I am

The boneyard girl

Weeping over splintered love

Haunted

Soul

WITH A CHOKED-OFF SCREAM, Allory hurled herself aside, but not quickly enough. Blam! Searing pain ripped into her right knee as a heavy blow spun her off the long sarembis branch and into space, mercifully granting a second’s respite from the chase. A chorus of ugly barks celebrated her downfall. All she glimpsed of the Ripper Baboon pack hunting her was the glint of tawny yellow eyes amongst the thick foliage and a flash of cruelly hooked claws.

Second ambush. The first had come within a whisker of ripping her head off her shoulders, leaving her too injured to fly.

Perhaps that was the point? Smart brutes, these. Killers with an instinct for entertainment.

Only, she was the quarry, the entertainment and a light dinner rolled into one.

Four lines of silver blood welled beside her kneecap. She clutched at the wound. Briefly, searing pain made her see white. Then, her plummeting body ripped through a hairy branch fruiting-tip, causing hundreds of spiky green chammis nuts to explode out of their casings, before she snapped a smaller tree limb with her shoulder and rebounded heavily off a towering spongiphore mushroom, a soft but decidedly pongy touchdown.

“Suggids!” she swore, spitting out a foul mouthful.

The giant mauve mushroom tasted worse than it stank, an unlikely but impressive feat.

Curling over onto her good knee, she tried to stand up and slumped back onto the peaty ground with a scream that included another, much fruitier word. Her wrecked wings stuck to her back, glued by her blood.

Dozens of Ripper Baboons came swinging down from the burgundy boughs in a shower of leaves, barking their characteristic gruff hunting cries. Allory did not stop to inquire whether they preferred Faerie flesh lightly salted, diced into neat cubes or served up on a bed of fresh targun moss. She fled. Injured leg and mutilated right wing-cluster? No time to rue the damage. No chance of flying to safety. Her tiny blue feet and her wits were her only hope now.

Run!

How had she thought herself lucky to escape the band of Marakusian Slavers which had captured her family? They were the lucky ones. If she did not work out a way to hide in five wing-ticks flat, she would be fresh baboon fodder.

Hide? She had quivered under cover while her family and her friends fought for their lives, shrieked in fear, were shot down and kicked aside and netted – and what had she done? Nothing. Allory’s eyesight blurred with fat tears, meaningless regret. She was a nothing, the runt among her seven pupae-siblings.

Smallest. Lightest. Weakest. A waste of good nectar.

Not an ounce of courage either.

That her close-knit family of Scintillant Fae loved her just as she was, made it no better. Allory knew she was a useless encumbrance, the one they always had to make allowances for. She kept getting sick. No huntress, no fighter, no provider was she … all she had done was to cower under cover, as her Dadfae had ordered, while they dragged her family and her people away, trapped and helpless in inescapable nets modelled on the long fronds of the super-sticky, carnivorous jungle sundew plant. Her pupae-sister Yallina’s sky-blue gaze had been the worst, silent accusation scorching from within a cage made of that tough green netting. The shrieks of the dying … her mind baulked at the litany of searing memories.

No. Keep going, don’t go there. Anything but that.

Weeping again now – these past four days had been fuller of tears than she imagined could exist inside Spheris – she crashed heedless through brush and undergrowth, tearing through thorny brakes and bounding awkwardly over the massive green tree roots that gripped the fertile black soils of her native jungle with gnarled fingers far older than her life. Grief made her blind; terror made her careless.

Allory never saw the Semmish Spinner trap.

All she knew was that the ground gave way beneath her misplaced foot and she hurtled down a near-vertical underground tunnel and barrelled straight through a nest of young spiders. Trying to brace herself against the sides wrenched her already aching leg. The slick woven silk offered no purchase as the soft grey bodies mobbed her eagerly, mandibles waving and fangs dripping yellow poison. She fumbled for her cepril tusk dagger before stepping on a spider’s furry head to launch herself blindly – away!

Without warning, the tunnel cut off, dropping her into space. Allory spied a crystalline roof above partly open to the air and sparkling turquoise waters below, but her flight path arced away from that. Whipping past long flowering vines that trailed from the rocky lip of the cenote all the way to the groundwater pool below, she nosedived antennae-first into a mountainous pile of soft, rotting old leaf fall.

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Splot. Hip deep.

Inelegance being a talent with no need for cultivation.

She pulled herself out slowly, trying to count her limbs and antennae and eight gossamer wings with their striking azure, cobalt and sapphire patterning, much like a butterfly’s most glorious raiment. Mostly attached. Some bits less so than others. Her flight muscles hurt abominably. The usually frisky, sensitive quad of wingtips on her right side was entirely numb. No, dead. She could not consider what this might mean. That vicious talon cut had struck bone deep.

Something wriggling on her tongue …

“Freaking suggids!” She spat out a lime-green grub.

Allory wriggled her rump as she backed up, having to exert considerable force to free herself from the gooey, bug-infested hole her head had just punched into the pile.

Thank Middlesun it was all spongy leaf-rot and that her antennae could clearly withstand more abuse than she had just handed out. Blinking her long, curling sapphire eyelashes to clear the muck, she sensed rather than spied movement through the rich azure radiance filtering down into the cenote through a screen of foliage impossibly far above. One could almost view the vast reaches of Centresky, but here in the deepest, most lethal jungles in the world, the sky was rarely seen. To a weakling who could not fly high, it was a mythical place she had never seen even into her nineteenth year. Not even a glimpse.

She shivered. Vast spaces filled with high-altitude predators? Not for the likes of her, nor any of her kind.

Barks ricocheted around the cavernous space, confusing her as to the direction they came from. Her head twizzled urgently. The danger had never been more severe. To the Rippers, this hunt was a game with but one end.

Scrambled Allory for breakfast.

Not much meat to go around the pack, mind. The omnivorous simians were rust-coloured brutes four times the height and forty times the weight of any Scintillant Fae, besides being strong, agile and aggressive beasts. Usually, they would not bother a Fae colony, for the warriors defended their territory to the death, but a Faerie runt caught out on her own was nothing short of a ready snack.

The baboons swung their hairy, long-armed bodies with ease down the flowering vines, drawing back their full crimson lips to display fine sets of three-inch fangs as they barked and grunted at one another. What were they saying?

‘Doesn’t she look tasty?’

‘Come on, brothers, join me for the feast!’

Several spread out to cut off her likely escape routes, but the rest angled toward the huge, sloping leaf pile. Sallow eyes blazed down upon her, at one tiny sapphire Fae who blended into nothing at all in this jungle, a brilliant sapphire butterfly pinned against a brownish-red slope of leaves.

“No … no!” she gasped, flailing for balance.

Scram! She had to escape. Somehow.

Sobbing with fear, Allory tried to dash upslope, away from the majority of the Ripper Baboons, but the soft footing and her injured knee betrayed her. Slipping and rolling downward in a shower of filthy muck, she found her dagger by sheer luck – the handle banged into her ribs. A desperate fumble secured it in her left hand. She scooted sideways, avoiding several flying swipes. Wickedly curved three-inch claws swished past her head, the reason for the name ‘ripper.’

What chance did she stand against these numbers?

Zero.

Faefolk said ‘my blood-sap fizzed behind my eyes,’ to describe the horror of one’s deepest, most precious memories playing out into impending death. She had never appreciated that saying so keenly before. Never known fear that ravaged all reason, fear beyond even what she had experienced at the colony.

Sap-stupefying fear.

Then, the strangest thing happened. As she struggled for balance, dancing past a baboon that swung past her on his vine, reaching out but missing his intended grip on her short, spiky blue hair, she saw the dagger blade waving in front of her nose. It felt disembodied, yet sapphire knuckles clenched the hilt as tightly as a jungle parasite strangulating young growth.

A voice not her own cried, “Come on! What’re you waiting for?” Allory brandished the obsidian blade. “Let’s play. Come on! Finish it!”

Too telling, the quaver, the distress in her voice.

Ruddy fur flashed toward her, one long, powerful arm outstretched and the paw curved outward to splay the talons in preparation for plucking her head off her shoulders. Allory slid backward, wailing in despair, raising the dagger without the slightest hope of hitting her target. She was no warrior. She’d be crushed in an instant.

The beast crashed into her, rolling her down the slope as her wrist twisted sharply – but, to her shock, the slavering fangs did not sink into her face. Instead, they remained agape in a grimace of death as she spun free. Huh? Her feet splashed along the shore, a fear-drunk, weaving path that led nowhere. Allory realised that sticky blood coated the side of her neck beneath her ear, welling steadily from several shallow cuts she did not remember receiving. Where had those come from? One wing cluster buzzed urgently; the other lay dead, plastered along her spine.

Yellow talons flashed around her, raking the air playfully, lethally close. Fear impelled her feet left, right, forwards in a stutter only to recoil as a hairy face seemed to leap toward her own. She whirled in place. Nowhere to go. Surrounded by beasts, what could she do?

Her chin rose slightly.

As one, the Ripper Baboon troop snarled in bestial anticipation.

She snarled back.

The Rippers beat their barrel chests and bayed in chorus to down her out, but for a few heart-pounding seconds, made no attack.

Cowards! How could any creature be more cowardly than her?

Or tinier?

Faltering backward a step, she found herself hard up against the warm body of the creature she must have, against all odds, slain. Allory yanked her dagger free of her unintended victim’s throat with a soft sucking sound she knew she’d never forget.

“Well?” she challenged, swinging the bloodied blade in a haphazard loop. “Want some more? Come on!”

The mouths drew closer, the bodies bigger. They measured a burly five feet tall even when crouched down. She was miniscule in comparison, a shade over eleven inches at most, as slender and frail as a day-old bamboo stalk.

What could they be waiting for? The disparity in size and strength was ludicrous, yet they hesitated.

“Just do it already!” she screamed. “I’ll – I’ll get you!”

So scary, I’m scaring myself here.

So scary, the Ripper Baboons barked in glee as they leaped down onto the leaf pile, surrounding her with slow, deliberate menace. Mocking. Relentless. Crowding her with their massive, shaggy bodies. She whipped the dagger back and forth, trying to keep them at bay. Without warning, a heavy paw slapped the blade out of her hand. No! Allory made to chase after the weapon, but a snarling trio of baboons stymied her. She screeched and jumped again as a paw swiped toward her backside. Swim for it? Ripper Baboons were excellent swimmers, no doubt far faster through the water than a titch like her. As the pack closed all the spaces around her, she knew that this was her final song.

Dull anger smouldered inside her chest.

What a waste of a life, even one as worthless as hers. How futile.

Raising her puny fists, she balled them up and launched herself at the nearest Ripper Baboon with a hopeless scream, “Then I’ll die!”

SSKKKRREEE-SSSS!!