Piercing the Bleak Chapter Three

Xacquan listens as her new acquaintance, a little boy named Ragmon, tells her the reason he came down into the Greylands.

CHAPTER THREE

            Many miles little Ragmon and I walked.  Occasionally Ragmon would stop and show me what he’d call “landmarks,” and tell me the legends his people had regarding them.  I, as always, was curious. 

Down there, surrounded by orange flows, one huge Cray, and miles and miles of Greylands, I had supposed the world would’ve ended sometime.  I don’t know what I thought.  I had almost imagined a big, flat disc, almost… and maybe a drop off point where the edges were.  Back before I had embarked on my journey from my place of first existance, I had assumed that whatever I dreamed of would simply…be there…and perhaps that was the reason my hope dwindled so quickly.   This journey had me reconsidering what the world must look like.  Either there was no end to it at all, or the world-disc was bigger.  Much bigger.  What I didn’t know then was the many nights I would stay up alone, contemplating this very idea and looking for an answer.

            I told this to Ragmon.

            “You only wait,” Ragmon said, making the hrrffing noise it labeled ‘chuff’ or ‘sigh’ or ‘long exhalation.’  “You think this is interesting right now.  Wait till you see the Greenlands, bathed in their tropical beauty.  Or the Goldlands, full of plains and plains of gold grassy goodness.  ‘Course… My tribe doesn’t make that journey too often.  It’s a long, long walk.  Babies can’t make it.  And I only saw it once because Papa was the diplomat and I was a clingy little boy who couldn’t let go.”

            “Papa…?  Boy…?” 

            “Papa.  Big guy, bigger than me, who tells me how to do things.  And boy.  Please don’t make me explain that… Not now.”

            “Gender?”

            “That’s right.  It’s a gender thing.  Thou shall not speak of it!”  A growling noise resonated from the ‘boy’’s mouth when it said this, and its two black and white balls, ‘eyes’, gave a little sparkle.  Somehow, this made me feel buoyant inside, as if the space beneath the curve of my chest would rise into the air.  And I did this thing then, where the corners of my speech feature, my ‘mouth’, raised a bit.

            “I cannot be-lieve it!” Ragmon declared.  “She smiled!  The mysterious Xacquan sa-my-led!  Heere me world, heeere!  For it is possible!”

            “I do not understand,” I said, but the buoyancy only grew stronger.  “I think I will float away.”

            “That,” Ragman said, “that is happiness.  It must be new to you.  Living by a tree all your life in a colorless world, you haven’t known much of it.”

            And right then, right there, a ray of something strange and special cut through the clouds of the Greylands, sliced right through them and sent a blaze of wonder through my soul.  Beside me, Ragmon sighed, jumped up and down in place, and rubbed his hands together fast as if to keep warm.  “Well, well, well.  Would ya look at that.  Sunlight.  This, Xacquan, is a miracle in the flesh.”

            We stood there, mouths gaped open as we took in the sunlight before it faded away.  I felt like the Cray, then, but a bigger, stronger, version of it.  The Cray was powerful, and so was I.

            I catch Ragmon looking up at me, the corners of its speech feature raised.  “You look like you’ve seen magic,” it said with a sigh like always.  “But just you wait.  The oracles in my tribe will blow your mind.”

 

            We came to a place where the dark grey skies grew lighter, but still festered with clouds.  The ground was on an uphill slant, and we walked and walked and walked.  Our legs fatigued quickly and easily, and our bodies grew cold.  On occasion, we would spot a patch of white downfall, “Snow,” Ragmon identified it as, and the more often we saw it, the more we would be cursed with a greater chill. 

Ahead of us was the uphill slant, and where it ended, the clouds began.  “Your tribe lives in the clouds?” I gasped.  How unattainable they had looked from my spot by the Cray.  And now, we were approaching them, about to walk through them.

            “Better yet.  My tribe lives above the clouds,” Ragmon, its arms wrapped around itself, replied.  “Above the smoke and the smog and the fog and the grey, underneath the Aurora Borealis, and within the heavens.  Glory’s our motto, that’s what they say.”

            “Then what were you doing down in the Greylands?  I would never want to be there, if I could be where you live,” I reasoned.

            Ragmon’s eyes dropped to the ground, and its arms pulled tighter around its chest.  “It’s… A sickness, you see.  I had to get the tree bark.  But…!”  It looked me straight in the eye.  “It’ll be all right, you know.  I gathered some, just as they asked.  And that’s when I found you!  It’ll go away in no time at all.  Stories say… This tree bark, here in my pockets, will invigorate my people and reempower their souls so they can live on.  It’ll be fine, just you see.”

            “Sickness…”

            Ragmon bit its mouth rim, its ‘lip’.  “Not that I don’t want to, but I can’t really explain it to you,” it said.  “Compare it to tiredness.  You’re so tired, you just want to drop, and you can’t move an inch.  Or hunger.  Your stomach is so starved it feels like it will pinch out of your midsection.  Either that, or crawl up your throat.  Or a mix of all of them, even.  That’s sickness.”

            We walked onward for a bit as I thought, in silence.  “Then, I understand,” I said.  “I was sick.  On the day you found me, I was sick.”

            Ragmon hrrfffed.  That time, though, it was deep and dark and lacked any sort of buoyance whatsoever.  If anything, it instead carried a very sinking energy, as if the area below the curve of my chest was going to… implode.  “But you weren’t sick,” Ragmon growled.  “And that’s why I can’t explain.  Because, out of everything that you can’t understand, you won’t be able to understand this the most.”

            I peered into its eyes.  The words came to me:  Sadness, Anger.  But I swore I never heard them before, and that it was a hunch, and that all it was was magic that came at the right moment in time.  Suddenly, I understood what happened:  It was the Cray.  It finally spoke to me from the inside of my pocket, not to my ears, but to my soul.  The Cray.   All this time, this is how it was speaking.  I just didn’t know how to listen.

            Ragmon looked away from me.  Shhmmmt, its smell feature said.  Shhmmmt, shhmmmt, shhmmmt. 

            That noise alone seemed to drain all the buoyancy I had left out of me, so I went to sit beneath a brittle tree and recharge.  Without a word, Ragmon followed me.  I sat with my back to the tree and stared down, way down upon the great distance up the slope we made.  It all seemed too much to take in, all of this that I never knew.

            We rested there until the skies filled with darkness.  Before long, there happened yet another thing that I never knew of.  Ragmon laid its head upon my curved arm-top, snapping me from my exhausted haze.  It wasn’t comfortable; in fact, it was rather frightening, and all I wished to do at first was to pull away and sit somewhere else.  But when I looked down, I saw it there, just a dark grey little boy with a worn out little face, eyes closed and body defenseless.  Young, came the words of the Cray.  Vulnerable.

            So I did something I never did before, took my arm and wrapped it around the little boy’s curved arm-top.  Safe, I thought to Ragmon.  I will keep you safe until the skies grow light again.