ToSW - Metamorphosis: Part 2

Tales of the Spirit World entry: Stories of the People

Metamorphosis – What Ever Happened to Ran
Part Two:  Ran


It was a homecoming like no other.  After mile upon mile of ocean, the saline blue gave way to the verdant green of rainforests and the heat-blasted fawn of raw cliffs and scoured hilltops.  Above these they blazed, reptilian comets, she bright and eager, he ember-skinned yet apprehensive.

Flaring his new-made nostrils wide, he inhaled the scent of the rich vegetation – wet, green, thick as stew – the dry rasp of the dust that ran over the tops of the cliffs in wind devils, the sweetly subtle scent of sunlight and something else…something wholly and disturbingly familiar.

Children.

Beyond a sandstone ridge, gliding over a shallow, green carpeted valley they found them.  A dozen or so, darting and laughing.  His nose picked up something astringent and dense, the scent almost a physical colour upon the backs of his lids.  This he recognized too – ink.  His wonderful eyes saw the temporarily abandoned portable tables, each equipped with paper, ceramic water dishes, ink sticks and brushes of varying sizes.

As the two young dragons swooped towards them, the children seemed to leap for them as one, laughing, cavorting, full of wonder at their luck that two such blessed creatures as dragons should fly overhead.

Ran looked ahead at his companion.  Shao was grinning, showing her beautiful teeth.

Just as they were about to pass over the group of youngsters, she inhaled deeply, then let loose a belling roar.  As well as sound, she breathed forth a torrent of big yellow sparks, each heatless; merely harmless point of light that floated down to catch and glow briefly upon skin and hair, sometimes gathering like snowflakes on eyelashes, or dancing ungraspable as fireflies.

The children’s delight was spectacular, their laughter filling the valley and the ears of all within it.

Ran listened, looking down at the smiling ink-stained faces, and remembered.

~~~

Their father was out, securing the boat before the storm started, and so Ran was left sitting cross-legged before the cook fire, Fei Yen a warm, sleepy bundle curled in his lap.

The rain beat harder upon the cottage’s roof, a sound like stones thrown at bamboo fences, and his sister whispered against his neck, “Tell me a story?”

Ran smiled and whispered back, “Tell you a joke instead?”  He was awful at telling stories.

“’Kay.”  Fei Yen wasn’t fussy.

“Alright, well, what did the grape say when the camelephant stood on him?”

She sat back a looked at him with big perplexed eyes the colour of river water under rainclouds.  “He said ouch?”

“Nope, just gave a little whine…”

Her pealing giggles filled the room, sweet, bell-toned, and drew love from his very bones.

~~~

Temples.

Temples everywhere.  Huge ziggurats of yellow stone, their steps – big enough for the greatest of sky coatls – embossed and painted with expansive murals, each filled with smoke-voiced attendants willing to help any dragon who landed there.

“They worship us,” Shao told him blithely as they sat together on a terrace overlooking the larger valleys toward the sea.

“Do they?”  Ran gave her a suspicious look.

“Don’t be like that,” she said, dipping her muzzle to take a sip from the elaborately carved bowl before her.  “They choose to be here.  Each of these humans is gifted with firebending, or dragon-tongue, or both.  They come here to learn from us, so that they can try to teach the rest of their people.”

“The Sun Warriors?”

“Yes, although it’s safer for them to live here.  In the temple city.  The rest of the tribes seem to spend their lives absorbed with infighting.”  Shao looked pained.  She sighed steam.  “Here, try this,” she said, changing the subject and nodding toward her bowl.

“What is it?”

“Xocolātl.  It’s made from cacao beans.  Careful it’s a little –”

“Pthaaaaaw!”

“– Bitter.”

Ran glowered.

Shao smiled.  “Um, you might want to try it with honey.  Speaking of, look, out that way.  Those are the hives.”

She pointed with one claw out to the east.  Ran could see paddocks dotted with big white domes, things he at first had assumed to be grain silos.  Between them were drifts of wild flowers, growing as they pleased.  The wind changed, carrying to them their rampant sweetness and the hum of their insectile worshipers.  Ran looked back to the central temple city, at the mountainous structures buzzing with the minute figures of human attendants and the odd ribboning figure of a dragon.  Huh…

“My lady, my lord?”

An attendant had crept up beside them on silent feet.  She bore a missive in a gold leafed dispatch case.  There was a crest Ran didn’t recognize on its side.  Shao inclined her head and the attendant spoke.

“You have been summoned, great coatls.  His Lordship, Huánglóng – sun upon his wings – desires for you to present yourselves to him in His Lordship’s temple.”

~~~

It didn’t register at first.

Ran stood at one end of the dock, having returned there from the cottage with the last of the fishing gear, and stock still, gazed in confusion at his father.

He wondered why he had his arm up to the elbow in one of the brine barrels.  He wondered where Fei Yen was.  He wondered why his father’s eyes were so glazed, so blank and hard.

Then the salted water in the barrel stirred and three small white digits broke the surface, reaching.

Ran dropped the gear.

No.

Fei Yen…

“FEI YEN!”

~~~

Ran crouched, the tip of his muzzle against the polished floor of the temple.  He dared not look up and meet the gaze of the splendid creature who sat in a shaft of sunlight between the mighty pillars of this, the greatest of the draconic temples.

He dared not, because he knew the stories of Huánglóng – sun upon his wings – and his sunlit eyes.  He knew, had been told from when he was very small, of how all dragons could read hearts and histories, but how the dragon-god could read the most coveted desires writ upon your very soul.

There were things written upon Ran’s soul that he would not have anyone read, let alone the giver of his second life.

Huánglóng was speaking.

“We have given thee a second chance, Ran of Jiāng Huí.”

Ran could hear the soft click of the god’s claws as he rose and stepped slowly towards him.

“We have looked over the length of oceans and gazed upon your soul.  We have seen your history, and plumbed the depths of your burning heart.  We have tasted your rage, scented your grief and marveled at your hate.”

There was a pause.  Ran closed his eyes.  Huánglóng’s many-layered voice, filled with music, was suddenly above him.  The god was gazing down upon him.  Ran laid his ears flat and waited for the blow.

When it came, it was not what he expected.

Huánglóng pitched his voice low.

“We have perceived your sacrilege, Ran of Jiāng Huí, and we have listened to the discordancy of your shame.”

Ran shook.

“But know this: it is your destiny that has saved you.  You shall do great things and your history has yet to fully unspool.  When it does…as it does, we shall be watching.  Look at me, Ran.”

Filled with thrilling terror, Ran looked up, and was consumed by the brilliant eyes that looked back at him.

“Who are you, Ran of Jiāng Huí?”

He found his voice, his new dragon’s voice, and he spoke.

“Lord Huánglóng…I – I am Ran of the Red, and I will be your loyal son.”

~~~

He didn’t remember running at his father.  He didn’t remember pushing him aside, and nor did he remember wondering where he got the strength to do so.

All he could remember was pulling Fei Yen from that barrel, the dark water running from her skin and oh, oh no, she was too pale, too bloodless, little girl where did you go…?

He remembered binding her close in his arms, wiping the wet hair from her face, patting the still features that so closely echoed his mothers –

“Wake up, mei-mei, come on, please wake up…”

– So close, she was so close, she was right here and yet he couldn’t find her, couldn’t get her to open her eyes…

He remembered the moment it sank in.  The moment he realized, in a brutal rush, that his sister was dead.

With fatal clarity, he remembered the knife sheathed at his hip.

~~~

It was called a reflecting pool, apparently; a man-made or dragon-made body of water positioned in a place, in such a way as to most favorably reflect the sky and the light from its celestial bodies.  This one was a little different, however, in that it had been designed specifically to reflect fireflies.

From where he sat, Ran couldn’t help but smell the ceramic feeders hanging from the weeping willows and wish maples branches, each filled with the rich red honey that drew the fireflies.  Yellow and vermillion clouds of them swarmed and drifted through the trees, their little lights catching brilliantly upon the dark and still waters of the pond.

Ran gazed at them, and remembered the last time he had watched fireflies.

“Remember the last time we watched fireflies?”

Shao landed beside him, movements a symphony of grace as she touched down upon the grass, talons gripping the turf, and folded the dark arcs of her wings.  Ran gazed silently at her as she settled on the bank.

“Yes,” he said, “I remember.”  It had been the night after his rebirth, when he had learnt how to move in his newborn body.  “I was just thinking about that.  Can dragons read minds, as well as hearts?”

Shao let out a trickle of chiming laughter.  “No, no we can’t read minds,” she told him, putting in a gentle emphasis on his new state of being.

He bowed his head a little.  They were silent, for a time.

“I regret it, you know.”

Shao blinked her deep blue eyes at him.  “Regret what?”

Ran swallowed thickly.  “What I – what I did.  They way I went about…about taking my own life.  I regret my sacrilege.”  He pressed his eyes closed and exhaled bright, white steam.  He pictured the river priestess, the sadness upon Jiān’s beautiful face.

“I regret it; Jiān didn’t deserve it.  She didn’t deserve my blood dirtying her goddess’s sacred waters.”

His fellow dragon gazed at him, expression fathomless and inscrutable.

“It is good, that you regret it.  But Ran, do you regret what led you to doing it in the first place?  Do you regret killing your father?”

~~~

Time moved past him in a blur.  The world felt underwater; distorted, yet painfully clear.  His father was speaking, and his words pushed Ran’s mind to the dizzy limit.

“It had to be done, Ran.  You know this.  She wasn’t right, from the moment she was born.  She came into this world and took you mother from us by doing so.  She stole Kiew from us…from me…”

How, Ran thought, how could he have thought that?  How could he think that it was Fei Yen’s fault that their mother died in childbed?  Fei Yen was the last thing Kiew had strived for, her last triumph, her swan song, and now that living, breathing victory was simply a still huddle of cold, sodden flesh…those brilliant river grey eyes closed forever.

Selfish, he thought, so very, very selfish.

There was no roar of rage as he surged to his feet, knife in hand.  There was no snarl of hate, no gasp of grief.  That would come later.  Now, there was only buzzing silence and the sound of the water lapping against the dock as he ran at his father.

Dimly, he was aware of people coming forward, crowding.  Other men in the village were rushing to stop him, to take his knife and rescue Fei Yen’s murderer.

They were quick, but Ran was quicker.

The tip of the blade slide, neat as you please, into his father’s solar plexus.  Ran felt muscle and sinews and organs give and rend beneath the cutting edge.  He angled the knife upwards, and drawn closer by the movement, found himself gazing into his father’s black eyes.

“She was worth ten of you,” Ran whispered.

He hauled the knife back and shoved the dying man away.  The villagers surged forward, knocking the blade from his hands and tackling him to the ground.

On his stomach, held down by many hands, Ran gazed unseeingly through the boards of the dock and watched his father’s blood hit the water.

~~~

He stared at the fireflies for a few moments, events playing out behind the dark lenses of his eyes.  The insects flitted closer, their glow reflecting upon the dull gloss of both dragons’ hides, and Ran sighed warm air, buoying their miniscule bodies higher into the draping branches of a nearby willow.

Finally he turned to Shao.

“No,” he said, very softly but full of fervor.  “No, I will never regret avenging my sister.”

~~~

It was barely half an hour later that the river priestess arrived.

The villages had trialed him by then, putting together reasons and a storyline because they could no coax or force one from Ran.  His shame – his hate – ran hot and deep by then.

Shame, that he had not protected Fei Yen, that he had not sensed his father’s actions brewing beneath the calm exterior the man had always show to the world.  Deep, soul melting shame that he had been borne to a kin slayer, and because of that person’s actions, was now himself one.

Barely able to cope, he simply shut down, closing himself off from the goings on around him.  He barely heard the proceedings of the thrown-together trial, or the sentence laid upon his head.

Blood for blood.  Death for death.

Ran refused to care.

“But Priestess –”

“No.  You said he spilt blood?  Well he spilt blood upon the river, so the river will judge him.  I claim him in the name of the goddess.”

Voices, light, as the door to his cell opened.  He tried to turn his face away from it, crushing his eyes closed and pulling away from the two posts that his wrists where bound to, forcing him to kneel, arms spread wide.  He had lost feeling in them long ago, the blood unable to make the constant journey upward to the tips of his curled fingers.

He heard the priestess draw breath in one quick gasp when she laid eyes on him.  He peered at her, just able to see her hands fist in the pale cloth of her robe, barely able to make out the distress tightening her mouth and narrowing her dark eyes.

‘Just go,’ he thought desperately, eyes closing wearily.  ‘Just go and let it all be done with.’

But when he opened them, she was still there, stubbornly plucking with nimble fingers at the ropes binding his wrists.

“It’ll be alright, I promise,” she whispered to him, voice full of reassurance.  “It’ll be alright.”

She was so kind, so full of hope.  Poor Jiān.

Ran looked back at her through the tangle of his hair.  He spoke to her for the first and last time.

“No,” he whispered back.  “No, it won’t.”

~~~

Time passed in days, and he grew used to his new body.

Time passed in months, and he grew used to his new home.

Time passed in years, and he grew used to his new life.

But when time passed in decades, Ran found what it truly was to be a dragon.

Because time did not touch dragons, except to let them grow.

And yet it was a strange growth.  The great coatls were rather isolated, save for those who chose to join Lord Huánglóng and the Great Agni in battle against Fell Tui and his kin.  During the time of that Great War, both Ran and Shao were deemed too young, and so were left behind, champing at their bits, still full of the false bravery of adolescence.

So they stayed, and they watched the world remake itself around them.

They watched the war come to an end.  Watched as their god and his ilk faded into spirithood, and then watched, helpless in their fleshy forms, as the spirit and mortal realms drifted apart and became two separate worlds, the edges of each gently overlapping.

Ran grieved, silently, privately, for those he would never see again; for all the mortals he left behind the day his human life crumbled about him.

They watched the decline and retreat of their own noble breed, as two smaller subspecies took root on the central islands.  One was not so different from their own, having the requisite six limb – forelegs, wings and hindlegs.  But some bore brash, bovine horns instead of branching antlers, and their muzzles were wide and strangely shaped – boxed, with oddly froglike mouths and slightly bulging eyes.  The second breeds was wingless and wore faces more similar to the nobles, had short antlers, and were richly bearded, their ears webbed and spoked like wings.  These strange siblings seem to favour the company of humans more than the nobles, and so had little contact with the ancient breed.

Time spun on, and still, the dragons watched.  They watched as the Sun Warriors’ infighting grew to genocide and one tribe at a time, they wiped each other from the face of the earth.  Only one part of their people survived; the secretive keepers, who lived amongst the dragons of the temple city.  The keepers watched, too, over the generations.  As their fellows died, they mourned in their silent way, shedding the marks of divinity from their dress, never again to wear Huánglóng’s gold leaf and pearl flakes.  Instead they shaved back the hair of their scalps and painted bands of blood red ink across their eyes.  For generations, their laments mingled with the incense that filled the night air.

Their hearts cried gently in sympathy for their humans, but still the dragons watched.  They watched as the world went on and forgot the Sun Warriors, believing them completely extinct.  They watched as the new creature called the Avatar was born into existence and upon those tiny human shoulders, the weight of the world was placed.

“They are the future,” Ran murmured once to his friend.

Shao bowed her head, thoughtful.  “It remains to be seen what they will do with it,” she replied.

And so the dragons watched, and said nothing.

~~~

Three days.

She tried for three days to get him to speak.  She tried, in her way, to heal him.  She encouraged him to eat, to drink the clean water that flowed plentiful about the shrine.  He did so, if she encouraged enough, but it was mechanical, the actions of an automaton carried out through habit, if nothing else.

Poor Jiān, she couldn’t possibly have known.

Despite his hate, and his rage, and his horrific shame…despite the grief that threatened to consume him…there was barely anything left of the boy he had been.  There were only the memories, and these stirred most strongly at night, in his dreams.  Sometimes he woke screaming, images of Fei Yen’s river-grey eyes still burning against the backs of his lids, her little voice still ringing in his ears, soft and sad.

“You didn’t save me, ge-ge.”

Then her eyes would go blank, her skin would shine with salted water, her soul would spill in a silver torrent from her rosebud mouth and her body would go cold in his arms.  As the nightmare spilled to an end he would feel his father’s hands about his throat.

“Kin slayer,” came the dead man’s rattle.  “You are indeed my loyal son…”

As he clawed back to the surface of the world, Jiān would be there with cool water and soothing words.  She would ask gentle questions about the nightmare, and when he would not answer she would wipe the sodden hair from his face and hold his hand until he found sleep again or feigned it.

Three days…on the third night, as he rose sobbing from the choking arms of sleep, Ran made up his mind.

This had to end.

~~~

Sixty-three Avatars, seventy-one generations of Sun Warriors and three thousand and eighty-two years after the rebirth of Ran of the Red, the first outsider in nine hundred years arrived in the temple city.

His name was Kuzon, and he brought with him terrible news.

The dragon that had carried him to the city was a small blue, one of the central island’s smaller winged breed, and she rumbled and bugled with the same distress as her rider.  She did not stay long enough to explain her breach of protocol by bringing the boy to the city, saying with fear that this was all she could do, that she had to go home.

As the attendants helped the boy to his feet, Ran stood upon the steps of the audience temple, long vacated by their lost god, and watched her become a blue speck upon the jagged horizon.  Turning away he followed the stoic faced Sun Warriors as they marched the boy into the temple.  Ran followed, taking his place with the rest of the elders as Kuzon knelt before them.

It was Shao, as the dragons elected speaker, who put the question to him.

“What news do you bring us, mortal?  What could be so important that you would breach our sanctuary and set foot in our city?”

Before one of the attendants could translate for him, Kuzon raised his face and answered.

“He speaks dragon-tongue, then,” Shao murmured to Ran in undertone.

But Ran didn’t hear her.  He was transfixed by the boy’s face as he spoke.  There was rage there, terribly familiar rage, and grief.  Grief that Ran hadn’t seen the likes of since Fei Yen’s murder, and then only when he met his own eyes in a reflection.

“He has lost everything,” he whispered to Shao.

“He did it,” Kuzon was saying.  “He – he really did it.  I dreamt, and I saw the temples burning, but I didn’t think – I didn’t think he would actually…”

He faded into heaving sobs, but it didn’t matter, because his heart opened, and the story laid itself bare before the dragons’ sunlit eyes.

Air Temples burning as squad after squad of imperial firebenders routed them and their occupants.  The ashes of children scattered across the four winds.  The little blue dragon watching with rising terror and guilt as she realized what she had let them do.  It was upon her back that they had arrived at the lofty Southern Temple, previously only reachable by sky-bison.  And, gazing with grim satisfaction from behind a veil of flame, the Fire Lord who had ordered the massacres.

“Sozin,” rasped Kuzon.  “Sozin killed them all.”

One last image was given to them, layered with grief and sunshine.  A boy, no more than twelve, his hair shaved away and the tattoos of a master upon his head and limbs.  They heard his laughter, his invitation to play, his affection as he spoke, the rush of the wind as he bent and flew.  His name sang to them, like a breeze through standing bamboo.

“Aang,” the boy before them choked out.  “He was the new Avatar, and Sozin killed them all to get him.  He’s missing and I – I don’t know if he got away or not.  All those people…those children…”

Ran thought sadly of Rinzen, who had visited the river villages.  The last he had seen of the airbender, he had received his master’s tattoos and had been letting his hair grow again.  Rinzen would have been sixteen then, he guessed, placing himself at fourteen and Fei Yen barely four, begged the airbender for stories, because he was so much better at telling them than her big brother.

The elders were speaking amongst themselves, whispering how it made sense, how they hadn’t heard anything from their only neighbours in Western Air Temple for weeks now…

Ran wasn’t listening.  Though he felt Shao’s eyes upon him, tasted her concern upon the seething air, all he could do was gaze at this boy, shaking at their feet, and wonder what he could do to ease his pain.

~~~

On the fourth day, Jiān left to continue her duties as priestess, and for the first time in perhaps a week, Ran was left alone.  He did not waste time, and taking neither food nor water, began to walk upriver.  He moved mindlessly, only focused on getting as far from the shrine as possible.  He didn’t want to be found, and he didn’t want the priestess to have the unpleasant experience of finding him…after.

He didn’t stop until evening when he reached the headwater, and collapsed, feet bleeding, upon its bank.  His mind was a miasma, by that point steeped in the black water of depression and swaddled in the suffocating fog of dehydration and heat delirium.  All he could think was that headwater’s were places of healing, and that if anything could make the nightmares go away…maybe this could.

He crawled forward into the water, disappearing below the surface as the bank dropped sharply away beneath him.  He thrashed instinctively for a few moments before stilling, limbs going limp, and sinking down through the deep water.  A trail of large silver bubbles marked his path downwards, leaking from his nose and open mouth.

‘Please,’ he thought, eyes turned upwards to the fingers of sunlight dancing overhead.  ‘Please…’

As his toes touched the graveled bottom, he inhaled.

~~~

Kuzon was put in one of the vacant priest’s quarters attached to Huánglóng’s temple.  The rooms were high-ceilinged and airy, big enough to allow the passage of young dragons, and yet Ran found the boy wrapped in a blanket on the bedroom balcony muttering about the walls being too close.

Ran settled on the temple’s shelved sides, and spoke quietly to him.

“You said you dreamt of the temples burning.  What did you mean?”

“I – I used to see things when I was small, my lord.  I would see things before they happened.  The night before, most of the time, in dreams.”  He drew a ragged breath.  “This was the first time it had happened since I was seven.  It was so outrageous; I couldn’t believe it…”

Ran watched the boy fold in on himself.

“What do you want now, Kuzon?” he asked gently.  “What do you want to do?”

The boy turned his head, forehead still resting against his knees.  Ran’s heart broke for the look on that young face.  His voice was filled with the plaintive exhaustion that can only come from hours of weeping.

“Please,” he whispered, “please just make it all go away.”

Ran looked back at him and murmured, “I wish I could.”

~~~

Time contracted.  Days and nights did not matter, because to Ran, they did not seem to pass.  He hovered upon the instant after his death, caught in the sacred currents of the headwater, a dragonfly in restless blue amber.

To Ran, it seemed that he died – and then was consumed.  Gold eyes like points of captive sunlight found him.  They rent him apart in their tearing, loving gaze, plumbed the depths of his heart –

“Ah, of course…”

– And he had a moment to think, ‘What…?’ before he was enveloped, ignited, embraced in the golden fires of change.

~~~

That night, Ran began to pray.

He filled the eastern most temple with incense, laid offerings before the statue of the sleeping ancestor that lay in the main chamber, then flew down to the temple’s gardens where the reflecting pool lay.

He gazed up at La’s half-blinded lantern, then down at the fireflies that still swarmed, all these years later across the low-singing water.  He could smell honey, and perhaps the cinnamon that had always announced their god’s presence.

Sighing, he closed his eyes and spoke to the empty air.

“You said my destiny saved me; that I would do great things.  You said you would be watching.  I don’t doubt that you can see me…hear me.  I also don’t think that in the three thousand and eighty-two years I have been a dragon I have done great things.”

He opened his eyes and watched the fireflies again for a few moments.  Thought about loving fires that had found him beneath the headwater.  Thought of Huánglóng’s gaze beating a hot tattoo upon his soul.

“But if I am to do one great thing, I want it to be this.  I offer back my second chance, in exchange for the mortal boy’s peace.  If it can be used to help him in any way, I will gladly give it.  Send me to my death, render me mortal, extinguishable, but save the boy from the heartache that is breaking him.

“I would not see him broken the way I was.”

That night, for the first time in decades, Ran dreamt.  Huánglóng stood before him, wings spread wide to touch the tops of mountains.  They faced each other over a lake of flame.  The air was filled with light and spice.

“I would not see him broken, either, my son…though I do not need to take your life to save his…”

~~~

“Tell me your name.”

“Ran…my name is Ran…”

~~~

When the attendants went to retrieve Kuzon the next day, all they found was scorched bedding and nestled amongst the ashes, a single golden dragon’s egg.

In their confusion they brought it to him, and Ran wrapped his coils lovingly about its patterned shell.  He put his cheek to its warm side.  The creature within turned, wrapped securely in its yellow womb.

“When you wake,” Ran whispered, “you shall still be Kuzon.”

He sighed, breathing those big shining sparks in a glinting cloud to surround them both, just as Shao had done the day they flew home.  

“But when you wake, the world will be a different place.”

The laughter of long ago children sang in his ears.

“You will be different too.”

Fei Yen gazed at him from his memories…and smiled.

“When you wake…you shall be Kuzon of the Red…”

Sunlight embraced them both.

“…and you will be my loyal son.”


End of Part Two: Ran