Ami by S. Jae-Jones

Author:S. Jae-Jones [Jae-Jones, S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

20

For the first time in a week, Ami was able to relax on a bed, and yet for the first time in as many days, she found herself unable to sleep.

In the end, the surviving Heralds had agreed to accompany Jin Zhara on the quest to seal the portal at the Root of the World. It had taken surprisingly little persuading; Okonwe, Pang Lok, and the others meekly following Gaden’s orders without protest. At Pang Lok’s suggestion, they decided to travel to the Gyasol lands to begin preparations for their journey to Mount Llangposa and the Root of the World.

From that point on, sleep had been strictly a matter of survival. Pang Lok and Okonwe set up a watch rotation between them all, and everyone participated, sleeping in shifts of four hours each. Traumatic survival, as it turned out, took up an enormous portion of the body and mind, to the point where she felt neither hunger nor exhaustion whenever she had a real moment to rest.

They had come to the Gyasol lands, in the shadow of the Skyhold, the highest peak in the Gunungs.

The first thing Ami noticed when they crossed into Pang Lok’s ancestral home was the smell of wildflowers and sweet grasses. Their entire flight from the site of the demon-blighted lands had filled her nose with the stink of spoilage and rot to the point where she had grown accustomed to breathing through her mouth.

The demonic blight had not touched these lands.

The Gyasol lands weren’t much compared to the grandeur of the southern cities, but to Ami, it was the most beautiful place on earth. The Gyasol were cultivators of aromatic flowers and woods, not nomadic yak-herders like so many other clans of the Free Peoples on this part of the Zanqi Plateau. The settlement was somewhat more permanent than some of the others she had seen in the past—buildings made of stone and wood instead of mobile tents made of yak-hide and bamboo. Purple and pink and white cosmos flowers, geraniums, and other blossoms decorated the whitewashed walls and brightly painted eaves, a splash of color on an otherwise dreary landscape. There was no freestanding gate leading to this village like there was in Kalantze, but there was a small stone stupa with the Gyasol name written in the Language of Flowers and the indigenous writing system of their people carved into the base. With a start, Ami realized that the stupa was their version of the Lion Temples she had seen littering the roads around the south, only instead of an everlasting flame, the offerings were bursting with a plethora of flowers.

“Lok-ah! Tama-yah!” A small, slight figure standing beside the stupa had hailed them joyfully as they approached. The figure had been Pang Lok’s grandmother, a youthful woman in her late-middle years, who looked scarce old enough to have as many grandchildren as she had claimed. Her name was Tenno, the clan leader, and she was an incredible host.

“Come, come,” she had called. “Come sit with us, we have made you food.

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