Lazul stood before his new company without apology or explanation the next morning.

  Upon seeing him, Dalagun snorted, but said nothing.

  Lamina sniffed him, and giggled.

  Galfarys had thought the man was stalking Hwayoung until she snarled at him to put away Lahahm, who of course was still snoring.

  Zaz’s reaction was the worst. He seemed almost insulted for some reason. His face had turned an enraged red when Hwayoung explained he was a slave.

  “I suppose we need everyone we can get, most especially the expendables.”

  If Hazahnahkah didn’t know better, Zaz seemed angrier over this than Dalagun murdering him. And his mood worsened as they traveled further from the settlement, up the road until it was road no longer—until they saw once again those alien animals with human limbs. Whether it was the stink that followed Dalagun, or the argument between Lamina or Galfarys, Hazahnahkah was unsure. The two of them were debating whether a wild snake could, in fact, be bargained with if you had enough cheese—when the forest erupted in chaos. Someone was rushing after them as soon as they left the village. The woman was half dressed, her sandals flailing in her hands, and yet she had an elegance to her—her hair was a flawless black, her skin a brimming white, and her heartbeat—it pitter-pattered like ceaseless rain.

  “Wait,” she screamed. “Please wait!”

  There was another man, also barely dressed as he chased after her. Although his bare feet met the gravel road, he threw his hand into the air in submission, walked back towards the village, cursing. Hwayoung ignored them both, hopping onto a chunk of land floating just barely above the surface of the mountain. Zaz and Galfarys followed, trying very hard to pretend that they could not hear the woman.

  “I SAID WAIT, YOU UTTER SWINE—!”

  Everyone froze. Even the spearbirds above blinked. Hazahnahkah felt Hwayoung place her hand on his hilt, but it withdrew just as quickly.

  The woman skidded to a halt in front of them, chest heaving, hair in a state that suggested a recent altercation with a hedge. Her dress was half-laced, her boots mismatched, and her expression suggested she had opinions about their collective life choices.

  “You left,” she accused, pointing a trembling finger at Zaz. “Without paying.”

  Zaz’s face turned beet red. It was difficult to separate whether this was embarrassment or fury. “I think you’re terribly flattering yourself! You are sorely mistaken!”

  “Emotional payments don’t count.” The woman then threw herself onto the young man, who looked rather like a young boy in her arms. She bent over and slid her cheek over his chest, falling to her knees. “Oh! To have such a warm gaze from so princely a man! It does fill me with such joy but that simply doesn’t meet my needs!”

  Zaz pushed off as swiftly as she had embraced him. “Get off me! You are embarrassing yourself! You are getting me mixed up with someone else!” He snarled at Dalagun. “If this is another one of your schemes to torment me I won’t be so forgiving—”

  “Spent every hour I could in the night houses and never met this woman in my life.” Dalagun scratched his bald head and a sly smile came across it. “But I think she’d make a fine addition to the team. More the merrier?”

  Galfarys leaned towards Hwayoung. “Are we getting robbed already?” he whispered. “Because if so there are surely better ways.”

  Hwayoung’s face was drained of emotion. “What does your Ramble say?”

  “Why, she must have entered my Ramble’s safety field less than a couple hours ago. I feel bad for her. She’s even newer here than we are.”

  “Mother says fresh meat,” Lamina added.

  Hwayoung sighed, but spoke loudly. “We have done nothing to warrant the attention of a painted lady. Much less a foreign one.”

  Painted lady? Hazahnahkah had heard the term before, back when Ysan had first invented makeup the language popped and blossomed across The Fawn Cities of Serpent’s Ramble all over the place. It was said they knew how to make men feel less lonely—for a price. And it must have been true for this woman as well. She smelled strongly of the perfumed girls who worked the night houses, behind the beaded curtains. But why would this agitate Hwayoung? The girl’s heart was now still as stone.

  “My name is Maria,” the woman said, curtseying. “My escort was caught in the jungles north, killed by the White Tiger.”

  They all exchanged glances. Zaz rubbed his temples. “That same White Tiger has also slain many of ours. Maria, we’re not exactly a chaperone service.”

  Maria planted her hands on her hips. “Oh, please. Half of you couldn’t chaperone a wet dog. But you’re the only idiots headed north, up towards my home… and I’ll pay you in—” She rummaged in her bodice, producing a handful of suspiciously shiny trinkets. “These. And… an unearned sense of personal fulfillment.”

  Lazul was really the only one open to hearing her out. He was quite far ahead, but had been hiking back down at the commotion. “Home? Are you familiar with these lands?”

  “As familiar as one can be.”

  The issue for Lazul seemed to be that he was unsure their company had the capacity to protect who was clearly a deadweight, but the clear tradeoff was that he had been a slave awhile, and knew only these lands as well as one knew a friend after ten years of absence. Hazahnahkah knew that feeling well. He could feel it in the man’s breaths, long, drawn out, and a bit labored as they worked their way through melancholy. Hwayoung didn’t think about it long. She directed Maria to lead the way with Lazul, and Zaz was left grumbling and stumbling after them.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Days lengthened as the road dissolved into game trails, and Zaz had revealed that his Ramble was nearly as useful as Galfarys’ for avoiding overlong confrontations. If they saw signs of ligers hunting them, the young man would wave his arm and their footfalls would vanish in a flash. The soundless tiles he created were also excellent in securing game, for his ability to fire through them and redirect his crossbow’s bolts proved time and time and again why swordsmen weren’t used for hunting. Most animals simply ran, and as much as Hazahnahkah wanted his compatriots to turn vegan—he had tried one too many times to produce bountiful land. Apparently this was all he understood of the biosphere’s structure was how mushrooms grew, and mushrooms was all that followed them. Hwayoung would not hear him out on this. “They’re just too squishy and gross,” she said.

  Zaz dimmed his panels—and subsequently weakening their noise suppression effect. “What?”

  “Mushrooms,” Hwayoung answered.

  “Oh yes, peasant food.”

  “Mummy loves peasant food,” Lamina said. “But she hates mushrooms. That means they’re even worse than peasants!”

  Galfarys raised a brow. “You do know we are speaking of fungi, not people.”

  Maria giggled. “I like mushrooms.”

  “That just makes me hate them more,” Hwayoung replied.

  Hazahnahkah wrote across a path of leaves in Hwayoung’s way.

  JUST WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE HAVE AGAINST MUSHROOMS? THEY’RE HEALTHY AND DELICIOUS.

  Hwayoung grunted. “You’re a sword. How would you know what mushrooms taste like?”

  I HAVE WATCHED PEOPLE EAT THEM. THEY ARE HEALTHY AND DELICIOUS.

  “No, they’re not!”

  “Stop screaming!” Dalagun snapped. “I can’t stand the smell of this Serpent’s shit fungi growing all over the place—”

  Galfarys interjected. “Do any of you have a foot condition?”

  Annoyed, Hazahnahkah didn’t bother continuing this fruitless conversation. Mushrooms were healthy and delicious, and it wasn’t like Galfarys stuck close.

  The Swordpriest often ranged outward from the group without ever seeming to leave it, his remaining blade humming faintly as it combed the brush and stone with a will of its own. His Swordpriest powers floated three more swords to him over time: one chipped and practical, one overly ornate and poorly balanced, one strong but overlarge, pulled from places no hand had touched in years. The recovery did not please him.

  “Bah,” he said. “Like starting all over again.”

  Hwayoung scowled at this. Zaz leaned to her and whispered. “He lost all his swords during the ystallo seasonal.”

  Hwayoung made an “ah” sound and left it at that. Galfarys was grumpy whenever he found a new weapon, and he went to wash himself in the nearest waters he could find as if to cleanse himself of any undesirable emotions. The Swordpriest would expend any energy he couldn’t clean off with sour training. It was always the same. His movements sharp and joyless, always finishing with driving Lahahm into the earth, wrenched the spear free, only to repeat again. His three swords always followed after a second or two late, circling in uneven orbits. He worked them hard, forcing them into formations that clearly wanted the absent four. Those spaces were filled by hefty rocks, but Galfarys was clearly less capable of manipulating such a shape.

  The blades were far faster, angling, lunging, correcting one another through an invisible lattice of intent rather than touch. Lazul sat some distance away on a fallen trunk, eyes closed, head inclined, not watching the steel so much as listening to the space around it, to the pressure Galfarys exerted when he commanded and the quieter pull that followed. Lazul’s breathing changed with each shift of the weapons, that his fingers twitched not in mimicry but anticipation, as if he were tracing the web he knew Galfarys would weave.

  It was during these stretches that the wildlife showed its teeth. Things skittered and lunged from the undergrowth with too many joints or eyes set wrong in the skull, driven by the warped instincts of a land still settling into itself. The group learned the rhythm quickly. Hazahnahkah’s concerns for those Knife had given dreams to had quickly refocused themselves onto the hostility of the environment. It didn’t take Hwayoung long to agree. She impaled a landimus against a tree, only to find that the creature had a second heart and two more flail-like fins than it was supposed to. Zaz speared the fiend with a swift bolt.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t have a third,” he said. “Is this Yurreth’s work?”

  “How are these related to Yurreth?” Hwayoung asked.

  “Rumor has it that The Woman Painted White feeds animals surrounding her kingdoms with her flesh,” Lazul answered. “It is as empowering as it is corrupting, and it would explain the bizarre behavior and extra organs—”

  A large winged beast passed overhead, a shadow on the land. Many years it had been since Hazahnahkah had seen an organism like this. The kind cities whispered in poems. Maria knew what it was. She knew what everything was, and was practically a living catalog.

  “Centuries ago they called The Woman Painted White Godeater. You would think she would have started with the wild gods first,” Galfarys remarked.

  “Well… for as much of the blame Yurreth takes for making much of The Ramble godless, some of the beings that have lived on in myth still remain,” Maria replied. “Especially those that protect her territories.”

  Dalagun’s nose wrinkled. “You mean she spits them back out?”

  “Why else would she eat them?” Maria asked. “For every god, fable, and mythic beast she’s swallowed, she’s birthed two more in the paths we travel now.” Her eyes fell to a many-horned beast, crawling out from the smouldering fire of its own underbelly. “A hellbelly. Or a kharv as the old city called them. They were spirits once—so they say—twisted by the hearts of Orphanspawn Who do Bad Things.”

  Hwayoung groaned at the sight. “Hell heals and its devils heal with them,” she murmured, drawing Hazahnahkah.

  But things far greater than Rapscallion-empowered beasts or ligers met them. Creatures that were far fiercer fled the mountains. Then, as they drew closer to the peaks, Hazahnahkah saw it. A living epic untainted and unswallowed by Yurreth’s sterilization of everything divine. Only a handful of times in his long life in Serpent’s Ramble could he briefly recall the flashes of an animal so old and magnificent. A Xiranyth.

  Health (source of vitality and abilities): 300,000

  Energy (source of stamina and abilities): 120,000

  Agility (speed of actions): 25,000

  Regeneration (rate of recovery per hour for Health and Energy): 50,000

  Tenacity (resistance to unwanted effects): 500,000

  Strength (physical or mental reality manipulation potency): 92,000

  It stepped out from the cedar like a fawn lost in daylight mist. A great beast of old wonder, shaped as though the fables of Osayn and The Fawn Cities had mingled their folklore verses: its body vast and gentle as an eight-legged elephant’s, its brow crowned with two spiraled horns of pearled jade, and its hide pale and rippled like Clest when struck by sunlight, veined with bursting gold. It regarded them with dark eyes deep with purity. Then, a shudder passed through its heaving chest, and with a cry like breaking bells it turned and fled, crashing downslope in blind terror. Fair as the vision had been, fresh fear lingered after it like a spilled shadow, for Hazahnahkah could not fathom what doom lay ahead that such a noble creature should flee from the very path they followed.