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

The three cities of the riverlands were monuments to the three aspects of the goddess Ostia. Krell had voluptuous Ostia Torrens, embodying wealth, Trestantia had armored Ostia Cassidar, embodying conquest, and Azenkar had winged Ostia Sapiam, embodying wisdom. The matron goddess of Azenkar towered over the river where it flowed across the state’s northern border, stone owl’s wings spread across the sun in welcome to friends and intimidation to intruders.

Isa had stood in the shadow of those wings the day he first set foot outside Azenkar. He remembered glancing to his right at Kendiri, to his left at Nazaru, and seeing his own irrepressible hunger echoed in their eyes. The three of them held their breath there on the cusp of what they were to be, each with their two sabers, a map of the riverlands, a pouch of copper cowries, and an excess of naïve enthusiasm.

“I can’t tell you what to do with yourselves out there,” Elder Thrask had said as zir students faced the Wilds beyond Azenkar. “That’s something you’ll each have to figure out for yourself.”

All Inkarnai left the temple at sixteen for the wandering, a four-year period during which they were to see the world, live among its people, and accrue its wisdom. At the end of those four years, the twenty-year-old Inkarnam could return and swear lifelong loyalty to the temple or opt for a life beyond it. Isa, Kendiri, and Nazaru were had all come of age in the same season, meaning Elder Thrask faced the difficult task of saying goodbye to all three of them at the same time.

“I can’t tell you to stay together… I just wanted to say—"

“That you’ll miss me the most,” Nazaru smirked.

Isa, Kendiri, and Elder Thrask shared a quiet breath of exasperation. Isa hadn’t realized at the time that it might be the last of those they ever shared, nor would it have occurred to him that those weird little moments of family were something to cherish.

High Inkarnai did not cry, but Isa remembered an over-bright sheen to the priest’s eyes as ze looked at the three strong young Inkarnai ze had raised from the cradle and touched each gently on the shoulder. “I hope to see all of you back home in four years.”

Ostia Sapiam may not have been Isa’s goddess but she was still the deity of his city, the closest shape Isa had ever had to a mother, and her outstretched wings always brought back the weight of Elder Thrask’s hand on his shoulder and zir soft voice: “Follow Kendiri, if you must, or Nazaru, if you must, but follow Aer before anyone else.” Isa had tried to follow that advice. He really had. And where had it gotten him?

“Ah, sweet Azenkar.” Damo came to lean on the rail beside Isa as the Waning Ibis passed beneath the shadow of Ostia Sapiam’s wings. “Nothin’ like that scent of fish, soil, and scholarly snobbery.”

“Hey,” Isa said.

“Don’t be so sensitive. It does smell like fish.”

“Wouldn’t you take fish over… whatever Krell smells like?”

“Shit?” Damo suggested.

“I was going to say sweat, but sure.”

Krell and Azenkar were close in size, but Krell was far denser, with four times Azenkar’s population crammed within its borders under ever-worsening living conditions. Where Krell was crowded with utilitarian housing units, much of Azenkar’s architecture stood dramatically over swathes of farmland, left open to make use of the floodwaters when the river overflowed its banks. The outlying part of Azenkar they passed now was sparsely populated. Only the houses of governors, mayors, and especially affluent farmers stood higher than one story, pale stone guards over sprawling expanses of farmland and the little shacks of the farmers who worked them.

Isa had never appreciated the genius behind Azenkari architecture until he and Spensa had tried to build a one-room farmhouse together.

“All those books!” Isa had shouted, kicking in the last part of their collapsing wall. “Access to all Azenkar’s libraries and you never read one thing on how to lay a damn brick!”

“What about you Mr. Mercenary?” Spensa had shouted right back, matching his frustration. “Mr. I-Can-Set-a-Bone-with-my-Eyes-Closed?”

“A house isn’t a skeleton!”

“No, you know what, this is fine,” Spensa scrubbed her hands over her face and then pushed them back through her hair, leaving streaks of dirt behind. “This is fine. We’re both smart, right?”

“Right.” Isa agreed, though, Aer help him, he was starting to have his doubts.

“We’ll sit down, we’ll rethink this, do the numbers again…” She looked half mad, her dark hair in disarray, her thin hands covered in blisters. “We’re smarter than this.”

In the end, it turned out they weren’t. They had been forced to go to Farmer Kandar, who owned the neighboring plot of land. And, through fits of laughter at their work, he had walked the two former scholars through everything they’d bungled. With no money to pay their new neighbor for his trouble, Isa had offered to go hunting and bring him back a day’s kill, to which Kandar had said, “Oh, you can hunt? Well, thank Ostia for that, no?” and refused to take anything from them. “If you kids farm as good as you build, you’ll want to sell that bushmeat for every shell you can get!”

After a few years and a few brushes with starvation, Isa and Spensa had gotten the hang of farming. Their yield had never quite matched their neighbors’ but it had been theirs and they were proud of it—no matter how Farmer Kandar continued to laugh. The first wave of plague had taken the old farmer and his wife. They had gone quickly, together, over one night, leaving behind their beautiful vineyard and golden fields of barley.

“My pickup is at the East Harbor, so it’s gonna be a while yet before we—where are you going?” Damo asked as Isa turned from the rail.

“Inside,” Isa said because he could name the farmers who had once lived in the abandoned shacks on this land. They were nearing Rionde.

“Oh,” Damo said as she took another look at their surroundings and realized where they were. “You don’t even want to look?”

“Knock when we pass the courthouse.”

“I’m not sure where that—”

“When the buildings get tall and pretty and clustered.” Isa opened the door to his cabin. “That’s my stop.”

“Isa—"

He closed the door. He didn’t want to see if the house he had built with Spensa was still there, if the fig tree Taniri liked to climb had hung onto its leaves, if the vineyard was doing alright. He didn’t deserve to see.

Only a few minutes had passed when Damo knocked. “We’re past it now.” It didn’t seem like something so monumental should pass in such a short time, but for all the space it took in Isa’s mind, Rionde was, in Osu’s domain, just a tiny stretch of land. “You can come out.”

Isa did so only because the Temple Inkarnam was not far downriver of Rionde. Along the riverbank, golden-brown farmland had given way to the stone architecture of the village center. All of Azenkar was built to an old standard of beauty. Even here in the state’s poorer outskirts, the architecture was studied and romantic, each design element approved by the academic oligarchy. Stone arches held dwellings, businesses, and state buildings above the floodline. During the rainy season, the long stairways that led up to the structures would be submerged to the highest steps, the streets and alleys between traversable only by canoe and gondola. Now, the channel paths between buildings were cracked and dry.

The people walking the dried earth among the buildings were fewer—sadder—than they had been, but there was a timeless, mocking indifference to the stone of the city. The gray-columns of the courthouse looked no different than they had when Isa was a child. The Church Sapiam, where he had first met Spensa, looked no different. Isa resented the stone for that. What business did stone have lasting so long when everything that made it matter was gone?

Isa closed his eyes thinking that perhaps he should meditate, let Aer hold him during these last few minutes through the most familiar part of Azenkar, but Tapia chittered and pawed at his sleeve, pulling him back to Osu’s domain.

“What?” he snapped, turning a glare on the lemur.

“Be nice,” Damo said as Tapia disregarded the glare and clambered onto Isa’s arm. “She’s just tryin’ to make friends.”

“Well, she—ah!” Isa jerked and fought to hold still at the unfamiliar sensation of little paws across his neck and shoulders. “She’s gonna have to get off if she doesn’t want to go for a swim.”

“So you are gonna visit your temple?” Damo’s face lit up.

“Yeah.” Isa wished he shared her enthusiasm.

“Need help pullin’ a heist?”

“Thanks, but I’m good.” The High Inkarnai were capable of killing even an outlandishly powerful tactomancer—and certainly would if they found her trespassing. The question was only how many Inkarnai she would take with her—and what they would do to Isa for having brought her into their midst.

“So, you’re plannin’ to ask nicely?” Damo sounded disappointed.

“Sort of.” Resting his arms on the rail, Isa clasped his hands together and ran a thumb over one of his tag runes. “I’m going to go in discreetly and try to find my old teacher.” Elder Thrask might flatly refuse to help him but Isa was sure ze wouldn’t kill him. Mostly sure. The old Inkarnam had always been fond of Isa, but a lot could change in twelve years.

“So… it’s a half-heist,” Damo said, “not totally criminal but not totally on the level.”

“You could put it that way.” Isa would have preferred not to use the word ‘heist’ at all.

“What’s the deal with you and your people, anyway?” Damo asked, reaching over to scratch behind Tapia’s ears. “Are you banned from the temple for all time or—”

“No. I can technically still visit. I think. I just can’t live or teach there, since I’ve used my abilities to commit murder.”

“That’s where they draw the line?”

“The first line, yeah.”

“And the second?”

“Cannibalism.” Slave trading and killing for hire were also in there as fuzzier afterthoughts, but the literal consumption of humans was the cardinal sin that was clear in every text. “If they found that I’d actually eaten a person, they’d send someone to kill me. The Temple Inkarnam never brings up a generation without closing the kill circle.”

“Sorry. The what?”

“If they’re going to train a child on say… a copperhead, they’ll make sure they train the next kid on something that can kill a copperhead. The black kingsnake is standard, I think. Then, the next kid would get something that can kill a kingsnake, like a boa constrictor. Factoring in size, strength, and venom potency, it tends to make a circle that closes where it began.”

“Are there even snakes that could kill you though?”

“Of course.” In all cases, Isa was confident that he could make it a death embrace for them both if he wanted to—but it wasn’t a given that he would want to. He had decided a long time ago that he wouldn’t resist Kendiri, if the temple sent her after him. Nazaru… he went back and forth on that one.

“What kind of snakes can kill a monster python?”

“You mean extant, non-fictional snakes?” he couldn’t help asking. “There are a few. King cobra, green anaconda, black mamba, and inland taipan… that’s about it. With some of the smaller venomous snakes, it’s hit or miss.”

“Ah,” Damo said. “Guess that explains Nazaru.”

Isa’s head jerked up, startling Tapia from his shoulders onto the deck. “What?”

“He’s about your age, and he turns into a cobra, right? So—”

“No. I mean—you know Nazaru?”

“Darlin’, I know every mercenary who hunts in the South Wilds. When I did a job with him a couple years back, he mentioned that you two grew up together, and—”

“That he could kill me? Because that’s not true,” Isa said too quickly, belatedly realizing that he was sounding very much like he had at nine, when he and Nazaru had first gotten their snake forms and argued about them to the point that an exasperated Kendiri had put a pillow over her head just to get some sleep. “It’s not,” he insisted when Damo eyed him with amused skepticism. “I’d kill him first.”

“Okay,” she laughed. “I take it you two didn’t part on the best of terms?”

“He sold me to bandits.”

“And you let him?” Damo still sounded more entertained than empathetic.

“I was sixteen.” It never would have happened if the three of them had stuck together, like Elder Thrask had wanted. But, after that first day’s trek along the river, Kendiri had turned west in the direction of Trestantia—though it wasn’t Trestantia that interested her; it was the corporomancers in the Wilds beyond. Of the three, she was the calmest, the most pragmatic, the gentle force that balanced their little trio on the edge of disaster. Neither Isa nor Nazaru really wanted to part with her, but they knew she needed to go west. It had been her fate since she first communed with Aer and saw the truth of her soul.

Isa often wondered what would have become of him if he had gone west into the Wilds with Kendiri instead of north with Nazaru.

“We should probably all split up,” Nazaru had said forebodingly, “you can’t trust anybody out here.”

“That means we should stick together,” Isa had said.

“Well, Kendiri’s set on the Wilds,” Nazaru had shrugged, “and I’m headed to Krell, so you get to pick one of us.”

Weighing the two, Isa had found the idea of Krell marginally less frightening than the idea of the Wilds and opted to stick with Nazaru. This proved to be a mistake when Nazaru sold him to bandits in the first town where they stopped. When Isa had emerged from their wagon, sabers dripping with blood, seething, crying, because Aer and all the Spirits help him, he had just killed three men, Nazaru had laughed, “Told you not to trust anybody.” And that had effectively ended their partnership.

“Ouch,” Damo had the nerve to giggle and Isa figured bitterly that she and Nazaru probably got along very well. “So, you and he are part of a kill circle?”

“Yes,” though for their particular age group, it was really a kill triangle; Isa, Nazaru, and Kendiri were all capable of dispatching each other, if necessary.

“Fun way to raise kids.”

“Well, when you have a cult of snake shifters in the middle of a Goddess-fearing city and you want people to let you hang around, you’ve got to show them you can clean up your damn messes.”

“And your cult doesn’t consider you a damn mess?” Damo looked surprised.

Isa just frowned at the backs of his hands, which was answer enough for Damo.

“Remains to be seen. Got it. Speakin’a which, this is your stop comin’ up, isn’t it?”

The Temple Inkarnam sat right up against the river. The open front of the building featured statues of the Seven Spirits—sort of. The spirits Inkarnam had no true forms, no physical essence for a sculptor to capture. Sculptures were just something riverlanders expected and required in a place of worship, so the Inkarnai of Azenkar had done their best. Endra was depicted as a woman, heavily pregnant, with features deliberately similar to local sculptures of Ostia. Raba was a severe man with a book like Ostia Sapiam’s in one hand and sword like Ostia Cassidar’s in the other. Aer was cloaked, obscuring all features. Theid was slightly emaciated, more animal than man or woman, eyes set deep in hollows, nails overgrown to claws. Like Endra, Osu had been cast as a woman, with classical riverlander features and curves. Alkem was lithe and androgynous, long hair loose about zir body like tumultuous waters. Ever was last in the line, a robed skeleton with the horns of an oryx and the jaws of a crocodile.

A swell of breeze brought the smell of incense to Isa and, with it, a heady rush of memory… playing hide and seek with Nazaru among the ankles of statues when they were supposed to be cleaning, bending over snake bites with Elder Thrask, the first time Isa had kissed a girl... Diran, the taipan shifter. She had taken his face between her hands behind the statue of Ever and pressed their lips together. Isa hadn’t known what to do with his mouth, so it had come out wet and clumsy and she had made fun of him for it right up until she left for the wandering a season before Isa.

Incense had no religious significance to the Inkarnai, who never used hallucinogens to connect with their gods—since their approach to meditation required total lucidity. The incense was really there to mask the reptilian smells of the serpentarium below and to impress a religious aura on the outsiders who visited for anti-venoms and organ replacements. To the average Azenkari, the Temple Inkarnam seemed like any proper church: stands of incense and stone gods in a vast hall. But this was just the face the temple showed to Azenkar. The truth of it was beneath the earth. And that was Isa’s way in.

"Have fun in there," Damo said as Isa climbed onto the rail of the Waning Ibis. “Guess I'll see you after I've picked up Nath."

“Nath?” Isa looked back at her, let out a little laugh, then a louder one as he turned the name over again. “Nath.” So, that was what Damo had meant when she said she had secured ‘real backup’? “Funny that didn’t come up earlier.”

“Well, you were so sure I was lying about Corrath, and the kingdom in the jungle, and the giant snake, I thought putting Nath Vendan on top might strain belief a little past the breaking point.”

“You were right,” Isa said, “but this is good.”

“It is?”

“Yeah, if Nath of the Iron Valley is real, and you know him, and he’s on this boat when I get back, maybe I’ll start believing half your story about the snake.”

"Fair enough."

 “Uh… Hold up,” Captain Xabres said when he noticed Isa crouched on the rail of the ship, balanced only by a combination of Azenkari river legs and years of scaling rooftops. “What are you doing, Inkarnam? You can’t—"

“He’s fine, Captain," Damo said as Isa prepared to dive. "In fact, watch this. It’s really somethin’ else.”

Isa plunged into the water, transformed, and just heard Xabres exclaim, “Ostia spend me dry!” before the water closed over his head.

When Isa had first learned to transform, the thing that had excited him most hadn’t been the thermal or vibration sensors. It had been the ocular scale.

“Why?” Kendiri had asked.

“Because when the wet season comes, I’ll be able to see under the river!” Isa had said giddily.

“Idiot,” Nazaru sneered. “You can’t see in the river.”

“How would you know?” Isa shot back. “You haven’t tried it.”

“Neither of you have tried it.” Kendiri couldn’t have sounded less interested but the two boys exchanged a glance and then tore down the steps, ignoring her shout of, “Oh, for Osu’s sake! I’m not coming to save you from any crocodiles!”

Isa was the faster sprinter, but Nazaru hauled back on his braid and muscled his way through the serpentarium doors first. The two boys sprinted that way into the tunnels below the Temple Inkarnam, pulling, shoving, and scrambling to get ahead. As their boots splashed into the ankle-deep waters of the lower tunnels, the anti-crocodile grate came into a view, and they looked at each other in challenge.

Neither boy could back down, so both ran at the iron bars full-tilt and transformed at the last second. Two snakes shot through the grate and plunged into the river beyond, reticulated python and king cobra, neck in neck. Isa hit the water first, winning the race, but, as usual, Nazaru’s cynicism won out against Isa’s bright-eyed curiosity. The same muck that made Isa’s human eyes burn when he tried to hold them open underwater clouded the river so completely that, even in python form, he could scarcely see three feet in front of his nose.

He stayed out in the open water far longer than he should have, at first hoping he would be able to make out something in the murk, and then just hoping that Nazaru would get bored and head back up the tunnel, so that Isa wouldn’t have to face him. But when Isa returned to the tunnel, the other boy was lounging back against the grate with a smirk on his stupid, insufferable face.

“See?” he said. “Told you so.”

And because Isa was only nine and hadn’t yet learned to balance Theid’s influence with better judgment, he punched Nazaru in the face.

Nine-year-old Isa would have been greatly consoled—even as Nazaru dragged his head back by the hair, rolled on top of him, and held him under that dingy water—to know that one day he would find himself staring through a mile of crystal-clear river. At the same time, snide, cynical little Nazaru would have been pleased to learn that the sight brought Isa no joy, that Isa had grown past joy. Maybe, after all these years, he had finally caught up to Nazaru in that. In venomous, pessimistic, bitterness.

Isa could have felt his way to the old tunnel entrance by vibration and memory, but in the clear water, he could see where the eelweed parted around a shadowed hole. It wasn’t the easiest way in, but it was Isa’s best bet at making it to Elder Thrask undiscovered, so he swam down and into the dark. During the wet season, this subterranean stream ran straight to the heart of the temple, filling the pool where teachers taught trainees how to swim. Now, the water tapered off just before the anti-crocodile grate, where Isa and Nazaru had gotten into that most disastrous of their many fistfights twenty years ago. The trouble hadn’t been that Nazaru had nearly killed Isa—that was nothing new—but that they had gotten into their splashy altercation on the wrong side of the grate. They didn’t realize they had company until the five-foot croc had taken a bite out of Nazaru’s leg. In the next instant, both boys transformed and bit back in an untrained frenzy of teeth and coils that very easily could have spelled the end for all three of them.

By the grace of Osu, when the biting, and thrashing, and constriction was done, they had managed to kill the crocodile and not each other. Isa had cried because, for all his bravado, it was the first time he had ever killed anything, while Nazaru slumped back against the grate and laughed hysterically. The Inkarnai had attributed the laughing fit to the shock of blood loss, but that was before they came to understand how much Nazaru genuinely enjoyed the sight of blood—even his own. Isa hadn’t been down this particular tunnel since that day—not so much because of the crocodile but because, when Elder Thrask had found out, ze had beaten them so badly that neither boy had felt much like poking around the tunnels for years afterward.

Once Isa had slipped through the grate, he transformed and straightened up, surprised by how small the space felt now that he was full grown. Bioluminescent cells lined the walls, filling the tunnel with murky blue-green light. They were delicate constructions of phosphorescent animal parts that only the High Inkarnai knew how to cultivate, and Isa wondered as he walked the winding corridor, if they had dimmed with age. He could have sworn that tunnels had been brighter during his childhood. Maybe Isa’s eyes had just been better back then. Maybe he had just been too dumb to fear the dark.

As he rounded the last curve on silent feet, the dim light fell on a figure in black… a child, leaning back against the wall, studying the end of her braid. Isa froze and was about to slink back into the shadows to take a different route. But the girl noticed him a half-second after he noticed her, jerking to attention as if afraid she had just been caught dozing.

“Elder!” She dropped the end of her braid and tugged the front of her cassock straight. “Can I do anything… for…?” She trailed off as the bio-light fell across Isa’s face.

“I’m actually looking for Elder Thrask, if ze’s got time.”

“I… I don’t know you,” the girl said tensely.

“You wouldn’t. You’re what? Twelve?”

“Thirteen,” she snapped defensively.

“My apologies, Inkarnam. Thirteen. Still, you’d have been in the nursery when I hit the road for the wandering. Nice sabers, by the way,” he said—just to let her know that he had noticed her right hand straying to one of the handles. “They giving these to trainees now?”

“I’m not a trainee. I’m a guard.”

“A guard?” Against what, Isa wondered. Marauding lungfish? “Down here?” 

“Yes, Elder, and you’re trespassing.”

“Nice to meet you too…” Isa tilted his head to get a better look at the tag runes repeated across her hands and scabbards. “Zarra.”

She stiffened. “You’re actually one of us…” Only a true Inkarnai could read tag runes at a glance.

“No,” Isa said sarcastically. “I bought this get-up in a costume shop.”

For whatever reason, the revelation didn’t seem to relax the girl. She had gone tense all over like a prey animal ready to bolt. But no matter her size, she was Inkarnam, and there was predatory intensity in her eyes as they zeroed in on his tag runes.

“Isa…” her eyes went wide. “You’re the other one… The mercenary.”

“Well, someone’s done her homework.” Isa attempted a smile that wasn’t returned.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Look,” Isa started forward, “I just—”

Zarra stepped back, but instead of the sound of her foot hitting the stones, the gunpowder pop of transformation filled the tunnel. In a flash of animantic light, Isa found himself facing a six-foot rattlesnake. He had a splinter of a second to register her species—diamondback, lethally venomous—before she struck.

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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