Posted on by Grace Crandall

Between Rarity and Value

Deep in the silent warehouse, along the right side of a long aisle, between the ragged remnant of fairy wing and a coffin bound with engraved steel bands, something glowed. It spread green light over the coffin’s engravings, and shone through the fairy wing’s translucent cells. It showed up the clumps of dust on the floor, and Linh tended to use it as a reminder of when the place needed sweeping.

 

The tank of amniotic fluid was bolted to the floor. As he went on his rounds in the night, Linh had to take care not to trip over the lines and wires that snaked to and from the tank, refreshing the fluid inside. Like giving fresh water to cut flowers, Linh always thought. As he stopped in front of the tank, doing his best to avoid looking at the dark shape suspended inside it, Linh very carefully did not follow that metaphor further.

 

Instead, he focused on the glass tablet that was cradled in the crook of his arm, tapping absently at it with his stylus. On the screen, every moment of his night was spoken for. The painstaking organization of the program stood as a testament to the mind behind the rigorous cataloging of the warehouse. Next to each task, a list of subtasks, and a box to check beside each one. Linh checked off renew salt circle, and the next task on the list glowed a bright green, and gave him a button prompt. Check vitals, it said. Linh clicked the blinking button. Before the next screen came up, he lost his battle with himself, and looked up.

 

He saw the rhythmic cycling of vital signs appear on the tablet screen, but he barely glanced at them. The dark shape suspended in mesmerizing green captured his full attention instead.

 

She wasn’t human. That had been the first assurance Linh had received, as the tank had been installed and its strange contents had become part of his nightly duties. No more human than the thing in the coffin that spent the first hour of his shift pounding its fists uselessly against the dark wood, or the woman made of gray mist who drifted and wailed inside her circle of salt, or the shambling creatures kept in cages and fed once a fortnight on lumpy, pale matter. He did not ever feel the need to pause in front of those things and watch them. Then again, he never felt the overwhelming need to look away from them, either.

 

In the tank, she twitched. The barest flutter of her fingers, a small, jerking motion with her foot. Standing, she would have been a bit shorter than he was. A bit wider, too. Her dignity was preserved by a set of simple black swimwear, but what skin showed was rough, marked with small scars, and hairier than might be expected. Her hand moved again, fingers curling a little, as if trying to grasp something.

 

Linh glanced down at the tablet in his hands. Sure enough. Her heart rate was bumping upwards, steadily rising as she twitched again. Her mouth twisted, a tiny baring of teeth, and for a moment, her face did not look as deceptively human as usual.

 

The fit eased as quickly as it came on. Heart rate reducing, stillness overtaking her limbs. She relaxed in her tank, and Linh saw the way the light shone, throwing her ribs into sharper relief than they had been a week ago.

 

He moved on, checking item number 39.398 as normal.

 

There was a space for comments on the screen. He hesitated, half-typing a single sentence; then he shook his head. Select all > cut. The text field stared blankly back at him, but the words he could never quite commit to putting in his report drifted through his mind, not so easily deleted.

 

She’s dreaming.

 

#

 

Linh was convinced that work parties were an unnecessary evil.

 

The punch was a much higher proof than anyone warned him it would be, the rancid burn masked by excessive sugar. Linh wasn’t sure which of the two substances was giving him the headache, but his own nervousness certainly wasn’t helping. He glanced out of the office windows, looking for reassurance in the familiar layout of aisles in the warehouse below, but the glare of the overhead lights had turned the windows into mirrors, and he only saw the gaggle of his co-workers, with his own face a jarring addition to their number.

 

He worked the night shift, so none of them were familiar faces, except for the gate-guards. Aside from them, the only person he recognized was Ms. Cordan herself. Linh had only met the woman once, at the very last, utterly nerve-wracking, interview. The experience did nothing to prepare him for the sight of her, flushed with alcohol and chatty with sugar. It did nothing to prepare him for her being chatty with him.

 

Her breath smelled impossibly fresh when she spoke, in spite of the meat and cheese tray. Her crisply ironed dress laid against her skin as if arranged on a storefront mannequin, making Linh feel unusually slovenly for his clean, but slightly rumpled, shirt. She didn’t seem to care, pulling him into conversation with apparent friendliness. She gestured with her drink as she talked. The plastic cup was decorated with tiny candy canes and gingerbread men. She held it with one pinky extended, the carmine liquid inside swirling delicately as she jostled it.

 

“You take care of my collection more closely than most,” She said. It was about an hour before Linh usually came in to work, and an hour later than the office people usually stayed; he wondered if the strange holiday party limbo was as uncomfortable for everyone else as it was for him.  

 

“I do,” he said, going for simplicity. And then, with some of the cowed instinct he’d had during his only other meeting with this woman, he added, “It’s quite the honor,”

 

“People leap at the chance to view even a single item,” Ms. Cordan agreed. And then, “But a lot of that’s just the novelty, really. It does get boring, after a while, I’m sure.”

 

Linh blinked. Frowned.

 

“Um. Yeah.”

 

He thought of the glass orb in aisle twelve, encased in lead and only able to be viewed through a constant camera feed; the way that even the solid foot of lead surrounding it on every side still cannot silence the clear, pure song that it sings. He thinks of the skeleton forever sleeping in its shadow box; the ribs as clear as glass and as thin as hair, the shining, preserved scales on its long tail, reflecting light like jewels.

 

Boring?

 

Unaware of his inner monologue, Ms. Cordan sighed. She looked out the window, and a small grimace crossed her face as she found the same reflection there that Linh had. Her eyes were glassy, and it was hard to guess if it was an effect of the liquor, or something else.

 

“I just want to see something new,” she said, plaintive. It was a strange purity of emotion to find wrapped in a silk dress.

 

Linh blinked. He’d been hoping to find an opening for a while now, a was that didn’t allow the black letters on their searing white background to mock him for being a fanciful fool. But now, in the not-yet-drunk haze, the unreality of being here, the both of them incongruously existing outside the easy companionship of the people who worked with one another every day. Here and now, it seemed as if the things he wanted to say…they didn’t fit in. but when nothing else fit in, they did not need to.

 

“I might have something new for you,” he said. His breath, coming all uneven to his lips, made the sentence stutter out in bits and spurts, and Ms. Cordan raised one perfectly manicured eyebrow at him. It was a dry, assessing, unimpressed look.

 

“Awfully confident, aren’t you?”

 

“Well, I…yes, actually, I am. Because you don’t visit the exhibits at night. Or you haven’t, since she came here, and she only dreams at night.”

 

She frowned, but her eyes were bright.

 

“Who dreams?”

 

#

 

The coffin was silent. The fairy wing was as glassy and perfect as always. And, shining her green light on both of them, curled in upon herself like a child in the womb, the woman was dreaming.

 

“It changes every night,” Linh said. His voice would not come out in anything but a whisper. “But she always dreams.”

 

As he spoke, she kicked one leg out, a small, jerking motion. The fluid sloshed in the tank, sending rippling light across the polished concrete, and in the split second of movement, Linh thought that the shape of that foot was different. Craggier. Sharper, somehow. But as she returned to the restless fetal shape, her hands tightly curled close to her face, she looked as human as ever.

 

“See?”

 

Linh turned to Ms. Cordan.

 

Her mouth was a flat line, not even the slightest upward quirk of life to it. She looked sad as she gazed at the tank. And then, as she saw him watching, she gave him the smallest of smiles, soft and disappointed.  

 

“Thank you,” she said. “It does look a bit like dreaming, doesn’t it? But…I’ve seen this before. It’s just…spare electrical signals. In stasis, like this, it’s a bit like…like someone shot a gun in an empty room, and shut the door. An endless ricochet, with nowhere to land. It makes them twitch and move, just like this, but it’s nothing, really.”

 

She sounded so sincere, so kind. Like she was explaining that, no, the closet wasn’t full of monsters to scared child.

 

It would be easy to blame the punch, but the truth is that Linh has never had the best hold on his temper. There’s a reason he worked the night shift, a reason he ordered his groceries by app and always waited five minutes after the knocking stopped to pick up deliveries from his front stoop. Linh has never been the best with people, and seeing this woman deny a plain fact, right in front of his face—and have the gall to take that tone doing it?

 

“Is it the spare electrical signal that’s getting her heart rate up like this?” He asked, waving his tablet at her, a bit more snappishly than politeness required. “Is that what’s getting her breathing to fluctuate? Her brain activity to spike?”

 

Frowning, Ms. Cordan held out both hands, snapping them in midair like pincers until Linh handed the tablet to her. The glow on her face made her skin look just as eerie as the tank girl’s. She scanned the information there, the crease between her eyebrows growing deeper.

 

“Well, that’s odd,” she said. “Distress, maybe? That could be the sedative failing, I suppose.”

 

The green light on the floor danced again, the shadows shimmering in an unsettled tremor. Linh looked towards the tank to see the girl curling in on herself again. Her fingers fluttered, and he could see her pupils darting back and forth underneath her lashes. And then, as he watched, she grew still.

 

At first, he thought it was the settling of her dream, the way she usually fell still after the course of her dreaming ended. But instead of settling, she seemed to grow slack and loose. The look of her was less like someone asleep than it was like someone dead. And, as Linh turned back in sudden trepidation and horror towards Ms. Cordan, he saw her with one precisely extended index finger leaving the screen of the tablet. Her gaze was fixed on the tank. He could see the green reflection on the wet edges of her eyelids, the mascara making her lashes into cartoon lines around the perfect circle of her eyeball.

 

“There,” she said. Her voice was soft. “That. That should fix it.”

 

“What did you do?”

 

She jumped a little, looking at him like she’d forgotten he was standing there.

 

“Increased the sedative flow. Not that it’s any of your business. You should have made a not of this immediate—hey!”

 

She jumped back as he lunged for the tablet. He managed to nab a corner of it, the rubberized safety casing providing a good grip. He dug his fingers in and tugged.

 

She held on. Her knuckles were white as she tried to haul the tablet to herself, and Linh was jerked off balance for a moment. When he tugged in turn, she slid across the floor, concrete scraping under her heels.

 

It was a squabble. It was silly.

 

Linh had the image in his mind of the tank girl, horribly still, encased in glass like everything else in this great dead warehouse. He had a mental picture of the scaled skeleton, just a few aisles over, and the desperate, horrified suspicion that it had been acquired when flesh had still wrapped its thin, delicate bones.

 

In the end, he couldn’t say which of them had touched the still-lit screen, or what button they might have pressed. One moment, they were locked in a deeply undignified tussle, and the next, they both heard a sound that stopped them in their tracks.

 

Bong.

 

 

#

 

 

The girl’s eyes were open.

 

She struck the glass with an open hand, a dull, echoing sound. Her gaze was strangely focused on them both, and her irises glowed an unnatural color, warm as a flame.

 

Linh’s mouth was suddenly dry. He shifted, slightly, not even so much as a step; a mere shifting back and away from the tank. She caught the movement, and glared at him, that strange flame-light seeming to flicker in her eyes.

 

#

 

Linh had been to a zoo once.

 

It had been an enjoyably chaotic trip, himself and twenty or so other children being wrangled along from one exhibit to the next by a bedraggled group of parent volunteers and a few teachers. Most of the animals hadn’t been much interested in them, instead happy to sleep or eat or wander about their grassy enclosures as the horde of children and adults gawked at them.

 

At the lion exhibit, though, one of the lionesses had taken an interest. She had stalked along the thick glass, following the pack of passing children. Linh, fascinated by the rippling of living muscle under her golden coat, had stopped. Leaned in, close enough that his breath had fogged the glass. The lioness had turned in one fluid movement, bringing them face to face. Her eyes had met his. At once intent and impersonal, something about her gaze had made Linh’s neck prickle, the hairs rising. The feeling had lasted through the rest of the day, even after one of the parent volunteers had pulled him back from the glass and gotten the class moving again.

 

#

 

As the tank girl watched Linh, he felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck again. He barely even noted the changing of the girl’s hand until his mind stumbled over the sight of sharp claws against the glass.

 

Her skin, never smooth, was growing taut and rough with hair. The liquid of the tank muffled the sound of cracking and popping as her body jerked and her limbs elongated. The tablet screen was flashing panicked red messages, the warnings overlapping unread as the nodes and wires were popped from their places on her body. Even as she writhed, even as her bones cracked, her hand rammed in measured time against the glass, echoing like the ringing of the witching hour:

 

Bong..

 

Bong.  

 

Bong.

 

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Ms. Cordan wheezed, panicked, as the girl in the tank lifted her inhuman, snouted head out of the dripping green ooze, as the powerful legs that no longer quite fit in the human sized tank slammed against the thick glass. Spiderweb cracks formed on the surface of the glass, creaking ominously.

 

The tank girl hacked like a dog, heaving green ooze onto the floor in thick, gloopy splashes. She hauled herself over the edge of the tank.

The weight was what finally shattered it.

 

A wave of green slime rushed out over the floor, dragging shattered glass in its wake. Fur wet, the tank girl raised her head, ears pinned back, eyes closed.

 

She howled.  

 

It was a lonely, mournful sound. The only answer was an echoing shriek—the office party, which Linh had almost forgotten, only now noticing the chaos.

 

Flashing blue phone light caught Linh’ attention, and he whipped around, seeing the partygoers on the balcony, the towering wolf girl risen to her full height, and finally—Ms. Cordan herself, tapping desperately at her phone screen. Linh didn’t know who she was calling, and he didn’t care. The light was alerting the—the beast-thing to their location, and from the way she was growling, Linh thought that tank girl was out for blood.

 

“Cordan!” he shouted, and Ms. Cordan looked up, meeting his eyes for a moment. Her panicked face was perfectly lit from below by the light of her phone screen, and she just blinked as Linh gestured wildly, trying to communicate ‘put the shiny location beacon away’ by wildly pinwheeling his arms.

 

He’d always been bad at charades.

 

The beast’s fur was flattened close to her body, beginning to curl up in sharp points like scales as she dripped green goop to the floor. Growling, she turned towards Cordan. Linh could see the way Ms. Cordan’s fingers were shaking as she tried unsuccessfully to navigate her touch screen with wet hands. He could see the way the beast’s face morphed, lips curling back to reveal mottled black and pink gums. He heard her rumble a warning deep in her chest.

 

She dropped to all fours, clawed hands splaying on the floor, and leapt.

 

“No!” Linh shouted, as his boss was flattened to the floor under that lanky bundle of fur and muscle. He looked around for something, and found a shard of thick safety glass from the burst tank. He grabbed it. Seeing nothing but a sliver of red dress visible under the beast’s body, seeing her jaws open and slavering over Ms. Cordan’s neck, Linh uttered a courageous, slightly pitchy yell and leapt forward, driving the spike of glass into the beast’s sodden back.

 

It was almost exactly like stabbing through a melon rind. The sense-memory messed with Linh’s head. He stumbled back, hands shaking.

 

Uttering a formless, furious sound, the beast moved off of Ms. Cordan, focusing on Linh instead. Ms. Cordan was wide-eyed. Wonder of all wonders, still breathing. He couldn’t see so much as a scratch on her, no darker stain on the now-rumpled red silk.

 

The relief was short-lived.

 

The beast hit the center of his chest. His skull cracked against the polished cement floor, and he had a sudden, incongruous bout of gratitude, because he’d just swept the floor the night before, and so wouldn’t get any soggy dust clumps in his hair.

 

His second thought was to wonder if his skull had broken. He couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel any pain past the shock, only the dull sense that there would be pain, later, if he lived to feel it.  

 

He could feel her breath, hot and foul where it hit his face. He could feel her strange hands, so much larger and rougher than a human’s; could feel the points of her dull, doglike claws where they pressed into the flesh of his shoulders. He could feel the impossible weight of her, pinning him to the floor.

 

Her eyes were such a perfect shade of gold. He’d walked past her every day in that tube of hers, and yet he’d never known. He’d had the gall to pity her for her protruding ribs, never knowing that the drugged sleep hid something like this.

 

He’d compared her gaze to the lioness’s, but that was wrong, too. She stared into his face, but also into his eyes. Something in that inhuman face searched his gaze, trying to parse his soul in the same way that he’d tried to parse hers.

 

Linh gulped, and fought the urge to close his eyes, to curl up, as if he could hide. A childish whimper left his lips as he scrabbled, one-handed, brushing aside broken glass, fingers searching for the corner of the tablet.

 

A shot echoed through the warehouse. Linh’ ears started ringing, but he felt the jolt of impact as it hit the beast. She looked up, baring her teeth, and Linh saw the bright red blood dripping through her fur. He knew his lips were moving, but if breath left his lips, he couldn’t hear his own prayers past the ringing.

 

His fingers slipped on the tablet screen, and he wiped them on his shirt, craning his neck to see what he was doing. In his periphery, he could see Ms. Cordan waving her arms, her mouth moving. He slapped the screen desperately, and looked up as he felt the jerking impact of another shot. The snarling beast was limping, a burst of red on her leg, but she was limping towards the gunman, not away. Linh couldn’t hear his own voice, but he felt the strain in his throat as he shouted at her. She turned.

 

That way! He shouted, pointing towards the far end of the facility, towards the door he’d used the tablet to open. She half-turned, as if debating her chances running away against charging an armed gunman, and for a moment, Linh was pretty sure that charging the gunman was coming out on top.

 

And then, just barely audible to his still-ringing ears, he heard it.

 

Howling.

 

So many voices, calling as one. It was lovely as music. She twitched one ear to listen. Another shot jolted her body, but she didn’t mark it. Linh saw the red of a feathered dart in her shoulder. Not blood, then. And not having any effect, either. When she bounded towards the door, there was not so much as a break in her stride.

 

Linh was always going to remember the way that utter joy looked on that strange, inhuman face.

 

#

 

The doctors did their worst with casts and pins, and Linh spent a restless, drugged night being woken every two hours by concerned nurses. What sleep he got was tinged in the artificial light of the hospital room, his blinking monitor and the light filtering in from the hallway. He dreamed he was immobile, suspended in glowing green, under the curious eyes of strangers.

 

#

 

Taking sick leave was shockingly easy. The insurance, too, covered far more of the hospital stay than Linh had dared to expect.

 

It would have been so much easier if he’d been able to hate her.

 

Ms. Cordan should have been a careless employer, hellish to work for. She should have been cruel, or stupid. She should match her wealth and her business. She shouldn’t be so easy to see as a person—so easy to like.

 

He couldn’t afford to quit, in the end. No matter how much he wanted to. He half-hoped he’d find himself fired for freeing one of Ms. Cordan’s collection items, but the only work emails in his inbox were a sympathetic note from his immediate supervisor, and the usual biweekly copy of his pay stub.

 

It was stupid to hate someone for being kind.

 

#

 

The rounds were strangely calm. It felt good, having a reason to move again.

 

Someone was pounding their fists against the inside of the coffin. Instead of ignoring them, he reached out a hand and knocked gently on the wood.

 

Whatever was inside fell silent. Linh continued dust-mopping. After a moment, he heard a gentle returning knock.  

 

Linh got his rounds done in record time so he could spend a few moments by the enclosure of the shuffling, groaning people. They devoured their evening meal with frightening alacrity, but as he waited by the bars, they huddled close to where he sat, and they seemed quieter than usual. Happier, maybe.

 When he took the early bus home, he was humming the strange song of the glass cube.

 

#

 

Linh only noticed that the was collection growing smaller after the fairy wing went missing. His emails were met with assurances that the items had only been relocated, and placating thanks for noticing the issue and bringing it up.

 

But once he had noticed, it was impossible not to see the empty spaces. Every night, there was more floor to sweep, the collection items disappearing one by one, and never being replaced.  Eventually, Linh had to bring books to work, his duties growing lighter and lighter as the collection thinned out.

 

He wondered if the facility was considered compromised. He wondered if he’d be allowed to work at the new one, wherever all the items were going. He tried not to wonder if whatever lived in the coffin had started up its panicked pounding again. If whomever was taking care of the zombies now would recognize their subtle signs of distress.

 

One night, the mermaid skeleton was the only thing left in the vast, immaculately clean warehouse.

 

Well. Almost the only thing.

 

Ms. Cordan was staring up into the case, her eyes moving over the iridescent scales, the eyeless sockets of the skull.

 

Tucking tonight’s book in his pocket, Linh walked up beside her.

 

“Hi.”

 

 Her voice was quiet.

 

“Hi,” Linh said. He looked at the mermaid too. He’d taken to wondering what its life had been like. What its people were like.

 

‘are you finally gonna fire me’ didn’t seem like the right thing to say, somehow.

 

“I meant to thank you,” Ms. Cordan said, which was startling in and of itself. “You were right.”

“About what?”

 

“She was dreaming.”

 

She swallowed.

 

“Werewolves dream,” she said.  “Vampires mourn. Fairies have a whole religion based around the bodies of their dead, did you know? Ghosts feel loneliness. Dragons can’t speak our language, but they do understand it.”

She was still staring at the case. Linh was, too. The case was a safe thing to look at.  

 

“I returned them,” she said.

 

Just a whisper, but it carried in the empty building. Not quite an echo, there was no repetition of the words; it was as if they merely…lingered. Sat in all the aisles and places that the collection no longer occupied.

 

“Every soul, every creature, every artifact. I…” her voice tapered away.

 

Linh looked over the empty warehouse. He’d imagined the items being shipped away to other warehouses, to big museums or private collections.

 

He thought again of the werewolf. Of that soulful, strange gaze. Of the girl who looked so human, suspended in her tank, dreaming for who knew how long.

 

“What about this one?” He asked, nodding towards the case, and Ms. Cordan swallowed and shook her head.

 

“The merfolk are gone, as far as I know,” she said. “He was the last of them when I got him. I was hoping to keep him alive, to…record what I could, before he was gone. I meant it as respect. Now, I…I can’t help but wish he could have spent his last days in the ocean.”

 

She gave a dry chuckle.

 

“I’m an idiot.”

 

Linh thought about that for a moment.

 

“At least you’re a brave idiot,” he said.

 

She snorted a short laugh, but actually looked at him. She looked tired, her skin chapped and sun-splotched.

 

“You returned everything yourself,” Linh said. “That must have been quite the adventure.”

 

She blinked. Raised her brows at him, as if she hadn’t thought of it that way before. He shuffled a little, getting as comfortable as he could on the hard floor.

 

“Yes,” she said, slowly. “I suppose it was.”

 

Linh leaned forward.

 

“Tell me about it?”

 

So she did. Haltingly at first; but soon, she was sketching her stories in the air as she talked. tale after tale whiled away the small hours. Each one seemed to Linh more solid, more real, than a thousand boxed-up wonders.

 

Outside, he could hear the muffled train horn, the traffic on the highway. But above both sounds, eerie and cutting as the winter wind—

 

He thought he heard the howling of wolves.

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Posted on by Grace Crandall

Strength of the Cedars

The sun was strong–blindingly so. It baked and stank in the rich mud on the shores of the Lake; it glittered through the reeds and lilies, and smothered itself in the dense needles of the pines.

In spite of the morning’s golden glow, the sky was dark. Above the green-tinted cliffs at the far edge of the lake, clouds the shade of slate slowly edged closer, changing shape as they came.

Prince Terrigan, standing at the very edge of the Lake, hooves splayed to let the mud seep pleasantly between his toes, took it all in–the lake-clear, sun-muddied air, the whispering branches of the trees, the still and lapping water at his feet–with wide eyes and open nostrils.

“There’ll be a storm soon,” he noted, trying to keep the excitement from his voice.

His uncle, Lord Baruch of the Northern Lagoon and the young prince’s closest advisor, huffed. He was standing up to his knees in the sweet water of the Lake, spear at the ready.

“You’d think you’d never seen a storm before.”

“I haven’t seen this storm before.”

“And yet, you seem to be looking at the trees. Can it be you haven’t seen them before?”

Terrigan grinned.

“Well, if Herpwell is correct in his thinking as put forth in Impossibilities, every molecule in the universe changes shape and position with such speed that one can never be sure that one has seen anything before, as even the most familiar of objects can be made up of molecules entirely new.”

Lord Baruch closed his eyes and shook his head.

“I’m going to regret teaching you philosophy, aren’t I? Well, nephew, as it seems that I must be an entirely new creature to you now than I was this morning, allow me to introduce yourself. I am Baruch, Lord of the North and handsomest Talleg in the Lake, and we were about to spear some delicious–and unsuspecting–fish.”

He hefted his spear as a sort of half-hearted illustration, and drew a chuckle from Terrigan’s lips. He bent down to pick his own spear up off the Lake-shore, and followed his uncle into the water.

“Handsomest Talleg in the Lake, eh?” he said, when they were both belly-deep in the warm water.

Baruch shook his head, a small smile on his lips, but didn’t reply. Terrigan chuckled again, then joined in his silence as they both waded further into the water, spears at the ready. Their steps stirred up mud and algae, and frightened the fish; the real fishing wouldn’t begin until they were waded in deep and stood still, giving the detritus time to settle, waiting for the fish to forget what it was that they were frightened of.

The sun reflected off the water, and away from the protective branches of the trees, it was even warmer. It was a sleepy kind of warmth, well suited to companionable silence, and Terrigan was more than happy to be left to his own thoughts with his uncle beside him.

He was surprised, then, when Baruch broke the silence.

“Do you know what your father told me, just before he died?”

Terrigan looked up, surprised by Baruch’s sudden change in tone, and even more so by the stillness of his uncle’s face.

“I… no. I don’t believe you’ve ever told me the full story of that night.” Terrigan said, not sure where the conversation was going. Baruch seemed to be lost in a world of his own, and though he had known both the old King and Queen far better than Terrigan ever could, they had been his parents, not Baruch’s. He couldn’t help but feel a twinge when Baruch spoke so callously of their deaths.

The clouds were still silent, but they were looming closer. Baruch, staring at his spear thoughtfully, gave a limp-sounding laugh that seemed to dull the sunlight and lend a sourness to the smell of the rich earth.

“He was stuck. Trapped by one of the fallen trees. I could smell the fire starting to burn his flesh, and I was trying–trying with all I had–to get that damned log off of him, but then–he handed me you. And he said, he…”

And the sunlight was dimming, half-hidden by a puffy, cheerful wisp of cloud; the lukewarm water trembled in a soft, promising breeze.

“He said ‘the line must not fail.’” Baruch glanced up, and what Terrigan saw in his eyes was so foreign that in that moment, Terrigan gave credence to Herpwell’s molecular theories.

“‘The line must not fail.’ To me, his brother. His blood.”

And the cloud passed, the sun was out again, and in the sudden sunlight, Terrigan didn’t see the danger until Baruch was already moving. The end of Baruch’s spear slammed hard into his temple, and he staggered, thoughtless, at the impact; then his uncle’s legs were wrapping around his, tugging them, and he had no strength to resist and no thought to as the older Talleg flipped him over and pushed him down into the water. 

And somehow, with all of this, it was not until one of Baruch’s hooves began to press down on his throat that Terrigan realized that his uncle was trying to kill him.

There should have been sound, he thought. One or both of them should be screaming, the sky should be thundering, something. But there was only the silent, heart-stopping panic and the water gurgling around his ears as he kicked, desperately trying to get the older Talleg’s weight off of his body, off his chest, off his throat. A kick landed, and the hoof at his throat jerked in pain or surprise. With another lashing hoof, Terrigan drove Baruch off him enough to scramble back, get himself upright, and suck in a panicked breath.

Something stung his side, and Terrigan didn’t even have to look to know that it was Baruch’s spear–his fishing spear–that had buried itself in the thick flesh over his ribs.

It would have been so much easier if Baruch was shouting, but he was silent. Silent, because this would be a secret murder by a secret traitor. Silent, as all the birds and all the creatures were silent at the scene, as Terrigan took lurching steps, trying to get away from the man who had raised him for as long as he could remember.

Terrigan sucked in another breath, then plunged beneath the surface of the lake, into the murky waters that all the fish had vacated, waters murky enough to hide him from his would-be killer, and flee.

—

The Lake was sunny. Cheerfully, inescapably so, with a light and cheerful breeze to whisper in the branches of the pines.

Glidda the Loon wanted to sing at the sight, but refrained. She had a voice suited to pink-skied evenings and indigo nights; eerie and soft and not unpleasant, but…not exactly cheerful. Best leave sunny days like this to the chickadees to celebrate.

In any case, she was singing in her heart. She had eaten so many fish she felt near to bursting, and there was nothing to do for the rest of the day but paddle around the lake and admire things.

She was just admiring the cedar trees–tall, graceful things, with their weather-whitened trunks and living-skeleton roots–when a lone Talleg stepped out onto the edge of the lake, startling her.

“Loo-oo-o!” she cried in alarm, starting up suddenly and then settling back down when the Talleg gave her no more than a cursory glance. He was young, she thought, and horribly scruffy; but for all their self-kept dignity, Loonkind are never snooty.

“Good morning,” she greeted. “It’s a lovely day, with plenty of fish in it. What has got you looking so glum?”

The Talleg huffed a sharp breath, and he looked at her just as sharply, as though expecting her to flee his foul mood; but Loonkind are not cowards either.

“A year ago today, I was stabbed in the side by one I considered a friend.” he said, savagely. “And I dragged myself up upon this bank, wounded and bleeding, and swore I would get my revenge. Tell me, are you supposed to look cheerful on the day you return to kill one of your own kind?”

Glidda ruffled her feathers, unsure how to respond to all this talk of killing and stabbing and bleeding. It was very much out of her depth. All she understood was the look in the boy’s eyes–a sick, feverish look, as though the wound he claimed he’d gotten was still festering, and the sadness in his voice when he said the word ‘friend’.

She proceeded carefully.

“Will it make you feel better, this killing?”

The Talleg’s face twitched into a bitter expression.

“What do you think?”

Glidda blinked. Generally speaking, she thought about fish. Or the weather. But there was a need in the boy’s eyes, and Glidda had had too many sons of her own not to feel as though she was supposed to give a better answer than ‘fish’.

“I… I think you once loved this friend.” she guessed, falteringly. “And I think that hating him is tiring you.” that much, at least, was obvious. The boy’s skin was saggy and his fur matted, at the feverish look in his eyes was not helping. Glidda fluttered her wings, helplessly.

“Have you considered…forgiveness?” she asked, only to have that sharp, feverish gaze turned on her again.

“forgiveness,” the boy sneered, and went back to staring absently across the Lake for a moment. He snorted, and said “forgiveness,” again, softly and under his breath. Then he turned away and stalked off back into the woods.

Glidda ruffled her feathers again, softly, and decided to go and admire the cedar trees somewhere else–somewhere far, far away from Tallegs and their antics.

—

The grey light of dawn was just beginning to separate the shapes of the world from one another, and the waters of the Lake were still and smooth as the skin of a sleeping snake. The night-dwelling creatures were beginning to nestle into their homes, the day-dwelling folk had yet to shift themselves, and all was quiet.

The fish were awake, though.

Terrigan watched one as if flitted through the clean, cold water. Silt had half-buried his hooves, and his legs were nearly frozen with inaction, but it did not matter.

Only the fish mattered.

He kept a hungry eye on it. Raised his spear. Brought it down in a sharp, decisive movement.

The fish was not awake any longer. It twitched convulsively as he brought it out of the water, stripped it from his spear, and dropped it into the ill-made sack hanging from his waist, already full and dripping with the rest of the morning catch. Three fish. It was not a grand meal for a Talleg, and he would be hungry again soon after, but it was adequate.

He and hunger, after all, were close companions now.

Terrigan’s gaze found their way, unbidden, over the expanse of Lake, to the opposite shore.

Three years ago, he had sworn to return. Sworn vengeance.

Two years ago, he had given up on vengeance, and sworn instead to never return.

The lake was still and quiet, and his stomach spasmed to protest its emptiness, but he watched the opposite shore, thinking of how they would all be sleeping now, and in a few hours, they would rise with the sun and there would be cook-fires and women chattering and men muttering and children laughing.

He was not sure what drew his gaze to the branches over his head. There was no sound, no flicker of movement, nothing. But when he looked up, it was into two yellow eyes, staring back unblinkingly into his own.

Terrigan laughed, and it sounded blasphemous in the surrounding silence.

“Have you come to advise me too, old bird?” he asked, thinking of that silly loon and her talk of forgiveness. (forgiveness. Ha. The best he could do was forget).

The owl said nothing. Only stared, motionless and silent and grey as the morning, utterly unhelpful.

“Come on,” Terrigan coaxed. “I thought your kind was wise. Which is better, ancient one? Vengeance, or forgiveness? Justice, or mercy?”

The owl said nothing.

“Advise me. Should I return? Kill him? Take my rightful place? Shed the blood of a kinsman because he thought to shed mine–it’s just, you see. But is it right?”

The owl blinked. It was a response, at least; Terrigan kept going, vaguely aware of the fact that it had been a long time since he’d spoken to anyone at all.

Too long, perhaps.

“And yet, this cannot be right either,” he said, looking back across the Lake. “I cannot exile myself for someone else’s crime, can I? Why…why would I do that? How can that be right?”

He looked back to find the owl, hoping that perhaps, it would speak this time. Offer some insight.

But the owl was gone.

Terrigan’s stomach was insistent now, and he pushed all thoughts of vengeance and mercy and the shore on the other side of the Lake from his mind in favor of something far more important: fish.

—

Winter was bitter. Bitter as the sour-smelling fruit of the cedar trees, and biting as the teeth of the ermine, and whiter than any living thing had a right to be. (Winter was not living. It was dead, a ghost-time, when all was frozen and the few creatures left scampering in the cold were haunted by a death that crept all too close).

The Lake was frozen, and snow had covered it over more than once, so it was hard to tell where the earth ended and where the ice began.

Terrigan’s long legs made easy work of the deep-drifted snow as he walked out into the frozen ice of the lake. He’d woven a pair of baskets for himself—they were far, far inferior to Filliti’s work, but serviceable enough for carrying fish and forage back to the small island he’d begun to make his own. He carried them underneath one arm, nested together, in hopes of having caught plenty for the day.

He was focused on his steps, his mind playing with the way the clouded sun made the snow a sweet summery yellow, and his own stark blue shadow stretching out wide along sharp-crested snow dunes.

He glanced up towards the place he knew his fishing line was, marked out by an upright pine bough, and halted in his tracks, brought up suddenly by the sight before him.

The wolf pack was not as extensive as Terrigan’s own clan—made up of one family, instead of many. Curious, Terrigan saw that there were wolf-pups among the group, leggy and nearly as tall as their kin, but still clearly not grown.

He began walking towards the pack again, assured that this was not a hunt or a war party. A hunting pack would not announce their presence, and a war party would never include pups.

He dropped his baskets in the snow as he approached, and made a small but respectful bow to the wolf who sat at the front of the pack, nearest Terrigan’s fishing-hole.

The black wolf made a small but equally respectful nod back.

“Hail and well-met, Prince Terrigan of the Northern Lagoon,” he said. He was not an aged wolf, still strong and hale enough to defend the pack, but he was old enough to have earned badger-like streaks of white on his muzzle, and there was the wisdom of many years in his eyes.

“Hail and well-met, Wolf-lord,” Terrigan replied, not knowing the wolf’s name. the wolf-packs were insular creatures, hated and feared by many for their need for meat, and liked to keep to themselves. Terrigan had been taught to respect their kind for they were wise and worth listening to, just so long as the light of hunger was not in their eyes. It was diplomatic, though, not to ask any names.

The knowledge echoed in Terrigan’s mind with Baruch’s voice, Baruch’s intonations, the memory of the lessons about statecraft that had once filled hours of Terrigan’s days.

“You have hidden on our lands for a full year now, young prince.” The wolf-lord said, pushing the painful memories away.

“We have not harmed or harried you, out of respect for your youth and your clan. But it has been a long time. Why do you not return to your people? Why do you not go back to your home?”

Terrigan snorted.

“I was cast out of my home, and chased away by my own uncle.” He said. “I could return, but there is no home there for us both. It is exile, or bloodshed. Which would you choose, wolf-lord?”

The wolf-pack took the story with exchanged glances, a ripple of unease, and the wolf-lord himself frowned, his teeth baring slightly, as if taking in a new and unpleasant scent.

“What packmate would do such a thing?” he asked, and on his face, there was all the confusion that Terrigan himself had first felt—still felt—but there was also something else. The wolf-lord, of course, would not understand. There was no such thing as disloyalty or betrayal in the pack; no such thing as exile. No wolf could survive alone, and no wolf would want to. Terrigan felt an ache of longing for a life of such simplicity, and a stab of disappointment, as well. How could the wolf-lord help him from his problems, if he did not even understand the greed and pride that had been the cause of them?

“I share your confusion, Wolf-lord,” he said sadly. “It is the reason I am still here, an intruder and alone. I am glad, however, that this is a thing beyond your understanding; I wish it was also beyond mine.”

The wolf nodded, rising from where he sat. The pack rose with him. “And I, in turn, thank you for challenging my wisdom,” he said. “You are welcome here for as long as you care to stay. If I may, however, I will leave you with my words: If you suffer for lack of your clan, so your clan must suffer for lack of you. I know that this does nothing to aid your decision, but it is true, nonetheless.”

He peered into Terrigan’s eyes, the autumn-orange irises as mesmerizing as a sunset.

“You are not expendable, Prince.” He said.

With that, the meeting was over, and the wolf-pack rose as one, organizing to return to the wooded lakeshore. The eldest wolf took the lead, limping along at a slow pace, and even the energetic cubs followed behind them. Last of all, the wolf-lord took up the very rear, keeping watchful eye upon his whole pack, ensuring not one was lost or left behind.

Terrigan swallowed against the pressure in his throat, and looked down at his baskets where they lay strewn in the snow. The line for his fishing was twitching subtly, something caught there, but it took him a moment before he knelt to draw the line from the water. The fish struggled, heaving as he pulled it from the water, its scales shining beautifully in the muffled sunlight.

Terrigan’s eyes stung, sudden and fierce, and he bent his head, burying it in his arms. The fish flopped back into the water, jerking the line again as it tried to swim away.

He missed his home. Me missed his home terribly. Not the comforts of it, but the people, the familiarity, even his own hopes and dreams there. He had once looked forward to leading his people, to caring for them in a way that would make his father and Baruch both proud. It had been his life—it had been his right.

It still was.

Terrigan blinked.

He’d had a full morning meal already. This catch was for preparation for tomorrow.

He drew the fish from the water, pulled the hook from its mouth as gently as he could, and released it back into the lake. It would return to its home, as he would return to his.

—

It was a day and a half trek back to the lake that Terrigan had called home since his youth.

Small fishing shacks dotted the lake itself, and the thin smoke of hearth-fires drifted up through the tree branches. It had not fallen apart in his absence, then.

He had not fallen apart in his absence, either; but the mere sight of his home restored his heart nearly as much as it hurt him.

He hesitated for a moment, then stepped out of the forest at the edge of the lake shore. The sun was shining full force today, glaringly bright where it reflected up against the snow, and Terrigan plowed through snow that came up to his knees.

A woman came out of one of the fishing-huts, focus on her own feet as she maneuvered to close the door behind her with one hand supporting a basket full of fish on her hip. It was Lilla. Terrigan opened his mouth, ready to call out to her, but the breath he’d gathered to do so only leaked soundlessly from his lungs.

She glanced up anyway, squinting across the lake, and frowning when she saw him. She reached down, ready to grab the filleting knife she kept at her belt, and Terrigan raised his hand to wave, the speech still not quite returning to him.

She dropped the basket of fish, and the filleting knife on top of it, and broke out in a raw gallop that would have echoed across the entire lake, but for the surfeit of muffling snow.

She slammed into him, arms wrapping around his neck, and he staggered, but did not fall over.

She clutched him so close that he didn’t have the breath to speak, but they were both weeping; silent, and weeping, and so utterly glad that words would not suffice. It was a true homecoming, a good homecoming, and it made the Wolf Lord’s words settle into the pit of Terrigan’s stomach, like a meal that had been swallowed, but was only now digesting, only now lending some strength to his limbs. If you have suffered for lack of them, they have suffered for lack of you.

It was true. It was true, and he should have come back long ago—for all of their sakes.

Lilla pulled back, stroking his face with a hand roughened by work, yet soft with age and kindness. “You’re alive,” she said, and her voice was filled with wonder. “Baruch said—” she frowned a little, studying Terrigan’s face.

“Baruch lied, didn’t he?” she asked.

Terrigan nodded.

“About many things,” he said. “But I do not think he knew he lied. He must have believed me dead, or else close enough.”

He shook his head, though he could tell that Lilla was full of questions.  

“How has it been with you—with everyone, here?” he asked.

“Well enough,” Lilla said. “We planted and gathered, fished and sewed. But it has not been the same. What of you?”

“I’ve eaten well enough,” Terrigan said. “The Wolf pack to the north was kind enough to give me amnesty on their lands. I’ve been living there. But I—it became time to return.”

He smiled down at her. “I’d like to see my uncle.” He said. “There is a conversation that he and I never finished.”

—

Baruch stood in the place where Terrigan’s father had used to stand, under the spreading cedar branches, his dark fur sharply contrasted by the bone-white roots of the ancient tree, his wide-spread antlers almost blending in with the boughs.

Terrigan had gathered more people to himself as he walked up the hill from the shore—not intentionally, but so many had recognized him, greeted him. There were many familiar faces, and some unfamiliar ones—young bandy-legged calves who had never met him, staring at him curiously from between their parent’s legs. He smiled back at them, but did little but greet the people he knew. There would be time for a true homecoming later. For now, he needed to have words with Baruch.

His uncle stared at him as he approached, just as one might stare at a ghost. His face drained of blood, and his eyes were wide.

Seeing his uncle again did something strange in Terrigan’s heart. He remembered the man’s face twisted in rage, remembered the hooves pressing into his neck, holding him down under the water, and he felt sorrow and fury and fear. But he also remembered all the years that had come before, the riches of knowledge that Baruch had passed onto him, the easy affection they had shared.

Terrigan halted some feet away from his uncle, and gave a simple nod.

“Uncle,” he said.

Baruch’s face spasmed into a smile. It was a massive effort on his part, and Terrigan almost admired his acting.

“Nephew!” he said, trying and failing to hide the waver in his voice. “You’re alive! I cannot tell you how much it gladdens my heart—”

It was tempting, so tempting. Terrigan could allow Baruch this pretense. It would be easy. Terrigan could reclaim his father’s place as lord of the northern lagoon, with Baruch as his second, and all would be as it had been. Not exile. Not bloodshed.

But not justice, either.

Strangely, it was the very affection that Terrigan still held for the man that kept him from taking the easy way, from smiling and accepting Baruch’s welcome.

He had trusted his uncle, once. He needed to know if he could ever truly trust him again. He needed this settled, out in the open. He needed to know whether Baruch was sorry for what he’d done, and he needed to know if he was ready to face the consequences for it. The things that had been done lay like a wound between them, and Terrigan wanted it healed, not simply hidden.  

It still took effort to gather his breath.

“You tried to drown me, uncle.” Terrigan said, and his voice came out cold and accusing. “And now you’re glad, to know that you failed?”

Whispers, hushed and hissing, ran through the small crowd behind Terrigan. Baruch flinched away from the harsh words.  

He could deny what he’d done. He could try to justify it, as he’d tried to justify it to Terrigan himself. He could try to run. He could try to play a part.

Terrigan wanted to see what he did, and hoped against hope that his uncle would behave with some semblance of the courage and honor that Terrigan wanted to believe he had.

He could see his uncle running through his options, trying to pick a good one. And then he saw him stop trying; saw his eyes close and his head bend.

“I am glad that I failed,” Baruch said. “I tried to kill the prince of this realm, my own brother’s son. I did it out of spite and unfounded anger; I failed to admit to my crimes out of pure cowardice, though they weighed heavily on my heart.”

He looked at Terrigan. “I am glad that I failed, and I am glad that you’ve returned,” he said. “Whatever my fate might be, it will be better than living thinking that I have killed you.”

Whatever my fate might be, Terrigan thought.

“Traitors are executed,” he pointed out, and it made him feel ugly, and cruel, but he needed to know.

Baruch did not move or flinch, though plenty of the people around them did—no whispers of disagreement, but plenty of unease.

“I know,” Baruch said quietly. He did know. He’d taught Terrigan the laws in the first place.

Baruch had still tried to kill him, and Terrigan did not intend to take I’m sorry as full recompense for spilt blood and utter betrayal. But the wound was scoured now, and stood a chance of healing.

“You sought power,” Terrigan said, “And so, power will be taken from you. Never again will you be solely responsible for so much as the raising of a house. Instead, you will be apprentice to any tradesperson who will take you. No sooner will you master a craft, than you must be taught a new one. This is my judgement, if all will accept it.”

Baruch looked up sharply. As the accused, he had the right to plead that a judgement was too harsh, just as everyone had the right to agree or disagree with one of the Lord’s declarations. As Terrigan looked around, however, no one so much as shook their head. The unease that had appeared at the mention of an execution had dissipated entirely.

Finally, Hwyttel the bed-builder shrugged.

“I’m always looking for new apprentices,” he said.

And so, it was settled.

—

Glidda was paddling around the lake, waiting for her mate to resurface with the day’s catch of fish. She was carrying their chick, still new and covered in fluffy down, under the wings on her back, and they were both enjoying the sunshine.

They were near to the Talleg village, and Glidda looked between the trees curiously, paddling just a little closer to the shore.

“Hello, lady loon,” a voice said from just over Glidda’s head, and she swam back, startled, and looked up to find one of the Tallegs, smiling down at her. She shook her head.

“Young man!” she declared. “You don’t go around startling people that way! It’s incredibly rude.”  

The Talleg laughed.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “But I just wanted to thank you. Your advice was invaluable. I ended up following it.”

Glidda did not remember ever offering a Talleg advice of any kind. She was already back-paddling, making her way out to open water, where no one burst out of the trees just to scare her.

“You’re very welcome,” she said. “Good day.”

—

“It’s not that I’m ungrateful,” Baruch told the owl, as the creature blinked implacably at him. “Quite the opposite, I’m very happy to be alive, even if it means I’m going to be sent out to collect reeds every morning.” He lifted his admittedly somewhat pitiful collection of the things, and tossed them haphazardly into the basket. “It’s just—I wish—”

He stopped, straightening.

“It’s my own fault, that he doesn’t trust me. He shouldn’t, not after what I’ve done. But it still aches.”

The owl gazed down at him, dark eyes seeming to hold mysteries.

“Come on,” Baruch said. “You’re supposed to be wise. What should I do? How can I earn back someone’s trust after nearly murdering them? Surely, you know that.”

The owl blinked. Spreading its wings, it silently flew from its perch.

“Hm,” Baruch said, and shook his head, and bent again to continue gathering reeds.

—

“Are we hunting them?” asked one of the youngest wolf-pups. The old wolf glanced down at his curious, fierce little grandson, and shook his graying head.

“No, child,” the old wolf said. “We are studying them. There is much the creatures of this world may teach us, if we give our careful attention.”

He looked up again, straining his eyes to see if he could catch a glimpse of the young prince in the village. He had burned with curiosity since his back had left the prince, unable to even fathom the notion of a pack divided to the extent that the prince’s had been. It seemed like a thing that should break the clan entirely, and yet here the village was, still standing. The echo of laughter sounded across the lake. Whole, and healthy, and well. The old wolf smiled. The prince had done well by his clan, then. Very well indeed.

The pup was slumped over on his forelegs, looking incredibly downtrodden, and the old wolf huffed a laugh.

“I did promise you we’d go hunting, didn’t I?” he said, and the pup perked up.

“Alright, we’ll go hunting. But not here. Come on, then.”

He turned away from the village, heading back to lands he knew better, and left the mystery of how Tallegs operated behind.

—

A pack of children were chasing at Terrigan’s heels, taking advantage of the fact that he was weighed down by pounds of fishing-nets and weaving expertly though his legs, playing a game of tag and definitely not playing a game of trip-the-adult. Though, their uproarious laughter whenever he stumbled seemed to belie their innocence.

Terrigan laughed along with them, heaving the nets up and into his antlers to keep the children from being tangled in them. They soon moved on, laughing and cheering as they splashed in the reedy water. Terrigan smiled after them.

“Lord Terrigan the Wise, they call you,” Baruch grumped beside him. “Lord Terrigan the Eternally Patient, is more like it.”

Over the past few years, Baruch had learned bed-building, basket-weaving, tree-tending, and was now learning how to mend nets. He had shown much sign of being rankled by his duties, but not to the point of true anger. Often, Terrigan had thought to pardon him, to allow him to pursue a single craft in peace. He was still considering it. To tell the truth, though, seeing Baruch so annoyed was just still too much fun.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” He countered.

Baruch seemed to consider that.

“I admit, it has turned out well for me,” he said. He sounded beaten-down, saddened by his own thoughts, and Terrigan sighed, dumping the nets onto the shore. Baruch spluttered. “Not in a tangle like–! They’re going to get knotted if you treat them like that!”

“Oh,” Terrigan said sheepishly. “Sorry?”

Baruch huffed, bending to try and sort the nets out from one another. Terrigan did not dare help, lest he be snapped at again.

“I take it that net-mending is not your favorite trade,” Terrigan said.

Baruch shrugged.

“It is certainly the wettest,” he said. “But it is also useful, and requires more of a mind than I had first assumed.”

“Have you found a trade that you would give better praise to than calling it ‘useful’?” Terrigan asked. “One that it would not be painful to call your own?”

“Hm,” Baruch said. “I enjoyed tending the trees.” He said. He looked up.

“But that doesn’t matter,” he concluded, with a smile on his face, “Because I will never have a trade to call my own, will I? That is my fate—a far kinder fate than I deserved, from you.”

Terrigan knelt down, slumping against a tree.

“No,” he said. “I needed to know if I could trust you. If you were still starved enough for power to claw your way towards it. It was never my intention to deprive you of anything to call your own; a trade, a family—”

He made a vague gesture, encapsulating everything he could not find a word for.

“Tree-tending, then?” he said. “You know the trade well enough to be a master of it, if you wish.”

Baruch was looking at him oddly.

“You have treated me mercifully enough already,” he said. “You wish to take away even this little punishment? It is almost as if you—” he shook his head. “What I did was wrong. You cannot just forgive it.”

“Can’t I?” Terrigan said. “I know the wrong of what you did, Baruch, but I also know why it was wrong. You hated me to the point of bloodshed. You judged your own grievance more important than the wholeness of your family and of your clan. You sought to decide both of our fates, when neither was in your hands.”

The air did not have quite the same sweet summer haze as the day that Baruch had tried to kill him, but the scent of sun-baked mud was still in the air, and no matter how many years had passed, that scent still served to twist Terrigan’s stomach. He had been a chattering child that day; a care-free, excitable person that he could never manage to be again. It hurt, even now. It likely always would.

“It’s my desire for our clan to be whole, Baruch. Your happiness matters more to me than my grievance. I seek to restore the wrong that was done, as much as is possible, not simply to retaliate against it. That is what I have wanted, this whole time; you’ve made it possible, by seeking to make up for what you did. You have my forgiveness, Baruch; you have had it since the moment you admitted what you’d done. Since before that, even. Can you understand that?”

Baruch was turned away. Terrigan could see the tightness in his jaw, and could guess at the expression on his face.

“Besides, if Herpwell’s theories are correct, we are all being restored on a foundational level, entirely new, every moment of our lives,” Terrigan joked. “We are not the people that we were that day. We need not be burdened by our past selves.”

He was rewarded by a burst of tearful laughter.

“You know that’s not true,” Baruch snorted, and he was right. But he was also laughing, and that was all that Terrigan had wanted, in the end. He grinned back, and bent down to start untangling the nets that had gotten all jumbled from his ill handling. Still snorting with laughter, Baruch joined him in the effort.

The lake was shining, blindingly bright in the sun, glittering like a star-filled sky. The smell of new life was everywhere, and the ancient cedars curled their roots ever deeper into the fissures in the dark granite shore stones, holding on for dear life as their branches swayed in a gentle breeze.

Yell at me on Discord!
Posted on by Grace Crandall · 1 Comment

White Knuckle Grip

Hetty Brown didn’t like the casino. Her reasons were numerous and multifaceted.

The most aggravating reason was sitting across the table from her, half-obscured by the cigar smoke that hung thick in the air. Pinstripe suit, his hair oiled back and his pencil-thin mustache sitting, sharp as a switchblade, over his lip.   He didn’t actually blend into the wallpaper, but he did look like he fit in, here. Like he belonged. It was a mark against him.

Her own shiny secondhand dress had looked fancy enough in the thrift shop. The deep indigo fabric had reminded her of the Starlight’s glowing holographic addition to the city skyline. The dress hadn’t held up well, though–had seemed almost glaringly cheap the moment she’d found her way to the upper levels of the casino. Even the platter-carriers had raised their eyebrows at her.

Hetty took a deep, smoke-filled breath, and tried to ignore the superior way he was smiling at her, focusing instead on the cards in her hands, doing her best not to bend them. Her grip was suited best for repairing the heavy machinery at the Luminarii Shipping Company. Things more fragile than steel tended to crumple.

She grimaced at the cards. It was a bad hand.

“If you’d like to fold,” the man on the other side of the table drawled. He must have oiled his voice as well as his hair, to talk so smooth. “Our companions already have.”

He made a wide, liberal gesture to the other seats at the circular poker table. They were all empty. The chairs had been pushed back in varying levels of frustration and disgust. One was still tipped on its back, the legs splayed garishly upwards, like a dead insect. One man had taken Slick’s winning streak even worse than the others, and he’d needed to be escorted out.

Hetty glanced at the chips on the table, the metallic rectangles glinting with the promise of great wealth, though they were next to worthless themselves. Considered folding, of only to find a table with more agreeable company. But—she wasn’t even halfway through, and she’d come here to lose her money. Slick’s winning streak helped with that. A few more rounds, some daring betting, and all her chips would be gone, lost in the gnawing, money-hungry maw of the city’s upper class. It would be back where it belonged.

She shook her head.

“I’ll see your bet, and raise you by fifty percent.” She said, picking up a few more tiles from her slowly shrinking pile and tossing them in the center of the table with a decisive clack.

“What?” she asked, when the man shook his head. “I can lose my money as well as anyone else here.”

She splayed her cards on the table. A three of dusts, a nine of ore, and a six and ten of voids. and Slick looked at them, then at her, before cautiously laying down his own hand. It was comically huge, in comparison to her own; a void captain and three officer cards in descending order of rank. Slick looked suspicious as he pulled the winnings towards himself, adding its wealth to his growing pile. Hetty leaned back in her chair, grabbing her glass of chilled apple cider and taking a refreshing sip. She didn’t know why things tasted better in crystal glasses, but they did. It was one of the few things that she and the casino owners could agree on.

Slick frowned at her, his eyes narrowing.

“Are you drunk?” he asked. Rich words, from a man who’d been downing shot after shot all night. She’d touched nothing but her apple cider. 

“Nope,” Hetty said, popping her lips obnoxiously and tipping the glass back, gulping the remaining liquid down to the dregs before setting it down on the green velvet tabletop. “Another hand?”

Slick frowned at her bit longer, and for a moment, Hetty was convinced that she’d have to find another table for the remainder of her evening, after all. Then he smiled, and shook his head.

“I’d be a fool to miss my chance at skinning you completely, wouldn’t I?” he asked, waving his hand for the cards to be dealt out. Hetty’s own smile felt closer to baring her teeth.

“I think you’re a fool either way,” she said.

“I’m not the one losing all my money.” He pointed out. The center of the table rose with a small hiss of hydraulics. It spat out fresh hands for them both before receding again. Slick picked up his hand and sorted through the cards, sifting them through his fingers and setting them in order. His mouth was quirked up in a small, deeply aggravating smile, and Hetty clenched her fists, hating him.

“You think losing money’s all people have to fear in the world,” she said, picking up her own cards without so much as looking at them. “That’s why I could look at someone trying to fit wings to a pallet jack and still see someone far wiser than you’ll ever be.”

She felt proud of herself. Proud of the cold calm that was settled over her, keeping her voice even. She could feel her blood was up, could feel the familiar rage, but she wasn’t out of control. She stood up, and Slick actually leaned back in his chair, possibly expecting a repeat of the chair-throwing incident form earlier. Instead of trying to land a punch across the table, though, Hetty picked up the trays of tiles she’d gotten at the casino’s front counter and dumped them, one by one, on the center of the table. Tile after tile clattered across the green velvet, and even Slick, with his precious metal cufflinks and perfectly tailored suit, looked awed, a little, at the glittering wealth. He looked at her, disbelieving. Far from feeling satisfied at his bewildered expression, it only made the fury wrapped around her bones curl tighter. How dare he offer her his attention only now. How dare he see nothing, nothing in the world but money. How dare he and all the rest of this dismal world weigh everything against a gold bar and find it wanting.

“I’m not here to win,” she snarled at him, gesturing to the chips on the table. “I don’t want a red cent of this. So take the bet. Take it all. It’ll be barely a blip in the bank account for you, anyway, so take it.”

Slick was still staring at the money. He giggled—giggled, like a kid or something.  

“I–,” he started, a little of the oily ease gone from his voice, “This will be—A lot more than a blip. Far more than a blip, for me.”

Hetty sat back down. She was tired. This was almost over with, and she could go back home, and pretend it had never happened. She could be free of it, if he just took the bet.

“I see your bet,” Slick said, and took his own mountain of wealth, shoving it out into the center of the table. He smiled at her when he did, like he’d just proved a point. “And I match it.”

His grin was getting on her nerves, but at least this would all be over soon. “See?” he said. “I can take risks, too.”

She shook her head, tossing her cards on the table. She didn’t want to dignify that with a reply. Besides, this would all be over once Slick laid out his own hand, and then she could go home, and lose this place in its own poisonous haze, like a fevered dream.

Slick—wasn’t laying out his hand, though. He was staring at her cards. Silent, with that shell-shocked look on his face, he was the least insufferable she’d ever seen him. She frowned at him. “What?” she asked.

He shook his head, scattering his own cards over the table haphazardly, and scrubbed his fingers through his hair, mussing the perfect coif he’d been sporting. Three captains and a lieutenant, she thought. It was a good hand. What—

She looked down at the cards she’d tossed on the table, suddenly realizing that she’d never so much as glanced at them.

Four supernova cards stared up at her from the table. Gold leaf glittered on their green-and-purple surfaces. The highest card from every suit. It wasn’t just a good hand, it was an unbeatable one.

Oh. Oh no.  

“Well played,” Slick said, still shaking his head. His perfect, razor-thin mustache was quirked up at one end, and his hair hung limply over his forehead. His reaction to losing was more respectable, she guessed, than the one man who’d thrown a fit and almost broken his chair. She would have preferred that anger over this, though—he was impressed. Like she’d planned this. Wanted it. Like she was no better than one of them.

“I didn’t—another round?” she stuttered. “Another round. Sit back down. I don’t want—”

But no, Slick was already pushing his chair in, picking up his glass and draining the last drops of amber alcohol from it.

“I know when I’ve been played,” he said, setting the glass back down with a dull thud. “And I should have known to quit when I was ahead.” He grinned at her, and the image of herself that his eyes reflected bore no resemblance to the woman she knew she was. “I do have to say—If it hadn’t been for that awful dress, I might have clocked what you were doing hours ago. You really looked the part. It’s a nice touch.”

He left before she could get up to punch him, and she was suddenly alone in a room filled with low light and drifting smoke, staring at a pile of shiny chips worth twice what she’d come here with, chilled apple cider curdling in her stomach in a way that made her wish she’d gone for something stronger.

—

Surprisingly, and utterly against every warning about the place that her mother had ever issued, the casino wouldn’t let her leave without her money. She tried. She was stopped at the door, and smiling women in fitted tuxedos showed her to the counter where she could turn her chips in and get the cash amount recharged onto her ID card. None of them raised their eyebrows at her dress now.

“Can’t you just—” she sighed, and leaned her forehead on the glass partition between her and the overly-cheery cashier. “Just. I can leave you tips, right? Can’t you just take it?”

“Oh, I assure you, Ma’am, the Starlight pays each of its employees a more than comfortable wage,” the girl chirped, the smile almost hiding the hungry look in her eyes. “We would never jeopardize our positions here by taking cash gifts from patrons, though I appreciate the offer.”

Go away before you get me fired, Hetty translated. Okay. Fine. She’d have to—do something else with it all, then. Tomorrow. She’d find some way to get rid of the money. Tomorrow.

The girl handed her pale blue plastic card back to her, and then slid something else across the counter. It was slim and pale, the shape and size of one of the casino’s chips, but not quite the right color, and without the distinctive brand of the Starlight embossed on it. Hetty frowned, picking it up.

“What’s this?” she asked, turning it over in her fingers.

The girl on the other side of the counter shrugged.

“I don’t know, Ma’am. One of our patrons must have betted and lost it. It’s yours now, though.”

It was strangely heavy, for something so small. Hetty turned it over again. It seemed like a solid piece of metal, perfectly smooth. It was pretty.

She put it in her pocket.

—

Outside the casino, the air was clear and clean. The street lights were heavily colored, reflecting against the streets in glittering glory, but even that was better than the hazy lighting inside the casino. Hetty glanced upwards, gazing for a few moments at the deep indigo sky. Stars made small pinpricks of light, and on the horizon, the rings of Yamuna, their neighboring planet, swept across the sky, the light it cast back on them interrupted by the jagged lines of apartment buildings in the distance.

Hetty’s feet didn’t want to move. Her work coat was wrapped around her shoulders, hanging unzipped over her chest, the grease-strained canvas a drastic contrast to the shiny fabric of her dress. She wrapped her arms around herself, not quite able to tear her gaze away from the sky.

The choked feeling rising in her throat was deeply unwelcome, and she tried to swallow it, tried to keep the burning tears out of her eyes. She couldn’t. She started walking, raising her hands to wipe at her face, a gesture which made her feel small and childish. She hated it.

The apartment was empty, and she didn’t want to go home to it.

She’d had time, in the months since the accident, to clean the place up. She’d shoved Tare’s belongings under the bed, and put Elle’s blankets in the corner, folded carefully.

The small studio apartment no longer looked like three people lived in it, but that didn’t mean it was empty. Elle’s collection of strange spices from other planets still lived, untouched, in the cupboard above the freezer. Tare’s notebooks, full of stories he’d never finish writing, lurked under the bed. Hetty still caught herself almost using his writing pen to jot down a list, and unthinkingly putting it back in the mug, finding a dull pencil to write with instead.

A brusque apology letter from Lumarii Shipping Company still laid, ripped and crumpled, in the garbage. Tragic accident. Deepest apologies. Due diligence.

The price they’d set on her sibling’s lives was enough to make sure that Hetty never had to worry about making the rent again.

It was too much money for one person to have. It was nowhere near enough money to even begin to make up for the loss.

She wanted it gone. Had just tried to get rid of it. she’d failed, somehow, and now, she just didn’t want to go home.

It’s hardly a home anymore, with no one inside it.

—

The streets outside the Starlight were intermittently busy. Few people were walking—the wide sidewalks were heated and well-lit, but the elegant women in shining fur coats and the men in tailored suits only used them to exit their sleek black hovercars and enter the various buildings that decorated the boulevard. Hotels and casinos, clubs and restaurants. Places with no real purpose but to give people a place to exist in for a while, surrounded by lights and smoke, glitter and shine. It was pretty, really pretty, and it made Hetty feel like her chest had been carved out with one of Elle’s serving spoons.

It was almost a relief when her feet started to rub painfully in her heeled shoes. The pain felt like something real, something grounded.

When the look of the streets began to change, that was a relief, too. The lighting became less colorful, the dim street lamps glowing green, and the buildings became taller, squarer, closer together. The effect was like being funneled into a maze, or sealed into a box, as if the very landscape wanted to say, you’re stuck here forever.

Hetty had grown up in this maze, though, and to her the press of buildings was a comfort. Their plain concrete faces and utilitarian edges did not expect anything of her but what she knew how to give. Hard work and a harder face. Fists clenched against any possible threats. Things that she knew.

Speaking of threats—

“Stop right there.”

Hetty startled, realizing that she’d been staring up at where the apartment complexes turned into a interwoven mess of concrete above her, obscuring the sky. She was in a narrow alleyway, only a few blocks away from her own apartment building, but there was someone standing at the end of it, silhouetted in green light. A very skinny someone, a few inches shorter than she would have been without the heels on. She frowned at them, and the person stepped forward, popping their knuckles and leveling a glare at her.

Her mouth quirked up slightly, and she shook her head. It was a kid.

“What are you doing?” she asked, trying and failing to keep the humor out of her voice.

“What does it look like?” the kid asked. “We’re robbing you.”

Okay, this was good. This was really good. Hetty turned around, and saw that the other end of the alley had been blocked off by a few more of the kids. There were a good half-dozen of them, and if you stuck them all together, they might have been the size of a mildly intimidating adult.

It had been a long time since Hetty had been robbed. Usually, it happened when a new gang took over the area, and was trying to convince people of the use of paying their protection fees. She’d never had a problem paying the fees—it made the grocery budget tight sometimes, but so did rent, and the power bill. It was just—how things were.

There was no way, though, that these kids had displaced the Scarabs. That gang had serious muscle, and more members than some religions. They’d held this area for half a decade now. It was equally unlikely that the kids didn’t know this was Scarab territory.

No, it was more likely that someone had hired these kids, and promised enough money that they’d collectively decided to risk the Scarabs’ wrath.

Hetty had a fair idea of who that was, too.

If Slick had just showed up and asked for his money back, Hetty would have given it to him. She didn’t want it. She didn’t care if he had it.

But no, he thought that she was some kind of money-grubbing con woman, someone who had to be threatened and bullied into giving up some money she’d stumbled on by pure chance.

Also, he’d sent kids to do his dirty work, and that just didn’t fly.

“You could try to do that,” she said, “And you could get a bloody nose from it. Or you could walk away, and I’ll let you off without one.”

The tallest of the children, the one who’d cracked his knuckles, scowled at her.

“We can take you.” He said, in a low growl. His voice must have dropped recently, if he was still showing it off like that.

Hetty couldn’t help it. She laughed.

“Maybe in a few years, kid,” she said. “When I’m all grey-haired and talking about the good old days, and you’ve grown another few inches. For now, your best bet is to go back to the guy that hired you, and let him know I’ll talk to him in person.”

She walked forward, intending to step past the kid, when footsteps scuffed on the ground behind her.

“Griff—” the knuckle-cracking kid shouted, and Hetty turned to find a tiny blur flying at her head. On instinct, she grabbed it, letting the force of the kid’s leap swing her around, and found herself with an armful of scrawny limbs that all lashed out at her with the righteous fury of an angry cat. She twisted her fist into the back of the kid’s shirt, and held him out at arm’s length. He growled, trying to kick her, but he couldn’t quite reach. What age even was he, she wondered?

The leader had his arms out wide, signaling the others to stop, his eyes fixed on the kid Hetty was holding.

They were loyal to each other, which she respected. It was also really convenient. She was too tired to get into a fight, and would really rather not punch kids, anyway.  

She lifted the kid she was holding—Griff? And jostled him slightly, looking the leader in the eye.

“I’m keeping this,” she said. “You can have him back once you get whoever hired you to come talk to me. Okay?”

The kid’s lips peeled away from his teeth. He was angry, but he knew as well as she did that he couldn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t a fun feeling, that kind of anger.

“What’s your name?” she asked. He scowled at her, but said,

“Pell,”

“Okay, Pell, I’m not gonna hurt your friend. I’m not gonna hurt you, either. I just want to talk to the guy who hired you, and I don’t want to be robbed tonight.”

Griff snarled and tried to scratch her arm. She ignored him.

Pell glanced between them both, distrust plain in his eyes, then nodded. He gestured to the others, getting them to come around behind him, keeping an eye on her the whole time.  

“I’ll tell him to talk to you,” he said, “But if he doesn’t—”

“I trust you’ll tell him.” Hetty said. “Whether he comes to talk to me or not, I’ll let Griff here go in the morning. Just don’t try and rob me again.”

“It’s Griffin,” Griff snapped at her, trying to kick her again.

“Hey,” Pell said, solemnly, catching the kid’s attention. “We’ll be back for you, okay?”

He looked at Hetty.

“We’ll be back for him.” He said, and she nodded.

“I know you will.”

—

She closed the apartment door behind her, and only then did she let the dirty little street gremlin go. He snarled at her, which she guessed was fair enough, and she took off her coat, kicking the fancy heels away from her aching feet as she did. The carpet was worn almost threadbare, but it was familiar, and thus a comfort to her aching toes.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. Griffin had his fists up, and he glared at her. She could have gripped both his wrists in one hand.

“You’re hungry,” she concluded, moving him to one side of the hall so she could walk past him. “Come on. Eat.”

The kitchen was just large enough to house a small freezer-fridge, a two-burner hot plate, a sink, and a tall shelf full of all the food that wouldn’t spoil at room temperature. Griffin followed her in, his steps slow and cautious, as if the floor might burn him if he walked too confidently.

Hetty usually made herself plain mashed buckwheat cereal. Fancy cooking had been Elle’s domain, and treading into the territory usually occupied by her sister made Hetty’s heart ache badly.

Plain mashed cereal was plenty nutritious. But it didn’t taste good. And she wanted, suddenly, to make something that tasted good—for the kid’s sake.

She reached up, grabbing the flour-stained book that had been Elle’s from where it was sitting on top of the fridge. The book crackled as she opened it, and the pages were gritty and rough under her fingers, but she found a recipe quickly enough—a kind of soup that Elle had always made when one of them was sick. It was a good soup, filling and warm and quick to make, and Hetty read over the ingredients quickly.

“You can sit,” she said over her shoulder. “Food will be ready soon.” Griffin startled slightly, but found a stool and sat down.

“Do I get to know your name?” he asked.

She glanced over her shoulder at him.

“It’s Hetty.”

—

The kid was suspicious of her, but he was hungrier than he was wary. He devoured every bit of the soup, even though it wasn’t anything close to as good as Elle’s cooking. It was crazy how much variance there was in the outcome of the same recipe.

Still, if Hetty could feed a half-starved street urchin with her cooking, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

She offered the kid Tare’s cot for the night, and was met with suspicion a second time. She didn’t push it. Griffin accepted, though, in the end. It was strange, digging the cot out from under the bed, unfolding it in the spare area between the bedroom and the kitchen. She hadn’t expected to ever do that again.

She was able to convince the kid to shower, and she gave him some of Tare’s old clothes, and all the blankets that Elle had spent evenings repairing with needle and thread while they both listened to the newest chapter of one of Tare’s stories.

Once Griffin was settled, Hetty went to shower, herself. She stripped out of the shiny blue dress, unable to feel at all tired past the overwhelming ache in her chest. The pain of it was worse than ever. It wasn’t just the emptiness of having lost them, now. It felt like an angry rat was stuck in her chest, tearing at her with claws and teeth, all rabid fury and no sense.

Her siblings were gone, and she wasn’t just sad. She was also so furious that she’d been barely holding herself back from looking for fights wherever she went. She was so done that she’d been living every day as if she was just an empty shell that went to work, did her job, came back, and ate.

She wasn’t, though. Empty. She was still herself, still here. They’d left her here. All of her. It wasn’t their fault, but they had. And she might not really know how to be herself when they weren’t here, but she was going to have to figure it out. She had years of existence left, and no matter how much it might hurt, she had to do something with them, something that wasn’t just existing.

She turned off the shower spray, and pressed her head against the wall, closing her eyes. She had to do something with her life, now. Without them. It hurt and it felt good. It ached, and it felt like healing. She hated it, and for the first time, she felt like she had something to do that wasn’t hating things.

She wasn’t sure what it was that she had to do, but she knew she had to do something, and that was new.

With the shower no longer running, she heard a sound. Like a door opening, several floors below. Like Slick, come to ask for his money back.

It was time to do that something. Whatever it was.

—

Griffin was soundly asleep on the cot in the kitchen. The kid snored like an old man, and Hetty felt her lips quirk up. She tossed her work coat on over her clothes, and walked out the door.

The hallway lamps glowed a sickly green. The other apartments were only signified by tarnished metal doors. Sometimes a door would be muffling a child crying, or thumping music, or two people screaming at one another, but it was late enough that the hallways were mostly silent.

As soon as Hetty opened the stairwell door, she saw someone climbing up it in a rumpled, if expensive, suit. Tagging behind him, Pell jogged up the stairs. His head was down and his shoulders were slumped.

The man in the suit was familiar, but not in the way that Hetty had been expecting. Instead of Slick’s oiled hair and thin mustache, she saw the square, clean-shaven face of the chair-thrower, the man who’d gambled away more than he could handle and ended up getting himself thrown out of the casino.  

She closed the door to the stairwell behind her, and crossed her arms, leaning up against it. The man looked up as the door clicked shut, and froze where he stood, his hand gripping the railing. They stared at each other for a few moments.

“What do you want?” she asked.

He blinked at her. “You’ve got something of mine.”

She frowned, unwrapping her arms and shoving her hand into her pocket. Her fingers closed around a small, cool thing. Something that looked like a gambling chip, but wasn’t. She pulled it out.

“This?” she asked. “What is it?”

The man swallowed, drawn to the tiny object like a metal shaving to a magnet. It seemed to take him effort to tear his gaze away and refocus on her, and when he finally had, his eyes were blazing with determination.

“None of your business.”

Fair enough.

She flipped it at him with her thumb, sending it flying through the air like a tiddlywink. Startled, he lunged to grab it out of the air, nearly falling down the stairs to catch it. Whatever it was, he thought it was worth cracking his head open. She had a sneaking suspicion that it really wasn’t.

“You should keep better track of your things,” she said. “Or at least hire better thieves.”

 He looked from it, to her, and back. He rubbed his thumb over it wonderingly, lovingly, like a mother stroking her baby’s cheek. He glanced up, suspicion and relief at odds in his eyes. She shook her head, and kicked off from the wall, turning around to open the door and go back home.

“Do you know what you’ve just handed over?” he asked, as she put her hand on the doorknob.

“Nope,” she said, turning the knob and opening the heavy metal door with ease.

“It’s—it’s worth more than life itself,” he insisted. “It’s more power—more knowledge—than most people ever see in their lifetimes. It’s—”

He sounded so desperate. So…obsessed. She felt bad for him, and it was that, more than anything, that made her turn back around.

“It doesn’t matter what it is,” she said, frowning down the stairs at him. “All that matters is what you use it for. I just bought myself some peace and quiet.”

That shut him up. He looked more confused than anything. It was probably like talking to a brick wall, but—

She sighed.

“Just. Whatever you use that for?” she said. “Make sure it’s worth it, first. Okay?”

She turned to Pell, who’d watched the whole exchange in silence. “You want to get your friend?” she asked.

The kid nodded, and she gestured him up the steps after her. Together, they left the man and his precious token in the stairwell.

The apartment was as dark and quiet as she’d left it. Griffin had stopped snoring. Pell was doing that same walking-on-lava thing that Griffin had done. When he saw Griffin, all curled up on the cot in the kitchen, he halted, and blinked. His hands twitched, like he wanted to grab Griffin and run, but couldn’t quite make himself do it.

“Do you kids have somewhere to sleep?” Hetty asked, keeping her voice at a whisper so as to not wake the kid. 

Pell shot her a suspicious look. “Yeah,” he said. She didn’t believe him.

“That’s good,” she said. “That you’ll have somewhere warm to bring him, once you wake him up. Somewhere safe. With food.”

Pell only looked at her more suspiciously, and a little angrily, too. He thought she was rubbing it in—everything he didn’t have. Everything he couldn’t give.

He couldn’t give them that, but—she could. She really could.

It would mean filling the tiny apartment with people. The food would be eaten, the spices used, the pens written with, the notebooks read—

 It would mean that life would keep going. Without Tare or Elle in it.

“You would be warm here,” she said. “And safe. And fed. If you like.”

It hurt, saying that. But it felt good, too.

—

A half-hour or so of convincing later, and Hetty was ushering seven small children into an apartment that hadn’t been half large enough for three people. Pell was herding them, apparently trying to keep them all from touching more things than they could help.

Another half-hour after that, the children were fed and warm and as suspicious as ever, and they’d all managed to make themselves fit on the bed, while Hetty took the cot in the kitchen.

She laid on it, unable to make herself go to sleep, though she was truly tired now.

She leaned over the side of the cot, reaching into the pocket that Elle had sewn into the bottom of it. Her hand closed around the worn spine of a notebook. She pulled it free, looking at the cover, where Tare had put the story’s title in precise block print, and Elle had drawn beautiful, curling patterns over the rest of the cover, as decoration.

She opened the notebook, flipped to the part where Tare’s blocky handwriting ended. It stopped mid-sentence. He must have been interrupted while he was writing the story, and planned to come back to finish the chapter later. It had been a good story. She’d never know how it ended, now.

She looked at the cut-off sentence for a moment. Let the grief hurt. It would probably always hurt, at least a little.

But then she turned the page, picked up a pen. Tare’s special pen. She wasn’t writing a story, exactly, but she thought Tare would probably approve, all the same.

The money she’d been paid for losing Elle and Tare wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough to make up for their loss. But, like she’d said—

It wasn’t what it was. It was what you used it for. And it was enough to help this gang of kids. To keep them alive, at the very least, and fed well, and maybe comfortable enough, safe enough, so they could do things like write stories, or mess with fancy spices, or even, when the time came—help a few others.

She started writing down a list. Just things they’d need. A house, for a start. With eight bedrooms in it.

People held on to what they liked. To money, or to power, or to odd little shiny things that were easily mistaken for gambling chips. But the things that were worth holding onto—the things that mattered, that gave you a reason to live at all—weren’t things that you could keep or throw away. All you could do was hold on with a white knuckle grip, and hope they didn’t slip through your fingers.

  • Between Rarity and Value
    Deep in the silent warehouse, along the right side of a long aisle, between the ragged remnant of fairy wing and a coffin bound with engraved steel bands, something glowed. It spread green light over the coffin’s engravings, and shone through the fairy wing’s translucent cells. It showed up the clumps of dust on the floor, and Linh tended to use it as a reminder of when the place needed sweeping.   The tank of amniotic fluid was bolted to the floor. As he went on his rounds in the night, Linh had to take care not to trip over…
  • Strength of the Cedars
    The sun was strong–blindingly so. It baked and stank in the rich mud on the shores of the Lake; it glittered through the reeds and lilies, and smothered itself in the dense needles of the pines. In spite of the morning’s golden glow, the sky was dark. Above the green-tinted cliffs at the far edge of the lake, clouds the shade of slate slowly edged closer, changing shape as they came. Prince Terrigan, standing at the very edge of the Lake, hooves splayed to let the mud seep pleasantly between his toes, took it all in–the lake-clear, sun-muddied air, the…
  • White Knuckle Grip
    Hetty Brown didn’t like the casino. Her reasons were numerous and multifaceted. The most aggravating reason was sitting across the table from her, half-obscured by the cigar smoke that hung thick in the air. Pinstripe suit, his hair oiled back and his pencil-thin mustache sitting, sharp as a switchblade, over his lip.   He didn’t actually blend into the wallpaper, but he did look like he fit in, here. Like he belonged. It was a mark against him. Her own shiny secondhand dress had looked fancy enough in the thrift shop. The deep indigo fabric had reminded her of the Starlight’s…
Posted on by Grace Crandall · 4 Comments

Skeleton Crew

A glowing purple portal in the middle of the woods. A creature with glowing eyes and black claws is emerging from it.

There are many ways to close a dark portal, but only one way to create one.

To craft a portal, you’d need to have a few ingredients. Moonlight. Dragon scales. Unicorn mane. Something owned by your great-great grandparents, and a blade that had lasted ten years without ever cutting so much as a piece of paper. Some writing whose author had been forgotten, and one precious memory that you were willing to sacrifice to the cause.

Once cast, a portal was roughly a meter wide, and perfectly circular. It had a sort of purple shimmer on the edges, and in the center, it was a black so deep and so dark that it seemed to suck the very light out of the world around you. Some records reported hearing strange sounds from the dark portal, and others reported seeing strange creatures. Eyewitness reports, though, were hard to come by, and usually incomplete. Most people who got close enough to a portal to write one up died in the process.

Create Portal wasn’t really a difficult spell; but it was involved, and time-consuming, and the general consensus between scholars, magicians, and government officials was that it wasn’t likely to be used by any magician worth their salt.

“It’s a finnicky process, and it’s just as likely to kill you as anything. Seriously,” Professor Amiratus said, clacking his teeth in a skeletal chuckle, and fluttering his phalanges in a dismissive gesture over his half-eaten food. “Whoever would bother with something like that? If you want to get in contact with another realm of consciousness—summon a kitten, or something.”

He chuckled at his own joke, and glanced nervously between the two heavily armored royal guards. His hope that they had barged into his office and interrupted his lunch in order to question him about dark portals out of simple scholarly interest was swiftly diminishing. From their dark expressions, this was serious.

Amiratus hated it when things were serious. Especially when they decided to be serious right in front of his sandwich. His lettuce was wilting, and so were his spirits.

“Apparently, Professor, someone decided to,” the taller, more attentive of the two guardsmen said. His name was Grellig, and he had a face that was nearly as stoic as his helmet. His partner, who had introduced herself as Zell, was eying the stacks of ungraded papers that lined the walls of Amiratus’s office with trepidation, evidently expected them to topple over on her. “Since you’ve been recognized as the kingdom’s foremost expert on magical portals, due to your—”

He gestured, perhaps somewhat insensitively, to Amiratus’s figure. Amiratus looked down at his bare ribcage. In the first few weeks after his accident, he’d tried to continue clothing himself; but, as it turned out, it was rather hard to find a tailor experienced in finding a flattering cut for a skeleton.

A man and woman, both wearing armor, standing in a room. They are surrounded by stacks of paper. The man looks tired and put out. The woman is making eye contact with a spider. She appears mildly disturbed.

That had been a long time ago. Amiratus had since found the use in using his forbidding figure to warn new students about proper lab safety. He was comfortable with his current form, odd though it was. That didn’t mean he liked it being gestured to, mid-conversation, as if it was something he might have overlooked.

“Due to my traumatic experience that I, alone, out of the half-dozen magicians around me, survived?” Amiratus asked, keeping his tone light. “The deeply tragic event of which I have no memory, that quite literally stripped all the flesh from my bones? Is that what you’re referring to?”

“Yes, sir. That.”

The guard didn’t even have the good grace to look abashed. Zell seemed not to have heard any bit of the conversation, staring transfixed at the sample jar of living eyes on Amiratus’s desk. The eyes, curious, spun around to stare at her in return. She startled, taking a step back, perilously close to one of the stacks of papers.

“Please don’t knock over my tower of procrastination,” Amiratus said, holding out a hand. “It’s scrupulously organized.”

“It…is?” she asked. There was enough doubt in her voice to frazzle the talents of every circus psychic in a twenty-mile radius. If Amiratus still had eyebrows, he would have raised one.

He didn’t, though. Very inconvenient, that was.

“Youths in my day treated their elders with more respect,” he griped, getting up from his desk and opening a drawer. He picked up the jar of living eyeballs and put it away, shutting the drawer. Too much exposure to light shortened their lifespan significantly. “And yes, my whole office is scrupulously organized. If that stack of papers wasn’t where it is, it would be impossible to walk through here.”

She frowned, but didn’t try to contradict him. Amiratus had been rather hoping she would. Pointless arguments were one of his few remaining joys in life.

“I assume this means you’ll come with us, sir?” Grellig asked.

“No, I just heard that the kingdom was in danger from a mysterious dark portal, and I decided that this would be the perfect time to take a walk in the park.”

He shuffled through the mess on his desk, scaring several spiders.

“Sorry, dears,” he said, as the spiders scuttled to find new hiding places. “Just looking for—this!”

He pulled free a dusty leather satchel, unseating a stack of papers in the process and sending them in a fluttering drift to the floor. He spared a glance for the mess, then pulled the satchel open and opened one of the drawers, frowning down at the array of magical ingredients. There were many spells to choose from in closing a dark portal, but only one that would work on such short notice, and that one needed some ingredients that wouldn’t fit in Amiratus’s desk drawers.

Amiratus stuffed a pair of scaling circlets into the bag, as well as a small pouch of powdered oak root, and a vial of medical alcohol. He really hoped he wasn’t forgetting anything.

“We’re going to need a goat,” he muttered, half to himself. Something glinted slightly from inside the bag, clinking against the clay vial of alcohol, and he frowned, pulling it out.

It was a small, silver tin, a gift from one of his students. A gift shop purchase, full of cards inscribed with simple spells meant to entertain children, but richly made. It had been a kind, if useless, gift.

“Is that all you need?” Zell asked, at the same time that her partner said,

“A goat?”  

“Yes,” Amiratus, tossing the little tin back in the bag. “A goat.”

—

Grellig didn’t like venturing into the university on the best of days. In fact, he very much enjoyed leaving the place. It was a microcosm of reality, with so much influence over the outside world, and yet so little connection to it. It made his head itch.

Grellig paused, briefly, as they left the gate. He usually did—just to take a moment, and savor the smell of sanity in the air. Zell stopped beside him, taking the time to put her helmet back on her head.

The small, angry skeleton man charged on ahead of them both. Somehow, he had donned a robe on their trek down from the literal ivory tower his office had been in. It was purple. What little sunlight was shining past the pale clouds made the embroidered constellations on the robe sparkle slightly.

Grellig sighed, and Zell gave him a look of sympathy. No sanity today, then. He probably should have expected that.

“Onward,” Professor Amiratus declared, “To the goat!”

Grellig sighed even deeper, and began to trudge after Amiratus. The animal market was in the opposite direction, but it seemed wise to let Amiratus figure that out on his own. Scholars were rarely either friendly or helpful if you happened to embarrass them.

He didn’t think to relay that advice to Zell. Before he could say anything, the woman jogged forward, her wooden crossbow clanking obnoxiously on her cuirass. Amiratus turned at the sound, steps slowing.

“Goats are that way, sir,” she said, jabbing her thumb in the opposite direction than the one they were traveling in. “Most of the market, too.”

“It is?” Amiratus asked, tipping his head to one side. “That’s odd. It used to be—” he paused. “Oh, but of course. That was before the Kavax invasion, wasn’t it? It’s been rebuilt since then.”

The Kavax invasion had happened over seventy years ago. Not even Grellig’s grandmother remembered it.

Amiratus spun on his heel, and made an expansive gesture with one skeletal hand.

“Lead the way, then! I’m bound to get us hopelessly lost.”

Well. That was easier than Grellig had expected it to be.

“What do we need a goat for, sir?” he asked. He had an uncomfortable feeling that the answer was going to involve stone tables, knapped-flint knives, and blood. His family had raised goats. He liked them, and while he wasn’t above cooking up some goat stew every once in a while, he liked them best when they were alive.

Amiratus snapped his bedazzled cloak, gathering it close to his ribcage with a theatrical gesture, and declared,

“You’ll see soon enough.”

Grellig, not at all reassured, grimaced.

—

They made it out of the market just as the first vendors were beginning to shut up their shops, and out of the city just as the sky was growing purple with night. Amiratus thought they had made fairly good time. Judging by the scowl on Grellig’s face, though, the guard did not agree. The big man looked down at his armful of goat with an expression most people reserved for their most despised enemy, or cups or tea that had gone prematurely cold. He dumped the armful off on Zell, who scrambled to keep the bleating creature from kicking its way free of her hold.

“How far away is this portal, anyway?” Amiratus asked.

“Not far at all,” Zell panted, grabbing the goat’s leg mid-leap and hauling it back into her arms. “Some of the king’s rangers discovered it in the royal forests this morning.”

“Royal forests,” Amiratus snorted, and even out of the corner of his eye socket, he caught the way that Grellig bristled at his tone.

“What’s the matter, royal guardsman?” he asked.

“You’re coming close to insulting our King,” Grellig growled. “Men have been exiled for less.”

“They have!” Amiratus said cheerily. “That’s part of the problem, really. In my day, kings were a great deal humbler. They didn’t claim ownership over forests, and rivers, and roads, dear heavens. Nowadays, they seem to sit about in their royal robes and expect the world to hand them adulation and material wealth on a golden platter. And what do they give in return, I ask you?”

“Hasn’t the king always owned the forest?” Zell asked. She seemed to have succeeded in calming down the goat in her arms—a truly impressive feat, if Amiratus’s knowledge of the nature of goats hadn’t become as horribly outdated as the rest of him—and was occupying herself by gently scritching at the creature’s nubbin horns. The goat was butting her hand affectionately. It was deeply adorable.

“Yes,” Grellig growled, at exactly the same time that Amiratus said,

“Of course not!”

Grellig glared at him. Amiratus couldn’t glare anymore, but he’d heard that some people found looking him in the empty sockets rather discomfiting. He hoped that Grellig was discomfited.

“It was during the reign of our first queen,” Amiratus said. “Two barons brought a complaint over land ownership to her, in an attempt to claim that she’d show unfair favoritism. She was too clever for them, and ended up convincing them both that all land not currently being used for building or agricultural pursuits belonged, by default, to her. The crown has held onto that land ever since–thus, royal forests.”

“Huh,” Zell said, sounding contemplative. Not for the first time, Amiratus wondered how much of the land’s history was actually taught to those who occupied it. Probably not much. It was hard to be proud of a nation when you knew how many petty feuds had shaped it.

Grellig seemed to have let Amiratus’s little history lesson fly in one ear and out the other. He was tromping on ahead, armor clanking, making use of the longer legs that nature had blessed him with.

“It’s getting dark,” he growled. “We should have left sooner.”

“If we’d left sooner, we wouldn’t have had our goat, which we needed to close the portal.” Amiratus said. “As for the dark—let me help with that.”

He snapped his fingers, and a glowing white orb fizzed to life above the three of them.

To be entirely fair, he cast the spell at least partially out of annoyance. He knew it might startle the two guards. A little harmless prank. He wanted to see Grellig jump.

Grellig didn’t jump.

The goat, however, did.

With a startled bleat, it kicked its way free of Zell’s arms, nothing but a small black-and-grey blur, disappearing into the underbrush. Amiratus didn’t even have time to curse himself for an idiot.

“Aak! Follow that goat!” he shouted. At the orb, mind you. The ball of light was a simple, obedient bit of magic, one that should be visible from a long way off.

But, of course—of course, the two guards thought he was shouting at them. They were far too used to following orders, too. Anyone else might have paused, said something like ‘Are you sure?’ or ‘Maybe we should consider other options’ or even ‘Of course I’m not going to plunge blindly into the forest, that’s insane, and so are you.’

But they didn’t say any of those things. Even Grellig didn’t so much as hesitate to dive headlong into the underbrush. Amiratus, unwilling as he was to be left behind, had to rush after them.

“Stop!” he shouted, but either the two couldn’t hear him over the cacophony of clanking armor and crunching leaves, or they thought he was yelling at the goat. “Slow down!” he tried, as he fell further behind them both. How did they run so fast with all that armor on?

As goat, guards, and orb all alike outpaced him, it became more and more difficult for Amiratus to see. Long, whippy thorns grabbed at his legs, and it wasn’t long before he cracked his shin on a soggy old tree trunk. The jolt was hard enough to send his loosely-held-together bones flying in all directions.

The clatter of armor and the crashing sound of trampled flora moved further and further away. The light of Amiratus’s orb bobbed along, just visible through the tangled mess of branches and leaves.

Amiratus groaned softly from where his skull had landed underneath a fern.  

Over the course of the years, he’d discovered that whatever the experience of going through the dark portal the first time had done to him had permanently bound his consciousness to his bones, his skull in particular. It was his own spellwork, however, that bound his bones to one another and made them ambulatory. It had been shoddily done—he was not too proud to admit that, if only to himself. If he’d ever bothered to renew the spells with the greater wizardly knowledge he’d accumulated over the years, he’d have been able to do something really useful—for example, say a single word and have his skeleton reassemble itself on the spot.

But he had never done that. He’d been putting it off.

With a groan, he willed his arm to move, pulling itself along like a drunken inchworm and feeling along the mossy ground for his other bones.

As he found missing pieces and put them in close proximity, the spellwork snapped them together like magnets. His legs and his arms were still separate from one another, ambling about drunkenly. From where his skull lay, He thought he could see his ribcage, large and white against the darkening forest, and he sent his reassembling selves after it.

This would have been easier with a light, but the orb spell couldn’t be cast and held more than once. If he cast it again now, Zell and Grellig would be left in the dark—literally. They’d probably be lost, and the goat would definitely be gone, and then they’d have to start the entire portal-closing procedure over again tomorrow.

No, it wasn’t worth it. Assembling himself in the dark it was, then.

The bobbing light grew ever more distant. By the time Amiratus had finally found his left thumb phalange, it was barely a speck in the distance.

“Don’t wait up,” Amiratus griped. “Don’t mind me at all. I’m just the only wizard who could possibly know the spell to close the portal, after all. That’s definitely not important.”

His thumb clicked into place, and Amiratus gave it an experimental wiggle. He seemed to be more or less in order. He couldn’t sense any missing bones, anyway, and that was about as good as he thought he was going to get in the dark.

A scream pierced the night, stabbing like a needle, and tugging the thread of his attention to the bobbing light in the far distance.

The light of the orb blinked out, leaving silence in its wake.

—

Grellig felt himself falling. It was a strange feeling, like the jerk of sudden terror that usually jarred him out of a bad dream—mortal fear surrounded by utter silence, utter lack of sensation.

But he wasn’t waking up.

He blinked, in hopes of making his surroundings clearer. Instead, it seemed that the blurred, rippling lines were as close to well-defined as they were going to get.

“Zell,” Grellig shouted. His voice seemed to waver, though he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t. There wasn’t anything to be afraid of yet. For all he knew, he was simply asleep! Ha. Probably dreaming. He’d wake up any moment now.

His voice did not echo in the emptiness. Instead, it seemed to be absorbed into the soft, rippling—cloth? Mist? It was impossible to tell what it was that surrounded him. The very center of Grellig’s chest felt sunken and raw, the feeling of falling sticking with him.

“Zell!” he shouted again. They’d been chasing that accursed goat, and Amiratus’s light had been bright enough to blind them both. She’d dove in after the animal, and Grellig had barely had enough time to register that they’d both disappeared, just barely noticed the glowing ring of purple light. He’d tried to stop, but he’d fallen in anyway.

They’d found the dark portal. They were inside it. Which meant, hopefully, that Zell was around here somewhere.

Again, though, his cry was absorbed into the strangely rippling dark. It was like being smothered by richly dyed velvet. The warm, soft numbness that was beginning to seep into his limbs was almost pleasant—or would have been, if Grellig’s terror hadn’t been filling his lungs with the need to move. He began to struggle. Somewhat pointlessly, as it turned out, because the soft, almost wispy material that seemed to make up the inside of the portal only gave way to his struggles, leaving him as helpless as a deer on ice.

Something shifted in the murky depths. A dark shadow, larger than any creature Grellig had ever seen, moved behind the curtain of mist, and its moving made a strange sound, like a heaving breath or the scraping of stone upon stone. Grellig could not move in this reality, could barely comprehend it, but the shadow that lived in the shadows could. Grellig felt the fear of finding himself in enemy territory, compounded tenfold; at least in the conflicts he was used to, enemy territory rarely rendered him this utterly helpless.

The moving thing moved again, and Grellig tried to strain backwards as the mist began to part, and a great head broke through, black as night and shining like a sapphire. A pair of glowing orange eyes looked down at him, and a voice spoke, in a hollow, echoing boom,

“What is this?”

“It’s—I’m—me,” Grellig said the first thing that came to mind. It seemed awfully breezy, all of a sudden. A cool wind brushed against his temples and buffeted his ears.

The face—the giant, strange, inhuman face—gave a very human frown.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I’m me!” Grellig shouted, somewhat idiotically, against the suddenly overwhelming wind. It seemed lighter all of a sudden. He was casting a shadow, he realized, on the strange material of the inside of the portal.

“You can speak?” the face asked, sounding surprised.

“Of course I can—”

The wind, which was uproarious now, catapulted something out of the darkness at him, hitting him directly in the face. Grellig coughed, spitting out a mouthful of fur, and frowned down at the thing in his arms.

The goat bleated back.

Grellig barely had time to be perplexed, before the wind tore the animal out of his grip, sending it catapulting into the bright circle of light behind him.

The bright circle of light that he was fairly certain hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“What the—what was that,” the face demanded.

“Our goat.” Grellig explained, helpfully, second before he had the sudden thought that maybe the face-creature was asking about the expanding, light-filled hole in the middle of their dark portal realm. He didn’t have time to double back and explain, though; because the next moment, he felt something hard and cold wrap tightly around his ankle. It jerked him towards the light, and the wind helped it along, until between the two, he was nearly flying. He had enough time, just, to see the clawed hand as it reached out to grab him; but he was moving too fast for it, now. He shot out of its grip just as the claws clacked shut over empty space. There was a blazing light, a sound like tearing cloth, and suddenly, he was lying on his back on cold, wet earth, misty night air filling his lungs. After the otherworldly numbness that had surrounded him inside the portal, the sudden rush of sensation bordered on painful. Still, it was a relief. He heaved deep breath after deep breath, all but drinking the air.

“Are you all right?”

A skull appeared in Grellig’s vision, skeletal fingers brushing up against his throat, checking for a pulse, and then beginning to prod his ribs. The professor wasn’t wearing his cloak anymore. Small mercies.

“Still alive, good. Still have all your bones? Do you know where you are? What’s my name?”

Grellig groaned, sitting up.

“I’ve got all my bones, Amiratus. Nothing in there hurt me. Where’s Zell?”

“I’m right here,” his partner chimed in, and Grellig turned to find her flushed, kneeling with her arms around the neck of that infernal goat, but otherwise okay. They were all in the small clearing in front of the dark portal, and Amiratus’s glowing orb was shining above them, lighting the small clearing with a blazing, eerie glow.

“Okay, so you’re all in one piece, and Zell’s all in one piece.” Amiratus said, and if Grellig didn’t know better, he would have said that the professor’s voice was almost expressing an emotion. Relief, maybe.

“And most importantly,” Amiratus said, collecting himself. “The goat’s all right.”

He shuffled over to his satchel, which had been hastily tipped over on one side, its contents scattered. Now that Grellig noticed it, he also saw the arcane lines carved deep in the dirt, still rippling blue with magical energy. The spell that had pulled them free of the portal, he realized.

“Would you mind bringing it over here, dear?”

Amiratus was shuffling through his supplies, and Grellig grimaced as he pulled free a small, ceremonial-looking dagger. Zell brought the goat over, and Grellig turned away, looking into the portal instead. It was just an animal, he thought, and the safety of the kingdom was at stake.

“There we are,”  Amiratus declared, and Grellig glanced back.

The goat was still alive, munching quietly on the underbrush. Amiratus was holding something pinched tight in his fingers. A small tuft of hair.

“That’ll be perfect.”

“Hold on,” Grellig said. “You just needed its hair?”

Amiratus looked at him blankly. Not that he could really look anything other than blank, being a skeleton and all, but still. It was infuriating.

“Well, yes.” Amiratus said. “Only very dark magic uses materials harvested with bloodshed.”

“You’re telling me that all that time spent haggling over it, all the trouble of chasing it, of falling in a dark portal, and we could have just asked politely for some of its hair and been on our way?”

“Well, no,” the professor hedged. “Not really. You see, the fresher the ingredients are, the higher a chance the spell has of working properly. Seeing as this spell is largely theoretical, and the danger is so great, I wanted to—”

This all sounded like excuses to Grellig, whose blood was rushing in his ears in a way that usually preceded a fistfight.

“We could have died! I could have died, over a stupid—”

“GOAT,” The dark portal boomed.

—

Amiratus wasn’t in the best of places, right now. Geographically or mentally.

The experience of being within five feet of another dark portal, so long after his run-in with the first, was making him realize just how little he’d managed to deal with the whole ‘losing his flesh and organs’ debacle. He’d poured his past hundred or so years into the research of dark portals. He made regular jokes to his students about his new bodily appearance, and the magical mix-up that had contributed to it.

He’d thought that counted as dealing with it. But, judging by the tension and near-panic that was trembling through his very marrow, he hadn’t dealt with it after all. Not even a little.

The booming voice emanating from the portal halted the argument, which was good. He and Grellig were both just working through their nerves, anyway, and a fight at this juncture wouldn’t help anyone.

On the other hand, it was a booming voice emanating from a dark portal, and that wasn’t good at all.

“Did it just say ‘goat’?” Amiratus asked. Grellig, for some reason, looked sheepish.

“HOW DARE YOU DISTURB MY SLUMBER.”

Something pushed at the misty membrane of the portal’s center, causing it to bulge outwards. Whatever it was didn’t quite break through, and a rumbling growl of frustration shook the very ground around them.

Amiratus needed to work fast.

The ingredients he’d chosen were for for the simplest portal-closing spell he knew, and he gathered them up in shaking hands, hoping that the spell didn’t betray his confidence in it.

He dashed out the still-glowing symbols of the item recovery spell he’d used to get the royal guards out of the portal, and drew fresh magical directives in the earth after them. They began to ripple with the magical energy still left over from the previous spell.

Goat hair in the first circle, to represent the native fauna of this plane; the powdered oak root in the second, to represent the flora. He took the medical alcohol and poured it across the ingredients and into the third and final circle, which contained no ingredients, but consisted of a series of symbols articulating consumption, the reality of being crushed and demolished, absorbed into an overwhelming force. It was an unkind symbol, but a necessary one.

Using flint and stone, Amiratus lit the alcohol, combining the ingredients of all the circles into one cohesive spell, and then placed his palms flat on the ground, pouring every bit of magical energy he had into the waiting ground.

A skeleton, kneeling on the ground, with his palms flat in front of him. He is surrounded by darkness, but light and energy is emanating from the ground in front of him.

The reaction was instantanous and dramatic. The night mists gathered, and the ground trembled. Wind picked up, and leaves began to swirl around the portal. It began to shrink, crushed upon every side by a world to which it did not belong. Like the cells of the blood gathering to clot a wound or kill an infection, the pale mist coalesced into a roiling, milky substance that wrapped around the portal like an angry fist. It shrunk, making wild, jerking movements like a dying animal. Fear-driven and unwilling to lose momentum, Amiratus poured energy into the spell, ignoring the way his bones were beginning to glow, how his hands felt like they were burning where they touched the ground. He had enough magic for this spell. He would probably be bedridden for a few weeks once it was done; but he could do it. It wouldn’t kill him.

He was fully convinced of this until the portal suddenly stopped shrinking.

At first, Amiratus looked down, double-checking the spell, thinking that one of the lines had been smudged out, or that the ingredients had fizzled out. But no; all was well there. When he looked up, the magic was still working. The night mists seemed to have been angered, even, by their lack of progress, roiling furiously as they worked to close the portal, bashing against it like waves against rock, but no longer able to budge it.

It wasn’t that the spell was weakening.

No, something inside the portal was pushing back.

The ground trembled as a voice boomed, audible even over the wind.

“I WILL NOT BE ASSAULTED IN THIS MANNER, GOAT.” The otherworldly creature roared. As Amiratus watched, horrified, a set of shining claws, the color of oil-slick, burst out of the portal. They curled around the portal’s outer rim, shoving at it. Another clawed hand wrapped itself around the other side of the portal.

Amiratus redoubled the energy he was pouring into the spell, trying to fight it. For a moment, he could feel their two forces matched against one another, raw strength against raw strength. Like every arm-wrestling match he’d ever had, he knew as soon as he tried to push against this alien power that he was dismally outmatched. And, like every arm-wrestling match he’d ever had, he tried to put up a fight anyway.

The creature gave a harsh tug, and the portal tore open with a sound like thunder. It was no longer a perfect circle—its edges were sharp and ragged, and dark purple smoke bubbled out of it as the creature reached through with an arm the size of a tree trunk. Amiratus was thrown back from his spellwork, and lay groaning as the creature’s gargantuan head burst upwards, out of the portal. It was covered in snakelike scales that reflected the light in sharp, dazzling patterns like faceted obsidian, and its eyes were bright and round like an owl’s, glowing orange over its bared teeth.

“DISTURB MY SLEEP, AND YOU WILL FACE MY VENGEANCE. SHOW YOURSELF, GOAT, AND PERHAPS I SHALL BE APPEASED BY SIMPLY TEARING YOUR FLESH FROM YOUR BONES.”

I should say something, Amiratus thought. I should say something.

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. It was all he could do not to flee into the forest.

Because he knew that voice. He remembered that threat.

And even worse, he remembered, now, what it felt like when it was carried out.

“Hey! Flat-face!”

That was Zell, shouting. She had her crossbow off her back, a bolt nocked and ready, pointed uselessly at the creature’s face.

It turned towards her, just in time for a crossbow bolt to glance off of its tooth. It growled at her, and took a step forward, the ground shuddering under its feet.

Zell was already readying another bolt, walking swiftly backward, calm and steady in the face of danger. Grellig, too, was standing beside her, sword drawn and at the ready, as if it was of any use whatsoever.

They stood no chance of winning. None whatsoever. And yet, they stood ready to fight anyway.

Amiratus had done that once. When his flesh had still been wrapped around his bones, he’d been a young apprentice, helping a passel of older magicians in their attempt to research other planes of reality.

When the portal had actually appeared, and when the creature inside it had spoken, the other magicians had run. They’d left him alone, unprepared to face the threat, but idiotically courageous enough to try. It hadn’t saved them; they’d likely sealed their own fates, even, by turning their backs. He’d never quite managed, in the aftermath, to either excuse or condemn them for their cowardice. But now that he was faced with the same choice—run, or stay—it seemed hardly like a choice at all. He couldn’t leave the two guards to face this alone. Couldn’t, and wouldn’t.

He was surrounded by the scattered remnants of his supply pouch. He scrabbled through the mess, looking for something that might spark some idea of how to halt or weaken the creature.

His hand closed around a small tin.

He brought it up in front of his face, deeply confused for a moment, until he remembered. The pack of simple child’s trick spells. He opened it, breaking the seal on the tin, and shuffled through the cards that poured out, looking for anything that might prove useful.

“No, no,” he whispered, shuffling past spells that blew bubbles or made rude noises, losing more hope with every card.

His fingers suddenly stilled upon an unexpected find. He stared at the cheery illustration on it in shock.

Well.

That might work.

His voice trembled as he began the simple incantation. It required no ingredients, and only needed the barest spark of natural magic to set the words in motion.

The creature turned its head towards Amiratus as he spoke, and he had to stifle a heady chuckle as those familiar eyes seemed to blaze through his soul. He dropped the card, his hands still trembling slightly, and spoke the final word.

“What—” the creature began, but was unable to finish. One of its limbs seemed to disappear out from under it, and it tipped suddenly to one side. A booming protest was cut off harshly as the gargantuan beast disappeared in the smoky shadows surrounding the torn portal.

Amiratus’s portal closing spell, while put on pause, was still active. The night mists coalesced anew, and without the creature bodily holding it open, the portal began to collapse once more. The energy that Amiratus had poured out into the ground flared to life, lighting the entire clearing up in blue fire, and with a thunderous clap, the portal collapsed completely, leaving purple smoke and pale mist drifting lazily in its wake.

The night mists began to dissipate, punctuating the sudden silence by unfurling itself, and creeping out along the ground. Amiratus laid flat on the ground, feeling utterly unable to move so much as a finger.

“Professor! Are you alright?”

Zell was kneeling next to his head.

“Unngh,” Amiratus said. It was the fullest articulation of how he felt that he was able to manage at the moment.

“What did you do? Where did—where did that thing go?”

Amiratus gestured vaguely towards the dissipating mist. It was nearly gone now, and in the middle of it, where the portal had once been, stood the goat. It was nibbling on the iridescent, dark  fur of a very small kitten, who was hissing at it furiously. It tried to swipe at the goat’s nose, but wobbled on unsteady legs and ended up just toppling over in its side. The goat, utterly unperturbed by the kitten’s fury, continued to lip curiously at its belly.

“Well, then.” Grellig  said. “That’s impressive.”

“I am impressive.” Amiratus agreed, shutting his eyes.

“What? No. That’s not what I—” Grellig protested, but Amiratus was already dozing off, and didn’t hear the rest of the sentence.

—

“Visitors for you, professor. From the Royal Guard.”

Amiratus looked up from what he was doing, nodding at the young secretary in acknowledgment.

“Thank you, Neil. Let them in, please.”

Amiratus returned to his task, paddling his fingers lightly in the saucer of cream on the floor, and making what he hoped was an encouraging noise.

“Come on, eat,” he said. “You’ll like it, I promise.”

The kitten hiding under his desk hissed at him. It had more energy to pour into bitter fury than Amiratus had ever had in his life. He couldn’t help but admire it, honestly.

“Am!” Zell exclaimed, bursting in the door and weaving expertly through the stacks of paper to lean over his desk and wrap him in a hug. Amiratus returned the gesture, somewhat awkwardly, with his one free arm, trying to shake cream off his other hand. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”

“Hello,” he said, chuckling at her enthusiasm. “Good to see you. Is that a raincloud following behind you, or is that just the force of Grellig’s scowl?”

“If you wanted me cheery, you’d have let us meet somewhere outside of this accursed university.” The big man griped. He was holding a leash, and on the other end of it, a surprisingly well-behaved goat stood, looking around the room benignly.

“Is that a medal on Francis’ collar?” Amiratus asked, noticing the small blue ribbon.

“In recognition of acts of bravery,” Grellig said proudly. He’d grown oddly warm towards the goat after the portal incident, insisting it had contributed to their eventual success. It seemed he’d gotten the rest of the Guard as attached to it as he was.

Amiratus shook his head. “I’m surprised you haven’t gotten a little cloak and breastplate made for him yet,” he said, and immediately regretted it when Grellig got a thoughtful look, as if actually considering the idea.

“Well, I am sorry to disturb you.” He said. “Both of you. But I did want to hand in my report.”

It was a piece of paper among many pieces of paper, but Amiratus found it readily enough. He’d stayed up late the previous night, trying to collect his words together in a fashion that made sense. He had a great deal of sympathy, now, for his students and their late papers; but he’d managed it. He picked it up—it was folded carefully, and sealed with a droplet of clear wax.

Zell took the paper, tucking it safely away in a pouch on her belt.

“You know, they never tell us anything,” Zell said, “And I’m curious. How on earth did that child’s spell work on a creature out of a dark portal?”

Amiratus puffed his chest out a little. He was still incredibly proud of his own inductive reasoning.

“Well, It was a subject I’d been researching recently,” he said, ignoring Grellig’s prolonged groan. “Looking into the mechanics of ‘summon creature’ spells. Matter, as we know, cannot be created or destroyed; the same holds true for consciousness. So, to summon a creature, you are not creating a creature; you must, at best, be taking one from another place, and likely shape-shifting it to suit you. It was a theory, widely accepted, though not proven, that the spell stole a creature from a nearby plane of reality. I hoped, that since the creature was the nearest consciousness from another plane, that the spell would choose it. The rest was largely luck.”

He shrugged, as if it wasn’t a big deal, even though he was thrumming inside with the scholarly implications of the proven theory.

“Well, you saved our skins,” Grellig admitted. “They should be giving you a medal for that.”

“Yes, I’ll be right in line after the goat.” Amiratus said dryly. “A great honor, I’m sure.”

Grellig and Zell left, and Zell made him promise to keep in touch. As the door closed behind them, Amiratus leaned back in his chair, almost failing to notice the small black shape sitting next to his foot.

The kitten had crawled out from under his desk. It was smooshed into a tiny meatloaf shape, lapping at the dish of cream with a truly withering scowl on its face. It noticed him looking, and bared its tiny teeth to hiss at him, but the effect was ruined, a little, by the droplets of cream still clinging to its whiskers.

“I understand,” Amiratus said. “I made you a whole different shape. It takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t know if either kittens or extraplanar beings had any sense of irony. He hoped they did, though.

He reached out a hand, giving the tiny thing a scritch around the ears. It began to purr, startled, and then hissed at him again, scuttling back under his desk.  

“Don’t worry,” he said, leaning down. “I know what it’s like, and I’m not the vengeful type. We’ll find a way to get you home, yeah?”

The kitten hissed emphatically, and Amiratus sat back up, pulling out a blank piece of paper and a stick of charcoal to start a shopping list.“Moonlight,” he said to himself, writing slowly. “Dragon scales. Unicorn mane…”

A calm goat, wearing a cloak and cuirass, gently licks a very angry cat.
Finis.
Posted on by Grace Crandall · 2 Comments

Skies Of Scarlet

The world was all one color, but not all one shape. Tree trunks twisted up and out of the hard earth like devil’s horns, branching off and lifting their windy whisperings up to the sky. In the cold, clear air, every shape was cut out solid and sharp-edged as a tombstone, or a temple. It seemed almost a sacrilege that the scattered brown leaves were fragile enough to be crushed underfoot.

A single figure made its way through the trees. A limp slowed his progress, twisting the man’s frame to be ever so slightly askew. He matched the landscape.

In spite of the wind trying to muster up some sound from the sullen earth, the trees kept their own hushed company, and the squirrels had all gone off to haunts of their own for the night. The man walked along in relative silence, then stopped, tilting his head back to see the sky.

Wisps of dirty white, left over from a day that could not decide if it wanted to be cloudy or not, bubbled and drifted in pale contrast to the dull purple hue of the highest heavens; and where the west was still alight with the ember-glow of a dying sun, they were rich with pink and gold.

The forest shared none of the sunlight. It had, an hour hence; but now the earth was a uniform brown, fading to black, with only the sharp sparks of sunset beyond the tangled web of devil’s horns–a light as useless as a tea-candle.

The man blinked at the scene, shivering against the bitter, frost-laden air. With a groan, he settled down to sit on the forest floor, crushing the leaves carelessly as he tried, without much success, to rub some of the snarling pain from his leg. It was an old wound that enjoyed being cantankerous about the weather.

If the man had his own way, he would not be out here. He would be home, letting the warmth from a blazing fire and a good cup of tea seep deep into his bones. Reading, perhaps. Or drifting aimlessly to doze. Either would be perfectly satisfactory.

However, whatever powers lay beyond the fast-fading sky did not seem to find much joy in giving the man his own way, so he sat, shivering and watching the ember-light flicker and begin to go out. Occasionally, he had to remind himself that he could not huddle up to the warm glow in the west and warm himself with it. Cold as it was, the reminders did not stop the idiotic notion from drifting into his head. He searched the blackening expanse above him for the white light of the fully-waxed moon, and did not find it. Hiding, he assumed, somewhere in the still-drifting clouds. Not that it mattered. He could feel it starting to pull at him, clouds or no.

With a sigh, he reached up and unpinned his cloak, letting it slide to the ground and feeling slightly irritated by the knowledge that it would probably be damp and very, very cold in the morning. Slowly, reluctantly, he bundled his other clothes in with it, fastening the bundle with the cloak-pin and leaving the whole affair stuffed into the roots of an indifferent pine. He dug his toes into the leaves, ignoring the twist of pain in his leg, doing his best to ignore the shuddering cold. Feeling the world against his skin, if only for a few moments, as the last of the sunlight dribbled away.

The moon gave one last tug, and the first of his bones cracked.

Every other bone followed its example. With a sickening, meaty sound, the man’s frame bent and twisted into something different altogether. Muscles spasmed and tore as they rearranged themselves, skin peeled and ripped, falling to the forest floor to be replaced by a thick coat of fur.

The walker screamed.

* * *

“What was that?” the boy asked, hands freezing on the ties of the very last pack. His face glowed orange in the light of the small fire they’d risked, everyone suddenly as glad of the light as they were of the warmth. The woman sitting beside the fire hugged her bundle closer to her chest, shushing the babe softly, and looked up at the man on the far side of the blaze. He was far enough out of the light so that it only glowed slightly against the streaks of silver in his hair. He halted in shouldering his own pack, cocking his head as though to listen even though the strange shriek had already ended.

“Owl,” he stated, the word sounding as though it had been picked at random from a list of reasonable possibilities, and the boy raised an eyebrow, looked to the woman, and finally shrugged, going back to checking over his pack. Owl or wolf or eldritch demon, strange sounds in the woods were the least of their problems. No one had the energy left for worry. The woman changed the subject.

“Am I allowed to carry a pack tonight, Noctus?”

This only served to settle the frown deeper into the man’s face, and he gave a grunt–whether in reply or in the attempt to shoulder his second pack, she doesn’t know. She raises an eyebrow, and Noctus shakes his head.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Bracchus and I can handle the packs. You’ve got a burden already, my lady.”

“She’s not that heavy,” the woman says, leaning back slightly to keep the babe’s questing hand from snatching the end of her nose. “I can manage more.”

“You can take my pack if you really want it,” the boy says with a flashing grin, and Noctus jerks his head sharply aside, the firelight throwing the lines of his face into sharp relief as he fixes the boy with a sharp look. He scowls at them both before turning away again, out of the firelight.

“We’ve yet to outrun our danger, milady,” he finally says, in softer tones than either of his companions is used to hearing from him. “He won’t be giving up the babe that easy, and I can’t risk her falling into his hands. Or you,” he adds, and it’s more of an admission than an afterthought. “If we are overtaken, I’ll have nothing slowing your steps. Least of all a pack that’s just as easily carried by one of us.”

At that, the woman looks up, the orange light glowing in her eyes.

“I won’t leave you behind.”

“For her sake,” Noctus growls, “You will.”

She looks down at her little bundle again. The babe is awake, playing silently with her hands, fixing her fingers with a frown of complete concentration that reminds the woman, briefly, of Noctus. She stands without a word, hugging the child close as she kicks dirt over the fire. She refuses to be useless.

“Alternately, I could hold the babe, and run away at the first sign of trouble,” Bracchus suggests brightly, shouldering his pack with a wild jangle of tinware, and the woman feels an unexpected grin twitching at her lips. “It’d break my heart, leaving you both to die, but if it’s what must be done–”

“Hush,” Noctus snaps. “Milady’s life is worth a hundred times either of ours. Remember that.”

Her grin is smoored over as efficiently as the fire, and Bracchus is as silent as he can be, a mere jangle of cookery in the moon-muddled dark.

“We must move.” Noctus’s voice is suddenly weary, ragged. The woman wishes she could take some of the weight from his shoulders, but he’s right. Her own little burden is more than heavy enough.

* * *

The walker pads along on four paws. He is used to being alone in the woods, and watches the small huddle of humans with interest, grateful when the woman kills the too-bright, sharp-smelling fire. The humans are moving, traveling in the dark like a wolf-pack when they should be sleeping like the rest of their kind, and his ears prick towards them, curious. They are very loud.

Once they’re out of sight, the beast works its way to its feet and begins to trot after them, following the ghost of a scent on the chill ground.

The leaves do not do so much as shuffle under his able paws, and the night does not seem so very dark to those yellow eyes. The twisting pain of an old wound in his foreleg kept his gait free of easy even-ness, but he’s used to the pain, and keeps pace with the little huddle of humans easily enough.

It was the soft whimpering from the woman’s bundle that had drawn him to them, bringing his curiosity to a peak; and past the scent of the smoke, he had caught another smell–soft, and floury, fresh and unsullied as kneaded dough while everyone else stank of weariness and fear. It was the scent of something very, very young.

It was something other than curiosity that made the wolf trot along after the group. It was the man who was the most afraid–he was as sharp-scented as the smoke, and his words were sliced apart with acid precision. The woman was gentler, her fear muted by a faint lingering of lavender and soap; and the boy was as fearful as his short years had taught him to be, still gangling and half-careless like a yearling buck who had yet to meet with hunters.

The babe, nestled in the woman’s arms, had no fear at all.

The wind, just the bare beginnings of a breeze, shifts; and it carries a scent on it that makes the wolf halt suddenly, turning around to scent the air and stare at the hills behind him. The breeze smells of tar and flame, the not-wolf musk of tame dogs, the sweat of horses and of men. A howl sounds from far-off over the hills, and the walker’s hackles rise as a growl sounds in his throat.

* * *

A sound cut into the night air, eerie and animal. It was distant, but very clearly audible in the cold, and Noctus halted abruptly, holding out a hand as everyone else stopped too, turning with fear-tuned instincts to listen.

The sound comes again, clearer than before. Baying. The woman stiffens, taking an unconscious step closer to him, and Noctus wishes, harshly, that he could know he could protect them all, know that he could keep her and the boy and the babe safe. But he can’t.

“Is that an owl?” Bracchus asks, easy grin wavering slightly.

“No. Dogs.” Noctus feels the growl in his voice, feels the helplessness seeping into his limbs. There’s only one thing they can do. He hopes against hope that it will be enough. “Run.”

* * *

It’s impressive, really, how long the travellers keep running. They’re fast, for tired, half-broken humans carrying packs; but the walker lopes along easily alongside them, and he knows that the dogs with their man-tainted musk are gaining on them all. The humans are growing slower with each passing minute, and the dogs are not. Finally, as the three skid down a long hill, the man falls to one knee, panting, and the dog’s baying echoes all around them, filling the moonlit dell until it seems a part of the air itself.

* * *

“This is as far as I run, Milady,” Noctus says, looking up into her eyes as though dreading to meet a challenge there. Bracchus has already thrown the packs to the ground and is rummaging in them. He pulls a long blade free with a decisive jerk, tossing it in Noctus’s direction and taking a dagger for himself, his face hard and determined in spite of his earlier protests. The woman hesitates for a moment.

* * *

On the outskirts, it is all the wolf can do to keep from running into their midst and dragging her away himself. The dogs are almost on them, almost there.

“Run!” the man bellows like a bull in a bear-trap, and the woman startles, then grows hard and determined herself.

She flees, leaving the scent of lavender and sourdough in the fear-soured air.

* * *

She runs until every step is a knife and every breath is a sob. The babe is wailing, but there’s no help for that; she has to run. She has to keep running.

She doesn’t think of Noctus; doesn’t think of the boy with his clay-hard face, the white-knuckled grip he had on his dagger. She doesn’t think of the dogs and their teeth; she doesn’t think of herself. She thinks of the babe in her arms, instead; thinks of speed and flight and how if she cannot do this, if she cannot get away, then the past fortnight of running and hiding, of sleeping in ditches and shushing the child when she wanted nothing more than to break down and cry along with the babe, will have been for nothing. She puts all her strength into her legs; but all her strength, it seems, is not enough.

The first of the dogs lands on her back. Scrabbling paws tear the fabric of her cloak and hot teeth sink into her shoulder.

It’s over. She knows it’s over as soon as she stumbles, knows it too solidly even to care about much more than the pain as the second dog bites down into her leg. Still she hugs the babe close, putting her body in between her and the sets of snapping teeth. The first dog is trying to get at her throat while the second pulls back in an effort to untie her human knot, and she curls tighter, feeling the terror in her belly like some demon or spirit that is keeping her from moving, from crying out. They begin to fight over her, the one with its teeth in her neck pulling one way, the one with her leg pulling the other, and the world goes white with pain.

Then there’s a yelp, and her ravaged leg is pulled for a moment, then falls limp. The beast at her neck lets go, shoving off her at some unseen attacker; another yelp, and all she can hear is her own ragged, panic-heavy breathing and the babe’s wails. With a surge of insane hope, she opens her eyes, thinking to see Noctus and his sword, alive somehow and come to save her.

Instead, she sees a wolf.

Moonlight outlines the creature, silvering the high-held head and pricked ears as cleanly as the icon on some lord’s coat-of-arms. Its teeth are bared, moon-born white stained black with the dog’s blood, fur dripping dark droplets into the stiff leaves of the forest floor. She can hear the rumble in the creature’s chest, low and deep as the far-off thunder of a seaside storm. Slowly, it turns its head towards her, and she stares up into the stony yellow eyes, trying to murmur soft things to the child in her arms. They come out garbled, wet-sounding and tasting of iron, and the wolf looks away, stalking around to settle beside her with a soft huff. His fur is warm against her side.

The iron taste is becoming less clear, the shapes in the moonlight blurring. Even the pain is fading. She’s tired, impossibly so; too tired to think, to speak.

She closes her eyes.

* * *

The babe goes quiet, sometime in the night; sometime after the dog’s baying had faded, accompanied by the shouts and distant cursing of frustrated men who had not found their quarry. The wolf feels the woman grow cold beside him, and stays close to her, letting the blood dry and stiffen on his fur, growling at anything that moves.

* * *

The world does not so much lighten as grow pale. It thins and fades, a ghost of itself, until flecks of pink begin to feather the east and the tree-trunks blacken and solidify in seeming rebellion against the coming light.

The walker wakes to find a world awash in pale yellow, and his own hands smeared with rusted scarlet.

With a wild scramble that startles leaves and squirrels alike, he comes upright and stares at the still, undeniably human figure splayed out beside him on the ground. It’s a woman, her eyes closed almost peacefully, her dark hair matted with blood and glittering with frost.

There was blood on on her–on the ground, on him–and the marks on her flesh were animal, signs of teeth sunk deep and ravaging. She wasn’t moving.

Heart pounding, he took a step back, then another, rubbing flecks of dried blood from his face with an equally sullied hand.

His heels bump against something soft and heavy, and he turns with a start, heart pounding yet harder when he finds another no-longer-living thing lying on the ground. It is black-furred and bloody, eyes glazed open and fangs bared. There is frost in its fur, and blood in its teeth. The man blinks, no longer certain what to think, what to do.

Then, a sound.

It’s a small, mewling sound; utterly unlike a squirrel, nothing like any animal he’s heard.

Leaning sideways to hold a protesting leg, he limps forward, muttering curses under his breath at the cold, and kneels beside the woman’s body, putting a hand on the frosted fabric of her cloak. It’s an odd, sickly business; untangling her stiff limbs as a sailor might untangle rope, but the sound persisted. She’d died clutching a bundle.

A noisy bundle.

That moved.

Flipping the fabric aside, he’s confronted by a pair of brown eyes, staring up at him in surprise. He stares back, faintly horrified, as the surprise turns to upset and the tiny eyes begin to fill with tears.

“Hush, now,” he finds himself saying. “Shh. It’s all right. It’s all right.” he fumbles with the new and unexpectedly squirmy burden, hands unskilled and unsure, before finally holding it close to his chest, making vaguely soothing noises and trying very hard to be warm.

The squirrels chatter unhelpfully. The trees, as usual, are silent; contentedly busy being painted in shades of pink and gold by the rising sun. The woman does not move, but the babe does stop wailing, cutting itself off with a choked sob and desperately stuffing a fist in its mouth.

The man stares, then stands. Manages–barely–not to curse at the twist of pain in his leg. The cold is still cruel, but the child against his chest is warmer than the pale sunlight. It twists in his arms, making discontented noises.

“It’s all right.” he mutters at it vaguely as he begins to walk out of the forest, not entirely sure it’s true. But it will be all right, soon; when he reaches home, and can get the babe warm, and safe, and fed. It will be all right.

Enjoy this story?

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Posted on by Grace Crandall · 3 Comments

The Last Last Chance (Last Chance, #6)

This story is the continuation of a series. To start at the beginning, click here.

   The face that hovered above his was white as worms, except for the eyes. The eyes gaped, shining and pitch black, abysses in the pasty, needle-toothed expanse. It was the face of a monster.

   Its lips quirked with something akin to humor.

   “One of us already?” It asked.

   For some strange reason, it was the articulation that sent a sick feeling of shock through Eli’s ribs. For one thing, he couldn’t entirely place the accent.

   For another, a face like that should never have learned how to speak.

*  *   *

   There was a boot on Eli’s throat. That’s all Ketzal saw as she surfaced.

   Then there were the figures. Four of them tall and straight like miniature mirrors of the city’s minarets, pale against the dark stone, and a fifth, bent like soft steel over Eli’s sprawled form.

    Water sloshed into Ketzal’s mouth as she scrambled for purchase on the stone of the lakeshore. Gripping the rock with numb hands, she hauled herself up and out of the water, splattering water on the stone with a sound that, in the silence, echoed like the breaking of a glass.

* * *

   The vampire bent closer, filling up Eli’s vision.

   “How many have you killed?” He asked, in a tone that was almost hushed. “How greedy must you have been?”

   “What?” Eli hissed. He tried to pull away, but the boot on his neck was keeping him immobile.

   Instead of answering, the vampire rose and turned, looking up at the lake. His weight shifted, and Eli jerked himself out from under his boot. Eli got up on his elbows, shaking his head against the throbbing in his ears.

   Ketzal was standing on the shore.

   Ketzal.

   The same Ketzal whom he’d last seen swimming safely away. The Ketzal who should, by rights, be safe on the other side of the lake. That Ketzal.

   That Ketzal was currently dripping water in a shining puddle, her neon hair lit by the glow of the lake, and her expression in shadow.

   “You let him go,” she said, addressing the one whose boot had just left Eli’s throat. Her voice was low and quiet, creating only the barest whisper of an echo across the softly rippling lake.

   “A breather.” One of the vampires whispered.

   “The breather,” another replied. “Hear that heartbeat?”

   The heartbeat, Eli thought, shaking his head again. The one that had been pounding in his ears. He raised his hand to his neck, feeling for a pulse to match the steady throbbing in his head; but there was none.

   It wasn’t his heartbeat.

   It was hers.

   The vampire who had been standing on Eli’s throat stepped back, cocking his head.

   “And if we don’t?” He asked.

Eli knew Ketzal. He had spent the better part of three months knowing Ketzal. And he knew exactly what it looked like when she was about to do something insanely reckless.

   Eli leapt to his feet, sprinting to the shoreline and stopping on the edge of it, just in time to plant a hand on Ketzal’s shoulder and keep her from stepping completely out of the water. Her feet were still just barely in it, lakewater refracting light around the toes of her boots. Her shirt, soaked through, was burning Eli’s skin; but he didn’t pull back. She was pushing against him, trying to come on shore; and he could feel the others lurking, ready for the second she did. Ready and hungry.

   He could feel her heart through his fingertips, beating far faster than it should have been, as Ketzal met his eyes. Her expression was equal parts burning rage and utter confusion. He could smell, thick and warm, the scent of raw meat and engine oil, the scent of a morning in the mines—

   The smell of blood.

   Her blood. The smell was heavy and insistent on the back of his tongue. His hand was flat against her shoulder, but it would have been easy—too easy—to shift his grip, to pull her on shore and within reach.

The thought was fleeting, and he shoved her back, a sickness in his throat like a lingering nightmare.

   “Eli!” She yelped, protesting, as she regained her balance. She glared at him, her anger shifting to concern when she caught a glimpse of his burnt hand. “Eli, what is this? What’s going on?”

    None of the vampires were moving. They merely took in the scene. Eli’s mouth was dry when he opened it to explain, and the words all tumbled over themselves as he realized that he had no explanation to give.

   “You’re safe in the lake,” he was able to manage.

   “If it’s safe in the lake, get in!” She said, and all Eli could do was shake his head.

   “Safe,” He said, “from us.”

*   *   *

   Eli was still holding out his hand, as though he could generate some kind of force field to make Ketzal stay where she was. As she stared, his blackened, blistered palm began to heal. She blinked, and it was whole again.

   “Oh,” she managed, glancing from the healed palm to Eli’s wide, pitch black eyes. “You’re a vampire.”

   There was silence for a moment. The lake—for some reason—was dangerous for vampires. Which meant Eli would have needed to be human, when they’d first swum it. He’d have had to—get vampired, somehow.

   “When did that happen?” She asked. Come to think of it, she’d never heard of anyone catching vampirism. Was it contagious?

   “Just go, Ketz,” Eli said, instead of answering. “I can’t follow. Get Breek, and get to safety.”

   If Ketzal felt like being fair, this was not the most ridiculous plan she’d ever heard. But it was pretty close, and anyway, she didn’t feel like being fair.

   “I’m not leaving you here,” she said, indignant. “That’s not an option.”

   “You can’t tread water forever,” Eli pointed out. “That’s not an option either.”

   “As of this instant,” one of the vampires interrupted, evidently deciding he’d had enough of sitting back to observe, “You have only two options.”

   Ketzal narrowed her eyes at him. He’d stuck his boot on Eli’s throat.

   “Who are you?” She asked, not really wanting to know. It seemed like a nice, jabbing kind of question, fitting her less than friendly mood.

   “Aren, former first mate of the proud ship Salvation,” he answered.    “And who are you?”

    “The Salvation?” Ketzal asked, suddenly curious. That had been the name of one of Ma-Rek’s ships—most notably, the last one.

   “Your choices are these,” Aren continued. “The first, and the one I’d suggest, is this: swim away. We couldn’t stop you. We don’t dare follow you. You’d be free and clear in a matter of minutes, with all of us nothing but an unpleasant memory.”

   “Aren,” one of the other vampires, a slight woman with dark braided hair, interjected in a hushed hiss. The former first mate only held up a hand for silence.

   “But,” He said, “You’d have to leave your friend here behind. And we would have to kill him.”

   “We’d have to what?” The interrupting woman interrupted again.

   “That does seem a little extreme,” another of the vampires, a man with a square jaw, commented. “He’s not exactly a threat.”

   At this, Eli scowled.

   “You know I can hear you, right?” He asked. “We can all hear you.”

   All, evidently, except for Aren. He showed no sign of having heard anything, though he did choose that moment to repeat himself rather loudly.

   “We would have to kill him,” he said.

   “But isn’t he—” Ketzal stopped herself, just on the verge of saying ‘one of you’.

   “You can kill vampires,” Aren said. “He’d fight, sure. But there are five of us, and only one of him. It wouldn’t last long—and neither would he.”

   Behind Aren’s back, Eli was fixing the vampire with a glare that said otherwise.

   “On the other hand,” Aren said obliviously, “You’ve got something we need. You can get in the lake, while the rest of us can’t.”

   “You want to go swimming by proxy?” Ketzal guessed.

   Aren leant forward, letting the glow of the lake turn his face an unsettling shade of green.

   “In a manner of speaking.” He said. “I want you to dive for that treasure.”

*    *   *

   Eli could tell that Ketzal was considering it. The look on her face was clear.

   But that was not the worst of it. No, the worst of it was that Eli didn’t want to tell her not to. He knew it was a bad deal. He knew that, for Aren-the-overly-polite-vampire, a promise meant nothing and his simple request to dive for treasure would not end up being as harmless as it sounded. Eli even had an inkling of the creature’s plan–Ketzal had already swum the lake three times in the last hour. How many times could she dive before her limbs gave out, or before she started to freeze? How long before she had to pull herself up onto the shore—into their reach?

   He should have been telling her not even to consider it. He should have told her that he didn’t need her help, that he’s more than glad to stay behind, if only she can be safe.

   But his throat was too dry to form words. He didn’t want to die, and he especially didn’t want to die alone.

   “So I dive for your treasure,” Ketzal said. “What do I get out of this?”

   “We don’t kill your friend.” Aren said with a shrug. “Maybe he’ll find his way to the surface eventually. Or not. Either way, you’ll be able to console yourself that he is, in fact, alive.”

To Eli, being left alone doesn’t sound much better than dying alone. In fact, it sounds infinitely worse.

Ketzal considered this for a moment. Finally, she nodded.

“Okay.”

Eli felt a sudden and unexpected flash of hurt. Clearly unwarranted; she was trying to save his life. Save his life, or alleviate the guilt she might have felt over his death.

If only they came to the same thing in the end.

* * *

“So,” Ketzal said, peering down into the water. “What do you want first?”

Aren had crept up to the very edge of the shore, and was peering into the depths, his dark eyes eerily lit like the lens of a security camera.

She could’ve splashed him, if she wanted. She didn’t. She didn’t have a plan, yet. And attacking without a plan wouldn’t do anyone much good.

The others, lurking in the shadows far from the shoreline, heard her question and gave an eager response.

“The coins!” The small woman cried.

“No, the figurines!” Another shouted.

“The solid bars,” rumbled a third.

Aren’s eyes were wide and hungry. It seemed to take effort for him to tear them from the treasure and settle on Ketzal.

“Anything,” he said. “Anything you can.”

Ketzal nodded and plunged into the water. It rushed hollowly around her ears, rippling with sound in an unending, living echo. Her eyes stung for a moment, before she blinked and the water no longer burned the edges of her lids.

Luckily, the lake was not deep. A few strokes, and she reached the treasure.

It was, without a doubt, beautiful.

There were coins, figurines, and dinner plates. There were ill-advised laser pistols, cosmetic jars, and intricate jewelry. She took some figurines to stuff in her pockets, stowed away some of the coins and the jewelry. Something–a duller, warmer color, like silver– shone beneath the coins. It did not budge when she tugged at it. Frowning, she glanced over the rest of the treasure-trove. The odd metal stood out now that she was looking for it. Whatever it was, it was huge, lurking like a skeleton under the piles of smaller treasures. The shape was surprisingly familiar.

She would have looked futher, but her air was beginning to run out. She swam back towards the surface, breaking through the rippling curtain with a gasp.

Eli was sitting on the bank, looking dejected. He, along with the rest of the vampires, looked up when she came to the surface. Aren stepped forward, arms held out.

“What have you brought?” He asked. “Show us!”

Ketzal spat water out of her mouth. She could have easily tossed what she had onto the shore before diving down again for more, but she had the beginnings of a plan now.

“In a moment.”

“In a moment?” Aren repeated. “No! Now! Or do you want to watch your friend die?”

Ketzal glanced at Eli, trying to give him an expression that meant ‘yes, I do have a plan, it’s fine.’ Judging from the look on his face, it didn’t work. She was in too deep to stop now.

“If you kill him now, I swim away and you don’t get any treasure at all.”

Aren looked like a man who’d just realized he’d been trapped, and was doing his best not to let it show. His best was not very good. Ketzal suspected he hadn’t had a lot of practice.

“I’m not asking for anything monumental,” Ketzal said. “Nothing that would hurt or inconvenience any of you. I’m just a historian, you understand. I like knowing things, and I’d like to know how you’ve all gotten here.”

“That’s a long story,” Aren warned her.

Ketzal looked around at the cave walls, the rippling water, and the silent abandoned city.

“Sorry,” she said, “Is there anything urgent you need to get to?”

Aren narrowed his eyes.

“I won’t tell it all at once,” he said. “You’ll get a peice of the story for each peice of treasure. That’s fair enough.”

“Why should we be trading with her?” Another of the vampires, a tall woman with a crooked nose and pale cropped hair, said. “Why not just take what we want?”

Aren fixed the woman with a frustrated glare.

“You’re welcome to swim in and try, Fess.”

At that, Fess backed away, hiding herself between two of the others, a sour twist to her lip. Aren shook his head, then turned his glare on Ketzal.

“All right, then,” he said. “We’re former crewmates of a man named Ma-Rek. A pirate.”

Her theory confirmed, Ketzal tossed him a figurine. It sizzled, burning his hands as he caught it, but Aren barely seemed to notice, running his fingers over the smooth, wet chrome with an expression of pure wonder that vastly improved the look of his haggard face. The others began to crowd around him, jostling one another as they reached out to touch the treasure. Eli sat silently by the bank. His eyes had followed the flight of the figurine, but he made no move towards it.

There was something about the treasure, Ketzal thought. Something twisted and strange, like a myth with the wrong ending. She did not like not knowing what it was.

“So you did know Ma-Rek,” she said.

Aren’s gaze did not lift from the chrome in his hands. “You say that name like you know it.”

“Like I said,” Ketzal replied, “I’m a historian.”

Fess snorted. “Must be pretty recent history.”

It would be difficult to judge time while trapped underground in the dark, Ketzal thought. She’d never considered that before.

“Not really,” she said, not bothering to break the news gently. “Ma-Rek died two thousand and thirty-three years ago.”

The vampires, hitherto primarily occupied with the chrome figurine, went still and looked up.

“How long?” Whispered the square-jawed man.

“Two thousand and thirty-three years,” Ketzal confirmed.

The stares that followed were utterly blank. Finally, someone chuckled.

“Bet the old bastard never thought we’d outlive him by this much,” they said. The whole bevy shifted into laughter, except for Aren. He was still looking over the chrome in his hands. When he spoke, it was distracted, as though he was speaking only to himself.

“You’ll want another piece of our story, then.”

Ketzal nodded, and Aren acknowledged her without looking up.

“We are trapped here by two curses.”

“Curses?” Ketzal asked, tossing a pocketful of coins on the shore. The vampires all crouched down, gathering fistfuls, save for Eli, who watched in silence, and Aren, who still held on to his figurine. Aren nodded.

“Curses,” he confirmed. “The first was laid by an old woman on a burning transport ship just before it blew. The second was laid by Ma-Rek himself.”

* * *

“Get!” Breek shouted, stomping at one of the crowding robots. He almost caught one of its legs with his foot, but it skittered back and away just in time — though not far enough for Breek’s comfort. He hadn’t had time to count them. All he knew was that they covered every nearby surface with their click-clacking legs, segmented bodies, and dully glowing red eyes. Apart from the disturbingly human torsos, they looked a lot like oversized insects. Unlike the jumping-scabs that had infested every home back on Bleachbone, however, they did not scuttle away from a scare.

Or, possibly, they just weren’t afraid of him.

The one who had gotten too close was advancing again, its rusted skull cocked to one side as it issued a curious chirrup.

“Get!” Breek shouted again, lunging forward to stomp at it.

Instead of skittering, as Breek hoped, or tanking still, as most of the bots had done so far, the bot shot out an inhuman hand and seized his leg. Breek screamed. He kicked instinctively, getting nothing but a curious chirp from the bot, and summarily fell flat on his back.

He kicked at the creature again, but it only grabbed his other leg. To his horror, it began to drag him along the wet stone, chittering at him all the while. The other robots followed along, clacking their fingers together in a never-ending chorus of apparent excitement. Breek fought, but every move he made only caused them to grip him tighter. Their bulbous heads and glowing eyes gathered above him, dripping with rainwater and blocking out the roiling storm-clouds.

He was out of his mind with fear. He must have been, because—against all logic and reason—he began to call for help.

“Eli!” He shouted, punching one of the bots wildly and getting bloody knuckles for his trouble. “Ketzal!”

It was insane, pointless hope. He knew that. But there was just enough of that insanity that now, in the midst of his fear—it almost seemed like there was a chance. A chance that they weren’t too far away to hear him; a chance that, hearing him, they would have it in their hearts to come and help.

“Please!” Breek shouted, as the chittering bots dragged him along. Rainwater was soaking his skin, pouring into his eyes and his mouth. “Please, help me!”

The bots screeched and squealed at one another, hauling him up a steep slope. Finally, they let go. Breek struggled to his feet, the ground shifting oddly under him. It was also slimy. He picked up his hand. His palm was red, covered with rain-soaked rust.

Breek looked down. He was standing on a pile of ancient metal plating, worn down to uselessness. All around him, the bots were chirruping and chittering amongst themselves, making gestures and—to Breek’s eyes—discussing his fate.

Breek swallowed. The place he’d been brought to seemed to have been made entirely out of scrap. Dismantled ship plating lay, disused and dark with rust, in piles tall as people.

Most of it, at least, was rusted—old, and half-rotting. But not all.

On the pile closest to the one upon which Breek had been deposited, there was a perfectly new and shiny plate, with a line of fresh welding bisecting a pair of familiar words.

What hope had lain in Breek’s heart promptly died. Eli and Ketzal weren’t coming to help him.

They couldn’t, because they had never left.

They were gone.

* * *

In Eli’s opinion, Ketzal was enjoying herself just a little too much.

“What was the first curse?” She asked, holding up a handful of coins.

“The one that made us blood-born.” Aren ground out. “Treasure, girl.”

Ketzal tossed a single coin on shore, and got a growl from Aren for her troubles.

“Details.” She demanded. And just like with every prior question, the vampire pirate finally capitulated.

“We’d found a merchant transport ship,” he said. “Tiny little thing, carrying textiles. Not a fortune’s worth, but enough to bother taking. They could have surrendered. We’d not have killed anyone who didn’t try to kill us first. But they fought, and it turned into a massacre as soon as you could blink.”

Sitting on the shore as he is, Eli can only see the man’s back silhouetted against the lake. There is no more expression in his figure than there is in his voice.

“Only one of them was left alive when we were done. Old woman. The ship was about to crack, and we were unloading the cargo before it did. Ma-Rek and I, we were supervising—happened to be standing next to where she was, bleeding out with a bit of her own ship stuck through her middle. She asked the captain, are you in charge of this band of murderers, and he said he was. I’ll never forget what she said after that.”

“What?” Ketzal asked, clearly mesmerized.

“Toss over the chrome, and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me, and I’ll toss over the chrome.” Ketzal returned. “I can sit here all day.”

She couldn’t, but she made it sound as if she could. Her voice was strong, confident and determined. Eli admired her for it.

He also hated it and wished she’d just swim away to safety already, but he admired it, too.

“Cursed be the chrome that’s won by blood.” Aren’s voice was cold and still as the lake itself, echoing someone else’s words. “Cursed be the men who covet it. Cursed to hunger and never be filled.”

Aren snorted, bending down to pick up a handful of shining chrome coins. He held it up, letting it sparkle in the light. Eli’s eye was drawn immediately to the shine, and a clawing feeling in his heart wanted. Not his own want, he thought. A curse’s want. A hunger he not asked for, but had somehow earned. Through what? His own desires? What sane person saw treasure and didn’t covet it? He shut his eyes, shaking his head against the foreign sensation.

“Old hag,” Aren said, letting the coins trickle through his fingers and clink one by one against the stones. “How wrong she was.”

Ketzal tossed another handful of coins onto the shore.

“That was one curse,” she said. “What was the second?”

“Well,” Aren said, “After the merchant ship, nothing seemed to change for a few weeks. We’d all forgotten about the curse by the time our next prey came in our sights—a big Alliance tax freighter, heavily guarded, but holding a fortune. We expected to lose a few crew in the attack—just part of the job. But when it came to it—” he stopped, shaking his head.

“We didn’t lose a single man. And—we couldn’t help ourselves. I’ve been in a few battles in my day, and plenty of massacres; but that was the only one that I could have called a bloodbath. We tore through the crew in a matter of moments. We drank from them, barely knowing what it was we did; and we squabbled over the haul like starved warp-rats, chasing crumbs. It felt like–it wasn’t just the thrill of a fight, that day. It was ecstasy. But afterwards, there wasn’t one of us that didn’t feel afraid. Ma-Rek, I think, most of all.”

“Ma-Rek was just the same as any of us,” another of the vampires cut in, over Eli’s shoulder.

Aren looked back at them briefly, nodding.

“He was worse,” he said, with conviction. “He was worse. By the time that day was over, he was bathed in more blood than any of us had drunk. The only bit of him you could see were his eyes; and the fear must have hit him harder than the rest of us, too, because they were dead. Black, and dead.”

Aren sighed, and Eli turned away from the slow slump of the vampire’s shoulders. He could still feel the steady thud of Ketzal’s heart, thrumming through him like his own heartbeat had only this morning, and he wondered what else in him had changed.

Beyond his pwn worries, the ancient story continued.

“Following that day, we all tried to pretend nothing was wrong. We were stronger, which was good; and we didn’t need to eat, and we couldn’t manage to sleep—but it was just more time to ourselves. Ma-Rek pretended right along with us—keeping to himself, locked away in his cabin. Told us he was planning something big—too big to be talked about. And we believed him.

“He had us held up on some backwater moon for almost a month. Building a monument, he said, to our victories–though even then, we wondered why he’d put it where no one would ever see it. Left half the crew behind there, told us all that they couldn’t be trusted. It seemed strange, but—we believed him again. Why wouldn’t we? The man had brought us through time and time again; why not now?”

   Aren sighed.

   “Finally, we came here,” he said.

Ketzal bobbed in the water, eyes aglow with lake-light.

“Ma-Rek knew this place, somehow. Gave us a lot of talk about how it was a perfect hiding-place. Stowed us and the treasure both down here, and then tried to go back to the surface without any of us noticing.”

Curious, Eli scooted closer, dangerously close to the edge of the water. As before, the glow of the chrome caught his eye, drawing him almost against his will. He found himself staring at it, and tried to pull his eyes away.

Before he could, though, something caught his eye. A shape, just the right side of familiar. A vast shape, lurking just beneath the piled chrome.

“We caught him at it, but it was already too late,” Aren said. “He spoke some words–not in a language any of us knew–and fled. We chased him, hard on his heels, but he was too fast for any of us. The lake burned us, as it had not before–part of his curse, I assume.”

“He left you.” Ketzal spoke quietly, the water rippling softly around her.

“He left us!” Aren’s voice echoed across the lake. “He left us as if we meant nothing!”

Eli, for one, had little investment in Aren’s feelings. He looked from the shape under the water, to Ketzal. Her eyes, caught in an expression of sympathy, met his, and he knew that she’d seen it as well.

The vast, spidery shape underneath the piles of treasure was far deadlier than any curse. Inactive, it was nothing but machinery and pressurized gases.

Activated, though–it could destroy everything in these caves.

He stared at her, and watched as a small smile spread over her face. They couldn’t talk. He didn’t know–exactly–what her plan was.

But he knew he didn’t like it.

“We’ve been trapped here ever since,” Aren concluded, and Ketzal redirected her attention to him.

“So the rain burns? Or is there some other reason you don’t go to the surface?”

“The rain does nothing,” Aren said. “The robots, though–they keep us underground, as surely as this treasure does.”

“The what?” Ketzal asked.

   Eli’s thoughts, which had been focused on underwater chemical bombs, were abruptly derailed.

   “The robots,” Aren said. “I’m surprised you didn’t see them. Bloodthirsty things. There used to be well over twenty of us, but after the skirmishes with them—” he shrugged. “Well. Here we are.”

Eli’s gaze snapped to Ketzal, and he saw his thoughts reflected on her face.

Breek.

*   *   *

   The vampires that had been watching Eli had all but forgotten about his existence, too caught up in the stories and artifacts of their past to remember the present. Eli had never told her if he’d found a way out or not, but from the way he jumped to his feet now, she guessed he had.

   The sudden burst of action startled the vampires. Ketzal threw what treasure she had up on shore, adding to the general confusion before she dove. All sound was dull and numb underwater. Tt might have been just her imagination, but she thought she heard muffled shouting coming from above the surface.

    She swam down, down, until she reached the pile of treasure and the thing that lay underneath. She’d recognized the shape from her studies of the anti-unity war of Ma-Rek’s day, and she prayed that the charge was still functioning. She found the trigger and pulled it.

   Thank every star in the System, there was a delay. Enough time to get to safety—for her, anyway. Not for the ancient things above the surface—the never-alive and the undead alike. As the dull metal came to life with rippling orange light, Ketzal set her path for the shore, and sent up a prayer for forgiveness for all she was about to destroy.

*   *   *

   Eli didn’t think anyone had managed to chase him. He could hear no footsteps pounding aside from his own, though with the way all found echoed and reverberated through the tall and silent pillars of the city, it was difficult to tell.

   The dark was not as dark as it had been, though whether that was a change in the caves themselves or how he saw them.

   He could feel the effects of the curse more strongly now. His legs felt lighter, his steps swifter and more solid. The cave walls flew by him at an alarming speed.

   But even with all the benefits of the curse, it was still a curse. Every step he took that led him farther away from the treasure felt like a burning in his bones, as though he’d dipped his very skeleton into the waters of the lake. His lungs no longer needed air, but they convulsed in his chest as he ran, forming their own silent protest against the path.

   Breek was in danger, somewhere on the surface.

   Aside from his legs falling off and rolling away, there was no obstacle any ancient curse could make that stood a chance of stopping him.

*   *   *

   Breek slid backwards off the pile of metal plating with a terrific crash. The robots, which had been quietly chittering among themselves, turned towards him with high-pitched screeches. Breek struggled to his feet and began to run, the rust-red ground of the scrapyard slipping under his feet. The robots swarmed after him, their screams echoing through the towers of scrap. Breek scrambled away as best he could, fleeing from the robots and also from the imminent knowledge that, really, he had nowhere to run to. He was doing nothing but prolonging the inevitable.

   Breek looked over his shoulder. The bots were click-clacking steadily after him, but couldn’t seem to manage any gait faster than a speedy walk. Breek began to scramble up another scrap pile, hoping to use the climb to slow them down. It felt different under his hands. Lighter than metal, and smoother. He glanced down.

   His fingers were splayed across the pale tines of a bare rib cage.

   In shock, Breek jerked his hand away. The whole pile shuddered under the movement, and began to teeter. With a dull clattering rush, it fell—right on top of Breek. He screamed, paralyzed under the weight of a mountain of human bone. The chittering of the bots came closer, their metal bodies adding extra weight to the crushing force on top of him. Red eyes glowed through the criss-cross bone pattern. The bots took hold of him with cold metal fingers, dragging him out, but still he couldn’t make himself move. One of the machines lowered its great rusted skull to his own, making a low chittering sound. Breek closed his eyes against it, fear rushing over him in a flood, and knew that he was about to die.

   But oh, he was not about to die like this.

   Breek opened his eyes. His hands weren’t tied down. He lashed out, punching the bot in the face. Pain shot through his arm, and there was no change to the bot except a streak of bright blood across its skull, slashing down between its eyes.

   But this wasn’t about winning, he thought, punching it again. This wasn’t about stopping what was going to happen.

   This was about Breek. This was about who he was. And he was not someone to take death quietly.

   He drew back his fist again, baring his teeth in the bot’s impassive, bloody face,

   There was a rush of air and a sudden clatter.

   The bot was gone.

   Breek sat up, looking for it. The bot was flat on its back, its legs making tiny jerking motions as the solid human figure above it punched it repeatedly into the ground. The rain pinged against its corpse.

    Finally, the bot went still with a sad and solitary whir. The figure turned around, meeting Breek’s stare with eyes that were utterly black.

   Eli.

   Eli grabbed Breek’s hand, pulling him to his feet.

   “We need to get to the ship!” He shouted. “Where is it?”

   Breek had no breath to give a proper answer. He gestured.

   Eli looked at the scrap surrounding them both, and seemed to understand.

   “Damn it,” he growled. “Grab a weapon, kid.”

   Breek ducked down, picking up a long, solid bone with a heavy joint at the end of it. It was slippery in his hands. Eli spun around, setting his back against Breek’s.

   “What are we going to do?” Breek asked, his breath finally halfway caught.

   “We’re going to fight,” Eli growled.

   Breek peered over Eli’s shoulder, at the horde of angry robots. They were click-clacking their way towards them with the inevitability of an oil spill, cramming into the narrow valley between the towers of scrap, towards the dead end marked by the pile of bones.

   “Okay,” Breek said, not wanting to inject any doubt into Eli’s confidence.

   Suddenly, the ground rocked and shuddered underneath them. Breek stumbled under the force of it. As one, the robots halted, chattering among themselves, their heads swiveling in search of the explosion’s source.

   One of the mountains of scrap shifted.

   The robots looked at it.

   So did Eli.

   So did Breek.

   The mountain of scrap squealed, leaned, and fell like a ship in a gravity drop.

   Breek blinked.

   Where there had once been an army of angry robots, there was now a pile of half-rusted metal sheeting, plinking steadily under the onslaught of the rain.

   Well.

   “What was that?” Breek asked.

   And, really, he should have known enough by now to expect Eli’s answer.

   “Ketzal.”

*   *   *

   Eli scrambled over the pile of bones and started running back towards the cave entrance, distantly aware of Breek running just behind him. Ketzal had set off the bomb. It had saved them, twice over—but all Eli could picture were the million ways it could have gone wrong. She could have gotten caught in the blast—thrown against the wall by concussion—crushed by a pile of rubble.

   But she hadn’t been. She was standing, muddy, wet, but grinning, over the entrance of the cave. All of Eli’s panic fell limp as a cast-off jelly mold. He met her in two strides and wrapped his arms around her.

   “Eli. Ribs. Ow.”

   “Sorry,” he said, immediately letting go.

   “No, you don’t have to let go,” she said, scooting closer. “Just—gentle, please.”

   Eli wrapped her in a hug again. A gentle one. Somehow, she stilled smelled like dust and hair dye, even after spending so long in the lake.

   “Come on in, Breek,” Ketzal said, opening her arm. “You went and missed the vampires.”

   Breek chuckled. “You missed the robots,” he said.

   Then, to Eli’s surprise, Breek wrapped his arms around them both in what had to be the universe’s soggiest hug. Eli could feel their heartbeats, throbbing strong in their fingertips.

   And—with a strange rush of utter relief—he could feel his own. Thrumming warm and wild in his chest, sending life and blood to every limb. He closed his eyes, resting his head against both of his friend’s. They were alive. They were all, by some miracle, alive. The curse was dead.

   A few moments later, Ketzal pulled away. She scanned the horizon. Frowned.

   “Incidentally,” she said, “Where is our ship?”

   Epilogue:

   “She’s bleeding again,” Ketzal noted. Eli looked up, to where the rough-patched seams of the ship’s walls were oozing with a strange mixture of oil, water and rust, staining the already splotchy metal with a bright streak of red.

   “So she is,” he agreed. “We’re almost to Bleachbone. Pax will fix her.”

   “He’s going to hate us,” Ketzal said.

   “He’s going to hate you,” Eli said. “I’m going to hide in the ship to avoid being yelled at.”

   Ketzal looked at him, indignant, but it was at that moment that Breek chose to walk into the cockpit.

   “How much farther?” He asked. “One engine is out and the other is shaking against the hull.”

   “Nearly there,” Ketzal promised.

   Breek nodded, looking solemn. The dark shape of the habited moon loomed on their viewscreen. There was something odd in the way he watched it, and Eli turned from the controls to look closer at the boy. Breek met his gaze with something that wasn’t quite a smile.

   “I’d say I’ve packed, but I didn’t bring anything aboard in the first place, so.” He shrugged his shoulders, then took off his jacket, handing it to Eli.

   “This is yours,” he said. “Sorry I took it.”

   Eli looked from the jacket, to Breek, and back again.

   “Packed?” Ketzal asked. “You’re leaving?”

   Breek looked at them both, seeming off-balance. “Don’t I—have to?”

   “When did we say that?” Ketzal asked. She looked at Eli. “Did we say that?”

   “No,” Eli said. He took a hand off the controls, pushing the offered jacket back to Breek. “We said nothing of the kind.”

   “You’ll both need better jackets than that where we’re going, anyway,” Ketzal said. “There’s a shortage of stars by the Caravian asteroid belt.”

   Breek halted in putting his jacket back on.

   “The what?” He and Eli asked in unison.

   Ketzal grinned, raising her eyebrows at them both. They were descending into the outer layer of Bleachbone’s synthosphere, the bright lights of the hidden town glowing in her eyes.

   “Another adventure,” she said. “That is, if you’re both interested.”

   Eli looked at Breek, and Breek stared back before speaking for them both.

“Asteroid belt,” he echoed. “Sounds fun.”

   Ketzal grinned even wider.

   Infectious, Eli thought, shaking his head.

   Infectious.

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Last Chance And The City Of The Undead (Last Chance, #5)

This story is part of a series. To start at the beginning, click here.

Ketzal stared. There were minarets. Underground minarets, carved straight from the native stone. She thought she could see the sharp edges of patterns, reflecting bits of light from the lake before the city’s towers rose too far into the shadowy depths of the ceiling.

“How far down do you think it is?”

Ketzal blinked. She frowned up at the minarets for another moment, wondering what Breek was talking about, before she glanced down and saw that he was staring into the lake. The glow lighting his face was rippling in strange patterns, his expression difficult to judge. Ketzal guessed that it was somewhere between ‘shock’ and ‘awe’, since—really—those were the only reasonable reactions to finding lost pirate treasure in an underground city.

Not that everyone’s reaction had to be reasonable. Eli was staring down into the lake as though he’d just woken from a nightmare. Or—no. Like he’d just found himself inside one.

It made no sense, but then again, Eli rarely did.

The minarets could wait. Ketzal peered down deep into the vibrant glow of the lake, squinting at the sparkling chrome.

“It’s hard to judge the depth, with water this clear,” she said. “It could be anywhere from twenty feet to two thousand deep, really.”

“How can we find out?” Breek asked, kneeling down to flick a finger at the water. It rippled quietly away from the disturbance, sending waves of refracted light dancing wildly over the cave walls.

“One second.” Ketzal said, feeling for the strap of her pack. “I’ve got—“ she patted her shoulder absently, frowning when her hand came away empty, “Something.”

* * *

Eli was aware that there was conversation going on over his head. Aware in a vague, unassuming way—the way you might be aware that the planet under your feet is spherical, or that someone, somewhere, is being chased by geese.

Mostly, though, he was aware of the lake, and of the things that shone and sparkled under the surface of the lake. He could almost feel the ripples of light leaving physical impressions on his skin.

He’d been perfectly prepared to find a death trap. Or a pile of useless, ancient junk. Or nothing.

Not once had he allowed himself to hope that there was actually any treasure. Treasure just lying around, free for the claiming. But here it was, and his fingers were prickling uncomfortably with the knowledge of how much had just come within his reach.

* * *

“Well, crap.”

Ketzal’s voice was flat. Eli came back to himself with the solidity of a loose clamp being locked into place.

“What?” He asked, peeling himself away from the the pale, rippling glow of the water. “What’s wrong?”

Ketzal was staring at the largest of the large boulders as though it had just rudely interrupted her.

“Well,” she said. “Remember that whole, falling, nearly being squished by giant rocks thing?”

“Yes,” Eli replied. He had the encroaching conviction that he didn’t to want to hear what this was leading up to.

“Well.” Ketzal said, “I had all of climbing gear in my pack.”

“Yes.”

“And I think it must have come off in the fall.”

That wasn’t so bad, Eli thought.

“We’ll look for it,” he began, then looked at Ketzal, standing stolidly with her hands on her hips in front of the largest and most immobile of boulders. She reached out her foot and toed a tiny bit of familiar fabric, sticking out from underneath it.

Oh.

“Oh,” Eli said, all helpful impulses grinding to a halt.

“Yep,” Ketzal agreed, evidently having boarded the same ship. She peered up at the gaping hole, so far above them, that led back to the surface. “‘Oh’ is about right.”

“You mean we’re stuck?” Breek, turned away from the treasure by more practical concerns just as Eli had been, asked. He glanced between them, his wide eyes reflecting slivers of pale light.

“Don’t panic,” Eli said.

The kid looked at him. “You know how we’re gonna get out?”

“No,” he admitted. “But don’t panic. It won’t help.”

It was good advice. Eli was trying to follow it himself.

Ketzal’s attention seemed to be occupied with the city on the other side of the lake.

“We could swim across.”

Eli followed her gaze. Ketzal glanced at him. “Whoever built that city must have had a way to get to and from it.”

Eli nodded, agreeing. Any passage out from the city could easily have caved in in the centuries since it had been abandoned, of course, or relied on some kind of power grid that no longer existed. He could already hear Breek’s half-panicked breathing, and so he didn’t mention it. He studied the water instead, trying to remember the last time he’d gone swimming.

Years ago. So many years. Colony 9 didn’t have water enough to spare—or time, either.

But he remembered, with sudden vividness, the pools on Red 16. They’d lived up to the planet’s name, the deep and sluggish water tinged with terracotta that would dye your skin as red as blood, and dry into a soft silt that rubbed off on everything you touched for days afterwards. The pools had been blessedly cool in the hot and arid afternoons; he’d spent hours swimming in them. The memory, so vastly removed both from the desperate years that followed it and from this cold and bloodless cave, sparked a strange kind of regret—a sadness that seemed to sink, uninvited, into his very bones.

But he thought he remembered how to swim, provided the water was really as calm as it looked.

There hadn’t been much in the way of pools on Bleachbone either, come to think of it. He looked at Breek.

“You know how to swim, kid?”

Breek looked at him, mouth crooked to the side, and shrugged.

“How hard can it be?”

This caught Ketzal’s attention.

“You don’t know how to swim?”

“Um,” Breek said, shrugging his shoulders into a slump. “No?”

Ketzal looked to Eli. “Do you know how to carry another person?” She asked. “Because I don’t.”

Eli thought for a moment, then shook his head. He was willing to risk his own life on his decades-old swimming knowledge. Not someone else’s.

Breek shifted his feet, squaring his shoulders. “I can figure it out,” he said.

“I’m sure you can, but now is not the time to be learning to swim,” Ketzal said. “I’m usually an advocate for impromptu learning, but if you start to drown here, neither of us could save you, and I, for one, would rather not watch you die.”

Eli blinked at the speech. It was strange to see Ketzal advocating for common sense.

“Tell you what,” Ketzal said. “Eli and I will swim across and find a way up. We’ve got more ropes on the ship; we’ll come back and pull you up.”

Breek shifted again, looking between Ketzal and Eli uncertainly.

“Uh, sure,” he said. “I guess. I’ll just—sit here?”

“Perfect,” Ketzal said. “It’s a plan. And once we’re all back up on the surface, we can formulate a plan for recording everything down here.” She glanced across the lake, wistful this time. “I thought that the most fascinating thing we could find would be Ma-Rek’s treasure, but—this city would have to be even older. Hidden down here, with no one the wiser.”

“No one but us,” Breek said, and Ketzal met him with a blazing grin.

Eli was listening. He was. Still, he found himself staring down, deep into the water, at the shine and glimmer of the submerged chrome.

“We will be bringing up the treasure, though.” He said. His voice sounded sharp, even to his own ears.

“Oh yeah, totally.” Ketzal said. “That too.”

Good, Eli thought, returning his gaze to the water.

Good.

* * *

The cave was filled with echoes as Ketzal and Eli splashed their way across the lake, sending riotous ripples over the calm surface and causing the light on the walls to dance wildly.

Breek didn’t want to drown. It was that fact, and that fact alone, that kept him from plunging into the lake after them.

Ketzal had promised that they wouldn’t leave him, he thought insistently. She didn’t seem like the type to lie—she hadn’t yet, anyway, not to his knowledge.

But there was trust, and then there were the facts. The facts were plain enough. They hadn’t wanted him along with them in the first place. Especially now that they’d found the treasure, he was useless. Anyone would be looking for a way to get rid of him, and this was the perfect excuse.

Breek watched them go, all the insisting of his mind solidified into one solid conviction. They were not coming back for him.

Eli’s arms were burning with unfamiliar exertion by the time he heaved himself, wet and dripping, out of the water. The rock was cold and solid under his hands, and the water itched like a chemical bath. Eli turned back, intending to send a reaffirming nod to Breek, but found his gaze captured by the treasure again. It glittered at him, and his skin itched.

He tore himself away from the sight with troubling difficulty.

“I think these are letters,” Ketzal said. She was a fast swimmer, and had come up on shore before him. Splattering water on the stone paving of the city entrance, she was tracing some carvings on the city gate with her fingers. They did look like letters, Eli thought, though he couldn’t have guessed the language if he tried.

He scratched at his neck.

“We’re looking for an exit, Ketz.” He said.

“Oh!” She said, pulling herself away. “Right.”

“It’s got to be on the outskirts of the city somewhere,” Eli guessed, frowning into the dark where a pathway ran between the city’s outer buildings and the cave wall. The glow of the lake only kept the path visible for so long, and it led into a deep, pitch-black shadow where they would have to find their was by feel alone.

It wasn’t any use just staring at it.

“You go right,” Eli said, “and I’ll go left?”

Ketzal looked into the dark on her side of the city, and nodded.

“It’s a plan.”

* * *

As Ketzal walked along the outskirts of the city, she studied the paving-stones under her feet. They weren’t individual stones, but rather a pattern, carved into the cave floor to imitate laid stone cobbles. Each raised stone bore its own carving—its own carefully created pattern.

She did not look up at the city. If she did, she wasn’t sure how she would pull herself away. Somewhere, deep in those buildings, lay the impressions of lives lived, of people who’d existed so very, very long ago. The story of who had built this city, and what they had built it for. Ketzal wanted nothing more than to look.

But, finding an exit came first. Once they found an exit, she could bring Breek and Eli to explore with her.

And, possibly more to the point, a flashlight.

So, Ketzal kept her hand flat on the far wall, trying to use the faded glow of the lake to see as she walked along it. The stone was rough under her fingers, hacked away almost carelessly to make room for the city.

She could feel the variance of the smooth cobblestone carvings through the soles of her boots, and startled a little when they turned into sharp crenellations. She glanced down as she walked, and found that there were letters under her feet. Not in any language she knew of, but they were too patterned and abstract to be anything else. She stared at them for a moment, trying to think of what it was that made them look so familiar to her. Large, curving letters, stamped comically huge on the road under her feet.

Like traffic directions.

She almost laughed at the realization. Traffic directions!

This, she thought, taking them in with glee, was exactly what she loved about history. Traffic directions were one thing—one single, not very interesting, thing. But the world that sprung up around them was not. Ancient traffic directions spoke of ancient police, ancient city planning engineers, ancient tourists finding their way by squinting confusedly at ancient maps. Just—people, vivid and alive in their own time, who existed now only in the blurred reflections of the things they had left behind.

As she walked, the rough-cut stone of the wall began to smooth out under her fingers, rippling against them with carefully carved curves. She glanced up, and her breath caught in her throat.

There were pictures carved into the wall.

Her fingers rested over the exquisitely detailed boot-straps of a towering man in an ancient space suit with the visor propped up to reveal a confident, strong-jawed face. He was looking towards the back of the city, arms akimbo as though surveying some proud accomplishment, and Ketzal was drawn further along the wall. The man was looking over a series of planets, each one presented as an unaccompanied sphere with a small representation of what the surface looked like carved into it. Some, Ketzal thought she recognized—they were planets from different systems. If the carvings of ships circling them meant what she thought they did, they were representations of of planets that this culture had explored and settled. In the background of the ships and planets, barely visible in the pale light, open space was represented as a sea of writhing serpents, open-mouthed and scowling. An appropriate view, she thought, at a time when intergalactic travel was so uncertain and risky that you’d have to be half insane to attempt it.

And in that time, these people had taken to the stars like a starving man to along-awaited meal, gobbling them down and exploring like their lives depended on it. The frieze of explored planets went on and on, interspersed every now and then with a proudly standing human figure—holding tablets, or weapons, or tools, to represent what they had contributed to the exploration effort. Dirty-faced mechanics and slim-fingered scholars and grizzled warriors, all alike represented as something glorious—something beautiful.

The light was growing dimmer with every step she took. She walked slower, trying to draw out the last few carvings as long as she could. She reached up, brushing her fingers along the curve of a small planet, represented as a lively jungle. She studied the carving for a moment, picking out the little jungle animals hidden cleverly in the leaves.

She blinked as she saw something she recognized. Curving antlers and wide, dead eyes; a mechanical torso attached to a slim-legged body.

So these people, she thought, knew about the Beast of Blue 12. Had they been responsible for it?

Belatedly, she remembered the radio message in the tunnels, and the one that had crackled over her speakers before the crash on Blue 12. A warning, or a welcome—the way that these people had marked out their habitable areas.

Fascinated, Ketzal brushed her fingers further over the stone, trying to pick out the shape of the next carving, even though it was hidden in shadow.

Her fingers stuttered over something that was not part of the carving at all. She frowned, feeling carefully. Sharp-edged and concave, the gouges in the stone ran in parallel lines. If she concentrated, she could almost see the edges of them by the light of the lake; but they scraped their way from that doubtful visibility into the pitch black of true dark.

The material of Ketzal’s shirt was wet and cold against her back, seeming strangely heavy when she raised her arm to feel the extent of the gouges in the stone. On instinct, she set her fingers into the deep grooves, drawing them down in a slow slashing motion.

They matched up with the gouges. Perfectly.

Sitting at the edge of the lake, Breek occupied himself by tapping his boots together in a steady, absentminded pattern, then stopping to listen to the echoes reverberate back to him across the lake.

The minutes passed.

They continued to pass.

He’d watched Ketzal and Eli pull themselves out of the water and go into the dark. Neither one of them had given him a backward glance.

He’d been waiting, and wondering, ever since.

He tried to break the monotony by reasoning with himself. Even if they weren’t going to come back for him, they had to come back for the treasure, right? He’d see them—not that it would do him a lot of good—but at least, then, he’d know.

Unless, some part of him—a nasty, unpleasant part of him that never seemed to go to sleep—said. Unless. How long, exactly, did it take for a person to die of starvation? He had water here, but no food. Three weeks? Four?

That wasn’t long to wait.

It would be a lot more convenient for them, he thought, to just—forget about him for a few weeks. Come back to collect the treasure later, when he was too dead to shout at them for it.

The thought sent a prickle up his spine.

They could have already reached the surface, he thought. They could be back on the Last Chance, congratulating their good luck.

He shot to his feet, staring across the lake, looking for any movement, any sign of life.

There was none.

Breek’s stomach twisted as though the starvation process had already begun.

They were going to leave him here to die if he didn’t do anything about it.

Breek stared into the lake, wondering if Ketzal had been lying about how difficult swimming would be, and if it would be worth the risk even if she hadn’t. He found a loose stone and tossed it in, watching as it sank.

And sank.

And continued sinking.

By the time it finally reached the bottom, disturbing a few chromium coins as it settled, Breek had decided that he didn’t want to try swimming. Not that it really mattered how deep the water was so long as it was over his head, but somehow, the notion of sinking that deep, of having breathable air that impossibly far out of his reach, sent a jolt of fear to the base of his spine, where it settled in to stay.

So swimming was out. If they wanted him to die, he wouldn’t do their work for them.

He looked up at the gaping hole that led to the surface, and then at the discarded suits and tangled tagalong line.

Climbing it was, then.

* * *

Eli hated the dark. His clothes had finally dried, though the ghost of the burning itch remained on his skin. He walked along the outside wall of the city, feeling his way and occasionally tripping over odd little ledges in the ground. He grumbled at them whenever he did. You’d think that people who had the great idea to carve a whole city out of solid rock would be able to make their roads flat, but evidently that wasn’t the case. The walls were mostly smooth, anyway, except for some odd bumps here and there.

He’d found an opening that could lead to the surface, almost immediately after parting ways with Ketzal; but now he had to find her again. The surest way to manage that was to continue on until they met up.

The wall was solid against his hand, and the further he walked, the louder was the heartbeat sounding in his ears. He couldn’t feel the throb of it in his chest, but his head was filled with steady thudding. It was unsettling.

Equally unsettling was the sense of looming shapes in the dark. He knew they were just buildings; but he could feel them, pulling at his attention with their weight, like the tug of gravity on the controls of a ship.

It was a relief when he rounded the corner and saw the light of the lake glowing in the distance. Set against the light in a stark silhouette, there was Ketzal. Eli felt a brief flash of exasperated affection, because Ketzal was studying the wall itself, and not looking for a doorway at all.

The next moment, his gaze was drawn to the side by a movement in the shadows.

A figure, also moving to stand against the glow of the lake. Eli froze for a moment, watching it move. It slunk forward, oh so silently, towards Ketzal’s distracted form. One figure.

And then another.

And another.

Fear flooded Eli’s his ribs like ice water.

Ketzal cocked her head, passing her fingers over the wall as though touching it could reveal some of its secrets. The pale lake-light caught on her bright yellow hair, twisting the color into a livid lime green.

The creatures crept on.

His throat was too dry to yell, but he burst forward, running flat out across the smooth stone. His shoulder hit another body as he ran, eliciting a brief yelp of surprise. Ketzal glanced up at the sound. Eli grabbed her shoulder, spinning her around and shoving her on ahead of him.

“Run!” He shouted, glancing back to catch a glimpse of the things following them. Pale, human faces with too-dark eyes. The faces were twisted up, revealing all too familiar over-sharp teeth.

“They’re vampires, Ketz!” He shouted.

“They’re what?”

The lake rose up like a rescue beacon in his peripheral vision, and he turned around just barely in time to see Ketzal, halted on the edge of it.

“What—“ she began.

“Keep going!” Eli shouted. He couldn’t stop. He slammed into her, bodily knocking her into the lake with a terrific splash. A wave of displaced water splashed back on Eli.

It was boiling hot.

Eli screamed, stumbling back from the lakeside. He stared down at his hands, bubbling an angry red. Panicked, he looked to where he’d knocked Ketzal into the water.

She was already swimming across the lake. Unharmed.

The next moment, hands seized his shoulders, pulling him down. He landed on his back, the pale grinning faces filling his vision. Eli struggled, pushing up against too-smooth hands, until he could he could look across the lake, see the dark shape of Ketzal as she swam away.

The hands were pulling him, twisting his limbs and all but tearing the muscles. He felt the rough clamp of teeth on his calf, around his wrist, ready to drain his blood.

He didn’t look at them. They didn’t matter. Ketzal was safe—nothing else mattered, as long as she was safe.

One of the creatures tugged his head to one side, taking the lake out his line of sight. Eli closed his eyes, and it sunk its teeth into his neck.

Ketzal’s ears were full of water and her heart was pounding hard in her chest as she dragged herself up on the far shore. The swim was a blur of adrenaline and splashing water. She coughed up some lake water, bitter and dribbly on her lips.

She looked around, wondering if she’d somehow found the wrong shore. Breek was nowhere to be found.

Breek was not there, but his suit was. So was her backpack, still squashed under a boulder. Ketzal frowned, and turned back, expecting to find Eli standing behind her.

She did not.

With a jolt, Ketzal saw the huddled group of figures on the far shore, gathered around a still figure in familiar clothes. Vampires, Eli had shouted. Vampires outside of Bleachbone, which was nearly unheard of.

Vampires who had caught Eli.

Afterwards, she would swear that she didn’t remember jumping back into the water.

* * *

The teeth are torn out of his skin almost as soon as they’re sunk in.

“Pah! What is this?”

Someone spits, and there’s a sizzle of hot liquid hitting stone.

The hands have left him, and Eli stuggles to sit up, his hand going to his neck.

“Not blood,” another voice cuts in.

His hand comes away wet with something black and viscous.

“Not human blood, at least.”

The liquid does not burn him as it drips down his arm, but it sizzles as it hits his sleeve, causing the fabric to wrinkle and blacken, shriveling away into nothing.

There was a sound of alarm from one of the creatures over his head, and Eli looked up into a pair of wide black eyes.

“He’s one of us.”

* * *

Breek was dusty, sweaty, scratched-up and annoyed, but he was no longer stuck. He crawled painfully out of the rock crevice of the cave entrance, barely even minding the warm rain thudding its steady beat on his back and soaking through his shirt. He took a gasping breath, scudding his bloody hands on the wet rock, and gave a satisfied exhale. Even the damp, warm air of Greyscape’s surface was better than the tunnels.

Infinitely better. Especially since now, he could make his was back to the Last Chance, and—

Breek’s thoughts screeched to a halt.

The Last Chance was gone.

His heart thudded as hard as the rain as he searched the horizon, hoping he’d missed something. There was no way they had reached the surface already. There was no way they’d left the planet.

Was there?

He took a step forward, blinking against the water dripping from his eyelashes.

The ship was definitely, positively gone.

They’d left, Breek thought. Left him here to die. For an event he’d been preparing for ever since they’d landed, it hit him hard as a sack of concrete.

He took a few more steps on wobbling knees. The rain felt as though it was not just hitting his skin, but pummeling it, a thousand tiny boxer’s gloves that would leave a thousand aching bruises. The sound of it, deep and regular, filled his ears.

The all-encompassing nature of the rain was, really, what made the sudden click stand out. Breek froze for a moment, listening.

It clicked again, just behind him.

He spun around.

A pair of red-glowing eyes, set in a rusted metal skull, stared back at him.

Breek took a step backwards—partially from surprise, and partially because the thing just had too many legs.

It followed him, its strangely segmented body dipping down to block the entrance of the cave.

It chittered at him, a warbling, tinny sound like the doorbell of an old convenience store.

Breek waved his hands at it.

“Hey!” He shouted. “Go away!” He took an aggressive step, swiping at the creature. “Away!”

It did not move. It only cocked its head at him, calculating. Its legs clicked against the stone as it shifted.

The things head rose up, bringing its forelimbs with it. They were long and gangling, tipped with things like tools in the place of hands, and its torso, metallic and red with rust, seemed almost human in contrast to its over-large, insect body.

It tipped its head back and raised its voice in a long, chittering screech.

The click-click of even more metal legs competed with the sound of the rain. More rusted metallic skulls rose out of hidey-holes and over ridges in the ground. They all fixed their glowing eyes on Breek. He took a step back. Then another. Something bumped against his back.

When he turned around, a pair of red eyes looked inquisitively into his own.

He was surrounded.

To read the next story in this series, click here.

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Last Chance And The Pale Lake (Last Chance, #4)

This work is part of a series. To start at the beginning, press here.

Loris, colloquially known as Greyscape, was not grey at all. Not from the outside. From the outside, the heavy atmosphere was swirling with surface storms, wild and fascinating as pattern-welded steel, glowing in rich shades of blue.

Eli really hated the color blue.

The bright blue outer skin of Loris filled the entire front window of the Last Chance. He gripped the controls with white knuckles as the ship bucked, expressing displeasure as they descended into the exosphere.

“I know, girl,” he murmured. “I know.”

The feeling of being sucked down, the gravity kicking in and taking control, always made Eli’s stomach uneasy.

“See, this is a really tricky landing,” Ketzal said, sitting back in the co-pilot’s seat. Her hair was yellow today. “Because Loris has what seems to be constant violent storms—“

“Really not a good time for piloting lessons,” Eli said. Calmly. Through clenched teeth. There was a thud and a shudder as Loris’s gravity took a more confident grip of the ship, and they began a rapid descent.

“I can leave,” Breek offered, for the third time. He was standing, keeping a white-knuckled grip on the backs of the two mismatched bucket seats. The look on his face added ‘being thrown up on’ to Eli’s long list of worries.

“No, stay!” Ketzal insisted. “You’ll need to know this someday.”

They were entering the stratosphere. The controls had given up on lurching against Eli’s palms and instead had decided upon a tactic of attempting to jitter free, buzzing against his fingers like a fly angry at having been caught.

“Is it—is it supposed to do that?” Breek’s voice wavered a little as the front of the Last Chance burst into flames.

“Yep. It’ll stop soon,” Ketzal said, waving her hand dismissively. “That’s not the fascinating bit.”

The flames juddered and extinguished, trailing smoke as they continued free-falling into the roiling soup of Loris’s stormy troposphere. The heavy clouds hit them like a fist. Eli winced at the sudden jolt, snapping on the secondary propulsion system and counter-steering rapidly to avoid being sucked into one of the towering thunderheads. Purple lightning crackled in a perfect spiral around them, blindingly bright against the indigo landscape.

Eli’s teeth were set, and he was hoping that the high-pitched squealing was Breek and not the landing gear.

It was probably not the landing gear.

“The really fascinating part is that Loris has a fixed orbit, like Bleachbone,” Ketzal went on, unaffected by the chaos. “But, unlike Bleachbone, it’s too large to be temperature-regulated by its own atmosphere. The starward side is mostly burning desert, and the dark side is all icy wasteland. But there’s a thin strip of landing area that we’ll actually be able to survive.”

It was definitely not the landing gear.

“Ketz,” Eli tried to interject, before a thick buffet of wind tossed the Last Chance to one side. He clenched his teeth, course-correcting as best he could.

“And it’s further complicated by the fact that, since Loris never lost her original atmosphere, there’s a thick layer of stormy hydrogen and helium that we can’t see through at all,” Ketzal continued. The Last Chance executed an unplanned loopty-loop as it broke through the top layer of cloud into a second, darker, and seemingly more turbulent region. More than one alarm was blaring, and Eli couldn’t tell what any of them were for. Lightning flashed above and in front of them, jagged strikes that only missed the ship by a few meters. They had to get out of this, Eli thought. He caught sight of a downward twister.

Perfect.

“Hold on!” He roared, probably interrupting one of Ketzal’s explanations. It was hard to hear anything over the thunder. Warning given, he pointed the ship nose-first into the vortex. It lurched, slamming hard into the side of the twister’s wall. There was a brief moment of feeling like a bug glued to a wall before the storm took hold.

Eli couldn’t hear anything over his own yell as the twister sucked them down.

* * *

On the surface of Loris, all was quiet. There was grey stone, and grey rain, and the scuttling grey things that dug in the rocky surface under the grey sky.

One of them was out in the rain, letting the clear water stream down its rusted shell as it quietly scrabbled and scraped at the rock, tapping and cocking its head to listen, then tapping and listening once more. It had forgotten what it was searching for. It had forgotten many things, as the constant rainwater of Loris seeped into the carefully engineered plating of its skull and diluted the precious fluids there that conducted the artificial synapses of its brain. It had forgotten so many things; but it remembered that it was searching for something. It remembered that that something was deep below the surface of the planet.

So, scrape and tap and listen it did.

When it did finally hear something over the the staccato drumbeat of falling rain, though, it did not come from the ground. It was a distant whine, high up in the sky. The thing stopped and looked up, its dark, lidless eyes unblinking against the rain.

The whine grew closer, louder. The creature’s head swiveled around, tracking the sound, just in time to see the thing that broke through the dark canopy of clouds. It was metallic and boxy, trailing smoke. It banked, wild as a wind-drunk bird, and dipped towards the surface, nearly landing three times before it came to ground with a wild screech of stone and metal, somewhere beyond the thing’s range of vision.

It chittered. This was curious. This was new.

It would tell the others.

* * *

Breek was choking on stomach acid in the nearest disposal chamber to the cockpit, leaning down and breathing hard as he tried to decide whether or not to trust his newly-emptied stomach. So far, the verdict was leaning towards the negative.

“Whoo!” Ketzal’s voice was muffled, but audible. “We’re alive!”

“Are you sure?” Breek questioned under his breath

“Sure am!” Ketzal said, probably responding to something Eli had said, but it made Breek huff a laugh all the same. He winced directly afterwards. Laughing wasn’t a good idea.

“You alright, Breek?” Eli called back, interrupting Breek’s inner argument over whether he should stand up or not.

“Fine!” He shouted. And he was, really—or would be, once he could stop breathing through his nose.

“Come on up, then!” Ketzal said. “We’ve got a whole planet to search!”

A whole planet, Breek thought bleakly. His stomach felt steady enough now, but it was a toss-up as to whether or not he wanted to go look at this new planet. It had been easier, hiding in that incineration bin, to picture Loris as a small globe marked with a large X where all the unimaginable riches lay.

It hadn’t really been until they had gotten close enough to the planet’s surface that the roiling storms blocked out everything else that he’d been forced to rethink that image. It was not a pleasant process. He did not like having all that space between himself and his hopes. In fact, he resented it.

Still. He wasn’t getting any closer by standing alone in a disposal chamber. Soon enough, he would have his share of that treasure, and he would never have to go galavanting across the universe ever again. No desperation, and no galavanting. It was his promise to himself; and it was a promise that he would not break.

He wiped his mouth and straightened his shoulders, letting the door zither shut behind him as he went to rejoin the others.

In the cockpit, the ship had quieted. The only sounds were the drumming of the rain on the window and the quiet murmur of Ketzal and Eli’s conversation.

“So this is Greyscape, huh?” He said, as he entered the cockpit.

Greyscape was a lot—bigger, than Bleachbone. Even with the cloud cover and the falling sheets of rain, it seemed incredibly bright, too, for a planet. Bright, and terrifyingly open. Breek determinedly did not let his heart sink within him.

“How are we gonna find something hidden in all this?” He asked.

“With diligence and hard work,” Ketzal replied, getting up from her seat. “Also, some clues. Excuse me,”

And with that, she squeezed past Breek and left the cockpit. Breek looked at Eli, hoping for some indication as to what that was supposed to mean, but Eli only shrugged. Slowly, one hand at a time, he peeled himself off the controls. Breek watched the process, thinking back to the landing. In his own terror, he’d thought Eli had been calm as Ketzal had seemed.

Today was a day for rethinking things.

Eli got up, giving him a wry look and nodding the way Ketzal had gone.

“Not much to do but follow,” he said.

* * *

Loris was beautiful. It was very wet, but it was beautiful.

Even in the cargo hold, shoving aside crates of tomato-and-chicken mash in order to find the one box that she knew was down here somewhere, Ketzal could still see it. The dark, roiling thunderheads, the thousand neon shades of lightning, the craggy grey rock all shining with the constant pounding rain; it was all there in her head, perfectly captured and yet only serving to sharpen her appetite for more. She’d been to many planets, and they were all amazing in their own way. Loris, though—Loris one was her current favorite.

Finally, she found the box she was looking for. Still wrapped in its protective packaging, stored for years without ever being used.

“There she is,” she heard Eli say, and she looked up to see him and Breek at the top of the stairs that led down into the hold. “See, it’s a small ship,” Eli turned back to explain, a smile quirking his lips, “So no matter how many times she runs off in some random direction, it’s only a twenty-minute search to find her again. Thirty, at most.”

“I don’t run off anywhere!” Ketzal protested, flipping her hair out of her face. Maybe the bright yellow hadn’t been such a good idea; it was a little distracting. “You’re just slow!”

“Hey, now,” Eli said, grinning at her. “I’m an old man. Show some respect.”

For that blatant ridiculousness, she threw a packet of tomato mash at him.

He caught it, laughing, and handed it over his shoulder to Breek, who after a moment of confusion, stuck it in his pocket.

“Alright,” Eli said, coming down the stairs. “What are we doing now?”

“Getting these suits out of storage.” With a grunt, she pulled the box free and scooted it out into open space.

Eli bent down beside her, tapping the box thoughtfully as he read the description written on it.

“The emergency spacewalk suits?”

“Yes.”

Eli cocked his head, squinting at her.

“Not sure if you’ve noticed,” he said, “But we do happen to be planetside, at the moment. We came through the atmosphere a few moments ago. It was that terrifying bit, with all the lightning?”

Ketzal’s shoulders slumped, and she fixed Eli with a look. She wasnt sure what kind of look it was, since it wasn’t one she’d practiced, but it was definitely a look.

“And I’m not sure if you’ve noticed,” she said, “but it’s raining outside, and none of us have any waterproof gear. These will work instead.”

“Ah,” Eli allowed, nodding.

“Plus, they have lamps for when we go underground.”

“Underground?” Eli asked.

“Underground,” Ketzal confirmed, with a grin.

* * *

Breek shrugged his shoulders, testing his range of movement in the heavy rubber suit.

It was clunky and uncomfortable, but to Ketzal’s credit, it was doing a good job of keeping him dry in the driving rain and wind. The surface of Loris was warm, though, and Breek was already sweating into insulation meant to protect wearers against the bitter cold of open space.

“We’re looking for a cave!” Ketzal shouted, her voice cracking loudly over the suits’ dusty inner radio. Breek jumped, fingers scrambling for a volume modulator. He found it, cranking it down just in time for Eli’s voice to come through and not break his eardrums doing so.

“Of course it’s a cave,” Eli said bleakly.

“Why a cave?” Breek asked. He knew Ketzal had already explained, but he’d forgotten to listen—and she never seemed to mind explaining things.

“I’ve been reading up,” Ketzal said. “They’ve actually found some of Ma-Rek’s old secondary stashes—not enough to have been his entire haul, but it’s definitely Ma-Rek’s work. He seemed to prefer underground locations, usually on the side of the planet closest to the Solar System. He was earth-born—there was a psychology paper that talked about how it meant he was always trying to find some kind of way to return home, or something. Whatever it meant to him, though, it was definitely a pattern.”

So, Breek thought. Cave. He could look for a cave. That didn’t sound too hard.

The rain was splattering against his face shield, turning the world into a mysterious mass of blurry shapes and colors, so he fumbled for the latch, swinging it up and away from his face. The warm rain splattered against his face now, splashing into his eyes and making him blink; but he could see a little.

Eli and Ketzal were both standing a few feet away, one of their half-bickering conversations crackling through Breek’s radio. Instead of listening, he started scanning the ground, carefully searching for any rift or opening that could lead into a cave.

The ground was dark and dull—almost black. It was a strange reversal, the light sky with the dark ground. Different from home, he thought, before angrily quashing that thought. Bleachbone had never been home; it had just been the only place he knew. He had spent sixteen years of his life planning to leave it, and that plan had not changed. If anything, it had gotten more solid, more real, now that there was treasure within reach—lost treasure, not even chrome he’d have had to steal or slave for.

He would find the treasure. Get the treasure. And then, enjoy never having to wallow on dangerous, ugly planets like this or Bleachbone ever again.

He was so focused on the ground that he didn’t notice, at first, the thing flickering just on the edge of his vision. It morphed and blinked, a moving light in the corner of his eye, barely there at first, and then an annoyance he was determined to ignore.

It took him a moment to realize that this was an uninhabited planet—and that Ketzal and Eli were behind him. His head snapped up with a jerk.

The thing, whatever it was, might have given one last flicker; or it might have been a trick of the light on the rain. The more he searched for it, the less he was certain he’d seen anything at all.

But he had seen something. Hadn’t he?

He took a cautious step towards where he thought the thing had been.

The line clipped onto his belt snapped, juddering him to a halt. He glanced down at it, frowning, and then looked back towards Ketzal and Eli. Ketzal was still stumbling a little, drawn off-balance by the connecting line, and Eli was steadying her with a hand under her elbow.

“Kid, what on earth are you doing?” Eli’s voice crackled loud and clear through the radio, though it was lost in the wind. “Get back here.”

“Have you found anything?” Ketzal asked, sounding breathless even through the static.

Breek didn’t think that a flicker on the horizon counted as finding something.

“No!” He shouted, and jogged back to within a reasonable distance. He gestured apologetically. “Forgot about the line thing.”

It felt a little like being on a leash, but he didn’t mention that.

“Well, I’m glad we have it,” Ketzal said, grinning at him. “Wouldn’t want to lose you.”

Breek nodded, even though he wasn’t sure if he agreed with the sentiment.

“So, cave.” Ketzal declared, and began walking off, studying the ground as she went. Eli fell into step beside her.

Breek had enough line to let them walk on for a bit before falling in himself. He held back, glancing over his shoulder at the horizon. It was completely still, save for the clouds and the rain.

But he could have sworn he’d seen something.

* * *

Eli had—he thought to his credit—decided to suspend his judgement of Greyscape until they had spent at least ten minutes on its surface.

It had been ten minutes.

He hated it.

It was hot. It was dark. The clouds were so heavy that it might as well have already been a cave for how open and free it felt, and they were currently looking for a way to sink even lower under the surface, piling more weight over their heads.

Just wonderful.

Eli squinted hard, trying to keep his eyes open enough to see without also getting them full of stinging rainwater. It was an impossible dilemma. Warm water ran down his face, and his too-large, too-heavy boots repeatedly stubbed themselves against the uneven rock shelves. Occasionally, he’d forget to watch the line, and it would run out and pull him off-balance, leading to a wild, flailing dance before he could right himself again.

At this rate, they would find a cave in approximately three hundred years. Eli resigned himself to a lifetime of being hungry and rained on.

Beside him, Breek was stumping along equally miserably. Eli was glad to not be alone in his bad mood. Ketzal, with her eternal cheeriness, occasionally felt like sunshine on a funeral.

The boy also kept stopping, glancing over his shoulder. It was making Eli nervous.

“What do you see?” He asked, after the third time. Breek looked at him as though he’d been caught stealing.

“Nothing,” he said. It was less than convincing.

Eli looked back to where the boy had been staring. There was the ship, all but hidden behind the sheets of falling rain, but there nonetheless. His heart cried out against leaving her, even though Ketzal had assured him that the planet was uninhabited.

There was something—a trick of the light? He stopped, frowning, trying to see through the rain. What was that?

“I found it!” Ketzal called, her voice echoing double—through the radio, and the rain-soaked air. It met his ears like a tap on the shoulder, pulling him away from his contemplation of the ship and towards the cave that Ketzal had found.

It had probably been nothing, anyway.

As it turned out, Ketzal’s ‘cave’ was little more than a crevice in the earth, just large enough for someone to squeeze through. It was raised up, protected by a shelf of rock, and unlikely to be flooded, even in the torrential rains. So, it was probably not a drowning death trap.

He could feel the walls closing in, though, just looking at it.

“We’re going in that?” Breek asked from just behind his shoulder. He sounded as excited by the prospect as Eli felt.

Ketzal glanced up at them both.

“I mean, it’s the only way underground we’ve found so far.” She said, reaching into her suit. She pulled out a tiny neon-green square and stuck it on the lip of rock overhanging the cave. It stuck there, clinging with incredible strength, and began to glow with a pulsating light: a marker to keep their place.

She brushed her wet hands uselessly on the soaked space suit, and stood up.

“Whatever Ma-Rek hid here, we’re not going to find it if we don’t look.”

Eli stopped himself on the cusp of saying that maybe, not finding the deranged leavings of a bloodthirsty pirate (even an ancient one) was a good thing. He’d proposed his death trap theory. Several times. Ketzal was determined to be curious. Breek, in his own way, was dead set on it too.

Eli was reminded of his own purpose here. He was here to keep them both safe. So, keep them safe he would, even if they were both utterly insane.

He leaned down, reaching a hand into the crevice. Nothing bit him.

“Well then,” he said, with a resigned sigh. “We might as well get going.”

* * *

Breek scrambled and scraped as he crawled into the cave after Eli. Ketzal sat on her haunches, waiting her turn, bouncing slightly on her heels to slough off some of her impatience. She loved this feeling—the prickling of not-quite-fear that started in her spine and ended in her fingertips. A new planet, a million and one new ideas and mysteries and stories. Maybe even treasure. Who knew what artifacts Ma-Rek had unintentionally preserved? Ancient coinage and art, metalwork and clothing. It was sure to be fascinating.

Finally, it was her turn. She unshouldered her pack and shoved it inside, then got down on her belly, wriggling and twisting to fit into the small space. The rubber suit made unhelpful bumps and rumples that caught on the stone, but soon enough, she was able to see the cave.

It opened out, after the initial lip, into a small, rounded chamber, large enough for Breek and Eli to stand up in. It seemed to be made of a different kind of stone. Unlike the matte grey surface of Loris, this stuff was pitch black and shining, gleaming under their lamps like the center of a giant jewel.

With one final kick, she worked herself free, sprawling into the cave and landing with a thud on the cave floor. Her lamp gave a faintly yellowish beam, making dancing triplicate shadows as it met with the beams from the other two suits.

“Wow,” she said, looking around the cave in awe. “I’ve never seen this type of rock before.”

Eli reached down a hand, helping her to her feet. He looked around the cave too, the bright bluish glow of his lamp enunciating the worry-lines around his eyes. “I’ve never seen this much of it,” he said.

Ketzal swung towards him, curious. “You know what kind of stone this is?”

Eli shrugged.

“We called it waterstone, on Colony 9. Sometimes you’d run into a little vein of it, and it’s not something the mining barons ever wanted, so we got to keep it. If you chipped off a little lump of it and kept it in your canteen, it’d keep your water from going funny. So, waterstone.”

Which was fascinating, really, but—

“Why did you need to keep your water from going funny?” She asked, lean not down to snatch her pack up off the floor. “Aren’t they supposed to keep it filtered?”

Eli huffed, something like amusement flickering over his face. “Well,” he began, but was interrupted.

“Hey!” Breek called. “There’s a tunnel that leads further down! It’s big enough to walk through!”

“Big enough to walk through?” Ketzal asked, huffing as she shouldered the pack, all heavy with climbing gear, She turned to Eli. “There’s no way this wasn’t man-made,” she breathed. “We’re getting close. We have to be.”

“Close to a death trap?”

Ketzal rolled her eyes. “Close to something.”

* * *

Waiting for Ketzal and Eli to start moving, Breek studied the tunnel he’d found. It was long and deep, plunging down into the earth at a pitch that was just this side of dangerous. Far, far down, he could hear something, like a low hum. Air reverberating through the small space, he guessed, like the way the wastes of Bleachbone would sometimes be set to wailing for hours on end.

“Hello,” he called, softly. His own voice came back to him, several times over. Hello! Hello! Hello!

Ketzal came up beside him, bright-eyed. “OOh!” She called. “An echo!”

Echo! Echo! Echo!

Eli came up behind them both, his eyes shut and his mouth in a straighter line than Breek had thought nature ever intended.

“If you could both never do that again,” he said, “I’d really appreciate it.”

“Never again!” Ketzal called.

Again! Again! Again!

Eli sighed.

* * *

Luckily, echoes were not endlessly enthralling. Not even to Ketzal. She stopped with them after the first fifteen minutes, and then, the only things to echo back on them were the sounds of their own footsteps.

The tunnel itself had a ringing kind of hum in it, like air blown over the top of a bottle. It was mournful-sounding. Every once in a while, there was a thud, or a click, like something moving in the shadows. Eli was used to strange noises in tunnels. Most of the time, they meant nothing.

Breek was less steady. He was quiet about it, but every odd, discordant sound made his gaze skitter towards the shadows.

“Hey,” he asked, after one particularly strange series of clicking noises. “Why isn’t there anyone here?”

Ketzal turned at the question, but she had that starry-eyed look on her face that meant she couldn’t pay proper attention to anything, except maybe old artifacts.

“Here, in the caves?” She asked.

“No,” Breek said. “Well—on this planet. It’s habitable, right? So why isn’t anyone here?”

Ketzal shrugged.

“Not all habitable planets get habited,” she said. “They’re discovered, mapped, and forgotten. It happens.”

“So,” Breek said, “There’s not—a reason.”

“Not a sinister one,” Ketzal said. “That I know of, anyway. Stuff like that tends to spread a lot of stories.”

She was being reassuring, but Breek was not being reassured.

“But, like,” he said. “It couldn’t be like in those Beast of Blue 12 movies? Where people have tried to settle and something got them?”

Eli raised both of his eyebrows, and caught Ketzal’s look over Breek’s head.

“What?” Breek asked. “What did I say?”

Eli grinned.

“Kid, you wouldn’t believe us.”

“Wouldn’t believe what?”

“Eli killed the Beast of Blue 12 with an ion laser,” Ketzal said.

“Yeah, sure,” Breek said. “I’m serious. Tell me how we know there isn’t something here.”

“I’m being serious too!” Ketzal protested. “He did! It’s how we met! Eli, tell him.”

“Yep,” Eli confirmed calmly. “It tried to hurt my ship, so I stabbed it right in the eyes.”

“Yeah, sure. Really, though,” Breek said.

“Eli!” Ketzal said. “You’re not helping!”

“Don’t worry, kid,” Eli said. “If anyone had landed and never been heard from again, there’d be stories. They’d have been missed. If it happens more than once, it builds up a legend. There’s no stories about the monster of Greyscape.”

As soon as he was done speaking, every suit’s radio crackled to life with a staticky signal, overloud in the confined space. Eli flinched, reaching for the dial to turn the radio down. The noise was cut, but the voice droned on, a stream of nonsense syllables interspersed with static. The fluctuation was headache-inducing, and Eli shut his radio off. Breek and Ketzal, on their own time, did the same. The voice stopped.

Breek’s face had gone suddenly pale, but Ketzal was almost glowing with excitement.

“It’s a ghost signal,” she said.

“It’s a what?” Breek asked, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

“We’re close to something!”

“Close to what?” Eli asked, but she was already shooting off, going down the tunnel faster than ever. Eli jumped to try and keep up, if only to keep from being dragged by the tag-along line, and Breek broke into a jog to follow him.

At first, Eli didn’t connect the strange reverberation under their tramping feet with any danger. It wasn’t until the ground trembled and the walls of the tunnel shook around them that his stomach plunged and he halted, planting his feet on the stone.

“Ketzal!” Eli called. “Be caref-“

Breek slammed into him from behind, knocking them both over. There was a rumble, and a crash, and a sudden jerk as the line pulled taut around his waist; and then Eli’s mouth was full of dust and the ground gave out beneath him.

* * *

“This,” Breek said, “Is what broken ribs feel like.”

His voice was muffled, coming fuzzily to Eli’s ears. As Eli gained more awareness of his surroundings, he realized that this was because Breek just happened to by lying on top of him.

“Damn your ribs,” Eli growled, into a faceful of space suit. “Get off my head.”

Breek only groaned, so Eli shoved him. Breek continued groaning from a slightly different spot on the vast pile of rubble, his suit’s lamp making a dull vertical beam in the dust-choked air.

“Are you all right?” Eli asked.

“No,” Breek said, but he was already getting to his elbows, so Eli ignored him.

“Ketzal?” He called. “Ketzal!”

“Over here.”

The air was deathly still, the ground uneven with rubble. A hazy beam of yellow light moved, swinging around wildly, and Eli could make out the lumpy shape of Ketzal in her too-large suit. His own lamp, he realized, had been crushed. It was no longer shining.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

“A little dazed, but fine,” she said. “I almost got squished by a giant rock. Are you okay?”

‘I almost got squished’ was not a good thing to hear at the best of times. Right now, it was only adding to Eli’s crushing awareness of everything that could have happened. He unclipped his tag-along line—half of it was underneath the pile of rubble between him and Ketzal.

“I’m stuck,” Ketzal said, sounding small and unnaturally confused, and Eli jumped up, hurrying over. She was trying to tug her line off without properly unclipping it, and blinking down in confusion every time it refused to come loose.

“Here,” Eli said, taking it out of her hands. “Let me. Are you dizzy at all?”

“No. I’m fine.”

He didn’t really know anything about head injuries, except that they made people a little off sometimes. Or a lot off. Or dead.

Heart pounding, he unclipped her line, then held up two fingers.

“How many fingers, Ketz?” He asked, but she was looking straight past him. “Ketzal,” he snapped, worried. “How many fingers?”

She glanced at him briefly, brushing his hand away in the next moment.

“Two. I’m okay, Eli, just a little shaken up. Look,”

Her gaze seemed clear enough. Relieved, Eli followed her gesture.

The dust had settled somewhat, allowing him to see further. They had fallen into a huge chamber. Above them, the hole that had broken in the floor of the tunnel gaped, dull and dark; but beyond that, the cave opened up into a realm of strange, clear light. The light rippled and reflected, shuddering against a dark vaulted ceiling with a life all its own, and the remaining airborne dust was a dark and dreamlike haze, obscuring the source of the light.

Breek had shed his space suit. He was a narrow silhouette against the glow, staring down into the glow and letting it reflect against his face.

“Look at the buildings, Eli,” Ketzal breathed, and Eli followed her vague gesture. Sure enough, past the rippling, glowing light, there were the hints of tall, strange structures, seemingly carved out of the stone walls. “This was a city.”

Eli nodded. He was less fascinated by the buildings, though, than by what, exactly, was causing the eerie light. He stood, helping Ketzal to her feet. She stood steadily enough. Eli started down the faint incline of rock. As the glow grew brighter, he was vaguely aware of Ketzal following along beside him, her lamp creating dull shadows against the chamber walls. When they reached the edge of the stone, she took in a hushed breath.

It was a pool. The water itself was alight, shimmering with the light of something fallen deep into the bottom of the lake. Eli squinted, trying to see.

He couldn’t believe his eyes.

Under the water, there was a pile of chrome larger than the Last Chance herself. Bars and coins and ingots and cups and bowls, pure and untouched in its bed of water.

It glittered. It shone. Light refracted through the pool and off the polished black walls, dancing slightly to some unheard tune, and Eli could feel the light of it on his skin, holding him still as the very stone.

Ketzal let out a little, half-choked giggle, and laid a hand on Eli’s numb shoulder. “We found it.”

* * *

On the surface of Loris, the machines had gathered. They had left their holes and their cubbies, their never-ending tunnels, to crowd around the new member of their company; a huge, boxy, beautiful thing that neither moved nor spoke. It was charred and dented by its dive through the stormy atmosphere, but its bones were unlike anything the machines had seen before, and it carried strange metals alongside familiar ones.

They chittered to one another, marking all its beautiful qualities. They ran dull metal fingers over its dented surface, collecting handfuls of cosmic dust. They tapped its sides, hoping to wake it up, and posed questions with undulating radio waves.

The ship did not move, and it did not answer.

It was dead, they agreed. Dead—but not useless.

The machines exchanged their fingers for lasers and claws, ratchets and pliers, and began to harvest what they could. One of them—it was the fastest with the ratchet, and the strongest with its fingers—was the first to peel away a sheet of travel-worn, dull plating. It came loose with a shriek and a clang, and the thing chittered happily as it skittered away with its prize. The plate dragged behind it, comically large, displaying its chipped paint to the cloud-darkened world above.

The paint formed curling, bright letters. They read: Chance.

This story is continued in Last Chance And The City Of The Undead.

Enjoy this story?

You’re in luck, my friend! There are many more. Why not delve into one of these?

Jester

Justice And Sandwiches

The Curious Case Of B-712

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Posted on by Grace Crandall · 1 Comment

What Is Left Undone

A glance over her shoulder, fleeting and instinctive, revealed nothing but trees.

Temati sucked in a steadying breath, trying to strengthen her unsteady legs. The deep shadows between the thick trunks gaped wide as wounds, unknown poison hidden within them.

Her hand did not leave her dagger. She could have sworn she’d heard voices.

The trees rustled their leaves, creaking against one another as they swayed under the influence of a breeze that Temati, caked as she was in soot and dried sweat, could not feel. She was a heavy, sagging, half-dead thing with a frightened animal for a heart; the beauty of the day could not touch her.

The sunlight came down in sharp shafts and lazy pools, shining green-tinted through the leaves. The light shifted and settled in harmony with the swaying branches.

The dagger handle stuck unpleasantly to Temati’s fingers as she released it. The leather of the hilt was still tacky with dried blood.

Nothing was moving through the underbrush after her, Temati assured herself. It was only the trees and the wind. This was not the city, with its hard lines and solid shadows, where any irregularity could prove to be a threat. No one had followed her here.

No one could have.

Another breeze waved the treetops, sending sun-spots dancing wildly across the ground, and Temati’s hand went to her dagger again, her sore muscles stiffening in readiness before she realized that it was—yet again—only the forest. She cursed under her breath.

She missed the city.

She did not, however, miss the city enough to risk the sure death sentence of returning to it. She forged on instead, picking her steps carefully over the narrow path.

Nearer to the Capital, the Kingsroad was a glorious feat of engineering, solid and dependable under the feet of horses and travelers, the wheels of ox-carts and carriages and bright-painted circus vardos. But the further out it went, the narrower the road became—narrower, and lumpier, devolving from stone to gravel and then finally pale sandy mud. By the time it came to the Great Forest, the Kingsroad had become nothing more than a footpath. It wound over and through the thickly wooded hills and valleys, the dirt worn away until it was little more than connecting plaster between the thick roots and dark stones.

Perhaps the change would have been less stark if she had not made the journey from the coastal Capital to the inland forests in one footsore, sleepless scramble. Taken more gradually, perhaps it would have been barely noticeable. Temati picked over the uneven surface and thought fondly of her old familiar rooftops, their dearly-remembered patterns of tile and thatch.

The air around her was still and warm. The tree-trunks creaked like thirsty throats, gossiping secrets; small animals rustled in the leaves, and—

Temati stopped, her ears catching something that jarred against the quiet, natural noises. She had heard a voice.

The cry was pitched and yet low all at once, heavy as a death-wail. It made Temati’s back prickle and her stomach turn gently sour. She could almost smell the sharpness of burning thatch again, the iron stench of blood as it boiled, and the wailing—the wailing that rose high as the black smoke—

The patches of sunlight danced as the tree-tops swayed under another breeze, and she shook herself, pushing the memory back into the past where it belonged.

The voice remained.

Hand on her dagger, Temati ducked low, creeping forward through the shadows, feet falling noiselessly on the smooth roots and stones of the path. The crest of the hill gave way to a steep, jackknifing path down into a narrow valley, the sunlight hazy through the pale-leafed trees.

At the very bottom of the valley, the source of the cry was lying in a crumpled pile on the ground. A taller, boyish figure was bending over her, seeming to be trying and failing to get her to get up. Temati frowned through the branches, trying to get a better veiw of the scene. She could see the boy’s sooty face, the skirts of the crumpled girl’s dress all darkened with singes.

Refugees from the fire. Children. They had traveled fast and far, to get here before her; it was little wonder that one of them had lost the strength to go any farther.

She went silently down the hill, intending to swing through the forest around the tiny mourning-party once she got a little closer. She could sidestep them neatly and leave the already terrified children none the wiser to her existence.

The closer she got, the clearer the words came through.

“She’s gone, Mis,” the boy said. He was still young enough to have a voice that cracked midway through his sentences—unless that was a by-product of the smoke. He knelt over the girl, both hands looped under her torso, and struggle to pull her to her feet. “Come on, we’ve got to go. She’d want us to go.”

“No!” The girl said—and she is a little girl, Temati realizes, unfamiliar as she is with children. Little enough to have wispy yellow hair that barely reached her ears. “No! Mia!”

Children, Temati’s mind supplied for the second time. She’s not sure why it matters. What difference does it make, that they are children?

Adults. Children. The old, the infirm, the proud and the angry and the humble and the kind—all are touched by war. All are claimed by death. She had wet her hands in the blood of too many slit throats to have any right to care, so what did this matter?

Why did this, of all things, halt her in her steps?

She stayed on the verge of the forest, unnoticed by the little group at the valley bottom. Safe in her shadows.

After a moment, she realized she was hiding. From children.

With a flash of indignance at her own cowardice, she stepped free of the shadows and continued down the path.

The boy noticed her first. He set his beardless chin in a stubborn jut, moving in front of the girl protectively.

The little creature looked up at his movement, and when her eyes caught on Temati coming down the path, they widened. In fear, Temati assumed. But before she could say a word, the child scrambled to her feet. It was only the boy’s arm, looped in a restraining hold around her torso, that kept her from barreling headlong for Temati.

“You have to help us!” She shouted with all the power in her tiny lungs, ignoring the boy when he hissed at her to be quiet. Temati took a cautious step backwards, away from this unexpected—exuberance? “Mia’s in there!” the girl pointed towards the thick and quiet forest, squirming in the boy’s grip all the while. “The trees ate her!”

Temati looked at the trees. They had done what?

With a vigorous twist, the girl slipped the boy’s grip like a desperate yellowfin and came racing for Temati. Surprised by the sudden assault, Temati stepped backwards, off the path. The leaves crunched under her ragged boots, and she could feel the fingerlike brush of twigs on her back. The girl halted abruptly, mouth dropping open as she gazed at something just beyond Temati’s shoulder.

She just had the time to recognize the fingerlike brush of something that was not a branch against her back before a cool hand wrapped itself around her arm from behind.

Temati freezes, her stomach plunging deep into the pit of her belly. For one blank moment, she is helpless. She cannot remember what she is supposed to do, how she is supposed to get away. A whispering like rustling leaves sounds, somehow just behind and yet all around her; a series of almost-words, like half a conversation heard across a noisy room. The hand is hard and implacable around her arm as it begins, ever so gently, to pull her into the woods.

The girl-child was motionless, transfixed by the sight of whatever it was that held Temati’s arm, but the boy was not. In one bounding step, he was at the edge of the forest, reaching out to snatch Temati’s wrist. His grip is more bone than muscle, but he tugged with all his might, and the warm, desperate grip on her wrist was enough to make her remember to move. She lashed out at the thing she could not see, and her elbow cracked painfully against something as hard as stone. With a twist and a jerk, her arm came free, and she fell backwards on the path, toppling over on top of the boy. He yelled in protest, but his words hit Temati’s ears like the handle end of a throwing knife, falling away again with hardly an impression left behind.

There is a face in the forest. It stares out at her, pale and narrow, with green-glowing firefly eyes. She blinks, disbelieving.

When her eyes open again, it is gone.

Like a trick of the light.

Heart throbbing in her ears, she stared into the deep shadows between the trees. Nothing there but shadows and sunlight.

Nothing.

“Get off of me, you sack of salmon guts!” The boy griped, jabbing her sore ribs with his knee. She struggled to sit up, wincing at the new pain in her elbow, and he gave a relieved gasp, scrambling to his feet.

Temati couldn’t take her eyes off of the spot where the face had been. Not even to protest being called a sack of salmon guts.

“What,” she asked instead, “Was that?”

The boy, brushing dirt off of his already filthy shirt, scowls at her without replying, but the little girl piped up.

“A tree.”

Temati’s gaze snapped down to where the tiny, soot-stained face was looking matter-of-factly at her. “A what?”

“A dryad,” the boy finally supplied, reaching out to press the girl protectively against his side. “A tree spirit.”

That was too much. She turned to look at him.

“Tree spirits aren’t real,” she said. “They’re made up by circus actors to add drama to forest scenes.”

He shrugged irritably at her.

“Alright, they’re made up. Why don’t you just step off the path again, then. See what happens.”

“They took our sister!” The little one said, and turned to her brother. “Tef, we has to get her back. We have to!”

Tree spirits weren’t real, Temati thought again.

But—there had been something there. Something that couldn’t have been her own eyes deceiving her—could it?

“What did they take her for?” Her eyes were drawn to the woods, to the dark and empty shadows. “Why—why did they try to take me?”

“Because you both stepped off the path,” Tef said, and graciously did not add on, idiot. “Thought we’d covered that.”

This exceedingly helpful explanation finished, he turned back to the little girl, whose tears were drying in sticky patterns over her sooty face. He knelt down to be on a level with her, and spoke quietly.

“Mia’s gone,” he said, and Temati can hear the grief in his voice. “they’ve taken her, and we can’t get her back, all right? We’ve got to go on. She’d want us to be safe.”

This, gentle as it is, only serves to stir the girl right up again. Her eyes flash and her hands form into tiny fists.

“I won’t leave her!” The child shouted. “I won’t! You be safe! I’ll die with her!”

Temati glanced between the argument and the woods, growing more confused that before. Was the sister dead, or not? How did a tree—or a tree spirit—eat someone? Curious, she thought back, trying to remember what she knew about tree spirits.

She had not seen many plays. She had always considered them fanciful, frivolous things; in the world she’d lived in—one of blood and stone and shifting loyalties—the melodramatic frippery had never seemed any better than a lie. Now, though, she wished she’d paid more attention.

According to what she’d seen, though, tree spirits lived in forests. They had a habit of derailing young lovers as they fled from their oppressive parents. They were—they were afraid of iron, weren’t they? Or had it been silver?

She found herself fingering the dagger at her hip. It had been an elegant thing once, charred and bloody as it was now; blued steel and black leather, with a boss of etched silver, tarnished with long use.

She had cleaned enough blood off the thing to dye the water of the freshest well red, she was sure. Blood of guilty and innocent alike; politicians and craftsmen, witnesses and rivals. And for what? For money? She had none now. For loyalty? As if anyone had ever shown such faith to her.

All she’d gotten for her trouble was the memory of sparks and screaming, and the scent of burnt blood in her nostrils no matter how clean the air she breathed was.

Perhaps the dagger could see a better use before she died. A plan—slim and strange, but growing stronger—was forming in her brain, and her soul was filling with the impetus to see it through. If the girl was alive somewhere, perhaps she could make up for one of the lives that Temati had taken. And if she was not—well.

These tree spirits would not live to take anyone else.

“All right,” she said. Both children ceased their arguing, looking towards her.

“I’m going to try and get your sister back.”

* * *

It was not, Temati reminded herself, the most pigeon-brained thing she’d ever done. That honor went to the great duck-kidnapping plot from her second year as an assassin.

Still, shouting at trees was not going to be very far down the list.

“Dryads of the great forest!” She called to the waving branches over her head. They were thick enough to block out almost every patch of sky, and glowed beetle-wing bright with the light of an unseen sun.

Tef flicked a glance over her as though sizing up her insanity and judging whether or not it was dangerous. She couldn’t exactly blame him, but she crossed her arms over her chest and raised her head high anyway, determined to see this through to its no doubt embarrassing end.

“You have taken a child!” She accused. “I demand her back!”

Next came the bit of the plan that still made Temati uncomfortable. “In payment for her safe and whole return, I offer myself,” she called. “An exchange.”

That was the whole speech, as far as she’d planned it.

It was received with silence. The trees were motionless, the children holding their breath; for a long and uncomfortable moment, Temati tried to calculate all of the ill-fated decisions that had led her to this moment.

Then it struck her. The trees were silent. Utterly and completely silent. Not a bird stirred, not a branch waved, there was no distant creak of trunk against trunk.

Temati shifted from foot to foot, glancing through the hollows between the trees.

Slowly, she began to discern figures.

It was not that they appeared, so much as they allowed themselves to be seen. A dark shadow in the underbrush, with no visible change, resolved itself into a slim crouching figure with jade-bright eyes. Something that, mere moments before, had been nothing but a quiet sunbeam was now a pale-eyed creature with a hard-set maiden face. Not a thing moved; but in the brief space of a few moments, the empty forest was filled and peopled with nigh on three thousand statuesque figures, all staring impassively at Temati and her shouted demands.

A tall, boxy-figured dryad stepped free of her sisters, not a single leaf crackling under her careful steps as she came up to the path and—just before her toes stepped over the last edge between under-scrub and packed earth—stopped.

Temati had seen many women in her life. She had seen starving old crones in rags and soft-skinned baronesses dripping with ancient jewels. She’d seen light-footed laughing dancing-girls and log-limbed working women with hands all reddened by lye. She had looked in mirrors and seen herself—a scared child, an angry young woman, a grown adult with grey-streaked hair and eyes that were heavy with all they had seen.

The dryad looked like none of these.

Her eyes were a pale, glowing gold, set deep in a smooth, butter-colored face. Her features were sharp and decisive as an eagle’s beak, strong-jawed and solid as a sculpted goddess. Wild, stick-borne leaves made a structure something like hair and something like a headdress on top of her head, carried high and proud like a crown. A dress of olive-tinted lichen and steel-grey bark fit close around her thick torso, dripping with pale moss that swayed and swished around her legs. She moved like a living thing, but when she stood—she might as well have been made of stone.

Belatedly, Temati realized that she was staring.

The woman stared back. Tilting her head thoughtfully, she held out a hand.

“You wish to join us?” She asked.

Temati was halted a little by the mildness of the words.

“The girl,” she said. “You took her.”

The woman nodded slowly.

“We did.”

“We want her back.”

At that, the woman frowned.

“Why?”

Temati blinked.

“Because—because we do,” she said. The dryad’s apparent confusion only deepened, and Temati decided it was time to move to more relevant details. “I offer myself in exchange.”

The woman’s face cleared.

“You wish to join us.”

This time, it was not a question. Temati’s hand slipped down a centimeter or two, closer to the dagger. Around them, the silent forest burst into a quiet rush of leafy voices, and Temati’s head snapped up to see the thousands of statue-solid maidens, whispering excitedly to one another.

While she was distracted, a cool hand landed on her shoulder. Temati snapped her gaze back to her opponent, her hand slipping down and seizing the dagger by its hilt, but the woman’s grip on her is stronger than any human creature’s.

“Come,” the lady said. Her voice was like wind rushing through the treetops. “Let me show you our peace.”

There was a tug—the strange, panic-inducing sense of imbalance that is always caused by being pulled off your feet—and then Temati was on her back, the roots and thorns separating the path from the forest scraping at her legs and the wide eyes of the two children staring after her for a single split second before she was swallowed up by the dark boughs.

* * *

Tef blinked, and the woman is gone. Devoured, just like Mia.

The dryads are gone too, every last one; it is as if they had never been. Mis, who had clung to his waist when the creatures had appeared, is crying softly into his shirt. It’s a slow, hiccuping sob, wracked from tired lungs. He knows he should be doing something, trying to get them both to get out of the forest, onward to—to somewhere safe. If there is anywhere safe.

He knows he should move, but suddenly, it does not seem worth the effort.

Mis sobs again. Holding her close, Tef sinks to the ground, trying and failing to blink back the dark prickling behind his own eyes.

“I know, Mis,” he said. “I know.”

* * *

As soon as the iron grip on her shoulder let her go, Temati fell flat on the forest floor. The wet leaves slid and slipped under her fingers as she scrambled to her feet. She twisted back, fighting through the branches and the underbrush, expecting to see the patchy sunlight of the path.

It was not there. There was only darkness.

Something crackled behind her, and she spun again to find the woman there. She was a dark figure in a darker landscape, punctuated by two glowing eyes.

Fumblingly, Temati found her dagger and pulled it free, holding it out in front of her like a holy relic to ward off a demon. The woman reached for her, and Temati stabbed with the dagger, keeping her away.

“Iron and silver,” she announced, waving the weapon warningly. “Everything your kind hates. I’ll use it, if you don’t let us go. Me and the girl both.”

The woman’s eyes flickered.

“Let you—“ she began, and then shook her head. With steady steps, she approached, seeming to care little for Temati’s wild dagger-jabs. With her heart rising in her throat, Temati ducked low, lashing out to drive the blade square into the center of the creature’s chest; but the woman caught the blade easily, prying it loose from Temati’s hands as though taking a plaything from a child. The bloody leather peeled free of Temati’s palm, and Temati could only watch, terror pounding in her ears, as the woman held the dagger flat on her palm, considering it curiously.

“Iron,” she said, softly. “It is nursed, even now, deep beneath our roots. Where mankind cannot find it.”

It was only by the glow of the woman’s eyes that Temati can see what is happening at all. She watched, petrified, as the steel blade began to redden and warp with rust. The dark leather dries and cracks and begins to swarm with tiny devouring insects as it, and the wooden handle beneath it, begin to fall away.The silver tarnishes, pitting and peeling like some ancient artifact. “Silver ore, too, runs beneath us. Why would we fear these things? Our roots have found more jewels and precious metals than your human mind could ever imagine. All the things you scramble and scrape, bleed and kill for—you think they affect everything as powerfully as they affect you.”

Temati’s dagger was desiccated to the point of uselessness. The woman’s pale hand closed over it, gently crushing it to dust and scattering it onto the forest floor. One of the tiny insects escaped her fist to skitter up the woman’s arm, and she paid it no mind as it burrowed in the bark that was creeping over her collarbone.

Temati swallowed thickly. She searched through the leaves for any hint of the solid weapon that was there only a moment ago, and found nothing but quietly rotting leaves. When she spoke, her voice was as weak as she felt.

“What do you want?” She asked.

“We do not want.” The dryad said. “We do not hunger, or thirst, or fear. We have feasted on the dead of many battles, and when the battles of this age are done, we will make life of them as well. We have peace.”

Temati is surprised by her own laughter.

“Peace,” she chuckles. It’s a word that belongs to her past, to youthful dreams and idiotic notions that she could somehow change the ways of the world. “Sure. Peace is a nice thing to think about, but—it’s not real.” She shakes her head. “Not for us humans, anyway.”

Thinking otherwise, she’d learned, just led you and led you, dangling hope in front of your eyes until you blinked and suddenly you found yourself looking down at a burning city with a torch held in your hand.

“We would share our peace,” the dryad, unoffended by Temati’s laughter, said.

Temati shook her head, amused. “Really? How would you do that?”

The dryad tilted her head. Reached out with one pale hand.

“See for yourself.”

At the touch of the woman’s fingers, Temati felt—different. She blinked, but her eyes did not want to open again. They felt crusted over, all the immediacy fallen away, as if she’d just had a long night’s sleep with the promise of a quiet day ahead. Her skin was clean. Her spine was straight, without the twinge of pain it’d had ever since she’d slipped and fallen off a rooftop one night and landed in a slops-bucket. She felt clear-headed and proud, as if she could stand as straight and tall as the richest queen.

She was standing tall, as a matter of fact. She could feel it. She was free of the smoke-induced itch in her lungs and the latent travel-stink and the sticky, ugly, unbathed feeling that had plagued her for so long. The sun was warm and pleasant on her cool skin. She swayed in time with the push and pull of the breeze, raising her limbs high overhead, soaking up the warmth of the sun through her leafy fingertips. The birds were singing, and an industrious squirrel was making its nest in her armpit.

She paused.

A squirrel. Was making its nest. In her armpit.

Her eyes snapped open, and the dryad, who had been holding a statue-soft hand to her forehead, startled back. Temati attempted to do the same, but there was a sharp, grinding pain in her legs and her feet would not move. She snapped her gaze downward. Her legs were slowly being covered in smooth bark. Instead of her own worn and weary feet in old and tattered boots, the thick trunk and roots of a tree stood. She could feel them, as if they were a part of her; she could feel the cool earth pressing, the thin shoots and tendrils of the roots plunging deep in a search for water.

“I don’t want to be a tree!” Temati said, as emphatically as she knew how. She tried tugging herself free again, but felt only the harsh hurt on the edges of her where tender flesh had yet to turn into solid wood. “I’m a human being, not a—a vegetable!”

The dryad looked at her, wide-eyed, holding her hands out as though pleading with Temati to stay still. Temati gave another excruciating jerk, just to spite her, and the woman took a step forward.

“Stop fighting!” She said, sounding panicked. “Why are you struggling? I’m giving you peace—haven’t you fought long enough?”

Temati stopped, breathing hard. The words struck her like a knife in the back, driven in by an old friend. They were unexpected. But she had fostered those words, hadn’t she? Held them in her heart, without ever seeing them for what they were. She had felt those words—before the coup, when she had noticed the streaks of grey beginning to drown out the old brown color of her hair. During it, when her lord had smiled and asked for one more favor, I’ll pay you handsomely, and she had realized that her only retirement would be a grave. Not ten minutes ago, when she, worn and smoke-charred and sweating, had listened to two children weep over a lost sister.

The dull ache in her legs was traveling upward. The flesh hurt, but where she had already turned to wood was painless. There was life there, but it was a life that did not hurt. The mere absence of pain felt like the release of a long-carried burden.

Haven’t you fought long enough?

She had. She had been fighting for years. And what had it gotten her? A lifetime of regrets? An uncomfortable confrontation with a dryad? Her whole body, sticky and smelly and aching as it was, hungered for a rest. Her rapidly growing roots were clean and calm, drinking life from the fertile earth. It felt a lot like peace.

Her flesh was weak and trembling against the solid wood, aching against the slowly encroaching change. Soon it would reach her ribs, her lungs, her heart. One moment of pain, and then—it would be over. All over, all done. She could finally rest.

She wanted, with every scrap of her fragile human want. She ached for this rest.

But still, she shook her head.

“It sounds like you’ve got it nice here, with the sun and the birds and the dirt,” she said, “But I’ve—“ she halted. Thought for a moment. “I have fought too long. For all the wrong things. I’d like a chance to fight for the right ones.”

The dryad blinked at her, slow and uncomprehending.

“You would choose the struggle? You are willing?”

Temati was so, so tired. Willing? Perhaps not. But determined?

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

The dryad leaned back slightly, considering. Her body creaked as she moved.

“I would not be,” she said. “All we have watched, all we have seen—we did not think that anyone—we did not think,” she continued, taking a step back. “That girl. Would she have chosen this as well?”

Temati was still half tree and all exhaustion. She shook her head again.

“I do not know,” she said. “You’ll have to ask her that, if you still can.”

The dryad nodded.

“I will,” she promised. “You’ve made your choice. I don’t understand it—but you may go,”

As she spoke, a shaft of golden light opened up, spilling past Temati’s feet and slicing into the dark hollow. Suddenly, Temati can no longer feel the slow, life-seeking twists and turns of the roots, the protective hug of the bark. She twists, and the tree-trunk cracks like a burst eggshell, letting her stumble free. She can feel her toes again—her own human toes, untethered to anything but their own aches and pains. She cannot resist the urge to wriggle them. Temati can see the way to the road. She half-turns, ready to make for it, but the woman’s voice halts her.

“If you ever wish for peace,” she said. “You may always return.”

Temati could feel that offer settling in her brain, and half-wishes it had never been made. She knows it will haunt her, this one last glimpse of an elegant goddess hidden in a mossy shadow.

“Thank you,” she said.

The patchy sunlight is calling for her, and she begins to scramble through the underbrush, ignoring the thorns as they rip at her and the branches that smack her face.

As she returns to the path, she finds it almost exactly as she left it. It is still lying in the divot between two high hills, with an arduous upward trek lying upon either side. It is still narrow and lumpy and half-overtaken by thorns.

But instead of two sooty children, there are three, Mis and Tef both wrapped tight around another young girl, who is crying and laughing and clinging to them all at once. Temati halts while she is still several paces distant, not quite able to make herself walk away.

The girl looks up, catches a glimpse of her. There is no recognition there, and she moves protectively between Temati and her siblings. She is a small, delicate thing, all wariness and bruises. Temati would have judged her weak, but she knows—knows the choice this girl had made, if she was here now. She knows it was not an easy one.

She nods, a gesture of respect, and the littlest girl—Mis—notices her. She tears free of her siblings, slamming into Temati’s legs and hugging them, babbling something into the dirty cloth of Temati’s breeches.

Temati stares down at the tiny figure, and cautiously lays a hand on her little shoulder. A feeling flickers deep in her chest.

It is not peace. It is not even happiness—not quite.

But it is something good, all the same.

Enjoy this story?

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Posted on by Grace Crandall · 1 Comment

Muddied Waters

With an oil-rag in one hand and a wooden countertop in front of him, Tobias was ignoring the rain.

It thudded against the roof, steady as an impatient customer’s drumming fingers. It ran and splattered from the eaves of the inn, audible even through the shuttered windows; and even the thick, cozy scents of warming liquor, hot mash, and woodsmoke could not hide the permeating smell of the drenching, soaking rain thudding so hard and thick into the earth that it left muddy, mushy bruises and deep, wounding gashes.

Tobias knew what he’d see, if he looked out there. The blackened fronts of the battened-down houses. The river that used to be a street, running slowly but steadily out of town to drown the fresh-started crops into uselessness; the sky as dark as lodestone, clouds hanging so low over the town that the surrounding mountains disappeared into them—two halves of a horrendous jaw, about to swallow the known world whole.

Tobias rubbed more oil into the stained wood of the bar, watching the color of the wood bloom to life under his attentions.

He knew what was out there, but he was ignoring it. He’d done what he could to keep his hotel from being swept away; now, they could only wait for the Thunderer’s anger to be worn out—or for the whole town to be demolished by the flood.

It was a madman’s wager, which would come first.

A crack of lightning sounded across the sky, flashing briefly through the shutters before it sizzled away in the space of a second. It shook the earth as it went. Tobias looked up, assuring himself that the roof was holding steady. It was. He frowned at it for a moment, distracted by the cobwebs.

“We know, ya great blowhole!” One of his guests shouted, pausing in his game of checkers. “Hush up and let a man think, would you?”

Tobias chuckled. Garrett was a farmer whose stead had been washed away in the rain. He, along with his wife and children, had found shelter in the hotel for lack of anywhere else to go. He hid his worry well, but if anyone had reason to be yelling at the Thunderer—it was he.

“Hush, Garrett,” the man’s wife hissed, leaning forward over her nervous knitting while Bryce, the second checkers-player, pretended to pour every ounce of his attention into the game. “Do you want to make him even angrier?”

“What’s he gonna do, Bette?” Garrett snapped back. “Rain on us some more?”

Tobias listened with a frown, wondering if he should step in. It had been a long three days, and everyone’s nerves were frayed. His hotel was not full—most everybody had stayed battened down in their homes—but the people that were here were worried and displaced, driven in by the storm as it had hit or by the loss of their home in the first few hours of the Thunderer’s rage.

Tobias had been running the Marquette Hotel for twenty years now, and he was good at his work. He knew how to calm people’s worries and settle them into a semblance of peace.

But it had been three days, and he was tired. He ignored the couple as they huffed and snipped at one another, rubbing the oil-rag in soothing circles.

The whole sky rumbled above them, shaking the earth, and Tobias grabbed the jar of oil to keep it from tipping over. The doors slammed open, and he jumped at the noise, believing for one idiotic moment that the storm itself had put skin and bones on to invade his little den of comparative safety.

It was not a storm. It was a person.

A slim, tall person, grinning the reckless grin of someone who had experienced the full wrath of bad weather, and survived. He took off his hat, sluicing water out onto the floor. It splashed and splattered on the floor, adding to the muddy puddles already made by the stranger’s soaked boots and dripping coat.

Freed from the hat, the stranger’s hair sprung up in a wild red nest on top of his head. It seemed to glow in the lantern-light, and his grin glowed with it as he ignored the questioning glances thrown his way and began to take off his coat.

“Quite the storm!” he remarked cheerily, hanging his coat up on a sturdy hook meant for lanterns.

“That it is,” Tobias agreed, setting an empty glass on the counter. “Local Thunderer, showing his strength. It’s a privilege of living in the sky, I suppose—not having to care ‘bout what happens to us here on the ground.”

He set a bottle down next to the glass as the stranger settled on a stool and planted his elbows on the bar.

“Liquor’s three cents a glass. You got a name?”

The stranger looked at the amber liquid with marked distaste.

“Do you have any cream?”

Tobias raised his head and fixed the stranger with a look that plainly said he was not someone who appreciated being jerked around. Cream, really?

The kid’s expression didn’t have a trace of mockery or sarcasm in it. Just a blank sort of hopefulness that made his mess of hair seem to stand up straighter than before. As Tobias held his gaze, that hope seemed to fade.

“I suppose not,” he said, with a dejected shrug. “That’s all right.”

“No,” Tobias put in, not wanting to lose business. “We’ve got it all right, but it’ll be four cents if you want it in a glass. Not many people want to drink cream, is all.”

The stranger was looking blank and cheerful again. “Many people,” he noted, “Are fools.”

Tobias snorted in agreement, making his way back into the kitchen.

Cream.

He shook his head.

* * *

The stranger got his glass of cream. Tobias went back to the bar, watching the wood soak in the healing oil, glow with the attention. Checkers clacked lightly from the far corner of the room, blending in with the clicking of Bette’s knitting needles in a futile attempt to drown out the sound of pounding rain and howling wind.

The stranger ran his finger around the rim of his glass, taking in the room with wide eyes.

“So,” he said, breaking the silence. “A Thunderer, eh?”

It was an awkward attempt at conversation, but Tobias nodded along, used to fielding all kinds of talk with friendliness, even when he wasn’t feeling particularly friendly.

“Sure thing,” he said, rubbing oil carefully into a deep gouge in the wood where, one interesting evening, a man with a hook for a hand had made an enthusiastic point. “They not have those, where you’re from?”

The stranger shook his head.

“Desert-born,” he explained. “We’ve got the thought-stealers and the jackal packs and the echobirds, but I’ve only ever heard of thunderers in stories.” He shifts in his seat again. “What’s it like?”

Tobias raised his eyebrows at the boy, and made an open gesture meant to indicate the current state of the outside world.

“Ruined crops and rampant hoof-rot is what it’s like,” he said. “You must have seen it, coming in. I’m impressed you even managed to get here, wherever you’re traveling from. Reckoned it’d be about impossible, by now.”

He was hoping that the man would reply with something at least vaguely enlightening—about where he came from, why he was here. But the stranger only shrugged his bony shoulders and said, with a smile scrawled awkward as an illiterate’s signature across his face, “I’ve got a knack for travel, I guess.”

Tobias nodded amiably, and scrubbed a little at a stain in the wood that had been there for years.

There is calm silence, for a few moments. It’s broken only by the click-clack of knitting needles and checkers tiles. The stranger is circling his finger around the rim of his glass—once, twice, three times. The glass begins to send out a soft, eerie hum.

“So,” the stranger said, suddenly, “As it turns out, I don’t have four cents.”

Tobias looked up.

“I don’t do business for free.”

As if to emphasize this point, another crackle and flash of lightning gave way to a deep boom of thunder. The stranger looked towards the window as the white light flashed outside, and for a moment, Tobias thought his eyes looked odd in the light. Too pale, too wide, reflecting the lightning back with a glow like a wolf glaring down a camp-fire.

It was over in a moment. He might not have seen anything at all. As the floor shook under their feet with the receding voice of the storm, the stranger looked back at him and tilted his head towards the shuttered window.

“Three days, and this storm ends.”

Tobias huffed a laugh.

“It’s a Thunderer’s rage,” he said. “No rhyme or reason to it. It’ll end when he’s worn himself out. Or died.”

Neither was likely to happen soon.

The stranger smiled at him, and lifted his finger from the glass. It stopped humming, abruptly, leaving an odd flavor of silence in its wake.

“Maybe,” he said. “Either way. For this glass of cream, I will see this storm ended in three days.”

Tobias frowned. First at the stranger, and then at the dripping overcoat, hanging up on its lantern-peg. For the first time, he caught the warm glint of silver protruding from one side of coat—a sword-hilt, if his eyes weren’t betraying him, wrought up in fancy and decorated with turquoise. It was exactly the kind of sword he’d expect from a young adventurer promising to slay Thunderers.

Tobias looked from the half-hidden sword to the boy’s beardless, hopeful face, and realized that the stranger was serious. He was going to fight the thunderer, and he was going to get himself killed.

In three days.

Another clap of thunder shook the inn, and Tobias sighed.

“Drink all the cream you want, boy,” he said, and dipped his rag in the jar of oil again.

* * *

“Are you really going to fight the Thunderer?”

The question came from a wide-eyed girl who barely brushed three feet. The stranger looked down from his place at the bar, considering her seriously.

“I’m going to talk to him.”

It was morning, though the sky outside was no less black than usual. He had taken Tobias’s invitatation to drink all the cream he liked seriously. He’d been sitting at the bar all night, nursing glass after glass and looking around the open barroom like it was the most fascinating thing he’d seen in his life.

Garrett and Bette’s daughter, whose name Tobias always forgot—he thought it started with an E? Looked even more awestruck.

“What are you going to say?” She asked.

The stranger got up from his stool and smiled at her.

“Things,” he said. The girl—Ellie? Scowled at him.

“What kind of things?”

“You’ll just have to watch and see,” he said. Bette realized where her daughter had gone off to and hustled over, taking her arm to bring her back. The girl let her mother lead her away, but she gazed back at the stranger, utterly ignoring Bette’s stern warning about being cautious of strangers.

Unaware of his admirer, said stranger took his now-dry coat from its peg and shrugged it onto his shoulders. The silver detailing of the sword-belt glowed in the dim light as he buckled it on, and Tobias leaned over the counter from where he was rubbing a set of glasses dry to get a better glance at the weapon. He saw the silverwork a little clearer, got a solid glimpse of the red and yellow leather wrapped in a strange pattern around the hilt, and then the stranger flapped his coat around himself and gave Tobias a smile.

“Wish me luck!” He said. Laughing like he’d said something clever, he exited the hotel, greeted by a low rumble of thunder as he left the double doors swinging in his wake.

He’d forgotten his hat.

With a grumble, Tobias stepped out from behind the bar, grabbing the hat from its hook and jogging to the still-swinging door, hoping to call the boy back so he wouldn’t have to go slogging after him through the mud.

He pushed the doors open, holding the hat up, and paused on the cusp of a shout.

The boy was striding down the road through the middle of the town, water swirling around his feet, the slicing rain plastering his wild, fire-red hair flat to his head. The wind beat his coat around his long, skinny legs, and as the boy walked, he tugged the sword free of his coat and of its sheath, raising it high over his head like a lantern to threaten the darkness of the clouds.

The blade was wide and straight, double-edged, the solid metal etched on either side of the deep tang with a pattern of raised wings, like an eagle’s first wild flap when it took off from its perch in chase of some recently sighted prey.

The boy held it up for a moment, and then lowered it carelessly to one side, squinting up at the clouds and blinking the rain from his face.

“Thunderer!” He bellowed, and Tobias jumped. The boy was almost as loud as the thunder himself. He felt a tiny press against his leg, and saw the brown braided head of the girl, her hand pressed to his thigh as she leaned around him to see.

A moment passed in which the boy got no answer, though the clouds above them swirled and trembled in deep shades of stone-black and steel-grey.

“If you do not stop this storm in three days,” he shouted, and now that Tobias was used to the impressive volume of his voice, it was easier to hear how it was dwarfed by even the lowest rumble from the clouds above, “You will die!”

There was another moment of silence.

Then, mission evidently accomplished, the boy turned on his heel and, sheathing the sword, began stalking back towards the inn.

Tobias stepped aside as he reached the doors.

“Was that it?” The girl asked skeptically. The stranger smiled at her.

“For today, yes. Oh, my hat! Thank you.”

Tobias let the hat be taken from his hand. The stranger replaced it on the lantern-hook, along with the sword-belt and dripping coat. This done, he resumed his seat at the bar and gave Tobias a sparkling smile.

“Do you have any more cream?”

* * *

Tobias spent the rest of the day mopping the floor, settling an argument that broke out over a game of checkers, and starting an account of how many glasses of cream the stranger was consuming. The tally was running high at one hundred and thirty-eight.

By the time the three days were up and the storm was still raging, Tobias was banking on the notion that the stranger’s bill would be high enough to demand his sword in payment. It was good craftsmanship, covered in precious stones and metals. It would be enough to begin rebuilding the town and repairing the damage from the storm.

All in all, it was a good plan. Tobias firmly believed that gaining a hapless adventurer, even one terrible at keeping his promises, was the best thing that had happened to the town in some time.

The next morning, Tobias came down to find the stranger’s coat hanging on the hook, but no stranger. The girl—Emma? And her mother were both huddled by the door, staring out. Tobias adjusted his eyeglasses and walked over to watch with them.

The boy was shouting at the sky again.

“—in three days, you will die!” He roared, holding up the sword.

The sky snapped and crackled in response, clouds swirling and roiling. Tobias thought he caught a glimpse of pale white in the black of the clouds—but in the next moment, it was gone.

The mud was up to the stranger’s calves as he trudged drippingly back, and the rain showed no signs of stopping. The boy offered them all a smile anyway.

“Not much longer now,” he said, and hung up his hat and sword before returning to the bar.

* * *

The morning of the third day, the boy seemed to have given up. He sat at the bar all day, drinking glass after glass of cream and seemingly ignorant of the resentful looks being cast his way by everyone in the hotel.

That evening, Tobias ordered his accounts and wrote out a bill for fifteen dollars and fifty-six cents—more than enough to demand the sword as payment.

Armed with the bill, he stalked out into the main room of the hotel, where Garrett’s game of checkers and Bette’s knitting had been joined by old man Harold determinedly trying to play a song on the hopelessly tuneless piano and a pair of young ranchers quietly drinking and playing cards. Bette and Garrett’s youngest two children, flying free of the supervision of their sister, were making a game of stealing cards and checkers on the sly and running across the room gleefully while the game-players were forced to get up and chase after them.

The stranger was watching from his habitual perch at the bar, nursing a glass of cream thoughtfully and smiling whenever the children ran wildly past him.

He turned that smile on Tobias as soon as he came near, and Tobias very pointedly did not smile back. He set the bill decisively on the counter and pushed it forward for the stranger’s observation.

The boy smiled at the bill. Then he smiled at Tobias.

All this smiling was beginning to set a prickling tension up Tobias’s spine.

“And this is?”

The boy’s questioning tone was so blankly innocent that for a moment Tobias entertained the notion that he was asking about the nature of paper and ink itself. In response, Tobias crossed his arms.

“It’s been three days,” he said. “The Thunderer’s still alive. Here’s what I’m owed for the cream.”

He was expecting shamefacedness. Bravado. Possibly protest. The boy, however, didn’t seem flustered at all. His smile did not falter, though it was tinged with a hint of confusion.

“It’s not been three days yet,” he said. “It’s not quite sunset.”

Tobias crosses his arms tighter.

“And you’re going to find and kill him in the next twenty minutes?” He asked. “Kid, that’s not—“

A flash of lightning shone white and blinding through every crack and cranny in the walls of the inn, bright enough to be blinding. The crack of thunder that followed on its heels shook Tobias’s bones and the very foundations of the inn. The bottles lined up behind the bar trembled and cracked against one another, several smashing down on the floor, and Bette let out a small shriek.

The inn was cast in a deeper darkness than before, the sharp ozone scent thick in the air. Tobias blinked, shaken, but the stranger merely set down his half-drunk glass of cream and looked up with a smile.

“Ah,” he said. “Just in time.”

* * *

“Pipsqueak!”

It’s a hollow, deafening voice, sizzling like lightning, rumbling like thunder. The stranger stood up from his stool, snagged his coat off its hook, and swept through the hotel’s double doors, leaving them swinging in his wake.

Tobias looked around the room, where everyone had stopped what they were doing. They were stiff as statues, staring at one another.

“Hello then! You’re almost late!” The boy shouted, his voice slightly muffled by the walls and doors; and as one, everyone in the room—Tobias included—rushed to look out the windows.

The street outside was all but unrecognizable. It had been battered, watered and churned so as to become a veritable sea of mud, running swift as a river. The boy was sunk into it past his knees, but he seemed unflustered by the fact. He stared up, unfazed, at the sky.

The sky had a face.

The sky, more specifically, had a skull.

The clouds had darkened, almost pitch-black, and they thrummed on every side like the beat of heavy wings. In the midst of the deep and wild dark, white bone shone, looking down through empty eyes at the stranger. Lightning snapped and crackled around the Thunderer’s teeth as he spoke, rattling back down the pale structure of his spine, crackling fissures in the oppressive dark.

“It is you who are late,” the hollow voice snapped. “It has been three days, and yet the storm continues, and I still live.”

Under the storm-heart of the Thunderer’s ribs, the rain had ceased, though it swirled around all the harder under the beat of his dark wings. The stranger stood in the relative quiet and set his hands on his hips with an air of petulance.

“Why is everyone in such a hurry?” He asked. “It’s not sunset yet. It won’t have been three days until sunset.”

A blinding flash of lightning threw the thunderer’s skeletal form into sharp relief for a moment, crackling outward, giving his wings and snapping tail brief definition, and Tobias flinched back from it, eyes burning. The world returned to the storm-dark shadows as the rumbling thunder of the creature’s laughter rattled its ribcage.

“It is not fifteen minutes until then, pipsqueak,” it said. “What—have you some concealed dagger? Will you take a mighty swing, and let it glance off my toe?”

He laughed again, and Tobias shut his eyes and ears, cringing from it; but when he opened them again, he saw the boy still standing, hands on his hips, looking up at the Thunderer as though he had never been obliged to look away.

When he spoke, he sounded sad.

“You’ve grown arrogant,” he said. “But there’s still time. You can still stop this storm. You can still live.”

The Thunderer laughed his deafening laugh again, and while the earth still shook with it, there was a heavy thud that Tobias felt trembling up his legs. The Thunderer had come down to earth, his great claws sinking into the mud. He took a prowling step forward, lowering his head to look directly down upon the stranger’s rain-plastered head.

“I? Arrogant?” He asked, blue electricity dancing around his jaws and flashing up through the empty sockets of his eyes. “What is arrogance, that it could apply to me? Have I taken more than is my due—I, who shake the earth with my wings? I, who scorch the sky with my breath?”

“Shake and scorch if you like,” the boy said. “The earth and the sky have been here before you. They will be here after you.”

The lightning flashed up bright and sharp in the Thunderer’s eyes, and with a tremble of air and a rattle of bone, he took a step back.

“Says a creature who sees the beginning and end of neither,” he snapped. “Do not preach to me, pipsqueak. It is you—you, who come threat-making and sinew-flexing—you who is arrogant. There is a price for such presumption.”

The crackling lightning was building, shining through the sockets of the Thunderer’s skull, a clear and present threat, but the boy only shrugged, raising his hands.

His empty hands.

Tobias’s eyes snapped from the boy, minuscule in the face of the Thunderer and his rage, to the sword, hanging sheathed and useless on its lantern-hook.

He needed his sword.

With no more thought than that, Tobias shoved through the small, terrified tangle of people who had gathered at the doors, sprinted the two steps to the lantern-hook, and tore the sword free of its sheath. The blade hummed and trembled like a living thing in his hands, but he had no time to wonder at it . He ran to the door, his guests parting like blown wheat before him, and out into the storm, sinking knee-deep in the mud within his first few steps. He would never be able to get to the boy in time.

“Seventeen seconds until sunset,” the Thunderer crackled, bending threateningly, and Tobias lost what little sense he’d managed to hold until now.

“Stranger! Your sword!” He remembered to roar in warning, and flung the blade in the boy’s general direction, and the Thunderer glanced up, surprised by the shouting.

He realized, as the blade left his hand, just how idiotic of a thing he was doing. The sword was heavy, it would fall. It would stab the boy. It would get lost in the mud.

The sword disagreed. It left his hand. It flew.

The blade rose, spinning, in an elegant arc over the boy’s head. The crackle of lightning flickered against the rain-wet metal as it hung, frozen, for one second in time.

Then it plummeted down, and the Thunderer had no time even to flinch away as the blade sliced into his skull and buried itself deep.

The lightning in the Thunderer’s mouth flickered for a moment. Then, with the shudder of a receding storm, the great frame of bones began to collapse, the swirling meat and matter of the Thunderer dying out and fading away.

He shook the ground one last time as he fell.

* * *

Tobias was knee-deep in mud when the sun reappeared. It set the west on fire, spreading orange and yellow and pink light over the mud-brown world in a way he hadn’t seen since a week past, when the Thunderer had first come down from his mountain.

He blinks at the monolithic skull, sunk to its jawbone in the deep-churned mud of the street and still managing to tower almost as tall as the storefronts. The pale columns of wing-bones arc up and over the buildings, with joints planted somewhere on the outskirts of town.

He’s only vaguely aware that there are people—coming out of his hotel, out of the houses, out of everywhere. They are slow, tentative, not quite managing any greetings just yet—just staring. They blink at one another in the unfamiliar sunlight.

Tobias does not think of the stranger until he catches a glimpse of the sword, shining like a perverted crown jewel in the very center of the dead Thunderer’s forehead. He turns, scanning the familiar faces.

The stranger is gone.

Epilogue

With a tube of polish in one hand and a soft cloth in the other, Tobias was spiting the dim light.

In all fairness, the sunset was being no more inconvenient than usual. The real inconvenience, or rather inconveniences, were the guests that had crowded the Marquette Hotel to bursting. Tourists, wanting to come see the remains of what is—what was—the very last Thunderer in existence. Fifteen years since he’d died, and still, the tourists came. They kept Tobias at the bar long past his usual hours, pushing his current task back until there was barely the light for it.

Squelching out a fresh dollop of polish onto the cloth, Tobias rubbed away at what might be a bit of tarnish, or possibly a shadow, on the silver hilt of the blade.

He can’t complain, really. The tourists pay well, even if they make more mess and noise than they’re worth. Even when they etch patterns into the Thunderer’s bones and climb up on his skeleton and try to tug the silver sword from his skull for a keepsake.

He huffs a laugh at the bent of his own thoughts, and squints at the sword-hilt. He’s getting old, and he should have brought a lantern.

“It’s after sunset, now,” a voice said from over his head. “Long past time to be done.”

Tobias jerked, and looked up.

Against the twilit sky, a sharp-edged, gangling figure is standing on the top of the Thunderer’s head, looking down at Tobias with his head cocked to one side. Tobias stares for a moment, and then settles, looking down at his work.

“Just one more grubby fingerprint, and I will be done,” he says. “And if you’d have remembered all your belongings for once, I’d never have had to come out here at all.”

It was far too dark to see what he was doing anymore. He tucked the rag into his pocket, but didn’t move to get up, looking up at the familiar silhouette.

“You going to take it back?” He asked. “If you don’t, one of these boys might actually get it loose someday and carry it off.”

There was silence for a few moments, as the stranger merely looked down at him. Thinking, Tobias assumed, though he couldn’t see the man’s face.

“Have you ever tried?” He asked, finally. “To pull it loose?”

Tobias huffed. “Why would I?”

The stranger shrugged. “To sell it,” he said. “To use it. Just to see if you could?”

“Can’t say I have.”

The stranger looked up, a profile against the deep blue of the sky, and once again, Tobias thought he caught an odd light in the boy’s eyes—a strangeness, gone as soon as it was seen.

The boy got up, dusting himself off.

“Well then, that’s for the best.” He said. “Whoever can draw that sword, can be assured—they will have need of it.”

Tobias nodded, as if this sort of proclamation was the kind of thing anyone might take their leave with. As the boy turned to walk back down the Thunderer’s spine, Tobias didn’t ask where he’d come from or where he was going. He called out,

“There’s a bottle of cream under the bar. Take it, for the road.”

The boy turned around, flashing a grin at him.

“You’re a true friend!” He shouted, and leapt down and out of sight.

Tobias huffed in response, and began to ready himself to climb back down off the skull.

He thought for a moment, before he did. The glint of silver was no longer quite visible in the dim light, but he knew where it lay.

He remembered the thrum of life in the blade. He remembered the ease with which it had flown from his hand.

It was a silly instinct, he thought, shaking his head at his own foolishness as he reached out, wrapping his hand around the solid hilt.

The metal hummed, trembling like the flank of an overexcited stallion under his hand, and Tobias felt his heart flutter.

He gripped the sword, and tugged.

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