Kiir adjusted the magnification on her visor and peered at the almond-shaped karrid leaf. Its jade-green shine was marred by a dusting of white frost — the gift of an early Icetide.
The frost didn’t concern her. Instead, she peered at the lightning bolt of pinkish, luminescent crystals that struck diagonally across the leaf’s surface. Where the strange accumulation met the green flesh, odd aberrations swirled. Veins knotted into geometric patterns. Cell structures exploded.
Ember bloom. Chimeric mutations.
Kiir dropped the leaf and looked up at the karrid tree. Two parallel slashes of pink ember had crosscut its rugged bark. These crystals were much bigger, as large as her hand, and had formed into the typical square-based pyramid with the points shaved off. But the light within was rosy. Simmering with power.
Unlike any ember known.
Excitement surged in her. Triggering the jets in her suit, she leapt into the air and surveyed the valley from on high. It was typical of the Sundric lowlands. Here, the mountains of Heliost gave way to soggy heath. Thick fog blanketed the land, punctured by distressed trees and crumbling castles. All of this terminated at the Sundric Sea, a silvery expanse about ten leagues north. Beyond that, Stralheim — a strangled signature on the far horizon.
Ice crystals on the wind. And something else… an unfamiliar tang.
The sensors in Kiir’s interceptor whispered. They drew her attention to a northwestern promontory overlooking the valley. Tuning up her optics, she saw peaked roofs and a palisade wall. Both played ghost games in the fog.
She returned to the ground and hooked the air sled to her suit. Spying a decrepit castle outside the village, she rocket-jumped clear across the valley and landed amid its crumbling ruin. There, she hid the sled, packed with her weapons and camping gear, taking only her SMG and dagger.
She walked straight through the swirling ice fog towards the village. The palisade wall emerged. She leaped over it and landed noiselessly in an alley between two wooden buildings. Arabesques of pink crystals snaked across the walls on either side. She followed them into a wide plaza.
All around her — devastation. Peasant dwellings blasted to ruin. Bodies frozen in the mud. A Sentinel watchtower broken off at the third story, its upper ramparts smashed across the street.
Crystals everywhere. Etched in curious double rows across the ground and walls. Looming over the town like blushing titans hewn from pink gemstone. Erupting from the skulls of victims. Hissing their little ember song.
The echo of the Anthem.
The wailing again pierced the silence and it drew her to the town’s edge. There, a village girl, some twelve winters old, wept near a quintuplet of recently dug graves: her peasant clothes, tattered and burnt; the snowy ground, stained with blood.
Such unchecked grief was hard to watch. And yet...
A smile itched at the corner of Kiir’s mouth.
Yes. Yes, it was here.
***
She set camp in the exposed third floor of the Sentinel tower. From there, she could see all around the town and across the valley, antics of the fog permitting. She’d brought a suspension tent, a tripod for her spyglass, a notebook, and a small armory: sniper rifle, hunting rifle, two SMGs, a bolt lance, and the Leach, her signature nine-inch, green-glowing, poison-seeping dagger. Everything needed to execute her hunt.
Then she exited her javelin and checked it for damage. It was a custom-fitted Interceptor, decked out in metallic black plating and fireproof muslin half-cape, hood, and trailing skirt. She checked the ember rings on all the joints; the pin-thin orange hoops glimmered reassuringly in their ceramic fittings. The sigil of the Princess Zhim, her patroness, etched in silver along the jaw of her faceplate, reflected the falling snow.
Then she flew a recon pass over the valley. In summer, this was a verdant but cool paradise fed by a river from the Helossar glacier. Now, frozen falls crowned the southern end of the valley, and two hilly ranges extended outward like a “v.” There were five rugged peaks: two on the left, three on the right, with the village below the first peak on the left. Between the ranges: a vast wilderness of frosty muskeg, lake ice, and snow-blasted forest.
It would take days to search it all.
When the white sun touched the horizon, she returned to camp, lit a fire, and waited. Wolven lingered at the forest edge; their blazing, yellow eyes betrayed their intent. With her scope and hunting rifle, she killed five in one breath and stacked them beyond the fire’s heat, to freeze.
While she roasted one, the rest of the pack receded into the dusk.
Daylight began to dim. She ate the cooked wolven, the stiff scars on her face resisting the simple act of chewing.
For a long time, she sat. Listened to the sounds of the wilderness. Of the village ruins creaking in the wind. Watched as the sky turned violet, then indigo, then black. As the constellations emerged and recounted the legends of old.
Gods and monsters. Hunters and prey. The deeds of mortals engraved in the heavens, with stars for words.
She swallowed hard and drew a pinch of grey dust from the pouch around her neck, tossing it in the fire. A blast of sparkling silver figures and prismatic symbols erupted upward, writing their own mysteries against the twilight.
She scanned the obscure imagery for meaning. Attempted to divine a prophecy of what her hunt may bring. Glory? Fortune? Perhaps contentedness to come? A return to joyful days long submerged in a life of misdemeanor?
Kiir sighed and closed her eyes. She could not read Shaper words — no one could. They were the musings of beings far greater than anything left alive on Coda today. But she held out hope that somewhere, someone, something knew she was there. Validating their great works.
In return, she asked for the one thing she needed most.
Salvation.
***
The next day, she drew a rudimentary map in her notebook, jotting down all relevant landmarks: the village, the five peaks, the frozen falls, the coastline, two large frozen lakes, a scattering of lagoons. At the same time, she tracked the rosy, parallel trails of ember. They jagged and snaked all over the valley, sometimes congregating in snarled knots, sometimes running for leagues and terminating for no apparent reason.
Twice that day, she saw the survivor girl gathering berries from the mander bushes. Many the child ate voraciously; many more she carried through the snow back to the village. Later, Kiir spotted her entering the Sentinel barracks, one of the few buildings left standing after the attack.
Through her spyglass, Kiir watched as the girl nursed a wounded Sentinel. He was unconscious. Suffering. Still locked in the towering javelin of his order, propped up against a column inside the barracks. She fed him berries with gentle desperation.
After almost an hour of hand-feeding the dying man, the girl went about various tasks: propping up a wall on the verge of collapse; patching wind-torn gaps in their ravaged shelter; tending her meager fire.
Kiir rubbed her jaw and frowned. Despite the hard work and singular focus, the girl’s situation was dire.
The winter was young, and the wolven were starving.
Later, when the girl left again, Kiir entered the barracks and stood over the Sentinel. Something in the room smelled worse than decomposition: floral and acrid, like fermenting perfume.
The man’s head was a horror. A chimeric mutation had overtaken the left side of his head, the flesh bubbled and sculpted. Erupting from the centerline of the infected area was a ridge of that unreal pink ember: flat-pointed pyramids, glowing and humming, apparently anchored to his very skull. A wound on the man’s neck and collar had been bandaged by an amateur.
She avoided the ember wound and stripped the bandages off his collarbones. The whiff of rotting flowers rose like a cloud — not like any infected wound she’d known. She swallowed her nausea and peered closer.
Blood pumped easily from four deep, ragged tears below his neck.
An animal wound. Certainly fatal.
She dropped the bandages on the dirty ground and shook him. When he didn’t respond, she touched the freezing Leach to his neck. That brought him around.
“Who…?”
“What attacked you?”
His eyes drifted over her javelin. “You Corvus?”
“Did the creature make you smell like this?”
He took a long breath and seemed to grow suspicious. “Help her first.”
Kiir raised her faceplate to reveal her maimed and wretched leer.
All hope drained away. His voice quavered with disgust. “Regulator.”
“My questions first. Then I save you and the girl.”
But the Sentinel’s integrity was intact. He looked away from her and spoke no more.
***
Later, Kiir sat by her bonfire on the watchtower roost and rubbed at the stiff scars on her face. She’d picked off another half-dozen wolven during the day and one was nearly done roasting on a spit.
Meanwhile, the girl crept near. Her grubby feet picked over the rubble. Never taking her eyes off the black-clad hunter, she sat by the fire and shuddered with relief.
Kiir watched as the girl cautiously inspected the hunter’s possessions: the tent, the air sled, the tripod and spyglass, the array of modern weapons. Finally, she stared wide-eyed at the roasting wolven. After a moment, a question began to form on her lips.
But Kiir turned to reveal the injured portion of her face. Its ghastly texture rippled in the firelight, like molten metal. And so the girl’s question died right then and there.
Kiir smiled. Though the injury was truly disfiguring, she enjoyed its tendency to simplify discussions.
Instead, there was quiet for almost twenty minutes. Then, without warning:
“Why did you come here?” the girl asked.
“I’m hunting.”
“For the mantikar?”
Kiir’s brow raised and a thrilled shiver ripped through her.
This is no legend. The mantikar is real to her.
“I didn’t see it. I was sleeping when it came. They said it was a young one.”
Kiir stared long at her, then sniffed and returned to the fire. “I would have traded you meat for that information. I couldn’t have known if you were lying.”
That didn’t faze the girl. “What do you want with it?”
“Can’t let a dangerous creature run around, terrorizing the folk.”
Silence and doubt.
“Okay,” Kiir grinned. “I’m actually just a wicked, greedy bitch. I’m gonna capture it and trade it to a crime lord to curry her favor.”
The girl pondered that and nodded.
Fourteen, maybe? Makeshift boots and nothing but a torn smock? Somehow still alive… everyone else dead. Kiir shifted and frowned at the fire, went back to rubbing her face.
“You won’t help him, will you.”
“Who, your Sentinel? He’s already dead. Or will be by tomorrow.”
“What happened to your face?”
Kiir snorted. “This? I did this on purpose. To scare children.”
“You’re not scary. You’re just old and ugly.” Then she got up and left without hesitation.
Kiir’s neck warmed with indignation. She suppressed the urge to shred the girl’s back with SMG fire.
Instead, she snorted out a rough laugh, leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
But the laugh didn’t work. The girl had nicked something vital.
Doubts flowed up from below. Much closer to the surface than ever before. Dreads and regrets. Disappointments and betrayals. The threat of punishment if she failed. No… as redress for a long line of failures.
So many years since it all began. Zhim and Kiir. The girls who killed to survive. Now she’s a princess… and what am I? Barely her pitiful subject.
She swallowed hard and fished out a pinch of dust, flicking it angrily into the fire. In the blast of ethereal Shaper symbols, she hunted for a remedy.
But there was nothing. Just more Shaper nonsense. She kicked a burning log, erasing the ancient diagrams with a flurry of sparks.
***
On the third day, she went deep. Followed every trail. Roared through the forest, kicking up a wake of flurried snow, shattering the frozen trees with rocket wash and sending animals screaming into the underbrush.
The risk of failure nipped at her heels. Like a pack of starving wolven.
Late in the day, high on a rise leading to the third peak on the east side of the valley, under a vaulted cliff hung heavy with ice, she found it: a pile of frozen corpses. Nineteen wolven, three licked-clean arnisaur shells, a host of smaller wildlife, and twenty-seven humans — the majority of the village.
They were surrounded by a dizzying gallery of blushing ember striations, painted on the walls and ground, always in that perplexing parallel helix. The mantikar was definitely triggering these ember blooms. How was a matter for Arcanists.
And the smell... It was different here. Still floral but also deathlike. A mortician’s catastrophic mistake.
She fought through it and tried to get a sense of the animal. It was big, that was certain. Perhaps a cat-like quadruped. At least the length of two korox, end-to-end. Taller than a Sentinel. Maybe two heads taller than her diminutive Interceptor.
A young one, the girl had said.
She pondered this as she traced the ember up the flanks of trees, over and beyond cliffs, raking across the ground. Again, she noted how the crystalline lines sometimes terminated without leaving any trail. Almost as if —
As if it could fly. A winged predator stinking of necrotized aristocrat. As big as a strider cabin.
A primitive instinct made her take a step backward.
Should have brought the Colossus.
***
That evening, her state of mind was an even split between apprehension and glee. Some of the corpses had been fresh. She knew where the creature ate. She knew that it must return.
As she tore through a wolven leg and pondered the construction of a blind, a wail reached her on the wind. This time, it wasn’t the girl.
She leaned over the edge of the watchtower’s shredded ramparts and peered with the spyglass down through the hole in the barracks ceiling.
The Sentinel was dying now. With wracking seizures and giant white eyes. Absurdly, the girl was shaking him by the shoulders and holding his face. Crying the whole time. Wet streaks flowing down her cheeks.
It did little good. In moments, his body stiffened. Then it went slack, for good.
Kiir watched as the girl embraced the body for nearly an hour. Later, she roused herself and took a shovel outside the palisade. Heavy with grief and lethargy, the girl dug a sixth grave alongside the others.
Kiir watched as the girl struggled to part the Sentinel from his suit. As she dragged the body through the village to the gravesite. As she failed in her attempt. As she was too weak to continue. As she fell half on the dead Sentinel, half in the snow. And as she lay there, still.
This Kiir watched with a pounding heart. The sun passing behind the peaks and the sky turning purple.
Suddenly, the girl arched her back and screamed skyward. With renewed life, shrieking like a dying animal, she heaved the body towards the grave.
And then… yellow eyes blazing at the forest’s edge.
They came low and silent, their protruding ribs and sunken bellies betraying a desperate bloodlust. The girl was unaware. Single-minded in her task. Perhaps delirious with grief. Exhausted and starving.
The pack jumped forward, snapping at her hands and hair. She swung the shovel in wild, frantic arcs, both feet planted over the dead Sentinel. But, though malnourished, the wolven were massive compared to her — the leanest was fully ten feet long — their skulls pitted with metallic accretions. No human could stand against even a single wolven. Not without a javelin.
One got hold of the dead Sentinel’s arm and tore the body out from under her. She landed hard in the snow and struck her head on the ice-packed ground. In a heartbeat, the pack ripped the dead Sentinel to bloody, shredded tatters.
Then they were on her. Leaping forward. Snickering and drooling. Baring their gleaming fangs. She couldn’t get her footing. She was in a daze, momentarily stunned by the fall.
Suddenly... a luminous tangle of green light scribbled over a whirl of black, like a murder of crows eating a swarm of fireflies. One wolven was cut nearly in half. Two more died in the split second that followed.
Their senses soon caught up to what was happening, but three more lay dead before the pack fled into the forest and Kiir slowed to a visible speed. Her armored chest heaved with tension; her suit’s padding slithered with sweat.
***
The girl woke slowly. She found herself tucked under a blanket by a roaring fire. A spot on her head was oozing and red. A wolven was turning gently on a spit.
Kiir sat nearby. Her usual leer was fixed in a resolved grimace. She laid a plate of wolven meat down beside the fire. “Eat.”
The girl rose slowly and looked all around. At the meat. At the hunter.
“Eat. You’ll need it for tomorrow.”
“... Why?”
“We hunt mantikar.”
***
No one mastered a javelin in a week. But Kiir made the girl a promise. She would shoot. She would fly. She would hunt and defeat the mantikar. All that — in one week.
The Sentinel's suit was a Captain’s designation, possessed of a few special capabilities. The ember rings crunched slightly when Kiir inspected them, and a wisp of glimmering orange dust sifted out onto the ground. But she brushed it away and made the suit ready. There was no time for details; there was no proof the mantikar would remain in the valley for long.
In a day, the girl was shooting and reloading. In two, she was recharging her energy shields. In three, she could work the Sentinel barrier, protecting both herself and one other ally from a frontal attack. On four, she had the knack of the Captain’s lightning burst ability. Might come in handy, if she got close enough.
Flight would be the challenge. It always was with beginners.
In the meantime, they built the blind. It had to be done carefully. Every time they visited the feeding grounds, new animal corpses had been added. The creature was so near.
On the sixth day, the girl had the basic gist. Years more training was required. All Kiir could do was caution the girl against trying anything complicated. She’d seen more than one novice snap their spine while attempting a wingover.
But the girl was strengthening. Not only physically, but mentally. Her focus was inborn — that much was clear from the outset. But with the javelin under her control and a weapon in her hand, the focus was maturing into a dark resolve. Kiir recognized it well enough.
The power to fight back is the power to seize your destiny. To project your very existence into the future.
“He told me you were evil.”
They sat on a frosty bluff, overlooking the valley while resting from flight training. The girl’s silence had been growing.
Kiir smirked as she polished her SMG. “Who?”
“Sentinel Jenin.”
Kiir shrugged and went back to her work. “Smartest Sentinel I ever met.”
“So you are. Evil.”
Kiir frowned and looked up at the cold sky. “I’ve had my moments.”
“Did she make you this way? The... crime lord?”
Kiir put the gun away. “You speak of her Royal Majesty Princess Zhim. And no — we sort of did it to each other.”
The gap that followed would have normally suited Kiir. But something urged her to go on. “We were abandoned as kids. I’m told we met on a fishing boat. Gutting salt-larkins before I could even talk. That was out of Vadys, in The Reaches. You know where that is?”
The girl shook her head.
“Lucky. Most kids there are slaves. But when we were twelve, we decided slavery wasn’t really our thing.”
“What did you do?”
“Stole everything. Ate whatever we could scrounge. Traded things for favors. Traded those favors for friends.” Kiir paused and stared down the well of those long years. Through all the schemes and traps. Lies and poisonings. Four bloody hands and strangulations in the dark.
She sniffed and rubbed her jaw. “Things kinda escalated from there.”
The girl blinked heavily. “You killed people?”
“It’s how we survived.”
“But now you’re fighting?”
“Hm?”
The girl swallowed and selected her words. “With the Princess? You said you were hunting the mantikar to… ‘curry her favor.’”
Kiir looked sharply away. Sometimes this girl was too smart for her own good. It reminded her of Zhim.
It stabbed her square in the heart.
She stood. “Tomorrow, we go. Get yourself ready.”
***
They soared through the freezing air, rocketing towards the mantikar’s feeding grounds. Kiir pointed down at the overhang, at the concave dent in the hillside. The girl nodded. The blind they’d built was still there.
A cloud passed overhead. Something moved in her peripheral. She smelled it before it struck.
Death and flowers.
Her visor was blinded and every alarm in her suit blared at once. She was tumbling through the air and shouting inside her helmet. But there was no communication except in person; there was no cypher to relay those words.
Everything was dead. Her rockets became useless weights on her back. Gravity loosened its pull as her heavy steel body dropped like a stone amid the snowflakes. The world spun around and around, in total blackness.
A series of hard crunches. Everything gone still. She thought she was dead.
Then her faceplate blew off. The electrical system had sensed that she was running low on oxygen. But everything powered by the ember rings was offline. All her weapons had been flung away. All but maybe one…
White wilderness surrounded her. Snow fell in a lazy whirl. Not a thing stirred. All she could do was struggle hopelessly, and call for the girl.
If your suit dies, you die. One of the less cheerful Freelancer sayings. But it was true. A dead suit was just a lead-lined coffin.
She swore to herself not to panic. To breath and shout and hope the suit reset itself. But all she heard was the quiet clicking as the engines cooled and the metal contracted. And so the panic didn’t listen to her. It just did its thing.
Then the mantikar slammed down into the snow before her.
It was enormous. Like two ursix back-to-back. A cat-like body: long and low, with clawed feet, sinewy tail, and thick muscles. There, the similarity to back-alley fort cats ended.
It had a huge, heavy canine head with massive looping horns and a wide, thin-lipped mouth with multiple arcs of shining teeth. Its slate-grey body was covered in alternating rows of shining indigo scales and patchy fur. Five tiny. glowing pink eyes arranged in a diamond pattern on the front of its head. All five were looking right at her.
Kiir hollered for help as the beast stalked closer. The powerful odor intensified with every inch. Roses. Decaying meat.
But what she saw next was like something out of a Shaper myth.
Two pink tendrils — rope-thin and transparent — snaked out from the beast’s shoulders. They spiraled and twisted above it, forming into shapes. Diagrams. Figures.
Shaper words.
They wove and drifted as though underwater. And wherever they touched the ground, lurid, pink ember blinked into existence, fully formed.
She suddenly felt the suit twitch and the motors actuate. Like a dead body enslaved to a dying brain. The ember rings in her suit were hissing a screechy little song.
It’s talking to the ember.
In a flash of reason, she remembered the Sentinel’s crunchy ember seals. They’d been altered by the mantikar’s attack — probably warping and changing shape, grinding against the ceramic fitting. Even the slightest misalignment of ember could destabilize a jav. How could she have been so foolish as to have not seen this coming?
As if sensing this distraction, the mantikar growled and bowed its head low. Its hindquarters angled up and shifted back and forth. It would pounce next. Batter her body to death. Tear her out of the suit piece by piece, like a clam from its shell.
Assault rifle fire rattled out and a shadow landed nearby. The mantikar withdrew under a hail of bullets, the pink tendrils weaving themselves into a deflecting barrier. The girl in her Sentinel suit rushed forward and stood over Kiir, activating her shield barrier.
“Get up!”
“I can’t! Don’t let the tendrils touch you! They’ll glitch your suit!”
But the mantikar roared and leaped forward, drawing a double path of crystalline growths in the snow. It pounced over the barrier to swipe at the girl with a snarling, deep-gutted roar.
She dodged with incredible alacrity. Managed to flip the release buckle on the back of Kiir’s suit before drawing the beast off.
The suit unfurled. Kiir clambered out and grabbed at the suit’s thigh compartment. The bolt lance fell into her hand and she whipped it aloft. From the palm-sized cylinder, white lightning erupted from both ends, crackling with power. Then she took off through the snow, pursuing the two combatants.
The mantikar threw its flank towards the girl, deflecting all bullets with its indigo scales and snapping the gun from her hands with one swipe of its thick tail. All around them, pink crystals shot up from the ground, like geysers of frozen glass. The girl dodged another pounce, rolled in the snow, snapped up the gun, and came up at max boost. The deadly pink tendrils flung out at her, missing by mere inches.
In a flash of action, Kiir wound her body up like a piston and prepared to hurl the lance. But she hesitated; she would only get one shot — she had no suit to recharge the weapon for a second try.
The mantikar seized the moment. In a split second, the pink tendrils formed into wyvern-like wings, and the beast launched upwards.
The girl went after it, both of them rocketing skyward, disappearing into the clouds.
Kiir ran forward and looked above. The clouds thundered with blasts of pink, blue, and the stuttering flash of assault rifle fire. All she could do was watch. Listen with a heaving chest.
Suddenly, pink crystals pelted down all around, slamming into the snow with deadly force. Kiir ran for the trees. The creature had turned the clouds themselves into an ember hailstorm.
The mantikar punched out of the clouds and tore down through the deadly rain like a rider on the storm. It spotted Kiir and torpedoed straight towards her. The girl was in its claws, limp and lifeless.
Kiir ran desperately into the forest, straight for the densest patch of trees. The mantikar followed at freefall speed, its tendrils releasing from the wing shape and instead dancing and raking across the ground and trees, decorating the forest with humming garlands of deadly crystals.
But the trees did their job. The mantikar crashed headlong through them, snapping some in half and tumbling across the ground, kicking up a pall of whirling snow. The creature grew confused. It lost sight of Kiir. It did not notice her slip behind it. It did not notice her raise the lance.
A supernova of flashing electrical arcs, blasting snow, and erupting ember spikes suddenly consumed the creature. Kiir fell back and shielded her eyes.
When the storm quieted, she looked again. A crystalline garden of rosy ice had grown tall and expanded outward in rings to obscure all within; at the center, blue light and sparks zagged into the air. A low moaning ricocheted around the valley.
No sign of the girl.
Kiir walked carefully through the maze of standing, translucent stones, hands shaking from the battle, and beheld her quarry.
The mantikar was trapped in a glittering web of blue starlight. The blast from the bolt lance had condensed like a net around the monster, trapping its limbs and stunning it into a stupor. The tendrils floated lazily above, no longer under any conscious control. Its five eyes twinkled with sedate rage.
The girl was there. She stood over it, her suit steaming in the snow. The rifle was in her hand.
“You killed them,” she mumbled, as though in a surprised stupor.
Kiir knew what came next. The resisting pull of her own survival begged her to intercept. To stop the girl before the hunt fell to ruin.
“Everyone… everything I had.” She touched the barrel to the creature’s forehead, in the center of the diamond eyes. Pressed it down with the full weight of her body, as if to punch straight through into the creature’s brain. Her finger trembling on the trigger. Her face seized in the red heat of vengeance.
Kiir was paralyzed. She needed the creature alive. From the barrel of the girl’s gun, Kiir envisioned her future forking off into two very different directions.
But then the girl buckled. The gun tumbled from her grip and fell along with her knees into the snow. There, she wept, and the red heat washed away.
In Kiir’s eyes, she was again the wailing child at the village grave. Fighting with all her might against the cold dirt even as it drove her down into the earth. Next in line to join those who’d failed.
In that moment, Kiir knew this girl.
***
The fanfare blew and the page announced her entry. “The Lady Aushkiir.”
The “nobility” parted as the hunter — in her shining black armor, bristling with weapons — entered Zhim’s court.
“Well, well, well… the hunter returns from her legendary deed.” The lanterns waved in the cave wind, casting the princess in a shifting golden light. She smiled darkly, as ever.
Kiir glanced sidelong at those gathered and bowed. “Your Highness.”
Zhim smirked theatrically around the room as if playing hide and seek with a child. “What? No mantikar on a leash?”
The court tittered. Everyone knew the mission had been a sham to get rid of the Lady Aushkiir. A suicide mission. The hunter who had disappointed the Princess one too many times. The friend turned failure.
“Instead, all I see is a bedraggled rat. And… phew!” she waved her hand before her nose. “One in need of a bath. I wonder where you shall ever find one,” she laughed, heavy with meaning.
But Kiir saw the tired resolve behind Zhim’s eyes. A commitment to her new “royal” role. Of the need to expunge any appearance of sympathy. Especially for an old friend who couldn’t pull her weight.
Kiir straightened up and produced an engraved box. The stink in the room grew exponentially. Even the Princess seemed to lose her sense of humor. For a moment.
“I found the mantikar — or one of them — in a mountain valley north of Helios. It had devastated a local village, killing all Sentinels, many villagers, and hunting the local wildlife near to extinction. I tracked it to its feeding lair and... it did not survive. I made a number of sketches for the Arcanists.” She produced a scroll case from her cape.
One of the Arcanists adjusted his spectacles and rushed forward to seize it. But Zhim held him back with a wave and a stern frown. “I wanted a pet. Not a picture.”
Kiir nodded. “On the hunt, I met the only survivor of the attack on the village. It had taken everything from her. Everything... but her will to survive.”
Zhim’s stare grew gloomy. It was a dangerous business this, cutting a crime lord to the quick.
“I gave her the mantikar, Your Highness. She needed it. More than us.”
Zhim stared at her in the face. Kiir felt it all hanging by a thread.
“As an apology, I brought a gift,” and she lifted the lid on the box.
Inside was an organ — some combination of starfish, mushroom, and squid — wriggling, squelching and smelling for all the world like a rose bouquet rolled in fermented carrion. “The pheromone sac of a young mantikar.”
Three nobles and the court Colossus vomited on the rugs. Most others bolted from the room. Soon, only Zhim and the Arcanist remained, the latter constrained by Zhim’s iron grip.
“I just felt you’d find a use for such a singular treasure.” And Kiir offered the box to the Princess.
Zhim smiled slow and wide. She closed the box and gestured at the Arcanist. He reluctantly took the box, snatched the scroll case from Kiir’s hand, and fled.
Then Zhim took her by the arm. “Aushkiir…” she spoke low and honestly. “You have reminded me that it is your gifts which I value most among all the treasures in our realm.”
Kiir breathed deep and started to bow. But Zhim denied her the motion and instead guided her into the tea lounge. “Now, about this mantikar. You must tell me everything. Spare no detail.”
They sat and drank. The tea disappeared and was refilled, accompanied by multiple plates of rare and imported delicacies. Kiir recounted the whole story — every detail. Zhim listened with growing attention. Soon they were laughing and reminiscing about other adventures from the long well of their years. And, for the first time in ages, Kiir felt content.
But, more than once, Kiir’s mind drifted back to the girl as she’d seen her last: standing on the bluff overlooking the shattered remains of her village. Clad in a bone-white javelin, the greatest weapon humanity had ever made. Projecting her very existence into the future.
With that image in her mind, Kiir smiled to herself and wondered if her quest would be told to children someday. The villain who came to capture a beast, but instead forged a hero.
On the surface, it seemed a tale worthy of a constellation. A story told with stars for words.
Special thanks to Jessica Campbell.