The Blind Valiant

WHAT HIDES BENEATH THE SKIN.

They trotted quietly through the second part of Kabwe and entered it cautiously, after viewing the masses of slaves working tirelessly under supervision by overseers and their pronged whips.

Kyrillos had seen the people naked brown under the stifling heat, muscles strained and skin scarred as a result of being the brutalized workforce of the city. He had seen throngs of Fell collapse under the savage thirst while the Echelon guards and overseer lounged nearby, sloshing cool water from the leather skeins, their eyes watchful for when any slave would collapse, just so they could unfurl their wicked whips.

Stone blocks were hewn and hammered, straw thinned and hefted in mighty bundles and carried to where they were needed for the forming of brick walls.

Kyrillos tried to unsee it all, but even when he looked away he met hollow gazes of the enslaved Fell and felt a pit roiling inside him.

So it came as a relief when they had ridden past the section of the city that was under construction, and into the second half where residents made their homes. But that relief was short-lived as he observed the state of such residences.

Anduin still recovering from his injury, had to stay on the horse while Kyrillos listened to his directions – which Anduin had called the colony. The street from the entrance was empty. The houses were dark and foreboding, with shattered windows. Many of the doors swung on broken hinges.

The horses rolled their eyes nervously. As they rode, he gripped the reins of the horse in one hand and the other tightened around the shortsword which Anduin hadn’t taken back.

But then his hand loosened as he saw the cause of his discomfort, and he blanched. The streets were littered with corpses grimacing in death, flies zipping about gutters of rancid water and the stench of something that putrid hung over the air.

And even that was what stopped Kyrillos in his steps. It was the starving children in the arms of their near death parents.

The colony was dying from starvation and disease. Neither young nor old had been spared. Kyrillos raised his arm to cover his nose from the stench of rotting bodies in the street.

And this is where they retire after suffering hours of tireless and violent labor under barbed whips?

He pushed forward, his eyes already sore from the sight before him.

“I don’t understand. Kabwe is a wealthy port city, why aren’t they helping these people? Why do they labor tirelessly only to come back to this...?” Kyrillos swallowed his words of rising anger, the sights of the vicious treatments of the slaves behind him rearing to the front of his mind.

“They won’t because this colony has been excommunicated by the Echelon. Other states and cities aren’t allowed to trade with them; to do so will only the same fate.”

Kyrillos glanced up at his constrained reply. “And they are still forced to build manses and temples? Even when there are children starving to death? For what reason, what crime did they commit?”

“Crime?” Anduin gave a harsh humorless laugh. “When has that been a cause for our turmoil at your people’s hands? They suffer because this was the hometown of the Monger and is still rumored to be a base for our operations. So the Echelon has defiled the land, seeking to draw more of us out by attacking a place we hold dear all the while exploiting the people’s poverty into workforces.”

“And is it, a base of your operations?”

“If it was, don’t you think we would want to keep it safe and thriving?” Anduin tried to look away, but the dying hungry faces held his attention which soured and darkened by the minute. “Do you think we would not want to free them of this brutality?”

“But why don’t you help instead? You say that your group are not terrorists but seek to save the defenseless and impoverished people oppressed by the Echelon. These people are oppressed.”

Anduin snorted with derision and tugged the horse to a horse so that he could sneer down at Kyrillos. “What’s this, are you finally acknowledging that your government is tyrannical and evil as more than half the continent say it is?”

But Kyrillos went quiet, his face contorted into a mix of pity and guilt directed at the suffering masses of people before them.

Anduin continued still, “Do you think we have not tried? You should know what happens when the Echelon cast an excommunication on a city.”

An affliction that impregnates the land, air, water and every living thing. Life itself seizes to founder.

It was one of the many tools which the Echelon had long since used to keep hold on some of the rebellious provinces under their jurisdiction.

Anduin seeing the light of realization spark in his eyes nodded. “Sorcery like that cannot be easily avoided or lifted. Anyone with an immeasurable amount of manæ and a perfectly constructed spell, could. But alas we are without such resources and neither do we understand how the excommunication curse works.”

Kyrillos stared at the open, sunken eyes of the starving children and wondered how life could be slowly leaving them as with their hopes of the future.

What does our existence mean when we have perpetrated so many deaths?

A wave of hopelessness and sadness overwhelmed him. Nausea rose from his stomach and he dropped the reins and rushed to an uncovered pit and vomited.

He felt a hand patting him on the back and he looked up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and saw Anduin.

When Kyrillos was done, Anduin asked gently, “Do you want to wait for me outside? Make camp somewhere off the colony?”

“No... I’ll stay. You can’t move on your own with that leg.” said Kyrillos shakily, heaving out a breath and standing upright.

He avoided looking at the gruesome sight before them. “No matter what you think the Mortimers are capable of, my father... Manfri wouldn’t have sanctioned this... he couldn’t have.”

He could not force out the words, and yet it sounded like he was trying to convince himself and not the Fell.

A muscle in Anduin’s jaw ticked at his words of faith for the Mortimers. “Don’t be so quick to get to his defense when you’re not sure he is even your father. How many times has he tried to kill in the last week?” Anduin turned to continue on foot forward and Kyrillos knew there was no need to argue about it.

The houses were grim and foreboding. Small, deep windows let in only sparse rays of light. Narrow doors were recessed into the buildings.

The tops of the roofs were flat – except for metal railings – and all were covered with slate shingles. It was one of these which they stopped at, Anduin securing their horse by the fence that kept off the small garden off the main building.

And it surprised Kyrillos that the beds of plants and oddly colored flowers were not as devastated by whatever was sickening the entire colony.

Some he recognized as ingredients for medicinal and sorcerous intentions. They walked into the partly demolished house, the door was open and Kyrillos was met with the heat and smell that belonged inside an apocathery.

Sheaves of dried hellebore hung from the low rafters, a cupboard towering high and with many compartments holding phials and bottles of multicolored contents and a hearth of crimson red flames boiling a pot of white smoke.

“Where have you brought us, Anduin? A witch’s hovel?” Kyrillos had to ask as he drew his eyes away from a jar of forked tongues to one stuffed full with a flower of sapphire petals.

“She’s no witch, I assure you. Not the kind you should be worried about anyway.”

“Is that so, young hellraiser?” A woman short enough to reach her own knees and wizened with round head of hair hidden underneath a dirty turban.

Wearing a leather mask over the lower half of her wrinkled face and gloves, she stepped from an inner room, dressed in a fishwife’s gown with an apron with bulging pockets.

“And this one you have brought me, he looks well on his way to madness.” Her rheumy eyes trained on Kyrillos where he stood by the shelf about to touch a petrified pygmy creature.

Anduin sidled forward, stepping between the two of them. “He’s not of your concern, Conseyna. But what is, is that I need a vial of memorescent.”

“Sorry. That substance has been extremely scarce for days now; supply’s been cut off from my dealer, as is a lot of things we usually get from you rebelling wretches. Word is that the Echelon is tightening up the trade routes through Pagne.”

Anduin rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “We knew that would happen sooner or later.”

The crone harrumphed and turned her back to them to attend to her simmering pot. “Yes but I’m still expecting my month’s worth of supplies as per my agreement with the Monger.”

“Well then I’ll do my best to carry on the message once you have helped me on my way to her doorstep.”

“And I told you I have not had a lick of memorescent for weeks not for the hope of trying. I need it for a potion that can save some of these ravaged people.”

Anduin linked closer to the counter, his face frowned at the woman dwarfed by his looming height. “Yes, how admirable you have become. But you must know a clue as to how to find the dealer?”

She turned back around and gave him a long suspicious look. “What do you want it for? Your people detest anything of Noirish sorcery.”

Kyrillos stiffened at that inquiry. If what Anduin had tried to explain to him about memorescent, the addictive substance could very well help him stabilize his memories.

Can we trust this strange witch with what we need it for?

“Having troubles forgetting the faces of your dinner?” she grinned, showing rows of coal black teeth.

Forgetting the faces of his dinner? What does that mean?

Kyrillos threw him a curious look which Anduin shifted to avoid meeting. Which told Kyrillos there was something to what the witch had said.

Conseyna the witch chuckled. “Keeping secrets from your traveling companion? I do hope it isn’t because he’s going to be chops by sunset.”

“Anduin, what is she talking about?”

“Don’t listen to her, she’s half mad from inhaling too much of her smog.” Anduin chided with a dark look at the witch. This only made her laugh even more as she ambled back to the pot of spewing smoke.

This time taking a tongue from the jar with a pair of iron tongs.

“That’s enough.” Anduin grated back at her. “If you aren’t going to tell me how you get your supply of memorescent then you can get on finding me something for my wounds.”

The pot sizzled and the white smoke colored to acid green. She looked back at him and snickered, “I thought you would never ask. I been smelling that mess since you walked in here.” She waved toward the inner room. "Come on then."

Anduin grumbled under his breath and turned to say to Kyrillos. “You should wait out here, watch the horse. Don’t touch anything and come get me if you see any sign of...”

He frowned at the man’s insistent tone. “Yes I know. What about the memorescent? You said it would help me figure out what’s going on with my visions.”

“And I’ll get it out of her, maybe someone who might have some.” He patted his arm before he limped forward to go through the curtained area of the house.

Kyrillos sighed and began to pace about. He was told not to touch anything but he was free to look about.

He took one glance at murky contents of jars lining the shelves next to him and moved towards the piles of tattered books and found that they were sybillines – books of spellcrafting written in the age when spells could be easily created from imagination and not bordered by the risks and rewards of relics and the Divines.

Kyrillos had only ever known one person to have crafted his own spell. Sharur, the ingenious one whose sorcery vastly exceeded Manfri’s even when he had been a child.

But even that gift had vanished as soon as Sharur had fashioned five spells, never to return much to the dismay of his boastful mother.

And he remembered what he had whispered to his closest friend as he and Anduin had escaped Montparnasse. If anyone could help him unravel the mystery of this mess Kyrillos has found himself in, it would be Sharur.

But can you trust his discretion? With his mother looming over his shoulder every moment?

Kyrillos shook the trepidation from his mind and focused on the sybilline. He flipped through the rotted pages of ink-smudged glyphs and drawings, sifting through incants that affected biology, sealing magics and those that could quell a storm as well as summon one.

It was when he came upon the section on psyche sorcery and memories did he become more interested as he squinted his eyes in a bid to decipher the old faded scribblings about the subject.

Yet none of it explained his own affliction. Nothing on the Miasma curse or how it was to be broken. Do I even want to break it? What will I find beneath the skins of these memories... who will I become?

That fear had creeped steadily upon him as more and more of fractured mind pieces together and urged him to break through the Mortimers’ deception.

Would I be vengeful and malicious at what was done to me? Would I try to harm people who I have known and loved as family?

As Kyrillos pondered that internal crisis, he paced about the hovel, nearing the narrow doorway into the next room and peeked through to see Anduin lying on the wooden table with only a piece of cloth to cover his waist while Conseyna passed a glowing hand over his body.

Anduin seemed to be drawn into a sleeping state. His muscled chest sparse with chest hair and scarred, rose and fell in slow rhythmic motion.

Kyrillos turned away back into the main room, stepping outside to stare at the depressing view of the city and its wretched occupants. It was only a moment or more when a weeping child in tattered clothes ran up to the hovel.

“Conseyna!” she cried, her face smudged with dirt and sweat. She would have collapsed on the hard ground if Kyrillos had not rushed forward to catch her.

The girl was lean to the point of bones, out of breath and clearly dehydrated.

“Child, what is wrong?”

“M-My... Mama...” she rasped in a language Kyrillos was unfamiliar with yet his mind wrapped around it like silk and provided him meaning.

He felt a pang for the child as he pulled the water skein from the saddle of his horse and poured into her parched mouth.

“Here, drink and tell me.” And swallowed gulps of cool water, her frail hands cupped Kyrillos’ wrist to keep the water flowing till she had enough.

Her eyes blinked open, blue as a summer sky but also multicolored like the wings of a butterfly. The sight of it knocked the breath from his lungs as he marveled not for the first time the beauty of the Fells.

“You must help me... she is dying.”

“Who?” the girl staggered to her feet but held tight to his hand as she urged.

“Mama, please. She’s been working and I... I don’t know she just fell and the others who fall never get up... they sicken and die. Please.” She tugged at him, her eyes welling in despairing tears as she pulled him away from the doorstep of the house.

“I... I...” he strayed a look behind him. Anduin had said not to wander off and to get him if something happened. But he was being treated and Kyrillos did not want to deny the child.

With the child’s hastened steps and him following with his hand still held desperately by hers, they walked deeper into the colony, taking turns and corners through abandoned and impoverished streets.

Then they came to a stop a few feet from a ravine or what used to be one. There was a hut of sorts built by the empty ravine and Kyrillos stumbled forward as he saw the shimmering people surrounding the dried banks.

Their scaly skins glittered like crushed glass under the noon sun yet they were dressed in rags and grimy clothes. Kyrillos frowned, suddenly disconcerted by the gathering of Fells even if a part of him told him there was nothing to be afraid of.

The girl pulled him forward and as if sensing a disturbance or the enemy in their midst, the Fells glanced over and sneered at Kyrillos, revealing jagged shark teeth.

Yet they still parted for him to pass through, curious of the foreboding crawl down his spine.

“What is his kind doing here?”

Someone called through the crowd. “Have you come to poison more of us? To laugh at what your desecration costs us each day?”

More spiteful remarks came from them, baring their daunting fangs and their once beautific scales turned spiny like spikes on a porcupine. But the girl shot those who stepped in front of them, an imploring look.

“You were supposed to get Conseyna. But you brought a Noirish?”

“He will help. He will help.” Her slight voice trembled and Kyrillos doubted they would listen to such a frightened child. But they did and backed away though he still felt their dislike in their lingering stares.

The girl took him into the crumbling hut and brought him to where a woman with the same mottled brown hair and copper skin like her, was lying on a mattress of straw.

The mother was heaving deeply and with much struggle. Her eyelids quivered open and as much the same multicolored eyes as her daughter fixed on Kyrillos’ face. A sad smile stretched over her sore-covered mouth.

“Ošt alfakynnyr.” She breathed out in the native Fell speech. And though he could not understand it, Kyrillos felt so much faith and hope in those indiscernible words that his heart missed a beat.

There were gasps and murmurs from her gathered neighbors and friends as they obviously heard her. Kyrillos shook out of the daze and went to his knees next to her and reached out a hand to touch her but stopped, cautious of the contagion.

“What’s wrong with her?”

A man by her side, hugging the little girl to his side, responded. “The blight of the excommunication. It has claimed hundreds but we believed it passed when we started working for your kind. It returned a week ago and has taken even more.”

The excommunication. Kyrillos started to rise up to his feet, shaking his head at the utter despair at the fact that he could not help. But a hand grabbed his and he looked down to see it was the sickening woman.

“Ošt alfakynnyr.” She repeated the words in a strained breath. “Ošt alfakynnyr... nevrysh a’tho. Ošt alfakynnyr...”

“What is she saying?” Kyrillos turned back at the man.

“It’s... an old prayer of our people. She entreats the Lost Savior and his blind brother for bravery.”

Kyrillos felt weary all of a sudden but he nodded and patted the hand of the woman, comfortingly. “She would need all the courage for this. I can’t help her.”

“No.” he looked down at the girl who had brought him here. “She does not ask it for herself but for you.”

Kyrillos blinked in mild surprise and looked from the man, seeing his sad nod, the child continued to say. "For me?"

“She calls on the Twins to help you find the courage to face your doubts so that you may find your true self. Only then will you help her and help us.”

His lips pursed in a disconcerted frown as Kyrillos was in deep thought on what the girl had explained. Courage to face my doubts... to find my true self...

“I don’t know these gods you pray to, much more believe there to be deities who would see all that is happening to their people and do nothing for them.” Kyrillos muttered as he dropped back to his knees and took the feverish hand of the woman in both of his.

“But I do have doubts, many. I do not know who I am... I am lost.”

“Etrin alfakyn vehi anselhim.”

“Not lost, only blind.” Her daughter translated for him.

Yes I’ve been blind to the lies the Mortimers have told me all these years. Been blind to the suffering all around me, blind to my own default...

I want to see.

With that Kyrillos shut his eyes, his head bent over the hand he held in his and delved deep into his mind for that coalition of benign and terrifying presence that had awakened since his death at the Alrudha festival.

I want to see!

It came like always in a rush of tidal volcanic heat, pulsing and burning through his veins before swirling outward in a spur of blackish blue light.

The woman gasped out loud and her back arched up from the mattress and Kyrillos clenched his grip on her hand as his pure unadulterated power streamed into her, delving into her bones and body as he directed it to burn out the affliction.

Kyrillos exhaled a sigh of relief and elation as he felt himself become a conduit of that trembling power and leaned back against his knees.

Then a frown on his brows became more tense as Kyrillos received a harrowing surge of resistance from the sorcery of the excommunication.

The woman groaned in agony, twisting away from his grip and the violet aura of his manæ pulsating from his hands.

“Hold her still, the affliction fights me.” Kyrillos growled at the man beside him.

Sweat broke out from his head, the sorcery holding her in its jaws of death was sickening; a void that sucked on whatever sorcery employed to extinguish it.

Frowning with concentration, Kyrillos endeavored to eke the needed force from where it'd embedded in my being and pushed it outward, along with the release of a spell.

This was dark magic. He could taste its bile acidity on his tongue and it retched up a hurl, but he held his own and pushed even more power.

The woman threw an agonizing scream that tore through the entire hut and outside to the crowds of gathered people with its horrifying sound, ringing shrieks of death searing his insides.

It was a ripple effect, emanating from Kyrillos as its focal source and spreading outward like the backlash of thunder.

That was how the volatile manæ escaped out of Kyrillos, guided by the point of his wishes to heal, restore and preserve otherwise it would only cause more destruction.

Kyrillos felt the exhilarating force rush through him like sinking through waves of the ocean and flooding everything uncontrollably. He vaguely heard gasps of shock echoing from around him but he concentrated still, guiding the manæ lest he made these people suffer even more.

It was only after the eruptive manæ drew back from the far recesses of the world and returned back into the depths of Kyrillos’ mind, did the woman jolt upright and regurgitated black putrid bile to the ground.

Kyrillos drew sharply back, his eyes bugged wider as the woman vomited for the next few minutes before she stopped and heaved a much stronger and healthier breath.

Her daughter ran into her arms, tears fell from both mother and daughter as they both realized that the former was not going to die as they had believed.

“How... h-how is this possible? The excommunication kills everything... only the Pontiff can cure it.” The man was gazing at Kyrillos with wide disbelieving eyes.

“How could you have done–” The crowds in the house murmuring their own amazement.

And as if to answer that question, an incandescent aura of deep purple burst from within Kyrillos as if a great faucet of power had been unleashed from within him.

He let the manæ encompass his entire body, a dusky glow that he knew could be spied even from the farthest corner of the hut, from the colony and labor camps far beyond the entrance of Kabwe lands.

A beacon glowing dark and vengeful in the daylight against the misery the Echelon had wrought on these people for so long.

And one by one, the Fells around him fell to their knees and bowed their heads to the ground in obeisance.

“Anselhim vrys ræd.” The healed woman enunciated with tears sparkling in her eyes and slowly her reverent words carried through the crowds and they echoed it in a steady rhythm of faith and allegiance.

And Kyrillos somehow did not need someone else translating those words for him because he knew their meaning.

“He that is blind shall see.”

“Kyrillos?” his head snapped to that voice that sliced through the droning of the Fells about him and he saw Anduin pushing through them.

“What–”

“I tried not to do anything but I could not. At the very least I’m beginning to learn to use this sorcery well.” Kyrillos said as he caught the look of aghast expression on the rebel’s face.

Anduin glanced at the woman and her child and stepped closer to him. “The sickness...”

“Don’t look at me like that. I only healed her.”

Anduin shook his head and muttered in a short of shocked breath. “Kyrillos you did not only heal her. You broke the excommunication. You healed everything.”