Page 38 of All That Has Flown Beyond
Word spread of his mixtures and his fair prices. Kaiyo never asked for too much and never asked for too little.
He began branching out to amulets. Small, subtle things that would not be a significant drain on the wearer’s Ousía. Even the most innocuous ones, however, he was sure to take care in selling, asking to have some brief contact with the buyer to understand their intentions. In doing so, not only did he gain a better understanding of what to ask in return for his goods, but he built a garden of connections that was soon fruitful.
People started contacting Kaiyo not for his hand-made objects and poultices but for his time and knowledge. At first, these were communications over the phone to people he already knew he could trust with gained knowledge. His small cottage beside Akiko’s began to fill with books, weighing the groaning shelves down, stacked on every corner and free surface as Kaiyo carefully researched the solution to every question he was asked.
Soon, the requests came from people whom Kaiyo had no previous relationship with. The requests became too complicated to fulfil over the phone or through mailed packages of information. He began to travel around the states, crossing the border to South America as needed.
Apart from travel expenses, Kaiyo only asked for money when needed and appropriate. What he valued most was the rolling snowball of knowledge.
He was invited to the Norwood pack, known for generations of unusual numbers of seers being born into the line. He was introduced to Steve, a small, thin, fifteen-year-old Yuxa who could shift into alichanura trivirgata, a rosy-coloured boa, three feet long and with a circumference as large as a golf ball.
Steven’s receptive Ousía had manifested when he was just two. The change had brought on a colic more commonly seen in younger babies, and he was eventually diagnosed with a hypersensitive Ousía. So receptive to surrounding Ousía, he would often get overwhelmed and go into what appaeared to be a sensory state of overload.
It had affected his life longer than he could remember. Forced to perceive others, his mental space was encroached upon every time he let his guard down. He had become adept at shielding himself from others, but the act was exhausting and isolating. He could not exert himself or let go of his inhibitions, having to avoid crowds and demanding situations. He had become afraid of the world and, ironically, the emotion was affecting his ability to deal with it, digging the hole of his isolation deeper.
Kaiyo would enter the sanctum of Steve’s room with his Ousía tightly wrapped up and masked. They would spend long hours together talking and coexisting as Kaiyo alternated between research and very slowly inspecting Steve’s sensitive Ousía.
As a phenomenon, Steven’s Ousía was exceedingly interesting. More than like raw skin, it was as if the nerves at the surface were overexcitable, sending signals to the part of him which processed this information and oversaturating it with stimuli. However, what struck Kaiyo most was simply Steve.
Steve’s youth had nothing on the trials he had experienced. His experience of the world was warped, but his ferocity in wanting to discover it, his determination in working towards it, was astonishing. He had spent a lot of time in what equalled solitary confinement, but it had not defeated him. Instead, he developed an admirable introspection. He viewed his situation as an obstacle he would fight fang and scale to defeat.
It was a two-month-long endeavour for Kaiyo to find a solution. Part of the payment for his time and effort was simply the vast knowledge he acquired there. In having to so delicately inspect Steve’s Ousía, he learnt more about Ousía in general than the texts he had managed to acquire had even hinted at.
Like the body, Ousía was a delicate organism but without physical form. It seemed to be constructed in layers. In humans, the surface layer received information from outward stimuli such as the impact of other Ousía or the person’s perception of the world. The next few layers processed internal stimuli such as emotions and thoughts. If one went deeper, you could find the more solid, unmovable sections that held core beliefs, temperament, morality. Each part interacted with the other, fed the other, built patterns and cycles which could be difficult to escape. Some Ousía were more flexible whilst others were rigid and rusted.
Kaiyo gained a new understanding of balanced Ousía. How complex the ecological relationship between each part was, and how the stimuli people focused on, both internally and externally, rained on everything constantly, eroding the landscape into shape.
Eventually, the ritual Kaiyo performed was like an operation and had to be performed over several days. Kaiyo had to reach out to Steven’s Ousía and change each receptive filament making him a seer, diminishing their ability to communicate information to the internal parts of the Ousía as if he were shrinking the opening of a camera lens.
Steve had wept as he stepped outside for the first time without having to shield himself from the world. Kaiyo had cried with him, almost understanding the feeling of being able to breathe after so long.
In payment, Kaiyo requested information about elementals, which were entities whose Ousía had characteristics not of animals, as shifters had, but of natural phenomena such as plants or rain. Seers were especially adept at finding and communicating with the elusive creatures, and the Norwood pack had acquired an impressive library on the topic.
It was not long after this that Kaiyo got his first tattoo. A black circle with a curved line sectioning off the top arch as if containing a hanging cloud, a straight line underneath as if the cutting wind, a spiked line of the land, the inky blot filling the lower arch of the circle to hold the fire lying underneath. The payment of his skin, he had discovered, would enhance his abilities to see and communicate with elementals. It was a small cost.
This helped him go to the Millward pack, who were having difficulty with water elementals. Some creatures damaged their Ousía through their actions to such an extent that they became corrupted, losing themselves to the imbalance plaguing their spirit. The beings on the Millwards’ land had such Ousía, making the land around them toxic.
In this case, there was no option but to kill the creatures. Their Ousía were too far gone, solidified in their ways and convictions. Kaiyo learnt that even if you were the most powerful being on the planet, there were some things which simply did notwantto change. It was a lesson in accepting his own limitations and a gained awareness of the responsibility of his own actions, not only in relation to how they affected himself, but how they existed within the current context of the world.
It was to the Royle pack next to meet Clara. She was a necromancer, meaning her Ousía was conductive but could not be trained as a witch due to its unusually strong anchor limiting its reach. However, this anchor was a perfect quality to develop an Ikiryo, a living ghost that could leave their physical form and travel to the Nunn, where Ousía of the deceased were until they decayed completely into the world. Ousía decomposed at a much slower rate than physical bodies, allowing for communication long after death, depending on how strong the individual’s Ousía had been in life.
However, venturing to the Nunn was dangerous and practically impossible without a guide. Most necromancers had familiars: animals which would be drawn to the necromancers as if fated. Their relationship would grow until they could communicate with each other’s Ousía as if they were talking out loud. These familiars acted as guides through the Nunn, making sure their partners always came back.
Clara, despite having the potential to be a necromancer, had difficulty using her anchor effectively and had yet to draw a familiar. Kaiyo had no doubt they were both related.
Clara was an incredibly tall, broad woman of Nordic descent, having joined the Royle pack through marriage. Her family had been poor, the students in high school unkind, and she walked through the world with her shoulders like magnets pulling at each other, her spine bent, giving up the space she was due to nothing but air.
Kaiyo had no easy solution for her. “My only advice at this time is that you go to therapy. I can suggest one in your area,” he told her. She had looked at him with uncomprehending eyes.
“Why?”
“The anchor you need is not dug into the earth. It’s dug into yourself. You are turning your face away from yourself. You have not gained the skill of how to acknowledge yourself as you are instead of who other people have told you to be. How can you venture into the world if you don’t have a safe space to come back to within yourself?
“It would benefit you to work through these things with someone who can offer an unbiased, skilled perspective. I’ll return six months after you start therapy if you choose to go, and we can look at specifics in terms of necromancer anchoring.”
Kaiyo had left with her still considering what he had proposed, but she called not long after to inform him that she was attending therapy. When he had returned, it was not to a changed woman, but to one on the way to becoming more herself.
The training had taken time, Kaiyo flying north to see her once every month. Anchors, like the self, had to be developed slowly. Kaiyo took the opportunity to receive payment each time he was there, training with Clara’s pack in different forms of fighting, which he would then practice at home.
