself in harm’s way to aid him. She had comforted him when he had dreamt of horrible things. She had taken care of him in Byhr while he’d been recovering from the poison. And now, she was looking away from the juggler with eyes that reflected shame and internal conflict.

“… you’re not quite correct, Jeuni,” Kihara said slowly. “My task was never to kill you.” She had never lied, so Jeuni knew that what she said was true. Her task hadn’t been to kill him.

“Then what was it?”

“I, like King, needed to bring you here, to the South, and present you in front of the god.”

“Then how did your orders conflict?” Jeuni asked, his curiosity at record levels.

“Jeuni.”

“Yes?”

“You know how you have those dreams, sometimes?” Kihara asked. “The ones where you wake up crying ‘Sone, Sone!’ and then tell me you were just dreaming?” It was Jeuni’s turn not to respond. “Did you ever see anyone about them, like a fortune teller or a cleric or anyone? Do you know where those dreams come from?” Jeuni shook his head frantically, keeping his mouth firmly shut. “Do you want to talk about those dreams?”

Jeuni shook his head again.

“Then it will be hard to explain my task,” she said, sighing heavily. “Do you have anymore questions?”

Jeuni said nothing, simply shaking his head one more time. He sat down on the frozen ground, shivering slightly as he did so. He reached under one of his cloak flaps and produced one of the large supply bags. Jeuni tugged on the drawstring and the bag opened, revealing a pitifully small amount of food, a few gourds of water, and a flask of wine. He took out the wine and hurled it a few feet away. The bottle shattered on the hard ground, its contents ruined.

“Why did you do that?” Kihara asked.

“The Second asked me a funny question on our first trip south,” Jeuni explained with a light tone, eyeing the red stain that slowly spread from the wrecked bottle. “He asked me if my alcoholism wasn’t some form of escapism, or something like that. I got really mad at the time, but… he was right. This whole time, I’ve been running away, Kihara. Always running. I ran away from my boring life and joined the Byhryn army. I ran away from the horrors of war and deserted. I ran away from my desertion and became a drunk. I ran away from my alcohol and came south. And just now, I ran again, south again, fleeing once again. I’m not running anymore, though. I’ve run all I can. I can’t run anywhere else.”

“So you’re done with escaping?” Kihara asked softly.

“I’m done with everything,” Jeuni responded, amused at his own ability to speak so lightly of his past and his imminent death. He continued to stare down at the spilled wine.

“Are you done with denying your past?”

“Haha, I don’t remember most of it,” Jeuni replied carelessly. “But sure. What happened, happened.”

“Are you done with hiding from the truth?”

“What is true, is true. I don’t see where you’re going with these questions, Kih—” Jeuni scrambled to his feet. Kihara was nowhere in sight.

“Are you done lying to yourself?” It was Kihara’s voice, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t just her voice. It was the voice of the beast-man, the Second Holder. It was the voice Tomora Ynthon would have had if he had ever spoken. In an instant, Jeuni understood why the voices of the Second and Kihara had been so hard to put words to: neither of Jeuni’s two companions had spoken with the voice of a single human. The Second’s infinitely faceted commands, Kihara’s beautiful songs—they were both more than any one person’s speech could be.

Jeuni didn’t know why he hadn’t realized this the last time he’d been in the heart of the South.

“I’m done lying to myself,” Jeuni said resolutely. That voice was the voice of… “god.”

“It has been a while, Jeuni Huros, but you have finally come here, and in good health at that. Do you know why I asked Herald to bring you to the South?” asked the wind.

“I have no idea,” responded the juggler truthfully.

“Allow me to instill in you some knowledge of this tundra, Jeuni Huros.”

Suddenly, Jeuni’s head filled with images and sounds. Pictures of white and gray, of a barren expanse of frozen earth and frozen sky. Pictures of a land where nothing can be born and nothing can grow, a land where everything can die. Sounds of the wind blasting across this nothingness. Somehow, Jeuni could feel the passage of time. He could see the pictures flying by as a clock ticked. Every tick was a second and the clock ticked sixty times. And another sixty times. And another sixty times. Sixty more times. Four minutes had gone by. And then twenty minutes, and then an hour. Hours turned into days and days into weeks and weeks into months and months into years. Now every tick was a year, and Jeuni counted them carefully as he watched the scenery flashing before his eyes.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five years. Six. Seven years.

The landscape was barren. There were no creatures. There was nothing save the cold and the earth and the sky and the wind. The wind was freezing, the earth was freezing, the sky was freezing. As the seasons turned, the colors didn’t change. The tundra was always frozen. The sky was always white.

Ten years. Thirty-two years. One hundred years. Five hundred and sixty-four years.

A thousand years. Two thousand years. The clock ticked on.

“That’s enough,” said Jeuni, and the clock stopped ticking. The images and sounds dissipated and the juggler was back where he had been, standing a few feet away from a broken bottle of wine near the edge of the tundra of the dark god. “That’s enough.”

“Do you understand now, Jeuni Huros?” demanded the wind.

“Yeah, I understand,” he said. “You’re not a limitlessly powerful deity. You can’t undo yourself. You’re tired of this wasteland but you can’t escape it. The only thing that can destroy you is magic. Your Holders are not wizards so they cannot fulfill your wishes. You sought out a wizard with magic strong enough to end you.”

Jeuni sighed and shook his head, then, before the wind could respond, began talking again.

“But that’s wrong. You gave Kihara the task of bringing me here so that you could ask me those questions. I understand now what she meant when she said that her task wasn’t to kill me. Her task was to have me judged in this place. The reason I saw death in her eyes when I met her was that I knew death awaited me at the end of my trial. Meeting Kihara and Herald and coming south to meet you was some sort of atonement… when I was here last, you decided to send me back because you didn’t want me to die by accident. It wouldn’t have been my atonement.”

Jeuni sighed again and closed his eyes.

“I understand it all now. I was brought here to be judged and now I will pay for my sins with death. But you’ve done terrible things as well. You also need to atone. That is why I cannot destroy you—destruction is nothing more than your desire. It will make up for nothing and it will fix nothing.”

“Fix nothing?” echoed the wind.

“What you showed me didn’t take the rest of the world into account,” Jeuni explained. “Outside of this wasteland, people have been dying. Outside of this wasteland, countries have been massacring each other. The world outside of this wasteland is a complete mess, in large part thanks to you having your first Holder found present-day Byhr. I understand now that you merely wanted some entertainment, and I can sympathize with that—my two journeys south were little more than entertainment, after all—but because of you, my hometown was just wiped out. There have been countless such slaughters, man killing man. This is something you have wrought, and something you must pay for.”

The wind grew chillier as it enveloped Jeuni.

“Is that your final answer?” asked the wind. It didn’t sound angry, as Jeuni had expected it to. It sounded sad. There was no malice in its voice. No darkness. The voice of the god sounded defeated, downtrodden.

“Yes. I will die and you will live on, forever.”

The wind blew away, gusting off to some other corner of the tundra. Jeuni fell back into a sitting position, exhausted. The montage of the dark god’s experiences had been bleak and depressing, much more so than simply being in the South for the second time. Though he was not enamored of the cold in the same manner as Kihara, Jeuni could find a certain beauty in the grays and whites of the tundra. What the dark god had shown him, on the other hand, was more than just the tundra. It was the tundra a million times over, and nothing but the tundra.

Jeuni ate the last of the food in his sack and then lay down on the ground and waited. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. Was Kihara going to come back from wherever she had gone? Would he freeze to death? Or would his body eventually run out of energy and fail? Would it be thirst that would claim him, or a lack of nutrition? Jeuni did not know. He knew that he was going to die, though, so he left it at that, and went to sleep.

—

“Jeuni, don’t go!”

Jeuni turned from the door to face the speaker. He was once more in that sepia-tinted room, surrounded by shattered bottles and the stench of death. His father’s corpse lay on the ground, broken.

“It’s time that I do, Sone,” he said sadly, not sure why he was saying it.

“No… don’t! They’re outside, waiting…”

It was true. Byhryn patrols were everywhere in the town, looking for Jeuni Huros. He knew that if he so much as set one foot outside, they would see him and he would die on the spot. But he also knew he couldn’t stay in that pungent room any longer.

“I’m sorry for everything,” he said, addressing the person in the bed. “I really am.”

And with that, he opened the door and stepped outside, the room swirling into nothingness as he stepped out into the street. He heard the sound of crossbow strings twanging and then all he saw was white.

—

All Jeuni saw was white because he was looking up into the blank sky that hung drearily over the tundra.

“You’re still alive, thank goodness,” muttered Kihara, kneeling over Jeuni. “I couldn’t tell if you were breathing or not, and—”

“I’ll be alive until I’m dead,” shrugged Jeuni, sitting up uncomfortably. His stomach hurt and he couldn’t feel his legs. “I don’t see how the timing matters. Where had you gone?”

“I went to find the god for you,” Kihara explained. “But I couldn’t, so here I am, back, alone.”

“He came to me while you were gone.”

“He did?” she asked, incredulous.

“Yeah. I figured everything out, Kihara. I figured out why I’m here and I figured out what I was supposed to do. Now, all I have left to do is die. It’s my final duty, as it were.” As he spoke, he felt his lips cracking. The air was cold and dry. “So here I will lie, until it’s all over.”

Kihara laid down next to Jeuni on the cold, hard ground.

“These are the last moments of our lives,” she murmured.

“But you’ll be fine, right?” asked the juggler, not a hint of bitterness in his voice.

“If it’s a matter of sustaining my body, I need food. I can’t regenerate without fuel, Jeuni. This is the end for me, too. Say…” She reached over and stroked Jeuni’s cheek. “You know, since nothing’s going to matter in a few hours, we could have some fun.”

Jeuni froze.

“It’s alright, Jeuni. I… I love you.”

“You’re a sweet girl,” Jeuni said mechanically, scenes and words flashing by in his head. The yellow room and everything he had done in it. Gyurot’s jokes about Kihara that had somehow angered him. His dreams and his life intertwined in that instant and the barrier holding back his memories broke.

“I’m not a girl,” Kihara argued. “You still don’t understand what it means to take the Covenant, to be a Holder, to be immortal, do you? We don’t age. I took the Covenant when I was fourteen. But that was nine years ago, Jeuni. I’m an adult… and I love you, and we’re going to die.”

Jeuni didn’t respond immediately. Kihara cupped his face in her hands, his ragged facial hair tickling her smooth palms, and turned it to face her. Her crimson eyes reflected something Jeuni had never seen in them before, and he pushed her away. He was atoning for his sin and he was going to die. Of course he loved Kihara—she had saved his life more than once. Of course he loved Kihara—she was beautiful. Of course he loved Kihara—even more so now that her advances had brought back to him in an instant all of the memories he had stowed away.

“You’re a sweet girl,” Jeuni repeated, turning to look back up at the empty, worn-out sky.

And they laid there on the frozen ground until they died.