Isha, The Speaker of Storms

Isha Arashi was kneeling beside her bed in The Sea’s Embrace, the inn where she had decided to sleep that night. Her exhaustion from the day’s events was too great to make it back to the local temple in Glory’s Coast. She would have normally slept in the temple where she was guaranteed to have a place to sleep and warm food in the morning, but unlike the inn, the temple didn’t charge her anything for the accommodations. She also would have been required to participate in the daily prayers, so this was one benefit of staying elsewhere.

Isha didn’t mind the daily routines of temple life. She had become accustomed to the little mannerisms of being in a temple, constantly being watched by the elders and constantly keeping up appearances for the partitioners. It was simply the fact that her time was never her own in the temple. Every minute of every day was scheduled out for her by the elders, the chores, the partitioners, and the daily necessities of meals and sleep. It was fine when she had nothing else to do. She had grown to enjoy temple life after the years she spent there, but she had other plans for the next day. Isha needed to get her adventuring party into better form.

If there was one thing that Isha learned from their expedition into The Tomb of The Sands of Time, it was that the four members of their party had no teamwork skills. Asyr had no ability to work under the pressure of combat. Hal fancied himself a leader, but became overwhelmed by the mantle of leadership and couldn’t keep enough of his focus for his own safety. Then finally, Dorak was Dorak. So self-centered that he would take unthinkable risks for glory and attention.

Isha thought for a bit longer and realized that she wasn’t being fair. She knew that she had her own issues earlier. She could have potentially saved Hal and Dorak if her magic was stronger. If she could have opened up the Ice Hawk’s stomach, Hal might have been saved. If her healing was stronger, Dorak might have been able to keep fighting. Knowing him, Isha believed that he would just go back to fighting the hawk, even if it killed him for real.

All of the members of their party had survived, but it was only due to the strange magic of The Sands of Time. She needed to understand more about the way the magic worked, so she was currently turning to the most knowledgeable source she knew, despite her own hesitation.

“O, Horn of Plenty. O, Lady of Storms. You who brought the gift of nature, heed my prayers: grant me a vision of what I must know as I lay my head to rest. I beseech you, hear me and speak to me, o goddess. So too as nature is a cycle, knowledge is a cycle. Grant your knowledge unto me so that I may grant it unto others, returning to you as the prayers of those who have seen your power and gifts. In the name of Lady Salkhi, I pray. Unen.”

It was a fairly common prayer that Isha had said many times across her life. She couldn’t remember when she was taught that prayer, but it was never one that she had said in such great earnest in some time. She would regularly say that prayer with various petitioners who wanted answers after some disaster struck. A farmer would be hit by a swarm of pests, who would then lose his entire field of crops and come into the temple, seeking answers from the goddess of nature. Other times, a family would lose their home in a natural disaster. As they seek refuge in the temple, waiting for a home to be rebuilt, they seek answers about the loss of all the things that can’t be rebuilt.

Isha was all too familiar with that kind of loss. When she first entered the temple, she hated the concept of the one she now called her goddess. Salkhi represented everything in nature. That included every beast of burden, every crop, every place that someone called home. It also included every monster, every pest, and everything that destroyed homes. From fires, to floods, storms to famines. Salkhi encompassed everything. Isha now knew the burden that was placed on her goddess, but Isha had a difficult burden, as well. Even though the Ariun Erdenes, the ten major deities of the Erdeniin Church, had god-like power, that power only came from the prayers of the believers. Salkhi’s power was always used to maintain the delicate balance of nature. As long as people kept praying to her, nature would keep its course.

The cost of keeping that course led to foreseeable consequences, though. Every prayer for bountiful harvests taxed the lands of their nutrients. Every bountiful harvest only made the next harvest more costly. Eventually, the fields didn’t have the nutrients to produce a bountiful harvest, so there would be years of meager harvests after years of bountiful harvests. All of nature’s courses would fall into natural patterns if not for Salkhi’s power. Salkhi kept nature from baring its fangs at the people of the world. As long as Salkhi received prayers, the consequences wouldn’t be as bad as they could be. Eventually, as the years were good, people would no longer pray for bountiful harvests or safety from harm. The prayers would not be enough to maintain the balance, so disasters would strike. In the end, the cycle would be maintained, instead with prayers. Isha was a part of that cycle.

Isha’s thoughts were still on her duties, even outside of the temple. She began removing her armor. She set down her mace, beside the bed. She first removed the pauldrons on her shoulders. Then, she removed the bangles on her wrists. She removed her boots, first the cuisses on her thighs, then the greaves on her calves, the poleyns on her knees, and finally the sabatons on her feet. Each of the parts of the boots, except for the sabatons, were strapped down with belts of leather, unlike the pauldrons, which were tied to her gambeson. Lastly, she removed her chest plate. This was a process that she had been through many times, but even with her level of experience, it still took her half an hour. She untied her gambeson, removing it, leaving only her teal silken robes. The robes had red hems and were the one thing she still wore from the village where she grew up. She retied the waist belt as it had come loose from the day’s activity and got to work on polishing her armor. Though she had learned temple life, prayers, and spells from the elders and scholars, she learned how to use her armor and weapons from the traveling priests. “Armor is only as good as the person who uses it. Just like your prayers, cleaning your armor should be done daily.”

As she set to polishing her armor, her exhaustion began creeping back up on her. She laid down in the bed, polishing the bangles, the one piece of her outfit which was more decorative, and eventually felt her eyes closing. She wasn’t in the temple today, so she let herself leave the polishing to be finished in the morning.

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Isha was in a familiar space: an empty plain of wheat fields as far as the eyes could see. This was the place where Isha stopped being Isha and started being the Speaker of Storms. Isha put herself back into the process of her duties as she felt a powerful presence behind her. She expected to hear the voice of her goddess, but as it grew closer and closer, she could hear in a whisper behind some kind of helmet or mask, “Your goddess will be joining you shortly. I have come to collect memories…”

Isha turned to face the voice, seeing a simple white mask without facial features. It was simply floating in the air with bandages dangling from its sides. Isha somehow instinctively knew that if she got too close, they would try and wrap around Isha’s head, so she took a step back.

“You are smarter than the hero’s child. Perhaps you will speak reason into the group that tried to visit me. Never step foot in my burial chambers again. I believe that you, as the Speaker of Storms, will know what happens when sands meet structures. Like a house or a cliff, sands can wear away at your very being. Do not allow yourself to meet this fate.”

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck the mask and it vanished in a puff of ozone. Isha knew to turn her gaze away as her goddess manifested herself in this space. When Isha knew it was safe to look, she saw the form that Salkhi had chosen to take this time. In the past, she had manifested as a giant elk, a great wind, a field of every crop, and many other things, but Isha preferred this form because she could tell where to look when speaking to her. Salkhi was an old human woman with tanned, leathery skin, deep, calloused hands, grey hair tied back in a bun, and a simple white cloth dress.

Salkhi spoke in a calm, reassuring voice without a hint of time in it. “A creature has trespassed upon my space and for this transgression, I offer my gratitude for your calmness.”

“My Lady of Storms, I am but your humble Speaker. My duties are to you, so I would ask that you speak freely before me.”

Salkhi smiled a slight, knowing smile. “You understand my presence fully. It has been many years now since I made you my Speaker, hasn’t it?”

“It has been. Almost twenty, to be precise.”

“In that time, you have almost never come to me seeking answers for yourself, have you?”

“I am but a humble servant. I seek to guide those who desire truth in difficult times. I am now one of those people.”

“I am unfortunately unable to give you the answers you seek. This creature and these magicks are beyond my domain.”

“I see.”

At Isha’s short response, Salkhi gave an almost inaudible chuckle. “That’s more like the girl I chose to be my Speaker. You know that I don’t require you to stand on all these formalities that the church demands. Do you know what one of the names I have been given is?”

“Mother Nature…” Isha replied with a sigh, clearly having gone through this conversation many times before.

“So I want you to treat me as such. I will hear you and help you. I am not as stuffy and high-maintenance as some of my siblings are. If you had to deal with Gerelt or Juram, you would-”

“My Lady, if you would please grant me guidance…” Isha said, cutting off her goddess.

“I’ll grant you guidance if you ask differently.” Salkhi clearly didn’t mind being cut off, but the deferential tone was a different matter.

Isha sighed, then said, “Mother, would you help me find what I need to know?”

Salkhi took a deep breath in, causing the fields to sway in the wind. Then Salkhi spoke, saying, “That could have been better, but we’ll work on it. I cannot tell you these things directly, but I will show you a memory that will guide you to the answer.”

The winds blew faster and faster as Salkhi exhaled, blowing Isha and the fields away. Isha flew through flashes of memories, bits and pieces of visions she had seen before, and eventually landed in a memory that she was unable to recall earlier that night when she was trying to remember when she first learned that prayer…

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“In the name of Lady Salkhi, I pray. Unen.”

“Unen.”

Isha’s voice was much higher pitched now than normally. She had just repeated the last line of the prayer that the elder was teaching to her. She was back in her first year of life in the temple. She was ten.

“Now, you’ve said a prayer for dreams of another world. If you just get a good night’s sleep, all of your questions will be answered, little one.”

The man who was speaking before her was an old orc, nearly seventy years of age. His green tusked face was warm and wrinkled. This man would come to be like a foster father, a teacher, and a confidant to Isha. When Isha had been taken to the closest temple to the Tosho Islands in the far eastern part of Aki-Jura, where she grew up, he was the only one who saw a child in need of parents. His name was William Verdan and he was a scholastic monk in service of the various temples of the Holy Erdeniin Church. He would have been called on for his broad knowledge of religious texts in his younger years, but now he helped teach young monks in temples across all four continents.

He stood up from Isha’s bedside and blew out the small candle on her nightstand. Isha’s room in the Forest Temple in Morigishi, one of the seven Erdeniin temples, was small, originally used as a room of refuge, one that would provide sanctuary to weary travelers. The room had been converted into a permanent place for Isha after she was brought to the temple. Isha needed a place to sleep, but more than that, she needed a place to be a child.

Verdan’s eyes were accustomed to the night and the dark as an orc, so he could see the small drawings on a wall in a single corner of the room, just behind the nightstand. Eight days ago, when Isha had first arrived at the temple, a room was prepared for her by the elders, but Verdan instead prepared a small stack of parchment and various colored inks. The next day, the elders prepared a stack of texts and scriptures for Verdan to teach Isha about. Verdan instead spent that entire day with Isha, simply drawing small designs, animals, plants, and various things. Isha, however, did not draw anything. Isha, up until that day, had not even spoken a word. The first thing that Isha said to Verdan was, “Where are my parents?”

Verdan had, of course, heard why Isha had been brought to the temple. The high priest had said, “This child of the Ariun Erdenes has survived a great ordeal and was chosen to be the next Speaker of Storms by the Horn of Plenty.” It took several more questions before an elder finally told Verdan that the “ordeal” was a massive flood that wiped out her entire village of Sakaumi, only sparing her and a handful of others. Verdan himself first joined the church after he survived starvation and a shipwreck, so he understood how the church was very caring to those who needed help. He also understood how the church needed its Speakers to prevent disaster in the world, but more so in the church itself.

“Where are my parents?”

“Well, my child, I- well-” Verdan paused, took a deep breath in and said, “I’m sorry. They are in a better place.”

Isha stayed as silent as the days before. She wanted to cry. She, as a half-water elemental, could cry until her life blood dried up. The tears didn’t come. It took energy to cry, but she simply didn’t have any. She had a room to sleep in, food to eat, water to drink, but she was simply tired. She didn’t know what the point in wasting energy on crying was. She simply sat there on the bed, empty parchment before her.

“I can teach you something to help you try and speak to your parents. You just need to not let anyone know that I taught you this.”

That’s what it was. Isha, up until those words were spoken, didn’t feel any hope, so there was no point in feeling sad. Everything was pointless. Her parents and her village had prayed to Salkhi, the goddess of nature, every day for her entire life. Salkhi wasn’t there to protect them when the flood came. She didn’t care about the church, the visions she had been having every night since the flood, or the man who tried to watch over her. She wanted to see her parents, but it was hopeless, so when she asked, she already knew the answer.

When the man spoke up and said that he could help her speak to her parents, she felt some small spark of hope which caused a new flood, this time of tears down her small face. She wanted to snuff out that spark, make herself stop crying, but the tears kept flowing. She simply looked up at the man and nodded.

“Repeat these words after me. O, Horn of Plenty. O, Lady of Storms.”

“O, Horn of Plenty.”

“O, Lady of Storms,” Verdan repeated.

“O, Lady of Storms.”

“Grant unto me a gift of sight beyond worlds.”

Isha was still sniffling as she repeated, “Grant me a gift of sight beyond worlds.”

“In the name of Lady Salkhi, I pray. Unen.”

Isha paused. She still couldn’t accept Salkhi. The goddess hadn’t been there. All she repeated was, “Unen.”

“Now, you’ve said a prayer for dreams of another world. If you just get a good night’s sleep, all of your questions will be answered, little one.” William Verdan stood, blew out the candle on her nightstand, and covered Isha in the blankets. “Good night, my child.” As the door closed, Isha drifted off into sleep.

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As her eyes began to open, the only things she could hear were the sounds of wind through grain fields and the sounds of sobbing. As her eyes opened, she could see wheat fields surrounding her and an old, tanned woman holding her tightly.

“I’m sorry. I wanted to do more. I wish I could have saved more. I should have tried to do more. I’m so sorry.”

Isha pushed the woman away, standing in the vast fields of wheat, scared at the possibility of what this situation meant. As she tried to prove to herself that the woman wasn’t who she thought she was, Isha stammered, “Wh- Who? Who are you? Where am I?”

Salkhi stood before Isha, reached her hand out to her small face to touch her cheek, but as she started to apologize again, Isha’s eyes went wide.

“No. Why? WHY ARE YOU HERE?!”

“I wanted to apologize to you, my child.”

“I’M NOT YOUR CHILD! YOU KILLED MY MOM! YOU KILLED MY DAD!”

Salkhi didn’t respond. She wanted to reach out to Isha again, but stopped short. Isha was a ball of tears and fury.

“WE PRAYED TO YOU EVERY DAY! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HELP US, NOT HURT US!”

Salkhi still didn’t respond. She couldn’t. Nothing would reach Isha at this moment.

“AND NOW, EVERYONE’S DEAD! I- I’M- I’m all alone.”

At those last words, Salkhi could stay silent no longer. She went to embrace Isha once more. Isha tried her best to push her away, but she was a child trying to push away a goddess. Even in Salkhi’s human shape, her strength was that of an adult who had worked for a lifetime. The harder Isha tried to push Salkhi away, the goddess simply shed more and more tears. Isha pushed and pushed, but could not make the goddess let go of her. Salkhi was silently crying as Isha stopped pushing, but instead started scratching at her muscled arms, her leathery neck, and her tanned face. Isha watched as the goddess let her even draw blood from one scratch to the face. As blood mixed with tears, Isha’s arms dropped to her sides, unable to even resist. Isha’s tears began to stop, the feeling of hopelessness setting back in. Salkhi stood up, picked Isha up and began walking through the fields of wheat.

“I’m going to tell you about the time when I became a goddess. How much do you know about how this world started?”

Isha mumbled, “I don’t know.”

Salkhi nodded and said, “This world started oh, about four thousand years ago. When it first started, there was a being known as Ariunkhun. Do you know any bit of the divine language?”

Isha mumbled, “No…”

Salkhi continued, “Well, the phrase Ariunkhun roughly translates to either everything or a holy being. It depends on context, but that’s not important. In the beginning, Ariunkhun, everything, was created. Ariunkhun, the holy being, was all alone, so it created ten amitad. Amitad means beings or creatures. The ten amitad gave thanks to Ariunkhun, the holy being and everything, and gave it gifts. Three of the amitad were a little bit mean, but the others were kind. The gifts that were given were the Ariun Erdenes. Ariun Erdenes means sacred treasures. The gifts given by the muamitad, the three mean ones, attacked Ariunkhun and destroyed everything. Everything was gone except for the ten Ariun Erdenes. Those ten then remade Ariunkhun, everything, and the world we have now exists because of this.”

Isha was trying to process the story, but was more confused by why she was told it, asking, “Why does this matter right now?”

Salkhi held Isha in her strong arms and said, “I was a gift to everything because everything was lonely. As long as I am here, you will never be alone.”

Isha wanted to cry tears of anger, of sadness, of despair, but the tears that flowed down her cheeks were tears of exhaustion. She was tired. She hadn’t slept soundly since the flood. She couldn’t stop thinking about everything that had happened. She finally felt a small shred of relief at the idea that she wasn’t alone, even if it wasn’t true.

“You said I won’t be alone, but why weren’t you there when the flood happened?”

Salkhi looked at Isha with a pained expression. She had known that that question would be coming.

“Do you know why I chose you to be my Speaker, Isha?”

Isha’s look turned equally pained at the way Salkhi deflected the question. “No, I don’t.”

“Well, my dear, as much as the world loves to think that the gods, the Ariun Erdenes, are all-powerful, it isn’t true. Ariunkhun was all-powerful. Ariunkhun simply existed. After it was destroyed, it took all of the power of the Ariun Erdenes to simply keep things existing.”

“But you’re gods, right? Aren’t gods supposed to be all-powerful? I remember that someone told me that the gods are so powerful that they could create something strong enough to kill a god and still kill that thing.”

Salkhi laughed an old, rich laugh like the sound of bread being broken. “I could do that, but it would take almost five hundred years worth of prayers. You prayed to me before you fell asleep tonight. That prayer gave me the power to see you right now. A single prayer for a good harvest will give me the power to feed one person for a month. A single prayer for good weather will give me the power to protect one person from storms for a month.”

“My parents prayed. I prayed every single day. Why did they get hit by the storm?”

“Do you remember the muamitad I told you about? Those gifts they gave were the Obsidian Dagger, the Crimson Axe, and the Oblivion’s Hood. My younger sister, Urvasan, and my older brothers, Dain and Martakh. They get prayers, as well. They, however, don’t maintain the balance of the world, as much. Urvasan is the goddess of betrayal. She received a prayer to send a storm to a group of my followers. I- I did what I could to limit it.”

Isha was stunned. First learning that the gods weren’t all-powerful, then learning that some of the gods didn’t care about the people, as well as learning that Salkhi didn’t send the storm that killed her family. All these things were too much for her. She tried to stand up from Salkhi’s arms, but as she put a foot down on the ground, it collapsed beneath her. Salkhi knelt down beside her and held her tight once more.

“This world isn’t perfect. There are evil things out there. Martakh controls death because he believes it is morally good. Dain commits violence because he believes it is a necessary evil. Urvasan betrays people because she wants to. I want you to know that this isn’t everything that the world is. I am the gift of nature. I am every small flower. I am every great oak. I am the greatest ocean and the smallest stream. I am the newborn deer and the great wise owl. I am the patch of dirt on a city’s road. I am the clouds above you. I am always with you.”

Isha had no energy left to cry, so the tears simply washed from her eyes down her face as she sat there, motionless before the goddess. As the goddess stood up beside Isha, she breathed out a deep gust of wind, blowing away all the stalks of wheat. Salkhi reached out her hand to Isha one final time, saying, “My child, it is time that you make a choice. There is something that can be done to prevent a thing like this from happening to others like you. We must gather the Speakers of my other siblings. If you gather them together, the seven of you can help to guide the people of the world into an age where the gifts of the muamitad do not destroy people’s lives. What I must ask of you, my child, is to accept your position as my Speaker. I cannot and will not force you to do so. If you accept, however, I will do what I can to help you see your parents one last time from beyond the veil of Aeterna.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I will still try and help you see them again, but my power to interfere in your life will be limited.”

Isha thought. She had been a simple child until this point. She grew up in a fishing village in the Tosho Islands of the Azuma Dynasty in Aki-Jura. She had been trying to learn from her mother how to make steamed dumplings. Her father had promised to bring her back a shiny scale from one of the fish he caught. Everything had changed because of a single storm. Isha wanted right now just to sleep. She wanted to rest, but simply knowing that she could find a way to see her parents one last time was enough to give her the energy to push a little bit more.

“I’ll do it.”

Salkhi gently placed her hand on Isha’s head and said, “Please close your eyes for a moment.”

As Isha did so, she could see a great light behind her eyelids. The hand on her head was warmer and warmer as Salkhi spoke in a voice like the sound of waves in the distance. “I have claimed this child as mine. She is my Speaker and I am her Goddess. We are joined in duty and bound in fate. Rise and open your eyes, Isha Arashi, for I have given you my name.”

Arashi. It was uncommon in the Azuma Dynasty for commoners to have two names. A second name was bestowed by the king as a gift for dutiful service. To be given a second name was a great honor for a duty not yet fulfilled. Arashi. In the native language of Aki-Jura, it meant storms in the dialect of Azuma. In the dialect of Akh-Shao, it roughly meant orchid or mist. Two sides of nature, both a single concept. Isha Arashi. A dutiful servant of the goddess of storms and nature. All that was left was for Isha to find the other Speakers. She would fulfill this duty, no matter how long it would take.

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Lady Isha Arashi awoke in her room in The Sea’s Embrace, the unpolished armor still beside her, nineteen years after that day. To that day, she had never even heard of another Speaker being chosen in the past hundred years. Another day on that path wouldn’t change anything. She picked up the armor and began to polish.

If she wanted to make a greater step toward her goal and her duty, she would need to make her name and position known. Each new prayer to her goddess would mean another opportunity to find a promised soul to one of the gods. For now, however, she had other matters at hand: making her name known. To do so, she needed to clear The Tomb of The Sands of Time. In order to do that, she needed to understand the magic of the tomb.

She suddenly remembered that white mask from her vision before it was struck down by her goddess. It was a magic from a domain not of her goddess. In order to understand that magic, she would need to find someone who understood that domain. She would need to go to the temple, but she also needed to work on improving the teamwork and communication skills of her party, but she also needed to find a way to bring new followers to her goddess. Her days were going to be busy.