Chapter 4
~ Maybe a Miracle ~
Declan Gosse usually only had to worry about relatively minor injuries. As the local doctor for a small and peaceful village on the edge of a forest, about the worst he ever saw on an ordinary day was a broken arm from a fall out of a tree, or the accidental loss of a finger when a poorly-maintained gun just happened to explode when fired. Today, however, was most certainly not an ordinary day—almost as long as he had been at the hospital, he had been hurriedly treating the injuries of a boy by the name of Basjon Gersham, who had been brought to his office with a series of deep slashes across his torso. Beysal and Leah stood just outside his door, holding each other close as they waited for the doctor to come to them with news of their son’s condition.
“I don’t know what to say,” Dr. Gosse said, walking out of the operating room and approaching the injured boy’s parents. “With wounds like that he should have been dead hours ago from the blood loss alone, but…”
“D’you think he’ll make it?”
“Well, I… I honestly don’t know at this point,” he stuttered. “I’ve never seen someone with injuries quite this bad, especially at his age… but he’s survived this much already. I’ll have to keep working on him over the next few days and see how things go.”
The next day, Basjon’s wounds had already ceased bleeding entirely, though he still had not moved or opened his eyes once since he had been brought in. The day after that, his injuries had healed themselves so thoroughly that the doctor’s stitches seemed to be getting in the way more than they were helping; Dr. Gosse disinfected the boy’s wounds and replaced his bandages, but by this point they were only really necessary to prevent unwanted visits from flies or infection. Within three days of the fight that caused his injuries, Basjon Gersham seemed to have made a full recovery—all that was left, in fact, was regaining consciousness.
This, of course, came later that day. Jon woke up in the unfamiliar hospital bed and sat up immediately, glancing around the room for a few minutes before figuring out what must have happened. He removed his own bandages, finding only fresh scars beneath them; they were the only remaining proof of the terrible injuries he had suffered. Getting up out of bed and walking around the room to stretch his arms and legs, he began to wonder just how long he’d been out. Though his memories weren’t so clear after the first time he was cut, he knew from the scars that these kinds of wounds didn’t heal in just a couple of days—it had to have been a least a few weeks for them to have healed this well.
Moving about the room some more, however, he noticed that he certainly didn’t feel like he had been immobile for weeks—if anything, he felt even stronger now than he had before. Where was the lingering weakness that always came along with being bedridden? Nothing about his current situation made any sense.
“Oh! You’re awake!”
At that very moment, the doctor had walked through the door. He immediately rushed to the boy’s side and started monitoring his vital signs, checking his pulse and heartbeat several times before he was finally convinced that everything about his patient was back to normal.
“Yeah,” Jon said, scratching his head slightly, “How long have I been in here, anyway?”
“Well… that’s the thing I don’t understand,” Dr. Gosse answered, walking over to his records and flipping through them. “Since the time your parents brought you in here, it’s been… just a little over three days.”
The boy’s jaw dropped.
“Three days!? How the…”
“Exactly,” the doctor interrupted. “Three days… just three days to recover from injuries that, in all honesty, should have killed someone your age. I don’t know how you did it, Basjon, but… that has to have been the quickest recovery I’ve seen in all my years.”
For a moment, the room was silent. And then, finally, Basjon asked a fairly obvious question.
“So… does that mean I can go home now?”
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At that point Basjon did, indeed, go home. Though he went about his chores, school, and the rest of his daily life as usual for about a year, eventually he brought up Aykathla’s kidnapping with his parents, informing them that he planned to climb the mountain someday and bring her back to the village himself. They thought he was crazy, of course—there was no way a thirteen-year-old boy could ever manage that kind of trip on his own, no matter how prepared, and they were both too old to be running around and climbing mountains with their young son. Though they would miss Aykathla, they couldn’t imagine any way of getting her back, especially since they had no way of knowing exactly where she was being held.
Over the next few years, however, it became clear that he wasn’t going to give up on this. Instead of his usual routine of running about and exploring the forest, he had developed an unusual training regimen—he started by lifting logs, then eventually he lashed one to his back and tried to run, climb, and jump for hours on end while weighted down by the heavy chunk of wood. It soon became obvious that this training, unconventional as it was, was working; as the weeks and months passed on, Basjon’s arms and legs began to grow less and less scrawny. Eventually, his father decided that there was no way to stop his son and instead helped him out. For years, he would have sparring matches with the boy, teaching him how to box and wrestle; he even joined in with Basjon’s odd log-related training sessions, standing a few yards back and hurling logs so that his son could catch or dodge them.
On the fifth year since Aykathla was taken away, Basjon almost seemed to abandon his training in favor of furiously searching through every library he could find. His father had mentioned several times before that the blue-haired invader known as Mekedzis had claimed that he had some sort of “weird power,” but apparently he hadn’t been any more specific about it than that. After thinking about the battle for a while, he realized that this power the pointy-eared man had mentioned must have had something to do with the unexpected surge of strength that allowed him to harm the robots with his bare hands—after sticks, rocks, and a shotgun blast had bounced off of them harmlessly, it should have been obvious that something strange was going on, but he had been so caught up in the moment that he had not made the connection at the time.
Unfortunately, his search barely came up with any results. Though quite a few legends did mention warriors with incredible strength, there seemed to be nothing that would explain a sudden, unexplained surge of power like what he had experienced. And, of course, he couldn’t find anything that sounded even vaguely similar to the strange flash of orange light he had seen at the moment of impact when Mekedzis had dodged his punch and it had destroyed one of the robots behind him instead. He was just about to give up when he remembered that there was one more source of ancient writings that he hadn’t checked—an old man who lived in a little hut somewhere deep within the woods, who occasionally showed up in town to visit with friends or just walk in the streets but otherwise kept to himself. It was a well-known fact that he was the oldest person in the village; he was rumored to have had his hundredth birthday years ago, and nobody was quite sure exactly how old he was now. If anyone was going to have old books that nobody else had even heard of, it was him.
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For hours Basjon traveled through the forest, searching for any sign of a path leading to the place the old hermit called home. Occasionally he would stumble across what appeared to be a well-worn trail only to find that it abruptly stopped after less than a mile or quickly revealed itself as a dry streambed rather than any kind of trail at all. He sighed in frustration and sat down on a tree stump, realizing that he had no idea where this house was and that he was now almost hopelessly lost in the maze of trees, deeper within the woods than he had ever been before.
He pushed that thought to the back of his mind for a while and focused on the scenery. Though it was early in the afternoon and the sun was still high in the sky above, hardly any light came through the dense foliage; what little sunlight did reach the ground came in leaf-shaped patterns as it streamed through several layers of trees to get there. A squirrel ran straight down a nearby tree, stopping just short of its roots to raise its head up and glance around before running off in another direction. Somewhere off in the distance, a chicken crowed; moments later, a chorus of crows from even further away echoed back a response. It was actually pretty peaceful, being this far within the forest’s borders; he briefly thought that maybe he should spend more time just staying still like this, before a scratching sound in the leaves behind him interrupted his train of thought.
“Who’s there!?”
Basjon spun around to face the source of the sound, only to find himself staring a rather large chicken right in the face. The bird flicked its long, scaly tail a few times, cocked its head to the side curiously, and then let out a short series of clucks.
“Oh… just a chicken,” he mumbled to himself, hanging his head in embarrassment. “I should’ve known.”
“Just a chicken, eh?”
Once again, Jon spun around, this time in the other direction. Sitting on a low-hanging branch of an enormous oak tree was a lanky old man in a dark green robe, with a beard that almost reached his knees. He held a long cane across his lap, but the way he effortlessly hopped down from the branch as Basjon stood up made it seem like he didn’t really need any help walking.
“Haven’t you ever heard the tale of a boy raised by chickens?”
“A boy raised by… wait a second, what?”
The old man chuckled, walking over past Basjon and patting the chicken on the head. He then raised one hand to his mouth, threw his head back, and let out a deafening crowing sound that seemed as if it would be heard for miles around. Almost immediately the sounds of other chickens responding were heard from all directions, and before long the forest seemed to be swarming with them. Some were fully-grown, and nearly reached Basjon’s waist; others were still so small that he could have held them in one hand if they had allowed him to get close enough to pick one up in the first place.
“Exactly what I said,” the old man laughed, hugging several of the larger chickens before continuing. “A boy raised by chickens. I’m sure you can imagine it took ‘im a while to pick up your people’s language after that, eh?”
“I’m… not sure what you’re getting at, here.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll skip ahead to the good part,” he grumbled, pushing his way through the cluster of chickens and sitting down on the same stump that Basjon had been sitting on before. “Chickens, you see… they know things. Things that some people would say we humans just aren’t meant to know.”
He suddenly hopped upward, startling Jon a bit. After standing on the stump for a few moments, he squatted down again but stopped just sort of actually sitting.
“What do these chickens know, you ask?” he said, craning his neck upward to look at the younger man’s face. “You’d like to know what they know… wouldn’t you?”
Basjon attempted to back away slowly, but instead stumbled over a pair of especially large chickens standing behind him and went tumbling over backward onto the ground as the birds fluttered off into the trees. When he managed to pull himself back up off the ground again, the old man was sitting cross-legged on the stump, grinning at him.
“Let me guess,” he said, looking over at the strange old man, “The boy who was raised by chickens is you, right?”
“I am indeed… not that boy at all,” he answered, shaking his head slightly. “Sorry to say, but he’s long dead… lived a couple thousand years ago, he did. But you don’t suppose that one must be raised by chickens just to learn from them, do you?”
“Um… I, uh… I guess not?”
The old man grinned and laughed, slapping his cane against the stump as he did. Eventually, he quieted down and went back to what he was saying before.
“There is much you could learn from these chickens here, young one,” he said, reaching over and stroking one of the birds’ wings as he spoke. “The knowledge of the chickens… that is what you’ve come here seeking.”
Basjon sighed and turned away, attempting to walk off to someplace far away from the most-likely-insane old man before him; when he tried to take even a single step, however, he found that the area had become so crowded with chickens that he could barely move.
“I don’t know if this has anything to do with your chickens, but I came here looking for some answers,” he said, “Answers about this… ‘weird power’ that I seem to have.”
“’Weird,’ is it?”
The old man hopped down from the stump and took a few steps toward him, stopping when he was barely a foot away. He then reached up with one hand and grabbed the boy’s shoulder, keeping him from moving away.
“True, it’s not every day that this power surfaces in your kind,” he said, “Pretty much unheard of these days, it is. So I suppose you could say that it’s ‘weird.’”
He backed off a bit, giving Basjon some space before continuing.
“But a long time ago, many people knew about this sort of ability,” he continued. “Not many of ‘em actually had it, of course… but at least they knew about it! It’s been given many names throughout history, but the one I always liked was what the chickens themselves call it—Num Power.”
He paused for a moment to draw an unusual symbol in the dirt using the tip of his cane. First he drew two crossed diagonal lines, and then he connected them with a shorter horizontal line across the top. Finally, he drew a perfect circle around the symbol, leaving just enough space that none of the other lines quite touched it.
“This here,” he said, “It’s the symbol of Num Power.”
Basjon watched as, all around him, the larger chickens carved the very same symbol into the dirt with their claws. Most of theirs weren’t quite as perfectly proportioned as the one the old man had drawn, but it was still clear that they all were intended to represent the same thing—the strange orange energy that had unexpectedly surged within him, which he now knew by name.
“Of course, a symbol isn’t good for much of anything besides looking nice,” he continued, kicking some loose dirt over the one he had drawn and stomping it out. “So don’t worry about that. Just know that whenever you see that mark from now on, that’s what it means.”
“Wait,” Jon said, “If hardly anyone even remembers it exists anymore, why would I be seeing the symbol anywhere?”
“Good question!”
The old man turned and began to walk down the dry streambed nearby, followed shortly afterward by the entire flock of chickens. After taking a few more steps, he motioned for Basjon to follow; though at first he hesitated, he knew that learning the secrets of Num Power would be the key to ever being able to stand a chance against someone like Mekedzis, so after a few moments’ pause he decided to follow the bearded stranger further into the woods.
“You see,” the old man said, not even looking back as he spoke, “Just because we humans have forgotten about Num Power over the years doesn’t mean everyone has. There might even be some books or scrolls here and there that still mention it.”
At the mention of scrolls, Basjon was immediately reminded of the one that Aykathla had brought with her. The fact that she had left it inside the house on the day that the golems had come to take her away had slipped his mind entirely; it should still be right where she had left it, tucked away in a secret compartment of the wall behind her dresser. His parents had never been the type to go snooping around in people’s rooms for no reason, so he knew it would still be waiting there when he returned.
“Thinking about something, are you?”
He nodded.
“Someone, actually. She’s… pretty much the whole reason I’m here right now.”
The old man laughed for a moment, then spun around to face him while the chickens continued walking on ahead without him.
“Oh, you’ve got yourself a girlfriend, eh?”
Basjon almost jumped out of his shoes, which was a bit difficult considering that they were sandals and were strapped to his feet pretty tightly.
“What!? No, I… we… it’s not like that! I haven’t even seen her in five years!”
The old man shrugged, then turned back around and quickly caught up with the crowd of chickens, leaving Jon behind and forcing him to run for a few seconds so as to not get left behind. A little bit of walking later, the entire group came to a little hut in the middle of the woods, surrounded by enormous trees that had to have been even older than the hermit himself. Most of the chickens fluttered up into the trees and perched on the highest branches, while a few larger ones stuck around as the area’s only human resident walked up to his own front door and swung it open.
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For the next year, Basjon went to that hut in the forest almost every day in order to learn how to control his Num Power. At first, he had difficulty accomplishing anything at all; he needed to be angry or threatened before it would activate, which made any sort of effective training nearly impossible. Using ancient techniques found in some of the old man’s books, he started to sit in the trees and meditate for hours on end in an attempt to calm his unstable emotions and figure out some way to separate them from his ability to use Num Power. Eventually, something seemed to have changed—he was able to draw out his Num Power a little bit even when at peace, causing his hands to glow with the same orange light he had seen before, though he wasn’t yet able to really do anything with it in this state.
After that, it seemed that he had learned all that the old books could teach him—so the old man sent him out into the woods with the strongest of the chickens instead, hoping that he would learn better from first-hand experience with others who had Num Power. At first, this new training regime didn’t seem to be going very well; before his first day of training with the chickens was done, he had already suffered several minor cuts and a deep gash across his left arm thanks to Num Power-infused kicks and tail-lashes from his feathery training partners. His clothes were absolutely shredded; the next time he came out there to train, he went ahead and took his shirt off beforehand, as he didn’t have an unlimited supply of them and he figured his parents probably wouldn’t react well to the idea of him coming through the door slashed up and bloody with rags barely hanging off of his body every other day.
Within a month, he had improved to the point where he had become aware of the way that he was subconsciously infusing his body with tiny amounts of Num Power in stressful situations. This was the way he had managed to punch the metallic bodies of the golems without injuring his hands in the process—his skin had been protected by the Num Power within it, making it many times more resistant to harm than it would have been normally. Now that he was aware of exactly how this aspect of his power worked, he was able to exercise some amount of control over it, focusing Num Power into specific parts of his body as needed to lessen the force of blows, hit harder, move faster, and jump higher. During the battle with Mekedzis, it seemed that only his brute strength and durability had been enhanced; whenever the blue-haired man had attacked, his strikes came far too quickly for him to dodge. Now that he could enhance his speed and reflexes, he might actually have a chance.
He certainly did have a chance against the chickens now—whereas he was getting pummeled left and right during the first few weeks of his training, now his sparring matches with each of the large birds usually ended without him sustaining much more than a scratch. After a while he started leaving his shirt on during his training, protecting his clothes with a faint aura of Num Power so that they were only scuffed up or torn slightly by the chickens’ attacks rather than being ripped to shreds. At one point his parents began to wonder if he was still undergoing any training at all, as he came home at the end of each day looking no worse for wear after his trips into the woods.
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One day, many months after his training had begun, Basjon was facing off against both of the largest chickens simultaneously when suddenly the old man swung open the door to his hut and came running out. The chickens halted their sparring match immediately, while their human student just stood there in mid-punch for a moment, looking a bit confused.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s time,” the old man said, leaning on his cane. “Your time for training is nearly over, young one… you must now undergo the final test.”
Jon blinked, then looked a bit worried for a moment.
“Wait, what? What do you mean my time is nearly over?”
The hermit reached into his robes and produced an ancient scroll—not the one Aykathla had brought, of course, but the overall appearance of it immediately reminded him of that one. In an unusual contrast to the clean and nearly perfect appearance of Aykathla’s scroll, this one was visibly old, torn in a few spots and crumpled up and smudged here and there. He slowly and carefully unrolled it, reading over it silently for a few moments and then summarizing its words in a language the boy could understand.
“Listen here,” he said, “The people on the mountain… you’re aware that they observe the rather abominable practice of arranged marriages, yes?”
“Yeah,” he said, “She mentioned that before… what about it?”
“This scroll is a record of those practices,” he continued. “Who knows how they may have changed in all these years, but at the time the scroll was written, the rule was that the marriage ceremony is always to take place on a young woman’s twentieth birthday.”
He paused for a few seconds to roll up the scroll once again, then slipped it back into his robes.
“Now… this girl of yours, who was taken away five years ago. How old do you suppose she would be now?”
“Umm,” Basjon mumbled, thinking it over in his head. “Well, five years ago I would’ve been fourteen… and she’s just a little younger than me, I think. So I guess she’d be nineteen by now.”
At first, he didn’t realize just how much of a problem that was. She had probably just turned nineteen this year, which meant that she wouldn’t end up being married off for another whole year. After he thought about it for a few moments, however, the situation began to sink in—he had less than a year to not only finish his training but climb the mountain and find her.
“So you see,” the old man said, tapping a nearby log with his staff to get the boy’s attention, “You must complete your training now so you have time to prepare for your journey up the mountain. And for the trip itself, of course—that one’s not going to be easy, even for you.”
“Okay,” Basjon said, shaking off his worries and stepping forward. “So what’s this ‘final test’ you mentioned earlier?”
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