Tap, tap-tap-tap, tap, tap-tap-tap…
Chakra wanted to cover his ears, but that meant letting go of the paper in his hands. He had to keep reading so the tapping wouldn’t madden him. He cowered in Mother’s shadow while she roared in the face of a towering warkey.
She waved her arms, drawing runes of distorted circles and arcs and loops in the air with her pen to break the synchronicity of its taps. She was no PenWielder, but Chakra prayed her dance drove the warkey insane.
“Embrace the imperfection,” he chanted, peering at the handwriting the best he could.
They should’ve never left the caldera, their haven. Why did he goad her to forage in the valleys when he should’ve known better? Father would never forgive him, and Dharma would grow up with barely a memory of their mother.
“Modulate your voice, Chakra,” she screamed. “Always break the pattern!”
He obeyed, blinking tears, turning the paper upside down and sideways to ensure he didn’t commit the words to memory. Memorization relied on patterns, and patterns paved the way for baneful perfection. The tapping grew louder, and Chakra risked a look.
How could he not? He’d heard of these horrid monsters all his life. From between Mother’s feet, he took in the closest of the horde of warkeys that loomed like aged trees. A long spindle of metal shaped into a coil had taken root in the ground, and upon this spring sat a large trapezoidal dome eclipsing the skies. The dome compressed and decompressed the spring in a hypnotic pattern of mind-shackling periodicity. Each shift reported a boom louder than a clap of thunder.
Mother’s knees buckled, and she staggered, masking his view. Chakra reared, shivering.
A tentacled spring for an arm lurched from the dome and scooped her up. She squealed and fought, brandishing her pen in a losing duel, but the spring coils compressed, shattering the symmetry of her anatomy, and unleashed an earthbound torrent of her flesh.
Chakra had learned to grow up with the image of Mother’s final moments burned into the back of his eyelids as his punishment, reliving her death each time he blinked or when he tried to sleep. The tapping, though. It gnawed at his sanity from the deep burrows in his ears. Twenty summers had passed, and he still questioned why the warkeys left him with their haunting metronome.
Father, in his dying breath, named Dharma the next PenWielder, and Chakra had accepted it. Foregoing his birthright was what he deserved for leading Mother to her grave. Instead, he honed his skills to become Master Pensmith under Grandfather’s training.
“Brother, do you hear me at all?”
Chakra blinked into the present. He sat in the colony’s council hall with his Pensmith Guild. He shifted in his seat, which wobbled on uneven legs. “I apologize. Must’ve spaced out.”
Dharma, built like an oak tree with eyes reminiscent of Mother’s dark brown irises, gazed with pity and concern from his metal-framed seat atop the stilted dais. “It’s okay, Master Pensmith. I was asking if you took stock of our warpen armory.”
“Yes.” Chakra cleared his throat and fumbled with the paper in hand. One blink, and it morphed into the little chit he’d clutched as a boy, blotted with Mother’s blood. His fingers shook. “We have twenty thousand Grade Ones, five thousand Twos, and a thousand Threes. The guild has a hundred active pensmiths across the five forge stations. Each of them can forge ten warpens of each grade a day. That comes to twelve thousand before the warkey horde reaches us.”
Dharma rubbed his chin and turned to Chakra’s wife next to him on the dais. “How soon can you imbue them all, Asha?”
She wound her plaited hair into a coil as she pondered over the numbers. Chakra clenched his jaw but remained seated, unable to look away from the helixes of her braid.
“The best we can do is thousand a day. A fifth of my sisters are to guard the library.”
Dharma didn’t look impressed; his thick brows wrinkled. Chakra wanted to iron them out with a lick of his thumb. But they each had a duty to fulfill, and honoring titles over kinship was paramount. “Indeed. Safeguarding our texts through this assault is of equal importance, after all.”
“We haven’t talked about the biggest tactical advantage warkeys have over warpens,” said Chakra. “Keysmiths have now forged new models of warkeys that build on each other’s tapping to create resonance. It’s how they breached the outer walls last summer. And they have supposedly gotten better now. With a wave so powerful, they can break our runic walls easily.”
An uncomfortable silence settled. The colony had given Chakra many names for surviving the horrors of warkey sighting and staying sane. Everything from mother-killer to pattern-eyes. Chakra had let none of that upset him because he’d had Dharma and Asha by his side.
Dharma’s piercing stare now shook the foundations of that solace.
“I have an idea for combining numbers and power,” Chakra added quickly. “The trick lies in how the warkeys generate their tapping. If we create a new type of warpen—”
The PenWielder rose from his seat. “We discussed this before, Master Pensmith. Much as I want to invest in new types of ammunition, we cannot waste time on testing and perfecting them when the warkeys will be upon our gates in five days.”
“Clickable pens don’t need imbuing, so we can produce more—”
Dharma spoke over him, his voice cold and firm as steel. “Every system of chaos needs a compass of unpredictable randomness; upon that, we lay our trust. The warkeys need the assurance of predictability, and your obsession with adding clicks to our design plays right into their strengths. We will defeat them by forging our biggest assembly of runic warpens yet.” He looked from Chakra to the guild. “Are you ready to serve your colony, pensmiths?”
“Aye, Wielder!” hollered the smiths, pumping fists into the air and rising as one.
“Will you do what it takes to fight these warkeys and end the War for Patterning?”
“Aye!”
“Then open your forges, and let’s create an army to be reckoned with.”
Chakra sat glued to his seat, astounded not just at being undermined, but at the underminer being his own blood. As pensmiths dispersed, Dharma and Asha stepped off the dais, and while a group of smiths snared the Wielder for a chat, Asha walked over to Chakra. She bent down for a kiss and Chakra met her lips. She patted his chest and smiled. “Are you alright, dear?”
He gazed into her eyes; their warmth, the comfort in her touch, the soothing calm it lent his chest each time they shared the same air. “I know my idea works. I’ve seen the tapping, and I know it works.” He didn’t care that he repeated himself. “I can’t erase it, and yet I’m helpless to make it stop.” He brought a shaking, clenched fist to his mouth and bit on the knuckle.
Her fingers combed through his hair, nails massaging his scalp erratically, just the way he liked. “Don’t you see why it scares the rest of us? We fight patterns; we don’t yield to them. Runic pens write free, but clicking restricts the ways a pen can move. We risk producing patterns.”
“I’ve been a pensmith for fifteen years. I know what I’m doing.”
“It isn’t your penmanship we question. I thank the gods you don’t suffer like the scourged ones; that warkey spared your sanity and gave you a chance to heal.” She sighed. “What happened to your mother isn’t your fault. I know it, Dharma knows it. The colony does, too. All you need is to accept it and join us. This is too heavy a burden to carry on your own.”
Chakra had heard versions of this rhetoric before. Asha always phrased her arguments in various ways, but the pattern in her message, her worry that he was always one outburst away from snapping and becoming the scourged, sickened him. Everyone only ever saw him with doubt and pity if not fear. He dipped his chin, considering his callused hands that’d forged countless warpens over the years. “Steady is the hand that wields a powerful pen,” Grandfather used to say. Chakra clenched his fist and squeezed, sensing the steadiness in his grip. He had to do this.
“Come now. Let’s go home and have dinner; think things through.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to my station.”
“Chakra… let your mind rest tonight.”
“Isn’t it hunger that drives a beast to run twice as far as it otherwise would?”
“Sometimes it’s fear.”
Chakra’s first stop was Scourge Alley.
Prestigious as pensmithing and calligraphy were, the colony wouldn’t function if everyone did just that. The privileged had to stand on the shoulders of the brave and the selfless, and the common folk were among the bravest and the most selfless Chakra knew. As farmers, foragers, and peddlers, they left the caldera each day for work, risking their lives. And that meant one out of every ten would inevitably encounter a warkey in the wild and return as a husk of their former self, as a scourged, forever haunted by what they’d endured.
As Chakra walked, heads turned, glazed eyes taking him in, mouths agape as if pried open by unasked questions and untold stories. Thanks to the PenWielder’s Relief Fund, the scourged were well-fed and sheltered, but they were humans too, in need of companionship and love, which was why they congregated in this alley among others who understood them.
Visiting the alley was a habit rather than a pattern Chakra had cultivated. Here, he didn’t have to explain himself every step of the way or force himself to behave like the normal ones did. This alley felt like home. And where else but home to act without judgment? The folks here knew what it was like to stare at a warkey up close, not simply read about it in scrambled texts. They’d felt a key’s rhythms echo in their ribs and between their ears, and if he told them about clickable warpens, they’d get it. Hopefully, they’d join him. To make enough clickable pens before the warkey horde showed in five days, he needed more minds like his, pensmiths who’d endured a warkey’s horror and understood how to defeat it.
Chakra’s forge could run about forty to fifty stations at full capacity. All boys in the colony trained in pensmithing before they came of age; luckily for Chakra, he’d rallied a hundred scourged men to work in shifts, who still recalled their lessons even if in flashes. With four days to go and each man forging ten to twenty click-pens a day, they could amass at least four thousand. Enough to make a difference.
“The large coils these tetrahedral domes rest on aren’t responsible for the tapping,” he explained once he’d gathered everyone. “In their domes, tiny coils buckle when the large coil compresses. These springs touch resonator plates that produce the terrifying taps.”
“You speak as if you’ve been inside a warkey,” mewled a scourged.
“I was so close to a warkey I might’ve as well been inside,” Chakra said, and it seemed to satisfy the skeptic. “What’s key to note is uniformity in the buckling, which dictates that a constant force must act on the dome of each warkey to produce notes of the same frequency.
“There lies the trick. Our clicks will employ discordant harmony. The spring in our new warpen will buckle with a frequency shifted from others in the unit. No two pens will click at the same rate. So, when we wield them, the interference will manifest as dissonant noise.”
“Aren’t warkeys immune to noise?” asked another.
“Indeed. Warkeys of today have filters that cancel out noise because it has no pattern. But as my late mother said, modulate your voice.”
“So,” a third one said, rising. “Each pen will click at the same rate to form a pattern, but the other pens follow their own rates. A noise of patterns!”
Chakra smiled. “From order, there is chaos—warkeys will simply be confused and submit to the maddening. You see it now, don’t you?”
“Oh yes,” he said, flashing an intelligent grin. “Maddeningly beautiful.”
Four days later, on the eve of the assault from the warkeys, Chakra turned to Grandfather for advice. A PenWielder’s duty was to wield the pen, never embody it, yet the old man’s last wish had been to imbue his soul in his pen, bringing great shame to Father. Perhaps that was why Father had bequeathed the pen to Chakra—a shameful possession for the shameful son.
Chakra considered it an honor, though, and took great care of it, polishing its sleek gilded body and ensuring its fine-tipped nib remained crooked to lend it the coveted flaw. Little divots decorated its frame, and the pen itself rested on a velvet pillow atop a varnished wooden plinth encased in glass at Chakra’s residence. Grandfather too, from the confines of his pen, had forged a warm bond with Chakra. In fact, he’d been first in the family to not regard him with pity or hate when he’d returned home covered in Mother’s gore.
Chakra knelt before the plinth. “I only wish I did this with Dharma’s blessing. I don’t wish ill upon him, and he’s been nothing but patient toward me. But if he finds out I’ve used my forge station not to build him warpens, but to make a new grade…”
“You overthink, Chakra,” Grandfather spoke in his baritone, his voice filtering through the grooves in the pen and the tiny pores in the glass casing. “Think of our history, boy. Everything we have is because someone fought for us to have it. When pencillers fought erasers in the War for Permanence, there wasn’t a final victory but a lengthy stalemate until pencillers came together and created the first warpen. Sure, it ran on ink and etched runes that a single spell of rain could wash away, but it mattered that they innovated an industry. Don’t you fret about the implications of your deed, because the time is upon us to innovate again and bring victory.”
“The root of my concern is such, Grandpa,” said Chakra. “The pencillers forged the first warpen together. Yet I’m alone in my vision. Against my brother.”
“Did I ever tell you of a time when pencillers and erasers lived in harmony? They even made instruments that drew on one end and erased on the other. Independent thought was a fabled idea then. If a penciller drew something wrong, an eraser undid it. It wasn’t until erasers thought for themselves and undid things not meant to be undone that pencillers rebelled for permanence.”
Chakra wasn’t in the mood for a sermon, and Grandfather lapsed into oodles of them these days. “I wish I had the sensibility to grasp the wisdom in our history.”
“My point is, dear boy, thought can swing whichever way the mind steers it. Erasers who were good turned envious. The pens that scribed treatises and tomes spanning the age of ancestral men also signified treaties that ended wars. A pen, then, was an instrument, a symbol for a tool of trade, something men passed from one to the other as a token of gratitude.
“At the same time, pens were lost by the millions. Some lost purpose when the ink ran dry; others died from prolonged use. So, in their quest for indelibility, they adapted to etch not on parchment, but the earth and skies and water. For the first time, a pen learned to wield power.”
Gooseflesh rippled along Chakra’s arms. He didn’t dare interrupt the old man just yet.
“It wasn’t a penciller who wanted to forge the first breed of a warpen, Chakra. It’s the pen that wills, and it is their will we command to this date, their destiny we etch. You get me, boy?”
Chakra nodded. “This… idea of mine. I’m just a conduit for their next adaptation.”
“They spoke, and you were the one that listened.”
“And now I must make Dharma listen.”
“Take me along. Let me knock sense into that little dome your brother calls his head.”
When Chakra arrived at his forge station, the PenWielder was already there, surveying the entire stock of click-pens Chakra had forged in secret with the scourged. He’d come with masters of the other four stations, who made a show of outrage by tipping over crates and cursing as the click-pens, long as a grown man’s forearm, clattered to the floor.
Dharma made it to Chakra in long strides, denting a few pens with the might of his boots.
“Tell me you had no part in this. Tell me, Brother, these hooligan scourges are to blame.”
Chakra saw in him nothing but a frightened kid desperate to be right.
Dharma shook his head. “Your arrogance has rendered this station useless. Our armory now is thousands of warpens shorter, Chakra. Is this what you wanted, or have you lost touch with reality? Tomorrow when the caldera falls and keysmiths overrun our corpses, who will be to blame? You, a reckless subordinate, or I, the one supposed to captain us to victory?”
“Victory lies in disruption, petulant child,” growled Grandfather from his pen that Chakra had clipped to his tunic pocket. Dharma’s wide eyes slid to it, and Chakra swore a nerve on his face had popped. “A good wielder knows when to stand his ground, but a wise one knows when to listen to the penmanship of his ‘reckless subordinates.’ Now, which one are you?”
“The one that asks his grandfather to keep his unsolicited advice to himself.”
“You dare insult me?” Grandfather scoffed, and his anger reverberated in Chakra’s chest. “Don’t you forget I’m your predecessor once removed.”
“You forget you’re twice removed,” said Dharma through gritted teeth, glaring at Chakra.
“There it is,” said Chakra, having had enough. “I finally see a shadow of Father’s sword-edged bravado in you. This isn’t about the deficit in the armory or my penmanship, but about your older brother undermining your stature and word as the PenWielder, am I right?”
Dharma took a step closer, a shadow falling over his face. “Tell me, how many lives have you lost on your watch? Certainly one.” He scoffed. “We’re not new to bearing the responsibility of death. It is I who contends with sending our men and women into the wilderness each day, and it is I who embraces them and their loved ones when they return changed or, worse, don’t return at all. That is the burden I bear, and obeying my word is the price everyone pays in return.” Chakra thought he saw a flicker of guilt in Dharma’s eyes.
“What about my burden? The ‘certainly one’ you mock was our mother. You were too young to remember, let alone see her… like that. Red, so much red…” Chakra gulped. Dharma’s cold eyes twitched, but he didn’t break. “That is the burden driving me, not the poisoned touch of keys, like the lot of you speculate.”
The thawing emotion on Dharma’s face hardened quickly. “Chain him.”
“You make a grave mistake,” growled Grandfather.
“And dispose of these pens before—”
“Stop,” shouted Chakra, as his skin prickled. The station masters advanced faster, guiding him towards a network of pulleys used to hoist warpen cartons. It wasn’t the cuffs snapping around his wrists that injected fear in Chakra, but the rhythmic waves rumbling through the night air.
“They’re here,” he gasped. The horde had arrived a day sooner. “I feel their resonance.”
“Yes,” squealed a scourged, cowering. The rest squirmed with hands on their temples.
“He’s lying,” said a master. “He seeks to delay the destruction of these evil pens.”
“No,” Dharma said, backing away. “Leave them be. Sound the sirens, load your warpens to the frontier train and seek shelter with the rest. Send word to Asha to round up the people in the library.” With a fist raised, he yelled, “For the future!” And the smiths echoed it with gusto.
Dharma bolted, robes fluttering in his wake. A mad scramble ensued as pensmiths filed out of the warehouse. The scourged, equally immune to the tapping, hurried out for a better look.
“Reach for me with your teeth, boy,” said Grandfather.
Chakra tried to wrench his wrists free; the cuffs wouldn’t give. Running people cast long shadows on the warehouse floor. He fretted for Asha’s safety, but she knew the drill. Dangling from the cuffs, he moved in a loose circle, tips of his boots scraping the floor.
“Clamp me in your teeth and pull up,” Grandfather said. “Angle the nib to the chain-link. There’s enough calligraphic power imbued in this for my wielding to melt metal.”
Chakra’s eyes widened. “But Grandpa, you need the imbuement to—”
“What did I tell you about a pen’s will, boy?” Grandfather said, his voice so stentorian that it drowned out the chaos outside the warehouse for a moment. “It can sense its owner’s thoughts from the pressure of his clench, the sweat his fingers leave on the grip. Just like I now sense your beating heart and the ambition it has wielded in you. Let me do my damn job.”
Chakra plucked the pen from his shirt pocket with his teeth, gripped the chains, and pulled. His own weight was a formidable foe, but he pulled with all he had until his muscles burned. Angling the curved nib, he held it against the chain-link with quivering lips.
“Hold it steady,” grumbled Grandfather as a purple flash sizzled from the tip, girding the iron link. In moments, it went from a dull gray to bright orange to blazing white. Snap! Chakra squealed through clenched teeth. “Now, the other hand, quick!”
“Are you alright, Grandpa?” he asked once he’d dropped free. The pen was hot to touch, and the curved nib had vaporized. “Grandpa?”
“Let me catch a breath, you blithering blunderbuss.”
Chakra grinned, clipping the pen to his pocket.
But his relief faded at exiting the station. The resonance had gotten so strong that people had no time to reach shelters. Women, men, and children sprawled on the ground, frantically chanting and leafing through handwritten tomes. Staring at deformed shapes was the only salvation from the assault.
It affected Chakra differently. In-between the odd pattern of taps, all he heard was a strange melody, a vague note of a human’s call. The note inserted a hook into his mind and drew him a step forward. It was a state of limbo, between awakening and dreaming, resisting and succumbing. At the frontier, where the caldera ended in giant spikes of walls jutting into the starlit sky, loomed the silhouettes of tetrahedral domes, bobbing up and down, up and down.
Tap, tap-tap-tap, tap, tap-tap-tap…
“Aren’t they beautiful?” murmured a scourged one from beside him, eyes transfixed by the breach at the border. “Maybe it’s time we embrace perfection.”
“No,” Chakra snapped, shoving him to break his illusion. The man stumbled, shaking his head and blinking rapidly. Behind him, at the warehouse’s mouth, assembled the other scourged.
“Roll out the click-pens,” Chakra cried. Even those scourges keenly watching the warkeys now moved. “Bring the cartons over to the frontier. I’ll lead the way.”
“Your brother won’t wield these,” a scourged yelled over the drowning wave of taps.
“I know,” Chakra said, facing the direction of the assault. “Which is why I must.”
A storm of flashes pixelated the air at the frontier like an orgy of fireflies against the tapping that molded hearts to beat to its accord. Swathes of clouds cleared the path for the titanic monsters of metal to survey their prey. The sky had the transcendent quality of a total eclipse.
Chakra raced along the last street with sheer power in his legs. Behind him hurtled an army of the scourged, lugging wagons of cartons. Like a bridled horse, Chakra focused on the collective mass of warkeys noodling their way up the colony walls. The frontier’s key attraction was the lake that separated the colony’s first settlements and the caldera’s spiked walls. On top of one such spike, the tallest, in fact, stood PenWielder Dharma.
Chakra panted, hands on his knees, as he waited for the scourged to catch up.
Dharma’s robes of silk buffeted. In one hand, he held his pen, a golden instrument. Sizzling light burst forth from its tip to the air in aperiodic swings, jabs, and twirls he orchestrated.
Overhead shimmered every grade of warpen in the armory, each etching a runic symbol so unhinged from a world of pattern that a few warkeys had simply frozen, their coils grinding in ways that blew apart their inner mechanisms.
From behind turrets mounted along the smaller spikes, soldiers catapulted incendiaries, melting the coils that steered these keys. But for each fallen comrade, another warkey bobbed into view, puncturing through the low-hanging clouds snaring the caldera. Some keys climbed atop the others and leapt over the wall to land on the lake, destroying the protective runes cast upon the waters. The soldiers pivoted to tackle them even as few yielded to the power of resonance and either raked themselves to a bloodied pulp or plunged to their deaths down the steep walls.
“Hurry!” Chakra yelled when the warkey unleashed tentacles from its dome and into the lake. They returned holding boulders that became cannonballs. Some flattened the soldier stations, detonating a stockade of unlaunched bombs. Other boulders were aimed at Dharma.
A few punctured his veil of runes, but Dharma deftly penned new ones.
Chakra closed his eyes and saw Mother’s horror-struck face, and he heard the faint echo of Father’s teachings from when the times were simpler and he’d been the intended successor.
“A sword draws blood, but a pen bleeds to draw. Its might is sacrificial liberty, and its bond with the wielder is more intimate than the one between him and his shadow. Don’t test or challenge it. Wielding isn’t about you. It isn’t an extension of your limb, but you are part of its forge.”
Pain blossomed in Chakra’s chest as a communal outcry from five thousand click-pens surged into him like a jolt of current. It threatened to push him to the ground, but he thought of his parents again, and of Dharma, who had now slipped toward a decisive loss and screamed Chakra’s name. He gritted his teeth at the thought of the warkey horde that threatened to destroy his home.
A pattern twenty summers in the making had to be broken.
Chakra’s arms shot wide, and a world-dwarfing scream erupted in his throat. One of the scourged handed him a click-pen, and it welded onto his hand. When he wielded, it yielded. With him, the entire army of the scourged deployed clickers of their own, and at his assertion, they acted.
The coils in the bodies of these warpens buckled, but unlike the monotone of warkey tapping, each pen clicked out of phase with its brethren. The resulting backlash sundered the resonant onslaught. The lake rippled, spurring eddies and waves that lashed the warkey submerged in it.
The monsters, irked, sprang tentacles at Chakra, but the discordant harmony broke their rhythmic oscillations, letting soldiers recoup and attack. Runic warpens regained strength and under the net counterattack, the tetrahedral domes fissured, unwinding in an earthbound torrent of coils and disemboweled wires. As one, the horde had risen and as one, it collapsed.
“You’ve brought us great pride, my boy,” said Grandfather as Chakra sat at the lake’s edge, water licking his boots. “Oh, what joy it was to experience your wielding!”
Chakra smiled. It was a tired one.
“Can we have a moment, Brother?”
Chakra rose and turned to find Dharma, hair tousled, robes pocked and grimy. But nothing beat the boyish smile on his face, and Chakra did everything in his power not to pull him into a hug. When Dharma eyed the pen on Chakra’s tunic, he smiled and passed the pen to Asha.
Dharma walked to the lake’s edge and faced the rising sun that peeked from between the spiked walls. “I hope you didn’t mind my outburst at the station, as insincere as it was.”
Chakra frowned. Was Dharma apologizing? “It’s alright, I understood your apprehension.”
Dharma’s smile dimpled his cheeks. “Very well. Congratulations on your promotion.”
Chakra furrowed his brows. “Promotion?”
The glint of sunlight in his dark eyes foretold a grievous turn of thought. “Recall how you paraded your idea of click-pens at the Pensmith Guild meeting?”
“Four days ago, yes. I’m sorry if I—”
Dharma laughed, shaking his head. “No, Brother, you convinced me. Right then and there you did, yes. I couldn’t openly lend support because the smiths would have thought I was siding with my insane brother this close to the assault. But I believed in your invention and even saw a golden opportunity. So, I let you forge in secret and looked the other way for as long as I needed to.”
“As long as you needed to?” asked Chakra, grappling with all of it.
Dharma shrugged. “Well, I had to sell my anger. To make a show of it all. Why else would I bring the other station masters with me?” He laid a hand on Chakra’s shoulder. “I’m installing a new post, Deputy PenWielder, and as one, you’ll keep forging click-pens for us.”
Chakra rubbed his forehead. “I don’t understand. Why?”
Dharma chuckled. “Because peace is the biggest of all patterns that weaken us. What is it, but an ideal? Endure it long enough, you enter a rut. We need war. Aperiodic, unexpected.”
Like today. Chakra’s throat ran dry. “You knew the horde would arrive a day sooner?”
“I planned it. With a batch of your click-pens, Brother. I used them to send out a wave of resonant clicks. It’s how I made the warkeys arrive sooner than they’d have on their own.”
“What about the people who died in this carnage because we weren’t prepared?”
Dharma sighed. “Recall what I said in the warehouse? That’s my burden to bear.”
Chakra stared at him in shock. Was this his little Dharma anymore? Chakra had once admired his eyes for their resemblance to Mother’s, but now it filled him with anger at the disgraceful son inheriting her trait.
As the PenWielder walked away, head held high, waving to the crowd, Chakra stood still, realizing at last why the warkeys had spared him twenty summers ago. Grandfather’s words echoed in him again: It’s the pen that wills, and it is their will we command to this date, their destiny we etch. Chakra, as he’d surmised then, was just a conduit for the warpens’ evolution into click-pens. Likewise, did the warkey that kill Mother flaunt its underbelly, wanting Chakra to learn of its mechanics and one day forge a weapon that could etch as well as click so it could further its own evolution?
Yesterday’s war had been between pencillers and erasers; today’s had been between pens and keys. Tomorrow, what enemy would his click-pens face? This war—was it between the makers, or the makings?
Aditya Sundararajan is a speculative fiction writer from India living in East Tennessee, where he works as a power systems researcher and explores his culture through storytelling. He is an affiliate member of HWA and has published short fiction with Tasavvur Nama, HyphenPunk, Water Dragon Publishing, and others
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