“Tojink was a Thori insult first,” the masked man said. “The Yarvan language acquired it about three decades ago. That’s why you recognized it.”
Jack was speechless. He didn’t know what was more of a surprise—that the man had suddenly appeared and single-handedly taken out all of their captors in a flurry of white-hot glitz, or that while he was standing amongst the carnage the first thing on his to-do list was clarifying the language misunderstanding.
“Ah, interesting,” Orvalys said, nodding his head. “That makes sense.”
“Um… what?” was all Jack could say.
“It’s one of many loan words,” the man said. He was dressed in flowing patchwork robes which wrapped tightly around his wrists and ankles. The mask resembled the skull of a creature Jack had never heard of before, and he was absolutely covered with glitzers of every size and shape. “Etymologically it has fairly straightforward roots. Toj is the Thori word for ‘brain’ or ‘mind,’ and ch’ink is a fish. Therefore toj-ch’ink is…”
“Oh!” Orv said. “Fish-brained!”
“Exactly!” the man said.
“We’re still tied up,” Jack interrupted. “Are we all aware we’re still tied up?”
“And toj ch’ink would naturally evolve into tojink,” Orvalys added. “I see now.”
The man kicked suddenly at one of the Thori with the metal toe of his boot. There was the slightest hint of a twitch. He quickly flipped a smaller pistol-sized glitzer out of the interior of his cloak, caught it, and fired into the body a few more times.
After checking for any additional movement, he looked back up and said, “Another interesting one is our Yarvan word for language, yimkordi. It’s related to the Thori word ko’ord’yi which literally translates to rope.”
Orvalys almost hopped with excitement. “Fascinating! So the Yarvan word for ‘grasp’ or ‘hold’ comes from the Thori for rope as well then?”
“Uh, speaking of rope—” Jack attempted, but the other two seemed not to notice.
“Precisely,” the man continued. “The Tinarians like to paint the Thori as a mysterious empire and people with elusive tendencies, but the Yarvans have had dealings with them for many generations in the past. They are more known than they seem.”
“At least that’s what the linguistic evidence would suggest,” Orvalys added.
“The best kind of evidence,” the man said. If he weren’t wearing the terrifying skull mask, Jack would have thought he winked at them. “Anyway, we better get these ropes off yeah?”
Before Jack could come up with any kind of response, the man leaped toward them, produced two shining knives and cut them both loose in one flowing motion. The ropes fell before he even realized he was free.
Orvalys picked up one of the pieces. “Ko’ord’yi.”
“Oh. Your accent is impressive,” the man said. “You’ve learned Thori before?”
The homunculus just shrugged and dropped the rope. “I just think language is fascinating.”
“You know what I think would be fascinating?” Jack said. “The answers to a few questions. Like why and how did you kill all these people?”
“Not that we aren’t grateful,” Orv added quickly. "You obviously saved our lives and both I and Jack greatly appreciate it."
"You're quite polite for a—" the masked man took a step closer and looked down at Orv for a moment. "Little, hairy, one-eyed mechanical person."
"Ah," Orvalys said. "You noticed."
How!? No one notices that. Literally, no one has noticed that before.
"Who are you?" Orvalys asked.
The man let out a chuckle. He looked from Jack to Orvalys and back again a few times. There was a certain kind of ease with which he moved, almost as if he was perpetually comfortable. He seemed to flow through every movement as if it were half-dance and half-martial art. Even in the small shifts in his weight, there was an element of intentionality. The man slowly reached up and unclasped his mask. He removed it to reveal an old, wrinkled face framed sharply by a grey beard streaked with white.
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“I am Lesh,” he said. “Most know me as the Old Spirit of the Woods of Athe.
Ki remembered when she was a little girl hearing about monsters in the woods.
Growing up in a small village outside Ullulia, she often snuck out the back door of their old cabin, over the babbling stream, and into the woods beyond.
The village had been situated on the edge of the northern foothills of the mountain range—mountains which hung ever-present above everything that had been a part of her life growing up. Her parents told her that thousands of years ago the people who had lived in this area worshipped those mountains as gods.
Her Yarvan ancestors had believed those gods would protect the people that lived in their shadow, but under one condition, they only inhabit the northern or ‘light’ side. Those forests had always been good for living in—for hunting and logging and harvesting, and because of those ancient beliefs, the Yarvan population stayed in the area between the Athes and the sea to the north for generation upon generation.
Because of this, the lands south of the range stayed virtually unpopulated. There was Livrik, the ancient holy city on the south side of the pass, but beyond it no one ventured. Those were the wild lands, the ‘dark’ lands—the lands of the shadow. Her ancestors had stories about the twisted woods past the mountains. It was a place regular people didn’t go. Only the occasional folk hero from one of the older legends ever made the treacherous journey past the jagged snow-capped peaks and had adventures on the other side, but those adventurous would always be the particularly perilous sort, and they were stories full of strange things—full of monsters.
Which was silly, of course. There weren’t monsters. They were, after all, only stories. Folk beliefs were just a way for the ancient Yarvans to explain everyday, ordinary events in ways they could understand. That was a fact easy enough to see in the modern world. The mythical monsters and gods and even heroic supernatural powers were all just exaggerated accounts of probably very normal, certainly believable situations. Time had a way of turning normal things into fantastic. A sentence spoken by one person becomes a very different sentence when repeated a hundred people down the line. Yarva's history was beautiful, but the further back you went the more superstitious it was.
Not that she advocated for absolute modernity. She may have the critical thinking skills to see the legends as only legends, but she still loved them. Her mother raised her on the tales from the Ris’alan—the Yarvan’s oldest book of tales. Her native culture was varied and colorful and worth preserving, and that was precisely why she hated Tinaria so much. They came in with their ugly stone buildings and glitzers, paving over Yarvan history and turning it all gray for the profit of an empire they claimed was a republic—green, leaf-shaped Yarvan flags covered up by angular purple republic banners.
Tinaria had stolen Yarva’s liberty. It had made them pay for their incarceration with blood. That violence became a fact under Hyriz the Butcher when her grandfather was young. But now the cultural advancement threatened Yarva’s stories. For Ki, the memory of her mother reading those stories was the only one she had left. She wasn’t about to let that be stolen as well.
That’s what pushed her to join the resistance. With her mother gone, she was lost. Her father had done his best—maybe even more than his best. He had always sought to protect her—he kept her physically safe—but she had never been able to share the pain on the inside. That hurt wasn’t something he could save her from, not with how it had all happened. And besides, he had pain too—growing up she could see it every day, and he never seemed to be able to share it either.
So she didn’t tell him. She always made up a story when going to the rebellion meetings and he never found out. She had never joined officially, even though they asked her. Her father’s heart couldn’t take that—not yet. So she decided to enlist instead, gather intel from the inside, and do something to help them resist, even if that something wasn’t actively fighting. Though she did prepare for that. She practiced with a glitzer every day for hours, but there were other reasons for that too.
Ki shook the thoughts away. She didn’t like thinking about her mother, and she didn’t have time. Right now she needed to concentrate on the fact that the Yarvan monsters from the Forest of Athe were just legends. They weren’t real—they couldn’t be. That was logical.
But for some reason, as she walked quietly through the dark, oppressive woods, those thoughts didn’t make Ki feel any better. The logical part of her brain was trying to reassure her, but there was another part as well, and it was saying something altogether different.
It was making a point as well, and that point was that even if the stories were exaggerated, they did start somewhere. There were reasons they existed in the first place, and it was those reasons that made her listen extra carefully to the sound of the wind playing in the leaves of the trees. It made her extra quick to look in the direction of any small sound.
It made her notice her heart was beating faster than normal.
And maybe it was her mind playing tricks on her, but this side of the mountain also just felt different. It was like there was something deep in her bones telling her to get away from it. To leave, to find safety again.
It felt like she was a stranger here, and that there was something else, very, very old that was aware of that.
I’m being stupid, she thought to herself. And then, just to prove it, she let out an audible laugh. It came out quieter than she thought it would be, and didn’t sound as convincing as she planned. Also, after the echo of it fell away, the silence that followed felt even heavier.
As she pushed on, she couldn’t help remembering a very specific thing about the old Yarvan stories about heroes. They were different from other stories, in that after the hero went out on the adventure, word of them would come back home, but they never did.