Teng sat under the willow trees by the creek, just him and Delia. Under them was the grassy ground, above them the starry sky.
Pale moonlight illuminated the night. Delias scent was of lavender and thyme.
They sat and talked for a long time about things of no importance, ordinary things, things of earth and forest, of life and love. The rest of the world seemed like the reflection of a pond, still and unmoving, where only they existed amidst the silence.
Then Teng heard wings from afar, a lone beat from whence there had been only silence.
Delia’s smile slipped, and her mouth formed a round shape as she puckered her lips. She didn’t speak, but Teng heard a soft cooing from her. It teased his ears like no other.
Time began to flow, rings forming on the before undisturbed water, and Delia’s eyes turned blue so deep Teng could drown in them.
“Come to me…” she said, but it was not her voice.
Then, like water scattering across stones, the scene dissolved and Teng’s eyes snapped open, inhaling breath like he’d been without forever. He swallowed hard and looked around. The walls of the hut were as brown as they had been when he went to bed yesterday eve, the smell of earth and sweat and closed space as thick and familiar as always.
His mother lay sleeping, wrapped in two or three blankets, her chest rising and falling in an even and seemingly ponderous rhythm. His father’s fur mat was empty, his blankets in disarray.
“Must be out hunting.” Teng muttered as he lifted his own blanket, stretched and headed out in the unwelcoming and bitter cold.
The frost of early dawn covered the ground and huts, like resin on hide and skin, and crunched beneath his bare feet as he walked. He tiptoed around the sleeping village until he got to the edge under the old hemlock. There, he pulled down his hide wraps and peed, making a yellow stain in the white crust.
Once done, he returned to the hut, making as little noise as possible. He grabbed his newly made pouch, glossy and gleaming in the light of the dying embers of the fire. Seeing his mother, wrapped in her blanket, he decided restoke the fire before leaving the hut.
As he traversed the quiet, slightly chilly landscape, excitement and unease bubbled and bundled up together inside of him. The dream was still vivid, or had it been a nightmare? His breath misted in the morning air as he scaled the cliff.
“I have all day to figure you out.”
Teng pulled out the feathers and the bones from beneath the rocks under which they were hidden. He’d thought about what to do for quite some time now, and had decided upon testing different things to see if he could make the essence in his body respond the way he wanted to do.
First, he put all but one feather in the pouch before cinching it and hiding it in the wrap that covered his groin, ensuring nothing could fall out. He then stood up and gazed out.
The wind tugged at his hair, carrying with it the scents of distant pines and wild earth. Beneath him, the world stretched wide and deep.
He held the feather out in front of him, letting it catch the first glimmers of dawn. The light played along its edges, making it glow with that deep, ethereal blue he’d come to know, almost as if the feather was drinking in the sky.
He could feel the weight of the world below and the boundless stretch of sky above, and for a moment, he felt small yet bound to something far greater.
Here, balanced between earth and sky, he felt the presence of the sky spirit more strongly, as though the feather were a link between him and the vastness that shaped his world.
Teng looked down at the feather and let everything else fall away, becoming engrossed in the lines, shapes and patterns until his awareness disappeared completely.
His essence began to move inside of him, the butterflies flapping their wings. Then, he put the feathers on the ground, and tried to keep the feeling. It lasted for about a couple of deep breaths before it slowly subsided.
Not to be disheartened, Teng took it back into his hand. But instead of looking at the feather, he traced his fingers and palms across its soft surface, closing his eyes. It tickled slightly, but he tried to not think about it. He kept tracing each line, each path each strand took from bottom to the top.
He creased his brows, there was meaning here, in this pattern. Once his eyes were closed, he could feel how the lines divided then returned, like how water fell from the sky only to return the sky spirit as mist.
His essence moved, and he willed it along the path the lines of the feather traced. Streams of essence left his belly, dividing into small slivers of blue-tinged light to course though his body, merging only to divide again. He could see it with his eyes, yet at the same time, not. It was as if existed both within and outside his body.
Each time the slivers merged into streams the collisions caused them to gain the speed they lost from traveling through his body as they once again fell away from each other.
It took about a hundred breaths for the essence to move once throughout his entire body, and it had not diminished at all.
Teng did not quite understand what was going on with his essence, but as it traveled though his body he felt refreshed, alert, quick and powerful all at once. He kept up the movement of his essence for another hundred breaths and tried to memorize the patterns and lines, how they moved, when they collided.
Burning the paths into his mind as firmly as he could do, he let go of the feather and focused all his concentration on following the paths.
Teng made it about ten or fifteen breaths before the image in his mind collapsed, and opened his eyes with a gasp.
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“Is this what you want to teach me, little fellow? To… move my essence?” Teng muttered to himself. He had never heard of moving essence except for when essence entered his body from flesh, marrow or blood and it became a part of him, gifted by the spirits.
At least, he knew not of anyone in the village who could do this. He had always thought it was just meant for strengthening the body over time, no more.
Then again, when the stars stood high and all the children should have been tucked inside their mats and blankets, Teng had once overheard a few of the older villagers murmur and whisper about mystical beasts around a campfire.
Beasts that he had never seen in the valley.
Beasts as large as big oaks and as fearsome as the falling thunder on a rainy day.
Beasts that could use and manipulate essence, whatever manipulate was.
Was the blue bird one such beast? It hadn't been fearsome nor big. Sure, he had been unable to crack its neck even when he twisted as hard as he could, and it wasn’t normal for a small bird to possess such strength and hardness. But, so mystical?
Another question came to his mind. Was manipulate the same as moving? Was this the way the blue bird, if it ever could, used essence? Would he be able to… manipulate essense?
Teng sighed as he looked down on the feather before him. The morning was clearing and the frost was being melted by the appearing sun in the cloudless sky.
He looked up, trying to gleam an answer to the mysteries before him but was met with silence from the spirit and a burning in his eyes for trying.
“I have nothing else to do anyway until I need to meet up with Kai and the others, so might as well keep trying to figure it out,” he thought.
He held the essence moving for longer this time, though unsure of how much longer since he’d stopped counting after three hundred breaths. The movement felt more natural now, a part of him.
Teng likened the essence movement as thrusting, the momentum as the essence collided created enough speed for it to split apart and merge anew.
How it worked, he had no idea, for as far he knew, movement didn’t simply make more movement from nothing. If he threw a stone, it would bounce one, maybe twice, but not keep bouncing forever. This was the law of the mountain spirit.
Or was it like that? He had not paid much attention as the grandpas and grandmas explained how the world worked when he was younger. Either way, he was sure his constantly dividing and merging essense didn’t follow the natural laws of the spirits.
“Could essence be free of the mountain spirit’s law?” Teng’s thoughts spiraled with curiosity and a small thrill. Was it part of the spirits yet bound to something greater?
Perhaps essence was outside the laws of the spirits, he mused, but that was at the same time impossible; for essense was a part of the spirits, a piece of them that would one day return whence it came. Right?
A part of him really wanted someone to explain all this to him, but he felt as if telling others of the blue bird and its feathers and bones would be a betrayal of sorts, a breaking of kinship, of honor between him, the blue bird and the sky spirit above.
Time passed as Teng studied how his essense flowed and ebbed, and mused about what was and what was not and what could be. He had changed his view, and would more aptly describe his essence as rolling a stone down a slope; the more it traveled, the more it seemed to gather a life of its own, breaking and reforming in a rhythm he couldn’t quite put a finger on.
When it was time to go meet his friends and train with the branches, he could hold onto the image of the paths and lines in his mind.
As he climbed down the cliff, he moved his essence in accordance with this image. His mind was sharp, his eyes keen. Protrusions were quick to find, footholds easy to reach. His legs and arms didn’t burn as they normally did when he ventured down the cliff. His breaths were easy and calm, not ragged and short.
Teng stood just past the village’s edge, letting the wind brush against him, soft as worn fur, steady as a river’s flow. The air felt heavier here, thick with the language of things that didn’t need words—scents, sounds, little tastes of life drifting across the village like dappled sunlight on leaves. The wind carried them all, murmuring secrets he hadn’t heard before.
Was this an effect of moving his essence in accordance with the feather?
First came the smell of earth, rich and damp as if freshly dug, mingling with the ashy scent of burned wood. Someone had stoked a morning fire, perhaps Grandmother Dari, whose hut always smelled of charcoal and crushed roots.
The smoke mingled with something thicker—the scent of marrow-broth, warm and clinging to the air. He could nearly taste the fat, heavy on his tongue, like the broth his mother made when his father returned empty-handed from hunting.
Then, faint but clear, the tang of tanned hide drifted over, the sharpness of freshly cured leather mixed with the musk of beast-skin. The smell wrapped around him like his father’s hunting wraps, still marked by the life of the animals from which they’d come.
Somewhere nearby, a hunter was removing his gear, scraping hides smooth, stretching the leather with care. He pictured Delia’s warm and smooth hands pressing down on the tough hide, each touch precise, each breath patient, helping her father prepare a fresh kill.
The wind shifted, and with it came laughter—high and soft, like a stream trickling over stones. The village children, already awake and scurrying through the frosted grass, their bare feet leaving small, temporary prints on the ground. He pictured them chasing shadows and darting between huts, little faces bright, their voices rising and falling like birds calling out in the trees.
Beneath their laughter, lower voices hummed, the kind only elders had—rough as tree bark, slow and solid as rocks pressing deep into the earth. They gathered near the fire pit, speaking in tones that settled heavy in the air, like the dense smoke from drying meat.
He couldn’t hear the words, but the weight of their voices was enough, filled with talk of hunts, of hunger, of the endless stretch of forest that lay dark and watching at the village’s edge, of fears and outsiders and tough times.
The wind shifted again, bringing a different kind of scent, bitter and sharp, like crushed pine needles. His mother’s hands came to mind, the way she ground plants into pastes, her palms stained green and brown, her fingers quick as a bird’s beak. She used this for his father’s sore back, her face set in that familiar crease of concentration. Her hands smelled of herbs and dirt and something else, something that was hers alone.
Then came a scent he knew well but rarely noticed—the smell of stone and crushed grass. It was the elders’ hut, where smoke rose into the blue sky, carrying the smell of dried leaves and old bones.
The elders sat there when night fell, their voices soft, their chants falling like the rain that pounded against the ground, sinking deep. It was an old smell, heavy with age and stories that only they carried, too heavy for anyone young as him. And yet, he understood, for the wind told him.
Teng felt each scent and sound settle within him, firming him. This was his village, his people, and each scent the wind brought him felt like a piece of them, filling him up, making him larger than himself. The wind began to calm, drifting slowly to a quiet. He stood, breathing it all in, rooted to the spot, feeling his feet planted firmly on the ground, tied by the invisible threads of each scent and sound to the village he called home.
Then he stepped into the village.
He knew he was no longer a mere child, even if he had not gone through the ceremony to become an adult. At that moment, he swore a silent oath to the spirits that he would do anything to protect this place. For this was his home, his family, his people.