Chương 33: Chapter 28 – The Ancestor’s Breath

Cade stood in the air with nothing under his feet but he did not fall. Wind combed his hair in a thin, high current, cool as shaded water. He turned his head and came face to face with a tree. A leviathan of green rose beside him like a mountain given leaves with a trunk wider than a building. The crown stacked in tiers upon tiers until distance turned the highest branches into a haze. Bark wore faint veins of light, a slow pulse through living wood.

The leaves hummed—not sound, exactly, more the pressure you feel in your ears when too high up. He knew the tree was saturated with life—with vitality—he could feel it like he felt gravity's pull down. He reached for the roughness of bark and felt— —ash. The world snapped sideways. Cade stumbled and caught himself in ankle-deep dust. The sky had the color of a dead furnace. The wind, when it moved, tasted of lye and old bones. He stared down in shock at hands that were not his.

Sleek, four-fingered digits ended in dark, blunt tips. Thin membranes connected each finger to the next. Black skin, so black it drank the light, ran smooth over sinewy limbs. Pearlescent sigils crawled across wrists and along forearms in fine arcs and lattices he couldn't identify, like intricate tribal tattoos. His chest rose and fell and yet as he took steps he realized his lungs didn't pull in air.

As his body trudged forward, walking through ash at a calm but determined pace, Cade realized he was not controlling the movements. He was a passenger, locked into a seat that rode inside a lithe amphibian with muscles like braided cords and white glyphs flowing along the flanks. Cade could feel the muscle firing patterns unfamiliar to his own physiology. He could sense joint angles, tendon tension, tiny stabilizers ticking on and off, yet he could not make any of it obey his own command.

His frantic mind tried to war against this ebony prison, tried to take control, until a faintly feminine voice blossomed from deep within. It spoke only three words. Observe and learn. Time seemed to hasten as days fell away in jump cuts. The sun lifted and dropped; the stars smeared into lines in the night sky. The creature walked the wasteland and Cade could do nothing but observe.

So he watched, he witnessed everything around him, his mind took notes on the journey as the body traversed with something else in control. Whomever he was inhabiting didn't breathe, he wasn't sure if this creature didn't need air or if the air here was toxic, either way she held her breath for days on end. The ash stung faintly, alkaline on the dewy black skin. The horizon lay banded in dull grays that bled earth and sky together. Every so often, something pulsed along her skin, prickling those pearly sigils.

After days of ceaseless marching, the creature stopped in the middle of nowhere. Flat ash all around, no landmark but a small dimple in the ground. To Cade it seemed random but he felt something inevitable about this place through his connection with this strange creature. The moment the body's weight settled, he felt it: a pocket just under the scorched crust, a hard, hungry pressure that was almost the opposite of the rich vitality he sensed in the tree earlier.

The black skinned creature folded into a simple seated posture: legs crossed, body upright, fingertips resting on thighs. Cade's sense of time slowed, dropping into the cadence of the body's pulse. There he felt not just blood, but something else flowing within the feminine form. The flow began to move in cycles he couldn't decipher. It slid along the sigils, threaded through hidden channels like water returning to old riverbeds, looped, reversed, braided.

He could track the surface of the pattern the way a novice tracks the tides on a chart knowing there's an ocean beneath the ink. Day became night and night became day with a slow inevitability as he traced the flow through the body he was forced to inhabit. Was this how stamina flowed? Was this mana? What is this energy I feel? So many questions popped into his mind throughout his time while the body sat. However, as soon as one question came up his concentration broke and he lost the connection.

He had to push everything out of his mind to be able to observe the mysterious flow again. At dawn, when light first bled over the horizon, the form stood. Feet planted, webbed toes shuffled and set firm in the ash. Hands rose to chest and pressed palm to palm in a gesture Cade almost laughed at as he recognized: prayer hands, mountain pose, Yoga 101 from the campus rec center—except what he was experiencing was more than a white girl yoga teacher could ever hope to demonstrate. Then the body exhaled.

At first it was simply air leaving lungs but as it went on the exhale began to carry more than breath. Cade could feel the flow from before gathering and exit the body and as it did a mist poured out. It slid from pores and eyes, from the corners of the mouth and from the fine membranous skin at the throat. The mist condensed into a visible haze as it rushed outward in ripples and then in waves until hundreds of meters of ash all around were covered in an ethereal white veil.

Cade felt the black skinned creature's will stay with the mist as if they were connected. He felt she was emptying herself both of breath as well as that mysterious energy that flowed through her body. At the end of the long exhale the creature held still without breath. Hands separated and fell. The released field of mist lay like a cloak across the land as far as the eye could see. It held still, as if awaiting a command. Cade felt an inhale, sharp and deep. Black arms swept toward the sky, palms lifting.

The mist obeyed. It rose in elegant strata. The air thickened as the pressure changed. Clouds condensed out of the mists. The haze gathered and darkened until a ceiling of storm muscled itself into being overhead. Cade could sense something else riding the updraft—an ambient ugliness from the land itself, the harsh, corrosive residue of whatever had burned this place hollow. It flowed up the channel the mist initiated, braided into the rising storm.

The land's ugliness followed the mist like a seed crystal spurs crystallization in a supersaturated solution. The rising mist was the template that the wasteland's residue was forced to follow. Cade felt the breath hold as her hands reached the top of the movement. Lightning crawled inside the newly formed clouds covering the sky. The body paused as the clouds condensed further and further until they were roiling above.

Then Cade felt an exhale and a deep reverberating vibration in the throat that sounded like a massive thundering croak. The lithe form folded at the waist, continuing the thunderous exhale until long fingers tipped toward the ground. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. Rain came down in a torrential downpour. It went from nothing to sheets in a heartbeat. It hammered ash into paste. It washed lines into the land.

Cade felt the direction of the flow swap as rain fell from the sky and back down to the earth. The upflow reversed and thunder became the sound of the land's surrender. He could feel that not everything that fell was connected to this body. That mysterious energy that was released was but a drop that had taught the bucket how to pour. He felt stupidly small and privileged to witness this intense magic at work, to feel it firsthand as if the energy flowed through his own body.

The sheer amount of control this creature had was unreal. This was true control, true magic at work, and he yearned to know more. The body stayed folded, empty-lung, while water pooled around her. Then she lowered herself in a smooth unbroken hinge to all fours—plank, but with amphibian physiology, wrists stacked under shoulders, spine elongated. The rain turned the ground below into a mirror. She looked down.

Cade saw her face in the growing pools: the smooth black skin, sigils that glowed in the dim, and eyes a deep sapphire, pupils thin vertical slits. The gaze held. The world quieted around the thunder roaring above. At that moment Cade realized he was in the body of a humanoid frog, similar, but strikingly different, from the one that had so effortlessly captured him. He had no time to question as a new sensation began to build deep inside of him.

Cade forced his mind to catalogue the new sensation as he watched and felt from inside this frog. She hadn't inhaled again but he felt gas still move into their shared lungs, gas and then something else that trickled up from below and behind where her navel would be. He knew oxygen left the lungs and carbon dioxide filled its place—the lungs were a membrane after all. Blood gases equilibrate even when one doesn't pull in air. But beneath his understanding of physiology, there was something he couldn't identify.

He traced it back to her core, a core he did not have. A different feeling had gathered there, more real, somehow, than anything else that moved so far. If he had to describe it he would say that it had the feel of potential. Not a defined thing yet but instead it was a library of possibility. Cade felt as the body he was inhabiting spun this mysterious feeling out of her core, creating yet another experience beyond his current understanding.

While he couldn't wrap his mind around what it was, he could sense its intent: clean, dense, and willing, no yearning to be used. He felt the frog exhale again, pushing out the carbon dioxide pulled from her blood. It wasn't just air leaving as her will tethered her breath to her core. She drew from her core, up through a mechanism Cade could barely sense. It traveled to the lungs and met the last of the breath as she exhaled. Her face lowered until her mouth just touched the water.

The last of the exhale left into the pool and sank. Cade's mind clicked as he felt this very feeling before. It was the feeling of being completely spent, the same feeling he had when he was nearly out of health, stamina, and mana. It was as if this frog had put every last bit of her resources into that final breath. Cade could feel everything in this body wanted to give up.

She yearned for rest from the lack of stamina, her mind wanted to collapse from the lack of mana, she pined over the sweet release of death from the lack of health. However one thing kept her going, an unyielding will that bubbled and boiled from deep within. A will that knew more than anything that she would not collapse and die here, that she could push further than any had before. Lightning struck in the same beat—dark lightning that hit with the crack of release.

The frog's breath sank into the watery ground below and spread as a wave. Where it passed life grew anew. Green appeared where her mouth had kissed the water. At first it looked like veins underneath the skin. Then threads broke the surface, living capillaries carrying possibility outwards. In three heartbeats the filaments braided into fronds and blades and leaves, a fractal rash of life raced away from her in a hundred-meter ring. Cade felt her push back up and flow to standing in one liquid motion.

Her lungs were burning for air and when she inhaled he felt the world inhale with her. Hands rose, palms opened and met above her head. The new green growth surged as it shot upward and outward, an organized chaos directed by her will alone. Buds detonated into impossible flowers. Creepers vaulted and chose their scaffolds. Trees unscrolled their crowns. The plain of desolation around her became a garden in seconds, then a jungle of clean growth with no rot, no clogging tangle, just purpose ordered by her will.

Her palms eased down to her chest. She exhaled, and so did the riot. The growth quieted from a frenzy into something sustainable, like a fever breaking into healthy heat. Cade felt as her mind eased and her body drank as a new energy turned and streamed into her as if a hundred rivers were flowing back to their source. It gathered and condensed around her as she held empty lungs. Time elongated as he felt the energy pour into her body and make its way to her core.

The intensity increased as Cade felt the energy compress and shift like a gas condensing into liquid. The intensity rose again, pressing at figurative walls inside of her core. Pain arrived from the strain. He would have quit long ago if he was in control. He felt where he would have quit, where it became too much to bear but the frog did not. She pushed forward with confidence as if her very being depended on what she was about to do.

Cade felt intense pressure behind his navel as the energy kept pouring into the frog's core. Somehow he knew that her core's reservoir had filled past what was safe. He felt like he was going to explode and his mind begged her to stop but she pressed on like she couldn't hear him. She didn't even fight it like Cade had expected, she just let the tremendous flow of energy pour into her and when her core could contain no more she let the energy trickle into her body.

The overflow found paths he hadn't known existed, hadn't felt before now. Eastern mythology called them meridians, other stories called them channels or pathways but the principle was the same. They were names for the internal or metaphysical constructs where mana, qi, madra, or other types of spiritual energy flowed. The dense liquid energy ran through these highways within the frog's body, then into smaller roads, then capillaries, until even the tiniest collateral carried a brightness even Cade could detect.

He felt her whole body fill as the energy continued pouring in. He felt her body tighten and expand from the inside and right before he was sure she was going to explode, she let it all out. She exhaled in a short, decisive pulse and thrust her palms up while her feet rooted down. The energy condensing within her split along two vectors. One drove down her legs and out through her soles; simultaneously a twin flood shot up her arms, through her fingers, and into the sky.

The ground beneath her bulged, shifted, then cracked. A tree erupted under her feet. It wasn't another unruly surge of the jungle around them. This was focused. She rode its crown as it shouldered her into the air. Wood grew faster than Cade had ever witnessed, the trunk thickening, sheath on sheath of bark layering to bear the impossible load. Nine thick roots torqued downward in a fractal storm, biting the earth in a tight embrace, finding bedrock and ploughing through, making it their own.

Above, the crown lifted and unfurled in a different fractal formation, branching on golden ratios, punching through the storm ceiling until daylight shattered around leaves. Cade tasted sap and felt the altitude pop in his ears. The air became thin. When the newborn giant tore the cloud skin, the sky sounded relieved. The frog lowered her hands. The floods became trickles and then a memory. She inhaled—not energy now, only air—and let the world do the rest of the work.

Gold arrived in the periphery of Cade's vision. At first he thought it was dust in his eyes. Then the motes thickened, lazy sparks drifting into his vision from nowhere. They accumulated until all he saw was gold, the whole world reduced to a warm, humming field of it. The gold blinked and Cade sat back to his own body.