The Battle

Noya glanced at Akolai as they approached the last leg of their journey. If the Gods favoured them, their purpose was waiting for them with a smile and a joke, making their travel nothing more than a horrible nightmare. They were tired. Noya just wanted to lie down and let the cold lull her to sleep, but she–they–needed to find out if they’d succeeded. They’d come too far to give up.

Akolai’s eyes lacked the luster of the anger that had fired them up the first time they had laid eyes on each other–two children from opposing countries, magics, and beliefs.

“Come on, Zi, show me how your countrymen are so superior to mine.” Noya hoped that goading him would give him the strength to take the last steps. She needed him with her. She didn’t have the strength to do this on her own.

“We, Zi, can run circles around you, Uleans.” Akolai’s heavy breathing gave his words a staccato rhythm. She worried about the wound at his side, but they’d have to deal with that later.

Noya forced a smile, even as she turned around and continued to trudge up the snowy hill, chilled to the bone, the weight of her pack pressing her down to the snow-covered ground. But she kept on marching, determined to do her part in preventing the war. Misouni, Noya’s cat, already waited atop the hill. Akolai moved beside her, as colourful as colourless Noya was, as light as Noya was heavy. She was a simple baker near the north gate of Ulea, he a mechanical apprentice at the sewage plant of Zi. Neither had had a clue about what they were being thrown into, trying to fulfil an ill-fated prophecy, and it all depended on their timing. Had they made it on time?

The answer came to them even before they crested the top, but the red splattering the white, crisp snow killed the last of their hopes. Too late. They hadn’t prevented the war.

“The President didn’t wait. He promised he would.” Akolai hung his head, unable to watch the massacre of millions. In the field, soldier went against soldier, emerald versus ruby, scimitars and archers versus swords and machine guns. There was no ending to the sea of fighters moving over an increasingly redder ground. The battle was like watching anthill under attack.

“You’re too naïve if you think your country ever wanted anything but war.” Noya’s words were bitter. “Your President knew the prophecy was a fake, so that when we failed, he’d have the blessings of all to attack my people.”

“It’s not as if your Queen thought differently.”

“True. The question is, what can we do now?”

“Do?” Akolai shook his head and scoffed. He dropped his pack on the ground, defeated. “We’re children, and there’s a war going on in the valley.” He stomped his feet into the snow. “We can’t do anything to stop it. We can either watch or join and try not to get killed.”

Noya watched her people die by the hand of Zi technology, the machines of Akolai’s people. The Uleans had no hope. Their magic was dying, and despite the worthless prophecy, Noya had found a way to help her people, but unless she got a message to them with the solution, they were doomed. She glanced at Misouni, who was the only messenger with hopes to make it through the battlefield. Too many would die until the Queen and her generals received the message, and then, how much would they trust a message delivered by a cat? But if she did nothing, how many more would die?

Think. “Give me an inventory of what we have.”

“Of use? Not much.” Akolai rummaged through their packs. “The food we have is not enough to distract two armies from battle, no matter how well you cook. There’s the machine the president gave us to get back fast, but that’s broken. The stupid stones we were told we needed to get to fulfil that fake prophecy. Um, those would take out a few soldiers if you could hit anything. But nothing else much of use.”

“Do you still have your transfiguration device?” Noya asked. As part of the President’s deception, Akolai had used the device to look like the president’s son, someone considered too important to risk on a fool’s errand. With their failing magic, the Queen of Ulea hadn’t even bothered to hide Noya’s lack of resemblance to the princess, even if the dresses Noya’d received had been grand but useless for a trip that involved hiking through mountains and deserts.

“And you’re going to change yourself into what?” Akolai frowned. “No disguise will ever help us go through that battlefield and talk to either leader. It’s useless.”

“Just give it to me.”

“Sure. Have at it.”

Noya took the device into her hands and held it over her head. From where they stood, none of the combatants could see them. The two of them were just specks of dark atop the hill.

She turned to him. “Do you trust me?”

He stared into her obsidian eyes. “Always.”

She nodded in quiet acceptance of a gift more precious than any she could have asked for. “Then, power it.”

“What do you need it to do?”

“Just give it energy and command it to obey me.”

Akolai nodded and grabbed his ink feather and the last of his dried akura leaves, their once purple color already faded to blue. He wrote in black ink a series of numbers and symbols Noya barely recognized from the ones he had taught her and slipped it into the slot on the side of the machine. With a whirring sound, the device glowed red, the light so powerful Noya had to close her eyes against the glare.

Noya took a deep breath and focused like the priestess in the temple of Odaefiri had shown her. She concentrated, willing her mind to see every fighter, no matter what side they were on. With sweat dripping down her cheek, she frowned in concentration and sent her vision as far as she could reach. Under the armies’ feet, the snow sloshed as the heat of the battle won against the cold of the land.

Screams, yells, silence. The cycle repeated as each combatant sought their next quarry and won or died. She tuned out the sounds, and the lack of them contrasted so loud in her mind that, for a moment, Noya thought she must have gone deaf. She hadn’t. She could hear Akolai’s shuddered breaths next to her and Misouni’s meows as the cat sat between her legs.

She sent her desire through Akolai’s machine, using every bit of energy she could gather, hoping it was enough to reach all the battlefield. Too many minds invaded her own, and she struggled not to let go of the machine. Her arms began to lower, and she feared that she, a simple dough maker, didn’t have the strength to change the fate of two nations. Then, Akolai’s arms went around her and helped her lift his transfiguration device.

The energy pulsed in waves, and where before she could only sense the noise of minds, now she could distinguish memories and feelings. She locked onto the faces she needed and pushed with all of her might. The light of transfiguration flashed like a sun across the whole of the valley. 

“Whatever you’re doing, it’s working.” Akolai whispered in her ear, his deep voice full with joy.

Noya didn’t need to open her eyes to see the battle cease. She could feel the fighters’ confusion and panic. Where across from them had stood an enemy, now stood a similarly confused loved one. No one dared raise their weapons. Yells of deep sorrow rose from the men who had been caught with their scimitars or swords embedded in who they saw now as their loved ones. Several lost their grip on their weapon and stepped back in horror, or knelt right where they were, dissolving into tears. Others stared in shock, disbelief, and desperation.

Noya would have smiled if she hadn’t been in so much pain for their suffering, if she hadn’t been so conscious that her next words could save or doom their people.

“Stop. Listen. See.” She spoke into their minds, as she let the image of their loved ones step to the side to stand right next to their enemies.

“The person standing right across from you–the person who now lies dead or dying at your feet–they are all the same as you. He, she, they have the same blood in their veins. Look around you and see the tainted snow. Aren’t you all bleeding crimson? Aren’t you all fighting for the same reason? To protect what you love?”

She swallowed the pain as the hope came towards hers in waves. 

“Everyone has a loved one.” Be strong. “Each one of you has a sister, a brother, a mother or a father, a pet, a friend, an elder you are protecting. We are protecting our homes and our customs against ones we do not understand.”

She pressed against Akolai’s warm body, feeding off his quiet strength.

“And it isn’t just you who fight for these things, but the one you are fighting has the same goal. That person, dressed in crimson or green, also has a loved one. They also want acceptance, love. They want to protect, to fight for what is right. Are you really so different?”

She braced for the denials, the hate that wouldn’t be put aside with ease.

“We are all creatures that seek comfort, and there is nothing easier for comfort than the familiar to us. When we are cold, we look for our hearth because we know it will provide us with the warmth we need. When we need companionship, we look for it in the people around us because they understand our needs.”

Her mind filled with unanimous agreement for once, and she smiled through her tears. Keep going. Her strength wouldn’t hold much longer.

“Our first instinct when faced with something new is to be afraid and to kill or destroy it. Why? Because it threatens what we believe is true. It threatens our comfort of the known. We need courage to recognise that there is not one right way to do things. Destruction is easier, but what is the price of that? So many lives and loved ones lost for no better reason than cowardice.”

The denial pushed back and slammed into her chest. The pain was more than she could bear.

But bear it she would.

“Please.” They needed to understand. “We are letting ignorance and fear guide our decisions. We’re letting our governments decide what is right. We’re blindly putting our faith in people who underneath it all are only human, with their virtues and defects, with their ideals and self-interests. And worse, we are letting our differences govern us. We seek to destroy each other when we can learn so much from our different beliefs. Imagine the power of belief and reason working together.”

Damn it. It wasn’t working. Noya’s grip on the illusion was weakening, her power draining like water escaping through a gap in a well. Some soldiers listened to her words, but others were slipping and raising their weapons one more time. Some ideas were too ingrained to disarm them with words. 

“No. Don’t close yourself off. Listen.” Akolai’s voice joined her, and his strength was there, behind her, surrounding her, lending her his love, his belief in her, his strength. He closed his hands over hers, even though he’d always hated her magic. He believed only in the machines and the instructions he could give them. But here he was, doing what he thought was a trick, trusting it could work. It had to work.

“We are raised to believe in what our ancestors have told us,” he told them. “We believe or we reason, but I ask you, why can’t we do both? Does it have to be one or the other? And if it must be, can’t you find it in your heart to accept that someone can believe different from us, without hating or hurting them for it?”

“Uleans.” Noya took over, her voice that of the commander of a thousand armies. She looked at the core of the emerald army. “Isn’t the power of Ulea that of belief and love? Aren’t we taught we should love the strangers even if we don’t understand them?”

She turned towards where the ruby standards flew. “And people of Zi, aren’t reasoning and research the core of the Zi? Isn’t your most sacred rule that nothing can be ever completely discarded until research has refuted it? Can’t you reason the possibility that you have yet to find the technology to see what the Uleans believe? Maybe Uleans are wrong, maybe the Zi are right and there is no true belief, but what if it is something in between and we can’t just yet see it?

“Have we all become so proud that only our truth can be the truth? Pride is an ice blanket in the night when winter is here. We can only grow if we work together. If we learn to listen instead of imposing. If we have difficult, painful conversations instead of blood and death.

“I’ve lost my parents and my brother. Akolai has lost his sister and cousins. I feel the same pain you all feel. Why would we impose that terrible, horrible, hollow feeling on someone else if we can avoid it? Why can’t we all be what we are–humans who are afraid but who have the heart to spare someone else the pain we’re already feeling?”

The device crackled and smoked in her hands, the energy too strong for the simple gadget, and the connection she’d had with the minds of millions cut off so abruptly, Noya only saw black. She was vaguely aware of Akolai holding her, helping her sit on the ground. He never left her side, and Misouni jumped into her lap to provide another source of heat. She was cold inside. She lay her head on Akolai’s shoulder.

“Do you think it worked?” Her eyes were squeezed shut. She couldn’t bear to look down on the valley. Her words couldn’t have been enough, but she’d had no other weapon.

“I don’t know.”

She attempted to rise, determined to cross that field to get to the Queen and her generals, but Akolai kept her in place.

“Neither of us has the energy to cross that battlefield right now, and they haven’t resumed the fighting... yet We can rest.”

His words rang true. There were no battle sounds coming from below, but this moment of peace wouldn’t last. There was so much work to be done, from the ground up, from each citizen up to their leaders. But she could rest. For now.