Small plumes of dust erupted from where her feet had been, and the liquid silver blur of her blade hummed as it sliced through the air. I instinctively parried the cut with the back of my hand, batting the blade up and into an arc that would narrowly miss the top of my head before bumping my perception of time down slightly as she redirected the momentum of her swing to bring her left hand in for a shot at my kidney. I punched down, driving her fist into my braced knee with a thunderous crack; the force of the blow sunk my foot into the dirt.

  From her crouched stance, she pivoted her hips and drove her body to my right, wrenching her arm back towards me with unholy speed and power. It was a clean horizontal chop aimed to separate my torso from my hips; the poor sword creaked in her grip as the steel fought against the forces acting on it. I sent a swell of energy through my sunken leg, vibrating it viciously and launching a small gout of dirt into her face as I leapt back to clear her sweep.

  She didn’t let up on her assault; two spindly spider legs exploded from her back as her blade swept harmlessly past my stomach. They curled up over her shoulders like twin scorpion tails before plunging toward me. I threw up both of my hands and grabbed the new appendages as they came within reach; I manipulated my weight and then hauled back on them, ripping Armela off the ground and up through the air in a wide vertical arc. As she reached the apex of the swing, she severed her spindly limbs and continued up into the air.

  The sudden loss of resistance in the limbs put me momentarily off balance, staggering back before extending a foot out behind me and allowing the arms to finish their arc. Armela spun in the air, orienting on me as she continued on her upward trajectory. She flung out an additional limb which fanned out into a great membranous wing, using it as a stabilizing force. She wound up and then launched her sword at me with terrifying force.

  Once the projectile had left her hand, a second massive wing sprouted from her back, and she began her freefall towards me. I dumped a ludicrous amount of energy into creating and manipulating a strong enough magnetic field to catch the sword as it whistled towards me while simultaneously launching both of the severed limbs I held back up at Armela. She flared out a single wing, which threw her into a wild spin off to the side, narrowly dodging the first limb, but she couldn’t quite roll out of the way of the second and was struck with a glancing blow across the left shoulder.

  The force of the impact was astounding; the dense metal-on-metal ‘crunch’ sounded more like a gunshot rolling down the hill and out across the forest. The limb ricocheted off into the distance, tumbling end over end as it flew out over the trees. I instructed a drone to collect the two errant limbs and return them to Armela. She was spinning wildly through the air as she attempted to manipulate her wings to arrest her descent. I sprinted towards her, snatching the sword from the magnetic field as it dissipated around me.

  Gathering speed, I made a ground-shattering leap towards her falling form, hurtling myself through the air like a cannonball wielding a sword. She noticed my rapidly approaching form as she finally got her spin under control, but it was too late. I slammed into her with the full weight of my body, driving the sword into her chest as we impacted. The sword struggled to penetrate 2 centimeters into her skin before it exploded from the force; the blade ripping apart into thousands of razor-sharp shards. They pinged harmlessly off our bodies as I contacted her, my momentum carrying us out of the camp and into the forest.

  I had her pinned against my shoulder, and my inertia attempted to carry me through her body. As we fell, she tried desperately to correct our course with her wings, but between my mass and speed, she was helpless against the coming impact. We plowed through trees; several thick trunks buckled and then exploded as her back slammed into them. Boreal leaves, twigs, bark, and sap were collecting in her hair and fur as we continued our destructive path through the wilderness until finally we hit the ground.

  We dug a furrow through the dirt as we slid through the roots and bushes before coming to rest at the base of a massive poplar tree. I hesitated briefly to see if she would continue the struggle, but when all she did was try to push me off her, I relented and rolled to her side, sitting with my back to the tree.

  “I’m going to get you one day, you know?”

  I laughed; her moxie was a constant source of joy for me.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Armela. You’ve gotten me already, haven’t you?”

  I snickered as she punched my shoulder hard enough to explode a regular human’s head.

  “Of course I do! I fairly claimed you and absolutely marked you as mine! Honestly, I’m surprised you’re not running across all the rooftops in Hilst proclaiming my ownership of you! Oh, speaking of being owned, I wonder how my little pet is making out with his mission…”

  Her eyes unfocused as she stared into the middle distance. Likely using the drone to overlook his progress. He couldn’t have made it terribly far down the road as it’d only been a few hours. My guess was that he was sleeping or hidden somewhere in the brush.

  “My, my! It appears my sneaky little whelp has stumbled across a camp of raiders! They must have just set up on the roadway today, doesn’t look like they’ve collected any wagons or goods, and it doesn’t look like there is any sign of a struggle in the road, or even off the road, for that matter. I’m surprised he found them, honestly; they’re hidden pretty well, a good distance from the road… he must have been actively looking for something like that. I wonder why?”

  She looked to me with the question to which I simply shrugged.

  “How should I know? I can’t read minds.”

  She frowned and quirked an eyebrow at me.

  “Then give me your best guess, idiot.”

  I sighed and ran through the options, ultimately rendering an 80% probability for my answer.

  “Most likely he’s going to raid the camp for supplies. We sent him to Eprie on foot, without provisions, without money, and without weapons. He essentially left the cave with just the shirt on his back and a several-day journey on foot ahead of him. Rather than hunt game in the forest and craft weapons out of scree and sticks, he’s going to raid the raiders and stock up on supplies. Or so I would assume.”

  The other 20% comprised possibilities like ‘because he felt like it’ and ‘he’s been possessed’; essentially, some of the wildest and far-flung options imaginable. Obviously, this didn’t rule them out, but with how astronomically unlikely they were, it was best not to consider them too deeply.

  “I guess that makes sense. I didn’t really give him much else to work with when I told him to go to Eprie and eliminate Heltor. Honestly, I’m not too sure an assassin of his caliber can pull it off. The priests of Rel are some of the most powerful people on the continent, especially in Siltera; they really aren’t questioned by many. Even the King often defers to the counsel of the Cardinals.”

  So Siltera was more of a theocracy than a true monastic kingdom. Bowing to the whims of the church when they pushed back; I supposed it wasn’t too outlandish; this was how things had been on earth as well, after all.

  “Does every kingdom host a score of cardinals? I thought they usually gathered around the Pope. Is Siltera their main operational center?”

  Armela shook her head before answering.

  “The Cardinals are dispatched to minister Rel’s churches in all kingdoms where Rel holds sway. They come from far out east, beyond the plains and across the Great Scar. I think their land is called Relmanon; I’ve never known anyone who’s said they’d been there, or said they knew anyone who’s been there either. Apparently, even by horse the journey can take 4 to 5 moons, and that’s assuming you survive passing through The Great Scar.”

  5 months by horse? How big was this continent? I wondered if maybe I hadn’t been sent to a world still in the Pangea stage of its development; where all the land was mushed together into one massive blob on the planet’s surface. But even so, for a journey on horseback to take that long, the continent had to be larger than both North America and Eurasia end to end. And that still excluded the western portions of the continent across the mountains.

  Clearly tectonic plates were present here, otherwise there would be no mountains… but for such a massive piece of land to remain intact like this… it was incredibly interesting. I wondered if that meant the other half of the planet was nothing but one massive ocean, several tens of thousands of kilometers across. Would there even be other continents?

  “Have you ever seen a map of the world, Armela?”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  The non sequitur caused her to pause, and then she shook her head again.

  “I’ve never seen a map for anything. Folks I’ve traveled with either knew where they were going, or at least what direction they were going. You follow the roads, and the roads lead you to where you need to be. Maps are something that those hoity-toity, stuffy-types keep up on the walls of their offices and war rooms. Most folk can’t afford a cartographer to draw them up a fancy little map to lug around with them and potentially lose, you know? Best just to keep a compass and word of mouth with you. Though I suppose now, I don’t really need either… like… ever again…”

  I nodded to this. It made sense that paying a skilled cartographer to sketch out a map would be fairly expensive, and to just carry it around with you and risk losing the investment in your travels would be foolish. Especially depending on the quality of the map you had drawn. Simple roads and directions wouldn’t be too expensive, but also wouldn’t be terribly useful outside of your immediate trip, either.

  “Nope, no maps for you now. You’ll have the most perfect map anyone’s ever seen tucked away in that pretty little head of yours. But on that note, I think it’s time we finished up for the night. We’ve made a big enough mess, and we’ll have a fairly busy day tomorrow organising the village for the coming battle.”

  Armela sighed and used two of her spider legs to prop herself up onto her feet. The drone I’d sent to collect her two discarded limbs returned to us as we walked towards the camp.

  “Oh! I’d forgotten about these…”

  Armela reached out and took the limbs from the drone, absorbing them back into her body as we continued through the forest.

  “I truly hope I get used to this at some point. It just feels… strange… sort of like eating but… with your hands instead… buurhhhrrr.”

  She feigned getting the jitters as she spoke.

  “Don’t get me wrong, this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me, but it is also the fucking strangest.”

  I chuckled and took her hand. A slight tingle emanated from the ring on my hand, which had been forged during our bonding rite. I wondered if this was some form of energy exchange; curious; I scanned the ring. It glowed heavily in the ultraviolet spectrum, bleeding a little into the visible spectrum as well. Soft pulses of radio frequencies expanded out and off the surface of our hands, washing out into the atmosphere like some kind of beacon; I wondered what the signal was trying to communicate. My pattern recognition wasn’t picking anything up, so it couldn’t be any sort of message or data stream. How perplexing.

  Perhaps it was a side effect of some other process. Like how the crystals were utilizing a power I couldn’t detect, perhaps this ring was making use of a power I didn’t have access to. Something tickled at the back of my mind. A recognition. Not a memory or conclusion, but more of an instinct. The ring and crystals were connected somehow. They were tied into the same system of power. Nia’cyl might explain what the connection was when I next saw her.

  “Trust me when I say things will grow significantly stranger as our time together continues. Before, it wasn’t such a concern to you; but now with your new body you’ll actually live to see the madness of it. You’ll remember the days when the world seemed so big to you; vast and unexplored. You’ll remember when there were still mysteries to the universe, riddles you couldn’t solve or questions you couldn’t answer. You’ll look back on these times and wonder why you joined with me.”

  She elbowed me in the ribs playfully; the force of the contact would have broken several ribs in a regular human.

  “Oh, come off it! The only thing making me wonder why I joined you is your constant need to philosophize like some stodgy old windbag. Honestly, if you spent less time yapping and more time fucking, you wouldn’t get the chance to be all mopey like this. If you weren’t as good in bed as you are, I’d have you pegged as a fuckin’ noble boy…”

  She trailed off as she visibly reappraised me; eyeing me as though I were a commodity for sale.

  “Maybe you are a pansy boy after all… is that it? You know, it’d make a lot more sense if that was the case… is that it, Vita? Do you want to be a girl? Wish you could live as a pretty little princess, spending your days being plowed by the lads you find in taverns?”

  I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of rising to her taunts. It’d be easier to have her tease me than to work through the complex emotional weight of my sexual orientation with her. I doubted she’d have the patience for anything longer than a few words, anyway.

  “Keep up your barking and I might just do exactly that to spite you, woman.”

  Armela laughed raucously before dismissing my empty threat.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah; I’ve got the measure of you now, Vita. Don’t think I’ll be letting this go! One day soon I’ll be the one with you bent over in front of me, and you’ll rue the day you thought you could pull one over on me. Mark my words!”

  I shifted to a separate topic, not wanting to let her dwell on something that would require its own lengthy talk to cover.

  “You mentioned ‘The Great Scar’; what is that?”

  She rolled her eyes in frustration, but realizing she would get nowhere with the old topic, rolled with the change and resigned herself to answering my question.

  “I don’t know much about it; I spent more time chasing field mice and hunting deer than I did listening to old tales from the elders in my clan. From what I remember, though, it was a great rift in the earth; so large you couldn’t see the other side and so deep you couldn’t see the bottom. Like some massive god had reached down and torn the ground apart. Some said it was created when Yuthrie and Fulmer came to blows and Yuthrie inflicted a grave wound on Fulmer, but beyond that I couldn’t really say.”

  She kicked a rock as we strode through the forest towards the camp. It struck the trunk of a tree and embedded into it several centimeters. Armela winced and sheepishly shook her head before continuing.

  “I know there have been endless expeditions from scholars and adventurers alike to plumb its depths, but of those who came back from the Scar, none have ever seen the bottom. It’s a 6-moon journey just to get to the narrower edges of it where bridges have been strung for crossing, but even then, it’s another 2 moon’s journey to come to the end, and that’s both ways.”

  I thought about how the planet surely would have filled that in by this point. Either with water or crumbling stone and dirt. It certainly wasn’t a natural formation, and by the sounds of it, a fairly recent geological event; likely not within the lifetime of any sentient beings currently roaming the surface, but who knew what some of the more ancient creatures living here had seen in their time. I wanted to explore it and wondered how my worms would handle circumnavigating it; how far down did it truly go?

  “Anyway, eventually I guess the tarts from Relmanon figured out some form of air travel or teleportation or something that allowed them to cross the gap, because they started flooding through the plains like a sea of locusts. And now they just come and go as they please, spreading the name of their shitty God and shitty religion wherever they go. Setting up corrupt operations in every country that’ll take them.”

  With Rel being the deity of knowledge and wisdom, it stood to reason that their followers would also be at the forefront of technology and advancement.

  “If they only came to the western parts of the continent recently, why does it seem like The Church of Rel is more abundant than the other God’s religions? How come Siltera hosts Rel churches instead of, say, Dersio?”

  Armela sighed and studied the ground as we made our way to the large pool I’d constructed.

  “Rel priests are some of the most powerful people on the continent; even some of the high-level adventurers or knights of Siltera would have a difficult time taking down an Archbishop, let alone a Cardinal. Most of their crusades were extremely successful in bringing other kingdoms and countries to heel. Honestly, most of the Western folk should be thankful that the Rel Church wasn’t interested in outright obliteration because I don’t think there’d have been much anyone could have done to stop them. They would force the standing religion to either submit or flee, embed themselves with the ruling class and then begin their preaching as though they’d always been there.”

  She shook her head.

  “They came across my clan when I was young; I don’t remember much of that exchange, but we were forced further north in order to leave their sphere of influence. They didn’t fight us, but I’m sure the threat was made that if we didn’t relocate, we’d be forced to either comply or die. I was still a small child so most of it just went in one ear and out the other for me.”

  She wiggled her long ears as she spoke. As we reached the pool, she dissolved her clothes and slid into the cool, still water.

  “Woof, that’s cold… anything you can do to heat this up?”

  I dumped massive amounts of energy into the water until noticeable steam rose from the surface, condensing in the cool night air.

  “So if the Rel Church is so strong, then why didn’t they aim for obliterating the other religions entirely?”

  Armela scrunched up her nose.

  “How the fuck should I know? I wasn’t wearing a frock when you found me, was I? You need to tell me when you’re asking rhetorical questions, Vita, because I never know if I’m actually supposed to answer them or not.”

  I put my hands up and apologized; there wasn’t really any way for her to answer that, so I supposed that was a fair response. I already had a pretty good idea of why they would let the other religions go on the way they had. The problem with organized groups of people on a mass scale like that is that when you run out of enemies, you go looking for them from within. The reason theocratic systems were so successful was that they could rally under the banner of a common goal.

  Not for the betterment of their own people, but for the subjugation of others. Exterminate your enemies, and suddenly your neighbors start looking rather suspicious. It also meant there would always be a stable source of ethically appropriate slaves to collect and use; something they were obviously attempting to jump-start here in the West. Midwest? We were east of the mountains, so this was probably considered the central continental region.

  The Rel Church was taking its time to acclimate people under its influence to the idea of ethical segregation. Heathens and heretics would all be fair game in the eyes of their God; and though the people had not yet accepted this belief, how many generations would need to pass before it became the standard of thinking among citizens attending Rel sermons. When would children grow up hating Dersio or Fulmer; hating the people who worshiped them instead?

  When would the kingdom be persuaded into passing laws preventing the private worship of those gods? The Rel Church seemed well-poised to start a global conflict in order to bring all lands under one belief. My religion needed to spread more quickly than I’d realized. If I let things linger as they were, dragging my heels on spreading my God’s name, we could very well find ourselves on the losing side of a religious war.

  Hilst was on track to heal from the damage that had been done to it by the priests and their corrupt leader. Once the Crusade rapidly approaching from the south had been crushed, I would need to dismantle their operations in Eprie and begin the work of spreading my God’s name there as well. I wasn’t sure how best to approach addressing the corruption of the Church with the people of Eprie yet; the city was much larger than Hilst, and a gathering like I’d conducted with the people of Hilst would not work.

  I couldn’t rely on the people in power to disseminate the information to the masses either. Hopefully, there was a media operation in Eprie; I hadn’t yet laid eyes on an actual book, but based on the average level of technology here, I was skeptical that printing presses had been invented. There was no Village Cryer in Hilst that I was aware of, so perhaps the spread of information was strictly word of mouth, a long chain of opportunities to muddle the truth and twist words.

  I could address Eprie over the drones like I had in Hilst, but my name was unknown there and they would be significantly less likely to take anything I had to say seriously, if not outright fear what they were hearing and seeing as the work of some demon or monster. I could distribute pamphlets, but what was the average literacy rate in the city? More likely, I’d be missing swaths of the population by gating the information behind printed words… unless… the pamphlets could also narrate the words.

  I could embed a small speaker into the card stock to orate the message printed on the card. And the more I thought about it, why not just make it a video? A small LCD screen to splice in depictions of the events in Hilst along with the message of what’s been done, all narrated by Ava. I would have traders from Hilst set up strategic stalls on the most populous corners of the city and distribute the cards to anyone passing by.

  This might be the course with the highest percentile of positive impact; it wouldn’t get everyone, but it stood the best chance at legitimately catching the most people. And that was precisely what I needed in order to move my plans forward. I slid into the water behind Armela and waded over to her as she bobbed gently through the steam. Coming up to her, I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and we shared a deeply passionate kiss. Breaking away, I asked her a question.

  “What do you know about books?”