sub-genres: romance, mythology, tragedy, betrayal
content warnings: none

This short story is one of many from the world's Holy Anthology and recounts the mythology behind the Ametjas dynasty, which Kiet briefly refers to in the last half of The Courtesy of Kings. This is a sample of the full story, which is free for my tier 1+ patrons to download, or available as a pdf e-book through the link in the in-line comment.

★ THE AMETHYST BLADE ★

In the later years before the first of the gods chose to depart, a great force had begun to sweep across the east. It rose like a sandstorm under a blistering sun: slowly at first, but steadily growing, thicker and thicker until the whole land was choked under its heat. Village after village, from one hamlet to another, it gathered without purpose or plan; like balls of snow rolling into one giant power down the slopes of a vulnerable mountain.

Greed, Envy, Fury ... the spirits had bred beyond immeasurable control, for the humans loved and fed them just as much as they loved and fed the humans, and so they lived and prospered whilst all that surrounded them withered slowly into a wasteland.

These spirits had every right to the land as much as every deity and every human and every other thing both living and dead; so the gods allowed them, for they were necessary, even while their numbers grew.

But Ranyu was few of the first to notice.

Her Purpose was to maintain balance over the earth, so every day she felt the weight of their deeds on her scale. Where there is love, so must there be apathy; where there is wealth, so must there be scarcity.

But in those days, her scales would tip heavier and heavier to one side, until one day she awoke from her slumber with a vengeance burning in her jii.

She found its source quickly, a few thousand miles away from her home. It was the remnants of a village, left burning for days. But even as she walked through it, she knew this atrocity alone would not have been enough to wake her. She walked a few miles more and found another village, and even further yet and found the relics of another; and as she walked, the amethyst chains she wore around her upper body grew longer and heavier, until finally upon the third village they had grown long and heavy enough for them to smite.

She whistled up at Sky and waited, until finally a shadow swept over the light of Sun, sweeping the lands in a darkness that only abated once a horned rukh landed in the charred remains of the village before her.

'I am filled with hunger, my dearest Grhāna, and I long to eat,' she said to her guardian, 'something that smells of ash and flame, that tastes of blood and burning flesh, that echoes with the ghost of pain and fear.'

So the great rukh lowered his head and Ranyu climbed up the branches of his horns until she stood upon his crown. And there she sat, caged between the outswept curves of bone that stemmed from just before his ears; for Grhāna was large—large enough that when he spread his wings, all three villages disappeared under his shadow, and when he lifted to the sky, all the dust and ash and smoke burst like a storm into all four corners of the wind.

And just as he was large were his senses so as keen. He could see iniquity in the hearts of men, hear injustice as they were performed, smell guilt as it passed through the air. His talons could sever spirits from their host, just as his beak could reach through flesh and pluck a rotted jii from its human.

The pillagers and murderers were rotten to the core, and their scent took Grhāna all the way back to their own village. Sky brought in her clouds, thick and grey, and above them the mighty rukh swept. A feather drifted down into the heart of the ravager village, smoke trailing from it as it descended. It swirled and thickened as black as night, and from it did Ranyu emerge, her feet brushing the earth just as the feather should have landed in her stead.

People had gathered, drawn and alarmed by the sudden night, for Grhāna kept away Sun's light and warmth whilst Ranyu walked amongst them.

They trembled, for they knew what they had done. The spoils of their war were proudly displayed before every hut, around every street, and especially upon the wide field where their leaders were preparing a grand feast: Horses and cattle still tethered away, poultry stacked in rattan cages, sacks of stolen rice and grain, carts still charred and broken from battle ...

Ranyu took them all in and measured their weight.

'I am Ranyu,' she said, and Wind carried her voice to whisper straight into every ear. 'And I have come to give you what is due.'

Every man turned then to point at his neighbour, every mother shielded their own babe. 'It was them, goddess, their sons and fathers, not ours! The hunters and spear-makers and dog-breeders who decided our own yield could no longer sustain us!' So were men quick to place blame upon another, but so loath to intercede before. 'What are the rest of us but mere farmers and fishers? Please, O Retributor, spare us!'

'It is not my business to pluck the weeds from the roses, only to ensure that Light always shines upon the garden whole. The payment for massacre is massacre, and so shall it be.'

Her Judgment came swift. Her chains coiled like serpents around her and with a hiss of metal were they all struck where they stood. The murderers and ravagers were consumed by the same flames they themselves had lit, their flesh ripped open with the same wounds they themselves had inflicted. Those who knew but did nothing were choked in their own fumes of accidie; and the few who knew nothing or had attempted to intervene were given the mercy of an instant sleep.

None of the villagers escaped her Justice that day, and when once again Sky called back her clouds, the village was left an empty shell of itself. But when all was quiet but for the cracking of embers, a babe's cries filled the air, and there amongst the rattan cages was a boy who could not have seen two Summer races yet.

Grhāna descended from the skies. 'What shall we do with it?' His voice was low and rumbled like a warning of thunder, and the boy hushed upon its sound.

'It is not my business to nourish a sapling nor have it razed, only to tend over Earth in which it is grown.'

And so they left the child where he lay, and his cries and screams filled up the heavens; so much so that Sun grew tired of hearing it, and when Moon took his place to watch over Earth, she, too, was quick to ire. Down she sent the spirits of Wind to take his cries in their embrace. All the way south they flew, and then west, and then up the greatest mountain in all the lands—so tall that its alps pierced through the clouds—and there over the jagged peaks they scattered the child's cries where it echoed again and again and again around the mighty Grhāna's lair.

They were mere spirits—they dared not disturb a goddess such as Ranyu—but Grhāna, mighty though he was, they knew could still be reached. For Grhāna, too, had a babe. A hatchling; and though it was four Summers out of its shell, the horned rukh were three times as slow as a human to grow and needed much nursing to survive.

So Grhāna heard the babe's cries. At first had he ignored it, then was he annoyed, but eventually it began to trouble him.

At last he took once more to the skies and made for the ravager village. There he found the babe still in its rattan cage, and he took it whole in his talons and brought it back to his mountain lair.

Thus for eight long years he nursed the babe, and he called it Raharja for it was clear that the spirits favoured him.
        

★ ★ ★
         

Upon the ninth summer a village had begun to prosper far down in the valleys below the great rukh's lair. The first of its men had come many years before, searching for lands fertile in soil and rich in game, and there they found both.

They did not know that a horned rukh nested in the peaks hidden in the clouds above, nor did they know that a goddess slept in a cave half way between them.

Ranyu's cavern was deep and vast, with tall, spiralling pillars shaped from the very cave itself. Flame spirits kept the place warm and lit, Wind kept it fresh and clean. It was a grand chamber with a throne at its very end, where the cave wall swept out and around into a low, gently curved seat. Dripstones and amethyst veins spired up behind it, curling into giant wings that fanned the throne and filled the entire stretch of the wall.

And upon the throne itself sat an effigy of stone, still and silent until slowly it opened its eyes.

For the village had grown in both land and people, and with more people came more spirits, that up in her cave, Ranyu felt them gathering like mosquitoes around a marsh. She stretched awake; a statue groaning into life. Stone melted into flesh and rippled into fabric and the veins in the cavern walls lit and twinkled as though to wake with her.

She wore her dhotya loose and high around her waist, in a shade of purple so deep and dark it was almost black, with a seamless pattern of the lotus flower embroidered in silver upon it. It flowed down her knees but fanned wider and longer at the back and trailed her like a cape as she walked across her throne room. Another length of fabric she wove behind her neck and over each breast to cover her near-flat chest, tied at the back and secured into place by the trailing, dark amethyst chains she wore around her body.

Her chains grew longer and longer in the presence of injustice, but when she stepped out of her cave and looked down into the valleys that day, they remained short and weightless around her.

But Ranyu knew best the nature of mankind, and she knew they were to be watched nonetheless, for so close to her home she would allow no imbalance. She was a particular goddess and valued symmetry in all its forms; even the tunnels that branched out from her throne room were perfectly mirrored and evenly paced.

So she drew in a deep breath of the Wind spirits and followed the scent of her guardian.

Of course Grhāna knew already of the village down below, and indeed he had been watching them since the first of their settlers came. He watched them even that day, hidden high in a plateau that was cradled between a precipice of his mountain and the slopes of two smaller ranges. Upon its west, the plateau rolled out into a stretch of hills and conifers, and even further down yet lay the village in the valleys.

'You did not wake me, Grhāna, and now is it too late.' The goddess stood upon a ledge in the precipice behind him.

Thus did the young Raharja first see the goddess: slight of stature but daunting yet. Her hair was straight with only a shadow of a wave, so thick and untamed it spread behind her like a lion's mane. It reached past her chest, a gleam of purple in its sheer black, a blend reflected just as faintly in her narrow eyes. Her skin was brown like fresh clay and looked just as velvet-rich, and when she spoke, her voice was soft; a whisper that danced in the breeze but struck right to his core.

So also did Ranyu first see the boy and immediately she knew. 'And I see now you have defied me, too, in other ways.'

'I have watched them, goddess, all this time,' said the great Grhāna, 'and not once yet have they given cause for me to disturb your sleep. As for the boy—'

'As for the boy,' interrupted the deity. 'The payment for a child taken is a child taken, and so shall it be.'

'She is yet too young, goddess, to fulfill your promise.'

'And how is she to keep the balance of all things, when she now herself brings disharmony? You have caused this imbalance, and now it must be put to right.'

Grhāna lowered his head, for a true guardian such as he never would defy his goddess, even if it meant offering up his own hatchling. But at once Raharja dashed between his talons until he stood before him and the goddess above them.

'Goddess,' he said. 'Have mercy on your guardian, and have mercy on his hatchling. Take me instead, for it is my fault that I am here. I cried and cried until the gracious Grhāna took pity on me and brought me to his lair. For years he has fed me and nurtured me beside his own little hatchling, but Amhuvsyr has only seen three Summer races yet in the seasons of the rukh; she'll die if you take her away, just as I'd have died had Grhāna not. Please, Lady Vengeance, take me in her place, for I am as much his child now as is Amhu.'

But Ranyu only stood and looked at the boy and felt the weight of her chains before retreating through a slit that opened in the mountain wall behind her.

She allowed Raharja to stay with the rukh, but from that day was he made to serve her, and his first task was to watch over the village down in the valleys. It was impossible for Grhāna to watch them more than he did from his plateau, large and conspicuous as he would have been any closer; but Raharja had the benefit of being human, and so he would descend the mountains and down the hills until he could study the hunters from the conifers, listen to the washer-women from the cascades, and watch the farmers from the marshes.

And as he was Grhāna's child as much as was Amhu, Raharja had also been gifted with his Sight. He saw how spirits gathered around the humans; how Rivalry burned through the hunters as they chased a deer or hog, how Joy bounced and brimmed around women gossiping by the river, and how Diligence hovered over the farmers' shoulders as they worked.

But most of all was he fascinated by the tiny buds of Affection, shimmering in pinks and reds and oranges and purples, sighing and giggling between children at play. Over the years some of them grew into red, burning Lust; pulsing like embers around their nether regions. Others turned to purple-grey Obsession and clung sickly like a rain cloud over their heads. But very few grew into the golden sunrise of Love and settled into their hearts, where they shone through the human and warmed everything around them.

     
★ ★ ★
   

By the time he knew every spirit and every human to which they were attached, six more times had Summer passed. The little human boy was growing into a young human man, and the spirits had become equally as curious of him as he was of them. But Raharja was favoured by the spirits, as his name suggested, and Wind had claimed him first. They drove away the annoying flecks of Disobedience and the moping, yellow-brown slugs of Insecurity; and all the other little spirits that seemed inexplicably drawn toward humans of his age.

Yet one spirit they could not keep away, try as they might. It was a little bubble of Wonder, white and covered in long, silk-soft down. It first appeared to Raharja when he scaled up the mountain peak to feed Amhuvsyr a fresh basket of berries he had gathered. He had paused between the ridges to catch his breath, and like so many times before, he looked upon the view that stretched far below him.

The clouds had parted then, and a rising Sun cast his morning glow across the rolling lands. He found himself wondering how far it all stretched ... what lay beyond the hills and the valleys and how many other villages he would there find ... and when he turned to resume his hike, there it was, the little bubble of Wonder; ten tiny legs popping out around its lychee-plump body to clutch at the rockface as it, too, stared out at the rolling lands below.

It hopped from crag to crag and followed Raharja until he scaled the peak, where upon a giant, sundered tree perched Grhāna. A wide basin filled the surface of the mountaintop, made warm and soft with lichen and moss interspersed between hollow trunks and dried rush. The eyrie was some eighty feet in diameter and a quarter as deep at its lowest. It swallowed Raharja, who only ever did sleep at its outermost brims.

'Grhāna,' he called up from the ridges of his eyrie. 'From where is it that I come?'

The horned rukh turned his massive neck and lowered his gaze, and he saw immediately the Wonder that was climbing upon the young boy's shoulder. 'Is that what brings you to ask me this today?'

'You did not hatch me from one of your eggs, nor do I belong to the humans down in the valleys below. But for six Summer races now have I watched them, and I see that every human belongs to another, every child comes from a mother. So to whom is it that I belong? From whose pain was it that I was born? And why is it that they have abandoned me?'

Grhāna murmured deep in his throat and turned back to gaze at the rising Sun. 'For that you must ask our Divine Retributor.'

And so was it that Ranyu awoke to the young boy kneeling before her throne, and when he asked, she took a primary feather that she had taken from Grhāna's wing and led Raharja out her cavern.

They stood by the slopes of the wooded mountain and Ranyu lifted the feather to the sky. 'You see the chains around my body?'

'Yes, goddess.'

'Hold on to its tail and do not let go.'

Up swept the feather, dancing along with the spirits of Wind as they carried it hours into the east, and then far into the north, and finally down through the clouds until a vast field of touch-me-nots and silvergrass broke through the lands below. It landed there upon its heart in a trail of smoke and shadow, the goddess and the human rising in its wake.

The ravager village had all but gone in the years that passed, its wooden huts long fallen under rot and rain, and its gravelled footpaths swallowed beneath fifteen Summers of grass.

'This is where we found you,' said Ranyu once the human collected his breath, for the spirit-travel had not gone easy for him. 'It was once a village of farmers and fishers, but also of ravagers and rapists, and this is where I razed them all to the ground.'

Touch-me-nots shied away from Raharja's feet as he passed. 'I ... I belong to ravagers and rapists?'

'You belong to the ground upon which you walk, and the sky under which you breathe. Your people abandoned you because they are dead, and the payment for murder is murder.'

When Raharja turned around, the goddess had a sword in her hand. He had never seen such a thing before; it looked a hundred times sharper than the spears the hunters carried and about five times the length of the stone knives the women used to skin their catch. Nor was it made of any ordinary stone, either, but cut of pure, old amethyst that he could see right through the blade.

Ranyu looked at the human and the single spirit of Wonder that sat starry-eyed upon his shoulder. 'This is Amṛtya, for not only does she hold immortality in her blade, she is also the only thing that can take mine.'

Raharja's gaze lifted from the blade and unto the goddess, his awe to alarm, for he did not know what the goddess knew. He never questioned why Fury and Envy and Spite and all the other malevolent little spirits never were attracted to him as they were to all the other humans down in the valley. If he had, perhaps he would understand then the calm in the deity's face as she offered the blade up to him by its hilt.

'What are you asking of me?' He finally asked.

'As I have taken from you, it is only just that you shall also take from me.'

'But when does it end? Must Grhāna in turn take my life, and the Wind spirits that love me then take justice upon him? Must this be the way until all the world is dead?'

'When this world passes, a new one shall appear. So is the nature of life; it creates within itself a balance, and it is my duty to see it maintained.'

'Then,' said Raharja, 'if it is balance you require, goddess, as you have taken from me my mentors and home, is it not also justice that you teach me how to wield a weapon in their stead? Is it not justice that you teach me how to protect the lands from monsters like them? to prevent the atrocities that had these people razed in the first place?'

It was the answer Ranyu expected from him, but she was pleased to hear it nonetheless. So she gave to him her amethyst blade, and she had her spirits train him in her cavern. Wind taught him how to listen, Flame taught him how to strike, and as the years passed, he would take to the rivers where Water taught him how to bend and Earth taught him how to persevere.

                 
★ ★ ★
     

When he was not training, Raharja would fly with Grhāna and watch as he kept the balance of the lands. When men cleared too much of a mangrove forest upon the southern coast, the horned rukh flew beyond them and with his titanic wings brought forth Ocean and her waves. She swept into their village, and—without the thickets and brambles to hold her back—claimed everything within her reach.

Raharja would look upon the devastation they left behind, and the moonlight that shimmered peacefully upon the naked marshes.

'So is the nature of life,' Grhāna would say. 'Men must learn not to take from it more than they give. Their village drowns today so that hundreds more do not drown tomorrow.'

Likewise, when Plague feasted too much and grew so large their pack could run down an entire town, Grhāna would descend upon them and squash them all down to the last shadow.

'Is it not Plague's nature to feast?' Raharja would ask. 'Why do you punish them for fulfilling their Purpose?'

'Is it punishment to quench a fire once the cold night has passed?' Grhāna would say. 'There is a time for Men, and there is a time for Plague. It is upon us to know when each must be stopped, and when each must be allowed. You, too, must learn all this, for there will be times my duties shall take me away far and long, and these lands will remain under your care.'

But Knowing did not come as naturally for Raharja as it did to Grhāna or Ranyu. He was neither like the deity and her guardian, nor was he like the humans down in the valleys below, and it took him many years to understand both.

He developed through his training not only a discipline, but a routine. He would meditate early in the mornings with Water, hunt for his meals with Flame, observe the village below with Wind, and as Moon took her place with Sky above, he would scale up the mountains with Earth and feed the young Amhuvsyr until Grhāna returned from his daily wanderings.

For though Amhu had seen Summer as many times as had Raharja, in the years of the rukh she had only seen seven. Her horns had sprouted and grown almost a whole feet long, but they were yet to branch. She was as large as a hawk and could fly just as well, but she was not yet strong enough to ascend all the way to their eyrie from the woodlands below. For all this and more, she had never flown below the cover of the clouds.

So she enjoyed Raharja's company, and he enjoyed nurturing her just as much. She could not yet speak as Grhāna spoke, but they understood each other the way a forest understood every single one of its trees. That was how he knew she was ill that day, and that when she was ill, she could not eat much more than berries and seeds.

But it was deep in the heart of Winter's race—her fifth coming since Raharja had begun his training—and all the bushes were bare. For three fruitless hours he had foraged the lands, and Sun was beginning his early retreat behind the mountain wall. It was not too late to fish or trap a wood mouse for Amhu, but Raharja knew neither would sit well with her for many days.

Wonder popped then upon his shoulder and nipped at his ear, and with it came the answer as clear as day.

He made his way west until the forest thinned into a rocky copse and the sound of rushing water slowly drowned the constant chirping of crickets. It was the cascades, and it came crashing in from a series of waterfalls that tumbled out of the mountain wall: some heavy and rumbling, others segmented by a series of slopes like a veil unfurled over stairs, and few yet falling thin and free into the plunge pool down below where they all united into one wild, running river.

The pool was waist-deep at its most and close to thirty feet wide, and it was from here the villagers collected their water. Only one remained then; a young woman up to her thighs in water as she stood below a narrow chute, gathering its catch in a clay jar.

The villagers were neither blind nor oblivious. Over the years, some had caught sight of Raharja watching them from the woods. At first they tried to coax him into their midst; leaving food and clothes like trails to a trap, but when it became clear that he was content to watching from afar, they stopped altogether.

The stories about him grew almost mythical. He was a spirit of the mountain, they whispered, protecting his territory ... he was a bhaktee seeking spiritual enlightenment from his deity ... or perhaps he was a godling himself. Whatever the case, the villagers decided it best not to test their luck with the mysterious boy of the mountains, who over the years became the mysterious man of the mountains, and he in turn also never disturbed them.

So when Raharja stepped out of the woods that day and into the dying light of the sun, the young woman gasped and lost her footing.

Raharja did not help her, for he thought approaching would only scare her more. Instead he held his hands out to show that they were empty. 'I mean not to frighten you,' he said, 'only to ask if you could trade with me some food.'

She did not answer, but neither did she flee.

'My sister is ill, and I have in need for her some samarind berries.' He had seen how the villagers grew them as hedges around their huts and hoped that perhaps some of their preserves yet remained.

It was a long while before the young woman spoke, and when she did her voice was small but filled with awe, for the villagers did not know that the mysterious man of the mountains could speak so well, nor did the woman know that he looked just as fine. He was tall and toned like their fiercest hunters, with a high nose and strong jaws that tapered to a pointed chin. He wore only a dhotya, and even this was wrapped low around his waist; so low that the woman forced herself not to look at it. 'You ... you have a sister?'

'Yes, and she is ill. A basket of samarind berries would help with her indigestion. I have not much to offer in return, but you can take your pick. I carry with me the tanned hide of two hares, a fishing spear made of antler tine, and a small pouch of dried mountain ginseng.'

The young woman rose to her feet then and nodded shyly at the weapon hanging upon his waist. 'How about a stone from your knife?'

'My knife?'

'Yes. It is so long, longer than any knife I've ever seen, and its handle glitters with a million tiny little stones, surely you can spare one for a basket of berries?'

'Oh, you mean my blade.' He took Amṛtya and considered the little flecks of amethyst adorning her hilt. She was a gift from Ranyu herself, and he felt that he should not be thoughtlessly damaging her upon the whims of another human. 'This is a sword, and though she can cut in a second what would take one of your knives a day, all the amethysts upon her hilt together would not carry you through Winter's race.'

'But one might look pretty around my neck, don't you think?' She pulled back her long, honey-brown hair to allow him the image, and with a jolt in his chest he thought indeed that it might look pretty.

So he took one of the many teardrops of amethysts from his hilt and waited as the young woman rushed back to the village. She returned with a basket of berries and they made their exchange, and when she ran off the second time, little pink and yellow bubbles burst from the air around her and trailed her home, filling the air with their pops and giggles.
           

★ ★ ★

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