Zeph Kaizen's Arc

Chapter 11 of 51

Zeph dragged the enforcer's body away from the overhang and came back to Keji. The old man's breath had thinned. The tiger sat by the stone with blood dark on its jaw. Zeph knelt in the snow and pressed his hand flat to his own chest. The candle of refusal was still there, small and steady. He had survived the enforcer. He would not survive the next one on that flame alone. Keji had told him about the three doors. Rage was closed. Refusal was open. Stillness he had touched once, the night he sat through in the stone hall and did not transform. He had never held that door long enough to walk through it. If he could join stillness to refusal, he could chain the moves. He could stop dropping the candle every time he took a hit. He crossed his legs in the snow. The tiger came and lay against his back, warm through the cold. Zeph closed his eyes and slowed his breath. He named what he would not accept. I will not lose Keji. I will not run again. He held the words and did not push after them. The warmth came up. He kept his breath long. Usually the warmth flared and cut off when he moved. This time he did not move. He held the two things at once, the quiet and the refusal, and felt them touch. Something stood in the snow in front of him. Zeph opened his eyes. A short figure stood there with white hair pushed up like flame and eyes that gave off pale light. Dark skin. Bare chest. A blue sash at the waist. A mark cut into his brow. The figure was not breathing hard. The figure was not breathing at all. "You are holding both doors," the figure said. "That is why I can stand here." Zeph did not move. He knew the face without being told. His own jaw. His own shoulders, smaller. An ancestor. Something the old Windchill songs had named and then stopped naming. "Zento," the figure said. "Keep the breath. Do not chase me." Zeph kept the breath. The warmth stayed. The quiet stayed. He counted to ten. He counted to twenty. His legs shook. At thirty the quiet slipped and the figure thinned like smoke and was gone. The warmth guttered a moment later. Zeph opened his hands. He had held the stillness door open. He had held it while refusal burned. He had done it for thirty counts. Behind him Keji drew a longer breath. Not healed. Steadier. Zeph looked east through the trees. The next one was already coming. He did not know when. He knew he could chain the doors now, for as long as thirty counts would let him. It was not the gold form. It was the road to it. He put another handful of snow against Keji's ribs and began to breathe again.