"Learn as many means of communication as you can when you travel. I don't just speak of languages. Even knowing what hand gestures mean in your host country is important.
Speaking of this thing, I have heard rumors of entire languages spoken only in gesture, although I have never seen it myself."
Misel Kai-Kesh, Elven traveler
---
I ached the next morning, exhausted in body and soul. Trying to learn magic in a single night was one thing. But doing it while trying to walk Mal’oko's tightrope was simply impossible. He had healed me if he struck me hard enough to draw blood, but that hadn't done anything for the bruising.
As might be expected, I had learned nothing. One night wasn't enough to rewrite your brain in the best of circumstances, and that was apparently what was being asked of me.
"To fully master the craft of illusion, one must shatter their umwelt and emerge into the transcendental sphere. This may be done in stages, starting with a broader understanding of the intersubjective spheres of perception."
That was another passage from the book, paired with an odd illustration of two circles overlapping. I had never even figured out how to oscillate a sphere.
I was flanked by Ki’pokiki and an elder I didn’t recognize as we dropped from the fortress and walked into the courtyard. Even knowing it was there, the fortress seemed to fade away, blending right back into the trees. Maybe that was just the effect of the sacrifice tree. There were taller trees in the forest, but this one seemed to dwarf them all. Its branches writhed in every direction, entangling the sky. Mossy old ropes slowly shifted in the breeze, and mossy old bones hid in the roots.
Mal’oko waited in the shadows, stripped to the waist. Without his clothes, he was shockingly thin and slightly hunched. His eyes were barely visible under a broad straw hat, reddened with ocre. They briefly met Ki’pokiki’s, and the two exchanged hard stares before she veered off to leave me alone. She joined the throngs of watching soldiers and kept her face perfectly still as she looked in on me.
“Initiate Malki’bene’ungo. Are you prepared to cast off the tribe of your birth and seek a home in ours?” Mal’oko spoke in a brassier voice than usual, a voice that seemed to come from the deepest roots of the tree.
“Yes. I am no longer of the Ungo.” Mal’oko had already drilled me on everything. It was just a ritual. Prepared lines, prepared motions. This was the easy part.
“You are a seed taken from your parent tree.” The priest lowered a bowl of ocre. “Your soil.”
I dipped my finger into the bowl of red-brown dust and made marks on my face. One line, cutting across my nose. Two dots below it. A line down the middle of my chest and a few more lining my ribs. I was told that these marks were an adaptation of those placed on the dead. In effect, I was officially between worlds now.
“And your water.” Mal’oko raised his other hand, containing a silver amphora, elaborately etched with symbols. I had been warned about this but I still winced at the smell.
The vessel contained a mix of fermented fruits and a fungus brew feeding upon them. The fungus wasn’t so bad, just a bit of an earthy scent, but alcohol was one of those human things I had never understood. Underneath the sickly-sweet smell of the fruit was that burning, nose-curling rot. The fact there were smells I liked mixed in only made it worse. Mostly apple, but also traces of blackberry and cranberry. If they hadn’t let it start rotting, I would be excited to drink it.
I tipped the amphora back and took a single swig. It was sweet and sour and that stale taste of rot that wine always had. I managed to swallow it and it burned all the way down, heat spreading from the pit of my stomach to the tips of my fingers. Everything began to feel oddly distant, like my arms and legs were attached to somebody else and I was just watching things from afar.
“You are now severed not only from tribe but from life. Journey into the land between and be reborn, initiate.” Mal’oko tapped me on both shoulders with his staff and turned me to face northwest.
My guide was waiting at the edge of the courtyard. Mal’oko had mentioned him last night, assuring me that he was both the best tracker in the fortress and loyal to Mal’oko himself. What he hadn’t told me was that Kelk’kali’joni the hunter had a unicorn.
For a moment I thought I was already feeling the effects of the drugs, but no, another member of the fae stood before me. The unicorn was shaped mostly like a horse, but it didn’t move like one. Its cloven hooves seemed to glide atop the grass of the clearing rather than sinking into it. Its hair was wrong too, thicker and silkier than a horse’s and green all the way through.
The only exception was its goat-like beard, which looked for all the world like woven gold threads. The beard danced just inches over the ground, somehow never dragging in the dirt despite its length. And those eyes, like silver, liquid eyes with those strange oblong pupils herbivores often had!
But of course, it was the horn that defined a unicorn. It was crystalline, like polished glass, gently curving up from the tip of the creature’s nose. It forked at the tip, ending in two points as sharp as any spear I had ever seen.
Atop it was Kelk’kali’joni, no saddle, no reins. Of course, a unicorn would never submit to such things. He was a good head taller than the next-tallest in the tribe, and unlike the rest, unarmored. Instead of any chain or a jack of plates, he was dressed all in buckskin, dyed in mottled brown and green. Without a helmet, he instead covered his head in a turban of similar colors, covering up the spaces where his ears should have been.
Yes, that was something that had surprised me. Mal’oko had told me he was deaf, and it didn’t seem to dampen even that harsh priest’s opinion of him. What kind of man was he? His eyes pierced me as he approached, blue as the sky.
It was an uncommon color for a squirrelfolk. Uncommon in general really. Once in a while you saw a mountain miner with yellow or red hair and blue eyes, but the tufts of hair peeking below that turban were black. I had only seen that combo on a single centaur, kept as a slave by the same lord who had forced the young squirrelfolk to walk the tightrope.
He had the same piercing stare that Kelk had now. Not judgemental like Mal'oko. More like the look a wary bear gave a distant intruder in its turf. He was determining if I was even worth the effort to remove. That was frankly a much better option. The strong had much less reason to torment me. They were too far above me to even bother.
So I approached. One hand out, the gesture I saw people use with horses. The unicorns fan-like ears flapped and it stretched its swan-neck down to sniff at me. There was a long, pregnant silence as the divine beast studied me. Then it shoved me to the ground and turned in disgust, flicking it's tail.
Laughter and jeers erupted among the watching squirrelfolk.
"Hey, good on you, little man!"
"Seriously? How?"
"Hey how old is he anyway?"
Grumbling to myself in 3 languages, I pulled myself to my feet. The unicorn refused to even look at me, but Kelk smiled and waved for me to follow. I wanted to be mad, but things felt fuzzy and distant now. Mal'oko handed me the amphora. I took another drink. The sky certainly was bright this morning. I followed Kelk into the woods and the trees danced to greet me.
—
This early in the morning, the sun was still hidden below the trees, but the forest seemed unnaturally bright despite that. The colors of wildflowers swam into their surroundings, becoming wild strokes of paint across my vision. The trees above looked like stained glass, the leaves practically glowing with the light coming through them.
Yep. I was high. I could barely feel my limbs and walking was a chore. I felt like I was up to my waist in water. The only thing keeping me going was Kelk riding ahead of me, occasionally glancing back to make sure I was still following but never stopping.
“Hey! Slow down!” I called out. He didn’t turn. Right, deaf. I didn’t get that. It seemed like too much of a disability for a hunter. Even Fomorians, formidable as they were, tended to not be warriors if they lacked eyes or ears, and Kelk was no Fomorian. Well, perhaps I could ask him about it.
I thankfully wasn’t too out of it to run up ahead, getting in view of Kelk. He looked mildly amused at my stumbling. His unicorn did not.
“Can you read lips?” I asked.
Kelk blinked in surprise. Was it such an odd question? After a moment, he nodded and made some strange gestures with his hands. He watched me for understanding before shaking his head and tapping his steed’s flanks with his heels. It picked up the pace and easily overtook me, leaving me behind again.
What was that? Was he speaking with his hands? I had never seen anything like it. Against the confused current of my mind ran one clear thought; I had to learn it. This wasn't just a new language, it was an entirely new way to use language itself. Once again I struggled ahead, even more difficult this time.
"Can you teach me how you talk with your hands?" I asked, and this time he looked truly surprised.
"I can talk. If you can't stand silence." He surprised me in turn with his voice. He spoke loud, flat, and slow, like a stone slowly dragging on stone.
"I can't." I admitted. "But I wanted to learn how you talk. What it's like to speak that way."
"What it's like to be deaf you mean." Kelk's voice couldn’t emote, but he certainly could glare.
"Well yes, that too. What's wrong with that?" I asked in genuine confusion.
"Nothing. Until it goes from how I hunt to how I do anything. How I have friends, how I handle things at home. It's tiresome." He sighed. "And by the way, I can hunt because this-" He touched his nose. "And these-" tapped his eyes. "And I do have ears." He scratched his unicorn's ears.
“Oh. I guess that makes sense. Prying like that would be annoying.” I mulled over the information in my head for a moment. “Why do you use your hands to talk then if you can talk normally?”
Kelk sighed and steered his unicorn around me. Oh. I probably should have seen that coming. I attempted to follow again and tripped over my own feet. The potion was affecting me more than before. Before, the world just felt too vibrant and somehow more “real”. Now everything was swimming.
I wasn’t yet seeing things that weren’t there, but space bent and twisted. One moment a beautiful red flower was so close it could tickle my nose, the next it was miles beyond my grasp. My stomach rolled over and I shut my eyes, trying to shut out everything that wasn’t real. Stars swam behind my eyelids, decomposing into fractal webs. They stretched around me, and for a moment I saw in all directions at once.
I got it.
My eyes snapped open and I struggled into a sitting position. Kelk was waiting in front of me, surrounded by everything. In the trees I saw people. Esen and Maarken and an old ogre I once knew and my teachers at the imperial category, and with them were infinite more, people I had never seen but knew. I could hear everything in the forest. Every bird and bug waving their wings and singing. The heartbeats of the burrowing badgers below. The rattle of leaves in the wind.
“Sorry Kelk. I was insensitive. Will you still teach me your language? I really do want to know it.” I asked.
“Looks like you’re finally ready. Pay attention, because I am a less patient teacher than Mal’oko.” Kelk signed as he spoke, each word a hand gesture as well.
I groaned at the warning. Why did everybody have to be so mean?
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