Finding Contentus

Chapter 97: Cracks Of Faith

Merde! Kakara swore. Drops of blood spilled down her arm from the last primal that cut her. Something was off, very off, irregular, out of place within her, like a misaligned bone. For the past month, Kakara had gone back to her roots of grueling, no pain, no gain training.

Two weeks remained until the fight, resulting in her taking no days off, or nights for that matter, she had to own her province again from the bottom to the top. She needed to prove the naysayers wrong and assert her dominance.

Most importantly, she needed to shake the fear out of the system that her body kept reacting to whenever she thought about Kaikara's grey eyes. She was missing something when it came to him, something so important that she cursed her poor memory again.

What the fuck was it? She had never seen so much hate, fear and trauma in someone's eyes when he glared at her.

Never.

I've killed many people and left just as many broken. How in the fuck am I supposed to remember one of them? Especially when I never want to remember any of them. Papa Ren didn't remember all the people he killed and affected. It's not something nice to remember in the first place...

Kakara sucked her teeth submissively, plagued by her hellish nightmares.

Oi, get it together Kakara. Focus. We'll deal with those broken doors when we have to, just as those doors seem to open after years away from this fucking place. What does Gabe find so beautiful about this place? I don't get it. I wish I got it. I wish I could see the world through his eyes. I wish I believed as he did. I wish I had faith as he did. I wish I... when was the last time I saw him?

A primal rudely interrupted her thoughts. Nasty fucker. Kakara saw it in the air, screaming at her. She kneed it in the jaw then slammed her hardened fist on top of its head like a hammer of war, crushing its skull like a grapefruit. Not even sparing a single second, she took off in an explosion of speed.

Kakara dashed across the snowfield at an inhuman pace in her element. Her hood from her black fur coat came off, allowing for her face to be exposed. The world became inaudible to her ears, muffled, disoriented, except for his voice.

"Hmph. What was that girl? Softness? Your time away has made you complacent. Do you believe your strength under that swine is enough?"

He's helped me survive better than you ever could. Kakara talked back to her father. This was exactly what she had been dreading for the longest time.

Her father's spirit, his Amandla, his forwarding light was more than a ghost here in Kimba, he was like... the province itself. He was in the air she breathed, the ice and snow she walked upon, he was in the mountains, he was Mount Max, Maxis was Kimba.

Kakara heard him as often as she heard the blizzards and storms. He was everywhere, inside her head, her blood, and outside in the unmerciful elements.

However, what irked her the most, what infuriated her the most, what revolted her the most, was the fact that she had begun conversing with her father's voice more whenever she heard him.

She believed she was going mad, fully, madder than her time on Mad Scar, until she decided to reveal the truth of her scarred dilemma to Gabrielle, who in turn, revealed that he often heard Dominique's voice and how he spoke back to it.

While that disturbed Kakara greatly, it also made her feel better about herself, about him, about them, they really shared the same problems that Kakara didn't know what else to do except hug him.

While she trained and prepared herself religiously for the fight by pushing her body to the extreme, Gabrielle prepared their people for the oncoming season of... well, the future by personally visiting all the settlements in the South, healing the sick and sending out food to all the people he could find, equally, without discrimination.