Muri The Lightning Primordial

Chapter 3 [ Worth In Mud 1]

CHAPTER THREE

Worth In Mud

The voice did not speak again for a long time.

Muri did not move either.

He crouched beside whatever was breathing in the dark beneath the old trees, one hand still pressed against skin that burned and crackled and somehow did not burn him, and he waited with the particular patience of someone who had spent nineteen cycles learning that the world reveals itself on its own schedule and not a moment before.

The rain filtered through the canopy above them in thin scattered threads. The river nearby moved with quiet authority over stones and root. Somewhere behind him, three miles of jungle separated him from a clan that had just decided, for the fourth time, that he was not enough.

He found he could not locate the feeling he was supposed to be having about that.

Everything in him was occupied by the heat beneath his hand.

"You are still here. ”

The voice arrived differently this time.

Less fractured.

Still enormous in the way of things that are compressing themselves significantly to fit inside a space they were not designed for, like an ocean trying to speak through a single shell.

" I am.” Muri replied.

" Most things run. ”

"I am figured, but I am not most things.”

A sound that might have been breathing and might have been something else entirely moved through the dark.

Not quite a laugh.

The shape of one.

"No...” the voice said.

"…You are not. ”

Muri shifted his weight carefully, feeling the root structure of the great tree behind him and using it to lower himself fully to the ground.

The mud was cold against his legs. The heat radiating from the figure beside him made the contrast sharper and somehow easier to bear simultaneously.

"You are injured.” he said.

"Badly. ”

"I am aware of my own condition. ”

"Are you now.”

It was not a question.

"Because the breathing of someone that is aware of its own condition and managing it sounds different from the breathing of someone that is aware of its condition and losing the argument with it. ”

Silence.

"You are very irritating.” the voice snapped

"For something so small. ”

"You are very dramatic. ” Muri replied

"For someone bleeding into the mud."

The heat beside him shifted — a movement, sharp and immediate, the instinctive response of something that did not appreciate being spoken to in that manner.

Muri felt the air change with it. Felt the electricity spike sudden and fierce against his skin, every hair on his body standing rigid in a single instant.

He did not move.

The electricity subsided slowly.

"...you genuinely are not afraid ” the voice said.

Quieter now.

A different quiet than before.

The silence of something recalibrating.

“ I told you.”

"Why? ”

Muri considered the question honestly, the way he considered everything — without the performance of certainty, without the mask his brothers wore that said I am not afraid because I am strong.

He was not strong in the way his clan measured strength. He had made his peace with that a long time ago and found it freed him considerably.

"I have been afraid... All my life." he said.

"I know what it feels like. It feels like the pit. Like standing at the edge of it and hearing something below that wants to kill you and knowing you cannot see it. It's dark, cold, unwelcoming, whispering words not meant for a human. ”

A pause.

" This does not feel like that. This feels like something else. ”

A pause.

Short but questioning.

"What does it feel like??? ”

He thought about the silver light blazing behind his eyes.

The pull that had brought his feet northeast without a decision being made, the sparks that made him reach out to her before his mind understood what it was reaching for.

"It feels like recognition. ” he said

"Like finding something I don't know but also feels strangely familiar.”

The silence that followed was very long and very full.

And something warm yet hot pressed against his shoulder and stayed there.

Not aggressive.

Not threatening.

Resting.

" I am Venit ” the voice said.

Quieter than it had been yet commanding.

Almost …almost… something human in the register of it.

" I do not know why I am telling you that."

"I am Muri. ” he replied with a soft smile, which vanished as soon as it appeared.

"…Son of Chief Abara, only child of the fifth wife, less of man even after nineteenth cycle…”

A beat.

" The blind one.” he concluded

" I know what blind means ” Venit scoffs

"I have existed since before your kind had words for it. ” she adds, rolling her eyes.

" Then you know it is not as easy going as people make it to be.”

Another pause.

"...no,” she said slowly.

"…I suppose it is not.”

* * *

She did not tell him what she was.

Not directly.

Not yet.

But the jungle around them told him things she did not say.

The rain avoided her.

He noticed it first as an absence, the sound of drops hitting the canopy was consistent in every direction except a rough circle of perhaps four feet surrounding the space she occupied.

As if the water steered away from her instinctively. Redirected as if even weather had opinions about proximity.

The insects had gone silent in a radius he estimated at thirty feet.

Most due to the smell of smoke and charred trees at the areas which she landed.

It was a familiar scent which he got use to after the pit.

The river nearby, which had been moving with its usual confident authority, had slowed.

He could hear it.

Lower volume.

More careful.

Like something approaching a presence it respected and was not entirely sure what to do about.

And the silver light behind his eyes — his lifelong companion, was behaving in ways it had never behaved before.

It was not just blazing now.

It was ‘responding.’

Moving in patterns that corresponded to her breathing. Dimming slightly when she fell quiet. Brightening when she spoke.

As if it had always been a receiver waiting for a signal it had never been close enough to receive.

"You are thinking very loudly.” Venit muttered.

"I think loudly when things are interesting.”

A pause.

“ And do I look interesting to you??”

"You are the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me.” Muri said honestly yet cluelessly with the simple honesty of someone who had nothing to lose from truth and had always found performance exhausting.

"Which is quite a significant statement because my evening was already unusual. ”

"What happened to your evening? ”

He told her.

Not everything.

Not the accumulated weight of four cycles and his brothers towering above him and the specific flavor of a clan's dismissal worn across nineteen years.

But the pit.

The beast.

The slingshot.

The last stone.

The lightning arriving at precisely the wrong moment and taking out everything he had just earned.

He told it plainly.

No self pity.

No performance of toughness.

Just the facts arranged in their order.

When he was done,she went silent for a moment.

"The lightning… ” she said.

"Yes?? ”

"It came during your fight.…? ”

" Directly into the pit, yes. ”

Something shifted in the heat beside him.

A tension entering it that had not been there before — not directed at him, but present.

Complicated.

" I am sorry.” Venit said.

The words were strange in her voice.

Not because they were insincere.

But because they sounded unfamiliar in her mouth, like words in a language she knew the meaning of but had rarely had occasion to use.

Muri turned toward her with the instinct he used to find his mother's face in dark rooms.

"Why are you apologizing for lightning??” he asked carefully.

She did not answer immediately.

When she did, her voice had changed again.

Dropped lower.

So low it was not a whisper

Something underneath it that was not quite grief but occupied adjacent territory.

“ Because… Because I'm the reason it exists…”

The jungle absorbed that statement the way it absorbed everything — without judgment, without reaction, simply taking it in and continuing.

Muri sat with it for a long moment.

Then, because he was Muri and silence had always been more honest than noise— brushed it aside.

"How bad are you hurt??” he asked as he smelled fresh blood.

A breath that was almost a laugh and almost something that hurt too much to be a laugh.

"Badly.” she admitted.

And the single word cost her something.

He heard it cost her.

"More than I have ever been. ”

"There is a healer…Three miles through that jungle. She is small and quiet and nobody pays her enough attention and she is the most capable person in our clan by a distance.”

A pause.

"She is also my mother. Which means she will help you without asking the questions that would complicate things.”

"I cannot move. ” Venit whispered.

Low.

Flat.

The voice of something admitting a thing it found deeply objectionable.

"Not far. Not yet.”

" Then I will bring her to you. ” Muri sighed with resolve.

" You do not know what I am.”

*No, I do not ” Muri agreed.

"But I know you are bleeding and I know someone who can help. I know that whatever you are—you sound human, feel human yet smell weird for one ”

He felt her flinch and a scowl appeared on her face, unfortunately he didn't notice that he was a threads-width close to losing his ability to speak to couple with his missing sight.

“ I do not smell weri...” Venit argued but was immediately cut off.

“ You also stopped breathing a moment ago when you were startled and then started it again, which means whatever else is true about you — you can die." He concluded.

“ Cheeky brat!! ” she snarled and flinched in pain.

He stood carefully, one hand on the root.

" The one about to save your life. Be more grateful. ” he sighed as he felt most insulted in just less than an hour than all his life.

‘ She's quite a handful ’

The silence stretched between them.

"Why???" Venit asked, this time genuinely.

The question of something that had existed long enough to have forgotten what it felt like to have that particular question answered.

"You have known me for less than an hour. ”

Muri found her direction by the heat and turned to face it.

"You said most things run. ” he said.

"Yes…"

"I will not run."

He paused at the edge of the hanging moss curtain.

"I will be back." he said.

"Do not die while I am gone. ” he added

"..."

" That was not a suggestion.” he smiled amd walked out.

“ Cheeky…”

Behind him the heat pulsed once — sharp, involuntary and the silver light behind his eyes blazed white and then settled into something steady and warm that was entirely new.

Like a fire that had just decided to stay.

His mother was awake.

She was always awake when he was not home. He had understood this from a young age without either of them ever discussing it, that she existed in a state of partial wakefulness whenever he was somewhere she could not put her hands on him and verify with her thumb at his pulse point that the universe had not done something irreversible.

He found her at the entrance of their hut, wrapped in her night cloth, facing the direction of the jungle with the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting so long they had stopped performing the act of it and simply become it.

"You were gone longer than air requires.” she said when he was still twenty feet away.

"I found something.”

She was quiet for exactly two seconds.

"What kind of something? ”

"The injured bleeding kind. ” He replied.

"In the jungle northeast. By the old river trees. ”

He stopped before her.

"I need you to come. ”

"How injured??”

"Badly. According to her words.”

"What is it?? ”

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

"I am not entirely certain how to answer that accurately.” he said more as a thought than an answer.

His mother made the sound she reserved for when he was being careful with information in a way that suggested the information was significant.

She went inside the hut without another word and he heard her moving with the quick systematic efficiency of a woman assembling her healing kit in the dark.

The particular sounds of each container, each cloth, each tool finding its place in the carry bag she had packed and repacked so many times the order was written into her hands.

She emerged in less than two minutes.

"Lead the way ” she said simply.

He led.