Donovan dreamed of the day his life changed. Wet stone and thick vines; the swish of his grass skirts; the pang of jealousy when he passed men in modern fashion. The chosen avatar of the jungle, of the Verdant resplendent, was to clothe and comport himself in the old ways: to eat only uncooked greens, to avoid all contact with forged metal, to wear reed skirts, to remain behind while the world marched ahead…
To debase himself before an empty altar.
His dream meandered through Deepbloom and arrived at the moldering archives beneath the Verdant ziggurat. There, scrolls whispered inconvenient truths: the Verdant a living, bleeding woman; a prehistory of plenty before the gods fell to warring; an accord of powers broken by hubris among the divine.
Paradise in ignorance; Eden before the fall.
He showed the scrolls to his elders, and they beat him for his nerve.
The jungle, they said without blinking, is the cradle of life and wisdom. Nothing so profane as a woman!
Fools who swapped knowledge for metaphor.
His dream skipped many years, boyhood to manhood, to the day when the threads finally converged. On that day, he gathered his courage, his rage, and his obsidian knife, and he descended to the gate of living vines that opened only for the scion.
He found the woman sleeping in the jungle’s center.
In dreams, he straddled her warm body and raised the dagger high.
Before the dagger could fall, an angry hand slapped him across the jaw.
Donovan grunted, slid sideways against his bindings, and blinked upwards at the tribunal.
She bled…
The manacles bound him to the cold, iron chair behind cold, iron bars. Beyond the bars, three judges read his sentence.
Like any woman, she bled…
Two temple warriors flanked his chair, batons held ready to beat him senseless again.
And in her body there was a trophy I was too stupid to take at the time…
He couldn’t quite remember what he said to provoke them at the start of this farce. Hopefully something worthwhile.
“…and your name and title are hereby forfeit for the murders on your head,” finished the jungle priest.
Fitting that he faced his death in the ziggurat that stole his life as a boy.
Deepbloom’s temple had not changed. A faint green light filtered through the canopy, casting the prison in an air of smothering calm. Outside, the monkeys hooted and the insects rustled, and water seeped into every nook and cranny.
“Do you have anything to say, nameless criminal, before the final verdict is announced?” the judge asked.
“Sure,” Donovan rasped, voice hoarse from two days without water. His mangled right arm had been forced behind his back, a source of unrelenting agony. “Give me my things, and I will let you live.”
According to Verdant law, a criminal’s instruments were to be present at trial. When the criminal met his fate, the instruments would be burned with his body. Thus, a number of interesting items waited on the wooden table: a diary, now worn from a hard journey; a topaz, gleaming with tired light; a sapphire, still bright as a lightbulb in its power; an emerald, gleaming like a star. A Lumian knife, too, still stained in blood.
“The emerald was waiting in her dead breast, you know,” Donovan explained, smirking. “The gods make these little trinkets the way a mother knits socks: something tucked away for a rainy day.”
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“Our blessed scion, fallen to a common thief…” The judge glanced away in disgust. “Your family was to care for the holy, and twice now you have shamed that legacy!”
“Would you like to know why?” the Redeemer taunted.
The door to the squalid cells swung open, creaking, to reveal a young warrior. He was bronzed and lithe, young and vacant-eyed. He wore his battle leathers, and he carried a six-foot spear with phoenix feathers beneath the head.
“Ah,” Donovan noted. “You’re out of time.”
The youth staggered like a drunk, focused through the haze, and stabbed the nearest judge in the stomach. Muttering and weaving on his feet, he wobbled across the room and brained the next.
The guards raced to match him, and there was a brief scuffle. Despite his delirium, the youth spun the spear through the tiny room with expert care, and the guards had only short clubs. With superior reach, the youth brought them down.
This was no surprise. The youth had been a renowned warrior before Donovan got to him, after all.
Soon the boy slumped to the muck before the cell, favoring his right arm. “I have done as you asked. Damn me, but I have obeyed. Lift this curse! These voices!”
“Release me,” Donovan ordered.
“They never cease…”
Donovan waited, letting his eyes project the authority his trembling arms could not.
“You must make them stop…” Shivering, the young man fetched the keys and unlocked the manacles. “Please.”
“You let them break your arm? Pathetic.”
“Make the voices stop…”
Donovan brushed past the youth, limping and wavering. He snatched the judge’s cup, drank feverishly, and felt the vertigo fade as blessed water hit his stomach.
“I cannot sleep or eat…I look at my hands and see only flesh…What are we? Where is the rest of me?”
“Yes, yes, such a bother. Hold this.” Donovan proffered the topaz. It was very light in his fingers, nearly spent.
The youth rested his hands upon the gem, shaking like a leaf.
“Return to the garden within,” he commanded. “As I have shown you.”
The ochre light misted free of the stone and settled onto the boy’s skin. It sank, flickering a moment through his veins…
Donovan snatched his hands away and rubbed his right arm. It grew no stronger with time, the damage to his muscles too deep. He struggled to touch his thumb and index finger, much less hold a cup. “Seek as I command, and you will be free of voices.”
He grew proficient with his left hand, and he picked up the murderous knife calmly.
“I stand among the darkened jungle, but all is quiet,” the youth recited. He stared with blank eyes into the far distance, his pupils gleaming the same color as the stone. “I see a path. I walk it. The leaves are written with wisdom I almost remember…”
“Recite it!” Donovan commanded.
“Something moves among the trees. Father Panther! He prowls the branches, golden eyes fastened on me.”
“Already?!” the Redeemer growled. He snatched the diary from the table and flipped quickly through the pages. “Heed my words. Focus on the leaves. Focus on this word: covenant. Covenant. The age before the gods warred. Covenant.”
The boy swooned on his feet. “Covenant. Graveyard. Air of salt, stink of betrayal. That which was once and longs to be again. They entrust her. They entrust her. They entrust her.”
“What power lingers there?” Donovan demanded, finger on runes he still scarcely understood.
“Father Panther speaks.”
“Ignore the damned cat! What of the graveyard? What power?!”
The topaz grim dimmer by the moment like a dream fading before the sun.
“Father Panther says you must not go to the place of mercy and judgement. Surrender woven Light and turn from this path, and the ocean will never find you.”
“Where is the graveyard?” he insisted.
“Air of salt, sky of grey. No memory, no remains. A place of sorrow…”
The topaz shattered, not into shards but rather a fine mist upon the young man’s fingers.
Only the youth remained entranced….
“Father Panther speaks for me.”
“And what does he say?” Donovan asked, adjusting his grip on the knife.
The boy opened his eyes, and they were a panther’s gold. “That I do not need to heed your poison words!”
Donovan stabbed, but the youth had been a renowned warrior. The youth caught Donovan’s wrist, and they fell together among the muck and the bodies. Their weapons fell away, and they clawed at each other like beasts, abandoning all pretense of civilization.
Donovan was maimed and exhausted; the boy was freshly wounded and delirious.
Still the boy managed to gain the upper hand, and he throttled the Redeemer with one good hand.
“No more!” the young warrior growled. “You will not sacrifice anyone more to the judgement you evade! The guardians watch, and they find you lacking!”
Stars burst before Donovan’s eyes. He slapped his left hand through the muck, questing, until his fingers felt the smooth shaft of a spear.
He bucked from the hips, twisted, and drove the spear into the boy’s side.
The boy stiffened, and Father Panther’s strength faded from his grip.
“For me…freedom…” the boy wheezed. He slouched backwards, touching the shaft in a bemused daze. “For you…what will remain?”
Donovan kicked the boy into the muck and staggered to his feet. “For all your talk of guardians and judgement, you bleed like anyone else.”
“Only gold survives the Black Gate…”
The boy slumped into the mud, one more on the pile of corpses.
The Redeemer leaned against the table, trembling.
“Air of salt…sky of grey…”
A badlands where nothing grew and no one lived.
“Ah. Of course.”
Donovan gathered his things and departed for the north. For his destiny and his due.