So this is not a canonical Kerisgame extra. It may or may not happen. Certainly, it assumes things about the point-of-view character, starting with the axiom that she's still alive. Depending on what Baisha is like if and when Keris reaches it on Orange Blossom's information, this piece of fiction is a dream that may never be sent, or may be sent to a different person, or may be sent bearing a different message.
Think of it as a teaser for a possible direction the next arc of the game may go in, and enjoy.
Midnight Augury
a mother's vision
The woman dreams.
In her dream, she is young again. She sits under the Tairan sky at the edge of the river, in the village she settled in two decades past. The air is peaceful and still, the silence broken only by the laughter and squeals of a child playing by the riverbank.
Her eyes drift to the child naturally, and it is her child; her little lost daughter. Her Keris, no older than the last time the woman saw her. A smile comes to the woman's lips, soft and sweet and unbearably sad.
Keris pays her no mind; thoroughly engrossed in levering a log upright from where it is half-sunk in the river mud. A stick in her hand serves as a spear, and she swipes enthusiastically at the air with it in imitation of her elders before jabbing her mud-covered wooden foe.
"So this is what Mother was like as a child. I suppose some things never change."
The woman isn't surprised, and turns to the figure suddenly beside her with the calm acceptance of a dream.
"She was always energetic," she agrees. The figure is probably female, but so utterly wrapped in dark mourning colours that she can say no more than that. Even its face is veiled behind blood-soaked silk, and as the woman stares at it an awful premonition wells up within her.
To raise a hand against this figure would bring doom down upon herself and all she loves. She knows it in her very bones.
"She was always violent, too," the figure - the goddess? - sighs. "But was that innate, or did she learn it from you, Grandmother? It's you she emulates when she takes up the spear, whether she knows it or not. What becomes of a child whose mother's dowry was murder?"
With a creaking groan, the log succumbs to Keris's ineffectual jabs and tips over, falling into the river with a mighty splash. Rather than lying there or floating away, it dissolves - and the waters run red with blood from within it. The supply is seemingly endless, and the stain spreads with terrible speed until the river is a charnel trough. The woman can see flickering fires reflected in it, and the sound of running water twists into the ring of steel, the crackling of flames and the screaming of villagers.
A chill goes up her back from memories a decade and a half old.
"I try to keep her contained," the goddess continues mercilessly. "But I don't know if I can, now. I can hope that they all deserve it, but I don't know how far she'll go or where she'll draw the line. I don't know if she'll stop."
"What..." the woman whispers. "What do you mean?"
It's little Keris who answers, waving from the bank of the blood-river and picking her way over to them; jumping from stone to stone in the mud and scrambling up the bank. Her hair has turned blood-red to match the river, the woman realises. When had it done that? The hazy logic of the dream had stopped her from noticing.
She reaches them and flops over her mother's lap like she always used to, and for a moment the woman reaches out to draw her into a hug. But then the little girl looks up, and her eyes...
... her
eyes...
Her eyes are grey, but it's the shining grey of sword and spearhead, and behind that there is blood - so much blood; an endless tide of it pouring from a hundred thousand corpses. There are wrathful flames, fierce and hot and hungry, and an ocean of cold, caustic hatred. There is pain and power and beauty and horror and glory; on and on and
on with no respite or mercy, because this is not a child. This is nothing like a child. This is something inconceivably vast and impossibly strong and intensely passionate, and already it is overflowing the fragile little form that houses it.
"Mama," says the thing wearing the face of her daughter, and its words shake the very mountains. "Mama, I've
found you."
Behind it, a scarlet rain begins to fall upwards from the blood-river, rising towards the sky. The sun is tinted red, but despite its presence the sky begins to darken. The wind picks up, carrying mad, delighted laughter to the woman's ears.
"I'm coming to get you, Mama," says the Keris-avatar. "I'll be there soon. I'll hunt down the ones who took you away and I'll kill them all."
The river screams, and before the woman's eyes it tears itself from its bed and pours upwards in a waterfall towards the night sky's crimson stars. The ground shudders with every word from the little girl's mouth, and the woman feels each syllable reverberate through her bones. The implacable resolve in the voice is as awful as it is terrifying.
"I'll kill the ones who took you and I'll kill the ones who they sent you to and I'll kill the ones who have you now. I'll kill and kill and kill until I reach you, Mama," says the thing. A god? A demon? But the figure beside her is a spirit, and
her voice doesn't make the sky fracture like a sheet of struck glass or open rents in the cliffs around them. The being speaking through the happy, smiling face of a five-year old child is something more.
"And then we'll be together again," it says in adoring tones that feel like hammer blows. "I've missed you. I never stopped missing you."
It blinks, and its eyes are windows into another world; alien and beautiful, strange and twisted, teeming with life that bears no resemblance to anything the woman knows.
Then it blinks again, and its eyes are the ones she remembers. Not worlds, not bottomless pools of carnage. Just the simple slate grey of her husband's gaze.
"I love you, Mama," Keris says, and hugs her. "I'll see you soon."
