Adolescent Tempest

Skeel Nishiyama stared down into the courtyard, sparsely lit by dying lamplight, at the body of a woman who had lived only moments ago. Even from the balcony, the child could see blood pooling around the lifeless corpse, seeping into cracks lining the stone streets. He could smell it; blood was on the steel railing he clung to now, where she'd fallen back and ripped open her palm. He couldn't bring his voice out, the night as silent as the unmoving lump of flesh. The corpse of his mother.

His insides threatened to spill out as the spinning sensation in his head slowly overtook his already shaky vision. He could taste the bile rising in his throat and was forced to clamp a cold, clammy palm over his quivering lips. The rough stone was sure to build callous on his bare feet if he stood there too long, but not even the frigid air seeping through his silk sleeping robes could urge him back inside.

One hand caressed the bloodied railing as he sank to the ground, knees meeting it with such force faint bruises were sure to appear under his ebony skin. Tight brown curls danced across his face in the midnight wind, curls he shared with the woman who'd raised him. The woman he just killed.

Moments later, a patrol located the death, rushing forth as the leather flaps of their armor made sounds as loud as their hurried steps. Life was a blur; he could hear the yelling, the screaming of servants, the barking of orders. But every sound churned together in his mind, sounding more like a symphony of his regret rather than the voices of living men and women. Dead, he felt like he was dead, or dying. What life was there for him to live now?

The doors to his quarters were forced open, sliding with such force their delicate frames shuddered and bent. Launching the scent of cherry wood to mix with his mother's sweet, scented blood. At some time, salty, stinging tears had begun rushing down his cheeks, he didn't have any mind to feel shame for them.

The steps behind him grew louder, and some primal fear snapped within his soul.

"NO!" he screamed, wheeling around to face the oncoming barrage of soldiers and servants, "D-Don't touch me!"

There was a nervous pause as the men comprehended the crazed look in the child's eyes. They had always been wary of the outsider and his whore mother; now was just a good reason to rest their hands on their blades. The boy continued his trembling, tucking his hand into the folds of his robes. There was a buzzing sensation ricocheting around inside his arms. A soldier took a step closer.

"NO!" he pleaded again, desperately trying to warn them, "I-I don't k-know what I did! I didn't mean to!"

No one had a care for his misery; he was a threat, a hindrance of a child that the shogunate's wife had enough sense to be rid of for this display. But they didn't understand, the boy wanted them to, he needed them to. His spirit wasn't strong enough to handle a death he caused, much less a room full of those who lacked understanding. His mother understood, and her fate was still the same.

The man advanced all the same, and that electric sensation snaked from his arms to his chest. Every breath felt like thousands of pinpricks down his throat, a stabbing at every organ congealed in his torso. The wind picked up, allowing more icy air to enter his frantically working lungs. The soldier stepped into the moonlight,

and Skeel met his narrow, black eyes. They seemed like bottomless voids surrounded by the man's pale, snowy flesh. But every bit of fear the child felt was nothing to do with this imposing figure, but rather what may happen to him.

"Please!" Skeel pleaded a final time, to still deaf ears. The buzzing, the electric feeling, took over every part of his body, growing almost unbearable with every passing moment. The soldier reached down, and Skeel tried so desperately to say with his eyes what was being ignored from his lips. It was too late.

He felt the strong hand of an adult man clamp itself around his wrist, and the sensation trapped in his body begged to be set free. He tried to keep it stable, to banish it to whatever corner of hell it had come from. But his fate was set from the moment this night had begun. From the moment he had chosen to cling to his mother when this foreign mind had invaded his body. His life meant something far different now.

The flash was sudden,

hardly a blink of time, but for the child, it was like an eternity. An eternity of watching the skin under the soldier’s helmet constrict and shudder as bolts of death snaked under it. The man’s eyes went white as the sickly scent of his burning flesh filled the child’s delicate senses. A familiar scent, a very recently familiar scent. His body flew back into the crowded room, airborne legs upsetting the schoolbooks scattered about a short table. The body landed

amongst several figures carved from maple wood, destroying the child’s favorite toys. The sickening crash and cracking of his bones sent waves of nausea through the boy as he tried with newfound desperation to cease the electric buzzing of his palms.

Small whiffs of smoke twisted off the burning leather armor, and in the silence, the slight sizzle of skin could be heard by every terrified soul. The boy began to wail, pleading so desperately for those present to stay back. The first crime was already enough to forfeit his soul; what was he now?

Whispers of ‘tempest’ made their way through the petrified crowd as those of religious nature began to study him with different eyes. His mother had sung of the old gods and their gifts. But this, he felt, could be nothing more than a curse of the most demonic kind. The spirit blessings were meant to preserve humanity, yet two souls lie dead that night. Dead at the hands of a child who wanted nothing more than to forfeit his life then and there.

Just as the ghost of sunlight began to seep into the blackened sky, after a lifetime of clinging to that same spot and watching the onlookers filter from his bed chambers, a woman walked through the broken doorway. She was stout and muscular, with a face of brutalized features and a glare even more horrifying. Skeel shivered as he had been for all this time. At some point, his fear had ceased intensifying, but it never left. The hulking figure entered with a lanky man, face adorned with downturned thin lips and glintless eyes; his gaunt face stared at the child with skepticism.  

The woman approached with a limp, grunting with every lumbering step. Her eyes, a piercing lavender, bore into him with a hostility that should have made the small boy frightful. But he could only manage fear of himself. The figures exchanged some words, Skeel interpreted none of them. His mind felt as frozen as his body; the world began to spin.

A strong force wrapped around his robed arm, but he felt too cold, too frozen, too numb to panic. The buzzing, the pinprick sensation began to well up again in his chest, flowing outward into his limbs once more. Despite the energy, he felt like a soggy cotton-stuffed doll. Like his form held no shape, only a growing, burning sensation, a demonic energy that threatened to become all he was. He felt that was already the truth, that his humanity had disappeared the moment that horrifying tendril of burning ruin had taken life.

His body lit, tears evaporating as soon as they fell. His mind began to completely petrify, unable to comprehend another soul ripped from its flesh because of him. All he could see was white, a burning white.

But the grip didn’t soften; if anything, it began to hurt with its strength. The woman stopped dragging him, clamping another hand onto his opposing shoulder. He could hear something, another noise mixing with the terrible ringing assaulting his ears. Yelling, someone was yelling at him. Then he felt his body begin to shake, as if someone was shoving him back and forth. That’s when words finally broke through his petrified stupor.

“-cus, focus! Damn’t kid, wake up!” a gruff voice pleaded angrily. He wanted to listen, but his body burned so fiercely no part of him had the will to move, “you’ave to calm down! Ya hear me boy? Control youself!”

He felt something strike him across his cheek, something harder than a human hand should have been. It left a pain different from the hot agony radiating through his body. It was a more familiar hurt, something he recalled from countless tumbling accidents on the stone pathways of the gardens. Stone, that’s what her grip felt like. Stone.

A warm, wet feeling took over the side of his face; it stung with every breath he took. It was as if the pain helped him focus, and forced him to give less mind to the spiral of emotions no child would be able to handle properly. Then he smelt it, his own blood, running in lines out of his nose and dripping from his rounded chin. Shapes began to re-form in his vision, the jagged features of the gruff woman. But there was something more to it, something he hadn’t noticed prior. Her features were far too pointed and cracked to be flesh, no, Skeel realized it now. Why her grip was so stiff, why she walked with a strange gait, why he was now bleeding from just being struck across the face. The woman was made of stone.

He felt himself relax as his shattering mind understood that she was afflicted with the same demons as him. Something about that gave him the slightest reassurance and almost aided in helping him forget what he’d done. Almost.

“Listen, boy,” she said, growling more than speaking the words, “it on’y gets worse’d more ya fight it. Breathe.”

He listened, acting on command like a dog. His mind was emptying; he let it as slow, methodical breaths entered and flowed from his tired lungs. Every part of him was exhausted; he felt his eyelids grow heavy as his body began to droop again.

“Feisty little thing, isn’t he?” a course man’s voice said. "Dear old mother was a Southerner, though. I suppose I’m not too surprised.”

Skeel’s pulse quickened again at the mention of the corpse below the balcony.

“I swear’ta Alakei Toshiaki, you light’d him up again-” the woman growled.

“I jest Talya, you really ought not to scrunch your nose so,” the man said with a breathy chuckle, “it destroys any woman left behind that swollen mess you call a face.”

“Quit talkin out ya ass or I’ll shove you’re face in it!”

“Very distinguished! I’m certain your husband adores your tongue.”

The woman, Talya, said nothing more, but Skeel could hear her breathing as if she were enraged. He found a small part of himself annoyed at the man in the room, confused by his calm tone, but most of what he felt was fatigue and pain. In a swift motion he nearly missed, Talya picked him up, with one arm under his legs and the other below his shoulders. His eyes were closed, and his mind was pounding out of consciousness. The man may have said something else, but Talya didn’t respond. The only sounds Skeel could manage to focus on now were the ringing in his ears and the echo of his mother’s screams replaying in his adolescent mind.