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

The plague had damaged Spensa’s left eye. It no longer focused properly. The change should have made her gaze less terrifying. Instead, it seemed to reveal her for what she actually was: a goddess-blessed sage who beheld the Earthly with one eye and the Divine with the other.

Bad enough that she looked on Isa and saw what used to be her family. But she also saw the monster he was beneath the face he shared with their daughter. This close, her clothes smelled of incense—the bitter kind that devotees of Ostia Sapiam inhaled to commune with their goddess. The scent might gift her clarity but it pierced Isa’s lungs with memory and he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Blackness swarmed to the edges of the Gray and, with it, Theid’s frantic hiss.

Run! Fight! Protect yourself! 

But Spensa wasn’t a gunman or a lion. There was no killing the quiet pain in her eyes, no escape from the echo of Taniri in the shape of her face. Her stern expression slipped, baring a fragility Isa couldn’t take, and he looked away.

“Is it really so terrible to see me?”

“No!” Isa lied. “Y-you… um…” His voice foundered on even the most basic of formalities. How have you been? What right did he have to ask that? You’re looking well? She wasn’t. And whose fault was that?

Isa had fallen ill with the plague first. He was the one who had brought it into their home. The sickness had raked its claws through Isa with merciful efficiency. First the rash and vomiting, then the initial bout of fever, which had made him delirious. Those first few days, he remembered Spensa sitting at his side with a damp cloth trying to bring the fever down while Taniri brought water from the well.

Isa’s last image of his daughter alive—truly alive—was of her tottering with the weight of a bucket far too big for her, but still smiling.

“You’re going to be okay, Papa.” 

When she had put her little hands on him, he had twitched away. This deep in the fever, his skin had turned to a nest of vipers, which writhed and hissed at any touch. 

“You’re going to be okay, right? Your spirits will protect you?”

Isa’s throat had been too ragged to answer. 

“Papa?”

His consciousness seething with shapes and voices that weren’t there, Isa hadn’t realized that would be the last time he heard his daughter speak. When the fever finally released him, Spensa and Taniri had both been lying in the bed beside him, too sick to move, and only one of them had come back.

“I’m fine, by the way,” Spensa said, jerking Isa back to the present. Taniri vanished like an imagined extra step in the dark, leaving Isa lurching. “Thanks for asking.”

“So, you’re… I-I mean, have you—” Just thinking the word remarried made Isa physically ill, but Aer’s pragmatic voice pointed out that the Riverlands were an unforgiving place for a woman. Better than Krell, sure, but a single woman in Azenkar still enjoyed only the barest rights to property and protection under the law. 

“Where are you living now?” was the least offensive question Isa could think of.

“At home,” Spensa said.

“Home?” he said in surprise. “You mean your parents accepted you back?”

“My parents, who wouldn’t attend our wedding? No, dummy, our home—or my home, anyway. I’d never give up something I worked so hard to build and, unlike you, I don’t have a disreputable former profession to fall back on. I mean, I tried local soothsayer, but I don’t have the rotten teeth for it.”

“But… how…?” They had barely kept up the farm with the two of them running themselves ragged. “That’s too much work for just you.”

“You don’t say.”

“So… is there…?”

“Is there another man?” Spensa raised her eyebrows while her eyes narrowed in indignation. “Are you really going to ask me that?”

Isa closed his mouth. She was right. He was the one who had left. He had no right to ask.

And really why ask at all? said a smooth voice that wasn’t Aer’s. This was Theid, not understanding why Isa would open himself to that pain. The thought of Spensa with someone else hurt beyond all reason. The thought of her starving or worse because no one was there with her hurt more. No matter the answer, it would hurt. Better to keep that door closed, yes?

“If you must know, a neighbor’s widow has moved in with me, picks up some of the slack”—your slack, she didn’t say, but they both knew it was what she meant.

See? Theid said as Isa swallowed. Doesn’t feel better knowing, does it?

The knowledge that there was no other man had lifted a sickly weight. But an equally sickening surge of worry and guilt had rushed in to fill the space. Two women had no claim to land if the government—or fuck, even a distant male relative—decided to repossess it. Spensa still wasn’t safe, and Isa had the nerve to be relieved—

“I’m actually more interested in the men you’ve been cozy with recently,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“I hear you’re back to hunting. The dodgy, lucrative kind.”

“I…” It wasn’t like denying the accusation would do any good. 

But the mercenary work was a betrayal as much as leaving Spensa in the first place. She had made him swear off bounty hunting when they married. “No humans. Only animals. I don’t want you raising our little girl with fresh blood on your hands.” 

“That’s where you’re headed now, isn’t it?” The hurt was audible beneath Spensa’s monotone. “A hunt?”

“Yeah.”

“Human?”

“Monster.”

“Well then,” she said tightly, “don’t let me keep you.”

“What?” Isa said as, in the Darkness, Theid said go! She’s given you your opening. Go before this gets worse. But somehow, Aer got hold of Isa’s tongue and blurted, “No. I… I need to say something…” however ineffectual. 

“Do you?”

No! Theid hissed. No! 

“Yes. Spensa, I’m so sorry.”

“About what?” Spensa’s voice wasn’t gentle; she hadn’t meant the question gently.

Isa opened his mouth to answer, but Theid froze him—as ze had frozen him the night Taniri died cradled in his arms. It was a primally naive conceit: If you don’t move, maybe it won’t be real. You won’t have to face it. 

But when dawn had broken, so had Spensa’s fever and she turned.

Immediately, Isa could tell that something had gone wrong. Her left eye was sightless and sagging. The true cruelty was that the plague hadn’t finished the job and blinded her; she still plainly saw Taniri bundled in Isa’s arms, her little body too stiff. She had still been able to look at him with the agony of hope straining to its limit.

“Taniri…” she had whispered, a last thread of hope—

And Isa had to be the one to break it.

In the months he stayed away from Spensa, he had managed to ignore the wound that had opened between them in that moment—when he shook his head, she’s gone. Here, he felt it as acutely as freshly-torn flesh, bleeding hot anguish into the air between them. Lifeblood. He couldn’t stay here and live.

“I’m sorry about Taniri,” he breathed on the thin hope that it would alleviate some of the pain.

“Really?” Spensa raised her eyebrows and there was so much hostility in her voice that Isa took a step back. “Are you actually stupid?”

“I—just—”

“That’s what you’re sorry for? Not for leaving me without saying anything? Without telling me where you were going? Not for making me bury our daughter by myself?”

“I thought… you didn’t want to speak to me.”

“Well, I don’t now!” Spensa gestured in inarticulate rage for a moment before, at last, forcing the words. “H-how could you do that to me?”

“I just… y-you wouldn’t speak. You turned away when I tried to touch you…”

“I was in pain!” Spensa snarled. “I needed time to pray, process. When you headed out, I thought you were doing the same. He’s just hunting. This is what he does. He’ll be back. That’s what I kept telling people… kept telling myself.” Spensa’s voice didn’t break but her eyes had gone glassy with tears. This was worse than her bite. Far worse. “I didn’t think you were such a child.”

“You… I thought you wanted me gone.”

“Why in Ostia’s name would I want that?”

“Because I let you down. I brought the plague to our house.” 

“The plague was everywhere by the time Taniri and I got sick. You didn’t—”

“I couldn’t help her when she needed me. I couldn’t save her.”

“Isa, that’s not your fault. What you’re doing to yourself, what you keep doing… That is your fault.”

“I just went back to being what I always was.” Not a husband. Not a father. “A killer.”

Only Spensa could scoff at that like Isa was a four-year-old who had just told her he was the King of Krell. “You think that’s all you are?”

“Am I wrong?” Isa demanded. “I’ve spent most of my life killing people—very competently. The one time I was supposed to do the opposite, I was supposed to protect something…”

“Look, Isa,” Spensa sighed when Isa paused to swallow his grief, “when I was little, I had this blanket I loved. It was the only thing I brought with me when my parents gave me to the Church Sapiam. Whenever the other girls would pick on me, whenever I felt threatened or embarrassed, I hid under that blanket and made believe nothing could touch me. But here’s the thing, Isa. You’re not five years old! You don’t need your blanket anymore—especially when the blanket in question happens to be made of the skins of butchered convicts.”

“I…” Isa shook his head, reminded for a moment of the times they used to argue philosophy as Spensa got progressively drunker, “I’ve lost the metaphor.”

“Alright, it wasn’t my most elegant.” Spensa rolled her eyes. “What I’m trying to say is… you became a mercenary at a time when you needed it to survive. Somewhere in that panicky animal part of you that doesn’t think clearly, you associate mercenary work with normalcy and survival. So, when you feel wounded, or powerless, or existentially threatened, you run and wrap yourself in it.”

“I don’t do that.”

“Yeah?” She said and the plague had diminished none of her incredulous bite. “What about that first year our crops failed? Or when I was pregnant and you thought we wouldn’t have enough to pay the midwife?”

“That was… I told you, I got lucky out hunting.”

“Sixty gold shells for an elephant carcass. Really? I might not have your expertise on wild animals, but I know for damn sure you can’t kill an elephant. Who you could kill—very competently, as you were just bragging—was that rogue Trestantian soldier who made off with the High Scholar’s daughter around that time. He had a sixty-gold-shell bounty on his head, didn’t he?” 

“How did you—”

“I saw the posters at market like everybody else, Isa. You’re not that sneaky.”

“So… why did you just let me do it anyway? I broke my promise. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because you only ever did it when you were trying to help… and when you were scared. How angry could I reasonably be about that? You changed a lot for me.” Fondness flickered on her face but didn’t quite manifest in a smile. “I wasn’t expecting everything to change. Not right away. Hunting was a part of you for a long time. If you needed some time to move on from that… I trusted you.”

And he had let her down.

“I still trust you,” Spensa added and Isa was terrified to find a thread of hope in her gaze, “to figure it out.”

“Why?” Isa demanded. “You should be furious with me.”

“Oh, I am. Properly livid. Let’s get that crystal clear. I just haven’t given up on you. There’s a difference.”

“But why?” Isa’s voice rose in anger he couldn’t explain.

And Spensa’s rose to match it. “Because giving up is easy! And the easy thing is rarely the right thing—by Aer or Ostia Sapiam. This bloodthirsty impulse is a weakness, Isa. It’s not who you are.”

“But it is!” Isa growled in his most monstrous voice. He let his face curl into a snarl because it was easier than manifesting any of the other emotions threatening to overtake him. “Did you ever think that maybe I like squeezing a man until I feel his bones break against my scales. I like the heat of blood in my teeth. Did you ever think that’s what I really am?” He took a step forward, towering over Spensa but she wasn’t as easily intimidated as a twelve-year-old Inkarnam and held her ground. “Maybe you’re the one who can’t see the truth.”

“Oh, the truth?” Spensa folded her arms. “So, you’re telling me this is Aer I’m talking to? Not Theid? Not your pure childish fear?”

“Don’t invoke them. You don’t understand—”

“You might have a whole confusion of patron spirits knocking around that tortured head of yours, but I’ve just got the one and She is Wisdom. So, don’t try to pull on this monstrous mask thinking it fools me. It’s not who you are.”

“Then who exactly do you think I am?”

Spensa shook her head. “You ask me that question like it’s mine to answer, but I…” She sighed and looked up at him with an aching expression. “I only have what I know.”

“Alright then,” Isa challenged, teeth bared, “what is it you think you know, Sapiam?”

She broke off the glare for a moment, eyelashes fluttering downward as she pursed her lips. When she spoke again, her voice had gone quiet and wrenchingly intimate…

“I know this Inkarnam who gave up the support of his Temple to build a life with this silly priestess he liked. I know he always woke before her and took great pains not to disturb her, in case she needed the extra rest. I know he never took the shortest path to anyplace because he liked to stop and look at the little details of the world… stuff no one else would notice, but if you stopped with him, he’d point it out, so that you got to see it too. I know he held himself with beautiful stillness when he was intent on something. I know he was there to hold Taniri, even though it must have hurt… it must have been the hardest thing in the world. He made sure she was loved at the end.”

Isa was shaking his head. “I-I can’t…” Everything human in him strained toward Spensa, but the Gray between them was filled with the merciless reality of Taniri’s absence. “Please, stop. I can’t talk about this.”

Look your fear in the face, Aer said even as Theid strained to close the door on it, to protect him—Look! “Look at me!” Spensa said.

“No…”

“Aer!” she said in the clear tones of a priestess calling on her god. When Isa looked up, she was gazing through him, into the Gray of his soul. Their eyes met across the gulf where Taniri should have been. “Aer, I know you’re still in there with him. Bring him to me.”

“But—“

“I said bring him to me!” The command was so fierce that it almost worked.

Isa’s soul twitched toward hers… but he caught on the claws of Shadow, the primal need to survive.

“Bring him to me, damn it! Bring me my husband!”

“I…” I’m here, Isa wanted to say, but he wasn’t, was he? Not wholly. Even if he could go to her, he would reach her in pieces. If she waited for a brave man—a  good man—to step across the threshold, she would be waiting forever. Because that wasn’t Isa and never had been.

“Who’s in your way right now? Theid? Alkem? Ever? Tell me!” Her eyes were bright, ready for a fight.

“What good would it do?” Isa whispered.

The Seven Spirits weren’t like the demons of Ostian lore. Each was an essential part of life. They couldn’t be exorcised… at least, not without destroying the humanity of the host.

“Maybe I just want to know why my husband is doing this.” Something trembled at the edge of Spensa’s hardness—the quiver of the hawk’s wingtip, a reminder that, for all its ferocity, the raptor was a light thing of feather and honeycomb bones.

Spensa’s right hand came up seemingly on muscle memory as if wanting to rest over Isa’s heart, as it had so many times when everything was right and the world was whole. The gesture ended in a clenched fist before her fingers reached him. 

“If you were a devotee of Ostia, I would know what to do about this…” She gestured to the broken wasteland between them, invisible but perceptible and insurmountable to them both. “But this isn’t something I can help you with, is it?” She met his gaze in utter loneliness. “It’s all happening on a place I can’t reach by prayer or contemplation, no matter how hard I try.”

Isa nodded and she lowered her hand.

“You have to work it out… the seven of you.”

Hearing the truth aloud was terrifying. Because if Spensa couldn’t save him any more than Kendiri, or Damored, or Tradelord Telasus could, then Isa was really on his own. And Aer knew he wasn’t strong enough to face the Dark alone.

“Well, get on with it then,” Spensa sighed and stood aside.

“What?”

“Kendiri Inkarnam tells me you have a boat to catch.”

“What about you?” Isa asked. Spensa might say she was fine, but the hungry hollows in her cheeks said otherwise.

“I don’t need help from a shell of my husband. That’s why you need to get on that damn boat and hunt that monster. Make sure you kill it.”

Isa shook his head as he moved for the exit. “No promises.”

“That’s not good enough!” Spensa grabbed a handful of his cassock and jerked him back. With fresh tattoos all across his body, the pain was excruciating. She brought him in close enough to kiss him, but before their lips met, she stopped him with too-thin fingers digging into his jaw. Her eyes bore into him from two realms.

“Endra, Raba, Aer,” she spoke the names of the spirits in ritual cadence, “Alkem, Osu, Theid, Ever… All seven of you bastards, listen to me.”

“Yes, Sapiam?” Isa said in a voice not quite his own.

“Don’t come back until you bring my husband back with you. All of him. Do you understand?”

Isa gave a single nod, feeling a million miles from his wife, even with her so unbearably close, her breath on his skin.

“If you can’t bring my Isa back whole, then I never want to see this face again.”

“Understood.”

And he pulled from her hands. 

The words he should have said strained taut like threads in the space between them. He should have told her that he was glad she was alright, that he admired her courage and envied her wisdom, that he was proud of her. He should have told her that he still loved her with all the reckless intensity he had when they plunged into Alkem’s waters together. But the words caught in the doorway and ripped, extending the tear between them, as his body walked past her, out of the Temple and on toward the harbor.

I don’t need help from a shell of my husband.

Isa chewed on the bitter words, coiled around them, drew them together as he passed through ravaged Azenkar.

If you can’t bring my Isa back whole, then I never want to see this face again.

The reality was that Isa wouldn’t be whole again. Not without Taniri. The man Spensa had married—if he had ever existed—was not coming back.

One cold truth emerged from the many, once Isa put them all together. If he couldn’t bring himself back to Spensa with her staring into his eyes, then she was lost to him. All reason to live was lost to him. And Isa understood what he should have from the beginning… that he would not be returning from the kingdom at the end of the river. The thought solidified, giving form to a months-old fog of emotions and bringing a grim peace to the Gray: 

He was going to die on this hunt.

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

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