Seven Forsaken

Please note that the chapter below is an early draft. Names and world-building details subject to change.

Isa’s mind frothed with predators. Ever had not deserted him, just abstracted, breaking to a thousand nebulous, overlaying dangers. One moment, the Spirit of Death swam beneath him like a shadow in the water, caressing him where his belly brushed the sand but never threatening to overtake him. Then ze wore a green cloak and slowly lifted a rifle to her shoulder. BANG! went the rifle and silent went the green around her, melting into the ridged backs of crocodiles that slowly closed to consume her kill.

Isa would bob back to the surface with the River’s currents for a moment here, a moment there, and almost find himself on his bunk in the cabin of the Waning Ibis. But the consciousness never lasted long before he plunged back into nonsense, nightmare, and memory.

He remembered Spensa, hair stuck to her cheeks with sweat, too exhausted for the walk to the River’s edge. Isa had kissed her damp hairline and said he would carry the baby to the shallows for them both. It was his first walk with his daughter. She had writhed and squalled all the way into the weeds and while Isa washed the red from her body under the curious eyes of shorebirds. The blood came cleanly from her pink hands with their tiny, pointless fingernails, her squirming feet, her sweet head already promising her parents’ thick, dark hair. He found a little nose under that blood that looked like his and touched it softly as he said:

“Before Aer, I name you Taniri for your mother’s favorite scholar and your father’s Temple sister. May Aer know you by this name and answer when you seek Truth. May Osu put this name only in the mouths of the loving and loyal. May Ever not call this name for the rest of my years and many years beyond."

The second time he dipped Taniri into the water, he went under with her—and it was his face that broke the surface in a memory too old for him to possibly retain. Elder Thrask smiled, framed by the dome above the Temple pool, a steady hand supporting the back of Isa’s head.

“Before Aer, I name you Isa, which means clear water in the ancient tongue. May Aer know you by this name and answer when you seek Truth.”

Aer wasn’t with Isa in the confusion, but there were several figures in the cabin.

A man was speaking with a heavy accent… Zarkadian. “What kind of name is Damored anyway?”

“A Sazuman one,” Damored’s voice answered from above Isa, and that was when he realized the tactomancer had a hand on his bare chest, carefully pulsing strength into his body. It was the only reason he was conscious.

“Sazumans have a thing about symmetry.” That voice was Nath’s, tucked off in shadow and accompanied by the slow scrape of a whetstone on metal. “Every name has to end on the same sound it started on.”

“It’s not symmetry so much as closing a loop.” Nothing soured in Damored’s voice, but Isa felt the touch on his skin go slightly bitter, prickling and pulling at pain that would have made him groan if he’d had the strength. “A person’s name tells their story, and all Sazuman stories are supposed to end where they began, at the roots of the Tree.”

“That’s beautiful,” Ro’aan said without irony.

“Is it?” Damo’s hand disappeared from Isa’s chest and chair legs scraped on wood as she stood.

“Where are you going Miss Damored?” Ro’aan asked.

“Below deck,” she said tersely, “and I told you, Damo is fine. Just Damo.”

Ro’aan and Nath kept talking after the door had banged shut behind Damored, but without her hand giving him strength, Isa slipped back under the surface. Their voices warped and he was back among strange monsters beneath the water.

Akkila died in the fevered water with him. Taniri died in the water with him so many times—a little girl, then a tiny baby, then a girl again, then the young woman she might have become—ripped apart like paper in the rapids. Isa remained through all the rending agony, buffeted by jaws that wouldn’t quite bite him and currents that wouldn’t quite dash him apart.

Bruised and drowning, he grasped for Aer, but the River was too strong, too disorienting. He couldn’t find Truth no matter how he cried out or reached for zir. Finally, in desperation, he reached for Theid, counting on desire and instinct to save him from the chaos. In the end, the only purchase he found was Osu—the physical world—whom he grabbed like driftwood in the madness. On that splinter of reality, he resurfaced with a gasp in the river-rocked cabin of the Waning Ibis.

“Morning, Rakkta,” a voice crooned like chill wind down a drenched spine. “Rough dreams, I take it?”

It took Isa a moment to recognize the Wilder word, Rakkta. It was a contemptuous term for tallfolk meaning ‘city thief.’ The speaker came into focus slowly, zir hair smoothed back in an oddly Krellish fashion where most Wildermyn left their curls loose around their faces, zir gray-green freckles gathered thick around lightless black eyes. Through his haze, Isa remembered those eyes hardening with hunger the moment before eight hundred pounds of feline had body-slammed Damored to the ground.

“Hold still,” said the lion-shifter, and Isa realized he had been weakly shifting back from that gaze. “I need to finish your stitches.”

“Stitches…?” Isa’s mouth moved so slowly it barely felt like it belonged to him. “You… you’re… treating me?”

“What?” the Wildermyn scoffed. “You’d rather have the other tallfolk at you with their invasive touchy magic and useless remedies?”

“No…” Isa strained back through the fog of his memory for context. Something had happened at the docks… a fight. Many gunshots. And far too many animals’ jaws. Hyena. Crocodile. And this lion-shifter, charging with intent to kill. “I just thought… you were…”

“Lygdaz Enzar,” the Wildermyn introduced zirself, “your newest crewmate.”

“Crewmate?” Isa’s brow scrunched in confusion. “You were attacking us.”

“I was bribed into changing my mind.”

Isa blinked, finding that things still weren’t adding up. Wildermyn didn’t accept bribes, and… “I thought the lion-shifting tribe went by a different name. Tsamela?” At least that was what Kendiri had said, back when she was researching for her wandering into the Wilds.

“Well,” Lygdaz slanted a strangely unsettling smile at Isa, “someone knows their Wilder clans—or did ten years ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Tsamela are no more,” ze said, threading what looked like a needle made of a rodent’s rib.

“Plague?” Isa asked softly.

“No.” There was that odd smile again. “Not plague.”

“Oh—what are you doing?” Isa asked as that curved needle moved to his arm where something had torn it open.

“You shouldn’t have killed the Strandwraith,” Lygdaz said. “There was a corporomancer for the ages, could have stitched up both your forms good as new. I was an apprentice when my pride cast me out.”

“Cast you out…?” Of course. That was the meaning of Enzar, from the old texts: Forsaken.

“Yep. So, you’ll get what you get, Inkarnam.”

Lygdaz spoke so casually about zir pride rejecting zir—and ceasing to exist—that it was disconcerting. To most of the Wildermyn Isa had met, community was everything, for better or for worse.

“I’m sorry,” Isa murmured experimentally, searching that green-freckled face for emotion. The emotion he got was unexpected—not sadness or anger, but a smile touched with spite and something darker. Derision? Glee?

“Don’t be sorry, Inkarnam,” Lygdaz said through that dark smile. “In a way, they’re still with me.” A shudder ran through Isa that had nothing to do with the rodent rib needle poised over his flesh. “Now, relax, Rakkta. This won’t hurt a bit.” Placing a powerful stubby hand around the hyena bite to hold Isa’s arm still, Lygdaz inserted the needle—and to Isa’s shock, there was no pain. Just a short pressure.

“I don’t feel it!” he exclaimed.

“Of course not,” Lygdaz said, pulling the thread through the wound and inserting the needle a second time—again without so much as a prick of discomfort. “I numbed you.”

“No numbing agent works that well,” Isa protested.

“Sure, not among the snake oil remedies that come out of your temple. There’s a reason the wise still come to Wildermyn for troubles of the body… and the mind, for that matter.” Zir eyes flicked meaningfully to Isa’s face for a moment before returning to the stitches.

“What are you talking about?” Isa demanded, not liking the knowing look in those eyes.

Lygdaz didn’t answer directly. That, at least, was rather Wildermyn of zir. “You cried out in your sleep.”

“I did?”

“Aer! Aer!” Lygdaz pitched zir gravelly voice up to mock Isa’s Riverland accent. “Theid! You said that name too, once.” Ze clicked zir tongue. “My, what would your high and mighty Inkarnai say about that? Crying out for your spirit of basest impulse?”

“I… That wasn’t—”

“I wonder what the fuss was about, Inkarnam. Couldn’t find your dear spirits in the tumult?”

Isa opened his mouth, the chill on his spine sharpening to a prickle. How did ze know? Was this a test? Was ze just trying to get under Isa’s skin for some reason?

“It’s fine, child,” Lygdaz said. “This is part of growing up.”

Isa hadn’t noted it before—Wildermyn lived unnaturally long lives and it could be difficult to place their age—but despite zir jet black hair, there were lines among the freckles at the corners of Lygdaz’s eyes. Though ze hardly looked it, ze could easily be twice Isa’s age.

“Every animancer comes to understand this—the dissolution of Aer and Theid—with age.”

“That’s not true,” Isa said confidently. The High Inkarnai were among the most knowledgeable animancers in the world and they lived by the Seven Spirits. Elder Thrask had spent every morning communing with Aer and receiving the truths—

“I meant real animancers, tossed and tested by the real world,” Lygdaz said, “not pretentious Azenkari ascetics insulated by their blank gray walls.”

“You’re not making sense,” Isa protested. “You Wildermyn have the same spirits, don’t you?” Albeit under different names. “Aer, Theid, Endra… they were all derived from Wilder traditions.”

“Sure,” Lygdaz said, “by idiots.”

Isa was sure Elder Thrask would have had some things to say to this arrogant Wildermyn, but Isa couldn’t clear his head enough to argue. Especially as he watched that needle glide through his body with no sensation. It was an eerie experience, seeing foreign hands stitch his mangled arm as though it belonged to someone else. Without the pain, it was like the body wasn’t his. The hyena bite slowly pulling closed had torn through one of the tracking lines connecting the tag rune on Isa’s hand to the trigger rune on his back. Would the tag even respond on an arm he could neither feel nor link to his other tattoos? Was it even his arm anymore?

“Nath Vendan will re-apply your tattoos when this mess turns to proper scar tissue,” Lygdaz said, following Isa’s gaze and seeming to read his anxiety.

“Oh… Does it have to be Nath?” Isa asked, remembering the metalmancer’s talk of tampering with his originator dust and turning him into a skin puppet.

“Unless you’d rather I do it?”

“No!” There should have been nothing more frightening to Isa than becoming a metalmage’s plaything. Yet something about this Wildermyn was off—crooked on a deep level that somehow surpassed any conscious and logical fear in Isa’s mind. Nath might be a master of violence in Osu’s realm of metal, flesh, and bone. But Lygdaz’s magic—and zir menace—lay in something intangible. Something of the soul that had Isa still with fear under zir hands.

He closed his eyes and tried to find Aer. If he could find Aer, everything would be fine.

“Doubt you’ll find zir,” Lygdaz’s voice slid into Isa’s attempt at meditation as easily as the needle into thin human skin. “But go ahead. Call out to your false spirits, if you must. Whatever you need to do work your sad little soul swap. At some point, you will need to transform.”

“What?” Isa’s eyes opened. “Why?”

“Well, if you tangled with Akkila for as long as the oarsman say, your python form’s going to need some work.”

“Oh yeah…” Isa said, only then fully contextualizing the nightmare of jaws and armor beneath the water that had troubled his sleep. He had taken the hyena-shifter into the River with him, not counting on crocodiles to come for the blood, but hoping… “Do you know how to treat a snake?”

“I’ve got some idea. Like I said, Inkarnam, you’ll get what you get.”

“Right…”

Lygdaz’s emotionless eyes tracked to Isa’s face and again seemed to sense his anxiety. “I am going to keep you alive, child,” ze said, and the cold conviction caught Isa off guard, “with all your ill-gotten magic intact.”

“Because Nath and Damored will kill you if you don’t?” It was the only thing Isa could think of to explain the determination in the Wildermyn’s otherwise inflectionless voice.

“That is what they promised.” Lygdaz shrugged. “Not sure if they mean it. This hardly seems like a hunt to tackle with zero shape-shifters on the team. And by the time you die—if you die—we’ll be too far downriver to search out a new one.”

“Well…” Somewhere ahead of them, there was Nazaru, but Damo was probably keener to cave his face than team up with him, now that he’d rejected and double-crossed her.

“Then why?” Isa asked, nonplused. “Camaraderie between animancers?”

Lygdaz let out a low, bone-rattling chuckle. “I’m not one for camaraderie, or loyalty, or… really anything normal folk waste their time on. Poor Damored may be an unstable fool, but she does know the way to my heart.”

“And what is that?”

“Money.” It was a deeply bizarre answer from a Wildermyn; most tribes didn’t even use currency. “I mean to collect the bounty we’ve been promised and I don’t see that happening without a snake-shifter.”

“So, you think this giant snake Damo describes could be real?” Isa asked.

“Well, I understand you’re the second Inkarnam headed downriver to see, so the tracks point to yes.”

“It’s a long shot.”

“But you, the cobra-shifter, and a lot of others seem to think there’s a shot. And the bounty is too good not to at least have a look.”

“But the bounty is…” Isa stopped short of finishing the thought. Damo probably didn’t want Lygdaz to know.

The Wildermyn guessed his next words anyway. “Not that much when you split it several ways? I know. But the jungle is a dangerous place, even without giant monsters in it. I’m figuring that at least a couple of us will die in the attempt. And if not… well… accidents happen.”

“Threatening my life isn’t going to work,” Isa said.

“Isn’t it?” Lygdaz raised bushy black eyebrows. “I suppose you hauled yourself back from the brink of death because you don’t want your life then?”

Isa had no answer to that. Not as Lygdaz drew a Krellish hunting knife from the folds of zir robe.

“Don’t worry now, Inkarnam.” Lygdaz put the knife to the thread and cut it. “You have nothing to fear. Not if you remain useful to me.”

“Useful?”

“You’re a hunter and a great snake. No better person to hunt a serpent, I’d think.”

“Sure.” Isa hoped ze was right. “But I have my doubts that we’ll find anything down this river.”

“Have all the doubts you like, child. You don’t want to die and I don’t want my time wasted. So, you get me to that monster and I promise not to crunch through your brainstem in the night. Deal?”

“I—”

“Shh. Think on it, Inkarnam. Ask your Truth Spirit for help, if ze cares to answer you.” Lygdaz gave him a mocking smile. “Though I have my doubts you’ll find anything down that river.”

Isa had no memory of transforming but the next time he resurfaced on creaking wood, it was to the slow pain of Lygdaz’s needles slipping between his scales. No… not Lygdaz’s needles. Bone couldn’t possibly pierce python hide and muscle… and Lygdaz was sitting before Isa, looking down on him with zir arms folded over zir chest. A larger human hot spot to Isa’s left wielded metal needles—two at once?—slipping them between Isa’s scales into his flesh.

“You don’t need to put the stitches so close together,” Lygdaz said.

“Okay,” Nath returned from Isa’s side, “and I don’t need a pint-sized psychopath tellin’ me how to handle my needles.” Isa’s body twitched at the pain—or tried to, but all his twenty-eight feet of muscle were immobile beneath Nath’s needles and Lygdaz’s terrible eyes. “Have you no respect for art?”

“All the respect, Master Vendan,” Lygdaz said. “I’ve just found that people like to minimize their patients’ pain.”

“I thought you said he wouldn’t feel anything under the drugs you gave him.”

“I said they’d keep him from moving, not feeling.”

One needle paused and the other slowed as Nath shifted, presumably looking up from his work at Lygdaz. “This poor fucker is basically pure muscle. You didn’t give him any numbing agent?”

Lygdaz shrugged narrow shoulders above Isa. “It’d be a waste. I only ever use numbing remedies and immobilizing drugs separately. Why use one on top of the other?”

“Anyone ever tell you somethin’s a bit wrong with you, Wildermyn?”

If the two bounty hunters spoke more words after that, Isa didn’t hear them. His mind, writhing in agony but unable to move a muscle in Osu’s domain, fled into the Gray. Except that it still wasn’t Aer’s Gray… nor was it Theid’s Shadowland, nor anyplace Isa recognized. It was more River, boiling, seething, and offering no respite from the pain.

Then Lygdaz’s hand was on Isa’s head, caressing his scales, slowly drawing him back to Osu. Nath was gone, but the pain remained, digging between his scales like viper fangs, filled with poison.

“There now, Rakkta,” the Wildermyn said in a parody of sympathy. “The metalmancer is finished." It was off and oddly backwards. Isa was the reptile-shifter while Lygdaz turned into the warm-blooded social hunter. But here, reptilian eyes locked with human, Isa shook in the presence of total cold-blooded indifference.

“And what did I tell you?” Lygdaz said. “No Theid or Aer when you really look for them. Just you in there. Couldn’t escape the pain, could you?”

Isa couldn’t cry out in snake form—by accident or not. How did ze know?

“How do I know?” Lygdaz inexplicably read the question even on Isa’s expressionless reptilian face. “It always happens in moments of extreme distress. Where most tallfolk cry out for their gods to save them, animancers step over into the Shadow and find the loop closing back to the Gray, all of it bleeding together. That’s what’s happening, isn’t it?”

That hand stroked Isa’s head again, gently trailing down the slope of the python’s back. And the need to lash out overcame Isa.

“I told you—”

Transforming without the Gray as an anchor was dangerous. Isa did anyway. It tore at his mind worse than it tore at his body, ripping sutures free of scales and skin. The agony slammed into Isa so hard that he nearly blacked out and found himself retching as he fell back to his human body, his hands on Lygdaz’s throat, blood running from torn stitches.

“Why?” Heaved out of Isa’s empty throat instead of vomit. “Why are you doing this? Why are you saying all this?”

“Because,” Lygdaz said calmly, “it’s the deeper truth of animancy.”

“Why would I want Truth from a forsaken…?” Isa trailed off, the pain in his human form taking him back to the first time he’d had stitches—after his fight with Nazaru at the anti-crocodile grate. Elder Thrask had made both boys sit through an interminable lecture on animancy and responsibility. That name—Enzar—had an older meaning than forsaken, one from the Ancient Wilds…

“Because I’ve been to the places of the mind that you and most animancers fear to venture,” Lygdaz said beneath Isa’s hand. “I know what’s there in the Shadow and what it really means.”

‘Enzar’ itself hadn’t meant ‘forsaken.’ Rather, it was the only act for which a tribe of the Wilds would forsake one of their own.

Don’t be sorry, Lygdaz had said of his dead pride. In a way, they’re still with me.

In its oldest form, Enzar meant—

“Cannibal!” Isa hissed.

Lygdaz’s mouth twisted into a smile. Isa had never seen a Wildermyn smile with all zir teeth—and after today, he never wanted to again. “Slow on the uptake, aren’t you, python?”

Transforming had been a mistake, as had the violent movement. Light and darkness popped like gunshots before Isa’s eyes.

“That’s right.” Lygdaz smiled, and in the confusion, zir hand was over Isa’s mouth, shoving a bitter plant between his teeth. “Rest.” In a tilt, ze had Isa on his back, a hand on his throat forcing him to swallow. “And if you want to wake up, see that you wake up useful.”

In that freckled face, for the first time, Isa beheld a true monster, void of grief, regret, and all human forms of pain. It was the last thing he saw before the drugs and shock dragged him under.

Taniri didn’t cry after the wash in the River. It was like after knowing her name, she knew her father, knew the world, and could, at last, relax. As Isa walked back up to the house, her tiny hands found a fold of his shirt and clutched it with surprising strength. Her form melted into his chest as if it had always been there, always part of him. Isa had never felt as perfectly whole and invincible as he did that morning.

In that joy, he walked over the plot where the child he had just named would be buried six years later.

The joy and horror and utter sadness clung to his chest as he breathed Osu’s air once, twice, and understood that as long as he kept drawing those breaths, the pain would never go away. He woke to a sheen on his face—not tears… or maybe tears, but mixed in with the air itself, which was thick and wet like the River.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Damo said. “Thought you could use some air—even if it is gettin’ to be weird jungle air.”

“Jungle…?” Isa sat and felt stitches pull at his arm and sides, but not sharply. He would have lifted his shirt to see how much the wounds had healed but the sight beyond the boat rail struck all other thoughts from his mind.

They were in a forest of towers—strange, barrel-trunked baobabs taller than any trees Isa had ever seen, their bristled tops soaring so high they nearly vanished in the melding of mist and clouds. When the birthplace of shape-shifting magic was depicted in books and murals, it always looked like this, white-gray mist flowing among great trees like pillars. Isa had always thought of these mystic forests as places of the distant past, but when he breathed in again to clear his head, the scene was still there. Unfamiliar animal sounds echoed among the trees—strange whoops and yowls—though Isa could see no movement through the fog.

“How long have I been asleep?” he whispered.

“Basically since the fight at the docks,” Damo said, “so a couple weeks. How you feelin’? Better?”

“Yes… inexplicably.” Isa’s body felt fine. His mind was another matter.

“Well, between me, Nath, and the Wildermyn, you had care fit for a Rama. The hope was that you’d be ready to hunt by this point. What do you think, Inkarnam? Did we succeed?”

“Yes,” Isa said, even though he’d scarcely tested his body. He needed to track, to fight, anything to take him out of the confusion of his own mind. “I’m ready.”

“Good. Because we dock in Lothmedi tomorrow.”

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this chapter of Seven Forsaken. You can get early access to the newest chapters of this story + more serialized content from the world of Altima on my Patreon.

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