JAKANNES

Map of Newnettan Monopoly Provinces: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9uDqqoCeB_TSjhTeDJGcWRORXM/view?usp=sharing

Ratman illustration: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9uDqqoCeB_TaUFiQkV3aUhJOGM/view?usp=sharing

Garjian illustration: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9uDqqoCeB_TYXV6N1NrT1ZQVUk/view?usp=sharing

Pronnounced: "Ja-kahn-z"

JAKANNES

“Though want may be vanish and vanish, purpose may yet remain.”

—Senior Dreamer Nyareziker

PART ONE

The Newnettan Provinces are in conflict. But this man, Jakannes, has no family left. His father was first to die, while the boy was only eight. Even now, nothing comes to mind when he hears the word “father”. Nor can he remember the father’s name, after whose death Jakannes declared to himself and anyone who might’ve listened that even though his father was gone, his mother was still around.

One rainless night, atypically hot by south Newnettan standards, their home caught fire owing to a stray candle being mysteriously knocked off balance, his mother trapped within walls collapsing and beams falling, a roaring furnace there was no way to escape. Her name was Enne. Young Jakannes, only ten, heard her wailing, not in pain, but because no one could help. Angelic aunt Mali covered his ears, but he still heard it all behind cupped hands, made to sound hollow and far, like a memory before the real one even had time to form. Mali, whether he liked it or not, became his undying bastion of protection.

Pneumonia or something like it crept into her lungs just over a year later. She passed away, choking, face swollen violet and black. Jakannes still wonders what he should have done other than stand to dumb attention. His sister Respanda, with sympathetic sibling eyes, told him there was nothing that he — nothing anyone — could have done. She made it her daily duty to remind him until by gradual increments he at least seemed to understand, seemed to look up rather than down. Together they worked on their parents’ farm with daily vigour, reaping, growing, building up — until she grew fatally ill. Her eye sockets sagged, mouth slackened enough to hinder speech, bodily pain so great she sweated herself into dehydration, no end foreseeable, daily despair, at one stage even leading to suicidal contemplations. But she recovered by the graces of things unseen, best left alone and unquestioned. From then on, it was her daily duty to remind Jakannes not to worry, that she was never going anywhere — see? That she’d been saved, that good things do happen, that they would keep alive, the two of them in joint effort, the last memory of their parents, their land. For the final time, with any luck, he began to gaze level with the horizon again, to meet its height, his eyes searching somewhere into the future, someplace far from both the present and the past — something he hadn’t dared to do since a time he liked not to remember.

Respanda was mauled to death one morning thanks to two failed warhounds on their way to a decommissioning plant having slipped off their chains and ripped her up just outside the front door as she was on her way to town, thinking the colours of her clothes were the colours of the enemy. The dogs were then decommissioned even earlier than planned, as if that could provide anything similar to recompense. There was a burial of Respanda, and Jakannes was ‘compensated’. But the whole thing was empty, and so was his soul, now.

For a few slow years Jakannes lived in solitude, more alone each day, going grey far too early, not only in his hair but in the colour of his skin. Out of nowhere, he met the woman who was to become his partner. He was delivering produce to the town depository; she was there to receive it, weigh it, and mark it into the town’s inventory. They talked, and they remembered each other’s faces from his mother Respanda’s burial — she’d been there as a mutual friend. Over time, and repeated trips to the inventory, she seemed to grow open to him, so he let himself dare to return the feelings of excitement he felt towards seeing her. It did not take long for them to discover she was with child. Jakannes did not know what to do. So he took a radical leap of faith and tried to be happy, just to see what would happen.

Standing together upon an outlook one midday — cliff sweeping down and away at their feet, the local township laid far beneath and behind them like a playset, flat as paper and distanced in aqua haze — they finally decided on a name for the child, together. And “together” was its meaning, in an old Cyronic dialect her immigrant parents used when she was still small, clinging as they did to anachronisms lest they blow away on the currents of time.

The accident happened when Jakannes was turned away. He went to get a water flask from a mule they’d purchased recently to carry produce from the farm to the town and back. It was snorting by a tree, fly-blown and complacent. It happened when he came back, when she was putting her arms out to feel the breeze whip her dress like a sail, white cloth billowing before a backdrop of blue, a lurch of wind a little too strong — she slipped back on a loose rock and kicked her feet helplessly as she fell off the edge. A fluttering trail of white vanishing, leaving only blue sky.

Gone. No one found her. Not until two days later when the body was found mangled, dress darkened with dust and soil, skin purple and broken, blood gone black under the sun.

And so it had happened once again. He felt no surprise. Jakannes did not look down, this time round; instead he looked forward. But the sun in his eyes had set at last as he stared unfocused into a point of triangulation in infinity, no end in sight.

The farm slowed down. Livestock grew underfed and thin through the year, the young bleating at his door at night for attention, which their parents had not the energy to give. Crops sagged, weeds jumped high in revelry, days became greyscale and clouded.

On a whim one morning, he abandoned the farm. Didn’t even sell it, just walked out the door and with the mule rigged and encumbered, thinking he would search for a new life. He became a road-worker. He built good roads, he built bad roads. Rushed roads, broken roads, sad unfinished roads. Highways and pathways through the lands with a team of twenty to forty men. Got into fights often. Chipped one tooth and got another knocked back by a fist. Living always on the road and by cooking-pot fires by night, he saw the lands and the oceans and the lakes. Hills and valleys. Horizon-reaching marshes, hot and wet, methane in the air, filling your nose, searing it with the hot reek of  things dead. He developed a talent for suppressing vomit. By the age of thirty, he quit when he came close to killing a man named Hacca over some meatless, half-sincere joke which only wounded his already withered pride. He carried what was left of his self on shoulders thin and heavy from living through so much death. Jakannes came to decide that he hated people, as such, and in particular groups of them.

After stealing a liveable portion of funds from the company safe, he journeyed back to his hometown. The house was still standing by the time he arrived. I did not greet him so much as ignore him in silent protest. The plank and stone walls were cold and bare, not overrun as such — the house never needed him, anyway. He’d never really been gone. But outside, in the fields, the prairie was in utter weed-thickened desolation, nature having slunk back into place. Foxes, cats. No hens or sow, fencing busted through in places, soil unplowed, a community of geese he’d never owned having settled down in a naturally formed dam. He went to shoo them off but gave up when they merely spread around him like he was repellant, and decided they may as well stay.

Slowly, and with a regret he wasn’t yet sure he fully felt, he attempted to rejuvenate what was left of the farm. He generated a minor flow of productivity, eventually. But there was a persistent sense of being underwhelmed that sat under his sternum and weighed on his stomach. Thankless produce, more effort put in than returned, no reason for this, no meaning to be found up above when he dared to search, not in the clouds, only grey, never even lined in blue, reflecting the sky like they used to— did they ever? He thought maybe he remembered something like it…

So he became a freelance travel escort. A job. He escorted anybody who paid the price, across whatever border, whatever wild place, between any maze of mountains. And still, his self, broken into little pieces and killed moment by endured moment, death by witnessed death, could not be given — not to others, not even to himself. Jakannes was contemplating quitting, joining the military or the Frontier Guard. Maybe a cult. Or something worse. Anything that would kill him. Something to do the deed for him, since he couldn’t even fully acknowledge his own life was there to be terminated. At one point he nearly committed the worst crime he could come up with, just to see if he could get away with it. To find out how it would feel to feel again, if he even felt anything at all. And if he didn’t, then at least the punishment would be so severe he’d die out of whatever trauma it left him with.

But then there fell a night, a fate-heralding dimming of daylight in which the sun did leave the sky differently, that afternoon. The nail-clipping of white moon in the blackness swarming with stars above the tree canopy did overthrow the sun. Only then did Jakannes accidentally find, somewhat against his will, some final, tricksterly-laughing residue of hope.

A woman named Varllee with a battered body and crooked shoulder was travelling with him. She’d paid for his wilderness escortship services across the border from Torlonde-Siva to Sidiel.

‘What for?’ he’d asked, without pretext or reason to. Asking had always been against his policy. ‘You goin’ there for the leather trade? The produce? Place is a bad spot to be in, just now, state sanctioned starve-out of that citadel they say.’

She just answered vaguely, so vaguely he could barely make it out; something about how she wanted to start a new life.

Jakannes had asked more.

By the time twilight filled the sky, he’d started a fire just near the edge of a clearing in the woods, fairly standard procedure, so as to be near cover from any rain that might come by surprise, as it did from time to time. They sat across the fire from one another, looking at each other through the blaze. This woman, her name Varllee, told him something then, from where she sat beyond the flame. Jakannes himself lay reclined on his travel bag twirling two pebbles in his hand, the stones going round and round, gliding over each other in smooth oscillations to tick and clack as they slipped across each other. And so Varllee said her words.

Jakannes stared at her from across the fire. For a moment, it was… as if he remembered what life was, or could have been. Her. Ethereal, unreal figment. She had wide cheekbones like that, too. And hair thrown to one side, just like that. He stopped swishing the pebbles. He clutched them tight. Finally he asked, ‘What do you mean you’ll “never die”?’

No response.

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‘Everyone dies,’ he told her. ‘Ye can’t just “not die”.’ He rolled the pebbles in his hand. ‘Everyone has to die,’ he said again.

Just like his father. His father had died.

‘Not me,’ Varllee said.

And his mother, too. Fire had digested her, cackling at what it was doing to her melting, crisping body.

‘Not me’, Varllee said again.

‘But how?’ He asked. Then his aunt had died, her lungs all black, filled with anything and everything but air. ‘Why?’ he asked again.

Warhounds ripping his sister apart.

‘I just will not die. I’m immortal.’

His love, with child, was not stood against the blue sky any longer. How?

Varllee remained silent for a time. Jakannes could feel her watching him.

‘You really want to know?’

Jakannes sat, remembering his gone love. He shut his eyes against the memory of her. He saw nothing, for a moment, pure as silence. But into the blackness behind his eyelids, her image phased forth uncalled for, the void singling her out among the wreck of all thought, against the dark, in silhouette, flowering against his will into clear portrait; strong, beautiful edges, colours, all pressing forth to squeeze into his soul and melt all over it, her eyes expunged out of then back into now where she did not even belong, only to convince him, tease him, and then leave, the dust of it all sighing back slowly to the ground.

He opened his eyes and looked for something else to see instead, something real. He stared as hard as he could, not at the fire so much as directly into it, until his eyes were hot and dry, like stones swollen with grit in his sockets. He could feel sweat collecting at the corners of his temples. A phrase he remembered, tuned by her voice, drifted towards the ears of his heart from memory-space, and he let the pebbles fall from his hand. The world tipped, and the ground turned, he put a hand on the ground to steady himself, his stomach coiling corewards in shrinking spirals, in his head a storm of roaring, swirling and curling and twirling and lashing and thrashing, and from the furnace rose a scream, screeching deep black from inside itself bending in and out, around itself and twirling up and out and over into the sky in umbrellas of dark eruption as its sound soared far up and up and out and more out and down around inside his ears to snake through his veins, so solid to stop his heart from—

Jakannes breathed.

The woman, Varllee, sat on the other side of the fire, expression unmoved. What had she seen? She looked too much like her. Jakannes shifted so the fire blocked her face and he could no longer see her.

She sat there. Had not moved or seemed to notice a thing. And still, she seemed to be watching.

‘What?’ he said. His chest felt small and tight. He forced air into it.

‘Nothing at all’, she replied.

‘You aren’t immortal,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be so stupid. It ain’t no way you can be.’ He felt around in the dirt for the two pebbles he’d dropped. His fingers found their smoothness, and he picked them back up.

‘Oh I am,’ she assured. ‘Anyway’n, how can you know I am not?’

And to that, there seemed to be no immediate reason. So he listened for more, expecting to laugh at whatever he heard.

Realising he was waiting, she began to explain. ‘Twenty three years ago or sometime then I fought a bear, or something shaped like one. I lived, it died. Ten years ago a tree fell on me, crushed my chest. Tree crumbled. It’s still there. Seven years ago I think I was swept downstream when I fell into a vein of rapids. Got wrecked up on the rocks. That’s why my arm and shoulder’s crooked. It set like that. Lungs filled up with water. Should have drowned. But I didn’t. That’s when I realised I’d been breathing without needing. So I stopped. Breathing. And I’m still alive. Last year a fox bit into my face. The scar on my cheek. Lost a lot of blood. I Lived. Broke the fox’s spine. Just a few months ago someone shot me with an arrow. Kept running. Pulled it out. I’m… alive, I suppose.’

Jakannes frowned and tried to make words.

‘I’m not joking on you,’ she added. ‘It’s all real. Breathing to me is unnecessary.’

‘Absolute shit. Prove it to me.’

‘I have been. Ever notice me breathing?’

‘What? I don’t know… shit, I don’t watch if people breathe or not. I sh’d report you to the Gauntlet Council for, for deceit and con-artistry, for being a shit-breathing liar—’

‘I don’t have to eat either,’ she claimed.

Jakannes sneered. ‘Yes ye do. Don’t try this on me now, I seen you eat. Don’t be stupid. You think I’m stupid. Do you think I am stupid?’

‘I only eat for pleasure, or what approximates it. Food can taste nice.’

‘Prove it.’

‘Okay. Watch me. I won’t need to eat from now on. See, I’ll prove it.’

Jakannes found nothing else to say. They were only a day from the border to Sidiel, and at the first step onto the Sidielish trade highway, funds would go from her pocket into his, and they would part.

Suddenly he stood up. He brushed dirt off. Massaging his forehead, he said, ‘I’ll get some more wood.’

The burn still strong, he left the aura of firelight and stepped through the ring of overgrowth and walked nowhere in particular. For a moment he pretended to wrench branches from trees in case she was watching him, but once he was far enough, he stopped. Not the sound of the fire did crackle through woods, and only the cricketed silence under the black-leaved canopy did sigh around his head, the splitting cracks of brittle twigs underfoot. He sat down against a trunk and let the cold night air filter under his clothes, over his hairs, and as it wrapped ever closer around him, he slouched. Under the weight of her. He hung his head and cradled it with his hands. A terrible weight gave way — mental stilts snapped weak within him as a top-heavy load of despair tumbled down to hang off his shoulders and pendulum-swing to thud against a swollen soul. He might have moaned, but who would have heard? The ears of tiny midnight lives might have pricked, but no eyes could watch, not without despair. Unwanted images breezed through his mind. But they were only images. Vague impressions of what he once had. What he had, all dead. Dead death dying, all of them dead. They were all died to death, as dead as dead can be dead, in all languages, all kinds of dead, and he was dying also.

Jakannes looked up in a sudden surge of alarm. He was dying. He stood up, dying.

Dying, he turned and ran back to the camp, heart thudding closer to death, beat by beat, sticks snapping, tripping, hands grazing as they broke fall after fall, raw and stung.

‘How!’ he yelled, breaking through the bush, slowly dying, grabbing her by the wrists. ‘How? How is it? Tell me now, how?’ He shook her. ‘How?’

Varllee recoiled, tried to push him away. ‘What do you want?’ she managed to say through being shaken by the man.

‘Tell me how!’

Her pupils had restricted, serious and small in the whites of her eyes — undying white, he saw, undying in their disgust as he kept shaking and screaming at her: ‘How? How? How?’

‘You’re mad!’ Varllee spat, struggling. She tried to look into Jakannes’ eyes, but they were either too terrible, or nothing like human, just savage and desperate, so she looked away. After a moment, she relaxed and sighed, undying. She shut her eyes and shook her head, which was never to die. Jakannes grew quiet.

The atmosphere around them was all stunned silence.

Which she eventually, carefully, broke. ‘How am I immortal, do you mean?’

Jakannes shook her arms.

‘Alright, alright. Let go.’

The man, the soul, seemed to return to his body. He took his hands off her wrists. Looked at his own hands, at how they were dying. He sat back on his haunches and seemed to come to some dark conclusion. But Varllee remembered, now, that this was only his natural expression, a stone-set look of robbed hope by default. He stood up and, like a scolded child, returned to his side of the fire. He sat back down, lay back against his rucksack and resumed his act of something like aloofness.

But the orange blaze was sawing at the air — it would die, in time, just like him. Jakannes conceded to exist, merely, for a while, slowly dying through it all.

It was quiet but for the crickets.

He muttered something, finally. But it was to the fire.

‘You say something?’ Varllee asked.

‘Just tell me,’ Jakannes told her. ‘Just tell me. I have to know, need to, just…’

‘… Fine then’, she said.

Jakannes waited.

She decided to toy with him, see what he’d do. ‘It’s supposed to be my secret. Why do I have to tell you?’

Jakannes said nothing.

‘Alright. Okay. Fine. Ready? Go find the Monolithian mountains. There’s a holy site there, I think. There’s stuff there called blue-life, in the mountains. In, inside, I mean proper inside, in their undergrounds. Their caves…’ She’d stopped, as if that were all she had to say.

‘What else?’ He asked.

‘You eat it.’

‘What. It’s food?’

‘No. It’s rock. Ore, like mineral ore.’

‘… And you eat it?’

‘Or rub it into your blood. Or drink it, if you can make it watery.’

‘You did this?’

‘No.’

‘What? Then how—’

‘I’m not telling you. It’s my secret.’

‘Then how—’

Varllee sighed. ‘Go to Elsasta, and find Aese Asheel. Go to the Backdoor on Tarn Street. He can tell you everything. More, at least.’

‘Uh. Who?’

‘Aese Asheel. He knows me.’ Varllee sniffed and shifted around a little. ‘Tell him about me, and he’ll know.’

‘Why won’t you just tell me?’

Varllee made a loud sigh. ‘Because I don’t want to.’

‘...you did all that?’

‘No. Well. How about you decide for yourself? And go talk to Asheel.’

‘But I have to know—’

‘Well, now you do.’

Jakannes was about to narrow his eyes and tell her she was a cryptic lying bitch, and that she should stop it before he cut the trip short, but he didn’t. He stopped short, the words coming together in his throat only to intersect, tangle, or miss each other and scatter into the realm of the unsaid. Lost, gone. And now, as he began yet again to feel the encroaching lapse, at the dusty window pane of his mind, there went past his unwanted beloved. The image of her, his beloved, his beloved image. He slouched into the earth and shut his eyes, but there came again that ghostly pendulum weight to strike hammer blows against a brittle will to live. Jakannes did not speak to Varllee again.