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

Every hunter in the South Wilds knew to fear the diamondback rattlesnake. Few had the speed to avoid one once it struck, but Isa had grown up dodging snake bites and jumped back just in time. As Zarra Inkarnam’s jaws closed on air, Isa’s fingers closed on the handles of his sabers. Both blades were out by the time the lurching viper recovered her balance.

She hissed, tail rattling in agitation, but Isa had effectively beaten her to the draw. For all her venom, there were now two blades between her and her target. Horrifyingly, though, she didn’t back down. Instead, she pressed forward, slit olive eyes absorbing her prey with determined intensity. Fuck. She was still going to try it.

“Oh, come on,” Isa groaned.

He could stop her—easily—but he’d have to kill her. He had good control with his sabers, but he couldn’t out-strike a rattler without slicing at full speed—fast enough to take the head off.

Zarra came at him, a ribbon of death.

And for a dark fraction of a second, Isa thought of standing still and letting those fangs sink into his calf above the boot. Death by rattler venom would be bitterly painful, but with that agony consuming his mind, maybe there wouldn’t be space for any other pain. For Isa’s purposes, it might not be a bad way to go.

At the last moment, Aer jerked him back from the dark, and he transformed.

Three hundred and fifty pounds of python slammed from pocket space into the tunnel before Zarra in a mass of coils forty times her size. Immediately, Isa reared up so that she could see the sheer difference between his snake form and hers. Once the spring was loosed, a rattler couldn’t stop a forward lunge, meaning the poor little Inkarnam crashed painfully against Isa’s side and glanced off without penetrating. A better angle might have gotten her through his scales—rattler fangs were nasty like that—but even if she managed a decent bite, her little venom glands didn’t have the juice to do more than annoy an animal Isa’s size. Like a wasp sting to a human, the bite would burn and throb and ultimately do little.

The dizzied diamondback knew instantly that she’d made a mistake. Isa could crush her, bite her in half, possibly even break her spine with a particularly brutal thrash of his coils. He wouldn’t, of course, but she didn’t know that. She snapped back to human form in a bang of light that would have left a sight-reliant creature reeling. But Isa, with his battery of heat sensors, didn’t lose track of her for a moment. And two could play at that game.

As the hyperventilating girl scrambled for her sabers, Isa transformed back himself. The explosion of animantic energy left Zarra momentarily blind, with no pit organs to make up for the deficit. Isa straightened into his human body to find her stumbling back, frantically blinking to clear the clouds of dark from her eyes.

Four Inkarnai sabers hissed from their scabbards in the same breath. Zarra lashed out first—fast, befitting a viper—but she couldn’t see where she was slicing. And even if her eyes had been in commission, her movements were too frantic to be precise. Again, Isa brought his unfair advantage of size and strength to bear, meeting the next swing with a crashing downward strike that knocked Zarra’s right saber from her hand to the floor.

Wryly, Isa pictured Elder Thrask turning this into a teachable moment. Hasty child, ze would scold and then say something half-poetic like… What good is striking first if your enemy strikes last? Probably something snappier and more insightful than that. But Isa was no teacher.

Panicked and underconfident, Zarra misspent a precious moment trying to switch her left saber to her dominant right hand. Isa’s blade met hers mid-transfer and her remaining saber went spinning into the dark.

Isa had ended the clash as decisively as he could without killing the girl, but the clang of metal reverberating through the surrounding tunnel made him wince. He knew how sound carried through these corridors during the dry season, straight up through the well into the heart of the Temple. If anyone was in that central chamber, they would come running. He had moments to fix this, to think of some way to explain himself.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said to Zarra, who had plastered herself back against the tunnel wall, eyes wide, breath coming in panicked gasps. “I was never going to hurt you.” Her eyes flicked to the first saber she had dropped, lying like a glistening fang on the stones between them. Isa put his boot on it to discourage the thought and she cringed back into the wall.

“Don’t… Look. Look.” He flipped both sabers into reverse grip and Zarra flinched again at the movement, but Isa only lined the blades up to the scabbards and sheathed them. “I’m just looking for—”

The vague sense of a body behind him was all the warning Isa got before arms wrapped around him and a mouth pressed to his neck. “Me?”

Even aged past puberty and transformation, Isa knew his friend’s voice.

“Kendiri,” he breathed, paralyzed.

Her embrace wasn’t strong around him but that grip wasn’t what held him in place; it was never meant to. The real threat was that mouth right up against his neck. If Kendiri transformed from this position, it would plant her mamba’s fangs right in Isa’s flesh—human or python, it wouldn’t matter; there was no creature on Earth big enough to shake off that venom. Isa would have time to crush Kendiri in his coils before death took him, but her elephant-felling bite would kill him, retaliation or none. Mutually assured destruction.

“Isa.” She didn’t sound remotely surprised. Instead, there was a sadness in her voice to match the darkest gray in Isa’s soul. “Welcome home, brother.”

The old familiarity pierced deep, though her teeth never touched his skin.

“Zarra, take his weapons,” Kendiri said against Isa’s neck. “He won’t move.”

“Y-yes, Elder Kendiri,” the young Inkarnam stammered and moved forward to slide Isa’s sabers from their scabbards. She did so quickly and stepped back with the weapons held defensively before her, just in case he did try something.

“I told you, child, he’s not going anywhere. We’re of a kill circle, Isa and I. Toss them.”

Zarra did as she was told and Isa’s jaw tightened at the sound of his sabers clattering harshly on the stone floor. Not good for the blades. Then again, neither was the way he had treated the Zarra’s sabers. Fair enough that she return the favor.

“Now, there are seven vials on my belt,” Kendiri said. “Take the third one from the right.”

Zarra approached and Isa didn’t dare turn to look as she took the vial from Kendiri’s belt. Not with the mamba shifter’s lips at his neck. She stepped back with a little glass vial of the kind used to store antivenoms. Only this one was painted with Kendiri’s intricate tag rune.

“Drink it,” Kendiri ordered.

Zarra looked up in surprise. “Elder?”

“I said, drink it. Quickly, please.”

Zarra hesitated but didn’t dare defy an order from a senior Inkarnam. It was the elders, after all, who knew how to handle the Temple’s venoms, antivenoms, and more intricate remedies. If they told you to drink a thing, you drank it. Pulling the stopper from the vial, Zarra put the unknown substance to her lips and tossed it back. Isa found himself grimacing faintly at the sight—and the realization that he wouldn’t have done any different at her age, when the world was simple and trust came easily.

“Sit,” Kendiri said as Zarra lowered the empty vial.

Zarra did as she was told clumsily, her legs giving out prematurely, so that she sat heavily and fell back against the wall for support. Her eyes had grown unfocused.

“Kendiri,” Isa said uneasily, straining slightly against his friend’s grip for the first time. “What—”

“Shh,” Kendiri shushed him with the same annoyance as she used to back in the temple archives when he interrupted her studies. Her grip dug into his arms. “Wait.”

Zarra’s eyelids sagged, blinking sluggishly beneath their own weight.

“Sedative,” Isa realized.

Kendiri sighed an irritated breath along the edge of his jaw. “What part of ‘wait’ do you not understand?”

“Apologies, Esteemed Elder,” Isa couldn’t help but needle, risking tilting his head slightly in her direction. “How many hours in the milking room?”

“Four.”

“Ha.”

“I’m not joking.” Kendiri released him as Zarra’s head dropped sideways onto her shoulder.

“She’s just unconscious, right?” Isa said, looking down at the young Inkarnam.

“Of course. Wouldn’t be the first time she’s nodded off while on watch. She’ll come to within an hour and assume this was a dream.”

Isa turned and, for the first time, faced a different Kendiri from the one he had known. Her mahogany hair and deep brown eyes were unchanged, but the rest of her… She looked so much more feminine than the spindly, studious child Isa had grown up with. Too feminine, actually. Too full. The picture was all made more dramatic by the hooded gray robe over her cassock.

“That robe…” Isa said. “Are you—?”

“A High Inkarnam?” Kendiri smiled a strange bitter smile. “Yeah. Ridiculous, right?”

“Y—” Isa stopped himself short of ‘yeah,’ figuring that would be rude. But the youngest person Isa had ever heard of ascending to High Inkarnam had been Elder Darres, who had passed the initiation at the age of forty. Kendiri was Isa’s age peer, not yet thirty.

“How?”

Kendiri had always been talented and wise beyond her years, but that couldn’t make up for the decades of study required to attain the rank of High Inkarnam.

“The plague hit us the same as everyone else, Isa, took half the elders.”

“Oh,” Isa said quietly. He had always thought of the Temple as this untouchable place that existed only in the past. As soon as he had made the decision not to go back, it had frozen into a construct of his memories. The idea that the same plague that had taken Taniri had come here too… well, obviously, it had. Isa just hadn’t let himself think about it. And, in the brief moments he had, he had consoled himself with the idea that the Inkarnai were good doctors. Surely, if anyone was going to be spared, it would be them.

“Nine of us were promoted prematurely to fill the gaps.” Kendiri shrugged. “A poor patch job, but someone has to run the Temple.”

“Elder Thrask?” Isa asked before fear of the answer could freeze his tongue.

Kendiri shook her head. This time she did say, “I’m sorry. Ze was happy with you, you know… with the choices you’d made in the end. Ze died happy with you.”

Then Elder Thrask had died early in the plague, before finding out where Isa’s choices had led him after. The only comfort in that thought was that the old Inkarnam hadn’t suffered as long as some.

Suddenly feeling cold and bitterly tired, Isa slumped back against the tunnel wall. “I guess, I’m glad I didn’t get the chance to disappoint zir… again.”

“Alright, well, I’m the High Inkarnam now.” Kendiri crossed to Zarra and lowered herself gingerly, bending at the knees to retrieve her vial from the girl’s limp hand. “You only have to worry about disappointing me.” Holding the wall for support, Kendiri straightened up.

“I…” Isa had planned what he would say if he were caught, different versions for Elder Thrask, Kendiri, the Elders who had liked him, those who hadn’t. The strange warping of time that came with looking at his childhood friend—grown up, fully realized—took all those words away. Suddenly, he was entirely preoccupied with Kendiri’s shape, the way the once-spry Inkarnam had squatted down instead of bending at the waist…

“Kendiri, are you…?”

“No need to look so stunned,” she said in annoyance. “You know the Truth Aer gave me and you know my skills.”

It wasn’t the fact that Kendiri had been able to get pregnant that had Isa shocked. It was the fact that she grabbed him—from behind, without warning—while he had been armed.

“I could have hurt you, Kendiri!” he exclaimed, genuinely angry for the first time in this strange reunion. “I could have…” He gestured to her pregnant belly, unable to even voice the rest of the thought. An elbow. That was all it would have taken. One moment of knee-jerk resistance.

“I’d have transformed first,” Kendiri said indifferently. Unlike Nazaru, with his grating posturing, Kendiri had only ever been honest about her abilities—and she had always transformed ungodly.

The words only half-cooled Isa’s anger. Because even Kendiri, blessed of Aer, could be wrong, and what if she had been wrong here. What if Isa had…

“You look terrible,” Kendiri said.

“Excuse you,” Isa snapped back, like they were twelve—because it was the only way he could think of to deflect those fangs from tender flesh. “I’m in excellent shape.”

But Kendiri was no half-trained rattler. A flashy scale exterior was nothing before her fangs. “I meant the Gray of you,” she said. “You’re a wreck.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s alright,” Kendiri said before Isa could refuse to talk about it. “I know why. You don’t need to explain.”

She didn’t say ‘I’m sorry.’ Kendiri had never been sentimental, but in her own measured way, she had always been compassionate. Far too compassionate to lead Isa into a conversation most would force.

“This, on the other hand…” Kendiri gestured around them. “You willexplain this.” When Isa was quiet, she drew her left saber. “Now, please.”

She had always fought like that: one-handed, left-handed. Elder Thrask had given her grief about it for years, but Kendiri’s skill, compounded by the confusion of muscle memory that came with facing a left-handed swordswoman, made her deadlier with one saber than two.

Armed, Isa might be able to take her. In the space of a second, he could transform twice and have his weapons back from where Zarra had thrown them… but he wouldn’t. Standing here, he knew for certain that he wouldn’t be the one to close their kill circle. Not on Kendiri. Not when she had a child on the way and Isa’s was gone.

Kendiri could press that blade to his solar plexus, lean into it slowly, and Isa wouldn’t lift a hand to stop her. Like any good swordswoman, Kendiri stood still for a moment, reading Isa’s reaction, the way he sank a little further back into the wall, tired and unresisting.

“Explain,” she a little too gently for the words to be a command.

“Would you believe me if I said I wasn’t trying to do any harm?”

“Yes,” Kendiri said, “if you can tell me what you were trying to do.”

“I have a dangerous job coming up,” he said and quickly added, “Not murder. Just a traditional hunt, but my tattoos are wearing thin.”

“They certainly are,” Kendiri said. “You want them refreshed.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all,” Isa said, confused. What else would he be after?

“I believe you,” Kendiri said after a beat of consideration—long enough that Isa respected her caution, short enough that it didn’t wound him—“but I would say that your timing is more than a little suspicious.”

“My timing?”

“There’s a reason we have apprentices guarding these tunnels,” she said. “Three days ago, we had a intruder come in this way.”

“Through the anti-crocodile grate?” Isa said in shock. “But no one else could…” He trailed off as he realized that there was one other person who could. “Nazaru?”

Kendiri’s expression—sedate and disappointed—was his answer.

“Do you know why?” Isa had to guess that Nazaru’s reasons had been similar to his own. After so long away from the Temple, anyone’s tattoos would wear thin. And after the things Nazaru had done, his chances of being welcomed in through the front doors would be worse than Isa’s.

“Nazaru also claimed to have a job coming up—also a monster, like yours.” Kendiri was studying Isa’s face as she spoke, tracking his reaction. “A giant snake, apparently, in a kingdom far down south. When I caught up to him in the archives, he asked if I wanted in, promised me a frankly ludicrous amount of money to drop everything and go with him. When I turned him down, he took all our vipers.”

“What?”

“Well, all the really potent ones. They’re going to be hell to replace. He also took a rather important book.”

Isa could hardly hear her. “He said a giant snake? In a kingdom down south?”

“He called it Lothmedi. Apparently, another mercenary he knew came to him with the job… a tactomancer he used to tumble.”

Damored.

“Raba damn it!” he snarled.

Kendiri blinked in surprise as Isa’s anger reverberated down the tunnel.

We need you along, Damo had said.You know more about snakes than anyone I know. “She lied to me.”

Well, not exactly, Aer pointed out as Isa started to pace in anger.

Damo had said she needed a snake-shifter. If Isa wasn’t the first Inkarnam she had approached, well, that was an omission, not a lie. And why exactly was Isa so angry? Damored had always lied, played multiple angles at once. She was a spy, for Aer’s sake.

As he paced back again, his hand flexing with the desire to punch a wall, he realized that Damored wasn’t really the focus of that anger. She was what she was—a thief, a liar, and a hedonist, who subsisted on thrill. Nazaru seemed to subsist on cruelty. He was the dark focal point, always one mocking step ahead of Isa. Not through any skill but through his total lack of conscience.

“Agh!” Isa uttered a disgusted sound as a second thought occurred to him.

“What?” Kendiri asked.

“Nothing.” Isa had just realized that Nazaru—the closest thing he had to a brother—and he had slept with the same woman. Aer. It wasn’t a wildly unlikely thing. Mercenaries who took jobs in the same area often worked together, slept together, got intimate—and Damored got around more than most. Still, the thought of her with Nazaru made Isa want to scrub his skin clean. Maybe he would miss the Waning Ibis when it left Azenkar’s East Harbor. Maybe it would be best to just not look at Damored’s face ever again.

“I’m confused,” Kendiri said, watching Isa stalk the width of the tunnel. “Who lied to you?”

“Damored.”

“The Sazuman mercenary?”

“Yeah.” Isa dragged a hand over his face. “She…” He toyed for a moment with the idea of telling a lie. But Kendiri had always been too close to Aer to fall for those. And what would be the point of lying, anyway? Kendiri had already caught him trying to sneak in, so nothing he said would make him look innocent. And she had once seen him fall down a flight of stairs trying to catch a lizard, so it wasn’t as though he had any dignity to protect.

“Damored also came to me with the Lothmedi job—I’m assuming after Nazaru turned her down—and I agreed. Why he turned her down, I don’t know,” Isa said when he paused pacing for a moment. On any kind of large game hunt, there was no one better to have along than Damored.

“He didn’t want to split the bounty,” Kendiri said, “or rather, he thought he had better people to split it with than the crew your Sazuman had in mind. My understanding was that he was trying to beat her to the target.”

“Of course.” That did sound like Nazaru. “But you have to believe me, Kendiri, I didn’t know he was anywhere near this thing. Hand to Aer—”

“Oh, I believe you,” Kendiri laughed in that knowing way Isa had always found so infuriating when they were young. It was still mildly irritating.

“What’s so funny?”

“I just know you would never get in bed with someone who considered you a second choice to Nazaru.”

“Well, would you?” Isa shot back.

“Wouldn’t know,” Kendiri smiled. “I’ve never come in second to either of you.”

Remembering that she had a blade raised between them, Isa resisted the urge to hiss. So much of his childhood memory was consumed by Nazaru’s cruelty. He had forgotten that Kendiri had been quite the brat too, when she deigned to get in the mud with them.

“The point is,” Isa said, “I was just looking for help with my tattoos. That’s all.”

“Funny,” Kendiri said. “If that was all, you could have come to the front hall and asked.”

“Would they have let me in?” Isa realized that his words were basically an admission: he had been ready to take what he needed from the Temple, with or without permission. But the idea of being lumped in with Nazaru rankled and he added, defensively, “I wasn’t going to steal anything from the serpentarium or the archives. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Hmm.” Kendiri was considering him again, her saber lowered but not sheathed. “Why not?”

It was Isa’s turn to laugh. “What do you mean why not? What am I going to do with a book and a basket of vipers?”

“Well, if the job description Nazaru gave me is true and you’re looking at a snake from the age of megafauna, sabers wouldn’t kill it. A cobra’s venom wouldn’t kill it. But the venom of many, many potent vipers, applied correctly… then you’re getting somewhere.”

“Sure.” Isa half rolled his eyes. “That’s assuming this thing exists. But it’s not possible, is it?” Kendiri was quiet and Isa felt his eyes widening. “Fuck. Is it?”

“I don’t know,” Kendiri sighed. “There are attempts to answer that in some of the older texts in our archives. All theoretical, but… Nazaru took one of those texts when he left. The oldest.”

“Wait—the Herpendium?” Isa said in disbelief. He had never been one to remember all the names of the dusty old books he’d be forced to read if he wanted to ascend to High Inkarnam, but of course, he knew the name of his cult’s most prized and sacred text. “You let him take the Herpendium?”

Kendiri didn’t seem affronted. “His heist was a little better considered than yours and a lot more aggressive. He had an accomplice with him… a light-skinned foreigner with strange godmarks and stranger magic.”

“Like an osseomancer?” Isa asked, trying to imagine what kind of obscure magic could have caught the High Inkarnai off-guard.

“No.” Kendiri shook her head, looking faintly unsettled at the memory. “This was no Riverlander, and the magic he did… no text I know even has a name for it. We might have been able to stop him, but we got slowed down administering antivenom to the four people Nazaru bit on his way out—and the fifteen more bitten when the foreigner destroyed the viper enclosures. No one died, although it was a close thing.”

“But the Herpendium…” Isa said, surprised at the mournful note in his voice—for a book, of all things; Spensa would have been so smug. In his defense, this was the book. The High Inkarnai guarded it so carefully that there weren’t even any copies. “Our order was born from that text.”

“Yes,” Kendiri said, “and it dies without its living members.” She looked to Zarra, still sitting unconscious against the wall. “The decision we made was calculated.”

“It’s what Nazaru knew you would do,” Isa said darkly.

Kendiri nodded, seeming to understand that his anger was for Nazaru and not her. Then, after a moment of silence, she sheathed her saber.

“What are you doing?” Isa asked in surprise.

“The next kid will be down to relieve Zarra in a few minutes, and she’ll be waking up about then. Pick up your weapons.”

Really? Isa almost laughed. Just like that, you’re going to trust me?

But the thought smacked so disgustingly of Nazaru that he shut his mouth and did as Kendiri said, cleaning his blades on his cassock before returning them to their scabbards. He wasn’t sure what Kendiri was planning, but for the moment, she didn’t seem to be against him, and that was good enough.

“Here.” Kendiri slung her High Inkarnam’s cloak off her shoulders. “Put this on. If you keep the hood up, they’ll assume you’re one of the other elders and we’re…” She paused with the garment halfway extended toward Isa. “No.” A smile turned the corner of her mouth. “No. Actually, I have a better idea.” Pulling the cloak back around her own shoulders, she turned in the direction of the Temple. “Follow me.”

“What?” Without a disguise or anything to cover his identifying tattoos? After his childhood friend had just burgled the Temple? How was that supposed to work?

“I’m trusting you, Isa,” Kendiri said. “Now, trust me.”

Trust no one, Nazaru crooned from Isa’s memory.

It was good advice, but just to spite Nazaru, Isa nodded. “Alright,” he agreed and followed Kendiri down the tunnel.

It felt odd strolling back into the Temple Inkarnam as though he belonged there. As though nothing had changed in the last twelve years. The central chamber was empty when Isa and Kendiri came up the steps into the pool basin.

“Were the steps always this small?” Isa muttered.

Kendiri smiled. “Don’t know if you noticed, Isa, but you got tall.”

Isa hadn’t really noticed. All he knew was that in those first few years away from the Temple, he had felt entirely too small, too skinny, too weak. When he had grown, it had seemed barely fast enough to put him at eye level with a world so much bigger and meaner than himself. Whether or not he had ever really grown into the brutality of mercenary life or the even more daunting responsibility of farm life, he was now decisively too big—too rough—for the place where he had grown up.

Carved stone arches were close over his head as he followed Kendiri up another flight of stairs into the serpentarium. The reptile smell, so distinct from river smell and farm smell, wrapped around Isa like a blanket that no longer fit, half-comforting but pulling awkwardly and leaving parts of him cold. The biolights here were weak like the ones in the tunnels below, but sunlight streamed through circular grates in the ceiling to warm the pits of snakes below.

Kendiri led Isa down the narrow walkway between the pits, each of which contained a different species, with trappings tailored to the inhabitant’s needs. A pair of anacondas rested halfway in a shallow pool, their backs slick with water, their stillness so perfect they might have been made of dark glass. A spindly brown boomslang hung from a tangle of branches, all but indistinguishable from the surrounding limbs. A cluster of boa constrictors basked on their rocks, indifferent to the slither and hiss of the feistier ball pythons in the next pit over.

Isa’s footsteps slowed at the reticulated python pit and sentiment made him pause. There were two new snakes there, but Isa immediately recognized Zendris, his reference snake. Still here, unchanged, after all these years. Isa couldn’t see himself when he transformed, but his snake form had been cast from this creature. Twenty-eight feet of power, bounded by dappled olive-green scales. Years of Isa’s life had been spent watching Zendris, learning his every ring of muscle, the way he slithered, the way he swam… the way he killed.

Snakes weren’t sentimental creatures. They didn’t bond with humans or recognize old companions but the aging monster lifted his head above the water’s surface as Isa looked down at him. His tongue flicked out to scent the air and Isa’s own tongue pressed at his teeth with an old urge to imitate. Zendris would probably as soon eat Isa as welcome him back to the Temple. A dark part of Isa appreciated that simplicity. He nodded to the monster in the mirror before turning to rejoin Kendiri.

But Kendiri had stopped too, fifteen-some paces on. Light from the grate overhead fell at her feet in a familiar pattern. Despite the fact that they were both too tall, time vanished for a moment as Isa realized that the two of them had stood exactly this way hundreds of times, Isa observing his reference snake, Kendiri two pits down, observing hers. But when Isa went to her and followed her gaze down, the peace of memory opened on a jarring emptiness.

The far wall of the mamba pit was gone, along with the walls of several neighboring pits. Jagged rock framed the absence, as if someone had crashed through the six inches of stone with a battering ram the size of a tower. Except, when Isa looked closer, he realized that the edges were singed. Not impact, then.

“Gunpowder?” he asked, turning to Kendiri.

“Magic.”

“What? But—”

“I told you we’d never seen anything like it. This mage came from a different land, I’m guessing from beyond the Barrows or across the Middle Sea. He didn’t carry any weapon. That”—Kendiri nodded to the twenty-foot gap in the wall—“came from his bare hands.”

Isa had never heard of anyone crossing the Middle Sea but then, he had never heard of a man shooting gunpowder charges from his hands either.

“And I thought I’d been keeping weird company since we parted ways,” Isa said, looking down on the decimated and empty pits. If memory served, these pits had housed most of the Temple’s vipers… “Mamba,” he murmured, “saw-scale, cobra, puff adder… banded krait… fer-de-lance? Shit.” He turned to Kendiri. “And Nazaru took them all?”

“About half,” Kendiri said. “Some died in the explosion and some he left to bite the poor kids who tried to go after him.”

“Miri?” Isa felt he should ask as they turned to continue out of the serpentarium. Kendiri had likely worked with her black mamba far longer than Isa had worked with Zendris.

“Oh, you know how tantrum-prone Nazaru gets when someone tells him ‘no.’ He cut Miri in seven pieces and threw them around for me to find.”

“Aer, what an asshole!”

“Language, Isa.” Kendiri made a shushing motion as they reached the next archway. “The kids are meditating.”

Beyond the snake pits lay the training chamber, where young Inkarnai meditated or studied their reference snakes in total silence. Despite the recent events and the gaping hole in their serpentarium, the day here proceeded as normal. A dozen children in the chamber and the only sound was the soft hiss of snakes and the sound of their scales on stone.

A girl who was probably Zarra’s age peer lay on her stomach alongside a beautiful burnt-orange corn snake, her cheek to the floor as she watched her reference animal slowly swallow a pigeon. Two boys sat back-to-back deep in meditation like Isa and Nazaru used to; except that Nazaru used to pinch Isa’s leg to make him yell and get into trouble. This pair seemed considerably better behaved. More like Taniri.

In another life—one with no Nazaru and better choices—Isa would have come back here and become a teacher for these little Inkarnai. But any future Isa might have had as a teacher had faded with his ties to the Temple and then disappeared entirely with Taniri.

Most of the trainees were too absorbed in their mental exercises to notice the two adults sweeping through the chamber on their way to something important. It was an adult Inkarnam who barred their way—another High Inkarnam far too young for the title. Isa vaguely remembered him as a towering teenager who had left for the Wandering four—maybe five—years ahead of Isa, Nazaru, and Kendiri. Now, he was shorter than Isa, his black hair already graying and thinning.

“What is this, Kendiri?” He whispered it, but in the stillness of the training chamber, he may as well have shouted. One of the meditating boys started from the Gray with a gasp. The other cracked an eye open in their direction. The girl on the floor with the corn snake lifted her head.

“This is Isa,” Kendiri said placidly. “Elder Thasa, you remember little Isa, my age peer—”

“And Nazaru’s,” Thasa said, his lips curling back into a snarl. “Another mercenary.”

All the children in the chamber looked up at the sheer venom in Thasa’s voice. A few stared at Isa with wide eyes, frightened. One girl clutched her rock python a little closer to her body, as if to protect it. That was good. Isa was a walking ambassador for all the worst things that could happen to an Inkarnam out in the world. He was everything the Elders warned in their horror stories: the world beyond the Temple is seductive and cruel. It will take your heart, your life, your soul, your humanity.

“Perhaps we should talk about this in the council chamber,” Kendiri suggested, “away from the children?”

“No.” Thasa put a hand pointedly on his right saber. “He’s not going one step further into the Temple.”

“Let’s not be dramatic—”

“We all know what kind of life he led after leaving us. He is a murderer and a thief.”

“Exactly,” Kendiri said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Look, we need the Herpendium back, but I can’t pursue Nazaru in my current condition”—Kendiri nodded to the bump at the front of her robes—“so I called in someone who can.”

“I’m sorry, you did this?” fury pushed Thasa’s voice past a whisper and a few trainees appeared at the doorway of the adjacent chamber, sticking their heads in to listen. “You brought him here?”

“Yes.” Kendiri was predisposed to blunt honesty, but when she chose to lie, she did so smoothly. “I sent for him the same day Nazaru robbed us.”

“The High Inkarnai should have been consulted!”

“You’re right, Elder. It was a decision of passion.” This was perhaps the most difficult lie to swallow; Isa had never known Kendiri to make a decision out of passion. Everything was considered with her—including, apparently, Thasa’s gullibility, because he seemed to buy the explanation immediately.

“The Council will not be pleased to hear of your rashness.”

“I’m sure they won’t,” Kendiri agreed, unbothered, “but it’s done. Isa’s here now and we’d be stupid not to accept his help.”

His help? Isa’s eyes left Thasa for a moment to flick to Kendiri. What exactly was she doing?

“How is bringing another murdering thief into this mess going to help?” Thasa demanded. A fair question. Isa and Nazaru tended to compound each other’s faults, not mitigate them. It was why their dynamic had gone toxic so fast in the absence of Kendiri’s antivenomous presence.

“I’d have thought that was obvious,” Kendiri said. “Isa’s experience is comparable to Nazaru’s in hunting, tracking, and combat. He’s going to follow Nazaru to the far kingdom where he’s headed. He has a plan, transportation, everything set up, right, Isa?” She turned to him with that calm smile.

“I…”

“Is this true, Isa Inkarnam?” Thasa’s eyes narrowed. “You have a plan to apprehend our rogue cobra-shifter?”

Blessed, damned clever Kendiri! She had found a way to play this to her advantage—at Isa’s expense, but he supposed that was fair; he had snuck in instead of announcing himself. When he glanced to his old friend, her eyebrows were raised just slightly over those intelligent brown eyes. You owe me, said that look.

“Yes, Elder.” Isa turned back to Thasa. “I’m going to get your Herpendium back.”

“And kill the thief, Nazaru?” Thasa added.

“Sure,” the vindictive child and the cold mercenary in Isa conspired to respond before the rest of him could think better of it. “Let’s throw that in for free.”

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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