Lukim

Lukim is a central character in the story of the four moons. His witnessing of the trafficking of Sheika by a gruff into the Valley of Traders changes the course of his life from being an assassin to being a deliverer and redeemer as he looks for Sheika. He meets with Petrak in the Valley of Traders after this initial encounter and then ends up in Lost Maidens where he is caught and tortured and left to die on the side of a mountain. He escapes from this place and eventually reunites with the Ice Cat that he knew when he was first born. He then heads back to the Valley of Traders. He has an encounter with God in the tunnels and meets Nias eventually. The connection of Nias back to Mardoqueo and the friends from old Battle School days that are with Nias and who know Mardoqueo and of their history are elemental in him eventually reuniting the family of Mardoqueo and finding Sheika.     Banza was said to have been killed by a wolf from behind while he stood in front of the closed bars of a bear cage in the dark preparing for the wrong fight. Lukim was not going to take anything for granted, he had his knife in his boot if he needed it but he much preferred to try to harness the animal first with his braided cord if he could. It was a rare animal indeed that could focus on anything other than removing the harness once it had locked in. He recognized the sound of the ice cat though and no doubt Ruyi would know the terror that it would bring to a cat-child such as he was. They called them cat children because they were taken to a cave where the giant ice-cats kept their kittens, and abandoned when they were but a few months old. Usually it was the unwanted ones, the children born from human pairings that brought shame to a royal family, or revealed a family line trait that bore the wrong colored eyes or would not absorb the light of the moon of their nation. Either way, the children rarely lived and the Rouge believed that the Ice Cats left them alone because of these sacrifices. Lukim had somehow survived the ice, the snow, the loneliness and the threat of death. The little cats in the den did not eat him. He would sit in the corner and hear the pounding of the snow and ice above the ceiling as the giant ice cat mother would jump and pummel holes into the den in order to drop in fresh meat for the kittens. Sometimes the children were dropped in through the back wall and the ice cats would hunt them from above and then pull them out through the holes. Little Lukim would sit, never knowing what would happen when he heard the pounding. He would smell the fresh blood in the air and he would know that something would eat something, he would hear the tearing and the snarling, but he wouldn’t move. He had never bled himself. So quickly had they taken little Lukim out of the room the moment that he was born with no color at all in his skin, no color in his eyes. He had not bled at all, nor had his mother even bled when she bore him. He was small and long and was not his mother’s first child. He was the second male though and he was not rouge, he had to be eliminated, so to the cats it had been. The heavy pounding on the wall that Lukim was leaning against, shocked him back to the present. “Ruyi is really pouring on the mental trauma,” He thought.