From Book 1 Poisonous Waters
Shifter, Chapter 2
Sitting silently by the oasis waters proved impossible for her; the seer continued to ask Askaran questions. By the end of the afternoon they had caught only two fish, both from Askaran's line and both landed by the seer. Two others had escaped the line after he had given it to the child to work with.
The first fish was a spiked hagfish, whose meat tasted like mud no matter how it was prepared. One fish would feed one person; Askaran thought he should give it to one of the cooks and see if they wanted to make stock or soup, which would feed many more mouths and could be seasoned heavily.
The second fish Askaran could not give to anyone except another shifter. The thick-scaled silver fish was a poisonous white ruin fish. He could use it as bait safely, but it was no good to eat. It seemed a shame; they had caught a very large white ruin.
He wrapped both in wax-coated leather and placed them at the bottom of his bag next to his water-skin to keep them cool. The afternoon heat was abating slowly as the sun touched the horizon, and they made their way out of the oasis.
Clouds hovered to the east as they left the valley for the dunes, dark and imposing. Askaran was surprised to see them. Rain this time of year was unusual, and he did not remember seeing the clouds when leaving the city. With the winds moving in from the south, he thought he should have spotted the clouds when choosing their direction that morning.
The seer was quiet until they were clear of the oasis and again among dunes, where demons were unable to sneak up on them.
"Do you like the desert, Askaran?" she asked.
"I like the quiet," he admitted, his eyes on the dark clouds ahead. Walking wet through a desert was not a bad thing, but he wasn't sure how the seer's desert wrap would hold up. If the storm broke early over them, he would have to make a shelter. "I like the solitude. It's hard to find space in the City some times."
"Enneads need Enneads," the seer informed him. "No one in the City would be alive without the others. We all have to help."
He lifted an eyebrow to her, but he wasn't sure she saw it under the cowl of the sand-cloak. "You been taking to the Eldest Seer?” he asked.
"It was the Historian Belker," she replied proudly. "He was telling me about Nanterac. He asked me to watch the desert, see if it was changing. He thinks it's getting cooler and wetter. He says we've had more storms too, more rain. He says it will make living here more easy."
"Easier," Askaran corrected.
"Easier," she agreed. "Askaran, if living in the desert is so hard, why do we live here?"
The wind shifted towards him, and the cloud twisted slowly. Askaran saw no haze of rain beneath it, and it moved a little too easily on the wind.
"Because here is where we are," he replied absently.
It wasn't a cloud. The black hovering above the City was smoke, and it was rising quickly.
He stopped where he was, startling the seer to a halt. They stood, the seer prudently silent, as he considered the sight.
For him to have thought it was a cloud, it had to be fresh and huge. That meant multiple fires throughout the City simultaneously, else he would have seen a plume, not a cloud. The City would not burn easily; too much was stone or glass. The shades set above the streets might catch, but the rods holding them were bone or metal. He expected the people would retreat to the pastures and keep away from the fires until they abated. Nothing they had was valuable enough to waste water on fighting the flames. In all the history of the City, Askaran had never heard of a fire.
He continued their walk, now wary. The seer remained silent at his side as they crossed through the valley of the dunes to approach the City from the west. Askaran avoided the crest of the dunes now, his hackles raised.
Once they could smell the smoke, Askaran paused again. He could hear strange noises; the sound of metal on stone and people shouting. Somewhere in the distance, the howl of a hound demon sounded, and Askaran felt a chill run down his spine. Even the demon in his mind fidgeted uncomfortably.
Something was very wrong.
"You know how to use a sand-cloak?" Askaran asked the seer as he unclasped his cloak and handed it to her.
She nodded, then said, "Roll once to collect the sand, then lie flat or on your side beside a dune. Shake it out when you get up."
He took her desert wrap and replaced it with the cloak. The extra cloth dragged behind her until he pinned it up in improvised hem using the fish hooks.
"You hide here," he told her. "Right here. I'm going to investigate this. Then I will come back for you."
Her eyes welled with tears, but she nodded. When he pulled away from her, her hand caught his arm.
"You promise?" she asked.
"I promise," Askaran replied. "Just hide here."
As he began his cautious climb up the dune to view the pasture ahead, he glanced back and was satisfied to see her properly collect the red sand on the cloak, then lie down. With a slight wind—a constant in the desert—she was invisible under the sand instantly.
He crawled over the dune, then the next one. Atop the third, he finally had a view of the pastureland around the City.
An army had trampled the pasture to the south, and some of the forces still occupied the flattened grasses there. The screams of the people floated now on the shifting winds and the closer he drew, the more piercing they became. A shriek— a woman panicked—seemed to call to the demon within him directly, making Askaran flinch.
He held the demon in check, knowing that even just the invaders on the pasture were numerous enough to kill the demon he harboured, and he did not know how many of the attackers had already made their way into the City.
He had a promise to keep.
He slunk closer, hiding in the shadows of the white markers as he traced a path to the south along the edge of the pasture. Once he reached the largest south pillar, he was close enough to see the attackers.
They were not demons. That alone made him pause. He had believed Nanterac devoid of sentient life. There were plenty of reptilian life hidden in the dunes, but nothing beyond. His mother had once spoken of parts of the world that were lush, but the Eldest Seer had never permitted exploration beyond the desert. Once, it had been to save their connection with their homeworld. Askaran did not know why it mattered now, but the rules had not changed.
At first he thought the invaders were reptiles themselves, although they had round skulls and little snouts. But as some moved to another gate, he could see they walked as an Ennead. The scales he had seen were armour, wound with cords of leather in collars and around their joints. Their shendyts were cloth, as were the shoes they wore laced up to the knee. Their faces were painted in repetitive patterns that seemed to be associated with the group they were with. Considering the amount of clothing they wore, he could not imagine how they could march in the heat.
The south gate had been smashed in, and now dozens of the armoured people guarded it, each with spear and tauran-hide shields. The demon in Askaran growled, and Askaran heard his own voice mirror the sounds; intruders had entered his territory.
His eyes were drawn up, and the demon nearly slipped his grasp entirely.
Enneads built low-lying houses, but one section of the City rose higher above the rest; the Heart Hall. There, the Eldest Seer guided the City. And there, hanging from an upper window in a chain, hung ten unadorned, white jellabiyas.
Thirteen desert seers lived in the City. Ten had been killed and stripped of their robes.
Askaran took a step forwards unwittingly, feeling the demon rise to the surface.
Three must yet live, he realized, and he knew where one was.
A new roar sounded over the City, and Askaran felt his heart skip.
Choran, fully shifted into his winged demon form, cleared the wall in a bound and landed atop the invaders. The tusks on either side of his maw thrashed left and right, crushing into the attackers and throwing them. Hissing a challenge, he faced a new squad and charged, goring two in a single strike. Tossing his head threw the bodies clear over the walls once more.
One eye was squinted shut, the skin around it scalped clear from the surrounding bone. More than one spear jutted out from flesh on his back and belly, but most of the strikes from the soldiers landed on plated joints. The bone defended him, but the thinner scale overlying the bone was shredded. Black blood oozed from every surface and, in seeing it, Askaran felt his heart sink.
The enemy swarmed in, long spears stabbing. One lucky strike cut between the ribs and sank into Choran's chest.
The demon thrashed, trampling and slashing. The tail, the end like a mace, killed the man with the spear instantly, but it was too late. With the deadly blow, Askaran had no doubt that Choran had just lost control of the demon.
The kills were no longer clean; Choran smashed his way through a dozen people with a single run but took another dozen wounds. He crushed another pair of warriors under his forefeet, thrusting out his horns to gore two more. There, pinned by a dozen new spears, he sagged, then stumbled. In collapsing, he crushed another two, but he did not rise.
As Askaran watched his friend be cut down, the demon in him seethed at his inaction, but the leash on it remained taught. The seer expected him to come get her. Charging into the army was fated to fail. He could not defeat so many. No one could. He had promised her.
Feeling a pull on the tether bound to the demon in his mind, Askaran withdrew.
She had to live. The little seer he had left hidden among the dunes had to be spared. He did not know where the other surviving seers were, but the earliest of the Eldest Seers had prophesied that, should all the seers of Nanterac die, so too would all the Enneads. The others could be facing death at any time. If the Youngest Seer died, then the Enneads died with her.
Askaran turned his back on the City and made his way back into the dunes.
The seer shook free the sand from the cloak as she stood before him, for once without questions. Her black eyes peered at him as if viewing his soul, and he felt the demon in him quake. He was not sure what she saw, but he had no doubt that she was, for the first time, seeing. He understood suddenly why Yarr had feared her.
A single tear fell from her black eyes.
“Ten robes," she said and he, seeing no way or reason to deny it, nodded. "So one other lives."
He cocked his head.
“Two would yet…” He trailed off, seeing the truth in her tears.
“Only one other,” she said. “The Eldest Seer has given his life to deny them their prize. This, I know.”
Asakarn let out a long breath. As much as he teased her about it, he had never known a seer’s visions to come so early to a child.
"But Choran shifted in the City," Askaran said, taking the seer's hand and leading her away, "and he bled there. Maybe others did too; they must have been forced into their demons. The City is not safe, not now. We'll go back to the oasis, hide there until the fires are out. I'll make sure the City is clear of demons, and we'll go back, find survivors..." He was certain there should be more to the plan. He wanted to add "rebuild", but it seemed futile. He did not know why the City had been attacked, and he did not know what would remain when they left, assuming they would leave at all. The enemy had marched across a desert to reach the City. There had to be a reason.
Darkness fell quickly once the suns set. Ero's crimson light lingered the longest, casting long red shadows over the auburn sands as the sands settled, and a chill crept in. Driven to exhaustion by the long walking, the seer fell asleep in his arms, her gentle murmurs warning that dreams haunted her.
Askaran found the oasis in the night, reconstructed the hide between the boulders, then laid her in the shadow of the shelter. He remembered to bury the fish, still wrapped, in the shallows to keep them cold until morning.
They were far enough away that the noises of the attack could not reach them, and the smoke plume had been lost in the darkness. The quiet chirp of the piper lizards felt wrong after the chaos of the invasion, entirely out of place, like chez beetles in the desert.
His life had just ended, Askaran was certain, but he could not quite bring himself to believe it. He felt like it was just another hunting trip, that he would finish tomorrow and go back and see Gaiana as he had promised, and be called upon again to fight a demon and everything would be the same. He had lived that life for three centuries. It could not be different.
Somewhere in his mind, the demon was laughing.
He sat at the entrance to the hide, looking out over the water as the cold set in. The piper lizards skittered away, leaving only the glowmoths, winged insects that fed on the deadfall from the reeds of the pond. The white of the wings reflected the light of the moons like sparks across the bushes.
He felt old and, not for the first time, filled with a fatigue that went deeper than any physical strain. For three centuries, he avoided shifting, trying to never let the demon get close enough to him to wear him down, but the weariness could not be stopped. No shifter lived beyond four hundred, and those that got close were the weaker forms, usually hounds. No one had expected any colossus demon shifter to get to two hundred, let alone three.
The exhaustion was worse now than evenr, and he wondered if Choran had been right after all; Askaran would be the next to go. Eventually, he would be too tired to hold the demon back. Before that happened, he had to go into the desert and find a way to kill himself. He could not let the demon take over, not in the end.
He hated thinking about that choice, that time. It would happen no matter how hard he disciplined his mind to contain the demon, or how often he chose to use his blades instead of his beast. He would lose the battle eventually and now wished for the death he had seen at the City under the smoke. He could have died in battle. It was his time soon anyway.
"Should have been there," he whispered, seeing fires in the flickering of the glowmoths over the water.
"Needed you alive," the seer's voice answered from behind him, making him jump. He turned to answer her but found her still wrapped in her cloak, her eyes closed. Even the rise and fall of her chest implied deep sleep.
Askaran returned to his place by the opening of the hide and lay down. Without him, the seer would die. With him, they could survive in the desert, maybe live long enough to clear out the City and return to the aquifer there. Because he was with her, she had hope.
He did not know what she could hope for now.
Giving up, Askaran let himself fall asleep. The demon tormented him with nightmares as he had expected.
Shifter, Chapter 2
Sitting silently by the oasis waters proved impossible for her; the seer continued to ask Askaran questions. By the end of the afternoon they had caught only two fish, both from Askaran's line and both landed by the seer. Two others had escaped the line after he had given it to the child to work with.
The first fish was a spiked hagfish, whose meat tasted like mud no matter how it was prepared. One fish would feed one person; Askaran thought he should give it to one of the cooks and see if they wanted to make stock or soup, which would feed many more mouths and could be seasoned heavily.
The second fish Askaran could not give to anyone except another shifter. The thick-scaled silver fish was a poisonous white ruin fish. He could use it as bait safely, but it was no good to eat. It seemed a shame; they had caught a very large white ruin.
He wrapped both in wax-coated leather and placed them at the bottom of his bag next to his water-skin to keep them cool. The afternoon heat was abating slowly as the sun touched the horizon, and they made their way out of the oasis.
Clouds hovered to the east as they left the valley for the dunes, dark and imposing. Askaran was surprised to see them. Rain this time of year was unusual, and he did not remember seeing the clouds when leaving the city. With the winds moving in from the south, he thought he should have spotted the clouds when choosing their direction that morning.
The seer was quiet until they were clear of the oasis and again among dunes, where demons were unable to sneak up on them.
"Do you like the desert, Askaran?" she asked.
"I like the quiet," he admitted, his eyes on the dark clouds ahead. Walking wet through a desert was not a bad thing, but he wasn't sure how the seer's desert wrap would hold up. If the storm broke early over them, he would have to make a shelter. "I like the solitude. It's hard to find space in the City some times."
"Enneads need Enneads," the seer informed him. "No one in the City would be alive without the others. We all have to help."
He lifted an eyebrow to her, but he wasn't sure she saw it under the cowl of the sand-cloak. "You been taking to the Eldest Seer?” he asked.
"It was the Historian Belker," she replied proudly. "He was telling me about Nanterac. He asked me to watch the desert, see if it was changing. He thinks it's getting cooler and wetter. He says we've had more storms too, more rain. He says it will make living here more easy."
"Easier," Askaran corrected.
"Easier," she agreed. "Askaran, if living in the desert is so hard, why do we live here?"
The wind shifted towards him, and the cloud twisted slowly. Askaran saw no haze of rain beneath it, and it moved a little too easily on the wind.
"Because here is where we are," he replied absently.
It wasn't a cloud. The black hovering above the City was smoke, and it was rising quickly.
He stopped where he was, startling the seer to a halt. They stood, the seer prudently silent, as he considered the sight.
For him to have thought it was a cloud, it had to be fresh and huge. That meant multiple fires throughout the City simultaneously, else he would have seen a plume, not a cloud. The City would not burn easily; too much was stone or glass. The shades set above the streets might catch, but the rods holding them were bone or metal. He expected the people would retreat to the pastures and keep away from the fires until they abated. Nothing they had was valuable enough to waste water on fighting the flames. In all the history of the City, Askaran had never heard of a fire.
He continued their walk, now wary. The seer remained silent at his side as they crossed through the valley of the dunes to approach the City from the west. Askaran avoided the crest of the dunes now, his hackles raised.
Once they could smell the smoke, Askaran paused again. He could hear strange noises; the sound of metal on stone and people shouting. Somewhere in the distance, the howl of a hound demon sounded, and Askaran felt a chill run down his spine. Even the demon in his mind fidgeted uncomfortably.
Something was very wrong.
"You know how to use a sand-cloak?" Askaran asked the seer as he unclasped his cloak and handed it to her.
She nodded, then said, "Roll once to collect the sand, then lie flat or on your side beside a dune. Shake it out when you get up."
He took her desert wrap and replaced it with the cloak. The extra cloth dragged behind her until he pinned it up in improvised hem using the fish hooks.
"You hide here," he told her. "Right here. I'm going to investigate this. Then I will come back for you."
Her eyes welled with tears, but she nodded. When he pulled away from her, her hand caught his arm.
"You promise?" she asked.
"I promise," Askaran replied. "Just hide here."
As he began his cautious climb up the dune to view the pasture ahead, he glanced back and was satisfied to see her properly collect the red sand on the cloak, then lie down. With a slight wind—a constant in the desert—she was invisible under the sand instantly.
He crawled over the dune, then the next one. Atop the third, he finally had a view of the pastureland around the City.
An army had trampled the pasture to the south, and some of the forces still occupied the flattened grasses there. The screams of the people floated now on the shifting winds and the closer he drew, the more piercing they became. A shriek— a woman panicked—seemed to call to the demon within him directly, making Askaran flinch.
He held the demon in check, knowing that even just the invaders on the pasture were numerous enough to kill the demon he harboured, and he did not know how many of the attackers had already made their way into the City.
He had a promise to keep.
He slunk closer, hiding in the shadows of the white markers as he traced a path to the south along the edge of the pasture. Once he reached the largest south pillar, he was close enough to see the attackers.
They were not demons. That alone made him pause. He had believed Nanterac devoid of sentient life. There were plenty of reptilian life hidden in the dunes, but nothing beyond. His mother had once spoken of parts of the world that were lush, but the Eldest Seer had never permitted exploration beyond the desert. Once, it had been to save their connection with their homeworld. Askaran did not know why it mattered now, but the rules had not changed.
At first he thought the invaders were reptiles themselves, although they had round skulls and little snouts. But as some moved to another gate, he could see they walked as an Ennead. The scales he had seen were armour, wound with cords of leather in collars and around their joints. Their shendyts were cloth, as were the shoes they wore laced up to the knee. Their faces were painted in repetitive patterns that seemed to be associated with the group they were with. Considering the amount of clothing they wore, he could not imagine how they could march in the heat.
The south gate had been smashed in, and now dozens of the armoured people guarded it, each with spear and tauran-hide shields. The demon in Askaran growled, and Askaran heard his own voice mirror the sounds; intruders had entered his territory.
His eyes were drawn up, and the demon nearly slipped his grasp entirely.
Enneads built low-lying houses, but one section of the City rose higher above the rest; the Heart Hall. There, the Eldest Seer guided the City. And there, hanging from an upper window in a chain, hung ten unadorned, white jellabiyas.
Thirteen desert seers lived in the City. Ten had been killed and stripped of their robes.
Askaran took a step forwards unwittingly, feeling the demon rise to the surface.
Three must yet live, he realized, and he knew where one was.
A new roar sounded over the City, and Askaran felt his heart skip.
Choran, fully shifted into his winged demon form, cleared the wall in a bound and landed atop the invaders. The tusks on either side of his maw thrashed left and right, crushing into the attackers and throwing them. Hissing a challenge, he faced a new squad and charged, goring two in a single strike. Tossing his head threw the bodies clear over the walls once more.
One eye was squinted shut, the skin around it scalped clear from the surrounding bone. More than one spear jutted out from flesh on his back and belly, but most of the strikes from the soldiers landed on plated joints. The bone defended him, but the thinner scale overlying the bone was shredded. Black blood oozed from every surface and, in seeing it, Askaran felt his heart sink.
The enemy swarmed in, long spears stabbing. One lucky strike cut between the ribs and sank into Choran's chest.
The demon thrashed, trampling and slashing. The tail, the end like a mace, killed the man with the spear instantly, but it was too late. With the deadly blow, Askaran had no doubt that Choran had just lost control of the demon.
The kills were no longer clean; Choran smashed his way through a dozen people with a single run but took another dozen wounds. He crushed another pair of warriors under his forefeet, thrusting out his horns to gore two more. There, pinned by a dozen new spears, he sagged, then stumbled. In collapsing, he crushed another two, but he did not rise.
As Askaran watched his friend be cut down, the demon in him seethed at his inaction, but the leash on it remained taught. The seer expected him to come get her. Charging into the army was fated to fail. He could not defeat so many. No one could. He had promised her.
Feeling a pull on the tether bound to the demon in his mind, Askaran withdrew.
She had to live. The little seer he had left hidden among the dunes had to be spared. He did not know where the other surviving seers were, but the earliest of the Eldest Seers had prophesied that, should all the seers of Nanterac die, so too would all the Enneads. The others could be facing death at any time. If the Youngest Seer died, then the Enneads died with her.
Askaran turned his back on the City and made his way back into the dunes.
The seer shook free the sand from the cloak as she stood before him, for once without questions. Her black eyes peered at him as if viewing his soul, and he felt the demon in him quake. He was not sure what she saw, but he had no doubt that she was, for the first time, seeing. He understood suddenly why Yarr had feared her.
A single tear fell from her black eyes.
“Ten robes," she said and he, seeing no way or reason to deny it, nodded. "So one other lives."
He cocked his head.
“Two would yet…” He trailed off, seeing the truth in her tears.
“Only one other,” she said. “The Eldest Seer has given his life to deny them their prize. This, I know.”
Asakarn let out a long breath. As much as he teased her about it, he had never known a seer’s visions to come so early to a child.
"But Choran shifted in the City," Askaran said, taking the seer's hand and leading her away, "and he bled there. Maybe others did too; they must have been forced into their demons. The City is not safe, not now. We'll go back to the oasis, hide there until the fires are out. I'll make sure the City is clear of demons, and we'll go back, find survivors..." He was certain there should be more to the plan. He wanted to add "rebuild", but it seemed futile. He did not know why the City had been attacked, and he did not know what would remain when they left, assuming they would leave at all. The enemy had marched across a desert to reach the City. There had to be a reason.
Darkness fell quickly once the suns set. Ero's crimson light lingered the longest, casting long red shadows over the auburn sands as the sands settled, and a chill crept in. Driven to exhaustion by the long walking, the seer fell asleep in his arms, her gentle murmurs warning that dreams haunted her.
Askaran found the oasis in the night, reconstructed the hide between the boulders, then laid her in the shadow of the shelter. He remembered to bury the fish, still wrapped, in the shallows to keep them cold until morning.
They were far enough away that the noises of the attack could not reach them, and the smoke plume had been lost in the darkness. The quiet chirp of the piper lizards felt wrong after the chaos of the invasion, entirely out of place, like chez beetles in the desert.
His life had just ended, Askaran was certain, but he could not quite bring himself to believe it. He felt like it was just another hunting trip, that he would finish tomorrow and go back and see Gaiana as he had promised, and be called upon again to fight a demon and everything would be the same. He had lived that life for three centuries. It could not be different.
Somewhere in his mind, the demon was laughing.
He sat at the entrance to the hide, looking out over the water as the cold set in. The piper lizards skittered away, leaving only the glowmoths, winged insects that fed on the deadfall from the reeds of the pond. The white of the wings reflected the light of the moons like sparks across the bushes.
He felt old and, not for the first time, filled with a fatigue that went deeper than any physical strain. For three centuries, he avoided shifting, trying to never let the demon get close enough to him to wear him down, but the weariness could not be stopped. No shifter lived beyond four hundred, and those that got close were the weaker forms, usually hounds. No one had expected any colossus demon shifter to get to two hundred, let alone three.
The exhaustion was worse now than evenr, and he wondered if Choran had been right after all; Askaran would be the next to go. Eventually, he would be too tired to hold the demon back. Before that happened, he had to go into the desert and find a way to kill himself. He could not let the demon take over, not in the end.
He hated thinking about that choice, that time. It would happen no matter how hard he disciplined his mind to contain the demon, or how often he chose to use his blades instead of his beast. He would lose the battle eventually and now wished for the death he had seen at the City under the smoke. He could have died in battle. It was his time soon anyway.
"Should have been there," he whispered, seeing fires in the flickering of the glowmoths over the water.
"Needed you alive," the seer's voice answered from behind him, making him jump. He turned to answer her but found her still wrapped in her cloak, her eyes closed. Even the rise and fall of her chest implied deep sleep.
Askaran returned to his place by the opening of the hide and lay down. Without him, the seer would die. With him, they could survive in the desert, maybe live long enough to clear out the City and return to the aquifer there. Because he was with her, she had hope.
He did not know what she could hope for now.
Giving up, Askaran let himself fall asleep. The demon tormented him with nightmares as he had expected.
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