Story:Conquest/Korem

Korem Taylan is a main character in Conquest.

Gaiden: A Gaze Alights
"M-my name is Susana," stutters the mouse-haired girl to her block-faced detainer, an unassuming man made terrifying by the cloak of night. He pulls her roughly along a narrow alleyway fraught with shadows.

"The only people who cared aren't going to ever see you again. You are one of many prices your father must pay for his default. Accept that you are a slave, and your life will be easier." The man's crisp navy blue uniform suggests an aura of order and respect, but to Susana, he is only the man that wrenched her away from her family.

"We're not slaves. That isn't fair! My father doesn't deserve to go to jail! He -" The girl's outburst is interrupted by a harsh slap to the face. There is a tiny, lingering sense of discomfort in the face of the appropriator, but then he remembers that the Endless Successors do not deal well with failure.

"Keep silent. Your father has nothing else of worth. At the very least, he is fortunate that the clan accepts you as partial reparation. There is far worse that could be wrought."

"I can pay!" the girl, exclaims, grubbing in the recesses of her faded tunic for a tiny coinpurse. The man swipes it from her in an instant, scoffs upon uncovering its contents, and pockets it, treating Susana with another glare.

She is no more than 9, but Susana is wise enough to take the hint. Her hand hurts from the grasp of her captor, and her face stings from his strike. The streets of the Delurian shantytowns lie almost completely abandoned, and the few vagrants awake know better than to tangle with a henchman of the Endless Successors. The River Juasyl, green and laconic, appears before them, one of many tendrils that feeds the great Rhana Strait. With an impatient tug, the detainer leads Susana towards a ramshackle wooden bridge, bereft of any artificial lighting to assist would-be pedestrians. Only the crescent moons, suspended in a sea of black, guide their path.

"Hurry up. I haven't got all night to get to the underground." grumbles the man.

Then why did you take me from my family at 3 in the morning? thinks Susana. She sniffles haltingly - there were tears as her father called out between bars from the receding wagon, but in the last ten minutes she has learned her companion did not appreciate crying.

Ancient and tired wooden planks release a septet of sighs as the officer takes his first steps onto the bridge. Susana hesitates: Juasyl, of meager width and shallow depths, seems so familiar and calm during the day. In the dead of night, with an abusive stranger, it seems the very void itself. ''Ultima, protect me. Ultima, protect me. Ultima...''

A sudden rush of wind, of sound. "What did you say?!" barks her captor, and Susana can see the fear in his eyes. The bridge lists almost gracefully in a querying creak, as if straining to hear a phantom.

"N-nothing," whispers Susana, though she wants with every fiber of her being to utter the prayers aloud, in the hope that someone, anyone, might -

The officer's arm explodes in a shower of blood as an arc of light swerves across the bridge. Both open their mouths in shock - Susana lets out a scream and falls, but the officer cannot manage a sound as he stares incredulously at his ruined shoulder. He spins around, away from the freed child, to see a half a skull rushing at him at blinding speed, in blinding light... then nothing.

There is a loud splash as the Juasyl accepts its tribute, and when the girl opens her eyes again, someone else stands before her, more specter than man. Two brilliant arcs revolve slowly around his figure, clad in dark, green and red leather save the face - and quite a face it is. A horned mask of bone and wood, shielding the eyes but revealing the mouth, separates Susana from her rescuer, but she knows not whether to feel relieved or alarmed.

Korem Taylan waves his right hand, not in greeting, but to dismiss the moonbeam folds. Without a word, he crouches next to Susana and holds out the other hand, in which lies a small, grey object.

"T-thank you," mumbles the girl as she retrieves her coinpurse with the same rapidity in which it was taken from her. "Who are you?"

"A friend," responds Korem, withdrawing his hand. Susana looks around, but no one else is there - the river flows peacefully, satiated. He makes no further movements, but remains fixated upon her through those terrible, obscured eyeholes, waiting for her to make the next move.

Everything - the pain, the tears, the hope - floods out all at once. "Please, you have to help me, the police took away my father but it's not our fault and -"

"I know," Korem replies. "I saw. I can help you."

"Help my dad, too!" Susana demands. "Do your magic thing again, there's a police wagon that took him away, if you run fast you can save him!"

"Your father cannot be saved yet. All things, in time." It does not seem like a very good answer to Susana.

"I will take you someplace safe," Korem says with quiet confidence. The girl stares at him, then at the soft, peaceful waters below.

"Are you going to take me back to my house?" the girl questions.

The mask shakes from side to side, almost imperceptibly. "I cannot. They would only take you away again. We are going to a monastery."

"...Oh." Her lip trembles for a moment, and a single tear wrenches free, diving silently towards the River Juasyl. Even in the waning light of the twin moons, they can see it shatter into a thousand ripples. "Okay," she says, voice cracking. "But only because my dad says that I can always trust nuns. You don't look like a nun, though."

"...Your father has taught you well." The masked man rises and offers a hand to the girl, who clambers onto his back, cushioned by the strange mane flowing from the back of his mask. They make their way down the gentle curve of the bridge, but instead of following the path, Korem veers towards the river, against its southern flow, and upon reaching its bank, breaks into a dash. The girl shrieks in a mixture of surprise and excitement, the wind tousling her short brown hair into a billowing fan behind her.

"Quiet. We cannot be seen, or heard." Susana notices that the man barely makes a sound despite his gait, his black cloth shoes obscuring each footfall. "Will I get to see my dad again?" she whispers, clinging on to the mane like a talisman.

Korem passes another bridge as Deluria proper begins to recede in the background. "I don't know. Sometimes the people we love don't come back. For us, or at all."

Now it is Susana's turn to not respond. She refuses to consider the worst, and yet... this man gives her such a terrible, contradictory sense of peace. As a distraction, she cranes her neck to catch a fleeting glimpse of a copse of birds-of-paradise, yellow and red fans spiking towards heaven. She has never been this far out of the city, and in the mystery of the night realizes she might not ever return. Another tear is lost in the brilliant weave of the mane.

Many minutes later, Deluria in the distance, the Juasyl ascends a cliff in the form of a modest waterfall. The sight of it somehow gives the girl the voice to speak again. "My name is Susana," she offers once more. Instead of a sneer, she receives a nod, and nothing more. "Don't you want to tell me yours?" she huffs, in a display of impatience she would not have dared to utter an hour earlier.

"No," says Korem. "Hold on. Don't let go." A curve of light appears around them, revolving quickly and then sweeping underneath Korem's feet just as he pushes off the ground. The momentum lifts the pair into the sky, barely clearing the outcrop. Susana lets out a laugh, thoughts of her father still in her mind. ''The masked man can climb waterfalls. Of course he can bring my dad back. We can live with the nuns and they will not care about money, and we can be happy.''

"Will I have to stay in the church forever?" Susana asks. "I don't want to be a sister. All the sisters I know are old and ugly, and I want to be young and beautiful."

"You can be whoever you want, if it is just in the eyes of God." replies Korem. He picks up his pace as the first crack of twilight splits the obsidian sky. The land here is slightly more parched, the birds of paradise more rare.

"Another thing. You will have to change your name, in case people recognize it. You can't be Susana."

"But I like Susana," the girl pouts, though she is no match for the stone face. "Fine. But it has to be beautiful. What do you think it should be?" Beneath the mask, Korem's face twists in a display of incomprehension. "Anything except Susana," he replies.

"How about... Zharina? It's the florist's name, and it's pretty. Don't you think so?"

The silence she receives is longer than usual, though she dares not fill it. "That works," comes the eventual whisper. For a while afterwards, there is no sound besides the gentle rush of the river, and then not even that as Korem swerves to the west, towards a lonely building nestled among gently rolling hills.

"If you won't tell me your name," the newly christened Zharina announces, "I get to call you goat-man. It's only fair." Her victim nods slightly. Though he moves rapidly and with a strange, silent grace, there is something that the young girl finds heavy about him.

"We are here," he announces. A single spire and warm earthen bricks welcome them to St. Dinova's Monastery, of the Order of Communion. It lacks a gate, and the pair pass under an arch on the way to a proud and ancient wooden door, flanked by spider plants. Korem lets Zharina down; she is mildly disappointed to give up the comfort of the mane. "Don't be scared. There are others like you here, and the nuns will know how to help you. But you must not tell anyone your real name. Go on, knock on the door."

Zharina leaves him just in front of the arch, with nothing but the clothing on her back and her coinpurse. Yet she feels she is leaving him behind and not the other way around. Before knocking, she pauses to ask the man standing in the moonlight one last question.

"Goat-man? Why do you do this?"

What can he say? The mantra rises within him, irresistible, inexorable...

The human heart longs for true freedom, the freedom offered by God. All too often when seeking freedom, one gives himself over to a false law, a false master. If the law of man clashes with the law of heaven, then it is no law, but farce. All thoughts, words, and actions, everything suffered, must lead to God. Go then as the arm of God, in charity and justice, but above all, in faith.

"God wills it," he says simply. She takes him for his word. "Thank you." With a determined, dirty hand, she raps smartly on the oaken door. It yields a young and kind-faced nun in ashen habits rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "Yes...? Oh, you are another..."

"The goat-man brought me here," claims Zharina, and the nun's face softens into a mix of amusement and exasperation. "Goat-man? That's a new one."

"It matches," says the young girl proudly, turning back around. See, he has horns, like..."

But she and the nun are the only two figures to be seen. The moons have faded into the break of day.