The Kine of Farnwen

PART ONE: THE RED COMPANY

AHNREN

The visions had been brutal. As Ahnren strode through the sand-swept plain, the hardened tip of her ahkh or staff guiding her as if it were sentient, they came back to her. As often was the case, she saw them again, vividly, reliving them as if she were there, though her eyes – shaded as they were by her hood against the harsh cold sunlight – remained open. Long ago she'd disciplined herself against the natural urge to fight these flashes, and simply let them take her where they would. Her body walked on, barely aware of her surroundings (nearly blending into them, in fact, her bronze skin like sun-baked sand), while her mind occupied that strange and beautiful realm that exists between everywhere and nowhere at all. It was a realm she called the Void, although her people had no such name for it. Most of her people hadn't ever been there, of course, but in a way she belonged to the Void. She always had.

The first of the visions had come on the third night of old-moon; by her counting that would now have been two weeks ago. It was stronger than the ones that followed, but it was vaguer too. In it, smoke filled her lungs, but it was a sweet smelling smoke, something almost medicinal in feel. At first it burned as she breathed, but after a few panicked moments she felt her chest loosen up and her sinuses open, and although she hadn't been ill she had the most powerful feeling that she'd suddenly been cured of something. But of what?

Looking around her she let the Void take shape. Out of the dark mists of nothingness emerged her dream surroundings; she was in a small house made of stone. Of stone! Imagine! And there were people seated around her, yet they were gazing downward, kind grins leaping out from their eyes, and she realized she was lying on some sort of low, well-stuffed bed. The people had skin that was less bronze than that of her home folk. It was more red, and their hair was fine, dark, and long, worn in plaits or held back with cloths. She could even discern the patterns in the cloths – the bedclothes, the headbands, the animal skin attire of the strange but soothing company before her. Concentrating, she could feel texture now as well. The bed was covered in some sort of coarse woolen blanket. It was very heavy but it was reassuring in its solidity, and the rough weave against the palms of her hands was as real as anything she'd experienced in her waking life. She then held her hand up before her face, noting with a detached curiosity that it was completely slick with a cold, stale sweat. Perhaps she'd nearly faced death, and these gentle folk had intervened – whatever the case, gratitude swelled within her. And something else, something new. Something that felt like belonging, or at least what she'd imagined belonging might be.

But suddenly the smoke smell turned acrid. She was soon surrounded by the vapor, which turned from white to a darkening grey and then nearly black, coughing, unable to catch her breath, and her eyes stinging too badly to keep open for long. What little she saw chilled her to the bone despite the increased temperature of the room. The faces of her red company (for that is what she'd named them, strictly for her own reference) were melting. Melting away right off of the skulls, dripping onto what was now a scalding hot stone floor and making sickening sizzling pops. The stained bare skulls stared at her, their jaws agape. She could even see the missing or bad teeth of the people, it was that real. Noise, often the last sense to join her in these Void-trips, finally began to crescendo and hit her ears hard. It was screaming. Bloody, horrible screaming like she'd never heard, by so, so many people. Yet underneath that grisly cacophony she sensed the unmistakable sound of someone's laughter. That laugh was as raging hot as the fire she now knew threatened this house, this village, but it was also cold, as if it echoed from the mouth of someone not quite human.

When she'd snapped back after that initial vision (it was rarely a relaxing transition between Void-state and normal life), she'd been jarred into the mundane surroundings of the market where she'd been shopping for staples. But that laugh seemed to jump out at her from the Void and followed her as she walked, for several minutes. Then a new, unfamiliar voice sounded over it. Not quite human? Or no longer human? And then, snap, that was it, she was one hundred percent back in lucid yet dull everyday reality.

She'd tried to shrug it off – after all, it was so vague. She'd finished looking for the deep green dye she wanted, bought some smoked meat from her friend Phadi at his stall, put as large a sack of flour as she could walk with into her shoulder sling, and set off toward home. But her mind didn't want to let this one go. Sometimes the visions, which she'd had her whole life, turned out to be nothing but noise, akin to those silly dreams everybody has that may be interesting or even amusing but don't amount to anything. Other times though, they had been so accurate as to scare her. The first one that had driven it home for her was the vision that came just after her tenth birthday; she'd seen/experienced herself holding a large brick and smashing insects with it. Repeatedly, as if on a loop. It had made her physically ill, actually. Three days later a group of hunters returning from the Uplands fell prey to a large landslide near Crescent Tunnel. Ahnren had wanted to tear her own brain out because she felt somehow responsible, and had no idea what to do or who to even ask for advice. So she told nobody and kept to herself as much as possible.

Although her seeming shyness and tendency to keep to herself were borne out of compassion for her community, they earned her their own set of troubles as she grew.

All of this – the visions renewed and the reminiscing about them – encompassed Ahnren's internal existence as her body kept on walking towards the place the sun sets. She'd already been walking for a few days, and her footprints, interrupted only sparsely by small camps she'd made, or here and there intersecting with other footprints, formed a very faint line through what looked like endless rolling hills of grassy, scrubby sand behind her. And there was no change to the landscape in sight. It was treacherous going as sands shifted and hillocks became depressions beneath even her slight weight. Nevertheless, she walked on and anyone who saw her at that time might be forgiven for thinking she was concentrating on her footing. Certainly nobody could suspect her of being elsewhere (if they saw her at all, which was not overly likely). That was exactly how she'd been trained to come across: barely there or just not there at all.