Atilan

     /MAH-mah/

      noun

     Mother.

     —Lutari Dictionary Vol. I

     ———

     "Luata wa mu ain?”

     Colchester had a strange expression on his face. It was affected. It had to be — he had been the island’s ambassador for over twenty years now. He absolutely knew what she said. “What’s that, now?”

     “Where,” Erin snarled, “is. My. Son.”

     “Is she still on about that?” said that weather girl Colchester had hired. “She’s not a very good conversationalist. It’s always about her son, or how I can’t touch her hat. I just want to put it on for a minute!”

     Colchester ignored the girl. “It’s been twenty years, he’s a grown man—”

     “Shush now. Where is my son?”

     Colchester liked to have picnics on the cliff by the Market. It was a quiet area with a nice view. It made a good setting for a confrontation between him and the Honoured Mother, a figure that normally was supposed to be the island’s wisest woman, its most level head.

     She could not have a level head about this.

     “Where is my son?” she said once again.

     “Your son is safe. He’s alive.”

     He sipped the chamomile again. At least he had the decency to stand up.

     “Remember when I told you that he wanted to be an adventurer, like me? He’s doing that. Likes tropical locales the best. Maybe somewhere in there, he remembers where he was born.”

     “He should not have to remember. Why has he never come home?”

     “He spent one year of his life here and today, he will have spent twenty-five elsewhere. Your home is not his home.”

     Then he looked at her, and his eyes were almost milk-white, and they had such a genuine sadness in them that Erin realised that in this moment, and this moment only, he was telling the truth.

     “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think mine is, either. If it was, perhaps Ranaka wouldn’t be so eager to leave.”

     And in that moment, Erin thought, Why is this pain his to feel?

     She lunged.

     Roxton Colchester II, an experienced adventurer who’d had many things lunge at him before, dodged.

     Well, you can imagine what happened next... The k’tiin clipped Colchester’s elbow and landed at his feet.

     Briana tsked. “Well, that’s not good.”

     “Very not good,” Colchester said, dabbing at his brow with a handkerchief.

     As he scooped everything into the picnic basket his expression was something easily mistaken for guilt. It was likely just the fear of getting caught.

     “We should go before anyone starts looking for her,” he said, walking away.

     “...”

     “Briana? Briana, I said—”

     Briana was standing still, stiller than she would ever stand of her own accord, with the k’tiin on her head.

     Colchester slowly approached her and reached for the k’tiin.

     It was Briana’s hand that snatched his wrist, but it was not Briana.

     “You cowardly fool,” said Erin through Briana’s mouth.

     Briana never rushed a storm, so Colchester had never seen what would happen if she did. Water vapour was pulled rapidly from the easiest sources. Steam rose from the surface of the ocean. Daylight faded.

     A blinding flash and thunderous crack tore through the air.

     “That was your ship.”

     Flash, crack, flash, crack.

     “And that was all the other ships.”

     “Get out…” Colchester said.

     “Or what?”

     Briana’s hair whipped around her shoulders. Her wings usually had a slight sparkling quality to them, but that light sharpened. Cracks spread along her pale skin, the same blue light shining through them.

     “What are you doing?!”

     “I am cursing this place. You have fattened yourself upon the fruits of our land for too long.”

     “No.”

     Night fell in the middle of the day as the sun was blotted out by the storm.

     “No!”

     Distant screaming from the Market as the trees began to bend.

     “Erin, if you’re trying to hurt me, you’re not going to do that without hurting everyone else on the island!”

     For a moment, the wind stopped.

     Then Erin said, “Okay.”

     And then everything exploded.

     ———

     The storm — not the rain, the cloud itself — was descending. Tendrils like a jellyfish were coming down to meet the cliff’s edge. The villagers ran.

     “Papa, what is happening?!”

     “I don’t know! Atilan, ki!” Matuk shouted at Roxton, carrying Tui back towards the trees.

     Roxton tried to stand up but his knee buckled beneath him. Lightning cracked.

     He turned.

     A wall of dark storm clouds had formed at the cliff’s edge. But not just clouds.

     Inside the storm, lightning made writhing shapes. The shapes of people. The shapes of many, many people. Wailing people.

     “Mu pupu, mu pupu—!”

     “Plawaa, Priana, la naat tuut matukuna!”

     “U lunt mu mama! Luata wa mu mama?!”

     That last one.

      Where is my mother?

     To wit, one shape stepped out of the storm.

     The shape was just barely the outline of a Lutari, but he could tell by her regal bearing and the ghost of the k’tiin on her head who she was.

     “Erin,” Roxton said. “Mother.”

     “Ranaka, mu atilan ain,” she said.

     Her voice was the whisper of rain.

     “Why have you taken my vengeance from me?”

     The rain was falling harder now. Waves shook the ground. From behind him, the villagers screamed.

     “You have your vengeance. Colchester is gone. You can stop the storm now!”

     “Unt luut yi ut?”

     “What?” Roxton said desperately, again feeling the feeling he felt when Lillian had told him that silly joke back on the first Primella, what he now knew was shame, the shame of having been taken, of having never questioned why he was the person he was.

     Not Ranaka. Not his mother’s ain. Not able to understand what his own family was saying to him. Just another Roxton Colchester.

     How was he supposed to know? He was a kid. It should’ve been reasonable to think the people who loved him would never do anything to hurt him.

     “And what of it?

     “...What?” he said, feeling small.

     “That does not make us whole. Our people are not whole. Our island is not whole. Nothing will ever be whole again. Why should we trudge forward?”

     The lights continued to writhe in the storm.

     “It is time to join us. It is time to leave this place.”

     “I — wait! Hold on! You — you can’t do that!”

     “I can and I am.”

     “No! You don’t have to do this! We learned to fight!”

     The rocks below the cliff were being consumed by water.

     “No,” he said. “No. I can’t do this!”

     Roxton put his head in his hands.

     “I — I came here even though I didn’t want to, and then I realised people needed my help, so I fought, and I fought, and I fought for people I just met, and I fought against people I never thought I would have to fight, and I fought some more, and I can’t do it anymore. I went into this thinking I was already out of strength and then I realised I had some left, and then I ran out for real, and now I’m just — I’m — I’m — I’m sitting here because I couldn’t put my knee brace on without my dad realising I was me, and not you, and now I can’t get up. I can’t get up. I can’t do it anymore.”

     The rain stopped.

     He felt warm, suddenly. He opened his eyes. Surprisingly, Erin could hug him in this form.

     “Ut’a ikur. Ut’ll pa ikur.”

     He couldn’t tell what was being said, but he could tell she was trying to calm him down. This made him cry harder.

     “Mama?” said Tui.

     One of the Lutari shapes stopped moving. The shape turned to look at Tui.

     “Mama!”

     Tui jumped out of Matuk’s grasp and ran towards the cliff’s edge. Matuk was too stricken to stop her.

     “Mama, ut’a ma!”

     The shape blinked. “Tuikutat?” she said, and stepped out of the storm to meet her. “Rii’pa kittan ai puk…”

     Matuk went to meet the Lutari shape too, saying, “Mu luya, mu luya,” which was her name, or nickname, or a plea, or something…

      Mu luya, if that was indeed her name, cried and threw her arms around them both.

     That opened the floodgates. Ain and P’Tunka saw something much the same, and even the Honoured Mother hobbled peacefully towards the ghost of a pockmarked young man. There was hugging, laughter, and sobbing.

     “Luut’a kiun in? What is this?” Erin said, remembering to translate this time.

     Roxton sniffed and wiped at his face, and he knew that everything was going to be okay now. He’d saved everyone. And yet he didn’t feel like an adventurer. He felt like a kid.

     “They’re letting go.”

     They’re trying to heal... It was painful, and the healing would be long and difficult, and from now on, a part of it would be missing.

     But it would live.

     “You can’t be a storm forever,” Roxton said. “Rain returns to the ocean too.”

     Erin exhaled deeply, even though she no longer needed to.

     “Mu ain. I see you have learned a lot on your adventure.”

     She didn’t mean coming here. She meant everything that had happened between the day he left and the day he came back. “Yeah.”

     “I wish you never left.”

     “Yeah.”

     “I wish none of this had happened.”

     “Yeah.”

     When Roxton hugged her back, he closed his eyes, not ready for what was going to happen next.

     “I’m sorry we never got to meet when we were both still here.”

     “Don’t apologise. U’m p’tiit yi rii,” she said.

     His hair stood on end.

     “I am so proud of you, my son.”

     And when he opened his eyes, she was gone.

     The sun, unobstructed, rose.

     ———

     /rah-NAH-kah/

      verb

     To search, to venture out, to love.

     —Lutari Dictionary Vol. I

     ———

     The villagers went back to the village. Not the cave, not the ramshackle settlement they’d built up in the marketplace. The real village.

     On shaking legs, they picked through the trees. The soil was carved deeply from years of unceasing rain. In many places, the ground had been stripped down to the limestone. People talked about bringing fruit peels and other waste here to induce a “rotting season,” a typically natural phase of the island’s life cycle.

     They had not had natural weather even before the storm. Before the storm, the Ataulat had made the island into a plastic paradise. The natural cycle: the rains, then the swelling of fruit that filled their bellies, then leftover fruit falling and rotting and restoring the soil that had been washed away. After forty years, this cycle would need to be restarted by force. The remains of the market village would also be good for this, someone said. It would be difficult, but it could be done.

     Not all of the original village was still standing, but some of it was. The bank largely survived, the rain having sluiced off its angled roof, creating a moat around it and its Neopoints, which no one was allowed to touch... (Nobody protested this. Nobody wanted to jinx anything by touching the foreign currency.) Someone found the Wheel of Happiness, having fallen off its moorings and rolled into the bushes. The Bog of Charity was a bog. It was fine.

     The state of the Survival Academy was difficult to gauge from the shore. The bridge that connected it to the main island had collapsed, but it was still attached to the landmass by the sandbar, so it hadn’t drifted away. Its irregular faux-feather roof was gone, the massive wooden feathers presumably having fallen off over the years, but the actual roof appeared intact.

     “You had something of an ancestral memory back there,” Matuk said.

     Matuk had made good on his promise to carry Roxton, even as they ended up going much further than originally planned. They both sat exhausted on a ledge overlooking the Survival Academy.

     Roxton opened one eye. “Did I?”

     “The Survival Academy teaches many war dances where you dress as someone else. “If one was good enough at war, weapons would not be needed.”

     “So back in the old days, a battle would just be brute strength?”

     “In a place where every minor wound can turn into a life threatening infection, that is the best option, yes.”

     “Fair enough.”

     ———

     “Lillian?”

     Roxton had eventually gotten his strength back and slowly hobbled back towards the intact shore. This was the kind of thing that would normally have him chasing the pain, but all his potions had been used on the villagers.

     Lillian sat on a low rock, watching the villagers carry debris away. She seemed unsure of whether it would be right to approach them.

     “Hey,” he said, sitting down. “Dad’s gone. Storm’s gone.”

     “Good, good. …Were you crying?” She looked at the remains of his costume. “And are those women’s clothes?”

     “It’s a long story.”

     Something was missing…

     “Where’s Scrap?”

     “I thought he was with you?” said Lillian.

     Which was when the Primella II, looking… not great, but definitely intact, slowly bobbed into view.

     “Fixed the boat, everybody!” Scrap shouted from the deck.

     Roxton sputtered. “What? How? When?”

     “...Did you fix the boat during the storm?” Lillian said.

     “Yup!” Scrap shouted.

     Scrap immediately fell down from exhaustion, his face slamming the deck.

     “Please clap,” he said.

     “Oh,” said Lillian.

     “I will handle!” said Tui, already wading into the water, holding a rock.

     …Eventually they got control of the boat without Tui hitting anyone with a rock.

     Lillian set about collecting plant samples. Animal ones were tricky — she gave up on Floobixes after her third forced nap. Jordie was stable, but he needed to go to a hospital ASAP. Scrap was just happy he’d fixed the boat.

     “Uh, hey, Roxton,” Lillian said. “A moment of honesty? I don’t actually have a million Neopoints.”

     “I figured. You’re on a professor’s salary.”

     “You knew I couldn’t pay you?”

     “Yeah.”

     “Why did you come?”

     He shrugged. “I owe you. The Lost Isle, and all.” When he saw Lillian’s eyes turn sad, he added, “And I do a lot of things just because, anyway, if someone gives me a ticket to go somewhere I’m not going to say no—”

     Lillian hugged him.

     “I’m so sorry.”

     “It’s fine. I used to trust him too.”

     When they let go, Scrap asked them what they were talking about.

     Roxton took a deep breath.

     “So it turned out that the cursed storm eating the island was actually the angry ghosts of people who fell to a plague that my father exposed them to when he discovered the island…among other events…” He paused. “But the storm’s gone! We’re good.”

     “...”

     “I mean, it makes more sense than the Moltara adventure,” Jordie said, laying on the sand nearby.

     “To be honest, I tore a muscle right before that happened and spent most of it up to my eyeballs in potions,” said Roxton.

     “...That actually explains a lot.”

     “I want a lawyer! I want a doctor! I want a ham and cheese sandwich!” Briana wailed.

     P’Tunka and a couple of muscle-bound figures were Quiggle-marching a captured Briana towards them. P’Tunka had some sort of colourful object balanced on his hip that Roxton couldn’t identify. “Atilan — well, I suppose you’re not atilan anymore,” P’Tunka said. “In any case, we found this fool trying to rob the bank, and we tire of dealing with her. Take her with you, plawaa.”

     “On it,” said Scrap, whisking Briana to the brig.

     “We can drop her off at New Faerieland. I can imagine the authorities there will be very interested in how this island had so much inclement weather when there was an Air faerie on watch,” Lillian said.

     “I doubt that, considering that they did not care enough to investigate in the first place, but thank you.”

     He was probably right, but Roxton still tried to keep the mood up. “Hey, if it happens, send a copy of her mugshot to the Honoured Mother’s office, okay?”

     P’Tunka sighed. “This is awkward.”

     He held up the thing on his hip — a collection of bright, glossy feathers that Roxton suddenly recognized as the k’tiin, restored to its former glory.

     “Her wave returned to the ocean.”

     “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.”

     “Don’t be. Her mind was already gone; I suspect she was only waiting for the storm to clear. Normally we would choose a new Honoured Mother now, but because it’s always a Mak woman, our only option is—”

     “MEEE!” shrieked Tui, making grabby hands at the sacred headdress.

     P’Tunka pulled it out of her reach immediately. “Yes. When you are older.”

     “How dare you defy your Honoured Mother!” Tui said. “Traitor! Fiend! Beast with a thousand tongues!”

     “Anyway,” said P’Tunka, continuing to hold the angry child at arm’s length, “there is talk of choosing someone else to rule in the meantime. Also, people have questions about whether we should continue giving absolute power to a person who can be hijacked by their own crown, so there is that.”

     “Fair. I’ll tell you what, if my vote counts for this, I’m voting for you.”

     “Really?”

     “Yeah! You’ve basically been ruling for who-knows-many years already, and as long as you don’t crack under existential terror again, I think you’ll be decent. Better than Tui, at least.”

     “Guards! Do what you must!”

     ———

     “Uh, hey, Jordie—”

     “Let me guess,” Jordie said from his bunk. “You’re staying?”

     Roxton blinked. “Was it that obvious?”

     “You didn’t put your stuff back on the boat,” he pointed out.

     “Didn’t think you were paying attention.”

     “Tch! I know you. You pack, like, two things immediately and then make sure they’re both there three times. What’s up with that?”

     “Little more than two.”

     “It’s called ‘exaggerating,’ Mr. Colchester.”

     “Eggsaggerating,” Roxton snorted.

     “Huh?”

     “Nothing. You’re not totally right, though. I’m not leaving, but I’m not staying either. I want to help rebuild, but once things are settled… I’m setting out again.”

     Jordie smiled. Roxton wondered when he’d started to look so grown up. “And here I thought you found a place to call home.”

     “I don’t have a home.”

     It was a sentence that would’ve been a nervous joke coming from a younger Roxton, a snappish remark from the mouth of a teenage Roxton, and a horrific secret whispered by a young Roxton. But for Roxton right now, it just felt… a little off. Not quite right.

     “Well, I guess I do, but it’s… you know. This.”

     A body that had been forced to exist in a world that looked at it with confusion, horror, and fascination. A body that was beginning to break down, but he could manage it, and he would continue to manage it until he couldn't anymore.

     There was a saying in the Haunted Woods — "You can't un-haunt a house." You could drive the literal ghosts out, sure, but it would never be whole again. It would always be the house someone passed in, the island that was cursed, the knee that sustained an unnoticed hairline fracture when its owner fell off a roof.

     But floors could be redone. Soil could be restored. Pain could be managed.

     Roxton was a Lutari. His home was a Lutari body, an atilan body, now returned.

     "I think I'm okay with that now."

     The End.