Hakakit Oasis, True Kürdiala | Day, Year 7002 A.A.
The Hakakit Oasis was not still; it was alive. It breathed in ways that could not be charted on parchment or measured by any scholar's tools. The glass-leaved trees swayed not in answer to the wind, but to a song Adam could almost hear—a rhythm buried beneath thought, something older than the oldest tale. Their trunks, pale and translucent, seemed to shimmer with an inner pulse, as though the sap within them carried memory rather than life.
Above, waterfalls defied reason, pouring both upward and downward, their silver-gold currents bending across invisible arches of power. The sight should have disoriented Adam, but instead it filled him with the strange calm of a dream he had once known as a cub, and forgotten. Even the air carried dualities—jasmine sweet yet sharpened by the tang of ozone, a scent like rain falling on stones that had witnessed the birth of the world.
And beneath his paws, the grass shivered faintly, as if it too were waiting. Not with dread, but with expectancy.
Adam sat cross-legged at the oasis's heart. The mist clung to his blue fur, softening its wild edges, making him look younger than he had felt in years. His breath came slow, deliberate. Yet inside him, storms lingered—the clash of battle against Toran, the revelation of Kurtcan, the unbearable weight of his mother's name spoken aloud after so long a silence.
Across from him sat King Azubuike Toran. He did not posture, did not reign in this place. The waterfalls themselves leaned toward him, their arcs curved like courtiers bowing to their sovereign. His black-and-white fur was brushed in the fractured glow of water and light, and his violet eyes held something too ancient for words—at once a tenderness and a judgment.
For long moments, neither spoke. Only the hush of falling streams, the hum of leaves, the trembling of grass. Yet even in the silence Adam felt it—that unseen thing rising, unbidden, from the marrow of his being.
A rhythm.
It was not his heart. His own chest beat in its usual, uneven cadence, quickened slightly by the weight of all he had heard. But this other pulse came deeper. From bone. From blood. From the place where his very essence tethered itself to the world. It was old—older than the crown of Narn, older than kings or wars. It was steady, commanding, like the footfall of some eternal presence.
At first he thought it was the Oasis itself. The waterfalls, the trees, the glowing grass—all seemed to pulse with the same hidden cadence. But as he focused, as his breath aligned with the hum of the place, he realized the truth. The rhythm was not coming from around him.
It was coming from within him.
Adam's ears twitched. His throat tightened. He remembered Toran's words—the name spoken with such weight that it seemed to ring against the walls of his soul. Kurtcan. An Arcem that lived. A soul, eternal and unbroken, passed down through blood like a hidden covenant. His mother's gift. His mother's burden.
That pulse—it was Kurtcan.
"Mother?" The word escaped him before thought could shape it.
The pulse in Adam's chest had grown steady now—no longer a faint echo but a clear rhythm, like the beating of some colossal heart hidden within the bones of the world. Every inhale carried it further into him. Every exhale braided it more firmly into his own breath.
"Yes…" Toran's voice came like a low tide rolling across sand, patient and certain. The King leaned forward, the waterfall light catching against his fur so that he seemed cloaked in shifting silver. His violet eyes, softened yet unblinking, fastened upon Adam.
"You've caught the pulse," Toran said, and in his tone was neither doubt nor hesitation. "That's her. That's Kurtcan. It's the Arcem, your blood, your inheritance… all reachin' out."
The words struck not like blows but like the opening of gates—heavy, inevitable, unresistable. Adam's ears flattened as if the weight of what had been spoken pressed down upon him. Her. Mother. Kurtcan. All entwined. All inseparable.
And then Toran's voice shifted. No longer speech in the ordinary sense, but something older, deeper, like the chants of priests who have long since forgotten where their words come from, yet know them to be true.
"Feel her heartbeat. Feel the Oasis. The Mana. The world. The stars. All of it." His words rippled outward like concentric circles in water. "You aren't apart from it. You are within it. That which is, is not. That which is not, may yet become. There is no form. There is no other. There just is."
Adam trembled. Each phrase reverberated within him as though the King's voice had become the very vibration of his bones. It did not sound merely in his ears but in his blood, his breath, his very soul.
He wanted to protest—to say he could not bear more, that the revelations of Kurtcan already stretched his heart near to breaking—but his mouth would not move. His body was stilled, not by force, but by recognition. Somewhere deep he knew: this was the threshold. There would be no returning unchanged.
Toran reached out, his movements unhurried, deliberate as a rite. His paw, dark-furred yet glimmering faintly in the oasis's light, settled upon Adam's brow. The touch was not heavy. It was as gentle as rain falling on still water. Yet the moment contact was made, a spark leapt between them—no fire, no lightning, but something vast.
"And thus…" Toran's voice hushed to a whisper, a seal upon the invocation, "open the Eye of Mana."
Adam's body stiffened. His breath caught in his chest.
And then—
—he dissolved.
__________________________________
Adam's vision shattered like glass, yet there was no pain. No panic. Just the quiet certainty of something ending.
He did not fall. Falling would have meant direction, gravity, an expectation of what waited below. Instead, he was—broken apart, drawn through unseen threads, and then set down again in a place that could not have been reached by foot or portal.
A crystalline void.
Endless, shimmering, eternal.
He hung weightless, his paws suspended in an air that was not air, his breath caught in a chest that seemed more memory than flesh. Below him stretched a vast lake of mirrored light, its surface rippling without wind, pulsing in alternating hues of blue and white. The glow was alive, steady and immense, as though the lake itself were a slumbering heart.
Above and below, on every horizon, shards of crystal jutted from the nothingness—some the size of mountains, others no larger than a blade of grass. They floated in silence, suspended in perfect stillness, yet each hummed faintly, carrying a pitch that Adam somehow knew was older than stars. The shards did not shine from reflected light; they were light, fractured and pure, refracting into colors he had no names for.
Adam drifted in the middle of it, small, bewildered, blue fur faintly glowing in the mirrored lake's aura.
His throat tightened.
'What… is this place?'
He wanted to whisper it aloud, but the sound seemed profane in such silence. And yet, silence itself was not emptiness. It was fullness, like a temple at dawn, when incense still clings to the air and the worshippers have yet to speak. The silence here was alive.
Then, without warning—
It broke.
Adam's fur prickled as though a storm had swept through his body. The Crescent Moon at his throat glowed—not with fire, nor heat, but with gravity, as though something older than time itself were tugging it home. The light of the mirrored lake condensed in front of him, folding in on itself like breath exhaled into crystal.
A platform took shape—solid radiance, vast and smooth, suspended in the endless void.
And upon it sat a Wolf Tracient.
Not merely seated, but enthroned by stillness, as if the entire crystalline realm bent around his existence. He was the axis upon which this inner world turned.
His fur was deep midnight-blue, but it shimmered with flecks of pale gold, constellations moving and shifting across his body as though he were made of living starlight stolen from the vault of heaven. His mane fell long and silver-blue over his shoulders, strands moving with a slow, celestial gravity, each hair a comet's tail frozen in descent. His eyes—sapphire, pupil-less, endless—burned like ancient suns drowned in deep time, holding light that had travelled epochs to reach this moment.
At his throat hung a Crescent Moon necklace, akin to Adam's own. Larger. Heavier. The pendant seemed worn not by years, but by centuries of vigil, carved with lines of power no craftsman alive could inscribe, for they were the scripture of a soul's covenant.
The figure looked at Adam—not with curiosity, not with judgment, but with recognition profound and absolute.
And then he smiled.
"Hail and well met, Lord Adam."
Adam felt himself straighten involuntarily, as though the words were a physical hand upon his spine, aligning his very bones to a truer north. His breath hitched. He wanted to kneel, to weep, to flee—yet could only stand, caught in the gravitational pull of those sapphire suns.
"You are…" Adam whispered, his voice smaller than he intended, lost in the vastness.
"Kurtcan," the wolf declared, his voice a resonant bell tolling in a silent cathedral. "The First. The Forefather. I am he."
The name did not echo—it resonated. Not in the air, but in Adam's spine, in his ribs, in the very marrow of his bones. It was as though the word Kurtcan had always been hidden inside him, a dormant seed of identity, and now it had been spoken aloud into the sun, forcing it to burst into terrible, beautiful life.
Adam swallowed hard. The silence pressed in again, heavy but not cruel. "You are… real."
Kurtcan tilted his head slightly, a smile brushing his majestic muzzle. "As real as thou art. As real as the heartbeat thou carriest that is not thine own. I gave mine own soul to this Arcem—not to rule, but to serve. To protect the bearers. Mine children, whether through blood… or through sacred purpose."
The words struck Adam's chest like the deep, final stroke of a funeral bell. Children.
His eyes burned. His paws trembled at his sides, claws scraping softly on the crystal. His whole life he had wandered, untethered, a ghost in his own skin, carrying voices he could not name and a power that bucked against his grasp like a wild thing. Now, before him, was the source—not a theory, not a curse, but a person. A father of all that he was.
Adam lowered himself into a bow, his forehead nearly brushing the radiant, humming platform. His voice cracked, stripped of all artifice. "The honour… is mine."
Kurtcan's chuckle filled the crystalline void—not a laugh of amusement, but of deep, abiding kinship, warm and ancient as bedrock. The sound shook the lake below and made the floating shards above shimmer like a galaxy of struck bells.
"Nay, young Lord," he said, his tone gentler now, yet no less immense. "'Tis thou who art burdened with the walking forward. The honour is not mine to receive. I am but the watcher at the gate. The keeper of the flame."
Adam's eyes widened, the mirrored lake and crystalline void shimmering as though listening to the very rhythm of his soul.
"This place…"he whispered, unable to finish the thought, the awe too large for words.
"Kurtcan's Domain," the wolf proclaimed, gesturing with a slow sweep of his starlit paw to the vast crystalline horizon. His voice reverberated like low, distant thunder, steady and intimate all at once. "The mind of the Arcem. Our mind. This is where the bond doth begin. A communion of self and soul. Ere we are one, we must first know one another."
Adam swallowed, his throat parchment-dry. "I was told that… I could commune here with my Mother."
Kurtcan's glowing eyes softened, their solar fury banked to a hearth's warmth. "Aye. The Panther speaketh true. But first, tell me… knowest thou the adage of the Kurt Clan? The creed writ upon thy spirit ere thou drew first breath?"
The words rose unbidden, etched into Adam's heart as though they had been the first lesson of a life he could not remember. He nodded, and he and Kurtcan spoke in unison, their voices overlapping like a single, perfect chord struck from the harp of fate:
"For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack."
The saying did not merely ring through the crystalline air; it vibrated, shaking loose motes of light from the floating shards. It was not a mere proverb, but a vow. A covenant written in blood-light and soul-smoke.
"Yea," Kurtcan said gravely, the word a stone laid upon the foundation of the world. "Upon this vow was this Arcem bound. All the souls who have borne it—young and old, broken and whole, fierce and fading—are bound to it. And to thee. At thy call, they shall answer."
Adam's breath caught in his throat. A great, unseen ocean of presence rippled around him—echoes of countless lives, countless voices, a chorus of whispers from the past, all linked by the immutable chain of that promise.
His voice trembled, small against the weight of legacy. "Can I… can I behold her? My mother?"
Kurtcan's expression shifted, the light around him softening, warming, as if dawn were breaking within his very form. It was not joy, but something older, heavier—an old sorrow that had long since learned how to smile through the tears of ages. "Of course. For that is the deepest magic of this place—to look upon the face of love that shaped thee."
The First Wolf lifted one paw, the gesture slow, ritualistic.
The light changed.
His constellation-flecked form began to fade, not vanishing, but unraveling into threads of pure radiance that swirled like starlight poured upon a still pond. From within that coalescing brilliance, another form emerged—woven not of star-strewn night, but of captured moonlight and memory.
A she-wolf stepped forth.
Her fur shimmered silver-gray, kissed with strands of golden yellow that flowed like liquid sunlight from her crown. She wore no armor, no regal mantle, only a simple dress of impossible grace, its fabric seeming spun from twilight, embroidered with sigils that glowed faintly, humming a silent, ancient song. Upon her brow rested not a crown of metal, but a diadem of emerald light, pulsing with the same, familiar rhythm that had always stirred in the deepest chamber of Adam's chest.
But her eyes…
Adam froze, the air snatched from his lungs.
Her eyes were his own.
The same shape, the same set, the same depth of colour holding the same unspoken history of quiet strength and hidden pain. In that instant, a dam inside him, built over a lifetime of lonely fortitude, cracked, then shattered.
"Mom…"
The word came out raw, helpless, a plea and a prayer and a sob all tangled together into one broken syllable.
Amaia's composure, her serene and queenly bearing, faltered. Her smile broke like crystal under a sweet, unbearable pressure, reforming into something more human, more real. Her lips trembled as she whispered back—words softer than the first dew forming on dawn's grass, yet they struck him with the force of a monsoon:
"My sweet boy."
She stepped forward, not as a queen or a legend steps, but as a mother crosses a room to a crying child. "Thou hast… grown."
Her voice was music half-remembered from a dream. It was the memory of a lullaby whose tune he had forgotten but whose comfort had never left him. It was the sound of morning rain on the window of a safe room, a sound he had ached for without knowing why.
Adam could not speak. His chest convulsed, his throat closed around a knot of two decades of grief. Before thought, before dignity, before fear, he ran.
He crashed into her arms.
Though she was woven of spirit and memory-light, her embrace was utterly, devastatingly real—warm, solid, alive. She smelled faintly of jasmine and rain-cooled earth, a scent that bypassed memory and went straight to the primal core of knowing. Her paws wrapped around his trembling frame with a tenderness that could still the spinning of stars.
Adam buried his face against the soft fur of her shoulder, his body shaking with the force of silent, shuddering sobs. Words, broken and wet, clawed their way out. "I missed you. I missed you so much. Why—why did you leave me alone?"
Amaia pulled back just enough to cup his face between her paws. Her touch was steady, infinitely soft, her thumbs wiping away the tears that traced paths through the fur beneath his eyes. Her gaze held the weight of ten thousand unshed tears and yet glowed with a pride that time and tragedy could not tarnish.
"I did not wish to," she whispered, her own voice breaking even as it held firm. "Thy father and I… we fought with every breath, with every beat of our hearts, to keep thee alive. We gave everything. Everything."
Adam's breath shuddered in and out. The words were a balm and a brand—healing the orphan's void even as they seared him with the fresh pain of their truth. He wanted to believe her—his heart, howling in its lonely cell, screamed to believe her—but another, colder voice whispered from the shadows: Then why does it still feel like abandonment?
"Then why…" his voice cracked like thin ice. His paws came up, clenching gently around her wrists, holding on as if she might dissolve. "Why two Arcems? Why Kirin and Kurtcan? Why… me?"
Amaia's expression softened further, a faint, tremulous smile touching her muzzle. It was a smile of profound, sorrowful love.
"Because thou art us, Adam. Thou art the bridge. The one born not merely to survive the storm… but to still it. To awaken what slumbers."
Her words hung in the luminous air like prophecy given substance, sinking into him deeper than any blade could pierce, lodging in the very core of his destiny.
She placed one paw gently, reverently, over his chest. The Crescent Moon pendant pulsed in immediate, ardent response, threads of cerulean light spreading from beneath it through his fur like veins of living crystal, mapping a constellation of connection.
"We sealed both Arcems within thee," she said, her voice a soft chant. "Kirin, from thy father's line. Kurtcan, from mine. For we believed—we knew—thou wouldst be the one to carry them both. Not to bear two burdens, but to wield one truth. To remake what Narn hath forgotten."
The crystalline lake below brightened, its mirror-surface perfectly capturing their image—mother and son, bound by light, by lineage, by a love that had chosen sacrifice over surrender.
Adam's breath came in ragged, shallow waves. Part of him, the part that was tired and feared the weight of crowns, wanted to recoil. Remake what Narn forgot? Bridge between father and mother? The burden seemed astronomical, crushing, a yoke for giants, not for a lost Kaplan who had only just found his way.
But another part of him—deeper, older, the child who had waited in the dark—clung to one, blazing truth: She believed in me. They both did.
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When her tale was done, the echoes of her voice fading into the luminous air, Amaia lifted his paw and pressed it gently, firmly, against the place where her heart would be. Her form glowed brighter, intensifying, threads of silver and gold weaving around her like a cocoon of farewell and benediction.
"I am not gone, Adam," she whispered, the sound like wind through sacred leaves. "I am with thee. In every beat of thy heart that remembers love. In every step taken in defiance of darkness. I will always be with thee."
Tears, hot and unresisted, blurred his vision, spilling over and tracing new paths through his fur. His chest ached with a release so profound it was akin to birth—the final, painful expulsion of a loneliness that had been his constant companion. He tried to speak, to give voice to the torrent within, but his voice broke under the weight of a gratitude and a grief too vast for language.
And then—she began to fade.
Not suddenly, but gradually, like the most beautiful of dawns surrendering to full day. Her body dissolved not into nothingness, but into a radiance that was pure essence, warm and soft as a remembered blanket. It wrapped around his chest, seeped into his skin, and was drawn into the hungry, waiting light of the Crescent Moon pendant at his throat.
The pendant blazed with sudden, silent brilliance, a small supernova against his fur, its pulse locking into perfect, eternal rhythm with the hammering of his own heart.
Adam gasped, his paw flying up to clutch it instinctively. The metal was warm, alive. She's inside… she's here.
The void around them grew quiet, a respectful, reverent silence settling over the lake and the crystal spires.
From the dissolving, golden-silver light, Kurtcan's vast form reassembled itself. Starlight gathered, constellations snapping back into place, until he sat once more upon the crystal's edge, his majesty restored. His sapphire eyes fixed upon Adam—not with command, but with a solemn, timeless inquiry.
"So, Lord Adam," Kurtcan asked, his voice low, weighted with the dust of epochs and the fire of stars, "dost thou accept what thine eyes have beheld? What hath been bestowed upon thee, by blood and by sacrifice?"
Adam rose slowly. Every muscle trembled with spent emotion, but his stance was unbroken, rooted. The tears still glistened on his fur, but they no longer weakened him; they crowned him, jewels of a hard-won understanding. His voice, when it came, was steady, firm, and carried the echo of his mother's strength:
"I do."
Kurtcan inclined his great head, a gesture of immense respect. "And wilt thou walk the path of mine Evrimci—mine Chosen? Wilt thou bear the covenant forward, under moon and star, through shadow and siege?"
The mirrored lake brightened, its surface shimmering, reflecting Adam's form not as a single being, but as the focal point of converging lines of light and legacy.
Adam's eyes, which had burned with sorrow, now kindled with a different fire. A fierce, yellow light ignited within them, glowing like twin captive moons. His voice carried not just resolve, but the gravity of a vow spoken upon the anvil of fate:
"I will bring justice. In thy name. In her name. For the Pack."
Kurtcan's lips curled in a faint, solemn smile, an expression of sorrow and pride intertwined. He rose to his full, towering height, his mane falling in waves of silver-blue like a waterfall of frozen sky. "Then I bind myself to thee. Until we are one in purpose, I serve. Until Narn remembereth its heart, I guide."
With that, his form ignited into a pillar of pure, silent light. The constellations of his fur scattered like a thousand stars flung from a celestial hand, then wheeled, folding inward in a glorious, terrifying spiral aimed at the centre of Adam's being.
The brilliance struck him.
It was fire and ice, a weight that promised flight, a crushing pressure that contained infinite freedom. It was power—not as a foreign invasion, but as a homecoming, a reclaiming of a birthright he had always carried in dormant fragments. It flooded him, fused with him, etched the vow of the Pack into every fibre of his soul.
He staggered, a soundless cry tearing from his throat, paws pressed against the now-blazing pendant as Kurtcan's essence completed its journey home. The mirrored lake beneath rippled violently, then stilled, its surface now reflecting a single figure—Adam—but within his outline blazed the intricate, double-helix light of two spirits made whole.
And then—
Silence.
________________________________________
Adam's eyes snapped open.
The world that greeted him was the same—and yet utterly changed.
The Oasis, with its silver-gold waterfalls and glass-leaved trees, had not shifted in form. And yet, every fiber of it seemed to bend toward him, as though acknowledging something newly born.
The air rippled with pressure, like the breath of a great beast exhaled around him. The waterfalls no longer fell neutrally, but leaned subtly in his direction, curving as though they sought to draw near. The trees shivered, though no wind moved through their branches. The very grass beneath him pulsed faintly with light, its rhythm answering the cadence of his heartbeat.
'The world is… listening to me,' Adam thought, his chest tightening. 'No— not to me. To Kurtcan. To us.'
The mana of the Oasis, once a quiet thrum in the background, now surged in spirals he could see—slow arcs of radiance weaving patterns through the mist, like celestial calligraphy written in the air.
And then—before him—light condensed.
It took form not in armor, nor in flame, but in something both simple and terrible: a bladeless sword hilt. Its frame glowed with soft blue-white radiance, as though carved from condensed moonlight. From the empty crossguard extended no steel.
The weapon hummed. Not with aggression. Not with raw destruction. But with identity.
Adam's breath caught.
From nearby, Toran stepped forward. His indigo eyes, wide with awe, softened into pride. He had seen the fiercest weapons of war, the oldest relics of Asalan's forging—yet this, even for him, was beyond measure.
"This…" Toran said slowly, reverently, "is the Mantle of the Arcem. Kurtcan's blade, shaped by your will. The Eye of Mana opens now—and Hisame answers."
The name lingered in the air like thunder after lightning.
Adam stared at the hilt, heart pounding in his chest like a drum. Every instinct screamed that this was no mere tool. This was vow made manifest. A covenant forged between his blood, his mother, Kurtcan, and the world itself.
His paw trembled as he lifted it toward the hilt. With a sharp inhale, Adam closed his paw around the hilt.
The Oasis exhaled.
A wave of invisible force rippled outward, bending grass, bowing trees, curving waterfalls. The mist swirled in spirals around him, radiant with unseen light. Every living thing seemed to incline, not out of fear, but acknowledgment—like courtiers bending knee to a newly crowned king.
Adam's eyes widened, his heart racing.
The blade in his grasp pulsed, humming in time with his heartbeat, alive with resonance. It was not foreign. It was not a stranger's weapon placed in his hands. It was the final piece of himself, returned at last.
Behind him, Toran bowed his head, not in mock ceremony, but in reverent truth. "It is done," he whispered. "The bond is sealed. You are no longer just heir, Adam. You are bearer of Kurtcan."
________________________________________
Adam rose slowly, Hisame in his grip.
The weapon's light was steady now, pulsing with the rhythm of his heart. As he stood, the glow spread across his body—not as fire, nor as armor, but as threads of crystalline lines that shimmered faintly across his blue fur. They traced him like constellations etched into flesh, flowing and shifting with every breath.
His eyes, once bright light, now burned with an inner crystalline blue so deep it seemed endless. Within those depths, golden flecks swirled slowly, orbiting like stars locked in the dance of a universe. He was no longer merely looking at the world—he was beholding it, unveiled and eternal.
His breathing was steady. Slow. Sovereign.
"I can hear it all," Adam whispered, his voice carrying not with force but with inevitability. "The rivers. The roots. The silence between thoughts. Everything."
The Oasis seemed to confirm his words. The waterfalls leaned inward with deeper curvature, their currents resonating like a chorus answering a hymn. The grass thrummed beneath his feet, attuned to the same frequency. Even the air was alive, its stillness heavy with reverence, as though holding its breath for him.
Toran approached, his steps unhurried, his violet eyes solemn. He carried no crown in this moment, no mantle of kinghood—only the quiet weight of one who had seen history unfold, and who knew when it had just shifted forever.
"That's the Eye of Mana," Toran said, his voice low and unadorned. "You don't just wield power anymore, Adam. You see what it is. What it isn't. What it wants to be."
Adam turned his gaze upward. The sky above the Oasis was not ordinary sky—it shimmered with veils of light, as though the heavens themselves had bent low to watch. For a long moment, he let his eyes drink it in.
"I won't waste it," he said.
There was no arrogance in the words, no youthful fire. Only resolution, spoken with the gravity of one who had finally stopped asking why me and begun to say because it must be me.
Toran stepped closer, resting a paw on Adam's shoulder. The gesture was paternal, yet the weight of his touch carried both blessing and warning.
"The race begins now," Toran said. His voice was no longer gentle; it was edged with steel. "And time's not on your side."
Adam closed his eyes briefly, then nodded once. Hisame pulsed in agreement, its runes flaring.
"Let them come," Adam said. His voice carried across the Oasis like a vow. "Let the false kings rise. I'll answer."