Empty Palm

[Dicey Reilly]

Jystana stood rigid on the hardwood floor, pose frozen mid-Kata in the most awkward of steps. She had been standing this way for hours in the exact position that the monk instructing her had told her to stop.

"Imagine it," he said, "right there in the palm of your hand. Tranquility. Peace. Strength. The pure white warmth of Quellious' child-like face. She is there for you to use if you just reach for her."

Jystana had tried, for hours to find this peace, this tranquility, but all she found was pain. Her arms ached and sweat dripped from her forehead as she forced muscles to stop tensing, stop moving. The monk had left her alone with her palm and the emptiness it held, a Teir'dal statue, in the middle of an otherwise empty room.

This had not been the first time that Jystana had been left to examine that emptiness that seemed to fill both her hand and her mind. Ever since she could remember, the monks had left her to the silence of introspection, once they had taught her body all that they felt it ready to learn. Always, once she reached as close to physical perfection in any stance, pose, or kata as possible, the monks would stop her noting something missing from within, and they would leave her until she was able to show something other then an empty vessel, and empty palm.

The monks would return before the evening meal and allow Jystana to leave her contemplations for rest and another session with new physical tasks that would begin with the next day, her inability to fill her palm with anything but air forgotten until the next test. This time, however the monks did not come. Jystana remained frozen over night and into the morning, body aching, mind numb.

As the sunlight filtered into the practice room and slowly changed from the soft warmth of daybreak into the hot bath of mid-day, Jystana's mind snapped back from the emptiness of her palm to the realization that something was terribly wrong. The chimes that accompanied daily life with the monks had been silent all day. There had been no call to breakfast, no call to morning katas, no call to prayer.

Jystana slowly eased her body from the pose she had kept, ignoring the shooting pains along her protesting nerves from every inch of her body, and quietly left the practice room, listening for any sound of life among the many students and monks that lived and worked in the farm compound surrounding the school.

What she found was silence. The livestock did not stir in their pens. The wind did not creak through the trees, to break the complete and total stillness around her.


Jystana searched the buildings for any sign of life and the monks who had raised her only to find emptiness. A chair had been knocked over in the study, a meal had been half eaten in the dining hall, but not a person was present. Looking down on the hard packed road before her, Jystana noticed wagon wheels and drag-marks headed towards the all too hushed barn in front of her.

Cautiously, Jystana approached the barn, her nose picking up a tangy smell of blood and death before her hand even touched the door. The livestock had been slaughtered in the stalls, and pools of blood mingled with the dirt and hay as the marks continued into the tack-room towards the back of the structure. Jystana paused at the door, hand shaking in both fear and fatigue. She took a deep breath, and with the control that a lifetime of living with those of the Ashen Order brought, she slowly exhaled steeling her mind and body to the sight she knew in her heart lay behind the door.

Bodies lay stacked in heaps, discarded like the now useless blood soaked feed that filled the other bags that lined the room. It looked like all the monks, and a few of the older students, had either their throats slit from behind or their necks broken without any signs of struggle or fight. The younger students were all absent, vanished with whatever wagon left tracks out on the dirt road before the barn.

Jystana bent down and gently picked up the body of the closest monk to her, methodically beginning the grim task of granting the dignity in death that each of her teachers deserved. She would first lay them all out in the barn, where she could close their eyes and cover them with whatever blanket she could find, she thought, before she would either bury them, or create a large enough pyre to burn and release their bodies from the defiled state they were currently in.

As she returned to the room after removing a few bodies, she caught a slight movement out of the corner of her eye. One of the monks was still alive. Quickly Jystana pushed aside the other bodies crowding the monk, whose eyes were dim, but still somehow focused in on her face. It was the monk who had left her just yesterday, looking for something within herself that was missing.

"Assassins", he coughed through lips stained with blood. "Slavers."

Jystana nodded, as she examined his wounds. There was no way that she could save him, too much time had passed, too much blood lost.

Recognition crept into the monk's eyes, and he smiled, as his life slowly seeped away. "What," his voice faltered in strength, and a question he had asked her on countless occasions before passed his lips a final time, "what...did you find...in your palm."

Jystana's eyes flashed hatred, as she looked back into his eyes. "Purpose" she answered firmly, as she watched him sigh and take his last breath.

Purpose.