The Feather on My Scale: Ch 24

Falling. A black void of electricity and gravity. I opened my eyes to find myself in a room I had not visited in years. A cabin in the mountains near the South Temple. Log and hardwood and a metal roof that was too rustic for a royal. The bed was a mess and clothes spilled across the floor. The windows had been left open to let the dome’s breath flutter into the room like a lost bird. Tension eased out of my spine as I laid my head back on the leather and wood rocking chair and listened to the floor creak below me.

“This is not what I expected of a king of a biodome.” Maolruibh startled me out of my ease.

“What are you doing here?” I gasped, trying to settle my racing heart.

“This is your void. I am honestly surprised to find you awake. I came looking for your memories. Instead, I find you have a void like I do. Dmitri. Hmm. I will have to revisit with him and find if he is also in possession of one. There might be more to what Corbin did to you than I had initially thought,” Maolruibh mused at the open window over the sink. Green gingham curtains, pulled back with scrap ties, framed a view of evergreens planted by the first settlers of the Hawria biodome.

“Seth’s cottage that burned to the ground in a wildfire years ago is my void?” I tried to wrap my head around this. True, it was the spot I visited in my head the most when I started daydreaming. Shortly after rescuing him from Last Rights, I had secretly taken him back south in hopes of freeing him to his past life. Instead, I had found a slice of heaven I could never fathom being able to touch again.

“If that is what this place is, then yes, it is your void. It’s the core of your peace. Where you feel the most alive.” Maolruibh nodded. He left the makeshift kitchen to ease onto a milking stool that served as the only other chair in the one-room building.

“You needed my memories. I take it, this was not what you were after? But, you said you could see me. My entirety as you said.”

Maolruibh shrugged. “It is different for Fyskar. I can’t just take from another. It is uncomfortable for both parties. With neutrals, it is maybe painful in the way a headache is irksome. With Fyskar, it is like having your skin undone into a million pieces and sewn back up in the same breath. It is torture at its finest, and within Fyskar, it is looked at as something forbidden. I will not press for those memories if only to obey tradition and to keep from alarming you further. Tell me then of hierarchies if I cannot have my information otherwise.”

And so I laid out the Temple, the Nobles, the Peasants, the Mariners and the history as I understood it of the Hawria biodome.

“What of you and Lunam? There is something dark you aren’t saying in what you have told me.” The man’s sea-glass green eyes drilled holes into my own.

“Mubkharatan. I am what Lunam calls a Providentia. We have no term for it in Hawria. But he is Mubkharatan. It is a gentle word for our incense burners, but it is a name derived of fear for those who possess the power of fire.”

“You fear the fire that Corbin placed in your blood to better help you survive this hellish landscape? You would depopulate that which is meant to save you?” Maolruibh’s face paled before mottling a livid red.

“Why are you upset by this? You left all of us for your underwater home because of us,” I bit back.

“We did not approve of Corbin’s methods, but they were done with reason.”

“Don’t preach to me about the sins of the fathers. I get enough of that from the Temple!” I snapped back.

“How many? How many have died because of your foolishness?” Maolruibh demanded.

I sagged. “Too many. And I do not know how to curb the killing without being dethroned. We must change. For the Mariners and the Mubkharatan both. The people are full of fear and suspicion. The Mariners for their ways with water. The Mubkharatan for their ways with fire. Those who possess magic in their blood are unnatural to the superstitious.”

Maolruibh shook his head in frustration. “What will we do?”

“Did you come looking to interbreed with the Mubkharatan? Is that where your disappointment comes from? Lunam represents a dome where we and the other dome have deposited more than our fair share of the Mubkharatan,” I offered if only to pacify the waves of anger I felt coming off Maolruibh.

“No. It was not to explicitly intertwine our blood with theirs. It is only that such a social system to come into use shows how history repeats itself, no matter how much one wishes it would not.”

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “As it is, your timing is abysmal. I have a hot under-the-collar lord looking to usurp me. Lunam’s people just arrived. The Temple has made an egregious error by allowing my marriage to a wab. You coming will set the spark to the kindling already laid in the hearth.”

Maolruibh stared at the fire in the glass-fronted wood stove in contemplation. “What if we offered you assistance?”

“For what? A right to my people?”

“To keep history from repeating itself.”

“You speak of Earth when you say that, don’t you?”

“Yes. The divide amongst people that led to war after war.”

“Then why did you let us have religion? Why do we have cultures that isn’t our own? Why do we worship the ancient gods and wear another land’s clothes? What did you want from us?” I demanded, voice rising.

Maolruibh blinked in confusion. “You are aware of Earth’s history?”

“I was a historian, a researcher, before my adopted father left me on a throne that is perpetually trying to kill me. Yes. I know of Earth. I know that I am, that the people of Hawria are neither of the Egyptian or Japanese lineages. We come from the MidEast and Europa. Those are the genetic background. The Mariners come from the Romae. For reasons beyond my understanding, they were forced in with these nations in an effort to assimilate. We worship gods we have no blood to share with. Why? Why take our culture away and substitute it with another?” I rose.

Maolruibh stared at me in horror. “What have they done to you?”

“They took my history away from me and substituted it with another.” I folded, my burst of anger smouldering away.

“Henu, I meant no harm. I don’t know the answers to the decisions made for your people. What I can do though, as one leader to another, is offer you alliance.”

“In trade for breeding rights to my people,” I spat.

“Never. People must be free. That is a truth never to be sundered. I offer alliance with a hope to form a relationship. To let my people and yours find a way. There may come a time where the Polaris Brotherhood expands, but not by force. Never by force. You and we both need help, and as the pack knows, it is easier with numbers on our side.” Maolruibh smiled amicably.

I sighed and gathered my thoughts. “Fix the dome. We will find if you are competent at battle shortly enough if Sev has not taken the Cliff Temple before the dome curtains are lifted and declared himself defacto Pharaoh. If he has – there will be a civil war, and I do not believe you or your demons will wish to be embroiled in it.”

“The Polaris Brotherhood are not demons. They are glendwellers, beings of flesh and blood bound to the wolf’s energy. They worship no spirit of evil.”

“Then what do you worship?”

“The Forest.” A limb snapped outside.

Chapel Orahamm (C) 2022-2024. All Rights Reserved.

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