With the Breath of His Bare Hands

Tyra Tanner

 

 

Heroes die.

Elu abandoned the safe path, the walled one with the masks and the warnings and the crimson-splashed scarfs draped on sharpened spears, descending instead into the sodden darkness of the forest swamp. The tick-tack of gaugaus chomping on insects and the frawump of minots’ wings accompanied the sound of his leather-wrapped feet squelching through mud.

His eyes, growing weary, pierced the darkness in piecemeal, a glimpse of pathway here, a jump of moonlight there. Carefully, religiously, he inhaled the tell-tale scents of evil’s homeland.

He smelled demon.

It was a raw scent, like the flavor of blood in the mouth or the pinch of a stinging beetle on the skin. It was a smell that wrapped a thick layer of fear around Elu’s movements, stiffening his spine as he hunched through twisted trees.

Around a bend and over a slab of wood that served as a bridge, Elu came to a well-worn bench, smoothed in the middle as if only one being ever sat thereon, and a small, sad front door nestled between two large mounds of dirt.

It was thickest here — the smell that promised a belabored death, a clawing death, a fangs-upon-flesh death.

Elu shuffled over to the bench, lowered himself, and let out a deep sigh. He’d stayed out too late. It was a bad habit, one that left him worn to the knobby bits of his bones by the time he reached home. But he couldn’t help the urge to stay at the alehouse where old friends chatted and the warmth of his mug reassured him that the days of fighting were past.

Some days — all days — he wished he didn’t live here.

 

Heroes die.

Not at the climax, nor in the denouement, but later, after the victor has grown bent with age, and the grand moment of triumph over evil is celebrated with annual traditions that wax stale by repetition.

Elu forced himself to sit on the bench outside his dank, barren home for much of the night. The moon hung overhead, filtered by black branches and gauzy clouds. He rolled his spine back and forth to stay awake, his sighs growing thicker as the hour grew later.

It wouldn’t do to fall asleep. He sat out here to remind himself that walls were little safety and the closing of latches a security only to feeble minds. But sometimes, when the memories of his ancient heroics played themselves out in his mind, and the gore colored his sight, his ever-present fear grew incapacitating, and he would dive into the little house and bar the door. Behind its thick wood, he would pant, remembering the exhale of the Haolmok demon’s breath against his neck, all those years ago, the lick of its poisonous tongue, just before Elu had turned and managed to Breathe at him.

The skin on Elu’s neck had withered black from the touch of that tongue, flaking off. Luckily, with the ministrations of the healers, regrowing to last him through another fight.

Or, as it turned out, many fights.

On his bench, Elu rubbed his knees, stretched his toes, and inhaled. Again and again, the scent of demon clogged his nose and throat.

It was always there.

Even when he spent afternoons lingering in the courtyard of Lord Seris’s Keep within the protected spellwork of the village, the blooming roses and layered peonies floating their perfumes upon the breeze, Elu only ever smelled demon.

The scent was what kept his fear alive.

And fear was what had kept him alive all these years.

 

When the first glimpse of gray morning light lessened the deep night, Elu stretched his cramped legs and shuffled into his house. He collapsed upon a pallet of blankets and slept like the dead.

Later in the morning he bathed. His pale skin fought to keep the bones inside, so waxen and thin had it become. His aged muscles sagged.

By the time he had finished bathing, eating, and sweeping his house, morning had turned to afternoon, and the light grew warm and bright, raising steam from the gurgling puddles in the swamp.

Elu kept to the dry paths as he went deeper into the forest, staff in hand, a skin of water at his waist. He came to a field of wilting yellow flowers.

Skygivers, they were called.

Each petal as large as a man’s hand spread wide, four to a blossom, they held themselves upward, tips touching, like a splintered yellow diamond. Or at least, that’s what they did when they weren’t sick and drooping, their yellow turned to ochre and their petals weeping upon the ground.

Elu bent low and touched the tips of the nearest petal. It turned to ash between his fingertips. Only a day. These flowers had bloomed and died in a single day.

Elu knelt on the ground and pressed his palms to the moist earth. He inhaled one two three quick breaths, four five six more, pumping his lungs full, seven eight nine, fuller, until he could draw in no more.

Holding it all inside of him, lungs stretched taut, he reached for stillness.

Stillness. A steady beat of thought and will. As he’d been taught when a boy. After he summoned the oak dragon to defend the village of Bakt as a youth of only fourteen, the villagers spread word that Elu could achieve greater stillness than any Breather in ages past.

He’d been filled with magic, brimming to the edges. As time passed though it felt less and less like stillness. It became a fullness, stuffed with fear.

When he’d faced the demon horde at Jallos, the ichor-slick forms disgorging from the gaping hillside, it had been urgency, fear, a reckless must must must. Breathe or die, Elu. Quick, there’s a demon sighting in Hapi. Breathe or die, Elu. Master, please, our village. The demons broke through. Breathe or die, Elu. The palace! They climbed the walls! Breathe or die, Elu. The crack of demon jaws making room for their next bite. Breathe or die, Elu. The screams of victims he couldn’t save before claws found home. Breathe or die, Elu. The bulging of its eyes as it sees you, as it understands you are the one come to kill it, and it rushes to strike first. Breathe or die, Elu.

Lungs beyond fullness, beyond stillness, in a muddled mess of colored memory, Elu looked upon the field of wilted flowers before him, and opened his mouth.

He Breathed.

The air rushed from his mouth as if eager to escape, and as the last tendril abandoned him, the flowers grabbed at the magic in the air, the petals picked themselves up and pointed skyward.

Elu stumbled forward, wheezing, coughing, hands grasping his staff, knuckles white. He leaned against a tree until the heaving ceased. He lowered himself onto a stump and eyed his field of Skygivers.

Sixty years ago, he’d been able to Breathe alive an entire forest, then turn around, and do it again. Fifty years ago, he’d Breathed into being a thousand stinging insects that flew among a demon army, dissolving demon flesh to ash with every bite.

Forty years ago, the demons had dwindled, and Elu pickied them off one by one. Thirty years ago, they grew harder to find, and Elu traveled farther, searched deeper. Twenty years ago, the King decreed the demons were forever gone, cast into hell by the might of the Breather, granting freedom to the race of men.

Victory is ours, the King said. Fear no more the night, my children.

But Elu knew there was never anything to fear from the night. The night was innocent, a simple guise demons donned like a cloak. And Elu also knew that despite the King’s words, the hopes of the masses, and the disappearance of the demons, the victory had not been complete.

An enemy had simply hidden itself.

Elu left his field of flowers till tomorrow, when he would awaken them again, and threaded through the gnarly forest, its whippoorwills sooty dark, their call mournful by day, haunting by night, and trod toward the village for his evening meal.

The quiet hum of magic pulsed as Elu crossed the gateway into town. He eyed the crimson-dyed fabrics trailing from spears. Demons loathed red, the blood color, because it was alive and warm, unlike them, who bled black and cold. Crossing that gateway was like stepping clean from a spring rain. Elu shrugged off the stink and dank touch of the swamp. Among the swept cobbles of town, the shops gleamed in the sunlight.

Children ran in the streets, bare-footed and fast as birds. Mothers laden with baskets of linens and vegetables weaved through the noisy younglings. Old men smoked pipes on shaded porches. Merchants hawking their wares called out to passersby, waving jewelry and cloth.

Elu liked the noise, the unrepentant barks of the animals and the layered sounds of the wagon wheels, the people busied by daily tasks, and the laughter of children who had never seen demons their entire lives.

It helped him forget for a while what the future held, why he woke every day and walked to the field and Breathed the flowers to life.

“Elu! Master Elu!”

Demk, the tavern owner, waved Elu over with a large meaty hand.

“By the window today, Master?” Demk asked, as he always did.

“Yes, please.”

Demk led Elu to his usual cozy corner where he could watch the activity of the village. Within moments, Elu had a steaming plate of food before him and a large mug of ale.

Demk hovered over Elu. “Can I get you anything else, Master?”

“No. Thank you.”

Demk’s chin split in a wide smile, his wrinkles crisscrossing his cheeks. Demk was only a decade or so younger than Elu, old enough to remember what life had been like in years past. Demk’s daughter, Parelda, was not. While Demk had served Elu a free meal every day for twenty years now, Parelda had disliked her father’s generosity. Even now, as she scrubbed mugs behind the lacquered countertop she sent a glare his way.

The old remembered the demons and the young thought of them as school lessons and nursery rhyme horrors. They did not smell demon everywhere they went or dream day and night of fanged monsters.

But after the King had released him from his search for demons, and he’d come upon the swamp, he’d known in his gut and soul and the hollow inside of him where his magic lingered, that it would be here.

This is where it would happen.

And he’d been waiting for it, day after day.

Breath or die, Elu.

He might be the only one left who knew.

Demons always come back.

 

“I was all the way over at Narasbridge some thirty years ago, when I heard a man talking about the demon that attacked Redton.”

“Oh, Redton.” Elu leaned back in the rocking chair on Lazza’s porch and listened to her voice. The old chair creaked as he rocked. He liked the creak. It was slow and gentle, lulling and calming.

“Yarv had taken us all there, even the kids. Telly must’ve been only five or six.”

Elu had never met Yarv, Lazza’s husband of some twenty-five years. He’d died of a heart ailment. Telly was now a grown women with kids of her own.

“But anyway, I remember the man. He said demon and everyone stopped to listen. You remember how it was. The fear. People wondering when their town would be the one other people spoke of in hushed tones.”

Lazza drew in a breath and set her own chair to rocking. The creak was higher pitched than Elu’s. Chirrup chirrup, it chimed. Wavuump wavuump, his hummed. Lazza’s house sat on a squat hill a little above the village, and from here, Elu could see the evening light settling upon Lord Seris’s walled keep.

“So the man says that Elu the Breather had defeated a demon the size of eight men, a fire-breathing monster with ten legs and ten arms, hell’s heat pouring from its maw, that Elu dove into the ground as if it were water and came up beneath the beast to gut it with the Breath of his bare hands.”

Elu quietly wondered, not for the first time, if Lazza embellished her memories. He didn’t mind; he liked the way her voice carried in the evening air.

“So?” Lazza asked. “Was that one true?”

“Mmm,” Elu mumbled. “There was a demon attack in Redton, but it was a small demon. By the time I reached it, the beast was hiding in a rocky bluff behind town, trying to dig itself into a hole.”

“What about the part where you went under the ground?”

“I Breathed water into the ground beneath it. The dirt turned to sludge and the thing was swallowed up.”

“Not quite as dramatic as popping in and out of the ground like you were made of air.”

“The truth doesn’t make for a good story, most of times.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think you’ve got plenty of good true stories, demon slayer.”

It was usually some time when the sun had disappeared behind the hills when Lazza would call him “demon slayer.” She’d lean back in her chair, close her eyes slightly, and murmur it with a laugh in her voice.

Every night, he’d chuckle in return, like it was a private joke between them.

The thing about the stories was that they never mentioned what happened in between. In between the battles and the fights, there were wet nights sleeping on the road, empty hours of waiting and wondering if he would survive the next attack, and small distractions (usually women) to take his mind off things for an hour or two.

It was the waiting that battered at Elu’s spirits the most, challenging his grip on stilling his mind. He felt each day was a delicate bubble, easily popped.

When he chatted with Lazza, the waiting was easier, the hours smoother.

Elu muttered a good night to her, and threaded through the darkened streets, his feet knowing the way. The alehouse on the corner of Swallow and Banc was the last place he liked to spend time before returning to the swamp each night.

Except tonight, Elu never made it to the alehouse.

 

 

Some centuries past, a wizened philosopher had said that a Breather is connected to all creatures, man and plant, animal and seed. He proposed that Breathers would sense disruptive demon energy and be preemptively prepared.

Part of Elu believed that, because something had drawn him to this village twenty years ago. But the other part of him dismissed it as wishful thinking, because as the wide-eyed lad with the torch rounded the corner three blocks before Swallow’s alehouse and gasped breathlessly, pointing madly at Elu, then waving his torch toward Lord Seris’s keep, Elu didn’t understand.

The boy finally inhaled a massive gulp of air. “The keep! Lord Seris! Demon!”

Elu felt his stomach fall, his weary bones suddenly rigid. He tightened his grip on his staff. “You sure, boy?”

The torch quivering in his hand, the youth was staring at Elu, but seeing something else, something that would leave an imprint on his soul.

Elu placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Go to Swallow’s. Tell Art to warn the villagers.”

The boy nodded.

“You did well.”

The boy nodded again. Then quietly, he eyed Elu’s wrinkled face. “Sir? I wonder if… sir… if you need help?”

Elu’s heart pounded in his chest. Take sixty-five years away, and Elu was this boy, young, afraid, but desperate to devote himself to a noble occupation, even at the risk of his life.

“Only the gods can help us now,” Elu said, and sent the boy on his way. The torch gone, the street was drenched in darkness. Elu considered his own words. He knew little of gods, but demons, those he knew.

The clank of his staff against the cobblestones accompanied the beating of his heart as he hurried toward the keep, a lone old man in the dark.

 

 

 

Elu looked through the three-men-tall iron gates at the guard inside. His head was missing, his fallen form slick with blood.

The gates were locked. Elu quietly tested the lock, his ears catching the silence around him. The lock wouldn’t give way. He cursed his stupidity. He should have asked the lad how he’d escaped the keep.

He could circle the walls, looking for a way in, while the household was being slaughtered, or he could use a small amount of Breath.

He inhaled once, twice. When he Breathed out, the prickle in his lungs smarting against the back of his throat, a small golden key lay in his hand. He inserted it in the lock and unwrapped the chain.

Inside the grounds, Elu found more of the demon’s victims. The gruesome bodies had been torn and chewed, then abandoned, which suggested the demon was in a rage but not particularly hungry. The hungry ones liked to pile their victims up and chow for hours.

When Elu came upon a serving maid huddled in a corner of the lower level of the keep, her bloody arm clasped in her apron, her sweat-glistened face a mask of pain, he dropped on his knees beside her.

“Let me see.”

Short gasps punched from her open mouth as she withdrew the apron. It wasn’t deep, but that wouldn’t matter. The skin around the bite was already turning black. She’d be dead in a hour. Elu looked down the darkened corridor. He sniffed sharply, but as always, he smelled demon, and there was nothing to guide him one way or another.

“Where’d it go?” Elu asked.

“Don’t know,” the maid said through clenched teeth.

Elu could leave her, chase the demon, and perhaps save someone else, but here before him was a life at his mercy, and so he inhaled one two three breaths, four five six breaths, and when he Breathed out, a bowl of water lay in his hands, small black petals floating therein. Called Demon Stones, the small black petals were the woman’s only chance to live. They would draw the poison out if it hadn’t reached her heart. Elu soaked the end of her apron in the water, and wrapped it around the wound.

He left her then. He weaved down the corridor only to find three more victims, their bites fatal if he didn’t intervene. He Breathed his strength into healing petals, and asked where the demon went, but none of them knew.

When he came upon the fifth victim, her head sagging as she fought off the poison, her condition tenuous but salvageable, and his pity clenched a fist into his chest, Elu realized he’d been taken for a fool.

It was a trap.

 

Elu abandoned stealth and ran.

In the inner walls of the keep, in the protected courtyard, bloomed a flower garden of rare beauty. The roses unfolded a sensuous red, the peonies flowered year round, and the heady fragrance of the hyacinths were waves of piercing sweetness. To reach the garden, one must pass the warded line of the village, then the guarded gates of the keep, then through a twisting, maze of corridors to a small guarded archway. Elu had spent some afternoons in its perfumed bubble. Lord Seris had always welcomed him, and he had been many years grateful.

But now, as Elu entered the garden, the stench of poisoned flesh, death, and soured blood crashed in upon him on an overwhelming wind.

The demon stood in the middle of the courtyard. Its head was a blackened blister with white, lidless eyes. Its hind quarters were as thick as Elu’s waist, its spine a spiked curve, its chest as solid as the stones holding up the keep, and its mouth hung ajar, bloodied teeth bared, as if awaiting a chunk of flesh.

The servants and guards lay in a wide circle around the demon, each bitten, each panting in pain. Swords were of little use against demons. Only Breath sent them back to the shadows. And in the demon’s grasp was Lord Seris himself, as yet unharmed, writhing against the creature’s sharp claws.

As Elu stepped into the courtyard, the demon jerked its head upright and locked eyes with him.

Then, as if in slow motion, and yet too fast for Elu to prevent, the demon clasped its teeth around Lord Seris’ arm and bit.

Once, many years ago, Elu had destroyed a horde of more than five hundred demons, and as they fell in waves before the power of his Breath, others kept coming, unthinking, compelled by rage. Elu had wondered at times if they had thoughts at all. But now, as he witnessed the demon bite Lord Seris, and he heard his friend and Lord cry out, he knew that this demon was a creature of cunning and intelligence.

The upturned earth in the center of the flower garden was proof. The demon had clawed its way underground to reach past the village’s wards and enter this most secure and beautiful place.

He’d taken hostages and withheld his appetite to wound the women and tempt Elu into releasing his Breath before confronting him.

And as Elu inhaled the demon’s scent, he was certain that he’d been smelling this particular beast for the past twenty years. It had always been nearby, underground, hiding…

Waiting for Elu to age, grow weaker, and now, it had lured him here and set the stage to destroy the Breather who had destroyed the demons.

As moans pierced the air, Elu inhaled one two three, deeper four five six, stuffing the air in seven eight nine. In the following quiet, the suffering victims looked to the Breather for deliverance. The demon held itself rigid in expectation. Ten eleven twelve, Elu’s lungs felt ready to burst. Further still, thirteen fourteen fifteen.

Then Elu the Breather imagined the form his Breath would take and released the air from his pent-up lungs with one puffing gust.

The hot air coalesced into flame, erupting into a spark of heaven fire that was smaller than a match. It wavered in the air a moment, then, in a gentle breeze, snuffed out.

The victims’ hopeful silence fell to moans of terror. The demon’s white eyes lit with pleasure.

Elu was out of Breath.

 

Heroes die.

Not at the cusp of battle, arms laden with glittering sword and shield, nor at the victory celebrations afterward, wounds wrapped and friends surrounding them.

Heroes die when age takes their power, when their hearts, still beating, and their will, still fierce, are trumped by the weakness of their old lungs, old flesh.

Elu fell to his knees in the garden. The lingering scent of crushed rose petals reached his nose. Finally, after a lifetime of facing the enemy, of fear, of reciting Breath or die, Elu, the time had come.

In his mind, he saw the dead that would be left. He saw Lazza on her porch, the demon making a meal of her. He saw the boy he’d sent to Swallow’s alehouse, and the people gathered there, and the demon among them.

No one knew what made a Breather. When Elu was gone, would another Breather come soon enough to save any of them? Or would it be years, leaving this one demon free to ravage villages, towns, and cities, laughing at the glittering spears, triumphant over the children of the sun.

The demon flung Lord Seris from his grasp. It coiled into its haunches, drawing its strength, then bounded forward toward Elu.

Elu opened his arms to receive his due.

In his heart and mind, he accepted the loss of his life and his hope to save those in his care. The acceptance swelled inside of him, and as the demon’s claws stretched out to grasp him, Elu spread his chest wide and embraced…

Stillness.

This last moment was as precious to live as all the others. It was a blank slate of beating heart, pulsing mind, and springing-to-life thoughts. He’d lived under the fear of his demise for so long that upon this new untasted ground, he felt at once free.

As the demon’s open maw stretched wide to claim him, Elu inhaled once, drew upon the Stillness flooding his heart, and Breathed out once. A small lick of holy water fell on the beast’s black tongue.

The demon’s wailed in outrage. It fell thrashing before Elu and clawed at its mouth, and as the Breath took force, the demon thinned into a shadow, into a mist, and then, into nothing.

Elu felt his head wobble. He knew there were victims who needed his aid, but a shadow of his own was creeping closer. Night fell hard onto his mind, and he fell hard onto the ground.

 

“Well, it’s about time,” Lazza’s voice entered Elu’s ears. “You know I’ve had visitors from as far as Tanna at my door, one claiming to be the best healer this side of the Gap, and I’d best step aside while she cares for the Master who won’t wake up. Now, I thought I was a patient woman, but that one had me fetching her things, as if I was her servant, and if you hadn’t woken, I might just have fetched her her death, and now you’re awake, I can send her off.”

Lazza patted Elu’s arm, and Elu patted Lazza’s hand, and the two looked each other in the eyes.

“How long… sleeping?”

“A couple weeks now. A couple weeks I’ve had that woman ordering me about…”

Elu’s heart closed tight. Lord Seris. All of the people in the courtyard of the keep would be long dead from demon poison.

“Lord Seris!”

“Now don’t you worry…”

Elu fell again into darkness, and when next he woke, the sight of a young boy hung in his vision. It was the boy who’d run through the streets to find him.

And behind the boy was a tall, elegant man sporting a gentle smile on his age-lined face.

“Lord Seris?” Elu mumbled, disbelieving.

“Thanks to you, and this lad,” Lord Seris replied. He placed a hand on the youth’s shoulder. “Go on, son, tell the Master.”

The boy’s face reddened, and as he opened his mouth to tell Elu his tale, a puff of golden air trailed from between his lips.

It was Breath.

Elu gasped, his surprise devolving into a fit of coughing. Lazza held a mug to lips. He sipped at bitter tea while the boy spoke. The boy, Kiegt, had run to Swallow’s as Elu had ordered, but Art had laughed when he said there was a demon attacking the keep. Kiegt had thrown his fist against the counter and shouted that his father worked on the guard, and the demon had eaten them first and if they wouldn’t believe him, then by the oaths of the gods, Kiegt would return alone and face the demon himself rather than sit among a bunch of old, fat cowards.

“Sorry, Master, but I did call them old, fat cowards.”

“Quite all right, young one,” Elu replied.

“So that roused a few of them and they came with me. We found you on the ground, and the others sick, and then I saw Rilla. She’s always been kind since my mother passed, and she was in a bad state, but there wasn’t nothing to be done, until…”

“Until you Breathed,” Elu spoke for him.

“It came upon me in a flash, Master. This big bubble in my chest, and it came out, and there was liquid silver in a bowl in my hands, and I wrapped their wounds in it.”

Elu hadn’t been able to Breathe liquid silver in twenty years. As he eyed the young lad, warmth spread through Elu’s chest.

“Kiegt healed us,” Lord Seris told Elu. “But, that means…”

“I’m no longer a Breather,” said Elu. One day a Breather, the next, it was gone, only to manifest in another.

Kiegt rubbed his hands in worry. “Master, I’m sorry, but if I could ask… seeing as Lazza’s taken me in, and she says you’re never going back to live alone in the swamp, she ain’t gonna let you, so if you would, I’d so much be grateful, sir, if you’d train me…?”

Would Elu train him? Ha! He looked around the room, at Lazza, who stubbornly folded her arms as if expecting him to resist her invitation, at Lord Seris, who had welcomed him into his life twenty years ago, and at Kiegt, his heart so ready, and Elu knew that nothing would give him more pleasure than to wait with these folks, to be here in their company, until the long night took him in earnest.