Walking elegy: chapter 7: a lizard called Kael

Humanity is a promise whispered to the future, a letter sent to a day we will never see.

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I found Kael not on the training grounds, but in the small, hydroponic grove we maintained deep under Sunegard, where the air was thick with the smell of damp earth and growing things. He was off-duty, his scaled form crouched before a particular plant, a broad-leafed fern native to the Tempest swamps. In his hand, he held a small, damp cloth, and he was meticulously, tenderly, wiping dust from each frond.

He hadn't heard me approach. I stood in the shadows of the nutrient-lamps, watching. The Stillness induced thoughts inside me framed the scene as inefficient use of a soldier’s rest period. But the memory of Borin’s bracer, warm against my skin, silenced the thought.

More than that, it was clear to me that this was not duty. This was devotion.

He was humming a tune, a simple, repeating melody I recognized as a traditional lizardman lullaby.

His focus seemed absolute.

I could be wrong but something told me that this was in some way hismeditation, as Shale’s sharpening was his. This was his song, as Lyra’s light-weaving was hers.

I must have made a sound, for his head snapped up, his eyes wide for a moment before he registered it was me. He scrambled to his feet, a flush of green darkening his cheeks.

“V-Viceroy! I was just… the filters… the dust from the excavations…”

“It’s alright, Kael,” I said, and my voice, for once, did not feel like it was made of stone. I stepped forward, into the artificial sunlight. “This plant is important to you.”

He looked down at the fern, his posture softening. “It’s a Sky-Tongue Fern. They only grow in the marsh around my village. The spores… they catch the light during the summer spore-release. It looks like the water is breathing stars.” He looked back at me, his expression open and unbearably young. “My… my mate, Ssslara, she loves them. When I earned my first spear, she wove me a crown of their leaves.”

I imagined him, a crown of woven flowers on his brow. I couldn't help but think that the image that came felt appropriate, no, fitting would be more exact.

A crown of flowers fitted him better than a blood-stained spear.

He reached into a pouch at his belt and pulled out a small, leather-bound journal. He opened it carefully. Pressed between its pages were several dried, fragile fronds of the same fern, and a carefully drawn sketch of a female lizardman with intelligent eyes and a gentle smile. She was holding a speckled egg.

“Our first clutch,” he said, his voice thick with a mixture of pride and aching sadness. “They should be hatching soon. I… I might be a father already.”

He said it the same way one would have when hearing they were actually given the stars above.

Even with the current low dose of Stillness, the self magically made drug I had created,  even though that I could feel running through my veins and that it was supposed to numb every feeling, every emotion to leave but an empty but safe void, I couldn’t but feel something akin to my heart constricting.

The logical unemotional Stillness induced part of me saw this as a new variable I could use to control more effectively if needed the lizardman.

I dismissed the thought.

As if I needed this to control him.

A daughter’s doll and the fact of both a father and husband I hoped would have survived but didn't, who had met death blinked in existence before fading. I hope it'll be different this time and not because I cared with the stillness making sure I wouldn't  but because a nation of orphans would be nothing but pitiful.

It was just that and nothing else. It could be nothing else. My stillness made sure of it.

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I could feel the emotional vulnerability. I could be wrong but I think that Kael would be the type of Father children would never feel unsafe and unheard with, not when he smiled like that when they weren't even born yet, not when he could smile and tend to flowers in the hellscape this cruel world was.

This was a tangible, ongoing future. It was a life, several lives, waiting in a shell for a father who was wiping dust from a plant in a tomb of stone, a world away.

“I promised Ssslara I’d bring back a fresh frond,” he said, closing the journal as if it were a holy text. “So the hatchlings would know the smell of our ancestral home they had never and would never be able to enjoy the way their mother and I did Dr to the war. I want them to experience not just this… this rock and metal, ugliness and blood but also, the beauty and sweetness the world can make.”

He looked at me, and in his eyes was none of the fear or awe the others sometimes held. There was only a desperate, hopeful need for understanding. “That’s why… that’s why we have to win, lady Nanana. Sorry if I'm being presumptuous. It's just that deep down, I think, I known It’s not just about borders or kings. It's not about humanity seeing us abominations and our need to survive face to such, us differents, us deemed monsters against monsters. It’s so my children and other children can see the water breathe stars. It’s so they never have to learn what a ‘front line’ is.”

I looked at this boy, this soldier, this would be father. He was not fighting for a past, like Shale, or a principle, like Lyra. He was fighting for a specific, fragile, imminent future. He was in a sense a custodian of a world he might not live to see.

It would be a shame if he didn't.

I reached out and, with a care I did not know I possessed, touched the leaf of the fern. It was cool and resilient.

“We will make sure they see it, Kael,” I said, and the words felt like a vow, a prayer offered to a god I didn’t believe in. It was a lie, of course. The math of this war made promises into ghosts. But in that moment, standing in that fragile garden under the mountain, I wanted the lie to be true more than I had ever wanted anything.

He smiled then, a bright, unburdened thing that seemed to push back into the darkness of the cavern. It was a pure thing unburdened by complexity and manipulation and thorns and violence. It was a simple one, an innocent one.

“I know you will, my lady. I believe in you.”

There was nothing more to be said. I turned to leave only to be stopped by him.

“Lady Nanana, I know you probably have a lot of more important things to do and it’s probably more than impolite but would you like to take care of the flowers with me?”

Take care of the flowers with him when there were a thousands of others things better to do, more productive to do.

Those were just flowers. Kael was no one truly important and even then, his importance only came of the fact that he was one of my subordinates, me, the second supreme authority of the Jura-tempest federation.

More than that, taking care of flowers as such, flowers that only made me think of unspoiled things, flowers that seemed as if they could not exist in any word containing in itself harshness and pain and suffering.

Me, touching them, the thought of it felt wrong even with Stillness. It felt like a sun being committed by myself against something pure, a despoiling, an orchestrated fall, a serpent with a red apple murdering innocence and all the good things in the world.

It felt like such yet “I don’t know how to take care of them.”

“Everything can be taught lady Nanana, everything can be learnt with time and dedication,” he answered with that same smile.

It felt like such yet  “I could hurt them Kael, destroy them. Aren’t they important for you?Doesn’t you fear this?”

“I won’t lie and say I don’t have any worry but… I think I know you a little my lady. I have been following you, your orders since the beginning of this war and I only saw someone who cared. If you care half  as much about the flowers as much as you do about us, about the soldiers, the people of our nation, I think that things will more than alright.”

It felt like such yet…

I touched one of the flowers with my fingers. It felt fragile, brittle, weak. Only one shove would be enough to kill.

It felt like such yet “Teach me Kael.”

Even more impossibly, the lizard man smile became brighter “of course my lady.”

It felt like such a waste of time. I shouldn’t have done that. There were so much more important things yet even with Stillness running through my veins, I couldn’t repress the shadow of a smile I felt blooming on my face.