Read Haja, The Explorer :: Chapter 9: The Ashen Tree Burns Up Leaving Behind a Tattered Seed

The day he killed his wife Rem, it was the day he regretted the most out of any other day in his life. Even before the war between the three countries, Mada recognized his shortcomings and was especially scared of his short temper and uncontrollable bursts of anger. In short, his condition was a result of a bad parental care during his younger days as well as an old relationship, that betrayed him and metaphorically stabbed him in the back. The consequence was an increasingly violent tendency during his everyday life. To add on top of that, during the war he enlisted as a soldier due to his strongly imprinted patriotism and saw things that heavily traumatized him, leading to his aggressive tendencies increasing as an outlet to his psychological trauma.

His wife knew about his tendencies and supported him through them ever since she entered his life. Especially when the two of them were alone, he would always lean on her shoulder and used her as a crook to lean on.

Even when he showed her his ugly side, she held to him and supported him through the tough times. In response however, he came back home less and less, because he didn’t want to endanger her due to his violent tendencies. Even though he was a twisted human and didn’t do everything in the right way during his life, the two of them loved each other dearly.

That’s why he was even more enraged, when after the war, his now pregnant wife decided to go with him into slavery in order to stay together with him. Why did she do that?

The two of them had a heated discussion and he cried out to her many times, both in anger and in anguish, but it was useless. Rem was a truly stubborn person, that rarely ever backed down on anything, when she put something into her head. He loved her for that.

In fact, behind the scenes, the discussion mostly revolved around their unborn child and what they should do about him. During that time, she succeeded in convincing him that it was better for the boy to be with the two of his parents instead of never seeing his father while growing up and even though he never was fully onboard and on the surface, he objected the idea due to his personal and hereditary values, inwardly he accepted the situation and had made it his goal to make the best out of this situation and give his child the best possible future despite their situation.

That’s right, despite what it looked like, Mada accepted his situation surprisingly easily. At least that’s one side of the story.

However the other side of the story and the other side of Mada Ashenwald is that of a psychologically disabled human being, whose symptoms worsened due to trying and failing to accommodate to his new life in slavery.

Even though he was never treated too badly, Mada always felt the gazes of those people he served; or rather it was the lack of gazes and the lack of acknowledgment from those he saw as his oppressioners, that made him go crazy.

From a political standpoint this behavior of the Estican nobles was a natural one, since they were now under new regulations due to the new treaty being singed between the countries previously at war with each other.

It was a time of change, where they tried to be especially careful with their behavior, since all the eyes, both externally and internally, were veered into their direction.

On the other hand Mada was secluded from public information and took their new behavior as a degradation to his pride. It was the worst action one could take against the type of person that he was.

In response, Mada showed an increasingly aggressive side of him to everyone including his own family and the nobles.

Of course, as per the treaty rules, they were now allowed to react to this act of insubordination and they reacted with various forms of punishment.

Perhaps it was an act of self-defense but during that time Mada started to retract showing this behavior to his superiors and increased the intensity of his behavior within closed quarters, i.e. during the time that he was together with his family in their quarters.

It was also during this time period that his sense of reason and restrain about his actions against Rem started diminishing. At some point he didn’t even remember what he did to her the day after.

The end result of that was obviously the death of Rem Ashenwald and this was also the trigger to his conscious reawakening and him realizing what he just did. On the night it happened Mada lied and covered up the act of violence that had transpired and even went as far as to ‘convince’ his own son to keep this a secret. The case seemed closed and he would never let it be opened up again.

At least this was the message, that Pasch’s father wanted to convey. On the inside however, Mada experienced a never-ending torrent of negative feelings that slowly started to crumble away at him. While performing his activities as a slave of the Blueseva-family, he stopped complaining or rebelling all-together. Instead he kept on channeling his anger on his young son. He knew, that this was not the right way of doing things and realized that at some point he would come to regret it the same way that he regretted the death of his wife, but at this point he was too far gone to stop doing that for if he did stop, Mada feared that he had to confront the realization that everything that happened in the last three years was his fault and he feared that he wasn’t mentally ready to confront such a big burden. He was a coward.

Having this constant feeling in his stomach after letting his anger out on his own son, Mada always stepped outside into a place, that was designated as a small space of outside land that the slaves were allowed to stay on for limited amounts of time every day.

He grabbed a sharp stone he saw on the ground and rolled up the sleeves of his hairshirt(the standard piece of clothing for slaves in Estica).

…

He let go of the sharp stone, which had its tip coated in a deep red, put back the sleeves of his shirt and went back to bed. This entire process took one hour and he repeated it every day for the entire next year.

On the first anniversary of his wife’s death(he used the scars he engraved on his arms as a means to measure the passing days)

Mada sat on the rim of his bed, once again ready to repeat this procedure as a way to cope with his current life.

Today he decided to look at his son’s bed and there he saw it. His son was deathly pale, writhing in pain while inside his bed.

Mada’s eyes bulged wide when he saw this and Pasch’s voice could be heard in a pained groan. He was shivering from his entire body and he was holding the parts of his body that Mada had just injured with his fists and feet.

With this shocking scene he finally had the realization: He was the one that did this to his son. He was the one that had done this to his wife.

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Tears were sprinkling from his eyes, his breathing growing ragged and his skin whitening like pale paper. Now no one could tell, who looked in a worse state: The father or the son. The father began crying out in a small and barely audible voice, he started writhing on the ground using his fingernails to scrape open his arms and he bashed his head against the ground…

He stopped. This was not going to help anyone. As long as he existed, he knew he would continue to be an uncontrollable angry mess. Even now, the thing that was on his mind was not the safety of his dying son but his own well-being.

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He might have imagined it, but it seemed like his son’s complexion became better after he said that. No one knows anymore. At this time Mada made his final decision.

He went to look under his bed and found a small chest inside it. He was allowed to keep some of the things from his past life as a soldier. Inside the chest, there were some pictures of the people from his battalion, a small compass, some basic measuring tools and one other thing. Inside the roof of this box, there was a small indenture. He placed his thumb on the indenture and silently said out loud:

<<For the glory of Ayrilia. For the peace of all. For the honor of our ancestors.>>

The indenture opened up into a small crevice and Mada used the tip of his thumb to open up that crevice, revealing a second cavity, within which there was a small hilt. He carefully pulled out the hilt and in his hands he held a small knife. This knife was a compulsory weapon for Ayrilian soldiers, that gave them the ability to decide the end of their life instead of potential worse outcomes like torture or such. Until now he had decided not to use this last resort and keep on living, but now he finally stopped seeing any merit to his life.

He sat down facing toward his son, assuming a cross-legged sitting position, holding the small dagger in his hands.

He took one final look at his son.

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His son didn’t react, he was still shivering intensely and just continued lying there with a pained expression.

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Mada paused for a second, tears welling up inside his eyes.

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He eventually broke into an hour-long sob. Lastly his tears dried up and he took one last look at his son.

<<Become a great man, Pasch Ashenwald. Become a great man, Imogyeran Ashenwald.>>

…

After the residents in the house heard the cry from the young boy, they rushed in to see the scene of a scared boy, bruised and battered up, holding onto the lifeless corpse of his father, already having turned pale, showing multiple marks underneath the sleeves of his shirt. The boy was constantly crying and panicking and shouting at his father, not getting a single reaction from the diseased.

To those, who were inside this room exactly one year prior, this whole situation had a tragic sense of irony to it.

…

Some time had passed and the nobles of the Blueseva-family decided that for the time being they would leave the young boy alone, exempting him from his chores and holding out on their future actions and treatment of the now traumatized boy. But that would be for a later date.

For now, Imogyeran had figuratively locked himself up inside ‘his room’ and stopped eating for an entire three days. Within this room, the young boy was in a state, where he began his hallucinations again.

I feel dizzy again. My head is starting to spin and my body is getting colder and colder.

But unlike before, the feeling he was feeling seemed to have changed. Instead of a lethargic cold that encompassed every crevice of his body and penetrated deep into his marrow, this cold enveloped him like a blanket, covering his skin and almost embracing him inside a hug full of compassion.

It’s cold… but at the same time it feels good

The boy had lost any parental figures within his life and there was no one that could help him as an emotional crutch to lean on during his very young development. It is already surprising enough that he was able to keep mustering a will to live. This alone deserves praise.

At the same time, he found something within this coldness that reminded him of the embraces he got from his mother at one point in his life.

He was craving this feeling and unknowingly to him, the more he craved after a physical entity of affection, the more ‘solid’ and ‘real’ this figure became.

I try to hug the air around my body but it somehow doesn’t feel like I hug anything. I am scared, that this thing will go away, so I shout:

<<Please don’t go! I don’t want you to go!>>

I break out into tears again for what is already a number of times that is higher than I can count.

Suddenly, I feel the thing around me tightening up a little, as if to console me.

It feels like I am in a trance, I slowly relax my body and stop thinking for a while.

Imogyeran closed his eyes, relaxed his ragged breathing and his tensed up body and opened them up again. They were glazed over. He was currently looking at the thing that revolved around him. What he was seeing was a blue mass of dots, endlessly revolving around him. When he concentrated on one spot, this mass would go to that spot and when he stopped concentrating, the mass of blue would encircle him again like before. Completely without any conscious knowledge about his actions, the young boy was forming an image inside his head. It was the image of the plush-toy that Miss Elise was keeping inside her room; a small wolf-like creature with thick muscles and droopy eyes. He imagined it walking on 4 legs, each leg ending in a soft paw, the creature having a smiling expression, while looking at him. He imagined a soft barking sound from it and he heard something. He didn’t know what he heard, but he repeated it nonetheless.

<<Donmir>>

I say this out loud, without knowing what it means. For some reason everything has gone black!

…

I just realized that I closed my eyes. After opening them back up, I am greeted with a big round pair of eyes, making me question whether I really opened my eyes back up again. Those were the eyes that I was imagining. In front of me, there is a large-scale version of the plushy that Miss Elise was playing with, just this one is in blue.

In actuality, ‘Donmir’ was a newborn spiritual being that was created due to the high amount of tears of sadness that gathered inside this room. It didn’t have any capabilities of directly conversing with its master or understanding and expressing its wishes. But of course, the young Imogyeran couldn’t know that at the time.

This encounter was the one thing, that changed his life; the one reason, that he could keep going because of.

His first friend, ‘Donmir’.