Eihm had walked for as long as he could, but without any real rest, food, or water he couldn’t make it nearly as far as he had the day before, and could not keep himself upright for nearly as long. Just before midday he again collapsed into the cushioning grass, and plummeted into the same nightmare. Sixty-eight spears this time. He awoke as the sun was three of his fists above the treetops he had left behind. He was still exhausted, but the heat of the day made it easier for his stiff, injured body to get moving once again.
As Eihm murmered to himself, his thin voice cadenced by the impact of each labored step, he experimented with the broken branch he still held in his right fist. There may have been a slight red outline around it still, or Eihm could have been imagining it, but nothing he tried to do seem to have any effect on it. Piecing it back together broken end to broken end, wrapping it with grass, breaking one half of it again, it all seemed to be mundane – until, frustrated, the young monk clenched the three pieces in his left fist as hard as he could, worrying at it violently with his other hand, and with a scream tossed the fragmented stick out into the field. As the pieces whirled through the air and began to fly their separate ways as their normal path would take them, they instead seemed to circle back towards each other, defying force, and landed all in the same place somewhere amongst the tall, brown stalks.
“No way… It’s gotta be, oh that’s gotta be it!” He waded through the field and, when he got to the spot where the sticks landed, searched on his hands and knees before he finally found the stick – two pieces near each other and otherwise whole, in the state they were in before the two were made three and then more.
“Aha! Yes! That’s just as expected… But no, not as expected. Why isn’t it fully repaired? I did it perfectly to the lamp, to the whole damn Monastery,” he growled, “but this stick is more stubborn than my whole home combined?”
He looked at the two sticks more closely, and indeed they seemed no longer just two parts of one, broken piece. The reddish outline was gone as well. An impotent rage – seething with his own sense of powerlessness - began boiling within Eihm’s blood. He barely even knew who or what he was anymore, and now he had to grapple with this incomprehensible ability that he, from a place of agony and grief, remained willfully ignorant of the origin and nature thereof. Just as his rage reached its peak, causing his muscles to spasm and shiver and his teeth to grind, just as he blindly turned all of his hatred and hurt into destroying the sticks as utterly as he could, his attention was caught off guard by a flash of green between his fingers – a delicate emerald leaf that was not there before. In that moment his years of training found a precarious ledge to grab onto, and for only an instant Eihm was able to find a modicum of calm and control within himself. That instant was enough, and instead of inflicting as complete a destruction that he could on the inert wood – something he had no inkling as to how to achieve – he dropped the sticks, to be lost in the grass, and thrashed in the air, yelling and crying in a boy’s broken voice.
Once Eihm had expunged that suffocating smoke from his lungs, heaving and sweating, he continued trudging on, mumbling both angrily and tiredly.
Nestled between the thick stalks of dry grass, the stick lay, no leaf to be seen.
ns 15.158.61.48da2
