Chapter 41: Zyxo day: Relapse or realization?

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Chapter 41

Zyxo day:

Relapse or realization?

 

 

 

 

     Kilala searched me out while I was gathering wood after my announcement. “Hey Amber! Since this big celebration for many reason, why don’t I bring my colored fire stones?” she asked. “More than one reason? What are the others then?” I asked. “So you no know about today then?” she asked. “I guess not, why? What’s up?” I said. “Oh well, I’ll just tell you. One reason is your home! In a new home and just pack with us! Then there is the defeat of the Drago tribe and all the victories with it. We celebrate our safety and new friends too. Then we also are celebrating our biggest holiday of year! It’s a big day with our ritual and all!” she said excitedly.

     Those words worried me a little. I never did like the word “ritual”. “We build big bonfire and dance around it wearing our animal skin clothing that looks like wolf skin, but is actually deer skin.” she started to explain. “Then we throw certain things into fire, not anything living though. We call this day: Zyxo day (Z-ee-k-oe). Which means day of praise from wolves to Christ God. We may be Indian, but we still are Christian.” she finished.

     Oh, that didn’t sound that bad. It could have been much worse than that I suppose. “I have special color stone for today. I have rainbow stone! Rare and great! I need to get them. Be right back.” she said, and then excitedly ran home to get them.

     We all worked to get enough wood and to get the stones. We got the stones set into a circle that was fifteen feet across! It was just huge! It was to be an enormous fire. We would have needed a lot more wood than I thought. We cheated though; we used leftover scraps from the cabin and all the furniture we needed to get rid of.

     I was still having such a good time with everyone. Hardly even one fear on my mind or one thought that something may go wrong, not saying it couldn’t, but it was very unlikely. Anyways, we started the fire going with matches and newspaper. Within twenty minutes we had something going. It was burnin’ bright and high. Glowing its orange color with the yellow hints flickering off every few moments. Beautiful, I had such a fascinations with fire sometimes.

     So everything was ready and the fire was going. Everyone went off to the village but Derek, my mom, Sammie and me. We waited behind so they could do whatever it was they needed to do to get ready. I’m guessing it was all the things that Kilala had said they used in this “ritual” as she called it.

     They returned just as the sky fell down with dark blues and various shades of purples over the last existence of the sun for that perfect day. They came back in such beautiful clothing and paints. The men war coats of fur resembling a timberland wolf and faces painted with what was seeming nature colored paints handmade from the earth in different shades of hunter green, autumns brown, and night black. They had necklaces of brown leather and all of them had a sharp tooth on it with a small single white feather tied next to it.

     The women of the tribe on the other hand wore silky looking tan and brown colored dear pelts, excluding the heads of course. They were white on some areas and long as to their knees. They also wore face paints, two white stripes on there face in a vertical stand point instead of horizontal, from below their eyes all the way to next to their lips. They wore a traditional looking headband with a dark colored hawk feather tucked neatly into the back into an antennae fashion. They wore their necklaces too. But theirs were fragments of turtle shells torn and cut into an odd shape I couldn’t figure out. It was some sort of symbol. They told me it meant “thing most important in life”. It came down about chest high and was a shiny glossy piece of jewelry.

     Kilala returned with a small sack of her powered rock stuff for the fire, and then she also had another sack. It was a burlap, beat, dirty bag that seemed to clink as she walked with it. It had something in it. “What’s in the bigger bag?” I asked. She smiled, then answered, “oh it is the best part of all of this Amber. But to you it is a surprise for now.” It didn’t matter anyways about it, so I just ignored it for then. It really wasn’t important at the time I guess.

     They all placed themselves around the fire in a pattern of a man women man women man women fashion. My family and I watched as they did a dance around the growing and contained fire. They gave something that sounded like a chant, but was some sort of prayer I think.

     Kilala threw the entire little sack of black power onto the eight-foot flames. It roared up a couple of feet and span and twisted into many hues and saturations of every color imaginable. It just flickered almost in a tie-dye-ish nature. To switch around until it flickered all the colored at once. I thought about it for a moment with the black powder. “Black is the essence of all colors.” I whispered to myself. I still waited patiently to see what was in the other sack.

They danced and sang, and we enjoyed their ancient ceremonial ritual and praise. It was a cool way to show your appreciation for God. I mean, its one thing to just say it, and another to show it, but this, I’d be proud if I were God.

     All the singing, dancing and laughter died down and all the guys sat around the fire in a circle then. Although the women stayed standing, each one making their way to behind a guy. They stood behind them as the men sat there. They were all paired off.

     Kilala walked over with a solemn face to match the moment. She held the sack as she came. She approached the circle and stopped to stare up at the fire a moment. She opened the sack and I became nervous about it. She took out a handful of foot long, quarter inch think, slender, black, metal rods. You can realize why I was so nervous.

I watched still. Each of the standing women was given a rod. After, they all placed them half in the fire. My heart started to race, but felt like it wanted to stop. Then the ladies grabbed the cool ends of the metal and carefully lifted them from the fires edge. They all blew on them once, and then they placed them on the guys skin. They men barely even flinched or wince, almost like nothing was happening!

I was starting to freak out silently, unnoticeable to the others. They did it again and again to them and started their own designs. Just pressing a hot metal rob on bare flesh to create their art, just like I use to…..

     I looked over at my mom, Derek, and Sammie with a horrified and confused look on my face. As if I was asking why they were doing this quietly. They all looked scared, worried and concerned for me. They should have been.

     I started to watch again and then started to twitch. Then I called out, “Kilala!” She ran to me quickly because of the tone in my voice worried her. “What is the matter Amber?” She said. “What are you guys doing?” I asked frantically. “Oh! This? This is the best part! The men get their warrior names burned into their backs along with their own symbol of them they have. And the women get their nature names and their personal symbols burned into their backs too. This only happens once a year under a full moon in the presence of a great fire. Cool, isn’t it?” she explained.

     Cool was hardly what I thought of it. But non the less I looked up to see the large and full luminescent moon looming over us with a brilliant shine. Almost as if it was watching. I suddenly heard the eerie howl of the two wolves almost in perfect unison. Then the winds started to pick up and made the orange flames flicker and rage.

     The clouds cleared to no more than gray wisps and the fire seem to be wild no more and started to for a shape. They all stood up and continued their pray in unison as Midnight and Sheilla had. The trees swayed in the strengthening winds and debris kicked up in small clouds all around. It was so strange and frightening.

     Then the Wulfin tribe chief came over to me and presented me in an honorable way a rod. The winds blew harder and the fire now seemed to growl. Then it swirled into what distinctively looked like a wolf’s head. It moved around over the fire and shifted its eyes to see upward. It was complete formed and there was no doubt it was a wolfs head made of fire, and it was moving like it was alive!

     He just looked around, like he was waiting for something. I was amazed, confused, and so very scared of it. The warriors walked up in front and knelt to it as it looked towards them. Kilala walked up and stood in the front of the line of kneeling warriors. “Oh thank you God!” she said loudly with her arms in the air, “ for gracing us with your presence today in a form of wolf! Thank you for our harvest and health! And thank you most of all for returning a lost member to our tribe! Amber! We feel more complete now! Thank you for all! O-nih-sho!” she said, then knelt down as well. Everyone did. I was frozen in my own gaze to move.

     The wolf head of God simply listened and nodded at all she said with a pleased look on its face. Then it howled a howl so mysterious, it was like it held all we want to know but never will and can not grasp even when it’s within reach…..it’s so hard to describe how it was. I shuddered at it. Then it just disappeared altogether. The winds stopped, the clouds returned, and the fire yielded to normal.

     Everything was silent, and I fell to the ground. I held my knees so I was in a little ball with tears ready to stream from my eyes. I stood up quickly with a very upset and painful look in my eyes as if I held a thousand pounds on my shoulder to carry for many years. My eyes glistened and shined with tears as everyone stared at me, then one escaped and hit the ground. All eyes were still on me. I was so confused and I hurt badly. I didn’t know what to think.

     I did those things and regret and couldn’t control them, but these…people did it for fun every year! I thought mine might have been a mental issue. How could they just purposely hurt themselves and laugh as if everyone did it? It was so terrible.

     I thought in a few moments more thoughts than thought in a day. I wondered if this had anything to do with why I did my ritual when my life soured. But then I thought, “no, no it couldn’t. I did this long before I found them. No way could I have ever known. I wish I had never come to the forest, so many secrets I found, so many lies, so much pain, and just so much of life that I never wanted to live. Why cant I just wake up? Why can’t I just go home? Why cant I just go back so nothing ever happened?”

     I would rather have lived that lie than to have learned this. This brought me no wisdom, it only brought me pain. Life is pain sometimes, but this is unbearable for one human soul to hold and be ok. I wasn’t ok, nothing was ok.

     Still the thoughts streamed in that day of a moment. Just poured through me. This was definitely the major turning and breaking point of this story, no, of my entire life and existence. I know some may say this is over dramatic, but I have to ask, have any of you ever lived this way? Have any of you out here ever really experienced the pain I’ve described? Lost everything, found new, then lost again only to float in a see of confusion and fear never knowing the shores of renewal besides of your own religion as a boat made of your hopes? I don’t think anyone can honestly say yes.

     Why does this have to happen to me? I ask myself, of all people why me? I have lived well and done my best and tried to do things right, but still I get what no one should ever have to deal with. I wouldn’t even with this on my worst of enemies.

     From just learning of my parents after finding the cabin and Midnight, then all the way to almost losing Derek and getting two new animals to finding my mother after battling an Indian chief for my newly found heritage. Then we come down the line to seeing God in the form of a wolf head in a huge bonfire. No, this all couldn’t be real; it had to be a dream, a bad dream. A nightmare. But I wouldn’t wake up. I screamed inside myself to open my eyes and see the new mornings light shine on my face with warmth and greetings. But now I knew it would never come.

     I was actually living this…..life, if I can even call it that! It was like something out of a science fiction movie! But it was worse, because it was all real.

     There were the few goods, but they always seemed to be dashed by new problems and all the misery I felt. But I pulled through to new light from darkness to a sun emerging, I came. But now it seems I will plunge back into the tunnel that may return sometimes to the glorious sun I love to see. The same sun that lets me know I’m alive and well in the physical sense. I was older in mental age then my real age showed, but knowledge can only lead to knowing stuff, and some things are best left a mysterious. Better clueless sometimes than puzzled as to why something is.

     The thoughts poured a few moments more. I wasn’t relapsing again; this was a realization of all I had been through as my own sign. Something needed to be seen, but it took this much to me for me to see what I had been missing. My true purpose want to live in the way I wanted to, but the way of how I am suppose to. For then I saw it did not matter what you wanted and what you wanted to do, but it matter what and when you are suppose to do what you are told by whoever says it.

     Everyone still stared at me, almost waiting for me to make my move before they moved. The silence was drawing to and end. All was becoming clear, no more confusion, or any of that, now I knew what I needed to, I didn’t need to care much anymore, it wasn’t up to me what I wanted, someone else was watching and telling me instead, maybe it was better that way.

     Eyes glued to me and the expression on my face most undesirable. The most they knew at that moment was that I was in pain, deep thought, and had just had a revelation that even made the angels shake with emotion. I knew all I needed to. Eyes stared, then I ran.