“So the Tachi isn’t the weapon of priests?” Seth asked, confused.
Jabari shook his head, bare hands deftly peeling a piece of apple. The man made the action seem as though he was carving a particularly venerable idol.
“Then why have I been doing all this for three months?” Seth pushed on. “I don’t even know how to use it, if we’re being honest with ourselves. It’s just—”
Jabari’s hands paused in their task and he spared Seth a look Seth couldn’t define. Regardless, Seth fell quiet. The fact that he was in the presence of someone stronger than a gold mage was becoming difficult to remember. Time was doing its best to lure him into a false sense of security. Three months of the man’s silent watchfulness was making him forget.
Since learning the purpose of his kidnaping, Seth’s fear of death had lifted. He didn’t think he was somehow special now; rarely was anything ever special to a priest. But he knew he wasn’t so easily expendable.
After the pain in his head in the woods, Seth had woken up to a dark night, carried by the scruff of his neck in the priest’s hand, as wild felines tend to carry their young. It was a behavior present in both earthly felines and soul beasts. Seth had stayed quiet through the journey and they’d moved till dawn before Jabari had put him down.
They’d been walking every day ever since. Every day for three months.
Every day since, Seth had drawn the long Tachi.
He would draw it at the crack of dawn, punishing himself gravely more than whatever tree Jabari would set him to. Countless hours would elapse before Jabari would stop him for a breakfast of pheasant. Always pheasant.
In truth, Seth couldn’t prove it was pheasant, having never tasted pheasant meat before. His only clue of its nature was his strange belief that its taste was what he believed pheasant would taste like. As for the length of time he practiced The Draw before breakfast, it was no more than two hours. But it certainly felt like more.
After their meal, they would resume their trip.
Every day Jabari would walk with even strides at a pace never too fast for Seth to keep up and never too slow for him to catch up.
Often times Seth would find himself making a game of it. Whenever the priest left prints—the man rarely ever left anything—he would mimic Jabari, placing one foot after the other in whatever footprints the man left behind. The difference in feet size did nothing to hinder this, and Seth made a game out of that too. Each time he would ensure he placed his foot at a spot of his choice, the middle, the edge, the end where the toes where, the beginning where the heels began. He knew the priest was always aware of his action, and since the man never complained, he took his pleasures where he could find them.
After all, he couldn’t sulk forever.
Dusk would find Seth suffering the adversity of a new tree. His arm would ache and his shoulder would throb. Each draw, never easier than the one before it, had since become his life. The eerie hiss of sharpened steel leaving a wooden scabbard no longer left him perturbed. But what worried him was how it was slowly edging on the path of addiction where it had once simply been habit. Yet, that worried him far less than his slowly growing acceptance.
It was as if he had succumbed, accepted his fate. He rarely ever fantasized about escape, not that he believed he would ever try it. The power of his kidnapper was dissuasion enough. But he was no longer playing with the fantasy. It was as though he’d accepted there would be no returning home. The promise of being a powerful soul mage guaranteed by being a priest played its part in it. Often times he would catch himself wondering what it would be like to be so powerful.
Seth did not like that.
During their trip, all of it spent on foot, walking like peasants unable to afford any form of transportation, Jabari would take the Tachi from Seth and secret it away into some place Seth, for the life of him, didn’t know. The disappearance of something so large caved his mind in the wondrous urge of unraveling a mystery. After a few days, he came to the educated conclusion that the man had a pocket marble.
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As large as an infant’s fist and sold in various aesthetic designs, pocket marbles weren’t rare, per say, but they were not the most common. Any soul mage with enough talent or experience or backing had one. It served as a storage space, holding more items than a bag comfortably could. Those were the large ones, holding unimaginable space. There existed smaller ones, though. There were aesthetically pleasing ones, tiny orbs no wider than an inch in circumference that held smaller spaces. These were fashioned into rings and bracelets and necklaces. And though they held smaller spaces, their prices didn’t differ so much from their larger counterparts.
Scientists and soulsmiths, the very ones who manufactured them, speculated that there was a form of space dilation hidden in the workings of the marbles as well as some authority over time. It was the reason it could hold so much and never change size, the reason perishable items lasted so long in it, despite any preservative runes.
That they weren’t sure, despite being at the heart of its creation, didn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Forty years into a world with reia and no one understood a third of the things they came across. They knew a material was capable of certain feats, but understanding how it achieved them was tantamount to understanding the concept of the existence of a religious deity; it was more gospel than science.
Seth found himself always grateful for the absence of the Tachi during their trips. While its weight was nothing significant, it continued to remain heavy in his hand. His hand was always sore mere moments after holding it, his body following soon after.
Still, it was more disturbing to find that his hand would start to miss its touch. He would reach for his side where it often was at the slightest disturbance from a particularly noisy shrub to a disturbingly ugly bird.
After their first month together, Jabari told Seth the reason he’d taken him from his family. Seth had suspected long since but it was a requiem in a funeral to hear it from the priest.
“We are going to the seminary,” Jabari said one quiet afternoon while they walked and Seth made a quiet game of his foot prints. “There you will learn what it means to be a priest.”
Daunted, yet unsurprised by the revelation, Seth asked, “Does that mean I’ll have to do things like abstinence and fasting, like all the other churches?”
Jabari shook his head in response.
“What of our god?” Seth went on, unraveling age old mysteries worn around priest like a particularly thick cowl. “Do we serve the bleeding goddess, or the undying wraith? Or are we just secret agents for the catholic church?”
The last one was a personal suspicion, of sorts. There were rumors that the catholic church had its own secret assembly of souled priests who took on the title of exorcists. They slew soul beasts where they had once fought demons, metaphorical or not. This suspicion was one Seth stood behind, amongst countless others. The catholic church did have a history of honing their own soldiers, after all.
Jabari’s response was uninterested. It reminded Seth of every time he’d ever said something not particularly smart to Jonathan when he was littler.
“You should have no interest in gods,” Jabari told him.
“Why?” Seth asked.
“Because they have no interests in you.”
Seth saw the logic in this. Gods, he believed, were a concept of human ideology, one that had grown wider, gaining grander popularization than it had in the world before reia. There had been major religions then and the less popular ones had all but faded into myths. Now, there seemed a group with one new god after the other popping up from every crevice.
The only reason the church of the bleeding goddess stood out was because they had registered with the government and shared some kind of alliance with the Barons. Still, there were stories that claimed there was a secrecy they hid from the world. But that was the way with the people; should anything or anyone grow to be powerful enough, there would be motes and dusts of secrecy garnished in every story.
After the first month of drawing the Tachi, Jabari set Seth to a new task. He did not cease the draw but did it less. In occupation of the time found in the lesser demand, Jabari gave him the task of walking. Apparently, he had been walking wrong his whole life. Considering how Jabari walked, Seth tried not to take offence at the insinuation.
Jabari walked like a man the world could not ignore and yet cared nothing for it. Even his movements were a mirror of his walk. Everything was slow, purposeful. There was a regal presence to him, less like a king amongst his subject and more like a man within his home. Each step he took always landed mute. His cassock, rustling even in the wind, made no sound. Seth attributed the latter to the possibility of one or more stitching of runes hidden in it. There existed neither cloth nor material that made no sound whatsoever when it moved. And he doubted any material existed so black the sun couldn’t shine upon it properly. At least, none he’d ever heard of, even in rumors.
“Don’t keep your feet so close together,” Jabari would say sometime within every lesson when Seth thought he was standing as instructed. “I understand you believe they are a pair simply because they come together, but they are not. They are individual parts; they do not always have to work together.”
Like all the things Jabari said on the few occasions he chose to speak, Seth understood barely half of it. What was the point to having two of them doing the same duty if they were not to work together? This and growing questions flooded his mind as he stood bare feet every time. But he knew better than to ask them. If the man who’d killed a bunch of Silver soul mages and a Gold said the sky was a figment of his imagination, then it was.
Seth was a child, not stupid.