Page 17 of Red Demon (Oria #1)

Brother

A weight eased from my heart after sharing my story with Mahakal.

To his credit, he left to travel south the next day to seek his justice.

For weeks afterward, I’d visit the temple daily to check the posted bulletins for news.

When I saw nothing about the Red Demon, I reminded myself that if her identity wasn’t public knowledge, her death might not be either.

In the meantime, I settled into a familiar rhythm with Galen and Asher.

Nunbiren was in a good place to heal, to grow stronger, and to develop new skills.

Weeks spilled into months with no news. Folding at the forging press kept me from thinking too hard, as did learning how to use and maintain the fabricator at the heart of the forge.

I excelled in the morning training. Galen was eager to teach me everything—how to bend steel to my will and to create poetry from small movements with every weapon we birthed from fire.

I strove to move beyond the predictable rhythms and movements to mastery, giving everything I did my whole heart.

I found comfort in my new life. Each night Galen and Asher had fresh questions for me, and even the ones that ended in silence brought me closer to them both.

They’d lost someone too: Asher’s mom died a few years back from cancer.

In the case of all our dead, there were no answers, just acknowledgement of a grief shared.

Every time I freed a secret that made me feel fragile or lost, I felt stronger.

Each time I felt alone, they drew me closer.

Asher took a little over a week to start calling me brother.

Galen was more reserved, but beyond his exacting and commanding presence, he was a patient and kind man, a natural leader.

In some ways, I trusted his gruff attitude more: being slow to trust meant I had full faith in his judgments.

I don’t think it was just Asher’s influence when things shifted a couple months later, over a dinner with the last of the strawberries for the year, greens blended into the spicy lentil stew.

“You figure you still need a father, boy?” he asked, setting down tea for us both.

I hesitated, the stew in front of me forgotten. Studying the wrinkles in his face, and his black and gold eyes, I nodded, finding a certainty in something I hadn’t considered a moment ago.

Galen’s smile crinkled the corners of his weathered face, bright as the forge fire.

“Very well, son,” he’d declared, with Asher grinning beside me, slapping me on the back.

From that day on, I was “son” and not “boy,” and a few days later, recognized by the elders and ancestors in a ceremony to name me part of the Eirini family.

The night of my adoption, I’d realized he used the Asri word, “ Taam,” not the word I’d called my dad. Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel like I was replacing anyone I’d lost, just stepping into a new life.

Nunbiren became home.

Months passed into seasons, and Mahakal did not return to town, but each season painted fresh memories.

Ruan, Ash and I swam in the forest under starlit skies, laughter mingling with the bite of fall.

In the winter, I started sparring with Plato on my days off.

He was a guy who just kept going, steel clashing to sweat, as difficult to exhaust as I was.

Meragc and Atalia got married the following summer, and I held their first child a year later, Nestor, a curious little boy wrapped in the brightest colored blanket I could find to gift him.

Those Asri brought drab colors into their nurseries too, but I had not forgotten where I came from.

There were cozy winter nights in the rooms of the forge, when Ash was learning to play the mandolin, and my taam and I both had to make the best of it.

Laughter echoed through the walls as I’d offer my best singing voice and worst possible lyrics for his songs.

Galen would shake his head and pretend I wasn’t funny, but of course I was.

It all took a while to catch up to me.

The second time I attended the Harvest Festival, I knew what to expect.

The sky painted the night with a thousand flickering dreams. Paper lanterns brought some of those nebulae down to the Nara, bobbing their lights on lines throughout the market, their warm colors dancing on celebrants’ faces.

I clutched a steaming mug of cider, watching the celebration unfold in the square, letting the spiced warmth spread through me.

Ash never missed the ceremony in the woods; he always wanted me with him to meet the ancestors.

Mazes of blue lines throbbed brighter and fainter in the ground, a network of mycelium connecting the magic of the core of the world to us.

At the edge of the forest, the trees glistened with cyan magic light, rustling in the wind in a way they didn’t any other time.

It terrified me the first time I saw the trees like that.

The Asri magic in the ground made me uneasy enough without the trees drinking it up.

The empire didn’t even try to pretend it could control the magic of the Oria bionetwork, even as it tried to keep us safe from everything else.

That fungus covered the whole world over, and the Asri believed the souls of their dead will still merge with it when they die, and it would preserve their soul and memories.

At Harvest Festival, they’d sit in the shining glade, chatting with the glowing ground, even though some of them—like me—heard nothing in return.

I believed my parents’ warnings. They said Oria can kill you if it feels threatened, and the long dead Attiq-ka and Asri that compose it might mark any Chaeten a threat.

But Ash and Galen and the rest didn’t fear it at all, and they didn’t expect me to fear it either.

“No murderers dwell in Oria ,” Galen explained.

A soul has to be accepted as righteous to return there, where they may rest until reincarnation.

The wicked become demons, their ghosts fragmenting as ruren-sa, roaming the wilds until they fade to dust.

In my sixteen years, I had seen no evidence of either ancestors or ghosts reaching out to me.

No Chaeten expected anything beyond their death.

Yet I couldn’t get through any major Asri ceremony without thinking of the family I lost. That year, I endeavored to do a better job hiding unease for the sake of the people around me.

Laughter floated in the air, mingling with the hum of the bionetwork thrumming beneath our feet.

At Harvest, Oria’s low drone is more discernible, like a distant waterfall.

Families clustered in the forest muttering to the dirt, their faces reflecting joy, claiming they heard whispers, laughter in the wind.

“Thank you Mona Terana, I am happy to see you too,” Asher said, as a burst of wind rustled the glowing branches. The crackle of the leaves stopped as he paused to listen, his closed eyes reflecting the lights.

“My grandfather is just here to complain, I think. He says they’ve been waiting for me all night,” Meragc said to me, laughing.

I forced a smile. Something in his tone and the cool weather made me think of Iden, of the voices he heard on his last night alive. Didn’t he say the same, that they were waiting for him all night? Maybe the whispers in the trees were just the wind. But my stomach tightened all the same.

Meragc pointed to something in the trees, then spun around. “I can hear you clearly. Glad you’re well, old man.”

“Well, there’s a whole crowd keeping tabs on me,” Asher said, laughing, “Hello, family!” he waved.

I started shutting down, unable to really listen. Iden had seen a crowd too. Maybe these same spirits, so kind to my friends, were the ones that drove Iden mad.

“One at a time please, you’re all too loud,” Meragc said.

“Maybe how loud they get is proportional to how much whiskey is in your cider, Meragc,” I said, grateful for the dark. I was closing my eyes tight, keeping the dark memory at arm’s length.

“You really can’t see anything at all?” Asher asked. “Or hear them?”

I heard the rustle of falling leaves in the dark, the distant waterfall sound.

Imagination would run wild with that if I let it, but I knew better.

My brother survived SBO only to open a door to voices in the wind, and something, probably Oria, drove him insane on a whispering night like this.

I couldn’t save him. I could only keep my own doors locked.

“No, but I’m fine with that.” I winced, realizing I let a little more bitterness in my tone than I intended.

Asher’s smile faded among the dancing lights.

I patted him on the shoulder. “Sorry Ash. I’ll meet you back home, okay?” I saluted back to Meragc, his tall frame hunched in the dark. “See you at dawn.”

He waved his glass. “Nope, I’m sleeping in!”

Walking the streets back, the lantern lights bobbed bright against the inky blackness. A pang of sadness tightened my throat. My new family welcomed me into their world, but I wasn’t sure that world could ever fully be mine.

I sank onto a bench outside the forge with my thoughts, not quite ready to make my way inside.

Footsteps. Asher’s familiar gait broke the quiet, his boots clicking in a steady rhythm against the stones. He landed beside me on the stone bench, and I watched the sky until his stare felt too heavy.

“What’s wrong, Brother?”

I shrugged, the gesture small and ineffective.

He nudged me with his shoulder. “Your ancestors staying silent?” The reflection of the lanterns lit the gold at the center of his brown eyes. “The fact that mine were so bent on killing yours for a while?”

When I didn’t smile with him, he whispered, “Iden.”

“Yeah.” I stared up at the star-dusted void, flickering with the chill of fall.

He sighed, looking up at the stars with me, his leg warm against mine.

“I’m just being a shit,” I said. “All of you are so happy on nights like this, and I try to be happy too, and that’s what gets to me. I feel bad for being happy when, well—” I gave a vague gesture off to the south, thinking about my Chaeten mother and siblings, and all the dead.

“Wouldn’t your Chaeten family want you to be happy?”

I ran my hands through my hair, a little longer now. “At what point am I slacking off by not avenging them? I have no idea what’s happening in the Bend, or if Mahakal did anything at all.”

Asher grimaced. “They’d tell us good news, na ?”

A gust of wind swept through the square, rustling the leaves on the lone tree and momentarily dimming the lantern’s glow. Asher followed it with his eyes, shadows drifting across his face.

“You’re right, it is weird. The empire evacuated everyone by now. There should be no one left down there to kill. Yet the roads south of the Bend are still closed.”

I looked back at the lanterns down the street, hearing the echoes of laughter from the market, my chest hollow. “I could head through the woods again. Go back and check it out.”

“But if you ran into the Red Demon, do you think you’d be strong enough to kill her?”

My gut twisted. “No.” And once that was out, I began to unravel. That’s what I feared most of all, not being strong enough when that moment came, watching her take more lives.

Voids, I had a way to go.

Asher gripped my shoulder, anchoring me through my swirling thoughts. “You’re already the strongest fighter in the militia. You’ve probably learned more in two years than the Z’har soldiers learn after a decade in the barracks.”

His words were a balm, goatshit though that statement was.

“I think she’s on your path. When the time comes to face her, you’ll be strong enough. Until then, stay and get stronger with me.”

“What if that’s impossible?” The question sank in the pit of my stomach. “If Mahakal hasn’t killed her yet, how could I?”

He traced the cobbles with his foot. “I’ll ask Oria when you feel ready. I’ve told my mom all about you. My grandparents, voids, anyone who will listen, about the awesome brother they didn’t get to meet. They’ll help us.”

“They’ll know you’re exaggerating.”

Asher’s grip felt warm on my shoulder. “Taam tells them all the same things.”

Nothing I could think to say could dim that.

“We’ll face her together, just like we face everything else. Meragc, and Atalia, and Ruan, and Plato and—”

The night air blew cool between us. I met Asher’s gaze.

I swallowed. “How do you say ‘You sure are a sappy piece of shit’ in Asri? I guess I’m still not fluent. Nothing sounds right.”

“You’d say: ‘Thank you. I appreciate you, Brother.’ Or does your cold Chaeten heart not have that emotional range to make sense of that?”

“Voids, my brothers would have eaten you alive, all this talk of emotional ranges … and hearts.” I laughed out the last word.

“Eat me alive?” He huffed. “Even for a metaphor, that’s horrendous. There’s no history behind that, right? Were any of those poor rabbits and deer alive when you tore into them?”

I shook my head. “No, fuck you, we—”

But he was laughing at me. It was a laugh that could shake loose the stars from the sky and must have left his abs begging for mercy. I let it carry me away too.

I leaned back on the bench beside him, and when my chest stopped heaving, I said, “They’d have liked you though, really.”

And I wished I could convince myself they’d be listening, so I could tell them all about the brother they never met.

The next day, I practiced the Red Demon’s move to double sheath her swords after stilling from a run, thinking about killing her the whole time.

And I trained twice as hard for each day that followed.

Years took root underneath my feet, and I grew stronger, learning to think with every limb.

It only takes a moment to die; I would make use of any moment I got.