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

Damored’s people called her the Drifter because, in the Sazuman matriarchy, it was usually the men who wandered from job to job, place to place, partner to partner, while the women held the homestead. Female drifters were rare and there were none as infamous as Damored. Here in the Riverlands, she was called the Honeyed Heartbreaker… or the Honeyed Headbreaker; it depended which town you stopped in and how drunk the tactomancer had gotten on her last visit.

She seemed to be playing Heartbreaker tonight, judging by the attractive young man sitting opposite her.

“Excuse me!” the boy toy piped up indignantly. “Who the hell is this guy?”

“Oh, how rude of me. Isa, this is Kadnus Kerisadne, son of Tradelord Kerisadne from across the river. Kadnus, this is Isa of Azenkar.”

“Madam, my Lord, I’m so sorry!” The barmaid, out of breath from hauling ineffectually at Isa’s arm, sounded mortified. “I know you said no interruptions—”

Damored touched the girl’s wrist where the gap between her sleeve and glove exposed a strip of skin. “No worries, Dionne, sweetheart,”—of course, she had learned the barmaid’s name—“Isa’s an old colleague.”

“Colleague?” From the note of jealousy in Kadnus’ voice, Isa was guessing he didn’t know exactly who Damored was. He must not have realized he was one man in a parade of hundreds she had tumbled on her way through the Riverlands.

“Not to worry, Kadnus,” Damored said as she waved the confused barmaid from the room. “Strictly a business relationship. He’s a married man.”

Isa had never known this to deter Damored—marriage didn’t even exist in Sazuman culture—but Kadnus seemed mollified. He may have been an idiot but other than that, he was exactly Damored’s type—Riverlander tall but not quite Sazuman tall, young but not disturbingly so, broad but not doughy, the kind of specimen who might have the stamina for a long night.

“In fact, Isa is actually here on business right now, so if you could give us the room.”

“He said something about a monster?”

“Don’t worry your gorgeous head of curls about that. Just go wait for me at the inn—and don’t mind the lemur. If she fusses, give her one of these.” Damored dug a dried fruit out of her pocket and pressed it into Kadnus’ palm.

“But—” The protest died on Kadnus’ lips as Damored clasped his hand between hers. A subtle glow lit her freckles and Isa watched Kadnus’ eyes glaze.

Between tactomancers of comparable power, Touch was a mutually consensual exchange of energy. Between a master tactomancer like Damored and a non-tactomancer like Kadnus—or Isa, for that matter—the exchange was unbalanced. Damored could give or take what she wanted in the currency of her choosing, be that strength, energy, or emotion. In this case, it looked like she was cooling a specific flavor of excitement and Isa was suddenly very glad the table obscured his view of Kadnus’ lap.

“We’ll continue this later,” she said with a roguish grin.

Kadnus frowned but no longer seemed ready to argue the point. Evidently, Damored had taken a measure of the indignation from him along with his erection. “You promise?”

She looked him in the eye with the earnest infatuation of a teenager in love. “On the Goddess and all Her Roots.” Aer, she could be convincing when she put in the effort.

But the sultry whisper dropped out as soon as her mark had skulked from the room. “Isa.” Her smile turned casual. “I figured you’d show,” she said, her vernacular sliding from carefully enunciated Krellish into Hunter’s Pidgin, “was bankin’ on it, but you had me worried there.”

Isa didn’t confess that he had had himself rather worried, as he slid into Kadnus’ vacated chair. Instead, he said dryly, “Nice place to do business.”

Most Krellish taverns had a backroom like this, where a wealthy customer could take a whore or barmaid to continue the night in private. This establishment wasn’t particularly upscale, but a cursory attempt had been made to lend the room a romantic atmosphere. The air was thick with the heavy-handed scent of incense—the fruit wine and honey smell of kyphi over the plummy scent of myrrh. Fine Belzadoni fabric had been hung in a haphazard attempt to mask the peeling plaster walls, and a lounge sat against one wall, offering the possibility of love-making—though it looked a bit used to be enticing.

“Too much chance of Kadnus being recognized at a nicer establishment,” Damored explained.

“A tradelord’s son, huh? I assume he’s covering your lodgings with daddy’s shells?”

Damored grinned. “He’s also payin’ for our boat downriver—though he doesn’t know it yet.”

“How’s that?”

“Huh? Oh, because his parents’ll kill him if they find out he’s been shackin’ up with a Sazuman.”

Blackmail. Having just seen the inside of a tradelord’s warehouse, Isa couldn’t bring himself to feel too sorry for the dupe. “You certainly seem to have him enthralled.”

“I didn’t use magic.”

He eyed her skeptically.

“Alright, I did just now to get him out of our hair, but I never use Touch in the seduction phase; it’s cheatin’, beneath me, and also wholly unnecessary in this city. Show a Krellish man a boob and he’s a goner. Let him squeeze it—”

“And he pays for a river cruise. Got it.” Isa rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t need the details.”

“You poor dopes are all so repressed,” Damored chuckled and leaned back to put her boots up on the table.

Isa was about to object to being lumped in with the Krellish. Then Damored slung an elbow over the back of her chair and Isa realized just how close he had come to walking in on a much racier scene between the tactomancer and her hapless mark. Damored’s leather vest was unlaced to the solar plexus, exposing the curve of both breasts. They were as big and flawless as Isa remembered, scattered with gold freckles that winked and vanished enticingly into cleavage like a valley of fireflies.

Any woman of the Riverlands would have snatched her clothes around her in shame the moment Isa burst in but Sazuman women didn’t attach shame to their breasts, and Damored lounged back in her chair as easily as any man with his vest undone. It was only when those perfect breasts moved in a sigh that Isa realized she was rolling her eyes.

“Fuckin’ Riverlanders.” Damored tugged the laces of her vest closed in exasperation. “Better?”

“I wasn’t… I mean… I am still married.”

“Yeah, you guys always say that like it means somethin’ mightily important and yet…”

“Yet what?” Isa wasn’t in the mood to defend the institution of marriage to a Sazuman. Not that he was in a great position to do so. Damored wasted no time exploiting the obvious.

“Yet where’s your wife?”

Beneath the table, Isa’s hands clenched too hard on his knees. “I came here to talk business, not to discuss my personal life.”

“Oh, you’re not gettin’ off that easy, friend. Before business, we unwind, share this wine me and Kadnus didn’t get to, and get caught up.”

“I don’t drink anymore.”

“Sure.” Lifting the wine jug from its place at the center of the table, she poured a dish for Isa and pushed it toward him. “Like you don’t kill, right?”

“Damored—”

“We’ve tumbled, Isa. It’s Damo. And before I let you anywhere near this job, we’re gonna chat our way through this jug of camel’s piss. This is a dangerous job. Much as I like danger, I also like comin’ out of it with all my limbs attached. I’m not goin’ into this one with a liability. So, you want in, Inkarnam, you’re gonna loosen the fuck up and tell me what’s gotten into you. For starters, you shave now?”

“Yeah.” Isa touched his chin where evening stubble had started.

Inkarnai were technically supposed to keep themselves clean-shaven all the time, but Isa had last seen Damo during a phase when he had been careless with his appearance—like he had been careless with his substance intake and where he stuck his sabers. It was only in these last few months that his days had become regimented and fastidious. Shaving was one more thing to keep him occupied, one more brick in the wall that held the memories back.

When it became clear that Isa wasn’t going to elaborate or touch the awful Krellish wine, Damored sighed. “Alright, new deal, you sorry stick in the mud: drink and I’ll tell you about the job.”

That sounded fair enough. By the time the jug was empty, Isa might have decided whether the job was worth peeling his scabs back for Damored.

Alcohol, like any mind-altering drug, could loosen an Inkarnam’s grip on his soul, which was why he had been so careful to avoid it lately. But if madness took him while he was in this room, Damored would have his brains splattered across her knuckles before it went too far.

Slowly, he brought the dish to his lips and swallowed. The wine wasn’t the strongest in Krell, but it had been so many months since Isa had had a drop of alcohol that it burned down his gullet like a sun-warmed kill.

“Alright,” he said as the wine eddied, tingling, through his blood. “I’m drinking. What’s the story with this monster?”

“It all started months ago—”

“Great. Really gonna make me work for it, huh?”

“You bet your fangs I am, sugar. Keep drinkin’.”

“Pythons don’t have fangs,” Isa muttered but tossed back the rest of the dish and let Damored pour him another.

“After Sazuma settled, I was gettin’ bored,” she said as she set the jug down, “thought I’d head downriver, see what there was to see. Well, it turns out downriver of Azenkar is pretty boring, lots’a scrubland, roaming Wildermyn, the occassional bandit-beset village. Couple hundred miles downriver of that, more’a the same. Couple hundred miles further, more’a the same, give or take a few baobab forests. But downriver of that… there’s a kingdom.”

“That can’t be right,” Isa said. “I mean, there’s a jungle at the end of the river.” A sort of “people go in but they don’t come out” jungle, to hear the Wildermyn tell of it.

“Yeah, and in that creepy jungle, there’s a creepy kingdom,” Damo said. “The locals call it Lothmedi.”

“Lothmedi?” Why was that name familiar? Isa had read it somewhere… in the old Inkarnam texts back at the Temple. If he remembered right, Lothmedi was listed as one of the ancient strongholds of animancy, but… “I thought it was a ruin.”

“Nah, it’s got people livin’ in it. Weird people, I grant you, but they’ve got a whole monarchy down there, with nobles, serfs, a police force, a standin’ army.”

“In the middle of the jungle?”

“Why the surprise?” Damo asked. “Didn’t the founders of your little snake cult come from the kingdoms of the Howling Wood?”

“Yeah, over a thousand years ago.” But the Order Inkarnam had been a fixture of Azenkar since the city’s founding. The Riverlands were all Isa had ever known.

“Well, wherever they came from, these Lothmedi have got themselves a serious monster problem.”

“Isn’t that kind of what you might expect when you take up residence next door to a bunch of tigers, and jaguars, and Osu knows what else lives in that green hell?”

“They don’t seem to mind horrifyin’ native fauna. But this thing makes human-snatching tigers look like a minor pest problem. I wasn’t kidding when I told you it snacks on horses, bites ‘em right in half.”

“And I wasn’t kidding when I said that was ridiculous.”

“Shut up and drink, Inkarnam. Anyway, I figured they’d want my help dealin’ with the monster—and they did, but they told me there was no point in me goin’ after it myself.”

“And you just accepted that like a sane person?” That didn’t seem like Damored’s style. “No one-woman excursion into the Death Jungle?”

“I was fixin’ for one. Then the most recently deployed huntin’ party reported back. Or rather, a few’a their horses did. Only one guy had survived and he was inches from bleedin’ out when the wildermages got to patchin’ him up.”

“I still don’t see how this put you off your terrible plan.”

“And I don’t see you drinkin’.”

Sighing, Isa drained his dish and held it out.

“Well,” Damo grinned pouring him another, “that one survivor wasn’t actually a Lothmedi native. He was a bounty hunter like you and me. You might’a heard’a him.”

“Who?”

“Bottom’s up.”

“Okay, okay.”

As Isa took a deep drink, Damored leaned forward dramatically and whispered, “Corrath.”

Shock nearly sent the mouthful of wine spraying back the way it had come. Isa swallowed painfully, coughed, thumped a fist into his chest, and cleared his throat. “Not… that Corrath?”

“The one and only,” Damo grinned, transparently delighted with the reaction she was getting.

Isa cleared his burning throat one more time, shaking his head. “You’re fucking with me.”

Corrath was a legend. He was the mirage that had first drawn a young Isa into the Wilds to try his hand at bounty hunting. There was something irresistibly captivating about the image of that invincible hunter, mammoth axe slung across his back as he roamed the Ascended dunes alone, pure power, so strong he answered to no human, beast, or god. But Corrath was just that: an image, spun from threads of hearsay and conjured by the naïve to feed their own power fantasies.

“He’s not actually real.” No living human was that powerful.

“That’s what the Krellish want you to believe, and to be fair, it’s not like he makes it hard for them. He’s as elusive as they come, but he is real. Did a few jobs with him west of Sazuma.”

“You’ve done jobs with him?” As someone who routinely spoke with his gods, Isa hadn’t thought he could be star-struck.

“Yeah, but I’ve never seen him so torn up.”

“He was torn up? Corrath was torn up?”

Damored waggled her eyebrows. “Intrigued?”

“I…” Terrified might have been a better word. “I see why you canceled your hunt.”

“Yeah, figured I wasn’t lookin’ at a one hunter job. The queen of Lothmedi figured the same and sponsored my way back upriver to recruit whatever hunters I could. I thought Azenkar was as far as I’d have to go to get who I wanted, but you had to go and be even further upriver, puttin’ me well over budget.”

“So, back up for a minute. You traveled hundreds of miles,”—quite possibly over a thousand—“to get me? For this? Are you insane?”

“You’re welcome.”

“I mean it, Damored. A monster you can’t handle is probably above my paygrade. A monster Corrath can’t fight… why bother?”

“To see what happens,” Damo shrugged. “And anyway, it’s not the size of the monster that put you on my list. It’s the species. The few survivors who got a look at the thing swear up and down that it was a snake.”

“A snake?” Isa repeated, incredulous.

“Okay, there was one guy who rambled about a giantess with a titanic rack but he got bit by like three poisonous spiders and was havin’ seizures the whole time I was there, so chock that account up to hallucinations. Everyone else described a monster snake.”

“Big enough to bite a horse in half? There is no such thing.”

“Are you sure? A minute ago, you thought Corrath wasn’t real.”

“Look, before the Ascension, in the age of megafauna, there were a few species of snake that were ‘giant’ by today’s standards.”

“Okay, so maybe—”

“But two things about that,” Isa cut Damored off before she could start with the usual speculations. “One: pre-Ascension snakes topped out at forty-some feet and one ton—that’s twice the length and three-to-four times the weight of my python form—with jaws about this big.” Isa held his hands a few feet apart. “Big enough to swallow a horse, sure, but not bite it in half at one go. Two: shape-shifting animancers need a living specimen for reference.” It was one of the best-known limits of animancy. “You can’t transform into an extinct animal.”

“See, this is why I went over budget to find you,” Damo said, “to get to the bottom of this reptilian weirdness. You know snakes better than anyone.”

“Which is why you should take my word for it that what you’re describing is no snake, and I’m no use to you.”

Damored’s freckles crinkled in a teasing smile. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”

Six years ago, Isa would have bristled, smashed his dish on the floor, challenged her to an ill-advised fistfight. Now, he said flatly, “I’m sane. Did you think getting me drunk would make your pitch seem reasonable?”

“I was aimin’ for fun,” Damo sighed, “but since you’ve apparently transformed into a joyless hand-wringer, let me assure you that you don’t need to be scared. I also got us some real backup. He had business to wrap up in Azenkar, so we’re gonna pick him up on our way downriver.”

“Real backup?”

“Yeah, and don’t worry.” Damored took some leaves from a pouch at her hip. “Even split four ways, the money’s fit for a Rama.” She popped a pair of the leaves and chewed them with her next draught. The first time Isa had watched Damored eat the wild weed and spit out the stems, it had made him sad. Violent, she might be, and pathologically flighty, but she seemed like she would make a good mother. She had laughed when he had naïvely suggested something to that effect.

“Oh, Isa,” she had said. “This life is no place for a child.”

Back then, Isa had assumed that by ‘this life,’ she had meant ‘my life’… the life of a mercenary is no place for a child. It only occurred to him now that maybe she had meant that this whole world was no place for a child. Either way, he should have listened.

“What?” she said when she saw him staring. “You want some?”

“Will they work on me?”

Her mouth twisted in amusement. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say yes. They will definitely keep you from gettin’ pregnant for the next three to five days.”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant and no, they don’t do a thing to male virility. Some men just like the taste, especially to offset crap alcohol.” She nodded to the wine jug. “There is a plant called brulig—or rat’s foot—some male drifters use to keep from fatherin’ a million kids. Just make sure you buy outside the city. Urban Wildermages way overcharge.”

“I’m fine.” Isa hadn’t been with a woman since Rionde. In one of those nights of extreme darkness, desperate to escape his own thoughts, he had tried with a prostitute. But he hadn’t gotten past sliding her dress from her shoulders. The feel of a woman’s skin on his took him straight back to Spensa and everything he’d lost.

“There’s that look again, Inkarnam. Like the world just fell apart in front of you. What’s eatin’ you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“So I gathered. But you know me. I’m just gonna prod until it comes out, so why not bite the bullet and get it over with before I pull it out of you?” she said and Isa knew her well enough to respect that it was no idle threat. He looked into his wine dish, knowing that if he met Damo’s eyes like a human, he wouldn’t be able to speak. “You’d settled down in a little village. Then what happened?”

Isa focused hard on the wine-stained ceramic in his hand. “Plague.”

“Shit.” Damo muttered. “But you said you were still married, so you and your wife both made it?”

“Yeah. It’s just…” Isa hadn’t spoken a word about Taniri since the day she had gone. Not even to Spensa. “We had a daughter. She’d be six now.”

“Goddess, Isa …” For once, there wasn’t a trace of mirth or irony in Damo’s voice. “I’d no idea. I mean, I heard the plague killed a horrific number of kids downriver of Sazuma, but I didn’t realize you were livin’ on the River, that you’d started a family…”

Her fingers brushed the back of Isa’s hand. Slowed by the alcohol, he jerked back a moment too late. Her godmarks had already flared gold.

“Oh…” The tactomancer blinked rapidly, and Isa realized that he didn’t feel any different. If anything, he had calmed. Damored hadn’t aggravated his emotions but absorbed them, taken a hit of his pain. Not by accident either. Tactomancers as skilled as Damored could shield themselves from the influence of foreign emotions if they wanted, but she had always been too curious for her own good.

“Idiot,” Isa muttered.

The incense had burned down, the atmosphere gentled to a terrible quiet.

“I don’t understand.” Damored’s voice was low, strained with the borrowed emotion. “What the hell are you doin’ out here? You miss her. Why aren’t you with her?”

“I…” How to put such a complex thing to words? The way he saw Taniri in Spensa’s face, and in the mirrored pain there, knew she saw the same. “I’m not sure she wants me around.”

“So, you left her all alone?” The heartbreak on Damo’s face was too much.

“We’re not talking about this,” Isa snapped.

“Why would you do that?”

For the same reason you wouldn’t break Midnas Quinar’s neck, Aer jumped in, unbidden and incisive as only the Spirit of Truth could be, Because you’re a selfish creature, Isa. You always have been.

“You don’t get to question me about this,” Isa hissed, willing to be cruel if only it would make Damo drop it. Anything to spare yourself. “You have a family back in Sazuma, don’t you? When was the last time you were with them?”

“I’m not wanted there. Thanks for remindin’ me.” The thought seemed to hurt Damo more than usual, which in turn seemed to confuse her. It made Isa wonder if the homesickness she was feeling was her own or a shadow of his.

The wine, now that Isa wanted more, was gone, the sounds from the bar a million miles away.

“Guess that makes us perfect monster food, doesn’t it?” Damo’s smile was lightless and grim. “No one’ll miss us.”

Monster food. The notion didn’t scare Isa the way it should. From where he stood, the crushing dark of death didn’t look that different from Theid’s Shadowland. But death, he could embrace without losing himself. Suicide was a sin against Aer, but ze couldn’t begrudge Isa a death on the job, could ze?

“You got a place to stay tonight?” Damo asked.

“I did.”

“Meanin’?”

“I’ve been staying at an inn a mile upriver from here. But Telasus knew I was there, and I may have just ‘disappointed’ him, so I probably shouldn’t go back.”

“Not even to get your things?” Damo asked, clearly noting the absence of Isa’s sabers.

“It’s not a good idea.”

“I’ve got you covered then.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I should be able to get you a room next door and, if I can swing it, we’ll be out of this shit city in two days.”

“You’re sure you want me along? As a snake expert, I’ll be useless on this job, and as a hunter…” he didn’t need to say it. Damo had felt the breakage in his soul for her herself. “You’re better off heading downriver without me. I don’t have any experience with prey like that.”

“Isa, neither do I. That’s kind of the point.”

“The point?”

“People in our line of work all die young. You could do that here—cross the wrong tradelord, get trampled in the inevitable slave uprising, or shanked by a rando in some alley—but the Isa Inkarnam I knew was more ambitiously suicidal than that. He got excited about unravelin’ mysteries and chasin’ legends. Wouldn’t you rather die as that guy? Huntin’ the impossible to the edge of the world?”

“I guess I can think of worse fates.” Far worse, if Theid had zir way.

“So, what do you say?” Damo held out a hand. “Go out with a bang?”

Go out with a bang. Isa actually found that the thought made him calm… verging on happy. And damn it if that wasn’t a strange feeling.

“I’m in,” he said, “but you’re not touching me again.”

“Fair enough.” Damored closed her fist, rubbing the fingers uneasily against one another. “Now, let’s get goin’. If we’re gonna secure a nice boat, I’ve got a virgin to deflower.”

Fortunately, there was an open room at the inn. Unfortunately, it was directly next to the one Damored was sharing with her fresh tumble, so Isa got to lie awake to the sounds of them fucking like she really did mean to jump into a serpent’s maw in the near future.

On a logical level, Isa knew why Damo did this. Sazumans despised sleeping alone. Being tactomancers, they drew power from skin-to-skin contact with other humans, as a reptile drew strength from the sun. In the root city of Sazuma, women usually accomplished this platonically; as many as ten sisters, aunts, and nieces might share one hammock, drawing strength from the group as they slept. Damored, however, lived like a Sazuman man, wandering, sharing a bed with whoever would have her. Naturally, this usually involved an offer of sex. Isa knew he should be glad that he would be setting out tomorrow with a Damored at full power. He just wished her powering up involved less thumping and grunting.

His own mode of restoring himself was quieter and thankfully allowed an escape from the sounds pounding through the thin wall. Closing his eyes, he meditated. The dark insides of his eyelids, brightened, blurred to fog, and the Gray swirled to life around him.

“Aer, I am here,” he announced himself.

An Inkarnam as practiced as Isa should have been able to find Aer with a word. Recently, Isa had struggled to find zir at all, registering zir only as a voice in the fog. This time, Aer did appear, shimmering into focus like a reflection in settling water. Part human and part snake. Perhaps more snake than usual, though ze was still too vaporous to make out any features clearly.

Isa shook before the Master of Souls. With relief. And with fear.

“You went far tonight, Isa,” Aer said, zir voice clear enough for the first time in months that Isa could feel the sadness in it.

“Forgive me,” he said, even though the words were useless; Aer couldn’t forgive what the Inkarnam couldn’t forgive himself. “I’m here now, Aer. I’m here.”

“Are you?” Aer fuzzed. Shadow crept like fingers through the mist.

“No!” Isa ran to his god with the desperation that had driven him from Telasus’ warehouse. “Stay!”

Before Aer could fade to Shadow, Isa threw his arms around zir—and screamed.

Where Theid beckoned with numbness, Aer froze and burned to the touch with all the blistering intensity of humanity. Isa weathered the agony and held tight. As he clutched Truth close, something knocked into his forehead, drawing him out of the Gray.

He opened his eyes to spring breeze in his hair, the rush and tickle of grass around him, and a small brow pressed into his.

“You have one eye,” Taniri observed.

“Nnnooo,” Isa said. “I’m pretty sure you have one eye.”

“No, you!” Taniri giggled and squashed her little face in closer, her nose crushed into the bridge of his, making the distortion even more dramatic.

“Aren’t you supposed to be shelling peas for Mama?”

“I’m all done.” She drew back a few inches and it was comical how much her thinking pout resembled Spensa’s. “Where’s your friend?”

“What?”

“Where’s Aer?” Taniri had taken Isa’s face between her tiny hands, her thumbs pulling down on the the skin of his cheeks as if she might find the Spirit of Truth hiding beneath his lower eyelids. “Mama said you were talking to Aer.”

“I was.” The rule was that Taniri was not to interrupt quiet prayer but, Raba forgive them, Isa and Spensa had long since given up on enforcing it.

“She said we couldn’t see because zir lives in your head.”

“That’s an oversimplif—ow!” Isa snatched Taniri’s hands from his face. “Young lady, you can’t just stick your fingers in people’s eyes. It’s not nice.”

“But I want to see too.”

“Well, you won’t find Aer in my eyes or anywhere in this world.”

“Why?”

“My eyes, and your eyes, and our noses, our hands, all bodies belong to Osu, Spirit of the Material. Ze is the master of this physical world,” Isa gestured around them. “Aer lives in a different world.”

“Could I go there? Could you take me?”

Isa considered his daughter. Not yet six, but gifted children often started young and Taniri could be unsettling in her focus. The High Inkarnai said that any child old enough to say “what if” was old enough to enter the Gray, and Taniri had spilled “what if”s like an inexhaustible spring since learning to talk.

She’s ready, Aer nudged him.

But am I? Isa doubted.

Well, ze said, let’s find out.

Okay. Isa cleared his throat. “You’ll have to be very patient and do exactly as I say.”

“Will it let me turn into a python?”

“No,” Isa laughed. “Not without many years of training,” and some invaluable pre-Ascension artifacts that Isa would likely never be able to afford for her working as a farmer, but he didn’t mention that.

“But I have these!” Taniri held out her hands, which were a mess of ink.

“Oh, for Raba’s sake, Taniri!” Isa started, but one look at her face broke apart any anger he might have been able to muster; her smile tended to have that effect. And when Isa registered the finger-smeared approximation of the tattoos on the backs of his own hands, even his annoyance fizzled to an exasperated smile. “Let’s get this washed off before Mama sees, okay?”

“But—!”

“Wash it off,” he said sternly, “and I will take you to see Aer.”

When Taniri’s hands were scrubbed clean of play runes, Isa took her to the stretch of grass between their farm and the bigger one next door. He usually meditated closer to the house, but he figured that Taniri would need a space with fewer distractions.

“First, sit like I do. Legs crossed—” he began but Taniri had already dropped into position in a perfect imitation of his posture, legs folded, back straight, thumbs crossed and fingertips resting together. Clearly, she had practiced.

“Good. Now, um…” Isa tried to remember how his first mentors had begun his training.

Giver her a focal point, Aer reminded him.

“Right.” In the Temple, they had used a candle in a dark room. Drawing one of his sabers, Isa drove it into the earth before Taniri, so the flat of the steel caught a slice of sunlight.

“You’re going to look here,” he pointed to the blade of the saber, burning silver-white against the surrounding grass, “right at this light, while you listen to my voice. It’s very important that you keep your eyes focused here.” Not to a grown Inkarnam, it wasn’t, but children had often had trouble visualizing Truth amid all the distractions of Osu’s domain.

“Will I see Aer if I look there?” Taniri asked, already focused on the saber with intensity beyond her years.

“Sort of,” Isa said. “It’s the starting point, the doorway. You’re going to need my voice to take you the rest of the way. Are you ready to listen and follow?”

“Yes, Papa.”

He had Taniri breathe with him, in deeply and out slowly. All the while, her gaze never left the saber. She barely blinked. “Now, I want you to think about all the sounds you hear around you. You hear the wind in the grass. That is Osu’s wind. You hear the calls of men and gulls by the river. Those are Osu’s voices. Very faintly, you might catch the click of Mama’s loom.” Isa took her through every sound around them, from the buzz of a dragonfly to the distant lapping of water on the riverbank.

Then, one by one, he helped her let them go. “The wind you hear is of Osu’s domain, so you let it go. The gulls you hear are Osu’s gulls, so you let them go…” slowly down the list of each sound. “Now, as you listen, all the sounds start to become faint and roll together into one great rushing sound, greater than wind, greater than water or anything in Osu’s domain. Do you hear it?”

Taniri was utterly still for a moment, bright black eyes narrowed on the focal point. “Yes,” she said at length. “I hear it.”

“Good. Now, as the rush overtakes you, you notice that the light before you is getting fuzzy. Your eyelids feel heavy, like you’re about to sleep, even though you’ve never felt more awake. The rush is all you hear now. The light off the blade blurs and becomes a wisp of fog, like the clouds that hang over the fields in the early morning. The wisp is small at first, but it grows as your eyes fall slowly, slowly shut…”

Taniri’s eyes fell closed on command, as if she were nodding off, but her posture held, her little chin tilted up in alertness.

“The fog surrounds you and you see that you have left Osu’s domain. You are in the Gray. You are walking in a new world. As you press deeper into the fog, a sense of peace and rightness overtakes you, and you come to understand that this is your world. This is Taniri Inkarnam. Here, you are you. You are absolute.”

Taniri’s mouth had fallen open slightly in wonder.

“As you walk on through this world of Taniri, you see a shape in the fog ahead. Not a shadow. A bright shape, made of mist and light, and you know in your heart that this shape is Truth.”

“Wow…” Taniri whispered and Isa bit back a smile.

“Do you see zir? Do you see the shape of Truth?”

“Yes…” Taniri breathed in a voice aching with wonder. “I see…”

Isa didn’t ask what exactly she saw—if Aer appeared to her as a girl, a snake, or something entirely unlike her father’s visions in the Gray. That was between the Inkarnam and the Master of Souls.

“When you’re ready, you will walk toward the Truth and ze will move toward you. When you’re ready zir image will become clearer until it’s the clearest thing in the universe.”

This was where Isa let go of Taniri’s hand, the point at which the Inkarnam, however young, had to proceed into the Gray on their own or not at all. As a child, Isa himself had wandered the Gray for many sessions before Aer took form before him. He had always been a meandering child, winding like a snake around obstacles, never taking a straight line to anything. But Taniri was a raptor like her mother. Once she zeroed in on a thing, she folded her wings back and dove in a straight line. Isa could tell from the straining look on her face that she was headed straight for that shape in the mist.

“Is it Aer?” she whispered, breathless.

Only she could discover that for sure. All Isa could do for her was say, “When you’re ready, you can call zir closer to see.”

A breath filled Taniri’s chest, deep and tremulous. She was nervous. “What do I say?”

“Aer, I am here.”

“Isa!” Aer’s voice rippled across the grass, rings of light exposing the precious scene for it was. Just a memory. Pain reverberated through Isa as he struggled to hold onto the moment with his daughter. But the harder he held on, knowing it was gone, the worse it hurt. “Isa Inkarnam!”

“I’m here!” Isa called back, racked with loss. “I’m here, damn you!”

But when Aer said, “Inkarnam!” again, zir voice was wrong. Aer didn’t have a Krellish accent.

“What…?” Isa blinked awake to find an armed man at the foot of his bed. No… He blinked again in the morning light. Three armed men.

“Isa Inkarnam. Tradelord Telasus Torrens requires an audience with you.”

“Oh. Great.”

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this chapter of Seven Forsaken. You can get new chapters of this story early and read more serialized stories from the world of Altima on my Patreon.

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