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

Isa had shunned the river for months now, traveling on foot, even the seventy-some miles from Azenkar to Krell. It wasn’t the crocodiles that kept him from the water. Isa didn’t fear death anymore. What he feared was instability.

Alkem, the Spirit of Change, lived in the river. As a young man, Isa had danced in the arms of Alkem’s currents as easily as he passed through Theid’s shadows—with a false sense of invincibility, unafraid of anything they might bring upon him. Now, he knew fear, and he regretted the plunge into the river as soon as his boots left Osu’s solid earth. But regret couldn’t stop a man mid-fall any more than it could stop water on its way to the sea.

All Isa could do was close his eyes and transform.

Tisadne’s surface struck a man and closed on a python, piercing Isa’s pit organs with the southbound chill of northern waters. Human eyes twitched closed when they met water, but a snake had no need—nor ability—to blink. As the rush of bubbles cleared, Isa stifled the human urge to draw a gasp of awe. Python vision was dichromatic, only registering blues and greens—no red—but blues and greens were more than sufficient to color the majesty of a river bottom that hadn’t been visible in a century. Krell’s waters had always been marginally cleaner than Azenkar’s, the privilege that came with situation further upriver, but never in living memory had they been this clear.

Isa had never known water could break sunlight into shifting nets and spears of white, but it was bitter awe. Because the only reason the waters were so clear was that the waste going into the river had been halved, along with the population of the riverlands.

As Isa passed through the harbor, he dove deep to avoid the oars of the galleys and the deadly wheels of steamboats. It wasn’t the first time he had descended this deep beneath Tisadne’s surface but it was the first time he did so with any notion of where he was going. The clarity had brought sunlight straight to the bottom of the river, revealing a sea of ribbony eelweed that swayed with Tisadne’s currents.

Isa might not be able to feel joy for the river—or anything—but some flicker of his old curiosity drove him down for a closer look. The rippling green teemed with fish, glinting like silver shells as they flashed through sunbeams and sunken boats crawling with crabs. A fishnet, half rotted and flowing with algae, hung like a veil over a statue that might have lain unseen for a hundred years—or longer. Nosing through the greenery, Isa ran across a shoulder cannon from before the days of flintlock guns, what looked like the wheel of a chariot, and a helmet that had fallen out of use some time during the last Riverland Wars. Some of the artifacts among the eelweed weren’t even Krellish in design, their abstracted forms bearing echoes of the Wilds. These were creations of the people who had lived on this stretch of river before Alkem had brought the ancestors of the Krellish upon them like a plague. They were gone now, Alkem coursing carelessly over their ruins, indifferent to the beauty ze had destroyed.

Though the High Inkarnai would have called it petty, Isa hadn’t prayed to Alkem since ze had brought plague to the riverlands. And I’m not starting now, he sullenly informed the waters as he wound through them. Not after he had begged with all the breath in his ragged lungs for his daughter’s life. I’ll never pray to you again.

Alkem didn’t answer Isa. Never had. Inkarnai with the ability to hear the Spirit of Change were rare and immensely powerful prophets who only came around once in a millennium. Had there been one among the Inkarnai this generation, they would have seen the plague before it hit. Still, Isa hoped Alkem heard him as he hissed, I hope you choke—or stagnate, or whatever misfortune can befall the Spirit of Change.

It was Aer who answered this time, chiding. That’s petulant, Isa, and it does no good.

Alkem killed Taniri.

Yes, Aer said softly, but rage never hurt Alkem any more than an arrow hurt fire. Rage is kindling for change.

What about indifference? I bet Alkem doesn’t like being neglected.

Ze does not, Aer agreed. But you are Inkarnam. To forsake one of the Seven is to undo us all. Denying Alkem will undo you.

All Isa’s attempts to offend the Spirit of Change must have been unsuccessful because he made it to the nearby shore without encountering any crocodiles—at least none big enough to pose a threat; a few foot-long youngsters yapped among the lilies in the shallows, snapping at dragonflies. In years past, Isa would have struggled to find a hiding place along the Krellish riverbank. Now, slithering through the reeds onto the sand, he had his pick of abandoned boats.

Large cargo vessels were too valuable to be abandoned at the bank; they had all been sold, stolen, or seized for state use the moment the plague took their owners. But the poor of the river manned little rowboats, valuable only to the fishermen to whom they meant livelihood. When scores of those fishermen had succumbed to the plague, their vessels were left to the river. Several such boats, in varying states of decay, had washed up here on the sand south of the harbor and Isa didn’t have to go far before he picked out an overturned rowboat big enough to conceal him. He was winding his way toward it when the sand-muffled vibration of human footsteps made him pause partway out of the reeds.

Three girls—servants’ daughters, judging from their plain bonnets—picked between the boat carcasses to draw water. Isa locked into stalking stillness to avoid drawing their attention; the last thing he needed was for a bunch of scared kids to run off screaming about a giant python. But the girls were far too busy chattering to one another to spare a glance for that jumble of jetsam that just might be a predator watching them.

Taniri would have been far more attentive at the water’s edge… But Taniri had never gotten big enough to carry water on her own. She never would.

Isa’s tail curled uneasily in the lilies, snapping a few stems beneath the water, and something in him itched to take a warning lunge at the girls’ ankles as they passed close to him. Just to put the fear of mortality into them. So maybe they would be more careful next time. It was a hypocritical thought. Isa had been at least as cavalier as these youngsters when he was their age, and it had gotten him bitten by vipers more than once.

Oddly, it was that thought that made him want to actually bite one of those skinny ankles—worse than he had ever been bitten since that clearly hadn’t driven the lesson home—He wanted to draw blood, show them fear, make them think how Endra-damned lucky they were to be alive when so many hadn’t lived to see the river so clear.

Isa… Aer’s voice brushed at his soul, gentle arms pulling him back from the dark.

A moment of tension, and then Isa relaxed into the grip of his god, the unthinkable impulse cooled, and the girls passed out of striking range. Their footsteps faded up the stone steps back to the road, leaving Isa feeling weak and evil. It seemed that he hadn’t truly outrun Theid’s shadows when he fled Telasus’ warehouse. Not all of them.

Stay with me? he asked.

Aer entwined with him. As long as you want me.

It was only then, secure in Aer’s grip, that Isa trusted himself to move again, slithering slowly into his hiding place. There were bones in the shade beneath the boat, picked clean by rats and crabs who went skittering away at the approach of a larger predator. Isa nosed a few bleached ribs as he gathered the back half of his body into the dark.

Isa had skinned and partitioned enough kills to know that these ribs belonged to a sizable mammal. Not as large as a horse, nor as small as a monkey. Isa would have liked to believe they belonged to an impala or gazelle, but antelopes never wandered this far into populous areas. A pig maybe, he thought—hoped—but that was before he touched the skull. Smooth, and round, and large relative to the ribs. Human. Oh Aer, these were the remains of a poor fisherman, who had crawled into the shade beneath his boat to die. A very Krellish thing to do, Isa thought wearily. Worshippers of Ostia Torrens liked to be buried with their most valuable possessions, so they could wow their goddess in the afterlife.

“See, that’s the thing I don’t get about the Krellish!” Spensa had slurred once. “The idea behind Ostia Torrens is that a man spends his whole life amassing wealth so that when he dies, he can pay her bride price and get a piece of that.”

“Yeah?” Isa had said as he poured her another dish of wine.

“Doesn’t that seem weird to you? That men obsessed with monogamy and sexual exclusivity suddenly all want to jump into bed with the same tall glass of hussy the second they kick off?”

Isa snorted, fairly sure he’d never heard anyone—let alone a virgin scholar of the Church Sapiam—call Ostia a hussy. But, as always, Spensa had captured his curiosity, so he didn’t waste time poking fun.

“All that work to woo the worst wife in the whole world,” she said swirling the wine in her dish.

“They refer to it as ‘winning the Goddess,’” Isa said, though at the time his Krellish was still been shaky and Spensa hid a smirk at his pronunciation. “So, I think they think of it as an exclusive union.”

“How though?” Spensa gestured in exasperation, a bit of wine sloshing onto her veil. “Literally how?”

“Maybe it’s like… In my religion, every Inkarnam communes with Aer. But every Inkarnam meets a different version.”

This was one of countless conversations they had had about their gods and others. Isa’s fellow hunters assumed that his reasons for buying the young priestess too many drinks were nefarious. He left them to their assumptions because it was simpler than explaining the truth: that he loved it when she got riled about her studies, when her veil slipped free along with all her filters and she ranted for an hour about a single translation error in the flaking old meditations of some prophet. Most people’s vocabulary deteriorated with drink. Spensa’s just heated with a peppering of vulgarities from her life in the slums of Azenkar before her parents had sold her off to be a virgin scribe to the Church. Much as Isa loved life as a hunter for hire, he did get to missing talk of gods, souls, and the nature of truth. Drunk Spensa made those conversations as combative, bloody, and exhilarating as any hunt.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said bluntly.

“Excuse me?”

“Aer’s the Spirit of Truth, right? Truth isn’t subjective. There aren’t different versions of it.”

“Sure, there are,” Isa protested, “like your Prophet What’s-her-name, and the other prophet who said she was a purveyor of pagan propaganda, and your mortal enemy, the translator who didn’t bother with the distinction between ‘submerge’ and ‘descend.’”

“That’s not truth!” Spensa banged her dish on the bar, looking for all the world like she was ready to throw down. “That’s the fallible human lens mucking things up, leaving generations of scribes to wade through the waste of their delusions to dredge up a little speck of enlightenment. Truth—I mean divine, incontrovertible, scientific truth—isn’t subjective. It’s absolute. Objectively, there is one of it. Sure, a god might be omnipresent, but she—he, it, ze—is one being,” she held up a finger, jabbed it in Isa’s face for emphasis, “one essential self.”

“Okay…” Isa chewed on her words for a while, taking the time to digest them before speaking again. “Point of clarification: Aer is the Master of Souls, not sciences. Ze embodies internal truths. The truths of the self that exist beyond the physical body. External truths—all that science and history you study at the Church Sapiam—is of the physical world. So, that’s not Aer’s domain. It’s Osu’s.”

“Yes!” Spensa’s eyes lit. “But this proves my point!”

“Does it?”

“A concept like Truth—your Aer—or Knowledge—my Ostia Sapiam—can exist outside the bounds of the physical world. Its home is the dimension of the mind, the soul, the intangible you that goes to the afterlife. What is the intangible value of Ostia Torrens? She has none. How could she? She’s the product of a culture that values only flesh and shells.”

“Well, desire technically exists in the realm of the mind, doesn’t it?” Isa said, though he wasn’t sure he had himself convinced. Theid was so enamored of Osu, so dependent on the material for zir existence, could the two really be separated? “Isn’t lust…?”

Spensa had gone quiet and still for the first time the entire evening, studying Isa with liquid black eyes. “What is lust, Inkarnam?”

And suddenly, Isa was far too aware of the sharp line of her clavicle, the sheen of wine on her lower lip. Had her eyes always been so large? So deep?

“Maybe—” He shifted back a fraction, hauling the conversation back to the Krellish and the theoretical. “Maybe lust is abstract—for them. Maybe there’s something more to it than flesh.”

“Nah-ah.” Spensa waved a hand in his direction in slurred denial. “An owl’s head. That’s abstract. That’s metaphor. Have you seen the thunder thighs on Ostia Torrens? Nothing abstract about that, Inkarnam. Just a gold-digging slut, as vapid as the horny sculptors who invented her.”

Isa had neglected to mention the gradual slippage of Spensa’s vernacular for the last hour but he suddenly had the feeling of needing to pull himself—pull both of them—back from the edge of something. She was a priestess Sapiai, after all, not a prostitute. And he was Inkarnam. They could discuss philosophy, sure, but letting the conversation wander all the way to lust seemed awfully like letting a drinking horse wade right up to the crocodile’s nose. “Are priestesses supposed to call any aspect of Ostia a slut?”

“Shit, you’re right.” Her eyes went wide in a show of horror but somehow lost none of their twinkle. “They’re gonna throw me outta the church if I keep acting so damn unbecoming. And in public too! What’ll I do? I’ll be destitute unless I settle down and get married.”

“Is that what you want?” Isa wasn’t sure why he asked. Maybe he was a little drunk too. “A house, kids… a good husband?” Aer, why did he ask that? He clearly wasn’t a good—

“Oh, no, no,” Spensa chuckled, mischievous. “A good man would never want a disgraced priestess, would he? No, I’ll get stuck with a real bad character, some disreputable lowlife, no-good-type fella. Maybe a killer.” She slanted a smile at him through the dark hair that had fallen free of its braids. “Maybe a heretic.”

Isa had been too young—or, Aer forgive him, just too dumb for his age—to know when flirting was happening. But every time he came back through South Azenkar, he took the foul-mouthed priestess for a drink, until the day she pulled her veil back, dropped her shawl, and said, “Are you ready to get excommunicated or what?”

“I’m already pushing my luck with my temple,” Isa said.

“As am I.” She put her hands on his upper arms, smoothed them over the shoulders of his cassock before slowly cupping his face. “Let’s burn our bridges together.”

“You’ll be an outcast from your own faith,” Isa said. The same was true of him, but the riverlands were so much more dangerous for a woman on her own.

She won’t be on her own though, Aer said.

And Isa found himself swelled with a strange, foreign joy as truth hit him. She’ll be with me. The word ‘forever’ hadn’t entered Isa’s conscious mind. He wasn’t that naïve, after all—he thought—but it had been there. A bright lens coloring his view ahead. It was that impossible brightness that pitched him into Spensa’s arms, set their bridges aflame, and left them both crashing into Alkem’s currents. Together. As if that would be forever and always enough.

You know, Isa thought as he cozied up beside the skeleton beneath the boat, You’re probably better off down here. No one had come to bury the fisherman, so Isa had to assume his family was gone. Without them, I promise… it wouldn’t have been worth sticking around.

Coiled around the bones, Isa settled in front of a hole in the hull to watch the boats pass in and out of the harbor with their loads of slaves, spices, and bolts of fabric. As the sun climbed toward noon, it warmed Isa’s scales with a hot dappling through the holes in the rowboat. Though python’s eyes didn’t close, Isa let himself slip into a reptilian doze.

He expected to have to wait a while. Damored had to first threaten Kadnus, then get the money from his father’s coffers, then find a captain willing to take them to a kingdom that didn’t exist. Maybe she’d just get a captain to take them to Azenkar and bank on finding a less sane captain there. However it went, Isa expected it to be dark before Damo had the goods. And if something went wrong, if she didn’t come for him, Isa’s best bet was to stay a snake and take the river out of Krell. Better death by crocodile than whatever Telasus had in mind for him.

Or I could stay here with you, friend, he thought with a look at the skeleton. In the dark, and fuck Alkem.

Isa started when Tapia padded excitedly atop the boat. He would have taken her for a small baboon—because there was simply no way Damored had arranged everything in just a few hours—but the lemur’s scent was distinctive. As he lifted his head, Damored’s skirts swished into view and her knuckles rapped cheerfully on the hull.

“We’re in business, buddy. You can come out.”

The boat Damo had secured was a marvel. A sleek black galley with two levels, the cabins and cargo on deck up top, and two rows of oarsmen below. The typical Krellish galley struck a delicate balance between speed and capacity, but this one’s builder had clearly favored speed—with a heaping side of flash. The finish was as indulgent as it was immaculate, shorebirds and naked lady nymphs carved into every inch of trim and painted an oily black that blinded in the sun.

“Nice, right?” Damo grinned.

“Yeah,” Isa said, trying not to gape. “I take it things went well with Kadnus?”

“Better than I expected. No yelling or crying. Honestly, I reckon he was still shook from this morning. Why argue with a gal who just caved a man’s skull, right? ‘Specially since I promised we’d connect if I’m ever in Krell again. Joke’s on him though. I’m never comin’ back this way again.”

“But your home is…” Isa trailed off when she threw him a disconcerting look and amended, “Sazuma’s that way.”

“Yeah, well…” Her voice took on a strange edge. “Fuck Sazuma.”

On a whim, instead of asking “why?” Isa touched her hand. He still had a swallow of Goddess Gift in his system, after all. Maybe he could feel something of her emotions, the way she felt his.

Damo’s eyes went to his hand on hers and a smile twisted the corner of her mouth. It was jagged, sardonic, and lacked all her usual warmth. “Nice try.”

“Worth a shot,” Isa said instead of trying to deny his intentions. “You always said tactomancy was a two-way stream.”

“Yeah, but, being the tactomancer, I control the locks and dams. Catch me half-conscious and you might get some mental backwash. Otherwise, you’re just giving me an opening to do what I want with you. Come. I’ll introduce you to the captain.”

The captain was a husky older man with a warm air and a wide smile that showed off several missing teeth. His peach-colored godmarks stood out dramatically on skin that had probably once been a similar color but had long since gone wrinkly and tan from years under the riverland sun.

“Threskiornar Xabres.” The man clasped Isa’s forearm and kissed the air by each of his cheeks in the customary riverland greeting, “captain of the Waning Ibis.”

“Isa Inkarnam,” Isa said, returning the gesture.

“Inkarnam!” the man exclaimed, his expression closer to delight than fear. “So, that explains the get-up. Never met an animantic cultist before.”

“Ex-cultist. Well… excommunicated. It’s complicated,” Isa hedged in case the good, Goddess-fearing captain was superstitious about having a heretic onboard.

“Huh.” Xabres flicked a sun-squinted gaze up and down Isa. “Always figured you priests of the Seven for a shrimpy lot but you’ve got quite the arms on you. I take it you and the lady are in the same line of work?”

Isa looked to Damo, unsure what to say. How much did the captain know about their venture? “Um—”

“Exotic game hunters, yes,” Damo said, “headed to the jungle for some rare quarry.” Half the truth then. That was smart. A captain with a mind for his own safety might not want to transport mercenaries.

“And… you’ve agreed to take us partway there, I assume?” Isa said.

“All the way, my pagan friend,” Captain Xabres beamed.

“Oh?” So, maybe safety wasn’t a priority for this guy.

“We’ll have to pick up a new crew in Azenkar—and probably a few times after that—but I’ve told the lady I’ll get you two to the kingdom at the end of the river. Assuming there is one.”

He winked at Damo, who explained, “I owe him fifty gold shells extra if we get there and it’s not real.”

“You’ll have a hell of a job getting back to Krell,” Isa said, but a glance at Damo’s smiled confirmed his first thought: Osu help me, this boat isn’t coming back upriver. They’d be lucky to reach their destination at all with the water on their side. There wasn’t a crew in the world who could row a vessel the hundreds of miles against the river.

“Kadnus covered the cost for Xabres to recrew as many times as he needs,” Damo said, as though this was a fix for basic physics.

The captain seemed to read the skepticism on Isa’s face. “People are always worrying, ‘what if I can’t get back?’ ‘What if, what if?’ ‘till they’ve gone and scared themselves so bad they never go half the places they could.”

“Maybe that’s not an unfounded fear,” Isa said. He could have done with more of it when he was younger. “I mean… call me crazy, Captain, but what if a death jungle isn’t a nice place to retire?”

“Don’t listen to him.” Damo elbowed Isa in an understated movement that felt like an anvil to the ribs. “He’s a compulsive wet blanket.”

Captain Xabres didn’t seem to mind—nor notice Isa stoically put a hand to his ribs and try to regain his breath. “I always dreamed’o sailin’ for the southern jungles, and I’m gettin’ old.” He didn’t look older than fifty, but the non-magic rarely lived much older than that. “Plague took my wife and mother, Goddess keep them in silks, so there’s no one left to worry about me. No better time. Ostia knows I didn’t buy this beauty to take it slow!” He gestured to the gleaming galley behind him.

“Ss—” Sorry for your loss, Isa wanted to say but realized that he was still too winded to manage anything more than a grunt.

“You two settle in,” the idiot captain said quite giddily for a man his age. “We’ll be off within the hour.”

“How did you land a captain with an actual death wish?” Isa asked Damo when he was sure the man was out of earshot. “I have to know. In a whole harbor of boatmen, how’d you pick this one out?” It wasn’t like she’d had time to interview the captain of every galley at the docks.

“Easy. Practical old guy. Totally impractical boat.”

“That explains nothing to me,” Isa confessed.

“He said it himself,” Damo said, “You only buy a sexy thing like this if you mean to show her a good time.”

“You’re sure you didn’t help him along with a little…” Isa waggled his fingers. The man did seem unnaturally giddy.

“Nah, that’s all him,” Damo said. “Hand to Goddess. There’s nothing like a plague to make everyone feel a little bit mortal and like they want to get in that one big adventure before they die. Our friend Xabres is obviously compensating for the fact that he hasn’t done anything exciting with his life. I just pitched us as that exciting thing. You know the Krellish are all about the pitch.”

It probably should have disturbed Isa how Damo seemed to have men boiled down to a science. At the moment, he just appreciated her efficiency.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s board this sexy thing.”

Isa was no stranger to boats. He had grown up in South Azenkar, where gondolas and canoes were the main modes of transportation during flood season. His legs automatically adjusted for the subtle movements of the deck, but something that had nothing to do with his physical body made him feel terrifyingly unsteady. As a python, he could swim with the current or against it as he wished. Aboard a boat, he was wholly at the mercy of Change.

Isa gripped the rail hard as Alkem’s waters sloshed and pulsed against the stern, rocking them with the deceptive gentleness of a cobra swaying its head.

“River sickness?” Captain Xabres said sympathetically.

“Something like that.”

“Didn’t know Azenkari could get river sick.”

Isa didn’t answer. Alkem, Child of Theid… He squeezed his eyes shut and didn’t know what to pray for. Spirit of Change… mercy.

Alkem knows no mercy, Aer reminded him, only movement. If the movement of the world brings us joy, that is ours to seize. If it brings us pain, then that is ours to endure.

I can’t. Isa felt himself starting to panic, acid stinging the back of his throat, shadows swarming his vision. I can’t—

You can. Balance, Isa. For every venom, there is an anti-venom. Where is your anti-venom?

Isa scrubbed hands over his face and found stubble beneath his fingers. It pricked him back to reality.

“Well,” Captain Xabres said, when Isa didn’t answer him, “I’ll leave you to adjust then.” He had just turned away when Isa lifted his head, pushed from the rail, and stood straight with the movement of the deck.

“Captain, do you have a razor?”

“What?”

“Do you have an extra razor?”

“No.” The man touched his own full beard. “But I’m sure we could come up with one.”

But it wasn’t as simple as shaving in the morning. Isa had built up a whole routine to dam the torrent of memories and anchor himself in those slow-moving waters. If he didn’t want Alkem to sweep him off to wherever, he needed rhythm, control.

“And… could any of your rowers use a break?”

“They haven’t started rowing yet.” Captain Xabres was squinting at Isa in concern. “Are you sure you’re alr—”

“Please, Captain. Could I row?”

The Krellishman eyed him doubtfully. “Do you know how?”

The answer was ‘barely’ so instead, Isa said, with a show of indignation, “I’m Azenkari.”

Captain Xabres gave him a last appraising look, seemed to decide he was robust enough, and shrugged. “Sure.”

So Isa pulled away from Krell with his hands on an oar, his body moving to the sound of the oarmaster’s drum. The steady beat held him through the surge and lull of the water, made rhythm from unpredictability. He could do this, he decided, muscles straining. He could hold here. At least until Azenkar.

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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