Hwayoung kept a careful distance from Maria, not the polite kind but the measured spacing of someone who was sick. Whenever Maria laughed too loudly or leaned into another body, Hwayoung’s eyes tracked the movement with disgust. Hazahnahkah wasn’t quite sure what bothered her so much. Her occupation may not have been the most glorious, but it was far from hurting people for a living—and as a native to these regions she was a better guide here than anyone else could be. Maria had saved them much time and probably from several steep falls.

  They weren’t exactly going up when they reached the next mountain over. Or rather, what was up for them wasn’t up for other things. What little form the mountain’s fragmented semblance retained quickly lost composure. It broke into tiny islands, some sideways, some upside down. Many were perfectly still. Whenever Hwayoung leapt from one to the other, Hazahnahkah would cast his sight as far as he could, and beneath them he saw brief glimpses: The Leviathan Sky. They were above it. No wonder people from The Fawn Cities never strayed from the Wish River of Serpent’s Ramble—anywhere else would hardly make any sense.

  “Don’t let your environment upset you,” Maria said. “We’re almost there.”

  “To where, exactly?” Zaz asked.

  “Stable land.”

  Dalagun scoffed.

  Lazul knocked his rod against a bamboo thicket. And groaned like a crowd of ghosts. “And ligers. We’re being watched.”

  “How do you know?” Hwayoung asked.

  “Listen to how much noise we’re making. It takes effort to stay silent.”

  Everyone paused. They listened, but could not even hear the wind. It was true. The jungle’s symphony of birdsong and clicking had fallen to a graveyard stillness.

  Lazul picked up a glimmering little talon, no larger than a child’s pinky, and inspected it as a jeweler would gold. “These aren’t fresh. No tiger leaves a trail in a place it lives for long. Tiger’s talon. Zaz, is this what ravaged your party?”

  Tiger’s talon. Hazahnahkah had not expected to find an item December 11th once used to teleport The Tower. Again its name confused him, tigers did not have talons.

  A knot caught Zaz’s throat. He nodded, eyes dark. “Nazaki must be quite far. Many survived with him. They would be making lots of noise and would not have died without a fight.” He turned to Lamina and Dalagun, who both nodded in reassurance.

  Galfarys used his Ramble whenever his eyes shut. It was simple for Hazahnahkah to sense when he expanded it. The change was a subtle readjustment of temperature, airflow, and gravity in what seemed to be farther than a one mile circumference around them.

  Dalagun suddenly leapt up like a little boy, knocking Zaz in the teeth as he pointed to something far beyond the sky.

  It was a reflective glimmer of those unidentifiable animals with no wings. Some were just sitting there, completely still, watching over the forests like great silver eyes. Hazahnahkah had never seen one so close before. He wasn’t even sure if it was alive.

  “LOOK!” Dalagun shouted at it.

  “OW!” Zaz replied.

  “It’s a dragon,” Lazul said. “Look at the way it moves—smooth, patient, like a stingray I once knew.”

  “A child of The Serpent with wings!” Lamina blurted, waving at it.

  Galfarys nearly tackled her. They struggled together for a moment but the man was so apprehensive that he actually managed to take her—and her mother, to the ground. He gasped with each roll they made him tumble. “Don’t you dare wave! They will mark us for collection!”

  “They?” Hwayoung asked.

  “Aliens!” Galfarys screamed, shaking.

  Zaz turned up his nose. “As in… extraterrestrial life?”

  “Yes!”

  “I must say I’m disappointed, Galfarys,” Zaz muttered. “I didn’t take you for a conspiracy theorist. If there were aliens, why hasn’t Vikushak and his instant painting technology managed to capture one completely yet?”

  “Because they control… everything! It’s a cabal I tell you. The most powerful people are in on it. More powerful than even the Rapscallions!”

  The man was on the borderline of berserk. Hazahnahkah wondered what he’d been through to make him think this, but Hwayoung pressed for evidence. “Proof?”

  Galfarys didn’t seem to register this. He jerked, eyes wide, looking at cloud patterns that signaled rain. “Was that a mosquito!?” He jerked again, dodge rolling off of Lamina and drawing Lahahm towards the woods. “By Serpent’s breath!? They’re sending mosquitoes after us! Cut the clouds!” he muttered, stinging along several other foreign curses to that.

  Maria poked Galfarys’ ass. The man leapt ten feet forward with a hellish squawk.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Take this seriously! We need to treat this as an attack,” Galfarys hissed. “They must be listening… listening to us!”

  Lazul exploded into laughter. “Listening! Ha! Then it’s wasting its time—none of us have said anything sensible in hours.”

  “It could be the power of someone’s Ramble…” Maria knelt down, drawing a dash where mud met sand. “People use all kinds of tricks to traverse these regions. The lands here forget themselves often. They reshape and reform slowly over a period of many moons each month. At least until we reach the mainland.”

  “And you lived on this mainland?” Zaz asked.

  Lazul nodded. “Of course she would. So did I, before I was a slave. The hinterlands are unpredictable and offer no way to survive. You either die or live as Yurreth’s. The region’s lack of identity is why she deals in slaves here. What better place to strip someone of their humanity than a place where nothing is remembered?”

  “Insidious work, that woman,” Maria added.

  Lazul’s eyes shut. “In another life I was a beast keeper in Elba. We took the worst of the worst, and Yurreth’s servants always proved to us that the beasts were never on the right side of the cage… Until then… it was a fantastic city—more advanced, more cultured, and more known than even The Fawn Cities now.”

  “I’ve never heard of Elba,” Zaz said, deeply troubled.

  “Of course you haven’t,” Lazul replied. “Yurreth saw to that. It’s called Placenta now.”

  “Placenta?”

  Maria nodded solemnly. “Yurreth has strange tastes in names.”

  “She has strange tastes in general,” Hwayoung said, scowling.

  Galfarys then stopped short, unfurled his camping canvas, and began to make his bedding beneath a tree. As with Lamina’s sleep signaling the end of deliberation, Galfarys’s making camp meant they had no choice but to stay with him or leave him to the wilds. He would refuse to unplant himself once settled. Although there was always an argument, it always ended the same way—with Galfarys saying “Call me a coward, but I am following my Ramble, and my Ramble has never betrayed me”. Hwayoung dreaded camping with the group though, and so did Hazahnahkah. It was primarily because of Maria. She would stay up all night with someone else, and they were rather loud, impolite, and extremely distracting. They even overheard her whispering, or rather, harassing Zaz.

  “Do you want to sleep with me?” she asked him.

  The temperature from Zaz’s direction became rather hot. Hazahnahkah could hear the young man’s heartbeat quicken, again it was unclear whether this was embarrassment or rage. Either way, the man’s face was surely red.

  “Go to sleep, fool,” he said.

  Hwayoung groaned loudly, got up, and stomped off to the lakeside below. She was pretending to pee, but really, these were always her best chances to talk to Hazahnahkah without being disturbed. “I really can’t stand that woman. No tact.”

  Hazahnahkah’s words shimmered in the reflection of the moon, bouncing off one another as waves of light formed words. He got a sense most didn’t like Maria, even Dalagun, who had seemed eager to welcome her into the group.

  WHY?

  “Because there’s no honor in selling one’s self.”

  BUT NOTHING IS BEING SOLD.

  “That makes things even worse!”

  I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

  This seemed to irk Hwayoung. She stared at him very oddly, then looked back up towards Clest, whose large green sphere slowly pushed over the moon. “Look at how we share the blame for Nazaki’s injury. I don’t pursue him just because I want him as a husband. I do it because it’s the honorable thing to do—to atone for one’s mistakes. The union has meaning to me… and… well… I thought it might to him too. These kinds of things are supposed to have meaning to people—even people like Maria.”

  Hazahnahkah was far less interested in Maria by this point. He knew from many years that what his wielders saw in others were often a reflection of themselves.

  YOU SEEK TO BE WITH HIM AS A FORM OF CONSOLATION?

  “It’s… more than that... It’s intentful…”

  WHAT DOES MARRIAGE MEAN TO YOU?

  “Love.”

  Hazahnahkah did not need to ask if she loved Nazaki. She did. It was easy to feel that. Though the sword was surprised it had taken him this long to really see it. Nazaki was the only one who spared the girl kindness in Osayn, and even when he lost his arm, he still allowed her to take care of him—no matter how much he begrudged it.

  DOES NAZAKI LOVE YOU?

  Hwayoung laughed. “No.” She wavered for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

  THEN WHY WOULD HE LEAVE OSAYN FOR YOUR QUEST?

  There was a flicker in the girl. In her voice, her face, and her eyes. She looked away from the sword. “It’s his home. He has a right to protect it. And haven’t we agreed your sister is dangerous? That she’s manipulating him?”

  LOVE MANIPULATES BETTER THAN ANY HATRED CAN.

  “You know, you really are nothing like the legends.”

  THAT’S UNFORTUNATE.

  Hwayoung laughed again, but it was a good laugh this time. Not a sad one. “In a good way. I think my village worshipped you because you weren’t there. If you said these things we would have tried to melt you down and say hearsay.”

  Hazahnahkah laughed, and perhaps, if only for the hair’s edge of a second, Hwayoung actually heard him. She turned in all directions, wildly confused, then looked back to him, hands covering her ears. She grinned. “So silly, a godlike sword that has difficulty writing or speaking. And to think my village thought it was because you had nothing to say to us less significant creatures.”

  IT IS NO INSIGNIFICANT FEAT TO CONNECT WITH ANOTHER.

  Hazahnahkah felt awfully good tonight. It helped that Galfarys’ Ramble eased the group’s collective vigilance tremendously. This meant Hazahnahkah could use his Third Terror to write more. He told Hwayoung of the only stories he could remember coherently—those centered around love. Of Ysan for Ul. Of December 11th for his fellow orphans. Even of Knife, whose vindictive fury sharpened towards Hwayoung for giving her away, now somehow seemed rooted in love more than anything else. His conversations with who was likely his sister was what surprised Hwayoung most.

  “You mean Knife gave Nazaki and his followers dreams because I gave her up?”

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT EITHER.

  “But you told me he died! Killed by her! His own Knife! Why would she care so much about me giving her away?”

  It really was a great mystery, Knife’s anger, Knife’s motivations, why Knife treated him the way she did when he was supposedly her brother. None of it made any sense to Hazahnahkah. Love, most of all, was a puzzle he was still trying to figure out. This conversation in the lake had made him weary, and his powers were so great and so terrible that he fell asleep the moment Hwayoung tucked him away. The last thing he could remember was playful swings and sways as the girl fiddled with the ring tied to his tsuka. She only did this when she thought he was asleep. It laved him in such comfortable feelings—and just a sprinkle of guilt.