That night, we went out for a celebratory dinner, leaving the office together in a large group. We had only gone down the street a little way when we were stopped by two nasty elders of my tribe. I tried to send my friends on without me, but they refused to leave. Especially when the elders marched up to me, slapped me and scolded me loudly in our language for being an ungrateful dog. I didn't dare retaliate. Although my friends couldn't understand what was being said, I was immediately swept behind a protective wall.
The director hugged my shivering body, asking me to tell her what was going on. I didn't dare tell her everything. In a small voice, I gave her a general gist of things.
The female elder continued to berate me from behind the wall of younger warriors protecting her and a male elder.
"You filthy clod of toe dirt cast out by worthless toe nail clippings," she screeched in our tribal language. "Our tribe has used so many resources to bring you up and this is how you repay us? You go and get defiled by a disgusting criminal and don't even dare to report it? Shame on you. You've shamed us. Shamed yourself. Why have you not been sending us all the money you owe to your tribe? Why is the amount so small? I don't believe you aren't hiding some of your filthy earnings in an attempt to steal what belongs to the tribe. I doubt you were as badly injured as they say if you're well enough to go out and eat with friends. You want to use the tribe's money to go out and play? Then you must return the money you are wasting and owe us five fold."
Someone had spilled the news to my tribe. Otherwise how would they know what had happened to me? And why were they only confronting me now? Perhaps they had only just been informed and rushed over? I wondered who the tale bearer was and wondered how they might feel with coals heaped on their head. I wanted to beat them up until they cried for their daddy. Who would tell on me and why?
Did someone hate me? Why did they want to destroy me?
The female elder spat in my direction and I saw a gust of wind turn the glob of phlegm around to smack her back in the face. That must have been Big Brother. The elder screeched even louder in disgust, wiping the spit off and trying again, only for it to land back in her mouth and make her choke for a moment.
"We'll spread your name across the city and let people know what bad characters City Agents like you are," scolded the male elder, spraying saliva from the gap between his front two teeth, taking over. "Everyone will spit on you and trip you up wherever you go. We'll shame you until you have no where to put your face. We should drag you back to the tribe to be punished and cleansed."
My shameless elders scolded like seagulls in the marketplace, while the warriors with them nonchalantly dug at their ears or looked my friends up and down with disdain. The male elder and some of the older warriors leered greedily at me. One of the warriors looked like he really wanted to have a go at fighting Big Brother just to see who was better.
"I knew we should never have let you return to your worthless parents," the female elder glared at me with her bulging eyes having finally gotten over her choking, coughing fit. Her yellow teeth snapped. "You've only become even more degenerate and have brought shame to our tribe. The Long Tooth Tribe has been talking about how you were kidnapped by a demon with a golden rod who made you addicted to his touch. They say pictures and videos of you were taken and have been spread about. It seems you really enjoyed being ploughed. For such a lowly clod of dung like you, you should have come back to admit your crimes and submitted to our judgment immediately after the event. Even if you haven't, you should at least have performed the £&#_# ritual to get rid of your bad luck and cut your influence off from the world. Although I don't agree, the Council of Elders have agreed that because of your so called faithful contributions to the tribe over the years, they have agreed to show you mercy and allow you to become §$^∆π@*¢. I think you should be..."
I shuddered at the ritual and punishment named, as well as what the female elder thought I should be punished with. A dark sticky tide surged up from beneath my mental feet sucking me down. It felt like a bucket of black slime had just been upended on my head. It stank of disappointment, helplessness and despair. If that ritual and punishment were meant to be my end, I might as well go kill myself now. Jump off a cliff. Stab myself in the chest. Cut my own throat and watch it spray, while my life seeped away from me and I suffocated in my own blood.
At the mention of those un-interpretable words unique to my tribal language and feeling the sticky black mud sucking me down into its depths, Shigure's head snapped up. Patting a hand on my shoulder, he stepped in front of me to shield me from their view.
He roared some words in a language I had never heard before and that my auto-interpret ability couldn't fathom.
The elders stumbled a few steps back with surprised horror and their hands over their mouths. The warriors looked confused. Slowly, the elders backed away, as if Shigure was some monster.
I felt nothing through my link with him. He had shielded himself and wasn't leaking anything into our shared chat room. All I could see was that he was furious. I had never seen him that mad ever before. Everyone looked shaken and confused.
Everyone backed away from Shigure as a small gust of wind began to circle around him and he began to glow red.
"Go back," Shigure enunciated, biting the words out at my tribesmen in the common language. As if he was straining not to lose his temper and reining it in so hard that his words sounded weak. "Don't look for her again."
The male elder took a few deep breaths and snarled back at Shigure.
"Then we will cast her out of the tribe and remove her name from her family stones. She will be nothing and nobody to us. Her name will be removed from her. She will be like a piece of dirt that one flicks away from between the toes," the male elder said in the same common language, making those around me stir and Director Worth hug me a little tighter. "We have no need for filth like her."
"So be it," Shigure snapped and turned to look back at me, as if to make sure I was ok. I caught sight of the left pupil that had turned blood red in his eye and Director Worth gasped.
"Kimi," she said, reaching out a hand in concern.
"I haven't done anything. Yet," Shigure replied in a cold voice, shaking her off. "Don't worry. I haven't completely lost my head." He glared at the tribesmen but spoke to the Director. "I told you before. This was going to happen sooner or later. They don't learn. They never learn," he said in a softer, more sinister voice. "I won't watch them do any of those things to Kim. Not like how they did it to Ji Ya when she went back to confess all those years ago. They have not a single bit of mercy in their bones. Do you remember what Ji Ya's body was like when we finally found it at the bottom of that cliff? They want to do something worse than that to Kim. Much worse. I can't even bring myself to interpret it."
Ji Ya? I recognised that name. She was the last City Agent who had been an indigenous person from the tribes. In fact, she had been from my tribe. I just didn't know what her tribal name - her real name - had been. From what Shigure had said, I was finally able to figure out who she was in the tribe. They had always used her as an example to us when we were kids. She had been my aunty from my cousin's maternal family or something like that.
Ji Ya had gotten a boyfriend from among the City Agents who wasn't from the tribes. He had tricked her into letting him bed her and had gotten her pregnant. When he found out she was pregnant, he had abandoned her for a younger and prettier woman. In grief and desperation, she had returned to the tribe to confess. They had forced her to give birth to the child. She had willingly performed the ritual with the tribe's help and had finished it by throwing her mutilated body off our highest cliff. The child had not survived and had been instead turned into a vitality nourishing soup for the elders.
The warriors sneered at Shigure and took a step forward but the elders called them back. The warriors looked annoyed and confused. I didn't understand how or why they weren't afraid of Shigure right now. He looked very scary. The sort of scary that would have me running for cover if I didn't know him.
"I told your tribe last time," Shigure said in an almost calm voice, but the wind and ominous glowing light around him intensified. "I warned you to clean up your act or I would remove the rest of the blessing your ancestors left for you and ensure the tribe's blood would end with the current generation."
"What's going on?" the warriors asked the elders in our tribal language. "Why are you stopping us? Who is this ugly airbag who covers himself up like a wimp to spout such arrogant words? Who cares if he's strong? Maybe we can beat him into the dust. We have a greater number of people."
The warriors were either overly self-confident with inflated egos or they were just frogs in a well. Likely both. Did they even realise that we were all City Agents and all City Agents were trained in combat? They probably didn't know about the special abilities, but that didn't mean they couldn't use their eyes to see the way we walked and moved.
The elders spat a word that couldn't be interpreted. The word was a title. A title I had only ever heard in stories. It was a title given to a special people from a special tribe. The noblest of all the tribes in the Land. They were wise leaders and elders that even the tribal chiefs could only bow down to. They judged matters and ensured the laws were kept. They judged entire tribes, not individuals, and meted out sentences that affected the whole tribe. Or in some cases, entire groups of tribes.
People who had performed great and meritable deeds could receive a blessing from these noble judges. The blessings could last generations depending upon the deed and the influence. My tribe had been relying upon the deeds and blessings from a few of our ancestors who had united several tribes in the region to repel a beast tide from the Tangled Ranges about two hundred years ago. That prestige was slowly fading with each new cocky and proud generation that seemed to take the tribe's status for granted. The ancient laws the tribesmen were once proud of had become so twisted through the generations that I couldn't figure out what their original form might have been once upon a time.
The title used was something similar to a seer, a noble lord and a judge all mixed together. I supposed, the closest translation in English would be a Noble Judge.
"What? Him?" the warriors scoffed, pointing at Shigure. "Isn't he just a squint eyed, yellow skinned, silver haired demon?"
"Idiots," the male elder spat in the tribal language. "The title isn't passed through families but from master to apprentice. Their tribe is filled with masters and their disciples. He is the only one of the recent generations that we know of, and what he can do is very real. He was the one who punished the Orange Scar Tribe for their betrayal during the last war when the overseas demons invaded."
The warriors looked horrified. I wasn't a boy and so hadn't heard any of the war stories. Therefore I had no idea what they were talking about. The tribes were never mentioned in the Organisation's accounts of the war.
The male elder glared at Shigure and then at me. He pointed his finger at me and said my tribal name, followed by more words in that language my ability couldn't interpret. Nevertheless, the words struck me hard. They gouged out something from me and ripped a hole through my identity. Something important was torn from me and it made all the healing shards in my mind shatter once more. This time into smaller pieces - like sand. There was no core to hold them together.
I fell to the ground clutching both chest and head in unspeakable pain. The pain roared and echoed through me like a deadly wind, ripping and tearing everything that had been me to shreds.
"I hope she doesn't survive it," was the muttered voice of the old woman in the common language when they left.
Voices called me names I couldn't comprehend. Those names had been based upon a central name and core. My identity and name had been stolen and now those names no longer carried any meaning to me. I faintly realised what had just happened.
I had been expelled from the tribes and had my name taken from me.
A hand on my head felt full of power and authority. The voice even more so.
"I name you Shigure Uki, the floating hope. Kim Na." Shigure declared, making the shattered sand in my mind shiver and attempt to clump together. My heart thumped painfully. It didn't feel like it fit but the names drilled its way inside, forming a tiny little core, no larger than a few grains of sand. It was too fragile and weak to carry any real weight. I could tell that they weren't the right name. "In the Name of," Shigure spoke a Name. A name of such authority and greatness that it seemed to slam into my head and freeze the shivering sand that didn't know what to do with itself, "I name Shigure Uki Kim Na, as my apprentice. The one disciple that I have chosen to carry on the title of…" and he used a few words in that language I couldn't understand once more.
"Wha-at?!" I heard shrieks from further down the street but couldn't spare the attention for them.
The tiny core that would make up my new identity grew a few sand grains larger and hardened a little with the naming and new titles. But it still wasn't enough to fill in the gaping hole that had been left behind.