Page 81 of All That Has Flown Beyond
They stayed together in order to go far.
“Oh my God! Oh my God, Ahmik, look!” Thea pointed at the statue of a pair of wolves, their faces tilted up as if they were about to call out to the moon.
“Fuck, yes!” Ahmik shouted, picking Thea up and swinging her around. She laughed, clinging back. They raced towards the statue marking the middle of the labyrinth, circling it with celebratory grins on their faces.
Kaiyo’s laughter joined theirs. “Well done. Now, you can close their eyes.”
Still smiling, they did. The labyrinth dissolved around them. When they opened their eyes, they were back on their own land. Thea and Ahmik looked at each other. It was there between them, the acknowledgment of how much they had avoided each other. How a simple task forcing their companionship and communication could make a difference, because the foundation of their relationship had always been there, cracked by years of neglect.
Kaiyo remembered a time when the three of them had scarcely spent a day without each other. When they were children, they would sleep over at the pack house on weekends, waking up early to watch TV. Without adult supervision, they would flip the channel to Adult Swim to watchSamurai X. They would play in the forest after breakfast, arguing over who got to be the main character.
“I shall never take another life!” Thea would shout, her hair long enough to tie back in the character’s style. She’d lunge at a bush despite her promises of peace, mutilating it with a stick.
“No!I’mKenshin!” Ahmik would proclaim, tackling Thea to the ground, where they would scuffle playfully.
Kaiyo, never to be outdone, would appear with an X drawn with dirt on his cheek. “I shall protect Japan!” he would say before joining the fray.
They had been inseparable. Maybe it only made sense that their sudden parting would crack the earth underneath them.
Thea reached out, taking Ahmik’s hand. “Kephale,” she acknowledged. Leader, pack, family.
Ahmik closed his eyes for a moment and squeezed back.
**********
Things did not simply solve themselves, and the slow fix wasn’t easy. But Kaiyo could see the change.
The improvement gained momentum during the training sessions.
Kaiyo set them on the task of building a structure around an egg which would help it survive a long drop. It was as if there was less dry kindling to catch on the natural frustration caused by the task. Even when arguments sparked, they were not as destructive, more easily put out by the rest of the pack. Isla had also gained confidence, pushing to be heard as they discussed options on how to insulate the egg. Kaiyo watched with pride as she was listened to, her eyes brightening every time.
When they dropped the egg, it cracked inside its cocoon. They watched it ooze, disgruntled, until Isla started laughing. The rest of the pack looked at her, grinning.
The cracked eggshell didn’t matter. For the first time, the pack had actually had fun during the task. It was all Kaiyo had been really hoping for.
Spending time together as a pack not only after training but during the week was becoming routine. That Sunday, Ahmik and Kaiyo were on cooking duty as the rest of the pack rested in the living room. Ahmik and Kaiyo moved around each other easily in a dance that was a remembered rhythm from years ago.
Despite the dangers Kaiyo knew it foretold, he let the peace inside him just be.
**********
“Okay. I’ll extend the invitation for spring,” Kaiyo said, finally putting the papers Ahmik and he had been looking at aside.
“Okay.”
They had spent the last six hours finalizing which packs Ahmik should attempt to form alliances with. Eyes and brains sore with exhaustion, they both collapsed on one of the couches at the end of the conservatory. The sun was long gone, night the furl of a black wing outside the glass cocoon they were in.
“Did you do a lot of this stuff in your work? Form alliances and stuff?” Ahmik asked curiously. The light was low and warm, and it gave a depth to Ahmik’s eyes like sunlight through trees.
“Kind of. Sometimes I was called as a mediator when two packs were hashing it out or to advise on possible alliances if one pack needed them. Sometimes I would take the initiative myself, set two packs up if I thought they’d work well together, you know. But not that much. There was a bit of everything, I guess.”
“Like what?”
“Well…I mean, I travelled quite a lot, so the problems would really differ between locations, especially outside of America. Like, there are a lot of elementals in Europe.”
“Really? More than here, you mean?”
“Yeah, a lot more. In Ireland, for example, arelots. Mostly harmless unless provoked, though. And then in, like, Japan, there are loads of demons.”
