Flowers, Again
'Right now, Celyn can’t help but think one thing, one straining question that keeps the angry tears flowing. Had Alum paid his price? And more, as the scrap of fur and muscle the Wastelands called a soldier advances on her, she asks herself the hardest question: had she paid her price?' Compiled posts from Trial 2 of Paradise Rising.
WITH THE SITUATION stabilised once more, Jehu took the distracted moment of relief to get as far away from Shrike as possible, scrambling across the rock even as it began to tilt, dragging them downwards. They continued to dig their claws in tightly, setting off the bleeding once more, but eventually they couldn’t hold on any longer. They plummeted down with the others with a loud yowl - not panicked, just loud.
When Jehu opened their eyes again, they were face-to-face with Shrike again. The picture almost reminded them of their first, all-defining memory. But Shrike’s eyes were green. Nonetheless, they hissed in his face, skittering back just as they had done in the stone arena. They didn’t want to be anywhere near the cat right now, whether he was a violent traitor or not. Let the others deal with him, they thought. Jehu only had one job right now. Walk to the mountains - I will meet you out there in the fields eventually. Jehu awaited their next challenge eagerly, tearing up clumps of earth in their claws in restless anticipation.
* * *
Jehu had been counting their days ever since they left the Valley behind. While home was so far away, it was the only reminder of it they had left, besides their own memories. A little over six five-day cycles had passed since the Legendaries’ sham Trial had ended, and today was the fourth day, the day they repeated truths.
So far from the place they call home, taking up the rear of their group’s small procession, Jehu began to mutter under their breath, small, disparate sentences that held their entire basis for reality, tripping over long words they never quite understood the meaning of, yet meaning them all the same. “The lofty are baser than any creature. To purge is to heal. Meraxes shows us the way. In our eyes, in our ears, in our life, we pave the way for a Wasteless world. A cat who shuns their comrades is a cat who shuns their soul. We are the claws, we are the fangs that rip the Waste from this world. To be Legendary is to eschew responsibility. To have power is to forsake the powerless. Personal possessions spell the death of higher duty.”
They paused for a moment, deep in thought, then decided to add a few of their own. They had been through a lot of new experiences, lately, and felt they needed something to cement their new lessons. “To be Legendary is to infect,” they corrected one of Meraxes’ existing lessons to start with. They continued, sinking back into that quiet, monotonous drawl as they committed the lines to memory, “a world without the Waste is Paradise. Helena shows the way to Paradise. Power should be used against those who misuse it.”
Running out of things to say, they scrunched up their nose in minute dissatisfaction. Jehu could never speak like Meraxes did. They simply did not know enough big, powerful words. But another lesson Meraxes had also taught them was that words are not power, but intent is, and Jehu had put every ounce of intent they had into those words, so they knew it was worth it.
Jehu was so lost in thought, eyes trained on the ground only several pawsteps ahead of them, that they did not notice the ground opening up beneath them before it was too late. They had never been unused to these transitions, already wholly familiar with the sensation of microsleep, and that of temporary unconsciousness - they suffered it almost every time the uncomfortable itchy feeling came to haunt them. They think they preferred that temporary blackness to the times where they would hurt themselves.
The traitor had once called Jehu’s feeling connotive dis-nans, or something to that effect. Jehu personally felt he had been making words up in an attempt to sound as smart as Meraxes. They could see right through it.
Jehu gently crouched when Helena appeared, staring up at the golden cat so unblinkingly that they didn’t even manage to take in the appearance of the colony cats beneath them. The Forest Colony… now that was a settlement with a bloody history for the young cat. The place where their traitor mentor brought Jehu to, and where they found out he was fleeing with Jehu, trying to drag them away from their true calling to this… bastardisation of a calling, the Legendaries’ Calling. The place where Jehu executed the second cat they had ever met.
“Go on, then,” Helena said. “Kill them.”
Jehu’s eyes flickered down to their new targets, hardening with heartless intent, and then quickly widening with sudden, heart-stabbing recognition. The dark, wavy fur. The tired, green eyes. The cat was a haunting reflection of her brother, save for the rusty, brown colour that patterned the blackness of her coat. “Hey there, little one,” she had once meowed when Jehu first met her in that forested camp. “Welcome to the living world.”
“Celyn?” Jehu cried incredulously, frozen to the spot. It was her, alright. The traitor’s sister, and the one who sealed his fate with her loose tongue. Jehu would question what she was doing here, but they knew why. Because a sacrifice had to be made, and Helena had provided it.
“Jehu!” Celyn said, amicable and relieved to see a familiar face, but with a concern in her eyes natural of any cat in this situation. And, perhaps, concern for Jehu, because for all she knew, Jehu was participating in the Legendaries’ so-called Trials. “Jehu, I heard what happened in the forest. They didn’t want it getting out, but we have our ways. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.” She paused. Then it came. “Where’s Alum?”
Of course, Jehu had made straight for the Valley the moment they’d pushed the traitor’s corpse into the rapids. This cat didn’t know what happened to her brother. Jehu’s expression twisted into some mix of triumphant pride and angered spite at the thought of what they’d done.
“Alum was a traitor!” Jehu spat, letting the bloody images run through their mind without pause, already feeling the ripping sensation of claws tearing through skin and the snap of broken bones. “And I executed him like a traitor. His body’s rotting at the bottom of the endless lake right now. He’s food for the bottomfeeders.”
They watched as Celyn’s expression morphed from incredulity, to shock, before twisting into utter disgust. “You fucking monster,” she hissed, all aggression, all claws. “He always told me to be patient with you brainwashed kits, but you really are unsalvageable, aren’t you? Aren’t you? You’re barely even a cat!”
She lurched forward on unsteady legs, almost as if she was about to be sick. She began to cry hot, heavy tears. “After all he did for things like you,” Celyn spat between clenched teeth. “What a fool.”
Jehu was all calm, all clarity, all orders. “It opens for a death,” they echoed Helena’s words, taking a few steps forward. “Celyn, do you wanna know what I’m going to do when I’m back in the Valley?”
Celyn didn’t respond, just gave them a wide-eyed, wild look containing all the malice and evil in the world, a grim reflection of the no-eyed cat that haunted Jehu’s every living moment. Mindless. Wrong. Something to be purged.
“When I get back to the Valley, I’m using this,” they raised a heavyset paw, claws unsheathed, and willed the long shadow they cast to change shape. Their paw’s shadow began rippling, before it suddenly jerked outwards, twisting and sharpening, until the shape finally settled into that of a set of long, ferocious talons. “And I’m going to kill every last Legendary you follow, and every last Wasteling you hide from us, and every last traitor that stands in our way, until there is nothing left to purge. Then we’ll be in Paradise.”
“NO!!” Celyn yowled in overwhelming anger and despair, and that’s when Jehu lunged forward, yellow flowers severing beneath ungiving claws and flying out behind them as they pelted toward their target.
CELYN IS NO fool. She has lived a life filled with missteps and spilled blood, but she is no fool. She had lived the same life as any cat old enough to remember a time before the Legendaries: a brutal hell, a waking nightmare, but warm spots in between, the times that made you remember that life was worth living, light at the end of the tunnel or no.
For Celyn, those warm spots had been her brother. Raised in a colony of assassins, with sins stacked up against them both, they had lived in pursuit of those warmer times, but cognizant that there would be no other side for claws as bloody as theirs. He had helped her flee, and she had done so, all the way to the Valley teeming with light and warm things, and she had started a new life among newer life. While her brother had stayed in the stunted scar of the outside world. Penitence, Cel. He’d started freeing slaves and child soldiers from outlying colonies, working his way north. We all have our ways out. He’d stayed in Ounce for three years.
Right now, Celyn can’t help but think one thing, one straining question that keeps the angry tears flowing. Had Alum paid his price? And more, as the scrap of fur and muscle the Wastelands called a soldier advances on her, she asks herself the hardest question: had she paid her price?
Celyn doesn’t think she believes anyone has a price to pay, only a life to live. And she wishes to continue living hers, more so than she wishes an unsalvageable deranged beast of a child can continue killing in the service of bloodletters. And perhaps that was hypocritical, and perhaps that was spitting on the memory of her brother’s work, but when Alum gave Celyn a way out, she took it. When Alum gave Jehu a way out, the little creature killed him.
Its worldview was challenged by a whisker’s length and it killed.
When she breaks it down like that, killing a troublesome predator seems like the safest thing to do. Whether it’s a child or not. Celyn wishes she could really, truly commit that belief to heart, but she is no fool, and she is no animal. And that is the hard part of turning her claws against her brother’s murderer.
* * *
Jehu rushed ahead, attempting as always to bowl their adversary over with sheer strength and their own momentum, because there was little in the way of strategic positioning in these combat situations the goddess kept springing on them, and Jehu was never taught what to do in a one-on-one fight. They had always had their allies by their side. It was numbers that did it, numbers of claws and fangs and muscle. That was what won fights.
Right now, Jehu’s allies were focused on their own altercations, or hanging back for some reason they just couldn’t fathom. And they were still deeply suspicious of Shrike, who hadn’t even attempted to defend his bizarre actions back in the stone arena. But it was hard to think about any of that too deeply now that they were focused on their all-defining task.
“Please stop, please! Maybe we can help each other get back!” A plea emerged from the direction of the colony cats - Jehu couldn’t put voices to faces right now. They just weren’t of any importance right now. But the cat scrambled forward, and that is what makes Jehu slow their sprint to a jog and take the dark tom in. “Please!”
He begged for the end of what Jehu saw as the only way out.
“Outta my way!” Jehu snarled, trying to duck past the tom to lunge at their enemy, who had also come to a standstill when the tom rushed ahead. She had a narrowed, frantic-looking expression to her, as if weighing up what to do next in the tumult of her own emotions. Jehu whipped their head back round to the tom. “You’re not mine,” they growled hastily. “If you want to get out, go for him.” They gesture with a shoulder to the brown-and-white tom called Shrike, and then try to shoulder past the cat-shaped obstacle.
He wasn’t having any of it. “Stop!” The colony tom exclaimed fearfully, launching himself pitifully at Jehu. The brown catling raised a merciless forepaw in response, letting out a loud hiss.
“Are you stupid?!” Jehu shouted, battering at the tom mindlessly with unsheathed claws. “Didn’t you hear? It opens for a death! That’s what she said! If you don’t let me go and save yourself, I will kill you!”
In that moment, Jehu didn’t care if they snatched someone’s ticket home by killing two cats. There was only thought in their mind:
IN MY WAY.
And maybe, just maybe, Helena would like it if Jehu killed more of these sacrifices.
If this tom didn’t back away now, Jehu was going to tear into more than the flesh of his shoulder.
* * *
Celyn had been about to lunge forward when the dark tom - his name eluded her - does her job for her. She brings herself to a complete halt, allowing herself the precious moments she has been awarded to calm herself and take a defensive position. In small waves, ebbing over her, she feels some old knowledge re-enter her psyche - the cool, killing haze of her assassin past - and then all at once, it engulfs her completely.
While the little devil is preoccupied with battering the tom to a ragged, bloody mess, Celyn stalks forward, sharp as a predator, and sneaks ahead in a low sprint, fangs bared and ready to kill.
CELYN FEELS HER fangs sink into hot flesh, but every instinct outside the base, raw impulse that tugs her to bite down harder and feel the blood spurt out between her jaws, every instinct outside of that tells her that this is wrong. That something is wrong.
Her eyes had seen the dark pelt dart out in front of her. Her ears detected the distinctly masculine cry of protest. Her mind knew that she was facing her colony-mate, not the little devil out for her blood. But it had been too late. And because it is too late, she bites down.
All of this comes rushing back to her at once, and the blood turns to bile in her mouth, and the animal departs her mind like a retreating night. She drops the body with a disturbed groan and backs away in horror. Her tears are no longer forming, as if they have been frozen in her sheer shock. She watches with wide eyes as the body moves, spilling blood, and then moves no more. A sickening wail that is not her own rises up, as another dark tom (his brother), stumbles to the fresh corpse.
Celyn does not move.
Celyn has killed an innocent cat.
So much for a new life.
* * *
It took several long moments for Jehu to fully process what had happened, and that was time they simply didn’t have, not when they knew their entire cause was on the line. They had been so focused on pushing the dark tom away - trying to scare him off in Shrike’s direction - that they did not detect the honed killing crouch of Celyn. She was so much like her brother, just as silent, and Jehu knew something was wrong when a blur of motion sprung up behind them, but Jehu was not afraid of death. They weren’t afraid of anything.
But the pain never came. They whipped around unhesitantly and saw Celyn, closer than she had been, but backing away from the prone body of the cat Jehu had just batted away. Their eyes narrowed instantly, a snarl re-emerging.
“You… killed him?” Of course, Jehu had been about to do the same had the tom not moved, but somehow, somehow Jehu had expected Celyn to be like her traitor brother. Weak. Soft. The tom bled out from the clean bite of a trained killer. “Just who are you?” Jehu cried in the molly’s direction, feeling more agitated by the second. “Why would you kill a comrade…?”
That’s what they were, right? Cats who lived together fought together, but Celyn had… she’d killed this cat. He hadn’t done anything wrong, or evil.
He had been Jehu’s enemy, but he hadn’t been Celyn’s.
Celyn’s eyes stared into nothing, or maybe at the golden flowers that littered the ground. “I didn’t…” she muttered, swallowing nervously when her voice wobbled. “I- we were assassins…”
Jehu wasn’t sure what to feel. They just kept staring at the unmoving body and back up at the traitor’s sister in bewilderment. And when Helena spoke...
“It appears we have our winners.”
… Jehu felt something sickening and ugly grow inside of them. It curled around their chest and poured down their throat. A fire grew in their belly, and for a glorious flash of a moment they felt the dragon within them, that fearsome creature that had followed Meraxes like a ghost, had made him roar and whimper in his sleep.
“No,” they said, almost inaudibly. “No,” they said again, louder this time, scratchier, and more incredulous. “No, this isn’t over yet.” … Right?
Jehu felt utterly lost, and they didn’t know why. And that feeling only stoked the fire.
They whipped their head around to Pine, who was fighting off the more aggressive of the colony cats. Leaving to Celyn to her own losses, for now, Jehu loped over to the black molly, and when they were close enough, they leapt. They landed on her bodily, hoping the momentum was enough to knock her over and expose her vulnerable throat and stomach.
“Leave my friend alone, you bastard!” Jehu spat, as their claws dug in and their fangs bore down.
If it’s really over, Jehu thought, then this is okay.
She lost. Meraxes would like this. Helena would want this.
* * *
Celyn doesn’t react, just watches the flowers and thinks of home. It’s over, she thinks, it’s over for her.