South of Paradise, Chapter 1
Hello! I have been trying to write a story (or set of stories) for a long time now but haven’t gotten a way to fully commit myself. So I decided I’d use medium to push myself, and will try to publish a chapter a week. Here it goes!
Homo homini lupus est.
如虎添翼
1 - Struggles
“Those eminent for scholarly virtues are not fighting men. Those eminent in war do not lose their temper. Those eminent in victory do not struggle.”
— Verse 68, Dao De Jing
My grandpa told me that I was born lucky. He said our blood was strong, fierce, and that in the end, we went without a struggle. Until I was seven he filled me with constant praise about how little we struggled. I did everything I could on our farm; chasing sheep into the corral and moving hay bales like they were nothing. I felt stronger than my mother and my grandfather; not in body, but in spirit. My grandpa never let me forget how lucky we were, often whispering to me as I drifted off to sleep after a story:
“We go through our lives and meet many struggles. Some view their entire lives as one enormous struggle, against the odds cast by fate. But that struggle, no matter how great or small, is what makes us alive. Any struggle beyond our own lives is… unnatural.”
Yet it always confused me, since Grandpa told me fierce meant strong and ferocious, like a cornered animal, or a mother bear protecting her cubs. Fierce meant always with a struggle.
I learned what he meant in the shortening fall days of my seventh year. The leaves were fanning out in dead clusters around the trees, and my mom’s eyes had lost their luster, her step crippled by a hidden pain. I awoke one day and found the house empty.
My mom had fallen in the kitchen, and shards from a wet plate were scattered all around her. The sun trickled in on the suds, which popped with a slow irregularity around her sopping hands. She had smashed her head on the counter top. Lines of blood trickled from bruises and cuts on her forehead. I never saw her move again. That was why I was lucky… Grandpa came over very quietly to her, while I screamed and whimpered and beat my fists against his back, telling him to do something. Through my tears, I’ll always remember that his eyes were dry. He gave a soft smile, I could see it reflected in the soapy shards that littered the floor.
Without a struggle.
Grandpa said they’d come for me in a few days, the Vultures, since they always passed by, even this far away from town. They’d see mama was gone, and once they’d seen her go without a struggle, they’d take me.
As sure as sunrise, the man in the dark clothes came, with the spade clinking in the scabbard on his back. He took me as soon as he learned of my mother’s passing. I fought with all my might, but that man had hands of iron, and he wouldn’t have let me go if I’d cut his arms off. His iron hand would be left gripping, squeezing: tearing me away from my grandfather, who stood in mournful silence, not daring to move.
The road to the headquarters of our order, the Nest, was unbelievably long. We traveled for days, with little but water and rice to make our way there. And once there, I was treated like a prisoner.
The first days are always the hardest at the Nest. They don’t feed you, barely give you any water, and they keep you locked by yourself, left to cry and use all your energy trying to get out of one empty, gray room. I thought I could take them all on, me against the world.
But that stops when you’re too weak to scream from lack of thirst, and when you pass out from lack of sleep and sustenance. They pour water on the floor, the dirty, grimy floor, and you lap it up to stay alive. When you’re too weak from hunger, a piece of slop will come through a shutter and you’ll dig into it with your bare hands, savoring every gooey bite.
That’s how it starts at the Nest, they build you up from nothing, the nothing that they make you. After a month or so of this, as time slips away in the Room, you forget almost everything except your hatred and fear, but also you learn that calmness saves energy, and that saving energy is vital. The final test comes when they slip a small blade in. The blade is nothing more than a butter-knife, but with a deadly point. Then they throw one of them in.
I’d only heard about them in strange stories grandpa might tell. They are what are left when you don’t go without a struggle, when you refuse to die.
The dead… The undead. They only throw one in, and he’s missing both his legs and an arm. Or maybe it’s a she, it’s hard to tell when they’re so desiccated. But they could snap your neck between their thumb and forefinger. All the strength that humans have within is unleashed in the struggle to consume. No boundaries, no fears, simply the struggle of undeath.
It came at me, dragging itself by its arm, eerily quiet. It just wanted to continue to exist.
As we all do.
I brought the knife down as hard as my weakened body would allow, straight above its brow. That deathblow signaled my rebirth, light came pouring through the opened door, and the real training began.
I was now part of a team, or more aptly termed, a Wake, a group of Vultures.
Our wake spent most of our nascent years in the Nest. It’s a compound made from the ruins of an old monastery, set on the outskirts of an abandoned town that now serves as our training grounds. The Nest is the northernmost living outpost in the entire region. As watches were exchanged or traveling groups of Vultures passed through, it would regularly house hundreds of inhabitants. A good number of its inhabitants were those of us who had not received the mark, a vulture’s claw on the right shoulder, which signified you were a full member of the order, until you gave your last breath.
We spent time with the other Wakes, but most of our training was with our 10-person family of brothers and sisters nearly the same age.
Our days were very regimented, half the day we spent in physical training: each day we learned or reviewed a new/old aspect of a martial art, all of them distance based. Distance was the key to every form, and weapons were always included when necessary. Any sort of very close or grappling based martial art, like wrestling, we practiced less intensely, mainly as a method of sparring as a Wake. Our Wake was six boys and four girls; we knew each other’s names and dreams. I could call each of their faces to mind more easily than anyone else’s.
All of our names were chosen by the Vultures, and were short and simple. I was now Leon; my old first name was not forgotten, but I chose to never speak it again. Ian and Erin, Samson and Sid, Wanda and Leon (me), Kyle and Bailey, Jane and Shane, my brothers and sisters, their names forever inscribed on the innermost chamber of my heart.
We all had the same skin and dark, tightly cropped hair, and chiseled but slim physique of all of the other members of our order.
Our weapons of choice were long, basically anything that exceeded the average human reach of about 1 meter. The spade was the weapon of our order; in that once you received your mark you received your own spade. One end of the spade was sharpened, while another was a crescent moon, used to divert or distract foes that we might not want to kill.
Killing another human was expressly forbidden, punishable by exile.
Our equipment also included throwing knives, with incendiary fluid attached in a small packet, and some of us carried long sabers for more close-quarters combat. Our most important weapons were our bodies and minds.
Our master was a patient and deadly man; he sought to bring out our weaknesses during training, and then turn them into our strengths.
My wake-brother Ian had trouble landing his throwing knives during target practice. Our master decided to bring Ian a bin full of 200 throwing knives and said “You must throw all of them, and each time that you miss the target, you will have to start over.” Every 50 knives he threw could be cleared away to make the throwing easier. Ian threw knives for half a day straight, his mistakes growing fewer and fewer as the hours drew on. When the 200th knife hit the target, the master came over and clapped him on the shoulder. Ian shouted in pain, his shoulder having grown very sore. “Now if I need to hit something with a knife, I know who’s my man,” quipped the master.
My weakness was in slaughtering the cattle. We were not farmers per se, but we needed to understand the value of life as well as survival skills, and so many of our tasks involved hunting and killing. My memories of the farm came back in the form of compassion for animals: I loved the sheep and the cows, and had no desire to kill any of them.
When forced to kill a small creature during training, I found myself incapable. Our master took me aside. He stared into my eyes and saw my weakness. He decided to make me apprentice to a farmer who slaughtered animals for a week. I was taken to the nearest farm and given the tools and shown how to slaughter every farm animal I could imagine. An swift strike with a bludgeon, followed by a throat slice.
I was responsible for nearly every killing blow to befall the animals destined for consumption, and I wept through the first few kills. I was confronted with the reality that I had killed these creatures so that the other humans could live, and it haunted me as I went about my training and other duties. But by the end of a week’s time my heart had hardened, and I became adept at slicing throats.
There were countless other examples of the master making our weaknesses our strengths, but the greatest weakness that the master targeted was the mind. “A mind does not kill,” said the master “a creature kills with his/her body; a mind preserves life.”
We were taught the art of meditation and of controlled breathing, taught to be masters of our bodies, so that temptation and ignorance would be mere bumps along the road of destiny.
During one of our early meditations that I remember very well, he spoke in almost a whisper so as to not disturb us:
“Life is the embodiment of struggle.” Gentle words moving through the still air of the mediation chamber, “To live is to struggle, to fight back against the cold night and painful hunger, the scorching day and crippling thirst. That which lives must consume that which has lived, that which wishes to live must sleep knowing it must wake to the same struggle. To struggle is to live another day.
“We are not fighters: we are cleansers. We live and struggle so that others may do the same. A day spent without struggle is a day spent beckoning death, if it is not a day of respite. The person who does not continually try to perfect him/herself will never be perfect. Struggle is the tool to realize perfection. Though you may never realize this perfection, you will be much closer than if you had never taken the first step on the journey.
“As you go farther into your meditation, remember this, I struggle to end unlife, I live to surpass death. Life is forever, death is but an instant. Only the longest and most efficacious struggles produce the most meaningful results. You live to preserve humanity, to preserve life.
“And the perfectly trained warrior… he or she does not struggle.”
