The sight of the bow’s polished wood wrenches at me, and pain twists inside me. Why did I stay hidden? The leather wraps on the grip show where his strong fingers held it, marks that will get no deeper now. Hands that guided my attempts to learn are no longer here to steady me. I want to cry, but the tears won’t come, just a burning pain in my chest. Every time I see something that reminds me, it hurts so much.
“Finnegan!”
My heart thumps under my ribs when mother screams behind me—her piercing shriek bouncing off the hut’s mud walls.
“Do you wish your father’s urvan to starve? Why are you not still gathering with your sisters?”
Fear of her fury swallows at the pain of my grief. The air within our house stirs it, and more breezes fill the house as the swirls beneath her skin glow.
“I left what I found by the basin. Father didn’t die in his sleep. mother, you know that. Uncle Aryo killed him. Why doesn’t someone punish him? Why is he involved in deciding who will be chieftain now?”
“You are still ignorant of the world, Finnegan. Your father’s sickness worsened. He died in his sleep. Have I not already made this clear?! You will not speak such accusations.”
Mother’s insistence digs into me, sparking flames within the grief that her fury almost snuffed out.
“It’s not an accusation. He pulled his heart out. I saw it; the breeze brought me the sounds. Look at father’s body.”
There isn’t disbelief in mother’s gaze; rather, her anger—scorn even—sears into me as the breezes harden about me. Pain hidden within me burns white-hot. Knowledge of the truth is as clear in her deep blue eyes as the sun in a cloudless sky.
“There is no need—I’ve already washed and wrapped him—there was no such wound. He died in his sleep. That is the end of the matter. Tomorrow, you will take Etti’s turn. Make sure you take the goats sunward, never go near the cliffs again.”
Her words are an eagle’s scream striking down at me, matching the fierceness in her expression.
“Mother, why would you lie-”
A hollow sound rings in my ears as pain spikes through my skull. A distant groan comes from me as the grit covering the hard-packed floor scratches at my nostrils with each breath. Mother swims in front of me as my confused breeze stirs dust from the earthen floor. My eyelids droop suddenly weighed down as she raises a hand and the hardening air shining like the mountains’ ice. Afternoon sunlight highlighting the blue swirls under her skin catches at my vision but shimmer away like a mirage when I try to focus. Blackness shrouds my eyes, her voice distant and thinning like wind through the stream’s reeds.
Cool water trickling across my face is the first thing I feel—the soft sound of the droplets echoing amid the throbbing pain.
“Don’t sit up; you’ll dislodge the cloth. You’re one massive bruise from chin to ear.”
Etti’s words are soft with grief, and I can hear the tears I can’t find.
“Mother says you’re to take the herd out tomorrow, but you don’t look good.”
“She knows Uncle Aryo-”
Pain stabs through my teeth at the slightest touch of her fingers against my lips. Her own barely move, but her breeze brings me the whispered words. The glistening tears in her eyes makes the silver of her eyes shine so bright evening in the dim light inside our home.
“Hush, she’s just outside. She’s so angry with you right now, and she’s scaring me. Do you want me to help you to your bed?”
She gently raises me as I take too long considering the question. The world spins with the motion and a sour tide claws at my throat the moment before I turn to vomit across the dirt. Each cough to keep from choking on it wrenches pain around behind my eyes. The rough cool cloth is painful against my face, but Etti cleans the mess from me before she lays me down clear of the mess. The smell of the soft goat’s cheese and bread offered by Etti fighting the sourness from the scrapped floor. Even the thought of eating that evening sickens me more. The night is equally unpleasant each time I wake up, my head throbs in pain, and the straw where mother usually sleeps remains empty. Trying to beg my breeze to bring in fresh air just grinds more pain behind my eyes.
My stomach gurgles hollowly as I herd the goats out of the paddock, though they take little prompting—there is nothing left they can eat within it. I must force myself not to lean on my bow stave as I follow along—my head hurts so much. The glare of pre-morning light already stabbing through my left eye, and my right sees double as I close one, then the other.
Don’t go near the cliffs.
Mother’s instruction digs at me repeatedly as I walk, and eventually, Mithra slowly brightens the sky. Anger at her lies about father echoes painfully in my thoughts. The dark cliff stones that I’d last seen witnessing my father’s death teased me with knowledge. Mother knew where he died. She wasn’t just covering the injury; she knew everything. What was she hiding there? Why did I need to stay away? The goats wander down the hill, now far out of sight from town. A heat mirage flickers over the herd as the world swims around me, and my breeze’s cries through the bushes echo my pain.
The shadows of swaying trees point behind me, and I turn towards the mountain’s peak. Hidden behind the rise I can’t see the village, but the mountain’s cliff draws my gaze. My eyes trace the trail from the shrines at its top that leads to the village’s sunset edge, I know every step of its path. But it wasn’t at the top of the cliff that my father died, and the goats’ bleating fades away as I start around the village.
It’s a trip that takes so long with the world blurring around me. The morning’s brightness is digging arrows into my eyes. The entire experience making me more miserable, I stop to eat the stone bread Etti has made last night. Dried mutton and bean paste had tasted fine and eased my stomach’s gurgling before the world’s movement made it come back up again. The dry heaves continue with my stomach long emptied across the ground, only the bitter bile gagging at the back of my throat.
The ground tempts me to lay down, but I force myself to move on. My destination finally coming into sight sours my mouth further, the bile sweet in comparison. The dark-grey stone I’d seen father laid out on; his blood oozing across its surface in the moonlight is so clean. The morning already having grown long, there is no shadow cast upon it but no bloodstains show. Had it been just a dream? The marks in its etched stone should have been thick with dried blood. Instead, they are as clean and familiar as they’ve ever been. I’d accused Uncle Aryo; had it been just a dream? Mother’s scorn wasn’t betrayal—it was for contempt for speaking lies against the family.
The swaying of the world smashes against me. Pain stabs into my knees and palms, only instinct getting my hands up in time to prevent my head from kissing the ground. Tears that had been so far away come with the sharpness of the pain, and my wails echo faintly back to me from the cliff’s crevices. Its hollows a mocking pan flute and the thought makes my breeze brush against them stirring more noise.
Bile erupts even though I’ve not eaten anything more. The sour smell and bitter taste make it impossible to stop. I feel hollow and aching when it at last subsides. The foul smell clinging to me, my front speckled with splashes. My vision fills with the dark-grey stone slab, as I force myself to my feet. One of them becomes two, three, then hands—worth swimming before me. Each swirls in circles merging and separating again, ripples caused by pain’s rain striking puddles in my mind. I stagger around the sour puddle before me, almost dropping amid it, but finally I sit upon the stone. Cuts opened on my palms from pressing against sharp rocks in my struggles to stand; bead with blood that shines in the sunlight.
I close my eyes as arrows of light twist in my eyes, reflecting off the pool of my bile. Beating against my pain, I clasp the stone’s cool rounded edge to keep myself from falling again. Blackness steals the day away, and when I open my eyes again the sun is far close to its peak. Laying on the stone my gaze settles on where my hands had rested amid the etched patterns, to keep myself upright. The blood from my palms should have marked the stone, yet there is nothing. The stone was as cool as it was when I sat down, despite my warmth and the lateness of the morning.
The swaying world has calmed slightly, but when I sit up, I see dark spots crawling along in my vision. A blink stops the swaying, but the drops are still there no longer crawling. They run beside footsteps towards a crevice, dark raindrops in the dry earth, but while the footsteps come back again, the droplets only run one way. Following them with unsteady steps leads me deep inside. I brush against the wall half for support to avoid stepping on the droplets leading the way. Their dark shapes in the sun’s reach guide me to a wall I remember seeing before.
Markings that I’d traced with my fingertips, gleaming with light as my breeze polished their contours linking the stones as I tried to decide if they had any meaning. The polished markings there are now painted red, but the blood looks still wet in the light that has made it this far. The copper smell grows stronger the longer I stand before it, and my sudden scream echoes in my ears. Rage at the lies tears through my chest, and my breeze smashes hard against the rocks. Red blood flares and burns with sudden heat. The stones of the walls collapse into space beyond. The darkness within eats the sunlight and only the faintest gleam is clear within. An arc like the moon’s edge gleaming with radiant light sits shining within the dust rising from the fallen stones.
“I smelt you seasons past, and now look what you’ve done. So desperate to find someone to speak to, little girl?”
The feminine voice sounds as if far away, but her voice isn’t raised in a shout.
“I’m not little. I’ll be married next spring.”
The thought of marrying the man my mother has selected twists and claws at my already abused stomach.
“Indeed? Is that supposed to mean you’re an adult or do your men just like them young?” The voice is edged with anger and despite the darkness beyond, no echoes speak of a vast chamber in the darkness.
A memory of his voice rises from the fog of pain, the quiet words intense as I defend my missed shot. Only those who are insecure defend their near success with words, those confident let their actions speak, and in failure, simply try again. “No, you’re right, I’m still a girl. I’m only fifteen winters now.”
“What is it you wish that brings you here?”
The brief words are a cool mountain breeze on my thoughts and grab at my focus. Memories of gathering tales, our family’s history clamours about, but I push the warnings aside. “You grant wishes, are you an Efreet?”
“It depends on the terms we can come to agree on, and—of course—what your wish is. Some are far easier to make come true than others, and the use of Power always requires a price to be paid.”
“Who are you? Why were you behind this wall?” My curiosity, something I’ve been told by mother is the bane of our family, gets the better of me, and I move beyond the fallen stones.
“Names are dangerous things in the wrong hands, but if you tell me your name I’ll share one with you. I was betrayed and trapped here, so I would know who I speak with. Who are you, and what wish brings you here?”
Betrayed, someone betrayed her as well? Why did I come here?
The scorn and anger in mother’s gaze, the cold hardness on Uncle Aryo’s face as he drove the knife into father’s chest, stab into me. Father had been so weak, he hadn’t even had the strength to defend himself, and Uncle Aryo had hesitated cutting out his heart. The memory of the wet sucking sounds his knife made twisting through father’s flesh, and the copper taste the breeze brought to my lips makes my stomach churn. Hard stone shards dig into the back of my legs and bring the world into focus. The broken stones that had been so cold under my touch when intact are already warm.
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“I wish vengeance. My father’s betrayers need to die. They lie and hide the truth of his murder. I wish to make them all pay.”
“Do you know all those involved? Can you give me names? Or would I need to discover that for myself?”
“I only know two of them, my Uncle Aryo and my mother, but I don’t know if there are others. There has to be though. From the footsteps, other men from the village brought my father’s body back. They’d have to have known the lies. They all live in our village, there hasn’t been travellers. I want his betrayers to suffer and die. I want their heads.”
“Very well, since we’ll need to talk terms you may call me Kāma. Now that you have a name from me, what is yours almost-adult?”
“Finnegan.”
“Fair or white. What an interesting name for one standing in the darkness of my place. So you wish all your father’s betrayers to suffer and die. Very well. I’m not in a lamp, so what will you pay me for fulfilling this wish?” purred Kāma.
My mother’s gaze filled with scorn roils rage within me at the thought she’d try to pretend my father’s murder never happened. “Anything you want.”
“What if I want everything you have?”
“I’d give you it all, but I only have a bow and a pendant. I’d give anything to get proper vengeance against my father’s betrayers.”
“Any one thing I chose it is then; I’ll just record this properly,” Kāma says, but I don’t know what she means and a scratching noise starts like reed brushing a goat’s hide. I ask for an explanation only to be hushed, but eventually, the scratching stops.
“The terms are now recorded. Now your commitment needs to be tested to see if you are worthy. Come forward and reach out your hand,” calls Kāma. The purring gone from her voice, she sounds as determined as father making a judgement some wouldn’t like.
There is no resistance to my first step or any other, and I feel the air pop around me as my foot crosses the moon’s arc. Darkness disappears as the light that it had been consuming suddenly shines into the chamber’s depth. A circle gleaming like a full moon sits amid a space barely bigger than my family’s bedroom. Within it, a woman crouches with a black feathered panel behind her, clad from head to toe in midnight black hide.
She stands as I stare at the flames burning in her irises, and a smile twists across her lips that looked stained purple. Her eyes hands span above my own. A bruise-like my own runs across her cheek to a pointed ear that peeks out among red tresses the colour of fresh blood. The black feathers behind her unfurl into battered wings, stretching out as they touched the chamber’s walls. Suddenly she holds out a rolled piece of leather to me, having moved so fast I didn’t even see her shift position.
“The terms of your contract for your keeping,” Kāma declares. “They are a duplicate of my own, but I’m sure you can’t actually read.”
“Contract? Read?”
Looking at the long black nails growing from poppy white fingers, I take what she offers carefully, but it still unrolls and flops about. For an instant, the sharp black lines on it glow with inner flames before they’re snuffed out, but they mean nothing to me.
“Contract accepted then. Those are the details of your deal with me, in case you want to argue about them to a court. Don’t lose your copy little one. Now I’ve got some vengeance to find for you—I mean your father—I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere,” her words snap sharper than mother’s orders and Kāma simply vanishes. I glance about seeking her, but I find only the dull polished walls of the chamber visible in suddenly fading light. The moon’s gleam fading from the circle leaving me in darkness as the sun climbs out of view.
“She said her name was Kāma, but what is she?”
A need for sunlight shivers up my spine, joining the dread at her disappearance, but as the darkness enfolds me, my feet refuse to move, and my limbs grow stiff.
I have chanted out my family tree, repeatedly before she returns. Instantly before me empty-handed and words die on my lips as an outstretched hand suddenly holds hair.
Etti’s face stares at me with accusing eyes. My twin, my friend, her features twisted in agony.
“She was home sleeping when I got back. She couldn’t have killed him,” my screams echo in the quiet chamber.
“Killed him. That isn’t what you wanted. You asked for your father’s betrayers to die and that you wanted to see their heads. This is the first, but don’t worry, I’ll show you all of them.”
“She wouldn’t betray him!”
Kāma’s smile grows edged with spite and more pleasure than I’d seen anyone show. The hungry flames in her eyes burn hotter as my pain grows. “A betrayer is someone who has led astray or deceived another. Your sister had been kissing a boy she liked and lied to your father about it.”
My sister’s head bounces off the floor as her hair billows in the air like cloth as it slides from Kāma’s grasp. It sounds hollow and light as a cored musk mellow, and even though I want to fall, I can’t move in the slightest.
Head after head joins hers on the ground. Lies told about escaping prey, a close call with a predator, the size of a leopard on a hill, minor moment of fun, or hurt feeling avoided. All punished with death that I asked to be delivered and she presents each to me. The head of my little cousin, having told father ‘No’, when rightly he needed to say yes to wanting more fruit when it was the only word he could speak. At the last, mother and Aryo’s heads are presented together. My vengeance ashes in my mouth, I can think of only the infants and young left alive.
Nothing, it means nothing now. I can’t even fall to my knees in grief, held fast exactly where she told me to stay.
“Now you mentioned a father’s murder. Is that correct?”
“Yes, I wanted vengeance for that betrayal. Not these foul deeds you’ve done. You killed them for no reason, and you knew it.”
Fear betrays the anger within me, and the words crack and break.
“Tsk, you said you wanted your father’s betrayers to die, and to see their heads,”
“Your Uncle mentioned the etchings in this crevice in your hearing. Knowing your curiosity would likely lead you to weaken the wards, vulnerable to your family’s power. Since your family’s bloodline maintained the wards' existence. He didn’t kill your father. That was on you. He just hastened his end and tried to stop me from getting out as your ignorant father asked him to do. Your mother heard you talking about the cave to your sister and didn’t warn your father. Knowing it was your Uncle’s doing, she kept quiet, wanting your father dead for his mistreatment of her. As the eldest son, only sacrificing him would reseal the wards once they’d decayed enough.”
“Father would never have mistreated mother.”
Even as I speak in his defence, memories of moments pick at me. Things that were out of place, disregarded amid daily life.
“Why wouldn’t he have mistreated a woman who only gave him girls? Including one who insisted she could do what boys could do, was a better archer than any of the boys, and wouldn’t take her eyes from other girls in the village. Why wouldn’t he mistreat such a failure of a woman?”
“Father taught me to handle a bow.”
My protest sounds pitiful and void of confidence even to my hearing, and she just smirks coldly.
“He told your mother he taught you because he expected you to fail. She knew his pride with other men watching wouldn’t let him do anything but teach you correctly. You spited him by being good at everything he wanted you to fail at so he could show you your place.”
“You’re a liar.”
Memories of father’s guidance on using a Shepard’s crook to herd the goats properly, steadying my aim towards the practice target among the boys. The words of advice he’d shared with all of us settling deep within my mind. His deep laughter when I brought in my first brace of pigeons for a meal.
Kāma shook my mother’s head at me, the tip of her tongue poking out at me from beneath her broken teeth, before disappearing away only to reappear on the next bounce. “No, I’m not lying. I’ve no need. I got the memories from her when I was seeking all your father’s betrayers.”
Memories that aren’t mine assault me, forcing into my mind. His heated words after my older sisters were born one after another until we twins were the last. I hear the bitter words and whispered conversation I’d seen from afar, but never know the cause of the arguments. Mother had insisted they were problems with the village council, matters and things not to involve myself in. Try as I had, I’d never been able to get my breeze to bring me the words of those discussions. Now, now I wanted to know none of them.
“Now I’ve a challenge. You wanted to see the heads of all his betrayers. So one I’m going to have to present before death. Perhaps best to keep it simple rather than play with necromancy in this place. To make it formal, for my payment, I choose your Soul.”
A blue of shimmering water appears on her arm, its surface smooth and clear like a still mountain pool. The reflection shows hollowed, guilt-wracked silver eyes looking out of a bruised face, pale and worn. The markings of my family’s linage showed in the blue swirls beneath that skin. My tear-stained face is apparent only an instant before the darkness swallows me whole.
Fire burns through me as I’m falling, the wind tears at my skin, compressing every ounce of guilt and self-loathing I possess and baking it deep into me until I feel when it shatters my Soul. Pain subsides and awareness of flesh returns in a rush. Hot water thick around me seems intent on cooking me. Not knowing how I got from the darkness to beneath the water, I kick and thrash. Light claws at me from above as I thrash towards what feels like the water’s surface, every motion like moving through mud. Reaching the surface, I find it isn’t water pouring off me, but liquid fire. As I pull in a breath that I didn’t seem to need, it draws in heat and the taste of rotting and cooked meat.
A forest of corpses and goat-sized lumps along the shoreline ahead of me, each baking in the heat coming off the liquid in which I’m swimming. The flames lick at me and try to pull me under, but the instant I want to reach the shore’s foul safety, I’m standing on its rocky bank. The change in location carrying the sensation of a gale buffeting me. A strange weight shifts on my back and I hear wings flap behind me. A glance is enough to reveal the battered, black-feathered wings now arching from my back. Their erratic motions send me staggering about, the sharp rocks underfoot somehow not breaking through bare skin. The world swirls around me as I flail to stay upright. Rocky shore, lines upon lines of corpses tied upright against poles, swaying lumps of lard, and a dusky lake of fire.
I’m sure I died, and the underworld we’re told is an empty void where spirits lived in hunger, not this monstrous place. I stagger against a corpse, the cooking flesh smears oil across me, and the body breaks into pieces. Only a desperate grab at the pole behind it keeps me upright. The sight of my arm sends shivers through me, where before my flesh had been pale with swirls of blue. Instead, my flesh is dusky brown, and the swirls that tied me to my breeze are all gone. My fingers now end in the same black nails that Kāma possessed. Their edges’ sharp enough to dig into the strange black material of the post that had held the corpse upright.
Hot wind wafts against my bare skin and I can’t feel—truly feel—it. Its pressure is there, but without my breeze, there is no sense of it. The wind, once kin to my family, ignores my cries for help, leaving lonely silence within my mind. Focusing on the wind, I freeze at the agonising screams it carries. I keep hold of the pole for balance and carefully turn to face the lake again. Faces some close to the surface, some deep beneath it, stare upwards with wide horror-filled eyes, their mouths open in their own soundless screams. Mounds of brown, rancid lard clutter the shoreline close to the fires. The hardened gel across their surface showing twisting facial features that seem offended by my presence.
Stone clicks against stone, the shifting sound drawing my attention the moment before the pole slams into my side. Yanked off balance again, its heated surface presses against my skin. A cord tightens around my neck, presses me hard against the metal. The pressure of it should have me choking for breath, yet I feel no urge to breathe. Twisting against the metal, I find cold furious eyes regarding me with the same intensity as finding a goat turd amongst clean stray bedding.
The woman could be with Kāma’s sister though her hair is the colour of a golden flame. Her gazes shines with the same hateful intensity, though instead of flames within her ice-blue eyes reflect the lake’s flames. A rope coils in her grasp and without a motion from her, it flexes and another section loops around my neck and forces my chin upwards.
“I saw when you broke the lake’s surface, little one. How are you not a Lemure?”
Words whose like I’d never heard before dig and grates against my ears. I saw her beautiful bow lips shape them so gracefully, yet their tones are sharp and vile. Her eyes wander over my naked form, while I try to find meaning to answer her question. Leather garments enfold an alluring form that catches my attention. The slightest flex of her body speaks of a snow leopard’s speeding grace.
“I don’t even know what that is? Let me go.”
The words come out as a choking sound, full of broken pottery shards and bitter scorn, even their barest sound cutting at the air.
I struggle fruitlessly against the rope’s loop as it forces my head about, and she motions at a lard thing. The clump is barely half my height, and at her motion, it somehow stands and turns our way. Melted features holding solid black eyes that stare our way with fear, hope, and hunger as one.
“I’d best take you to the region supervisor and get this mess sorted out.”
Instantly the same sensation that occurred when I appeared on the shoreline enfolds us and stones appear around us. Each block is twice my height, and as I try to determine their height, units of measurement I don’t remember learning run through my mind. I now stand the same height as Kāma, and my current captor, perhaps one-eight centimetres, if not a fraction less. The near flat chest that I’d possessed had grown as well, and my breasts bounce awkwardly with every quick step she forces me to take. One hand is still upon the rope, but a hand reaching across my shoulder digs painfully tight into a wing’s edge.
Things of spiked hide, and red glaring eyes scurry around the chamber, presenting hide stacks to other black winged women sitting behind tables. When a figure clad head to toe in some strange metal moves from before a table, my captor drags me to the open spot, past other things that hiss and bark, only to be ignored.
“This one crawled from Moto Maluuni Lake on Avernus.”
Though she shares the same battered black wings, within her feathers sit motes of blue light, that reflect off her ivory white skin in the chamber’s dim light. Hair the colour of dead coals matches the gaze that she fixes on me, narrowing sceptically after a moment’s consideration.
“What was your name?”
“Finnegan.”
I don’t know why I answer so readily, but I simply do—my name forcing itself from my lips.
The eagle-eyed gaze digs into me as she glances between me and the bundles of flayed faces, a thing passing with spikes for flesh thing on her desk. Long nails tear a piece of skin apart and she sucks it in between knife-edged teeth as she looks through scrolls sealed with black blobs.
“Here you are. This is interesting, no wonder you’re an Erinys now when you were formerly Mortal. Fancy a sylph ending up amongst us. Djinn-kin, you got your wish granted, now there is just Hell to pay. What to call you, hm? Chieftain’s daughter Finnegan, you are no longer. Your new name is Ilya, little trainee. Welcome to Hell’s Army.”