The Cave Bleeds Red
The surface of the water is troubled. Silver glides through the pool of tears in great pain and sorrow. She opens her mind and consumes the liquid like a tonic, heightening her visionary command, sharpening her sight. Around her the waters fade and form shadows mingled with the cries of desperation and despair. The supernatural elements resonate and surround her here, and the shaman begins to see the scorched and barren sands of Kheshatta whose grains are tainted with darkening stain.
The vision unfolds and she listens to its distress. Harkening to the deep acumen, it reveals the spirit of the woman wondering the desert, her belly swollen with child. She cries out to the darkness and hears silence in answer. The woman stumbles to knee. The child comes. Silver wonders who calls to her spirit as she doubles in pain to labor the birthing of the One...
Beads of sweat speckle her skin, fused to tears of anguish. She senses the waves of nausea returning. Dizzy she closes her eyes, resting her head against a stone – feeling the comforting coolness of it; she sighs. The sigh turns into a scream of pain as her swollen belly tightens again. She grits her teeth trying to keep the scream silent. Curling away from the pressure, she arches against natural form. The tattered robe falls gaping. She gasps, and the pain lessens. Her eyes shut tightly as she whimpers feeling her belly begin to tighten again. There is so much blood, too much blood. Reaching a hand down to her stomach she feels for the mound of the child, but there is only the soften flesh of the voided cavity. Then the emptiness of the silence leaves her breathless, for the woman’s body grows cold. Fear takes her. His icy grasp cradles her in an endless embrace.
The cave waters are broken as the shaman rises, and the swollen emerald tears fall from her skin in course to the unifying surface as the shaman sheds the terror of the trance. The transition echoes the flight of danger. She gathers her things and is off. She seeks the child.
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The Babe
The Babe
The vision of the childbirth the shaman had in the stillness of the cave stayed with Silver as she traveled to the far lands of Kheshatta. She knew the vision was a gift. Life was offered a stay and to her, but what troubled her at present was why it landed to her. Why did the world circle around is such strange patterns? Why did a stygian woman give her life in exchange for a child? Why did the task of nurturing the newborn fall to a Cimmerian shaman of no real family or wealth? And most of all, why did this child come to Terra now? The woman in her was always asking these many questions, the deeper questions that rarely exposed answers so readily.
Silver found the baby twisted within the terribly dirty folds in the hem of his mother’s blood-stained robe. The wailing child grasped the tattered cloth as if the last bequeathed token of his mother’s love. The shaman crouched near and then loosened the child’s grip and took him into her arms and swaddled him in her own warm cloak. She cradled him with a rocking motion and sang him a gentling song as she looked on in the cool darkness at the sight of death and motherhood in a tormented embrace. She wondered who the mother was. In the calming of their nestle, the child took the nub of her small finger and suckled. His thrashing from the discomforting cold ceased. The child and mother were separated but not by the shaman’s blade; the Lotus birth gave the child all his need, and now the shaman woman gave the child comfort and warmth.
Again she looked to the mother and knew what had to be done, for the dead must be tended. She whispered to the woman, “You are free mother, Kharon awaits you. Your child will be well cared for. Do not walk the land in want of your boy. It is not his time.”
After completing a simple burial ritual for the woman, she placed the woman's tokens in a small satchel for the boy and slid the bag into the hidden compartment of her silks. In doing so, her hand brushed across Satetka’s parchments that she always kept with her, but something was different. Usually the prophecies felt warm and vibrant, but now the pages were dead to her touch. The burning tingle of its fibers was gone. “Well, what could this mean?” She looked into the bundle in her arm and asked, “Is it you who has silenced the High Priest’s loadstone spell that has bound me to them all these moons, or is it some other thing that saves me from that fate?” The baby wiggled his lips as if in answer, but his eyes were serenely closed, and the infant drifted on in peaceful sleep. Deep in inner reflection, Silver mounted her stallion and bid him go gently for the bundle he carried.
**********
Back within the safety of the Grey Knights’ city, warm fires glowed late into many nights. The fat, rosy cheeks of the infant grinned up at his caretaker as he grew by day and week. From time to time, the child surrendered a haunting radiance as he gazed at the nothing. Silver wondered if the babe knew something she did not. “Ben-own Jahden fits you well,” she would tell him, “for you were born a son in the origin of sorrow.” Jahden would smile hearing his name and then break out in laughter countering the mood. The child’s laughter was contagious, drawing in all around within its reach. “Jahden, Jahden, how sweet you are,” she would sing, tease him. “Do not steal my heart away from me so quickly.”