The Last Stormdancer

The stones rising to meet us. Open grinning mouths. Teeth of black rock, smiling as wide as the sky.

“Wish to fight for the right to see them born still?” I asked.

His eyes on mine.

“Die mewling inside cracked shell too thin to hold them?”

My eyes on his.

“Monkey-children not worth that.”

“But I vowed,” he said. “Khan’s word is law.”

Seconds from impact.

“Then be not Khan,” I said. “And my word be law.”

He spread his wings, snarling, momentum and gravity tearing at his joints. Pulling us back, away from death’s velocity and rolling, just as I had taught him when we young, flipping himself beneath me as we collided with the mountainside. The crunch of year-deep drifts of snow, the splintering crack of ice and stone beneath. The impact knocking all from our lungs, pressing me to him, blood and feathers and fur. And there on his back he lay, wings spread in the deep frost about us, throat exposed. At my mercy.

The pack gathered about us, soaring down from the Aerie above, astonished cries and fearful roars. The Khan, bested by a female? Never in our history had such a thing come to pass. What could it mean? What could it portend?

Understand, monkey-child; the title of Khan is never given. Always taken. Bought with murder. And for me to claim his title, I should have claimed Rahh’s life. He knew it to be so. My rule would be bought with his death. Such was our way.

But mine would be a new way.

“Enough death. Not for this. Not kill you, Rahh. Too few of us left. Too much lost already.”

My roar echoed on the stone around me, in the sky above me, my grandfather’s ghost hanging in the air beside me.

“Arashitora do not kill arashitora! No more. Khan’s word is law!”

Rahh dragged himself to his feet, bloodied and bruised, shaking the snow from his fur. Ragged breath boiling the air between us. Thunder echoing in rolling clouds as the others gathered on the stones about us, wide eyed, hackles raised as Rahh lowered head in deference.

“Khan’s word is law.”

I looked about my kin. Rage burning in my chest. Flame in my eyes.

“Not stay here. Fight no more. Why we help them, when they not help themselves? When they destroy all beautiful and pure?”

Rahh’s voice was low, and keen-edged.

“Certain this about them? Not about him?”

I growled long and low. The truth striking closer to my heart than he could know.

“This about us.”

I looked to my belly, to the lives I could already feel swelling inside there. To the two futures laid before them—one beneath this sweltering bloody sky in a land run through with poison and gleaming brass. The other, I did not know where. North perhaps, where the dragons fled. A different land. A different future. One at least where they might have a chance to breathe.

Rahh pressed his cheek to mine. Nodded slow.

“Us.”

* * *

We took her back to the land of her birth. The land of the Kitsune clan. The Lady Ami upon my shoulders, the last monkey-child ever to sit there. The island that had been our home laid out below, bloodred and turning slowly to rot. My eyes were ever on the land beneath. The smog creeping into the soft valleys. The beginnings of a decay; a blackening that even then was beginning to take seed, and in years to come, would grow so much worse.

But the Lady Ami’s eyes were on the horizon. The edge of the sky. What might be. What could still be. One hand pressed to the curve of her belly.

We found it where he said we would—at the edge of a murmuring forest, by the banks of a chuckling stream. A tiny house, a thatched roof, a crooked door. Beast skins hung on racks outside the walls. An old woman and an older man, both browned and wizened by the sun. The woman bent with years, almost blind. The man tall and wiry, still possessed of a hunter’s spirit, sweeping up his spear and watching me with wide and terrified eyes as I came in to land.

Lady Ami slipped off my shoulders, sank slowly to the ground. Though we could not speak, still she knew this was an ending. Tears in her eyes. Empty hands upturned toward me. Dragging what she could of a smile along bloodless, trembling lips.

But the taste of ashes lingered on my tongue. The taste of death you monkey-children had carved for yourselves with the petals of bloodred flowers. So I took to the wing. My mate and all my pack beside me. Turning away from your prophecies and destinies, your greed and your blindness, turning our eyes instead to the fateless horizon. A place we could make our own. A future, our own to decide.

And we did not look back.

Arashitora live long years, monkey-child. And my years were good ones. Bright ones. Spent in a place where the storm endlessly raged. Where our father Raijin beat upon his drums with all the fury of the heavens. Rahh and I knew joy. Our cubs growing fierce and proud and strong away from your choking sky. Our kind spared the extinction awaiting us if we had lingered beneath that ceiling of bloody red. And when he left me, when he lay down his head and slept forevermore, I was there beside him, my wings around him, my stripes slowly turning gray.

Those twilight years were tinged, yes, I admit, with a hint of regret. That I was not there to save Jun as he died. That his prophecy, his destiny—that a child of his grandmother’s line would one day save the world with an army of thunder tigers behind him—had proven false. It was a grand dream. A bright dream. But not, I thought, a true dream.

Because I did not know, monkey-child, you see? I did not know.

I did not know of the sweet collision between Jun and Ami that night amidst the lotus blooms. I did not know the seed of it grew in the Lady’s womb, nor that it would fruit into a fine and healthy son. I did not know he would be raised a hunter by his great-grandfather, nor that his grandson would inherit not only his craft, but also Jun’s gift.

A gift he would pass on to his only daughter.

But I know her name, monkey-child.

Just as you do.

I know it as I lay here, watching the endless storm rage above a night-black sea. I know it as the wind howls me a lullaby, old as the stars, singing to my weary bones of a time when I flew free and wild and strong, a boy as light as twig and tinder upon my shoulders, the whoop of his joy spilling into me as we plummeted together from the clouds.

I know it as I know my children, their children, swooping and wheeling in the skies above my head.

I know it as I know myself.

I know it as I close my eyes.

I know Jun was not the last Stormdancer.

And how do I know?

Foolish monkey-child.

Death told me.