I closed my eyes and felt the energy flowing through my body. I concentrated on the steady stream of bright light as it sped up into itself. It concentrated in a brilliant ball underneath my breastbone, speeding up until it imploded. In that moment I relaxed completely and my will stopped being. My muscles started contorting and I felt my limps vanishing as the turquoise scales started to cover my body. I welcomed the change while I shedded my human skin, feeling the energy reaching every single cell of my being. With my forked tongue I tasted the air. Smoke. Fungus. Sulphur. I was getting close. I slithered through the small opening in the cave where my human legs could not have taken me. He had murdered them all. No, not murdered. He had exterminated them. For nothing but spite. The cave kept narrowing and I felt the wall overneath caressing the scarlet feathers that crowned my head. The sign of my divinity. The light kept diminishing but I did not need it. As I slithered the rocks started feeling softer, rounded by eons of water tripping though the narrow cracks. “I will find them. I will find them and start anew and everything he destroyed, I will make right.” My body was on autopilot, fixated on that which I had once made. The connection vibrating in my heart. The dark and clammy atmosphere started to get warm, belying the distance underneath the surface. The taste of sulphur a constant sting on my tongue. He would not be here. He had gone into a deep slumber and save for the ancient ones rumbles, he would not wake. I hoped. Steam started coming up from underneath the rocks. I sped up. The heat burned my scales, an impossibility for anything but his heat. The narrow passageway slowly expanded, making it easier chase through another curve. The vibration was a constant now and suddenly I froze. “They are here.” My gaze lifted up as I found myself in a chamber. The oppressive air clung to me as a toxic fog. I extended my senses… deserted. Would he really leave them just laying around? I concentrated on my form and felt my limbs forming. As the scales disappeared, the feathers are replaced with a curtain of burgundy hair reaching to my knees. While I stayed crouched in front of the opening I would no longer fit, my nose stung with the foulness in the air. I focussed on the vibration in my hart. Carefully I walked towards what is mine. The moist plates uncomfortably warm underneath the soles of my feet. The steam now reached to my knees. While I kept my course, my eyes saw his stone throne raised body lengths above the floor, build from a blue luminescent lime. Their light cast a soft earie glow in the chamber. I imagined him sitting there. His bulk. The fierceness of his presence. His arrogance flowing from him like the robes he wore. I Blinked. “There they are”. On a plateau in front of his throne. The light of the stones caressed a pile of the whitest of bones. So many. My hand trembled as I reached for them. My fingers following the brim of one of the skulls. “Which one were you? Were you the one that made me my final jade image? Are you the one that looked upon the stars and saw my face?” I close my eyes and my tears fall. “How could my brother hurt me so?” My shoulders shook with the grief for the children that were never born. Through my tears I gazed at the bones and saw past the pain and found potential. Glistering as a single star in the darkest of nights. I straightened my shoulders as I focused on nothing else, letting the darkness move past me. I took a deep breath. While I exhaled I reached my arms to the side and looked for where I knew the stars were. The next breath knew no end. I inhaled the wind of the east with all the new beginnings it brings. I turned my gaze to the bones on the tableau and I breathed the wind over them, wishing them home. While I blew, the bones disintegrated in front of me, carried away on a gust of wind following the narrow trail I took to get there. I kept blowing until the last of the bones were gone and my gaze followed them on their journey home. With no time to spare I took after them, assuming my other shape while on route. Through the cave and the narrow pathways I rushed home where my treasures would be waiting…
The trees and ferns moved away from my path and revealed my cabin. I finally felt relieve lighten my nerves. I had made it. In front of the door the bones were laid out on the dirt floor. Not the careless pile in which I had found them. Rather, several skulls each topped a full body with ribs, arms and legs. For the first time since I had awaken I felt a smile curve my lips. There were eight sets of bones. Eight people I could form, who would walk the earth once more. I walked into my cabin and took a wooden bowl from the table. I went to my bed and pulled a small box from underneath. I flipped it open and saw my knife, with both handle and blade made from the deepest obsidian. The stone felt cold in my hand. I had carved the handle with small jaguars and snakes the first time I had been awake, and had spent countless nights sharpening the blade by hand instead of mind. I rushed outside. As I sat in front of the eight, I looked at the bowl. It was as wide as my hand. It would not do. With both hands I put the bowl in front of me. I held it in place with my feet as my hands started shaping the wood. I stretched it and stretched it, the same way I had once taught people to bake pots from clay. When the bowl was finally large enough, I took my blade in my left hand and cut deep in the inside of my right arm, opening it from elbow to wrist. It tingled. The blood sparkled in the sun as it slowly filled the bowl. When it was nearly full I placed the flat end of the blade against the cut and I felt the skin close again. One by one I took the bones and covered them in the blood. Every two hundred and six bones of every pile in front of me. By the forty second bone I started humming.
“They are going to be all right. By my blood it will be made right. “ The moon had risen high when I place back the last of the bones of the eighth person. I looked up to the sky and I grinned to my sister Moon. By morning they would be formed a new…