11. Will to Power V

It was evening, and the moonlight cast its shadows.

Pria sneezed. She hugged the fur coat tighter, waiting for Reimallia. Then she heard it—a pounding of wooden floors. She hid behind a tree, nocked her bow, and watched.

The door slid open. Reimallia looked around, and then saw her. Pria loosed.

Cultivators, as much as she despised them, praised their supernatural senses. Reimallia seemed panicked, and out of place in that split second. She shouldn’t have been able to react, but as soon as she spotted the arrow her eyes widened to alert, and she tilted her head in that split second.

The second thing that proved they were truly different was their proclivity to turn to violence. Reimallia must have moved before her thoughts caught up to her. A threat, Pria thought. And eliminate that threat.

Two meters before the cultivator could reach Pria, she pulled on a rope hidden under the leaves and snow, pulling Reimallia feet up hanging under the tree. Pria then threw a rock underneath the cultivator, sparking it with another rock—soaked in oil. Fire lit up. Smoke dusted the air, and before Reimallia could move, she coughed.

She tried to speak but the smoke filled her lungs, and her strength as a cultivator diminished.

Pria watched silently, calmly, and counted to twenty. Reimallia opened her mouth and closed it, slowly losing consciousness. The fire had surrounded her, making it difficult to swat away.

Pria knelt, and looked down at Reimallia. “The silvers,” she said. “Where is it? Is it in your pocket?”

Reimallia shook her head. Pria circled the cultivator. It wasn’t there.

“Lady Pria! Let her go.”

The young master was standing by the door, one hand on his leg, visibly in pain. He shouldn’t have been able to walk just yet. It had only been a few hours. Somethind did happen inside.

There was no pocket of silvers here, the young master was somehow healed, and now Reimallia left looking disturbed. Something in the puzzle was missing.

Pria doused the fire with snow, then cut the rope that hung the cultivator.

Reimallia collapsed on the ground and began to hic and sob. “Young master,” she said, gesturing on the ground. “Might I ask you to provide an explanation?”

“I am just as confused as you are,” he said, staring at her. “Why she tried to steal my silvers, how and why you trapped a cultivator.”

“I’m a hunter,” Pria said simply.

Reimallia gasped for breath. She whispered, mostly to herself, “I don’t want to be… a cultivator anymore.”

Pria noticed it that instant. The smell of venom and poison and rot was gone. It surprised her, and very little things do. She turned to the cultivator, Reimallia, who was crying on the ground, powerless and now—qi wasn’t flowing through her. Life seemed to leave at her last breath, mixing with the wind and the chill and disappearing.

There was no cultivator here anymore. There was a girl, too young, and vulnerable. It was as if she reverted back to her mortality.

What are cultivators?

KAL SORVENN

Pria had taken her back to her quarters that night. And then, when the cultivator fell asleep, Kal and Pria discussed what happened. As it turned out, Reimallia had planned on leaving, and Pria wanted to stop her—and successfully too. She didn’t elaborate.

Neither did he. When Kal explained his situation, he talked about how healing oneself through souls, and it worked, but the accidental price was that Reimallia had been too involved in her memories—she couldn’t pull away, and rediscovery of that past revealed more than she would like.

“She’s not a cultivator. Anymore.” That was what Pria had told him. When he asked why, she said, “I can smell qi.”

“Is her condition permanent?”

She shrugged.

The next day, upon waking up, he found Reimallia in his room, standing at the foot of the bed. Her nose was red, her ears were red, and so were her eyes.

“Are you well?”

Without saying a word, she walked over to him and grabbed his arm. Nothing happened.

“Take me back,” she whispered. “Take me back there. Now.”

“I’m not a Teacher,” he said. “I can’t help you if you fall back down there again.”

“I want to see her again, you witless stick.”

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“No.”

She raised a hand, stopped, made a face, and then stomped off.

He raised his wounded leg. He had stopped bleeding, but it would take a couple more explorations into his soul to heal it fully.

He still didn’t know what Pria was thinking. Over the next week, Pria had attended to him and his injuries, but she spoke rarely, and when she didn’t wish to answer his questions, she remained as silent as a statue. It was irritating him at first, but he’d grown to like it. She was a woman of many things and much of her remained a mystery.

He had asked Pria for parchment, for which there was plentiful in the library. He used that, and whatever ink that was left, and had taken a habit to draft a human figure each night. His drawings were the only thing that kept him occupied. He hid them in the false bottom with the silvers. They were embarassing artworks.

Reimallia was still in distraught. She had found out she couldn’t cultivate anymore and lashed out in her room. He didn’t want to imagine the damage, though Pria had told him there was only a horror of broken bones and bloodied mess on the walls. At night, he could hear her weep.

And come the morning, she would walk into his room without knocking and demand that he take her back. He refused that offer, time and time again.

“You did this,” she had told him with tears in her eyes. “You stripped me of my cultivation! Was this your plan? To see if I would steal your silvers and escape? Give it back. Give it back!”

He wished he could. His only saving grace was that she didn’t attack him with a knife. He was, after all, the only individual at the moment that could reverse her “illness.”

At the strike first day on the second week since his injury, he could walk again. It had rained, and while rarely, droplets of water seeped through the ceilings in the hallways and the other rooms.

Kal healed faster now. The stitches were closing, and he trained on pacing around his room. And, as usual, he waited for the door to open. It did.

Reimaillia saw him, stared at his feet, and pointed behind her. “Come with me.”

She threw him a wooden bucket while she carried two on each of her hand. “You can walk,” she said. “You can work.”

Kal, now dressed in thick furs and gloves and boots, followed her outside, where they continued to walk toward the river. She was thickly covered now as well. She looked like a ball walking on stumpy two legs. Without her cultivation, she was more sensitive to temperature.

“Who are you anyway?” she asked.

“I just told you who I am.”

“Who were you before you transmigrated? An enemy of the empire?”

“Once,” he said.

She was restless now, and seemed to latch onto another topic. “I remember the Almorian Republic attacked the empire three years ago.”

“Three years?” At first it was a chuckle, then he was laughing.

“You’re an Almorian. You’re a demon. You sacrifice babies and unborn children to the altar to create abominations. You imitate gods by shaping sapient creations out of the blood and flesh of dead cultivators.”

“Is that what they told you?” It was more amusing than irritating. He decided he’d let go of pursuing her past, as awkward as her desire to transition the subject they may be. “Have I acted like these demons you speak of?”

“We’re all demons,” she said finally. “Cultivators, almorians, mortals, I don’t care anymore. Do you remember the monkey dragon we killed?”

“The wounds it left on my leg wasn’t lost on me.”

“I found a disturbing… thing.”

She told him about a little, black demonic creature that he failed to kill when he exploded all those silvers inside the monkey dragon’s mouth. There wasn’t much she knew, but she left it in the basement, and it began eating the flesh of the monkey dragon for sustenance. Kal would have to see it later.

The clouds enveloped the sky in a thick blanket today. There was no sun. Every breath was a chill, and Kal suffered at every step, but he was greatful to be able to walk out again. He had distracted himself drawing in secret, but that would never be enough.

“Was this the division of labor we talked about?”

She turned to him, then ahead. “I shall heat the baths and gather the water from the river. You will begin by cleaning the privy and sweeping the roof, which is in need of fixing. I can’t sleep with that innecessant dripping.” She let out a long sigh. “Can’t you… make me a cultivator again?”

“I remember Pria informing me that it was you who lost the desire to be a cultivator. You said it yourself, by the snow.”

There was silence for some time. They arrived at the wide river, but it was frozen over. The ice stretched and disappeared in the horizon. Kal watched it in amazement. “I’ve never seen a river this big. And frozen.”

“Were there rivers in your land?”

He took a moment to process all that she had said. “My land? Of course there are rivers. Where there are mountains, there will be rivers, and forests, and animals both harmless and dangerous. There are families as well, and children, if you haven’t noticed. And unlike animals, they don’t sprout horns on their head. Did you tell Lady Pria about who I am?”

“Pria is dutiful. I have no wish to embroil her in your politicking with the Sarnasia, though I hear your brother will be arriving here in the future.”

Art? No. This Lahrs’ brother. “I hope not anytime soon. Who is she? Lady Pria, a maid who bested you when you were a cultivator.”

“I would have won,” she reasoned. “She wouldn’t last more than a minute under different circumstances.”

“But she did win. And she wasn’t fazed when I saw her last. Lady Pria was surprisingly casual about all of it. And all she has to say was that she’s a hunter. Doesn’t that strike you as suspicious?”

He found Reimallia trying to balance herself on ice. “I’m not scared of her.”

“No doubt. Lady Pria certainly has talents of her own, and quite rare too. You can’t cultivate a callous sort of fearlessness from meditating. But the first time I saw her…”

The first time he saw her, he glimpsed a hint of fear in her eyes. Reimallia was looking at him now, studying him. “I want to know her better.”

She began to slide back when they heard a crack, and another, again and again until Kal shouted, “Don’t move!”

“This is it for me,” she was trembling now. She shut her eyes and stood very still. “Stripped of cultivation and died of a frozen heart seasons apart from her possibly betrothed lover.”

He stood at the edge of the river. “I admire your poetry at such a critical moment but can you drop your furs and lose all that weight?”

“And now he has the gall to call me fat. Fat.”

“Reimallia! This isn’t the time to be jesting.”

She giggled, but it wasn’t out of joy. Quite the opposite. “I lost everything. What have I left to offer the heavens?”

Kal felt lightning in him. “Don’t you want to find out who Lady Pria is? Before the end of the week, we will have known Pria as familiar as the rising and falling of the sun.”

She frowned, twisted her lip, an then, “I… I don’t know. Have you seen how deep this river is?”

She crashed down, and there was a splash, and Reimallia was gone. He wouldn’t be able to swim, not in this state. They would both drown if he did that. If she could somehow awaken as a cultivator once again, and there was always that slim possibilty, but…

The wind lapped, and the figure of a lithe woman, wearing nothing but clothes wrapped tightly around her chest and waist, so beautifully leaped into the ice-cursed river.