Muri The Lightning Primordial

Chapter 4 [Worth In Mud 2]

CHAPTER FOUR

Worth In Mud 2

The jungle at this hour was its own complete world.

His mother moved through it with the quiet competence of someone who had gathered medicines here her entire adult life and knew its grammar as well as her son did though differently, through different senses, but equally completely.

She did not ask him questions as they walked. She never asked questions she knew he would answer when he was ready.

The silver light guided him as it had before.

Steady.

Warm.

Rhythmic

He felt it intensify when they were close.

"Here.” he gestured, pushing through the hanging moss.

The heat reached them both simultaneously.

His mother stopped walking.

In nineteen cycles of watching her navigate everything from difficult births to clan politics to the particular challenge of raising a blind child in a clan that measured worth in physical dominance, he had never once heard her make a sound of pure involuntary surprise.

She made one now.

Small.

Quickly controlled.

But present.

*"Muri…” she whispered carefully.

"…What did you find???”

"I told you. Someone injured. ” he shrugged

"That…" his mother started but found it difficult to finish minding her next words, with the precision of a woman choosing her words the way she chose her medicines — exactly and with full awareness of their effect.

“…is not someone. That is …”

"A woman! ” said firm a voice from the dark.

Different from before.

Muri turned toward it sharply.

The voice was still hers, he knew it with a certainty that had no rational basis and did not require one — but it had changed entirely in register.

Smaller.

Contained.

More human.

The ocean that had been speaking through a shell had somehow, improbably, fit itself inside the shell completely.

And with it, the heat had dropped. Not gone — he could still feel it, a warmth beyond what any human body should produce, humming at the edges of her like an instrument played slightly too loud for the room.

But reduced.

Managed.

"A wounded woman." Venit repeated.

Steadier this time.

As if she was testing the shape of the sentence and finding it serviceable.

" Who has had a difficult evening.”

His mother's healer instincts apparently overrode everything else she might have been experiencing because she crossed the space between them without further discussion and Muri heard her kneel in the mud and begin her assessment — hands moving, the small sounds of someone cataloguing damage with professional focus.

Then she stopped.

"Your temperature…" his mother noticed

"Is unusual. Yes. For your kind especially”

"It is not possible. ” His mother blurted out

"And yet…”

"You are not —”

"I am injured! ” Venit said, with a gentleness that did not fully conceal the enormity beneath it.

"And your son brought you to help me. That is what is true right now. The rest …”

A pause

"… can wait until I am not bleeding. ”

A long silence in which Muri imagined his mother performing the internal negotiation between what she was seeing and what she knew to be possible and arriving at the conclusion she always arrived at, that what was in front of her was more important than the category it failed to fit into.

"Where does it hurt most??” his mother asked as her hands hovered as though they were skeptical of going into uncharted areas

"Everywhere ” Venit groaned

"But the left side is the argument I am currently losing.”

His mother worked.

* * *

It took longer than it should have because Venit's human form, convincing at a distance, became increasingly complicated up close.

His mother's hands, which had mapped a thousand bodies across her healing years and knew the geography of human damage with absolute fluency — kept finding things that were not where they were supposed to be.

Not wrong.

Not absent.

Simply arranged differently.

Like a building that follows all the rules of architecture but has chosen an unconventional floor plan.

She did not comment on these findings.

She simply adapted and continued.

Muri stayed close, passing her what she asked for before she finished asking — he knew her kit as well as she did, had spent his childhood sitting beside her while she worked, learning the names and properties of every medicine by scent and texture.

"The dark powder.” she requested.

He had it in her hand before the sentence ended.

"The long cloth. Not the short one.”

"I know the difference, Mama.”

From the direction of Venit came a sound that was almost certainly amusement poorly disguised as a pained exhale.

"Do not…” Muri snapped, pointing at her general location with his free hand, "…encourage her!”

"I said nothing…" Venit said in a small voice, with the specific innocence of someone who had been saying things continuously without moving their mouth.

"You were loud about it. ”

"I am an injured woman in a jungle. I am entitled to whatever inner life I choose. ”

His mother made the small sound she made when she was trying not to smile and had nearly succeeded.

"She has a point.” she cleared her throat.

"You are supposed to be on my side.” Muri gasped.

"I am on the side of my patient. It is a professional obligation. ”

‘ Traitor ’

* * *

When his mother declared the immediate work done, her voice carrying the particular cadence of someone who had done what could be done and was filing away approximately forty seven questions for later , then the problem of transport presented itself.

"She cannot walk three miles.” his mother said quietly to Muri while Venit was occupied with the careful process of not making sounds that would reveal how much moving cost her.

"I know. ”

"You are injured yourself. ” she adds

"I know that too. ”

"Muri…”

"I will carry her.”

A pause from his mother contained an entire conversation she had decided not to have.

" I will go ahead and prepare.” she said instead.

" The path is clear. You know your way around it . ”

" I do.”

She pressed her hand briefly against his face — thumb at his pulse point as always and then he heard her move back through the hanging moss and away through the jungle toward home.

He turned toward Venit.

" I am going to carry you. ” he said.

" I am telling you this before I attempt it so that you have the opportunity to object in advance rather than struggling like a fish while I am doing it.”

A pause.

"I do not require carrying.” Venit hissed

"You cannot walk three miles.”

"I can walk. ” she insisted

" How far??”

A silence that was itself an answer.

"I thought so.” Muri said, walking to her and carefully, with the methodical deliberateness of someone who had spent a lifetime navigating physical space without sight, worked out the geography of her — where she was, how she was positioned, how to get his arms where they needed to be without causing damage his mother had just spent significant effort preventing.

She was lighter than he expected.

He did not say this because he suspected it would not be received well.

‘ You have said enough for one night Muri.’

" This is undignified! ” Venit puffed

"You are welcome.” Muri sneered, and began walking.

* * *

She was quiet for perhaps thirty seconds.

It was— in Muri's experience, the outer limit of how long something with strong opinions could sustain silence while being carried through a jungle by someone it had met less than two hours ago.

"You are going the wrong way.” she said.

‘ Is she actually serious?!?!’

" I am not! ”

" We should go left.”

" Left takes us to the river crossing. The crossing is deep this time of year because of the rain. Which you will notice has been falling for quite some time now”

"I am aware of rain. I have existed longer than rain." She huffs

"Whatever, at that you should be aware it makes river crossings inadvisable for injured people being carried by other injured people. ” he countered

A pause.

‘ All that pride about her age yet she knows little…tsk ’

"...how hurt are you?" she ask, in a different tone.

Smaller.

The tone from under the old trees when she had pressed against his shoulder and stayed there.

" I am fine.”

" That is not what I asked. ”

“ Six cuts, one bite, my back from hitting the pit wall, my right hand from the slingshot and my ears are still ringing from the lightning.”

A pause.

" I am fine.”

" You are carrying an injured…”

"…Person,"Muri said.

"I am carrying an injured person through a jungle I know in my sleep. I am fine. Stop moving or you will undo my mother's work and she will be displeased and when she is displeased she becomes very quiet in a way that is somehow worse than a festival.”

Venit went still.

" Your mother is unusual.”

"She is extraordinary.” Muri said simply with a hint of pride.

" She has spent nineteen cycles being the only person in our clan who treated me as what I am rather than what I cannot do. In my experience that makes a person either extraordinary or related to you and in her case it is both.”

Silence from Venit.

The kind with texture.

“ What are you? ” she asked quietly.

"In your own assessment.”

He navigated around a root cluster he knew by memory, adjusting his grip carefully.

"Someone who killed a beast with a slingshot and a stone.” he said.

" In the dark. In the rain. Blind.”

A beat.

"The clan has not finished deciding what to do with that information. I find I have stopped waiting for their conclusion.”

"When did you stop waiting?”

" Soon... real soon—when I found something more interesting to do."

The heat in his arms pulsed once.

Brief and involuntary.

"You are…" Venit started, and then stopped.

" I am what??"

"...nothing. Watch the root!!"

"I cannot watch anything" Muri replied in a matter of fact tone.

A pause.

" It was a figure of speech." Venit whispered as she felt cringe at her blunder.

"A very helpful one indeed." Muri muttered sarcastically.

"I am just trying to be thoughtful, which by my standards is not something I do often!!!" she snaps

"You are also currently being carried. I would argue those standards authenticity."

From somewhere above his shoulder came a sound he had not heard from her yet.

Small.

Unguarded.

Genuine.

She was laughing.

Not the enormous fractured sound of something vast trying to fit through a small opening. Something human-shaped and warm and surprised at itself.

“ You're right, I look quite pitiful.”

He kept his face forward and said nothing and felt something in his chest arrange itself into a configuration it had never previously occupied.

His mother's hut received them the way it received everything Muri brought home — without question, with immediate practical response.

Blankets had been laid.

Water heated.

Additional medicines arranged in the order she would need them.

He settled Venit down with careful attention and straightened up.

" Sit." his mother told him.

"I am helping."

"You are bleeding through the cloth I put on your back. Sit. I will tell you what to pass me."

He sat.

What followed was the particular choreography of his mother working — the movements he had memorized across a lifetime of watching with his ears, translated now into a version that included him handing her things, holding things, supporting things when four hands were more useful than two.

She did not explain what she was doing as she did it. She did not need to. He followed by sound and instruction and the occasional directional press of her hand.

Venit endured it with a stillness that cost her something. He could hear the cost. She had the stillness of something accustomed to being the largest force in any space it occupied suddenly being required to be small and patient and cooperative and finding all three deeply unnatural.

"This will hurt." his mother cautioned at one point.

"Everything hurts."Venit said.

"More than everything currently does."

"Do it."

It did.

Venit made no sound.

Muri, who had been told he could not see her face, found that he knew her expression anyway.

When it was done his mother moved around the hut in the quiet systematic way of someone completing the last steps of a long process — cleaning, replacing, restoring order.

Muri sat beside the sleeping mat where Venit had been settled, his own wounds dressed now, his back aching in a manageable way, his ears still carrying their high distant ring.

The silver light behind his eyes had gone soft.

Not dim.

Soft.

The difference between a fire blazing and a fire settled — still burning, fully present, simply no longer urgent.

He could hear her breathing.

Even and slow and — for the first time since he had found her in the mud — not working.

Not losing an argument.

Simply breathing the way things breathe when they have stopped fighting for the moment and allowed themselves the complicated vulnerability of rest.

He stayed where he was and listened and did not examine too carefully why he was not ready to move.

His mother passed behind him and pressed her hand briefly against the back of his neck — not checking his pulse this time.

Something else.

Something that did not have a clinical name.

More like a motherly pet.

Then she went to her own rest behind the dividing cloth at the back of the hut.

The hut settled into its nighttime sounds.

Muri sat in the comfortable dark that had been his entire life and listened to a god breathe.

‘ Or so she says…’

He did not hear the entrance.

He rarely heard his father coming .

Abara moved with the particular contradiction of very large men who had learned quietness, and nineteen cycles of familiarity had not made it easier to track.

He knew his father was there only when the quality of the air in the hut changed — the specific displacement of it that meant something very large had just occupied space near the doorway.

He turned his face toward the entrance.

His father was not speaking.

That was the first indication that something significant was happening.

Abara always spoke.

Had always filled spaces with his voice the way he filled rooms with his body — naturally, without apparent effort, as if silence were simply a material he had never learned to leave in place.

The silence now was total.

Muri opened his mouth.

"Muri…" his father said.

One word.

His name.

In a voice Muri had never heard his father use in nineteen cycles of knowing him.

"Father…”

"Who…” Abara said, very carefully and very quietly, "…is that. ”

Muri turned back toward where Venit lay sleeping.

He thought about what his father was seeing. The white hair that had no business being that color on someone that young. The features arranged in something that was almost entirely human and held that almost-ness the way a painting of a fire holds almost-warmth.

The faint luminescence at the edges of her — barely visible, barely there, the last residue of something she had not fully managed to suppress. The wounds his mother had dressed that even now, at their most damaged, carried a quality that wounds on ordinary bodies did not carry.

And all of it wrapped in a beauty so far outside the category of ordinary that it arrived in the mind not as a single impression but as a series of them — each one complete, each one followed immediately by another.

He heard his father's breath catch.

He heard his father's large hand find the doorframe.

" Father…” Muri said, with the calm of someone who had decided that the truth, whatever it cost, was always cheaper than the alternatives.

"I can explain. ”

His father did not respond.

The silence stretched between the Chief of the clan and his blind youngest son sitting in the dark beside a half naked sleeping figure that did not belong to any world Abara had a name for.

Outside the hut the jungle breathed.

The river moved.

And somewhere in the space between one heartbeat and the next...