7. Sun
Chapter 7
Sun
A s they emerged from the trees, their faces greeted me with equal parts disbelief and relief, their eyes glassy with unshed tears, and I knew without touching my freezing face that my tears were already rolling down my cheeks.
We embraced in a tangle of arms and legs and nearly fell over, Jia discarding her weapon. My dearest friends, alive, Atlan walking after being so injured he couldn’t stand, and both of them… both of them didn’t harbor a shred of hatred for me in their hearts, for their eyes overflowed with joy and gratitude all directed at me.
We pulled apart long enough to hear Hadi howl. But not in pain. He was furious as we whorled around to see the panthera attempting to gnaw off his leg.
“Zihan! Heel!” Atlan shouted, marching up to the creature without a lick of fear.
I tried to stop him, but Jia stopped me, shaking her head. Her hair was loose, almost down to her back, and it was striking as she had always worn the traditional top knot of all warriors for as long as I knew her. She looked petite and feminine. It didn’t feel right for such a skilled warrior.
“Friend,” Atlan mouthed slowly as he sank to his knees, holding his hand to the panthera. He motioned from his lips to his heart in a sweeping motion, palm down to face up, scooping inward.
It clicked as Atlan repeated the word until the panthera’s chest rose and fell more evenly, bloodlust leaving him.
He wasn’t speaking the southern dialect of Yewan, the imperial dialect imposed on all of Naran. Atlan spoke the western tongue, his regional mother tongue I hadn’t heard in a decade. It wasn’t exactly like that heard in the provisional capital of Ri, but vaguely familiar.
He had spoken only Rin during his training days, earning derision from his fellow conscripts. It was a sign of backwardness, they’d jeered; I scolded them, then beat out any backtalk after that. But after that, Atlan forced himself to speak in the heavier baritone of Yewan, slower, with the words less slurred together.
And that’s how Jia and Atlan bonded, I recalled, as she was from Hae and learned the hard way that although the north and south had been united by Emperor Gaulu, remnants of their independence would not be tolerated. Kari and Hae had fought fiercely against what Gaulu had then called reunification but was merely conquering their territory before the war with the nocs even began.
One empire, under a mad emperor. I closed my eyes and willed away the bile. My closest friends were little more than prisoners to the most powerful warden of the land, one I had served unflinchingly, unquestioningly for years to feed my bloodthirst, to kill as many nocs as I could.
I reopened my eyes and watched in wonder, wandering back to Hadi’s side as Atlan began to stroke Zihan, as he called him, speaking in broken Rin paired with…
“Signed language?” I asked Jia, and she nodded with a smile.
She walked toward me and muttered, “He cannot speak, probably. His throat is slashed under the fur. But Zihan understands us and awakened near Ri, so Atlan has been trying to teach him some.”
I vaguely remembered about Atlan being adopted by a very elderly couple, an orphan of the war. He’d shown us those hand movements that had proved helpful in war when we had to be silent. He taught our squadron, for his adopted father was deaf, and he was good at that universal silent tongue. Atlan’s hands resembled modified military signals more than language this go around, other than the movement for friends, but I got the gist.
Friend.
No attack.
Heel.
Zihan was like a tamed tiger wrapped around its master’s feet. Or, more accurately, a leopard, as it pawed at Atlan’s hip and sat in the snow, large tail curling around. He shook his blood-stained white locks and peered up at him expectantly.
Jia had to hold me up because I did falter, almost slipping and sliding in shock as Atlan kneeled and ruffled his hair like a child. He pressed his cheek to Zihan’s with an affectionate smile, and the panthera purred in return.
Zihan’s eyes found mine, and they softened, the grunts turning into scratching of his large, clawed paws in the snow. When Hadi stepped forward to shield me, Zihan growled low—asking forgiveness while giving me a clear warning for Hadi to stay away from Atlan. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing.
“Well, things are getting interesting. Those bastards weren’t lying when they claimed to be our allies. Useless as they were in the fight.”
We all glanced upward in unison, adrenaline pumping, as Bracken reached us, his large black wings spreading out like a dark halo as he landed not far behind Hadi, Jia, and I. Clem was riding tucked in Kiar’s arm, holding something, as they were dropped to the ground in a heap of wings and scales rolling on the ground.
When they righted themselves, Clem clutched the bundle in his arms tighter, cloaked and covered from the frost with wonder in his eyes. And Kiar looked like he would hurl, injured but shockingly unscathed to have dealt with such an onslaught of attackers.
They were all shockingly unscathed, given the number of nightwings, and it was thanks to Zihan and, wait…
“What do you mean, they said they were allies?” I asked Bracken, looking to Atlan and Jia, who wore tight smiles. Something like anger was sparked in their dark gazes.
“I still cannot stand flying,” Kiar murmured, dry heaving, his jaw unhinging, until he hacked up what looked like a partially digested shoulder blade, feathers still poking out. I turned so I wouldn’t spill my guts and add to the putrid smell.
Suddenly, the incessant, rhythmic grunting from Zihan grew louder, his green-blue eyes flashing with dismay. Jia came to his side, abandoning me, and we stood separated, my friends and their pet leopard on one end, me and my men on the other.
“It’s okay. They’re all friends,” Jia said, stroking his head. It was unimaginable. The only one who I knew matched the ferocity of my hatred of nocs was Jia, and yet she was all but babying one. An apex predator!
The panthera stood, towering over even Atlan, and unlocked the heaps of flesh and the head from his belt, tossing them in Bracken’s general direction like an offering. We all stared, mouth gaped, but Bracken whistled low with delight.
“It’s a friendly gesture, you know. You pampered princes wouldn’t know what it’s like outside Yewan. You were always attached to Hadi’s ass even then, Kiar,”Bracken said, reaching for the bloody mass of flesh without a second thought. “Power submitting to power. Alliances formed with bloodshed. He wants to share a meal and become friends. Rare for his kind. It’s rare for any noc. I like him already.”
Before he could chomp it down, Clem stopped Bracken, kicking his leg fiercely as Kiar’s face twisted up like he’d hurl again. Zihan grunted his approval, crouching beside Atlan’s leg again, waiting, expectantly.
But even Hadi shot Bracken a disapproving glare, and he rolled his eyes, tossing the meat as he whispered, “Apologies. They don’t share our exquisite taste.”
I wondered if it was poisoned until my stomach flipped, meeting Jia and Atlan’s uneasy gazes. Of course. It was noc meat. Pantheras were known to eat it for substance, natural born cannibals, and batbeast…?
Well, now I was beginning to understand why they were both known as the most sadistic and cruel among their kind.
I could’ve sworn Zihan’s ears folded, his body slouching in defeat, and Atlan patted him gently, saying, “I-It was a good present. Don’t worry. We’re all friends now.”
“Come, let us sit and wait for the others,” Jia offered, shrugging off a heavy bag I had just noticed on her small back. I noticed that she was shockingly thin as if she hadn’t put on a pound since escaping captivity.
Everything felt so surreal as we sat around, soldiers and monsters making a truce like it was nothing. Atlan sat beside me, pressing his thigh against mine, and grinned, tears stinging the corners and finally falling down his face with transparent waves.
“Master, I’m so grateful you’re alive,” he finally gushed.
His boyish features seemed thinner, harder. I reached up and traced the long scar down Atlan’s right eye and shuddered with rage. It had not been there before, just like all the other scars and wounds and burns from the lightning rods now littering his backside.
Jia was worse for wear, what looked like a burn peeking through her collar. Both were dressed in fur-lined tunics I’d only seen on mountain villagers, white as snow, to help blend in with the elements.
Jia and Atlan were no longer the doe-eyed new recruits permanently etched into my mind, until now.
Horror haunted their once-shining eyes. Unlike me, they had not forgotten the torture they’d endured by their overlords. Nor forced themselves to like I had. Even as they sat, civil, even smiling at my nocs who shot them venomous looks, I could tell those scars would remain for a long time. Possibly forever.
This was another testament to my failure of leadership. I was too ashamed to meet their eyes after that.
“Master, I have so much to tell you,” Atlan began, and I shook my head sharply.
“Sun. Just call me Sun. Both of you,” I demanded.
He beamed, and so did Jia, though confusion colored their faces along with the ruby red of their flushed cheeks.
I wanted them to drop the formalities since I felt unworthy of the title. Master? What master was I?
The god stones glowed in my pocket, and I reached for them without a second thought. Hadi or Kiar, or maybe both, hissed in warning, but I showed them to my friends. I needed to regain their trust fully. I expected shock, I expected to have to explain everything and how my world had collapsed on the mountaintop.
But their eyes were dead, lips pressed in thin, hard lines even as a trickle of wonder sparked from beholding the moonstone we fought so hard to recover and the sunstone we’d fought so hard to protect. I flinched because they knew.
Somehow, they knew of Gaulu’s betrayal. The secret of the noc creation. Everything. They didn’t have to say anything for me to realize they knew.
How?
My silent question went unanswered as Atlan burst, pressing his forehead to mine and then his lip to my ear. Growls, hisses, clicking, and the screech of claws on bark filled the air, followed by Zihan’s warning growl. But I ignored them all.
Atlan wasn’t flirting, the jealous fools. He was speaking in rushed whispers, too fast, too many, like a torrent turning into a tidal wave and finally transforming into a tsunami of information about everything that had happened to them until now.
Of escaping and confronting a pack of pantheras. Of waking in a strange mountainous village, they had mistaken as Jade Moon. Of capture, reimprisonment, and finally, freedom among nocs who lived with humans! And finally he spoke of a name that I hadn’t heard since my imprisonment. One I hadn’t given any serious consideration.
“You have to speak to General Hideyoshi. He will help you!” Atlan finished.
“General Hideyoshi will help me?” I repeated incredulously as Atlan nodded his head so hard he knocked his top knot out of its crude tie, his hair tumbling down to his mid-back.
My eyes widened in shock. How had their hair grown so long while their bodies remained malnourished and frail under the heavy, downy fur they wore?
“He will help you! Here!” he offered me some food from his backpack and a spare pair of boots that would be pure bliss on my raw sandaled feet. I also spotted the beginnings of crude weapons needing more sharpening within the lifesaving bag.
“Food and weapons. We meant to take it north, to help Tao, and then free the others at Black Lantern Prison. We’d take Jia as far as we could, then split off but… This changes everything. You need it more.”
“Hold on!” I grumbled. “Why would the general help me?”
“You hold the godstones! Even without seeing them, we forgave you once we learned the truth. I–” he choked, a fierce blush painting his face pink.
I’d nearly forgotten being caught in such a compromising position with Kiar, Bracken, and Clem and blushed profusely in return.
“He has always been your supporter, and anyway, even Jia came around. And there are whispers, rumors that made it up the mountain that you control the king of nocs!” Atlan said, and Hadi growled as he tried to tuck his large body against my other side possessively. “That alone deserves an audience with the general, don’t you think?”
“I supposed it does,” I said, my mind reeling with this glimmer of hope, a new way forward.
Then, in a soft voice, Jia spoke slowly.
“Atlan must’ve told you my former cellmate, Sai, is dead. He was killed during the escape. Tao… I need to get him to a doctor far away, or I’d join you all to slaughter Gaulu, the traitor! There is a woman in the noc village who has patched him up the best she could, that child’s mother—a human mother, Sun. There’s too much even to begin to explain the horror of that. How astonished I had been.”
She drifted off, leaning into me, and I instinctively threw an arm around her shoulders. We huddled together, Atlan wrapped in his leopard, and I barely grasped her referring to a child who wasn’t there.
No matter, I thought. Nothing else mattered but this moment, the haunting words flowing from her chapped lips stunted by hiccups.
“Either way, I need medicine, and we cannot find it up there. Atlan, Krish, and I decided to escape, and only Zihan followed to protect us. But then he heard something, something worse than the lion butchered on the ground. A mighty swarm, and he smelled you, Sun! We tried to teach him your scent so that if one day we reunited… Forgive me. I did not know; my eyes were closed and my heart hard when I rejected you, dear leader,” Jia finished, finally allowing her tears to flow.
“Who is Krish?” I asked, the onslaught of new names and faces dizzying.
As if on cue, a mountain of a man came barreling through the forest. I was too numb then to flinch, but my harem closed in on us even and Zihan growled, fur-raising, daring him to cross over to our side.
The man before us was at least a stone taller than Atlan, who was always the tallest in a room. Atlan stood immediately to greet him, and I flinched as the panthera unfurled himself and drifted until he was lying in Jia’s lap. My hand trembled slightly, but he was well and truly tamed. Even more so than my nocs, who looked ready to strike at any moment.
Hah! Who was I kidding? We lived together as equals, as much as possible: me and my men. However, this panthera, this Zihan, was nothing more than a pet. It was astonishing.
“Atlan! Those bastards will be here soon. I knew we should’ve taken the longer path below the mountain. What a mess.”
“Secondary, it’s fine,” Atlan said, and my eyebrows shot upward. That was an elite status. Spymasters, emissaries, and a handful of generals. I was the only first rank, but very few in the armed forces held the title of secondary.
“Oh, mother’s mighty wave, return me to your watery grave,” he whispered, a sailor’s saying, as the stranger’s dark brown eyes found mine, flecked with gold that resembled the sun. “Zihan wasn’t joking when he said he scented the chosen one was near.”
His voice was brutally deep, like gravel tumbling over cobblestone. Krish wrapped his arm around Atlan’s shoulder as I stood, then hooked it lower as I drew close, around my junior’s waist, and I frowned. His waist-length, wavy black hair fluttered in the wind, and he was wearing a matching white fur-lined tunic with heavy fur boots. But I noticed his skin was tan, permanently sun-kissed like the islanders far south residing on islands in the Shakmir Sea.
The rank two soldier was packed with muscle and smelled vaguely of salt. A tank of a man not fit for the delicate statecraft of most rank two warriors I’d met. I swept my eyes back up to meet Krish, and he smiled. They were upturned, his smile mischievous, a feline appearance resembling the panthera wrapped around Jia’s feet.
“The great rank one, Batu Sun. The Noc Slayer,” a reptilian glaze shadowed his dark and stormy eyes that lit up with the thought of me slaughtering nocs. “You’re shorter than I thought you’d be, but otherwise, just as I’d imagined during my training days.”
“Krish! Respect,” Jia and Atlan scolded at once, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I thought instantly I would love to get to know him more, but the fate of the world hung in the balance now. I didn’t have time to chit-chat for much longer. And the sun was beginning to set.
“Where is the boy? I gave him to the mothian before the batbeast flew them all to safety,” Krish said, panic overtaking his features. “Gods, Atlan, I didn’t know he’d followed us this far into the wilderness.”
“Is this the boy?” Clem asked, and Krish’s face lit up, the rustling of unwrapping cloth filling the air.
A sharp inhale of breath from my nocs sent the hair on my forearms on high alert as a tiny wail filled the air, the whining of a young child that sounded too similar to a newborn infant in pitch. Too high, and… no, it couldn’t be, but I heard the sound of clicking that most certainly wasn’t coming from Clem.
I gasped, turning to see Clem holding up the child in question, who looked no more than five years of age. He had large, solid black eyes and, more shockingly, three sets of tiny arms wriggling about. He grabbed at Bracken with two, squeezed Clem’s upper hands holding him, and the other two dangled by his side.
Kiar threw himself away from it, and Hadi’s face, for the first time, glazed over in slack-jawed shock. Even he couldn’t muster up the appearance of indifference at the appearance of a child noc.
“Put him down, mothian,” a new voice called, and Hadi tried to drag me behind him, but I shrugged him off.
Atlan, Jia, and Krish were at ease, and the panthera was quiet. This was another one of their so-called friends.
What the fuck is going on?
“Where were you two!?” Atlan barked, eyes narrowed. His tone would be nagging if his eyes didn’t flicker with hatred. “Damn you, Nguyen! Damn you, too, Shizumi, for going along with that nonsense. You drew those monsters to our master. If you didn’t want us to leave that way, you should’ve told us clearly it was a nightwing nest, not spoken in your—your fucking riddles!”
I blinked. Atlan wasn’t one to curse. Maybe these were foes, not friends after all.
Two straw hats appeared, and they were wearing matching monk attire. And when the tallest tipped his head upward, I gasped.
“We were nearby, watching your reunion and assessing if it was worthwhile to lose our heads for your foolishness to save that dying man. But then we saw the chosen and heard the screams of the child. We had no choice but to come. Be grateful. You’d be dead by now if not for us.”
His voice wrapped around me like a whisper, as if chanting an incantation, and the air blossomed with the heady scent of incense. It was the monk from Tsuki’s temple, the one who had hidden his footsteps in the snow and told me the right words to say.
He removed his hat to reveal the downy jet-black feathers of a nightwing, sharp golden gaze holding mine with a manic expression, all bared fangs, that I had to assume was an attempt at a grin.
The smaller noc, still very tall, removed his hat, and another brutally scarred face greeted me with deep-set black eyes that reminded me of stars set in the night sky. He tapped his black walking stick, tail twitching to and fro, and electricity burned the ground around him—a lightning rod held by a black-furred rat like our former prison guards. I shuddered as he grinned.
“Don’t mind this zealot, chosen,” he addressed me, and I squared my shoulders, stepping in front of Atlan, who was still seething. Krish and Jia busied themselves, making a point to ignore the newcomers.
Another commotion, a blur zooming under Atlan’s spread legs, then around me, and the crawler-like child scrambled into the rat’s arms, cooing, “Big brother!”
The disgust and confusion must’ve shown on my face because the rat–Shizumi, was it?–chuckled. But one side of his face was stiff, like he’d had a stroke, and made the laughter look more gruesome than it should.
“Don’t mind Thiên. He thinks everything taller, and male is a brother right now,” the rat nodded to the nightwing, who hadn’t looked away from me yet.
“And he’s a bit of a blowhard regarding his goddess, but he means well. I didn’t think you’d survive, but I suppose you truly are the mortal meant to join light and dark and redeem this world and the other…”
After that, a stony silence filled the air, and a more burdensome stone settled in my gut. This was too much to process, too much all at once. I had to anchor myself to this moment and the next steps, not concern myself with child nocs, hidden villages, and monks who used black arts.
My nails dug into Atlan’s wrist, and he looked down at me expectantly. I brought his face closer, like him, having the urge to whisper even though their hearing was leagues better than our own.
“You will tell me everything in your own words, in your story, later. But for now, we need your help destroying Gaulu. Only important information, got it? Where is General Hideyoshi? Why do you believe he will follow me beyond the godstones?”
Noc and humans together. That’s what Tsuki had wanted. I guessed this was the test run, and Atlan was my guide to this brave new world.