It was a risk, telling him that. There was the chance he’d clam up, clamp down, and push me away. But his hands remained warm and so steady on me.
“I want to learn more about you, too.”
That drew me up short. “But…What happened to, ‘I don’t want anything at all?’”
“I said I try not to want anything,” he reminded me. Then, a grating note of irritation. “Apparently, I am not nearly as successful as I should like.”
He was bothered by his own curiosity about me. He looked at the desire as something to be conquered, and he was failing. He didn’t want to want to be down here in the dark with me right now. But he was here anyway, because for some reason, he couldn’t seem to help himself.
I found that utterly fascinating. And a little depressing, if I were honest.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s the point of not wanting things?”
He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn’t answer. But then, just when we’d been down here so long that my poor eyes started hallucinating the soft glow of light up ahead, he spoke.
“When I was a cub, after the deaths of my parents, my uncle, the great Gahn Seerak, took a blade from his back and drew the sharp edge of it down the length of my face.”
Shocked, I stumbled, and would have stopped walking entirely if it weren’t for Gahn Thaleo’s ceaseless support. His hands never left me, warm and heavy, guiding me through the darkness. Like he was guiding me into his own past.
“That’s horrible,” I choked out, once I’d regained my footing and the power of my own voice.
“It was a valuable lesson,” he said without emotion. “I am immensely grateful to him for it.”
“You’re grateful that your uncle sliced open your face as a child?” I questioned. “You’re grateful he gave you that scar? My God, Thaleo! Why didn’t one of the healers see to you?!”
Emotion, along with my madly beating heart, clawed its way up my throat. Anger. Loads of it. Pulsing like poison in me, for the bleeding child he’d once been.
All at once, and for the very first time, I could see him that way. As a child. Something I’d never been able to picture before. A small, uncertain-but-stoic little boy, with black blood coursing down his face, one brilliant eye closed against the onslaught.
“I am,” he said evenly.
“And what sort of lesson was he trying to teach you?” I practically spat. My limbs felt hot with the need to do something. Rage looking for an outlet. I could be quite protective of my friends – I often felt that way about Fiona, or about Zaria and the children Wanda and Vanda. Now, I felt that way about Gahn Thaleo. The man who very staunchly insisted he wasnotmy friend. I wanted to reach into the past. And punch his uncle in the face.
“A necessary one,” Gahn Thaleo insisted. “A lesson on endurance. A lesson on the selfish nature of pain; the pointlessness of acknowledging it and of trying to end it.There is no pain but the pain of your people.” He said that last bit like it was a vow, or a mantra, something he’d repeated to himself often over the years. I had no doubt it was a quote from Gahn Seerak. “He knew I would be Gahn one day. He wanted me strong.”
“Strong, or scarred?” I bit out. My eyes burned.Tears. I blinked furiously. This drew attention to the contrast of the darkness of my closed eyes and the air ahead. There wasdefinitely dim, bluish light filtering in from somewhere now. I wasn’t imagining it.
“I do not believe those are mutually exclusive things,” he said. And he sounded so fucking blasé about it all. Like he was telling me that his uncle had once taken him fishing and told him about the meaning of life. Instead of enacting what I saw as a horrifying act of abuse against him.Just a child!
“This scar is a reminder,” he went on. “A reminder of what it means to be a true Gahn to my people. I will want nothing for myself. I will act only as a conduit for the survival of my tribe. The day I was victor of the baklok was the day I disappeared.”
“But you didn’t disappear,” I objected. I squeezed his hand, and felt a resulting tremor of surprise go through his fingers. “You’re right here. Right here with me.”
A trembling quietness. Then, a low, nearly wondering reply of, “So I am.”
This is why he is the way he is,I thought, grim realization dawning.This is why he lied and lured Gahn Errok into the taklok. This is why he doesn’t show a lick of emotion.
Those emotions were still there inside him. I was more and more certain of it with every interaction we had, every word we shared. But he’d learned to bury his feelings so deep it felt foreign, even for him, to examine or experience them. His uncle may have physically only cut his face, but he really cut him into two people that day. The feeling, hurting Thaleo. And the coldly efficient Gahn he now presented to the world.
Which one did he think was real?
When you wear a mask that long…
Does it become who you are?
I didn’t think I was ready to ask. Gahn Thaleo led me around a sharp corner, and the dim blue light suddenly brightened. I gasped as we entered a glittering cavern, thousands of points of illumination multiplying on the glittering angles of the gem-like walls. There was water here, crystal-clear and appearing nearly fluorescent as it took on the strange blue light, as well as glittering amethyst- and sapphire-like stalagmites and stalactites.
“What is that?” I asked, tilting my head back to try to understand what was making all this light. Some kind of bioluminescent algae? But no, the points of light weremoving.
