Dragon Mirror- Ties Between the Veil

Tito was laying on the bed in Zhao’s parents cabin, scowling up at the ceiling. Zhao had gone out to grab groceries after they decided to stay the weekend. The journal lay on her chest, and a small note that had been in the lock box was crumpled in her fist. Her wig was on the floor, and her shaved head prickled.

When they had opened the box, Tito had expected something amazing. And instead there had been the note that was currently clutched in her fist, and a silver chain necklace with a small crystal bauble caged in more twisted silver that came to an intricate point, like a pendulum.

“What the fuck.” She threw the note.

The note was short. The note had directions. The note was fucking pointless bullshit.

Raina, since you have not come, I have made other preparations. Your answers are inside the journal and the pendant. If you are able to divine them, then come find me.

Kiishthwa LongShadow

Who the fuck was Kiish-whatever? Mr. LongShadow was apparently her uncle. Who had taken whatever was in the box and put this shit inside. She hadn’t been left an address or anything. And when she googled the name on her phone, nothing showed up.

She lifted the journal to reread the page she had been on. There had been a preface denoting that this journal was a copy of a copy.

The quiet is unbearable. It’s been several months since the sickness swept through the mountains. I may leave behind this tragedy and travel north. Kiishthwa says he will stay and mourn his family. I will leave a stone of recall with him, and I will come to visit when I can. I have to move on, the terms of the bargain have yet to be met.

Tito rolled over and dropped the journal over the edge of the bed. Some of the pages were old and did not match the rest of the paper sewn into the hand bound book. Several of the entries were about her mother, and mostly about Raina. But there was a good chunk of random writing that did not seem to follow from one day to the next.

She lifted the necklace disconsolately and stared into its depths. Did this involve magic? This short entry was the only mention of Kiishthwa. And it mentioned a “stone of recall”.

She abruptly sat up. The little ball had gone cloudy when she thought of Kiishthwa. This shit was magic!

Tito stared, concentrating on Kiishthwa, and suddenly she felt like she was falling inward. She felt a rushing sensation, and almost felt like she was spiraling into the pendant. She hadn’t felt like this since her first time smoking weed.

She found herself standing in waist high weeds, staring into a clearing with wooden longhouses next to mounded huts with sod grown over the tops. People that were obviously Native American were going about their business, carrying baskets or sitting and carving decorations or talking animatedly while doing other tasks.

She looked upward in amazement, realizing they were on the side of a mountain. She looked over her shoulder and stepped forward quickly as she realized she was standing on the edge of a steep embankment over a creek.

The sound of the wail of a baby cut through the air, and Tito hesitantly walked toward the village. The people gave out a glad cry in words that Tito didn’t understand, but still continued along their day. Several women were clearing a pit of ash while two men dragged the butchered carcass of what looked like a huge deer or elk on a travois.

A woman came out of one of the round sod covered homes and declaimed in a loud voice. Tito had no idea what she was saying- but all of the people stopped, cheered and laughed, stooping to congratulate a man kneeling off to the side. She hadn’t seen him while walking up, but he was on a colorful woven mat, staring avidly at the woman.

She knelt in front of him and held out a small bundle that let out a loud wail as she opened the wrappings.

Since no one seemed to see her, Tito strolled over to peek over the woman’s shoulder. A small angry looking infant boy lay in her arms, and he only settled as the man took him and gently re-wrapped him. Tito couldn’t help staring. The babe had tufts of nearly white hair crowning his head.

She had thought something that strange would freak these people out, but everyone was smiling as if doubly blessed.

“My birth.”

“FUCK!” Tito screamed and leapt away from someone speaking right behind her.

She whirled with her hands going out in a defensive stance. She gaped. The man that stood behind her was tall, and in his later years, possibly about fifty. But she scowled over at the white haired babe, then at the man who had long white hair tied into one braid that fell over one shoulder to his hip.

Maybe not so old, so possibly forty. His dark face was lightly lined, with the high cheekbones and nose of an Indigenous American. His black eyes were bright and amused.

The man looked wildly out of place in the scene wearing green flannel and torn blue jeans.

“Your birth?!” She looked around at the village, she wondered if there had been reenactment villages forty to sixty years ago. She got the feeling that this was not a reenactment.

He smirked, and Tito felt a welling of annoyance.

“Kiishthwa?” He laughed, and it was a bright musical sound. She stood up straight.

“Close enough.” He turned to look down at his infant self. A small sad smile crept across his face and she realized he was staring at the man she assumed was his father.

Abruptly his eyes were on her and she stepped back in response to the intensity. “You are Raina’s sister. So I must assume Raina is… gone?”

“Why is all this shit about Raina? My name is Tito.” She felt her face flushing.

He pursed his lips, glancing again at his father, and turned away decisively. His face was sad and reserved as he raised his eyes to study her again.

“Raina was the only one born with a specific gift that supposedly none of us possessed. My mother believed it passed from her the moment Raina was born. It also enabled my mother to finally die, once she brought Raina her Aya’Chyn.”

Tito stared at him. What gift? The Aya’Chyn? Am I inside my own head, or inside that weird glass ball?

Kiishthwa smiled widely.

“You are in fact outside your own head, in the aether, where I have come to meet you. Once I felt my memories being accessed, I projected my mind to meet yours.” Tito scowled, opening her mouth to protest the mental intrusion.

“Mouth open or closed, it is your thoughts that are communicating to me.”

She folded her arms, staring at the scene of the man as an infant and his father. “So where did Raina go, and why?” He inclined his head slightly, and she looked behind her.

She felt her mouth open in shock. A radiant woman with long gold hair and silver white streaks was being helped out of the birthing house. It was her grandma Pani, young and gorgeous, with a fiercely proud gaze leveled on her child.

“What year is this?”

Kiishthwa looked up, and then down at his toes, as if he were trying to count the years in his head. He looked back up into her eyes.

“I will be honest, I am not sure. But it is at least a hundred years before the first news of European settlers reaching us in our mountain valley. And forty years from now…” He held out his hand, palm up.

“The sickness reached us before the news of explorers reaching the eastern shore. The influenza spread worse than the black plague in Europe.” He closed his hand into a fist.

“Millions died before the settlers landed. Leaving behind an empty and enticing land for conquering.” He raised a finger, and everything seemed to shift in a blur.

Tito stood in the same spot in a village that was changed only slightly, with buildings shifted around, and the woods cleared further back. It was eerily quiet. There was no one in view. Kiishthwa pointed behind her again.

She turned to see Kiishthwa as he looked now, but dressed in buckskin trousers and bare chested with tattoos lining his arms. His hair was loose and smeared with ashes that also smeared his haggard face. He was dragging a pallet with a body wrapped in a woven blanket and a wolfskin lain on top. He stopped next to a deep pit that smoked with a greasy stench of prior use, and two other smaller bodies. One was obviously a younger child.

He dropped to his knees and threw his head back and keened. Tito covered her mouth and jerked back. She let out a soft sob, and darted a look to the modern day Kiishthwa.

He nodded, his eyes hooded in grief “My wife and two children. Along with most of my tribe.” He chewed his lip, then his eyes turned to look off into the woods.

Tito saw her grandmother walking silently out of the woods. She wore woven cloth dyed an ocher red with what looked like the feathers of some type of bird woven into a headdress of white fur. She strode quietly to stand next to her son. She had barely aged since his birth, and Tito felt a chill.

She spoke and Tito couldn’t understand what she was saying in that low earnest voice. Tito jumped slightly as Kiishthwa started translating.

“Only a third of our cousins up the valley have survived the illness. There is nothing here for us. Let us go north to find the Mirror.”

There was a long silence before both Kiishthwa’s spoke, one in his native language, the other in english. “I will stay. I cannot leave my family. Come back to us safely from your journeys. But I am not like you, so your search continues. You are the true Moon Spirit. You do not need me.”

For a moment, Panillia looked like she was about to kneel and embrace her son. But then her posture stiffened, and she bowed her head, turning away. “I will come back, at least once a year. I will tell you if I find it.” And then she walked away down the forest path leading out of the empty village.

The modern Kiishthwa gestured again, and everything faded into a misty blue gray. “I burned the entire village to the ground. And moved to live with my cousins to help prepare for the winter.” He swallowed. “There was enough food for everyone, but the work was tripled for everyone that had survived.”

Tito looked around her, disoriented. “What happened to Pani? How were both of you still alive?” She felt nauseous.

“My mother had a curse of immortality. She came through the Drakun Mirror to be able to have a mortal life.” He paused, seeming to be thinking. “For whatever reason, she didn’t seem to age until the birth of my youngest- and she had been excited and told me about the Aya’Chyn when-” He swallowed abruptly. “Behitha was four when she started showing signs of strong Will.”

Tito made a face. She had been willful, but she felt like that’s not what he meant. She was curious about what an Aya’Chyn was.

“My mother gained fine lines at the corners of her eyes, and a light entered them that burned with a feverish goal. But nothing came of it, because the sickness swept over the mountains that next spring and took Behitha, along with my wife and older son.”

“She decided to go back north to look for the Mirror, the gateway that she had first come through, she knew that it had been by the Great Falls, the Niagara.” Kiishthwa stared into the distance, as if seeing his lost family. “She came home at the end of every harvest and stayed through the winter, leaving at first thaw. After a decade, I think she realized she had stopped aging again. And when I did not marry again and have any more children, I found that I had also stopped aging.”

His piercing black eyes swung to bore into hers. “The ability to age and die for us seemed to be tied to procreation and passing on the Will. I was her first, so she never realized that I too possessed the Will.” He closed his eyes and Tito mentally shook herself.

There was a strange ripple that swept through her mind, making everything shiver, but Kiishthwa didn’t seem to feel it.

“I believe we all had the Will, but my mother was single minded in her view of the ability to connect to an Aya’Chyn.” He threw his hand to the side dismissively. “It’s a type of outside consciousness that increases power. But Panillia was rooted in the ideals of her home plane, and blind to the Earth.”

There was a long silence. And Tito hesitantly cleared her throat. “Ah- Well, that explains Gma Pani’s obsession with Raina if she was able to do whatever this thing was. I was always an afterthought to her.” Bitterness was difficult to keep from her voice.

Kiishthwa smiled nonchalantly. “After about fifty years, there was a long break in her visits, about ten years, where I thought she might have died. But that was when I learned the extent of my Will.” The view around them blurred, and then the pair of them were standing on the side of a mountain. The woods were thick and the birdsong was strident. Tito saw the sun high in the sky through the trees.

Noise behind her caused her to turn around and she jerked back, having almost put her foot into a small banked fire. A hide tent lay low on a flat section between the trees jutting out of the mountainside. Kiishthwa of the past sat cross legged, knapping a piece of flint for an arrowhead. A handful of arrowheads were laid out on an unwrapped bundle of tools.

The sunlight filtered down onto the man, whom focused on his work. But Tito gasped. Slowly creeping across the branch of a tree behind him, a large mountain lion poised to leap. A scraping sound of claws on bark made past Kiishthwa look up in time to see the big cat leap.

He shouted, a hand raising up to fend off the hurtling weight. In that quick moment, everything seemed to slow. The lion screeched and twisted in midair to land next to Kiishthwa, barely missing him and scattering his tools and arrowheads. The big cat crouched, shuddering, its ears back, teeth bared, and tail lashing wildly.

Kiishthwa of the past stared at the animal, his hand still extended, nearly close enough to touch the tan fur. He hesitated, then gestured and spoke a word. The mountain lion sprang off into the underbrush as if it had been burned.

The man gazed after the retreating animal.

“I told it to go. And it went.”

Another ripple made Tito nauseous, causing the vision to bend and warp. She shook herself.

Tito looked at the man who was directing these visions. He had an amused smile on his face. She opened her mouth, but he motioned again, and they were suddenly inside the dark interior of a longhouse.

Children slept in groups along the sides of the longhouse on raised beds, their parents either also sleeping or sitting at the edges and talking quietly while working on individual projects. There were not many children, and very few elderly.

There was a wall in the middle separating a section in the back for storage, and a second floor set away from the two firepits. She couldn’t tell if there were more people sleeping up there or if it was more storage.

Several people seemed to be cooking on one of the fires, and Tito spotted Kiishthwa sitting off to the side of the other firepit, staring into the flames.

She jumped as the Kiishthwa rocking flannel stepped up next to her and spoke. “This is when I first began reaching through the flames with my mind. This is how I discovered my mother had gone West, South, and then back East and North. I didn’t realize at the time that I was watching her journey in real time. She had entered the wide desert, seen the Great Chasm, then found and followed the Gulf. She spent several years in the Mississippi before traveling further East.”

“She was unaware for several years that I watched her with astral projection.” He glanced at her, “I assume you know the modern term for walking the world outside your body?” She bit her lip, nodding. Some grade A wicca bullshit.

“I had thought I was looking into the spirit world, that I was seeing my dead mother’s journey. I saw her in strange landscapes with strange people and then with strangely dressed white men and strange boats and buildings.” He rubbed his eyes. “I was obsessed with trying to see my wife and children, but could only ever see my mother.” He blew out a breath.

“I was an idiot.”

Tito grunted noncommittally, waiting to see where this was going. She felt faint and dizzy as everything shivered around her.

“I don’t know why, but after years of just watching, I grew frustrated and I…” He paused, chuckling. “Well, I yelled at her for leaving.”

“Panillia heard me, and within the next moments, she vanished from my sight. I could not find her again until that summer, when she came home to find me.”

A greater ripple shook through Tito and she staggered. Kiishthwa turned to look at her, concern in his eyes.

“Ah- I believe you’re wakin-”