Spirit Unbreakable

When Riumi woke up his whole body was stiff, an after effect of it being flood with electricity. He felt so completely drained that he didn’t think he could move at all, but somewhere, deep inside him a voice was yelling at him to keep moving. Keep moving towards the truth.

He finally got up into a sitting position and looked at the meager supplies before him. A few protein bars littered the floor which he had not seen previously, as well as the Flimsy that Shanahan had given him. He touched the surface with his gloved hand. Once it was running, he looked at the route that Shanahan had mapped out for him to follow. The first stop that Riumi could see on the route was labeled supplies. Quickly eating the protein bars, he shoved the Flimsy into the backpack and felt one more object lodged inside. Pulling it out, he realized that it was a pair of goggles. Placing them over his face, he tapped the side of them and let them synchronize with the Flimsy in the backpack. Once that was accomplished, his vision was augmented with the route and map that Riumi was to follow. After doing some warm up exercises, Riumi jump from the cave mouth, spreading his wings and letting the air current carry him high up in the air.

Riumi landed in front of a storage unit some hours later, nearly falling out of the sky from exhaustion. He had flown low in the sky, scared that fatigue was going to make him fall out of the sky altogether. He was relieved when the route he was following indicated destination reached. He looked at the steel door in front of him trying not to fall over. He saw a keypad to the right of the door and as soon as he looked at it a numerical sequence was projected on the inside of his goggles. He typed it in and was relieved to hear a click as it unlocked.

Upon opening the door, the first thing that Riumi saw was Ichi no Tsubasa. He touched it reassuringly and inspected the rest of the room’s contents. Near the back of the storage unit Riumi found more medical supplies. He sifted through them until he found more burn ointment and clean gauze.

Stripping off his riding suit, he attended to his wounds. Most were weeping clear plasma which had soaked through the gauze, leaving yellow stains interspersed amongst the red of blood. He felt like he should let the wounds breath a bit and left all the weeping burns exposed to the chilled air while he paced the room gathering what he felt he would need for the rest of the journey. Once he was packed, he unfolded a cot that had been stored in the corner and gently lay upon it, his wounds a mass of stinging needles on his legs, arms and torso. Despite the pain he felt, he managed to fall asleep as the air automatically warmed in response to the presence of an occupant.

He wasn’t sure how long he had slept before he woke. It could have been hours or merely minutes, his body could not tell the difference still utterly exhausted. He had awoken to his body convulsing with shivers, feeling as if had been dipped into an icy lake. With trembling hands and sluggish movements, he reached for the burn ointment and gauze and began to bandage his wounds once again. Once this had been accomplished, as quickly as his heavy limbs would allow, he put back on his riding suit, relieved to feel the shaking slowly subside. He glanced at the vitals panel on the right wrist of the suite. It was blinking wildly, displaying the diagnosis of hypothermia and alternately displaying “rewarming in progress.” Riumi looked at it in a daze. How did I get hypothermia? Was it the altitude?

Exhaustion was threatening to overwhelm him again and before he passed out, Riumi grabbed some protein bars and began munching on them. He took out the Flimsy and brought it back to life.

“Causes of hypothermia,” he spoke at the Flimsy which resulted in numerous results on Riumi’s query. He had a long way to go to get to New Zealand and he needed to know whatever had caused his hypothermia would not happen again. He scrolled through the results until he came upon a page with the heading Management of Hypothermia in Burn Cases. He gently touched one of the wounds on his abdomen while he read: In severe burn cases hypothermia can be caused with the rapid loss of heat in the exposed areas that are no longer covered with the epidermal layer.

Riumi checked the vitals gauge on his riding suit satisfied that as long as he was wearing it he could stave off hypothermia from the missing layer of skin from his burns. He finished off the last protein bar and gently lay on the cot once again.

The second time he woke up he finally felt rested. He quickly changed the bandages on his wounds, strapped Ichi no Tsubasa and its counterpart onto his back between his wings and secured the backpack across his chest. When he stepped outside the storage unit he was engulfed in darkness. He slid the goggles into place and launched into the air, catching a thermal that brought him high above the glowing city below. Previous to this point he had been too exhausted and in pain to enjoy the freedom of flying, powered by his own wings. It was exhilarating.

He watched the city lights becoming smaller and smaller as he gained more and more altitude and they became an intricate pattern. He felt the air begin to get cooler and cooler the higher he got and checked his wrist to make sure his vitals were stable. He had to be at cruising altitude for airplanes by now. The land below a black blanket interrupted by cities seemingly built out of fireflies. It was breathtaking. Taking it all in, Riumi rolled onto his back and left himself free fall as he gazed into the cloudless sky above him.

A sea of stars like nothing he had ever seen in his life filled his gaze. The light pollution from the cities he had lived in always covered the majesty of the world beyond the confines of this blue sphere. He could almost see the brush of a painter at work, setting up the background of midnight blue, so dark as to almost be black, then taking glitter and splashing it across the face of his canvas marking a swath through the middle where clusters of light danced together and sprayed out thinner and thinner. Lights in the sky he once thought were only white were suddenly, reds and blues mixed with white and yellow. Small specks of glittering light representing the immensity of life out there in the universe.

It dawned on him suddenly that somewhere out there was the planet he was from. One of those small shining lights held the truth about him. It seemed so far away from here, almost unreachable. But, for that small moment as he fell through the sky watching the many worlds twinkling, trying desperately to be seen, he didn’t care about the truth or his place in it. He accepted that moment as it was, as he was, a small spec of life in a sea of worlds trying desperately to twinkle back, to be seen and heard, despite how small he was.

He flipped back over and let the air catch his wings and throw him back up into the atmosphere. He gained altitude until he was high above the oncoming clouds and where the air frosted his platinum hair and made his breath puffs of ice crystals. He tapped the side of the goggles and Shanahan’s route displayed once again.

It took seven long days for Riumi to reach his final destination, an almost inaccessible cave high up on the side of mount Rarakiora in New Zealand. The chaotic wind patterns that buffeted him from all sides as he tried to land nearly threw him into the side of the mountain. As he landed, a blast of wind made him slide across the ice near the cave entrance and he was only saved from smashing into the side of the mountain by a reflexive push with his wings. Finally on stable ground, he folded his wings, which despite the long distance of flying were not fatigued at all. They must be built for long distance travel.

Shivering slightly from the cold autumn air blowing off the snow covered peaks as he waited for his riding suit to adjust, he step into the narrow opening before him. He pulled the goggles off as the display read destination reached. He took the backpack off from around his shoulders and flexed his legs, feeling the newly created skin over his burns stretch in protest. They had almost completely healed over in the 7 days that Riumi had been flying.

He shoved the goggles into his backpack and took out a torch. The light bounced off the rock of the crevice he found himself in showing him a gradually descending shaft just wide enough to fit a human. Taking a deep breath, Riumi grabbed the backpack off the ground, slung it over his shoulder and began the descent into the heart of the mountain.

As Riumi descended, it became apparent by the winding pathway that this was a shaft carved out by years of running water. In certain places the way was so tight he had to take Ichi no Tsubasa and the wakizashi off his back and toss them a distance in front of him as he tried to maneuver himself through the narrow passage, feeling the rock scrap against his wings unforgivingly. After hours of this slow descent and zig zagging course, he finally slid into a large cavern. He watched the torch light bounce off the deep blue walls and realized that he was in a cavern made of ice. Am I under the glacier? He tried to calculate the route he had taken through the mountain depths and realized that in fact he had doubled back towards the Tasman glacier. He shone the torch at the ceiling which was a wash of icy blue. He could hear thunderous sounds as the ice shifted imperceptibly overhead, deep cracks that Riumi could not see.

Satisfied that the glacier was not going to suddenly come crashing down, he walked deeper into its cavernous depths.

Why did Shanahan send me here? What I am supposed to find?

He scanned with the torch light in wide arches across the cavern floor and was suddenly blinded as something on the glacier floor reflected its light back at him. Stepping closer to the spot, he wedged the torch in the craggy ice and watched as it amplified the light to fill the whole cavern. As Riumi gazed awe struck at the result, his eyes finally settled on a black stone object that was half buried in the ice floor.

As he stepped closer, he realized to his astonishment that it was no stone he looked at, but the behemoth form of a sleeping dragon. This realization stopped Riumi in his tracks. Riumi reflexively grabbed Ichi no Tsubasa from off his back, separating the blade from the saya in one fluid movement, while simultaneously unsheathing the wakizashi with his right hand, which he had facing downward.

He took a defensive stance in front of the unmoving form waiting for the hulking dragon to notice his presence. He stood like this for a few moments before he realized that there was no life in the dragon before him.

Sliding the wakizashi back into its sheath, he moved closer to the black dragon. The closer he got to it, the more apparent it was that the dragon was just a fading husk of an ancient age. He reached out and touched the scales on the tail that was curled under the dragon’s face and felt unyielding stone. It’s petrified, he realized as his ran his hand across the once organic, now stone figure. Riumi could not help but stare in amazement at the majestic sculpture that the dragon formed. His smile soon faded from his lips as he realized what this meant.

“I’m chasing phantoms,” he yelled into the empty ice cavern. Warm tears threatened at the edge of his vision and he lowered his katana, its tip falling gracefully to touch the floor. A thunderous crack split the air in the cavern as the ice overhead shifted and Riumi turned away from the petrified relic.

Having been absorbed in his own melancholy he had not heard the figure approach, so when he turned and saw it, he lashed out defensively with Ichi no Tsubasa. The ringing of metal on metal split the silence in the cave as Ichi no Tsubasa hit the blade of Imako.

Riumi looked from the two opposing blades to the sight of the woman behind the other blade. Her teal green eyes shone with a fiery light, the rest of her face frozen in shock. Riumi pushed forcefully against the woman’s blade breaking the momentary contact.

Looking more closely at the woman before him, it dawned on him that he knew her very well. An image of his past on Vespen suddenly bubbled to the surface of his mind. This woman, Shyss, was the one that had sent him and Shylaya to Earth, frozen for a millennium.

Reliving that last moment of his past life in this icy cave with the only possible way for him to know the truth a petrified form behind him, his anger grew from a small ember in his heart to a fiery flame.

With an enraged scream he engaged Shyss in fierce combat, immediately causing her to fall into a defensive stance.

Riumi counted: One, two, three, four, one more move and this nightmare finally ends.

He slashed down on his fifth move and heard it connect, not with flesh and bone, but with the ringing metal of Shyss’s sword. Startled, he moved off her blade and backed away. She is better than me, he suddenly realized. This thought fueled his ever growing anger and he resumed his attack. Each move parried. It was soon apparent to him that she was not returning attacks; instead she just kept deflecting Riumi’s own attacks with apparent ease.

“Fight me,” Riumi finally screamed.

“Riumi stop,” Shyss said between blows.

“I will never stop. I will never stop,” Riumi replied, his rage was causing him to lose focus on his form and he felt Shyss slip past his guard. Before she could move in to strike him, he used his wings to force himself backward while at the same time grabbing the wakizashi with his right hand. He held the blades before him in true katana fashion.

“Why are you fighting me?” Shyss asked.

Riumi was on top of her before she had time to catch her breath. The ringing of the blades crashing against each other echoed in the glacial chamber causing the ice around them to crack. Large chunks started falling from the cavern ceiling. Riumi dodged them and kept advancing on Shyss.

“Why did you send me here? Why did you make me love this world? Why did you abandon me?” Riumi asked, each question emphasized by a strike of his blade against Shyss’s.

The next time they broke apart, Riumi was breathing heavily. He could feel the skin surrounding his burns beginning to crack and bleed from the strain. He pushed the pain aside and looked at Shyss, she seemed suddenly more determined. The hard look on her face made Riumi pause.

She threw her tangled braid of hair over her shoulder and unclasped her cloak, letting it sink to the icy floor. Riumi watched as she unfolded her wings. Confusion crossed his face. Shyss didn’t have wings. They took them away from her when she chose to be with Orasic.

His momentary hesitation left him unguarded as Shyss began to participate in the battle offensively with the full skill of the Rumeum’antra form. She was a whirl of wings and blades which Riumi could barely deflect.

Each blow sent him further and further of balance. He looked for an opening in her defences and seeing one went in for the kill only to find his blade stopped short with Shyss’s firm grip on his hand, her blade flinging the wakizashi from his grasp.

As the blade spun in circles across the icy floor he suddenly felt pulled from his body. He was staring at himself through her eyes. What is happening? He found he was unable to move. He could not move his body that he was staring at or the body he was looking through.

He heard her voice like a whisper in the corner of his mind, the voice that had helped him during the rapid growth of his wings. The voice that had helped him split his mind. He was in her mind. It was not Shyss he was fighting at all, it was Shylaya.

Stop fighting me Riumi. I am here to help you. Her words rang like a spell through his mind and he felt his consciousness fall back into his body. He let Ichi no Tsubasa fall from his grip and heard it clatter to the ground. Shylaya released her gasp on his hand, and as his body began to shake, she helped him gently to the ground. It was then that he realized that Shylaya had not come alone. Shanahan, along with two strange men, stood at the entrance to the cavern. All had looks of concern and relief on their face. Riumi looked back at Shylaya.

“How is this possible? You were just a little brat when I last saw you. You look older than me,” Riumi said touching her face to make sure that she was real.

“The life support system on my cryogenic chamber failed, it woke me up sooner than you,” Shylaya replied.

“You look so much like your grandmother,” Riumi replied.

Shylaya smiled again.

“How did you find me?”

Shylaya turned to look at Shanahan. When she faced Riumi again, she spoke. “Shanahan helped me. I’ve come to take you home.”

Riumi broke contact with Shylaya and turned to look at his fallen blades. “I can’t go back there, Shylaya,” he whispered.

“I’m known as Reniko now, Riumi,” Reniko replied.

“Is the war still going?” Riumi asked.

“No. It’s not. I ended it. It’s safe to go back.”

“Why did they send us here, Laya?” Riumi looked at her desperately.

“To save us. They sent us here to save us. Our world was ending and they wanted to give us a chance to live.”

“It wasn’t to infiltrate and subdue?”

Reniko was shaking her head. “Never. Our parents would never do that, Riumi. If we took Earth, we would be no better than the Rük. They just wanted a chance for us to grow up free.”

Riumi looked up at the ceiling and let the hot tears fall. “Thank you. Thank you for that.” The guilt of his existence was alleviated with those few words from an old friend.

He looked at Reniko, his little Shylaya, and now his redeemer. She stood up, her angelic form hovering over Riumi, her hand outstretched to him.

“Let’s go home.”

Riumi grabbed her hand.