Yuka (II)

She awoke.   Yuka did not know how she got here, as she couldn't move any part of her, not even her eyes, as she looked up toward the wooden ceiling. It was Uro hardwood, she could tell from its distinct deep colour. The room was lighted mildly, and it seemed to be night, for no light peaked through the ceiling.   Slowly, life returned to her body. She breathed heavily. She didn't even have dreams that she could remember, never minding what she had saw. The last she remembered was being in a museum and turning her head to see something. She had no clue what it was. Yuka blinked her weary eyes and started to stir. Was this her room? Had someone taken her here? Where was Harry?   "...hello?" She said in her mother tongue, a different dialect to that of Yam. She repeated in the Higher Tongue. No answer came either way. She looked down on herself, moving her head slowly. She was in nightclothes now, and on a bed that wasn't out of the ordinary by the standards of the city. She felt indignified and embarassed that someone had changed her while she was unconscious. When I find out who did this, there will be hell to pay! As she lifted herself however, she noticed a bandage on her forehead, and that one of her pointed ears was covered as well. That must have been why her hearing wasn't what it normally was!   Arching up to the side of the bed, she looked around. The candle was all the light here, and it certainly gave the room a beauty that was hard to deny. Yuka noticed her belongings were here, and her initial alarm fluttered away. It was the room she rented! At least those working at the inn were considerate to her. It was al-   But it wasn't right.   She noticed the room she was in had no door, or ladder above, or cellar below. It was wood all around! And when she saw in one of the corners, she noticed between the planks there was a faint green glow. Very faint, too faint for a human to see, but for her, it was there. If she had any hairs, they'd have pricked up.   "Who's there?" She asked as she got up, reaching for the dagger by the bedside. "Harry?" She shouted. "Yekken?" Yuka was suddenly confused. She had never met anyone called Yekken before, nor seen such a name in any language. How did she know it?   She steadily approached the source of the glowing. It now seemed stronger. Her claws reached into the cracks, and she began to pull. It opened easily. Too easily. She pulled a plank out and it seemed the light shrank, but it merely lessened. She could see a grey floor beneath, perhaps granite? As she pulled at the wood outward, removing more planks, she noticed something was wrong. The platform seemed to only go for a short while before meeting the horizon. Some trickery this must be! She knelt down and laid her slim frame through the hole she had made. It was true, and she saw no wall, and looked to the ceiling.   There was no ceiling. Or sky! Only a great dark fog, pierced by green, gold and orange lights that shine and dimmed all around, seemingly at random.   "What in the name of the Source?" she let herself say out loud. This was not what she had read in the scriptures, or of those of any faith she knew. It seemed too formless, too chaotic. Yuka stepped out.   The skies started to give way. The crude writing she had once seen came to her mind again as she saw curiously shaped lights in the clouds. They parted, and platforms descended toward her slowly, as if they too were puffs of smoke. But when she, using her above-human reflexes, jumped onto one, they were as solid as any rock. Her mind was swimming.   Yuka only knew that the path ahead was forward. Maiyuhi had warned her before the Order was destroyed that there would be truths to find and lies to be exposed, all in the Forbidden Isles. She did not expect them to come to her in her own land! The Forefathers, The Ancient Ones, they had to be involved. The ancestors of the Yamachai, they had been cast out of the mortal world thousands of years ago by the Source itself. Those of the Isles claimed their various gods did the deed, but now Yuka did not know the truth, as she climbed from the first platform to another.   "Uh!" She let out a yelp as she felt her knees pop while climbing up. She looked ahead, and saw the next would require a jump. Oh, wonderful. The light above her consisted of three lines sideways through an egg shape, resembling but not quite like her language's word for 'awake'. Yuka wondered what this meant as she crouched down, ready to jump up into the clouds. Before she did though, she noticed the other clouds moved to spell something. The letters were unlike anything she had seen before.   As she turned to her front, she saw small clouds form in front of her, developing into shapes. An old Yam priest, his ears work down and claws blunted, seemed to form before her, crouching in meditation. Is this the Source, she thought. Have I died and entered the Great void? This seemed to change as the priest suddenly convulsed, the clouds that made him up steaming like water from a stream. The face wretched in silent screams to an unnatural angle, as something was drawn from him. His soul?   What had had come out went to another cloud, this one of a man. A man holding a flowing shard just like the one from the Sanctuary! More 'sounds drifted from elsewhere into this shard, and the man looked on with glee forming in his eyeless features. Greed would be the downfall of us all, she remembered from the scriptures. And humans were the greediest race of them all. Only the long-gone Forefathers could rival them, though only because they had much power themselves.   "The Gem is no more, but the shards remain." She heard a voice, faint, but there. She could not tell if it was male or female, or both, or neither.   "Who is there?" She darted around. She didn't have a weapon, but she knew how to use her body as one. "What is this?" There was no response.   She turned and saw the clouds and little shards, red and blue, representing both of the Crystals, were coming into new shapes around her. In one, she saw a red shard being picked up by a fat human, grovelling in the dirt. Another, she saw a blue shard being carried away by some strange insect unlike any she had seen. Such beasts are not in the sacred scriptures, she thought.   A third of the red shards was dropped out of view into the bottomless void, while yet another was taken by a man surrounded by rippers. When he rose, they knelt to him. She saw a number of others of both crystals, and she realised the impossible. Someone or something is trying to rebuild them! "Impossible." She heard herself say.   "Not so." That disembodied voice went again. As she looked on, she saw the man with the rippers draining something out of other men and centaurs. Their life essence perhaps? Some of the ancient spells were known by very, very few of the Yamachai, and even those were far weaker than they once were millennia ago. But if the crystals were being reformed, anything would be possible! This is what Maiyuhi had warned her about before he died.   "Many will come, and many will go." The voice came. "Many human, many centaur, many of Yam. Some innocent, some not. They toil with that they do not understand." The mists were pierced by golden figures of various shapes, one a mighty warrior, clad in armour, another a woman with arms like a spider, and another with wings like a bird.   "The Forefathers!" Yuka exclaimed. "Someone wishes to bring them back!" She turned around. "How is this possible?"   The voice answered, this time in the voice of a thousand old women, of Yam and of man. "They were so gifted, so unique, and yet they squandered their gifts. They and the N'Krai almost destroyed your world in their hubris." Yuka was shook as she heard. Am I speaking to a god? "We took away their gifts when the crystals broke. We couldn't afford to let our worshippers die in conflict, else Those who Slumber would awaken, and all we created would be for nothing." Yuka looked closer. The golden flames of the warrior blazed as he came forward. She had heard from Maiyuhi the names of some of the Forefathers in her training. Lesser than the Source, or these supposed 'gods', the Forefathers were unknown in number, but one was infamous above them all.   "Saka." She heard herself say. The spirit of vengeance.   "His thirst has only grown over the millennia." The goddess claimed. "The mortal races, yes, even your own, have forgotten their ways, and Saka's thirst is beyond anything mortality can comprehend." Yuka wished she didn't know.   "At Shin, they used a shard to destroy the Order. Everything I knew." She remembered being an orphan before Maiyuhi had taken her in. These traitors and this monster had taken her only family away from her. "This abomination! How is it possible?" Even in the presence of a supposed goddess, her indignation would not quench.   "As you know from the priests, the barrier can be pricked with great effort, to seep in a tiny glimpse of what was." Yuka had heard whispers of the things the Yamachai's High Priest could do, that only those in the Temple were allowed to see, and the prophetic dreams she had seen herself from Maiyuhi once or twice before. "With the crystals being reforged piece by piece, those who wish harm can carve bigger and bigger tears. Even the barrier I set up won't be enough when that comes."   This confused Yuka. "Can't you just make one that can't be pierced? Or wipe them from existence? Or something?" She was angry at all this happening, but all she really wanted was to be back in the world she knew. "Why do you just watch as we will suffer?"   She looked around as the shapes moved on, and the orange light faded away. The red sands seemed to burn her skin as they travelled around. The green glow returned now.   Suddenly it came upon her, brighter than before. So bright, it was blinding. Putting her hand in front of her, Yuka twitched her ears forward to make up, and the voice returned like the mightiest thunder.   "Do not presume to know your creators! Our ways are on a far greater scale than you can imagine." The voice felt closer, as if it were in a physical form. "I lost brothers and sisters building the world from the chaos before, and I lost myself too. I lost still more when we built the mortal world you call home, and your Forefathers, and the N'Krai. And the stars themselves!" The air was like a furnace now, and the smell of ash and tar filled the blasting air. "Do not think we haven't tried, for we are not our firstborn. We allow our creations to choose to follow us, in our own ways of course." Yuka knelt down as the light became too great to bear. "With so much choice, comes so many wrong choices, regrettably." As the voice said this, the light and air dimmed, at first a little, then more and more until Yuka could finally open her eyes again.   A beautiful sprite lay before her, warmly glowing green like a woman blooming from a rose, flowers in her hair and across her skin. Perhaps it was one of the goddesses of the Forbidden Isles, or whoever inspired them. "Our realms are full of our believers who left the mortal world, their devotion keeps our lifeblood throwing. And our blood keeps order in the cosmos." She turned to the right, as Yuka saw the scriptures of the priests gathered in front of her, only to disintegrate too. "Your traditions have kept some strong, those others forgot, but you too have forgotten your roots." She turned back to Yuka. "You will not forget this, though, will you?"   "Of course not!" The sweating and crying Yuka replied. The figure's beauty was stunning and terrifying all at once.   "Good." The goddess turned back to her. "Saka and his allies plot against you, and their acolytes grow more powerful by the day. You will not be alone in your quest. Others serve our will, even if they do not know it." The floor beneath Yuka's feet began to shake. She tried to keep her balance, but it was in vain, as it crumbled like sand beneath her, dragging her beneath.   "No! No! Help! Please!" She cried out to the goddess as the sands sank beneath her.   "Go." And with that, the ground gave way, and she fell. Yuka was back on those mountainsides, learning herself for a second. I cheated death once, she thought. Maybe this is my time? Her thoughts and the faces of those she loved flowed through her mind as the black mists of the bottomless void rushed up to meet her.   Yuka woke with a thunderous scream. She turned to her side and saw Harry on the floor, shook at the noise.   "What the bloody hell was that?" He shouted. She noticed he had spilled tea over his top. "You looked like you were having a seizure! Or a fever! No, both!" He got himself up from what was his fallen chair. "What even happened to you? The staff found you in the museum out cold. You've been out for two days." Two? I've overstayer our welcome here. He offered some tea. She suddenly realised how thirsty she was, and gulped the whole thing down.   "The Forefathers, the 'Ancient Ones' as those in the Dominion call them." They wrote that tablet all those years ago." She saw the confused look on Harry's face. "Harruldsun Svadi, what did you think wrote those tablets? What other language in the world looks like that, or glows green from black rock?" Harry's confusion only grew. "We must hurry, regardless." She tried getting up, but slouched back down again from the exhaustion. "When I've recovered, we sail for Phoz. I don't care for any of your reservations there, we need to get to the bottom of all this!" She laid out a hand to touch him, but it faltered. "Ah," she sighed. "I wasn't cut out for this." She laid her head back on the pillow.   "And I am?" Harry asked. That made her laugh, even if she wheezed afterward. Some light heartedness would be good before the last journey of her life.