Supernatural Fic: From the Ground
Jun. 15th, 2006 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xaaraTitle: From the Ground (1/4)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xaara
Rating: PG-13, gen
Timeline: AU (or will be, anyway--sort of an alternative canon)
Summary: People have long since forsaken their belief in God. Only ghost stories remain.
Next Part: Two
From the Ground
There is nothing truer than myth.
-Eugène Ionesco
--
Some things exist only in whispers.
The Two have no name. Once, perhaps, they did. Before. But now, centuries later, their names have folded back into the gyres of time, slipped into the undertow and washed silently to sea. Billions have seen them, but their faces slide from memory, leaving only impressions: a smile, a blood-streaked hand, a dawn that seemed lost but came, breaking pink over the horizon and sending The Two on their way.
People have long since forsaken their belief in God. Only ghost stories remain.
Someone in every town offers The Two shelter and sustenance. They take what they need and deny what they desire and move on. Once upon a time, their father told them tales of protectors, of champions who held back the darkness. They have become their heroes. They have become one another; no one knows for certain which is which. They complete and complement each other and one day they will destroy each other to save the world.
--
“Dude, get your ass off the car,” Dean says. He’s collected the food they’ll need for the next few days and stows it in the backseat while Sam watches the horizon with one eye squinted nearly shut.
“Where’re we headed?” Sam asks, turning and opening both his eyes until they meet Dean’s.
Dean shrugs. “Dunno. This place is done for now. Can probably come back here later if we need to, but for now I figure we just drive east, see what’s out there.”
“Sounds good. You drive fast enough and we can probably make the next town before nightfall, hole up there.” Sam unbuckles the holster slung across his hips and sets it in his lap as he folds himself into the passenger seat.
It’s Dean’s turn to squint at the horizon. It wavers sometimes, flickers in the dust-laden air, and when he and Sam chase it late into the night, it appears as only the vaguest of billows in the distance.
--
This is their choice and their fate, their gift and their curse. They fight because they were born to it and because they know nothing else. They bleed and laugh with the pain and survive, always survive.
They do not age. Some say that they made a deal with Satan. Some say that they were cursed forever to walk the earth, killing and saving, giving life and receiving life in return. No one knows, not really, because it’s too big to understand, too immense for the narrow focus of human minds.
Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, in one quicksilver spasm, the universe came into being. Good spoke to Evil then; nothing else existed in the expanse of particle-dotted space that was their home. Without humans, without souls, there was nothing to purify, nothing to corrupt, and so Good and Evil lay in wait, watching as the universe spun and collected and spun and expanded. Watching as man grew and changed and began to look to the stars.
We must give them Good, said Good, and wrapped itself around the earth until men knew fairness and love and respect.
Evil complained, and blanketed the earth with its body as well. They lay that way for millennia and humankind continued below them, creating weapons and discovering medicine, learning to kill and learning to heal, until
Stop poking me, said Good.
Then stop hogging Africa, said Evil.
I’m not the one with the bony elbows, said Good. Besides, you totally said I could have Africa this week.
They scrabbled for purchase against the planet, and below them the earth bucked and shuddered and tore open, and the humans watched the skies with fear on their faces.
This is counterproductive, said Good, pausing its struggle to watch as the humans buried their dead. We keep this up, we’re going to break them.
I have an idea, said Evil. It explained the terms of its wager.
Good agreed. Together, they fashioned souls from grains of sand and scattered them along the waterways where the humans went to fish and drink and swim. Hundreds of billions of souls, so many that by the time Good and Evil finished, the world lay strewn with them.
And then Good and Evil descended to the earth, and Good created benevolent leaders while Evil created tyrants. Good helped the people start their first schools while Evil stirred children into squabbling knots that grew into warring factions. The Balance wavered one way, and then the other, but never toppled.
Each time a person died, his fellows buried him in the earth’s embrace or consigned him to fire. And after the body decomposed or incinerated, Good and Evil sent messengers to collect souls, to examine them, to wipe them clean and set them back on remote beaches. They kept a tally.
Until Evil cheated.
You can’t do that, Good said.
Do what? asked Evil.
Shape people into demons. It’s not fair. Demons are an automatic point for your side.
I didn’t complain when you recruited all those saints, Evil said. Or the martyrs. I didn’t complain about those either.
That’s because the people who killed them racked up tens of points for you, said Good. It’s not the same at all.
I didn’t even say anything when you created religion, Evil pointed out. You have people telling hundreds of thousands of other people that being Evil is bad.
Well, said Good, it is.
Heaven and Hell? Stroke of genius, I have to admit, but all just propaganda for your side. Why can’t I have demons?
Good thought for a long time. Fine, he said at last. You can have demons. But I get demon hunters.
One. Demon hunter.
Three.
Two. You can have two, final offer.
Immortal souls?
Sure.
Only two?
Only two.
Okay, said Good. Deal.
The Two maintain the Balance. They perch at the end of an oscillating seesaw, their weight against the thousand evils clustered near the fulcrum. A strong wind could knock them loose, or one of them could tire and lose his footing. They could collapse and plummet to their deaths, and the world would plummet with them.
New champions would arise to fend off the darkness, new men and women with souls as old as sand and scars like half-remembered runes scrawled across their bodies. The world refuses to plummet.
The people wait. Most of them never question it, the Balance. They work and return home to warm dinner and warm beds and let the beauty of lightning distract them from its ferocity.
--
Okay, so Dad was wrong when he said he thought vampires were extinct. Thing about them is they’re not like humans--they don’t need a male and a female and nine months to reproduce. They need one vampire and one human and one night. You leave one alive and in a week he can create a hundred like him. Usually, they’re careful about who they take. But the vampires are a dying breed, and they know it. They’ve gotten desperate, sloppy. They’re starting to raid frat parties, midnight movies. Anyplace young people come together in large groups in confined spaces after dark.
Dad was right about one thing, though. Twenty untrained vampires still wearing Abercrombie polos against two seasoned warriors, the odds are still in the vampires’ favor.
“Any bright ideas?” Sam shouts over the sounds of clashing metal and screaming demons.
“I thought you said there were only three of them,” Dean shouts back before his back thuds into a wall. He and Sam stand there, catching their breath, their machetes held defensively before them while a pack of vampires snarls a few paces away.
“There were only three of them.” Sam raises his sword as one approaches; it backs off to join the whirlpool of fanged creatures. He chances a glance at Dean, who wears what Sam likes to think of as his Thinking Face. He will never tell Dean about his Thinking Face; Sam wants to live to see thirty.
It’s only a matter of time now until the vampires regroup, organize, and rush them.
Fuck thirty--Sam’s always had realistic goals. He wants to live to see twenty-four. Another seven hours. Shouldn’t be too much to ask.
“I’m out of ideas on this, college boy,” Dean says. “Unless you brought a wheelbarrow and a holocaust cloak, I’m for the good old charge ‘em with machetes.”
“Fine. My mark.” Sam takes a breath. “Three, two--”
Dean shakes his head and charges.
“Christ, Dean.” Sam follows.
A single, top-heavy second later, Sam sinks into the dance of the battle, his senses open to input from all sides. Two of the vampires attack him from the rear; he spins, keeping his machete close to his body. Let it get too far out, you’re open, it takes too long to bring back in and make one mistake, you’re fucked, you’re gone. So he spins and lets the momentum take him under the flailing punch of the first vampire, down into a kick at the exposed knee of the other. Conserve energy. Make them work harder. They’re demons; they’re stronger than you. Keep moving. Keep your mind focused but aware of the big picture. Know where your brother is.
Sam’s done this hundreds, thousands of times before. When the pain rips through his right shoulder, all he can think is, There’s nothing there.
It’s true. There’s nothing to his right, not even a suspicious shadow. No vampires close enough to have inflicted the blow, no gunshot, no whine of an arrow. But it felt like a knife separating his muscle, and when he staggers into a defensive position and lets his eyes flicker to his shoulder, again the thought: There’s nothing there. No blood. The sleeve remains intact.
--the hell?
Get out of here, Sam thinks. Get out of here now. Go go go. Something’s wrong. Out. Now.
“Okay,” says Dean, and moves towards the door.
Sam stumbles out after him, into the low sunlight of evening, and they run to the car, keeping below the cover of nearby foliage. The vampires don’t pursue them, even though Sam and Dean are making enough noise to alert a deaf person to their presence. It’s a twisted kind of truce; they’ll pick this up later. When the car comes into view, they slow to a jog. The piercing pain in Sam’s shoulder has subsided to a throb and he uses his left hand to prod it. Nothing. Still nothing.
“Shit.” Dean sounds out of breath. He’s panting a little. “That was more than I expected to be doing tonight.”
“Hey Dean,” Sam begins, and then he looks at his brother. Takes a good look at him, sees the tiredness in his eyes, the way his shoulders slump a little beneath his grin, the way his shirt has wicked blood outward from the cut in his right shoulder. Sam can’t remember what he was going to say.
“What’s up?” Dean asks. He wipes his machete and stores it in the trunk, then takes Sam’s and repeats the action. “If you’re going to say ‘I’m an idiot who can’t count,’ now would be the time.”
“I felt it when you got hurt,” Sam says, pointing at Dean’s injured shoulder.
Dean doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, I heard you in my brain,” he says, and shrugs. “Figure it’s just part of the gig.”
Until Dean says that, Sam isn’t aware of how much he wants someone to tell him it’s all right, that everything’s going to be all right. “Yeah. Part of the gig.” He hesitates. “It doesn’t--”
“Worry me? No. Besides, we’ve had this conversation like a hundred times, man. Your mind does some freaky shit. Get over it.”
Sam watches Dean’s face carefully, waiting for him to turn away or for his forehead to furrow in the expression that means no, actually, it’s not all right. Nothing happens, so Sam grins, opens the car door. “What if I start being able to read your thoughts?”
“What if I pass out from blood loss and then you have to haul my ass to a hospital because you’re too busy being an emo little bitch to drive back to the motel?”
“Whatever,” Sam says as Dean clambers into the passenger seat and closes his eyes. He waits for Dean to relax, then says, conversationally, “I may not listen to music that sounds like an airstrike, but at least I never wore mascara.”
Dean’s left eye pops open. “It was a dare.”
“You wore it for three weeks, dude.”
“It wouldn’t come off.” Dean shifts in the seat. “Get us back to the motel.”
“I bet everyone told you how pretty you looked.”
Dean looks over at him and Sam gives up on living until twenty-four.
--
Sam wakes up when the door slams and looks at the bedside clock. Just after three in the morning; Dean’s apparently out for a walk. Shoulder was probably bothering him.
Something strange rests on the nightstand beside the clock and Sam flicks on a light to look at it. An envelope, dark red. Sam printed across the front in Dean’s hand.
Bemused, Sam opens the envelope and extracts a card. The front features an image of Darth Vader, lightsaber raised beneath bold capital letters reading Birthday Greetings, Brother. When he opens the card, the sound of a mechanical inhalation startles him, then makes him grin.
“Your destiny lies with me,” the card informs him, its speaker unable to reproduce James Earl Jones’s deep tones. “I am the master.”
Across the inside of the card: you read my mind just remember I know where you sleep. -D
Sam laughs, long and hard, until tears stand in his eyes. He folds the card carefully, slides it back into the envelope, and clicks the light off.
--
Good watched the first Two--a set of sisters--from birth. It watched as they grew and changed and learned the art of balance, of keeping their feet on gravel and in the rushing stream beside their home. It watched as they learned one another, until one could nearly read the other’s thoughts. It watched as they wept when the spirits of the warriors killed invading their valley took their parents, and then, as they slept, it replaced their souls with ones it had labored over.
Raksha and Pramiti, beautiful girls both, their hair long and fluid in the darkness, sighed and turned over and continued to sleep.
Pramiti woke to Raksha’s restlessness, and sat up to her screams. She turned and touched her sister’s shoulder, shook her gently until Raksha opened eyes brimming with tears and said, with terrified certainty, “It falls to us.”
They scavenged weapons from their father’s chest, salt from the butcher, and set out astride their parents’s horses. Two months later, the spirits of the warriors lay dead aside Pramiti’s body. Raksha mourned her sister for eight days. On the ninth day, she ascended the mountain near her home, climbing until her muscles ached with the strain and the air through her lungs thinned to near-nothingness.
The next morning, she lay as she fell, dead from the cold, her fingers clutching a scrap of cloth from Pramiti’s scarf.
Good watched the first Two and felt for the first time the sensation of failure.
If I might make a suggestion, Evil said. Good glared and Evil shrugged, then continued, I’d give them more than just the knowledge of how to fight. I’d give them, you know, that sort of instinct that warriors need. Knowing when to fight and when to back down, how to keep everything in mind at once. Just saying. Might help avoid this sort of thing in the future.
Good grumbled, but when it released Pramiti’s soul alongside Raksha’s back into the current to wash downstream, it included in the grains of sand the gift of sight.
Part Two
Author:
xaaraRating: PG-13, gen
Timeline: AU (or will be, anyway--sort of an alternative canon)
Summary: People have long since forsaken their belief in God. Only ghost stories remain.
Next Part: Two
From the Ground
There is nothing truer than myth.
-Eugène Ionesco
--
Some things exist only in whispers.
The Two have no name. Once, perhaps, they did. Before. But now, centuries later, their names have folded back into the gyres of time, slipped into the undertow and washed silently to sea. Billions have seen them, but their faces slide from memory, leaving only impressions: a smile, a blood-streaked hand, a dawn that seemed lost but came, breaking pink over the horizon and sending The Two on their way.
People have long since forsaken their belief in God. Only ghost stories remain.
Someone in every town offers The Two shelter and sustenance. They take what they need and deny what they desire and move on. Once upon a time, their father told them tales of protectors, of champions who held back the darkness. They have become their heroes. They have become one another; no one knows for certain which is which. They complete and complement each other and one day they will destroy each other to save the world.
--
“Dude, get your ass off the car,” Dean says. He’s collected the food they’ll need for the next few days and stows it in the backseat while Sam watches the horizon with one eye squinted nearly shut.
“Where’re we headed?” Sam asks, turning and opening both his eyes until they meet Dean’s.
Dean shrugs. “Dunno. This place is done for now. Can probably come back here later if we need to, but for now I figure we just drive east, see what’s out there.”
“Sounds good. You drive fast enough and we can probably make the next town before nightfall, hole up there.” Sam unbuckles the holster slung across his hips and sets it in his lap as he folds himself into the passenger seat.
It’s Dean’s turn to squint at the horizon. It wavers sometimes, flickers in the dust-laden air, and when he and Sam chase it late into the night, it appears as only the vaguest of billows in the distance.
--
This is their choice and their fate, their gift and their curse. They fight because they were born to it and because they know nothing else. They bleed and laugh with the pain and survive, always survive.
They do not age. Some say that they made a deal with Satan. Some say that they were cursed forever to walk the earth, killing and saving, giving life and receiving life in return. No one knows, not really, because it’s too big to understand, too immense for the narrow focus of human minds.
Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, in one quicksilver spasm, the universe came into being. Good spoke to Evil then; nothing else existed in the expanse of particle-dotted space that was their home. Without humans, without souls, there was nothing to purify, nothing to corrupt, and so Good and Evil lay in wait, watching as the universe spun and collected and spun and expanded. Watching as man grew and changed and began to look to the stars.
We must give them Good, said Good, and wrapped itself around the earth until men knew fairness and love and respect.
Evil complained, and blanketed the earth with its body as well. They lay that way for millennia and humankind continued below them, creating weapons and discovering medicine, learning to kill and learning to heal, until
Stop poking me, said Good.
Then stop hogging Africa, said Evil.
I’m not the one with the bony elbows, said Good. Besides, you totally said I could have Africa this week.
They scrabbled for purchase against the planet, and below them the earth bucked and shuddered and tore open, and the humans watched the skies with fear on their faces.
This is counterproductive, said Good, pausing its struggle to watch as the humans buried their dead. We keep this up, we’re going to break them.
I have an idea, said Evil. It explained the terms of its wager.
Good agreed. Together, they fashioned souls from grains of sand and scattered them along the waterways where the humans went to fish and drink and swim. Hundreds of billions of souls, so many that by the time Good and Evil finished, the world lay strewn with them.
And then Good and Evil descended to the earth, and Good created benevolent leaders while Evil created tyrants. Good helped the people start their first schools while Evil stirred children into squabbling knots that grew into warring factions. The Balance wavered one way, and then the other, but never toppled.
Each time a person died, his fellows buried him in the earth’s embrace or consigned him to fire. And after the body decomposed or incinerated, Good and Evil sent messengers to collect souls, to examine them, to wipe them clean and set them back on remote beaches. They kept a tally.
Until Evil cheated.
You can’t do that, Good said.
Do what? asked Evil.
Shape people into demons. It’s not fair. Demons are an automatic point for your side.
I didn’t complain when you recruited all those saints, Evil said. Or the martyrs. I didn’t complain about those either.
That’s because the people who killed them racked up tens of points for you, said Good. It’s not the same at all.
I didn’t even say anything when you created religion, Evil pointed out. You have people telling hundreds of thousands of other people that being Evil is bad.
Well, said Good, it is.
Heaven and Hell? Stroke of genius, I have to admit, but all just propaganda for your side. Why can’t I have demons?
Good thought for a long time. Fine, he said at last. You can have demons. But I get demon hunters.
One. Demon hunter.
Three.
Two. You can have two, final offer.
Immortal souls?
Sure.
Only two?
Only two.
Okay, said Good. Deal.
The Two maintain the Balance. They perch at the end of an oscillating seesaw, their weight against the thousand evils clustered near the fulcrum. A strong wind could knock them loose, or one of them could tire and lose his footing. They could collapse and plummet to their deaths, and the world would plummet with them.
New champions would arise to fend off the darkness, new men and women with souls as old as sand and scars like half-remembered runes scrawled across their bodies. The world refuses to plummet.
The people wait. Most of them never question it, the Balance. They work and return home to warm dinner and warm beds and let the beauty of lightning distract them from its ferocity.
--
Okay, so Dad was wrong when he said he thought vampires were extinct. Thing about them is they’re not like humans--they don’t need a male and a female and nine months to reproduce. They need one vampire and one human and one night. You leave one alive and in a week he can create a hundred like him. Usually, they’re careful about who they take. But the vampires are a dying breed, and they know it. They’ve gotten desperate, sloppy. They’re starting to raid frat parties, midnight movies. Anyplace young people come together in large groups in confined spaces after dark.
Dad was right about one thing, though. Twenty untrained vampires still wearing Abercrombie polos against two seasoned warriors, the odds are still in the vampires’ favor.
“Any bright ideas?” Sam shouts over the sounds of clashing metal and screaming demons.
“I thought you said there were only three of them,” Dean shouts back before his back thuds into a wall. He and Sam stand there, catching their breath, their machetes held defensively before them while a pack of vampires snarls a few paces away.
“There were only three of them.” Sam raises his sword as one approaches; it backs off to join the whirlpool of fanged creatures. He chances a glance at Dean, who wears what Sam likes to think of as his Thinking Face. He will never tell Dean about his Thinking Face; Sam wants to live to see thirty.
It’s only a matter of time now until the vampires regroup, organize, and rush them.
Fuck thirty--Sam’s always had realistic goals. He wants to live to see twenty-four. Another seven hours. Shouldn’t be too much to ask.
“I’m out of ideas on this, college boy,” Dean says. “Unless you brought a wheelbarrow and a holocaust cloak, I’m for the good old charge ‘em with machetes.”
“Fine. My mark.” Sam takes a breath. “Three, two--”
Dean shakes his head and charges.
“Christ, Dean.” Sam follows.
A single, top-heavy second later, Sam sinks into the dance of the battle, his senses open to input from all sides. Two of the vampires attack him from the rear; he spins, keeping his machete close to his body. Let it get too far out, you’re open, it takes too long to bring back in and make one mistake, you’re fucked, you’re gone. So he spins and lets the momentum take him under the flailing punch of the first vampire, down into a kick at the exposed knee of the other. Conserve energy. Make them work harder. They’re demons; they’re stronger than you. Keep moving. Keep your mind focused but aware of the big picture. Know where your brother is.
Sam’s done this hundreds, thousands of times before. When the pain rips through his right shoulder, all he can think is, There’s nothing there.
It’s true. There’s nothing to his right, not even a suspicious shadow. No vampires close enough to have inflicted the blow, no gunshot, no whine of an arrow. But it felt like a knife separating his muscle, and when he staggers into a defensive position and lets his eyes flicker to his shoulder, again the thought: There’s nothing there. No blood. The sleeve remains intact.
--the hell?
Get out of here, Sam thinks. Get out of here now. Go go go. Something’s wrong. Out. Now.
“Okay,” says Dean, and moves towards the door.
Sam stumbles out after him, into the low sunlight of evening, and they run to the car, keeping below the cover of nearby foliage. The vampires don’t pursue them, even though Sam and Dean are making enough noise to alert a deaf person to their presence. It’s a twisted kind of truce; they’ll pick this up later. When the car comes into view, they slow to a jog. The piercing pain in Sam’s shoulder has subsided to a throb and he uses his left hand to prod it. Nothing. Still nothing.
“Shit.” Dean sounds out of breath. He’s panting a little. “That was more than I expected to be doing tonight.”
“Hey Dean,” Sam begins, and then he looks at his brother. Takes a good look at him, sees the tiredness in his eyes, the way his shoulders slump a little beneath his grin, the way his shirt has wicked blood outward from the cut in his right shoulder. Sam can’t remember what he was going to say.
“What’s up?” Dean asks. He wipes his machete and stores it in the trunk, then takes Sam’s and repeats the action. “If you’re going to say ‘I’m an idiot who can’t count,’ now would be the time.”
“I felt it when you got hurt,” Sam says, pointing at Dean’s injured shoulder.
Dean doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, I heard you in my brain,” he says, and shrugs. “Figure it’s just part of the gig.”
Until Dean says that, Sam isn’t aware of how much he wants someone to tell him it’s all right, that everything’s going to be all right. “Yeah. Part of the gig.” He hesitates. “It doesn’t--”
“Worry me? No. Besides, we’ve had this conversation like a hundred times, man. Your mind does some freaky shit. Get over it.”
Sam watches Dean’s face carefully, waiting for him to turn away or for his forehead to furrow in the expression that means no, actually, it’s not all right. Nothing happens, so Sam grins, opens the car door. “What if I start being able to read your thoughts?”
“What if I pass out from blood loss and then you have to haul my ass to a hospital because you’re too busy being an emo little bitch to drive back to the motel?”
“Whatever,” Sam says as Dean clambers into the passenger seat and closes his eyes. He waits for Dean to relax, then says, conversationally, “I may not listen to music that sounds like an airstrike, but at least I never wore mascara.”
Dean’s left eye pops open. “It was a dare.”
“You wore it for three weeks, dude.”
“It wouldn’t come off.” Dean shifts in the seat. “Get us back to the motel.”
“I bet everyone told you how pretty you looked.”
Dean looks over at him and Sam gives up on living until twenty-four.
--
Sam wakes up when the door slams and looks at the bedside clock. Just after three in the morning; Dean’s apparently out for a walk. Shoulder was probably bothering him.
Something strange rests on the nightstand beside the clock and Sam flicks on a light to look at it. An envelope, dark red. Sam printed across the front in Dean’s hand.
Bemused, Sam opens the envelope and extracts a card. The front features an image of Darth Vader, lightsaber raised beneath bold capital letters reading Birthday Greetings, Brother. When he opens the card, the sound of a mechanical inhalation startles him, then makes him grin.
“Your destiny lies with me,” the card informs him, its speaker unable to reproduce James Earl Jones’s deep tones. “I am the master.”
Across the inside of the card: you read my mind just remember I know where you sleep. -D
Sam laughs, long and hard, until tears stand in his eyes. He folds the card carefully, slides it back into the envelope, and clicks the light off.
--
Good watched the first Two--a set of sisters--from birth. It watched as they grew and changed and learned the art of balance, of keeping their feet on gravel and in the rushing stream beside their home. It watched as they learned one another, until one could nearly read the other’s thoughts. It watched as they wept when the spirits of the warriors killed invading their valley took their parents, and then, as they slept, it replaced their souls with ones it had labored over.
Raksha and Pramiti, beautiful girls both, their hair long and fluid in the darkness, sighed and turned over and continued to sleep.
Pramiti woke to Raksha’s restlessness, and sat up to her screams. She turned and touched her sister’s shoulder, shook her gently until Raksha opened eyes brimming with tears and said, with terrified certainty, “It falls to us.”
They scavenged weapons from their father’s chest, salt from the butcher, and set out astride their parents’s horses. Two months later, the spirits of the warriors lay dead aside Pramiti’s body. Raksha mourned her sister for eight days. On the ninth day, she ascended the mountain near her home, climbing until her muscles ached with the strain and the air through her lungs thinned to near-nothingness.
The next morning, she lay as she fell, dead from the cold, her fingers clutching a scrap of cloth from Pramiti’s scarf.
Good watched the first Two and felt for the first time the sensation of failure.
If I might make a suggestion, Evil said. Good glared and Evil shrugged, then continued, I’d give them more than just the knowledge of how to fight. I’d give them, you know, that sort of instinct that warriors need. Knowing when to fight and when to back down, how to keep everything in mind at once. Just saying. Might help avoid this sort of thing in the future.
Good grumbled, but when it released Pramiti’s soul alongside Raksha’s back into the current to wash downstream, it included in the grains of sand the gift of sight.
Part Two