Muri The Lightning Primordial

Chapter 5[ What The Morning Holds]

CHAPTER FIVE

What the Morning Holds

The silence in the doorway lasted long enough to become its own event.

Muri had read silences his entire life the way sighted people read expressions by texture, duration, and what lived underneath them.

He had learned early that silence was not the absence of communication but a different form of it entirely, and that people revealed more in what they chose not to say than in anything they eventually said.

His father's silence right now was the most complex he had ever heard.

It had several layers.

The outermost was simple shock, he could hear that in the quality of Abara's breathing, the slight disruption of its usual deep unhurried rhythm.

Beneath the shock was something Muri could not immediately name. Something that involved his father's weight shifting slowly on the doorframe. Something that sounded, improbably, like a large man trying very hard to find the correct arrangement of words before releasing any of them.

"Muri.” his father said finally.

One word.

His name.

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

"Father."

"Who…" Abara began very carefully and very quietly "…is that??? ”

Muri turned back toward where Venit lay sleeping as if he needed the direction to think.

He made a decision in the space of two seconds. The kind of decision that announces itself not as a choice between options but as the only available path given what needed protecting.

"I found her…" he said.

"…Northeast of the boundary. There is a cliff face near the second river bend, she had fallen. She was unconscious when I reached her. ”

A pause.

" The cliff?? ”Abara muttered.

"Yes.”

"Northeast??? ”

"Yes, Father. ”

"Where you went…” his father said slowly, "…to get air?? ”

"Yes.”

The silence that followed this had a texture Muri recognized, it was the texture of a very intelligent man holding two versions of a story against each other and examining the places where they did and did not align.

"She is not clan.” Abara noted.

"No. I think she is a nomad. She has not said much, she was barely conscious when Mama began treating her. ”

"Her hair…”

"Is unusual. Yes ”

"Muri… ”

"Father.”

"Her hair… ” Abara said, with the patient deliberateness of someone who felt the first answer had not engaged adequately with the question,

"…is white. She does not appear old enough for white hair!! ”

"Some people are born with it.” Muri said.

“Boy, you can not see your own hair, how do you know people are born with it?!?!” Abara grunts with a frown.

" Mama has told me of such things. Rare, but not impossible. ”

Another silence.

Longer this time.

Muri kept his face neutral with the practice of nineteen cycles of keeping his face neutral when the alternative was more expensive.

His father exhaled.

Long and slow.

The exhale of a man who had looked at two versions of a story and chosen, for reasons of his own, to set one of them down.

"She is being treated?? ”Abara s asked.

"Mama has been thorough.”

" She will stay until she is well?? ”

"That was my intention.”

"And then?? ”

"And then she will head to where she was going. She is a nomad. She has her own path.”

His father was quiet for a moment.

"You found a stranger at the bottom of a cliff in the dark…" Abara said thoughtfully.

"……Injured. And brought her three miles through jungle to your mother. ”

" Yes.”

"Blind."

‘ Yeah, thanks for noticing just now Father!’

" I am always blind, Father. It stops being a relevant factor. ” Muri snarled as he rolled his eyes.

Something moved in his father's silence that sounded almost like reluctant amusement reaching for the surface and not quite making it.

"The rite…" Abara said, shifting. His voice changed register — still his father's voice, but the layer of it that belonged to the clan rather than to Muri specifically.

"The Elders are talking.”

Muri went still.

Not visibly. But still.

"Are they?? ” he mutters

"Two of them went into the pit after. When things had settled. ”

A pause weighted with what it was carrying.

"They found something in the beast. ”

The hut was very quiet.

‘ Ofcourse they did ’

Muri said nothing.

"Your rock was in the eye socket. Fully buried.” He paused.

"The wound was — they are saying it was a killing blow. That the beast was already dead when the lightning came.”

‘ Obviously~’

The silence that followed was the longest of the night.

Muri sat inside it and felt it from every angle — the shape of what his father was telling him, the weight of what it meant, the fact that he had known, had always known, what the stone had done when it left his hand in the dark and the rain and the thunder.

He had known.

And still the clan had decided what it decided.

And he had walked northeast into the jungle and found something that had reorganized the night entirely.

"Muri…” his father called.

Something in his voice had shifted.

The Chief layer had thinned.

What was underneath it was older and less composed.

"If the Elders rule that the kill was yours —”

"Father. ”

"If they rule — ”

"Father. ” Muri's voice was level.

Quiet.

"I hear you. I hear what you are telling me and I understand what it means and I am grateful that you came to tell me yourself. ”

A pause.

"But the woman behind me was pulled from a cliff tonight and Mama has been working for hours and I am tired and my back hurts and my ears are still ringing. ”

He turned his face toward the sleeping mat where Venit lay.

"Whatever the Elders decide…” he said, "…will be decided whether I sit here worrying about it or not. She…”— he gestured behind him — "…will not be fine unless someone makes sure she is. So…”

A silence.

His father absorbed this with the particular quality of a man recognizing something of himself in a statement and finding the experience simultaneously gratifying and humbling.

"Rest.” Abara said finally.

"Both of you. ”

"That was always the plan.”

He heard his father move. The large quiet footsteps toward the entrance. Then stopped.

"You did well tonight," Abara said. Not the Chief's voice.

Not the father-performing-for-the-clan voice.

The voice from the pit edge when he had dropped to his knees in the mud calling Muri's name into the dark.

"I simply help a dying woman.” Muri shrugged

"I know what I did.”

"I know you do ” his father saif with amusement in his tone.

And left.

* * *

The hut settled into its night time sounds.

His mother had gone to her rest behind the dividing cloth hours ago — he had heard her stop moving, heard her breathing slow and deepen into the particular rhythm of genuine sleep rather than the shallow maintenance of someone staying alert.

He sat beside Venit's sleeping mat and did not particularly try to sleep himself. His body ached in the comprehensive way of something that had been through a significant amount in a short period of time and was filing its complaints in bulk.

His back.

His right hand.

The six cuts his mother had dressed.

The bite on his forearm that throbbed with the specific indignation of wounds that felt they had been under acknowledged.

He sat in his comfortable dark and listened to a god breathe.

Or so she says.

He was not sure what he believed about that. He was sure of the heat and the rain avoiding her and the river going careful and the silver light behind his eyes behaving in ways it had never behaved before.

He was sure of the voice in the dark under the old trees that had arrived like something enormous trying to be small and had not quite managed complete success.

Whether that added up to what she said it added up to —

He would wait and see.

‘ Well not see literally~’

He always waited and was rewarded. It was the most reliable method available to someone who could lacked sight.

He was somewhere in the long stretch between late night and early morning, not asleep but not fully present either, when Venit made a sound.

He became alert immediately. The particular sharpness of someone whose hearing had always been their primary instrument snapping to full attention.

She was still asleep. He could tell by her breathing — it had not changed into the waking pattern. But her stillness had broken.

Something was moving through her sleep the way storms move through a landscape — not asking permission, not confined to neat borders.

"—you will not…”

Low.

Fragmented.

In her sleep voice which was enormous in the way her waking voice only became when she forgot to manage it.

"—♦♦♦♦…you cannot—this is not…"

A sound that was not a word.

Pain in it, or something adjacent to pain — the sound of something being pressed against a limit and refusing to yield and being pressed harder regardless.

Muri sat very still.

"—let go…let go let go let go…"

Then a crack of electricity — sharp, involuntary, the silver light behind his eyes blazing sudden and immediate — and she went still again.

Back into even breathing.

As if whatever had been happening in the landscape of her sleep had resolved itself or at least paused.

Muri sat in the aftermath of it.

He had no reference for what she was saying meant.

It was not a word in any language he knew, something humans was not meant to grasp, and it had come out of her with the weight of something that mattered enormously.

He filed it away in the part of his mind where he kept things that were not yet his business.

She had found him in the dark. She had bled in the mud. She had let him carry her through the jungle, which he suspected cost her more than she would ever say directly.

She had laughed — that small unguarded genuine laugh — above his shoulder on the path through the trees.

Whatever else was true about her, whatever enormous complicated architecture of history and power and pain lived in the sleep sounds she was making — it was hers.

He would wait until she chose to give him any part of it.

He settled back against the wall.

‘ None of my business ’ he thought.

And went to sleep.

Morning arrived by degrees.

His mother was first, as she always was — moving through the hut with the quiet systematic efficiency of someone whose mornings had been organized around purpose for so long that rising and beginning had become a single motion.

She checked Muri first.

He felt her approach in his sleep and surfaced enough to register the familiar hand at his pulse point before descending again.

The she checked Venit second.

He heard her pause.

Heard the small sound she made when she was revising an expectation.

She did not say anything.

She went about the business of the morning.

He slept.

She woke him eventually with the specific touch she used that was not urgent but was also not optional — a hand on his shoulder that said when you are ready in a tone that meant which is now.

"How do you feel?? ” she asked, when he had surfaced fully.

"Better than last night. ”

"That is a low standard. ”

"I am working with what I have. ” he smiled at her voice.

She pressed the bowl of something warm into his hands and he drinks it.

Outside the hut the clan was well into its morning — the sounds of it reaching him in layers, the near sounds of immediate neighbours and the further sounds of the common areas where the day's work organized itself.

He heard no loud gruffy competitive brothers.

That did not mean they were not there.

‘ They are probably out hunting.’

Then he turned towards Venit's direction.

"She is still sleeping.” his mother said, with a quality in her voice that suggested this was interesting to her professionally.

"She was tired I guess.”

"She was significantly injured, Muri. People significantly injured do not typically —” she paused, choosing her words. "—Sleep through the morning so peacefully ”

"She is unusual. ”

" Very " his mother agreed, in the tone that meant she had a great deal more to say on that subject and was choosing the timing carefully.

Venit slept.

The morning moved through its business without her. His mother came and went — he heard her outside navigating the clan's curiosity about the hut's occupants with the practiced deflection of someone who had been doing exactly this for nineteen cycles with a different subject.

Brief exchanges.

Calm answers.

The particular social skill of giving people enough to stop them asking more.

The sun climbed.

He could feel it in the quality of the light that reached him even through his unseeing eyes — the warmth of it strengthening, the air in the hut shifting from morning cool to midday settled.

He was passing his mother a cloth when he heard the breathing change.

The same shift he had noticed in the early hours — instantaneous, no intermediate state. Asleep and then awake, like a lamp lit.

"You are both staring at me.” Venit with a low morning tone.

"I cannot stare" Muri said with a sneer.

" Yeah… Last I checked ”

"You are doing the equivalent.” He shrugged and turned away.

"How do you feel?? ” his mother asked, already moving, already reaching.

"I …” Venit started then stopped.

A pause that had the quality of something running an internal assessment and finding the results surprising.

"Better!! ”

"Better…" his mother repeated.

"Considerably!"

His mother's hands were moving — he could tell by the small sounds of her working, the particular focus she brought to examination.

Then she went still.

"Your left side…" she said carefully.

"Yes??”

"I dressed those wounds last night…”

"Yes?? ”

"The deepest ones. ”

"I imagine so…”

"They are — ” his mother stopped.

Muri had heard his mother stop mid-sentence perhaps three times in his life. Each time it had meant she had encountered something that required her to rebuild the sentence from the beginning.

"They are significantly less deeper than they were last night.”

"Hm.” Venit said.

"That is not — ”

"I heal quickly. ” Venit said, with the ease of someone offering an explanation they know is inadequate and have decided is sufficient regardless.

"It is simply how I am built. You should not concern yourself with it. ”

"I am a healer. ” his mother said pleasantly.

"Concerning myself with how people are built is the precise nature of my work.”

"And you do it beautifully!! ” Venit said.

"I feel remarkably better. Your medicines are extraordinary. I truly am grateful.”

A pause that had the specific quality of someone deploying warmth strategically.

"I wonder if I might stand. ”

"You wonder if — ” his mother began shocked at her words.

She was bleeding to death just last night and now she's wondering to stand??

"I have been horizontal for quite avery long time and besides I would like to see how you live as a clan.” The sound of Venit moving — carefully, but with increasing steadiness.

"I have watched from a distance for many cycles. I have never been — inside it. ”

"You should rest ” his mother injected

"I am well rested, I assure you ”

"You were injured — ”

"And I am better. You said so yourself. ”

A pause.

"Where are my — ” another pause. "—What are the coverings called??”

"Clothes," Muri whispered

"Clothes. Where are my clothes?? ”

"Damaged beyond use. ” his mother replied.

"I have left something of mine beside you. ”

A silence in which Venit apparently examined what had been left.

"It is a bit small," she muttered.

"I am a small woman."

"It might not—"

"It will fit!" his mother said firmly, with the serenity of someone who has decided to be correct and is waiting for the world to catch up.

"It will be fitted. There is a difference." She smiled.

Muri heard her stand.

‘ What does she mean...???’

“ I don't want to know ” he sighed, voicing out his thoughts.

“ Ohhh it does fits!!! Woww Muri, I didn't know your mother was once this big in the...”

“ Ohhh shut up!!! ” he hissed and turned away.

He knew she was standing before she said anything — the displacement of air changed, the heat that had been concentrated at mat level redistributing as she rose to her full height. She moved experimentally.

Once across the hut.

Back.

With increasing confidence and decreasing caution.

"You should sit. ” he said.

"You are not my healer. ” she countered.

"My mother is your healer and she said you should rest. ” he snapped back.

"Your mother said I should rest. She did not say I should lie in the dark indefinitely. ”

"It has been less than a full day— ”

"I want to go outside. ”

"You are not ready— ”

"I am considerably more ready than you are qualified to assess. ” she huffs.

"I am telling you as someone who carried you half dead through three miles of jungle last night that you are— ”

"I am grateful for the carrying… ” Venit said, "…but I was barely conscious and lacked will power for most of it and did not choose the experience. I am conscious now. I am choosing. ” she said shuddering as though she was reliving a traumatic experience.

"You are being reckless. ” he sighed.

"I am being decisive. They are different things. ” Sha replied stubbornly.

"You are being— ”

"Hey Cheeky brat ” Venit called out.

‘ Cheeky…???’

"What." He sighed in resignation.

"I am going outside. ”

He opened his mouth.

"You…” she continued, before he could produce whatever he had been assembling, "…can either walk with me or sit here and be concerned alone. Both options are available to you. One that's not is making me lie down again. ”

A silence.

He heard his mother make the sound she made when she had elected not to involve herself in something and was committed to that election regardless of what developed.

‘ Traitor!’

"Fine.”

He stood.

He made his way to the entrance with the efficient economy of movement that nineteen cycles of navigation had given him. He pushed through the entrance and turned to say something — a final reasonable objection, something measured and sensible about the rate of recovery and the importance of not undoing his mother's careful work —

And stopped.

Because the clan had stopped.

All sounds invading his ear while he was still behind close doors disappeared as soon as he opened it.

He could feel it before he understood it — the ambient noise of the morning dropping in a radius around their hut with the completeness of something switched off.

Footsteps halting.

Voices cutting short mid-sentence.

The particular quality of collective arrested motion that meant an entire group of people had simultaneously found something that replaced whatever they had been doing.

Behind him he heard Venit step through the entrance and into the open air.

He heard her breathe it in

He heard the silence of his clan deepen by several degrees.

And then — from somewhere to his left, in the direction of where his brothers usually stood in the mornings — he heard a sound he had never once heard from any of his three brothers in nineteen cycles of knowing them.

Complete.

Utter.

Silence.

Not the silence of people who have nothing to say. The silence of people who have lost access to the mechanism that produces words.

Venit stepped up beside him. He felt the warmth of her. Felt the way the sun hit her differently than it hit everything else — or perhaps it was the way she received it, some quality of the light finding something in her to answer.

"Hm," she mutters quietly, to no one in particular, with the satisfaction of someone who had expected a reaction and found the reality exceeded the expectation.

"What??” Muri said, at normal volume, into a silence so complete his voice landed like a stone on still water.

"What is everyone looking at?!? ”

He could feel their gaze, latching on to his skins as though they aimed at undressing his thoughts.

Nobody answered.

Which was, in its own way, the most complete answer available.

The sun hung high and generous above the clan boundary, and every mouth in the vicinity of the healer's hut had found the same configuration—

Open.

Wide Open.