A glyph [https://i.imgur.com/ZLENX3y.png]

Andra stopped to sniff the wind. The land, blanketed by recent snow, was deceptively smooth, gentle curves covering rocks and hollows and the jagged stumps of long-dead trees. A strange land, its rhythms and patterns unlike those she knew from the far north. The wind, though, the wind did not lie. It told of storm and snow, and faintly — so very faintly — of humans.

For days she had followed the trail of the humans who had taken her sister, then an ice-storm had blown in from the north. She had been forced to shelter. When the storm passed, all sign of them was lost.

They had been travelling directly south, though, as humans did, so once the storm quieted she had continued on the same line in hope of finding them.

That was many days ago. She had begun to lose hope, but now, the scent of humans was on the wind. Whether they were the humans she sought, she couldn’t say, but it was a direction and a purpose.

She turned her face to the wind and walked. Before long she saw the remains of a trail, overlain by snow, but still clear: the passage of many clumsy booted feet, at least four people, all human. She sped her pace, eyes and ears and nose alert to every small clue.

Here, one had fallen. Then gone on, leaning on another for support.

Fresh specks of snow stung her face. Cloud shadowed the white land, low enough to touch the hilltops with grey fingers. A storm was coming, but she had hours yet.

She went on, sliding down a steep slope. In the lee, the snow was much disturbed and strong human smells lingered: faeces, food, blood. Four distinct humans had been here, at least one of them a man, and no scent of her sister. She did not think they were the humans she sought, but she was not familiar enough with human scents to be sure.

Only hours ago, the four had huddled here. She pictured them in her mind, how they had sat and moved, shared their food, and talked. Just as a group of lasker would, like her own family gathered in the longhouse to eat and share warmth, Eldest telling a tale, small ones playing, Mother and Father…

Memory was a hot weight in her chest. Her clan was far away, Mother and Father long dead. Strangers had taken their place, and Andra had no close kin now, only Cara, her youngest true-sister. The sister she had sworn to kill.

The sky had darkened further while she examined the campsite. Ice edged the wind. The storm would be fierce when it came, fierce enough she might need shelter herself. Strange. She had thought the weather would be milder in the south, but it was not so.

The humans travelled slowly. She could catch them before the storm hit.

She set off on their trail, moving fast and not bothering to hide her own passing. The coming storm would wipe out any sign she—or anyone—had been here.

A few hours later, she caught their scent, wind-whipped up a slope. They were near. Flurries of snow blinded her, and the wind had a low and dangerous note. She slid down the hill. Already wind and fresh snow smoothed their trail, but she had their scent, and a hunter’s feel for how they moved in the landscape—clumsy, slow, seeking the easy path.

Her heart beat strongly. She was hollow and light with hunger. So long she had hunted and so far, with so little prospect of success, and now her quarry might be near and nearly helpless in these conditions, where she was not. She could creep up under cover of the storm and kill them before they knew she was there.

But if it were the same humans who had killed a lasker before, then for all their clumsiness, they might be dangerous. Besides, if she killed them she wouldn’t know what had happened to her sister — whether they had killed her, or she had escaped.

Caution was indicated, not bloodlust. She would creep up on them, yes, but to observe, not to kill. Not yet.

As she had thought, there were four: a man, an old woman, and two young ones. The adults huddled together under an overhang. The children scraped at the snow with their hands, trying to dig a shelter.

Andra crouched only yards from them, but the snow fell thickly now, and the humans weren’t looking in her direction.

They were not the humans she had sought. Those had been two adult men, and accustomed to travelling the north; these humans were helpless as infants. They should have begun digging a snow hole an hour ago. The young ones were trying, but they were weak and slow. The adults were succumbing to the slowness. Soon, they would sleep and die, and the young ones would follow before morning.

She had lost her sister’s trail, and the trail of the humans who killed the lasker man. There was no chance of finding either. All hope of vengeance was lost, had been lost for many days, only she had been too stubborn to admit the truth. Her stubbornness had led her far from home, and she was hungry.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

No thought now was needed. The humans were prey. They were dying anyway; it was mercy, like killing cubs abandoned by their mother.

She drew her knife, the one she had taken from the dead.

Si glyph [https://i.imgur.com/mHhTdaF.png]

Simon was dying when the angel came.

He didn’t feel the cold anymore, and the pain that had been all-consuming had faded to numbness. His sluggish thoughts circled the idea that he was dying. It didn’t seem so important as it had.

This is how it ends, he thought. I shall sleep, and die, and Sam and Lorie will die, all because of me. My fault. My stupidity. My weakness.

He knew he should move. He should dig out the snow hole and get his children into shelter, even if the doing killed him. This was entirely clear and obvious, yet the thought could not connect to movement. His body slept already. His thoughts felt distant from himself, slow and cold as deep water.

And then the angel stepped from the blinding snow, gripped his arm and lifted him with more than a man’s strength. Her dark eyes burned into his.

‘Angel,’ he said. He had never believed in angels, or at least, not the angels of Nana’s stories, the ones who came to help Sammael’s righteous in their hour of need. And he wasn’t even a Sammael-worshipper… so this angel had clearly made a mistake. ‘Save them. Please.’

His voice was only a hoarse whisper, lost in the wind, yet the angel heard. She stared at him and a strange expression crossed her face.

Then she dropped him.

Ah, he thought. It was oddly reassuring. He’d never asked for a miracle, and he certainly didn’t deserve one. Better, really, to die peacefully without having to change the views of a lifetime…

It was his last thought as he fell into warm and comfortable oblivion.

Darkness. Absolute, unyielding black pressing in on him from every side. Confining him; his limbs would not, could not move, not even an inch. Crushing, hard-edged weight shortened every breath. Pain — in his leg, in his fingers and toes, everywhere.

Buried alive. Every miner’s nightmare.

His mind drifted. Fragments of reality mixed with delusion and memory.

He had lain buried a long time… or perhaps not long. Terror stretched minutes to hours, and perhaps he had been unconscious. Time was unknowable. Slowly, he mastered himself: he was an Earth Adept and an Oryche. He should not fear the Earth. The pain was not intolerable, the darkness was only darkness, and he was alive.

Luck had saved him. Irony there. The collapse of the tunnel was his fault — his inexperience, his arrogance, his incompetence. He was only an Adept, not a Master, and he had overreached himself. And now, he paid the price, dying by slow degrees, helpless, trapped, and alone.

No, not quite alone. Someone breathed, not far away: hoarse, ragged breaths. Someone else lived.

‘Who’s there?’ he said, or tried to. Pressed by rocks above into the floor below, there was barely room to breathe, and his mouth was choked with dust.

‘Brant,’ came the reply. ‘Are you hurt, sir?’

‘My leg. You?’

‘I live yet.’

It was an indescribable comfort not to be alone, though guilt followed. Brant and himself were both trapped, both doomed.

‘I’m sorry, Brant,’ he said. ‘You were right. I should have listened.’

Brant did not reply for a time. Simon worried he had fallen unconscious, but then he coughed, and said, ‘You tried your best, boy, I’m sure.’

It hadn’t been good enough. And for that, Brant and six other men would pay the price. Simon had killed them all, and Brant knew it, but he was being kind.

Brant was a foreman in the mine, not a young man. He and his wife had a daughter Simon’s age. Simon lived with them as a lodger. He slept on a truckle-bed in their kitchen, ate his meals with them. He had lived with them for half a year yet couldn’t say he knew them well.

It was no fault of theirs. They had tried, in their rough way, to befriend him, and he had held himself apart, nursing his anger and his misery.

And now, sunk in shame and guilt, Simon wished himself dead. Those killed in the rockfall were the lucky ones. Dust dried his mouth. It hurt to swallow. To die of thirst would take days. Long, long, painful days.

Someone groaned, somewhere in the dark. Brant, or someone else? He strained to listen. Blood rushed in his ears. ‘Brant, are you there?’

‘I’m going nowhere.’ His voice sounded weaker.

‘You’re a good man,’ Simon said. ‘You were kind to me, and I was ungrateful. I’m sorry.’ He was babbling, trying to relieve his fear with the sound of his own voice.

‘Hold hard, boy. They will dig us out, be sure of it. Your life’s worth ten of us.’

A stab of guilt: once, he would have agreed. ‘No, it’s not. I’m nothing.’

‘Not so. You’re a blessing from Sammael hisself. Do you know how many died, the year before you came?’

‘No.’

‘Twenty-two, my own brother among them. But since you came, not one man has died.’

Mining was dangerous work. Gas explosions killed. Cave-ins killed. Everyday accidents left men maimed and crippled. This Simon knew, though he had never faced it. He was an Oryche, of House Oryche. He had lived in luxury a man such as Brant couldn’t begin to imagine, all bought and paid for with the lives of miners like him.

The mine-manager had told Simon what work to do, to shore up an unstable tunnel, to check for pockets of gas… He had done as he was asked with no great effort or enthusiasm. It was meaningless to him, a mere way to pass time until his family saw sense and called him back to Athanor.

‘So you see, your life is worth more than any man’s here.’ Brant coughed. ‘They will dig you out, for sure.’

Squeezed beneath the rock and darkness, Simon listened to the beating of his heart in the silence.

He had grown up knowing Simon vai Oryche would be an important man, yet his own House, his own family, had cast him aside and forgotten him as if he were worthless, an embarrassment. They had condemned him to this black hell, and he doubted, now, that anyone but his mother cared if he lived or died. Though considering her condition, she might not either.

All the people he had counted on—father, mother, uncles, cousins, teachers—were gone. All he had was Brant’s voice in the dark, and to him, and his fellow miners, Simon vai Oryche was an Earth Adept, a man whose work made theirs a little safer.

If he lived—he swore it, earnestly, like Brant would swear to his god, though Simon’s own gnostic belief was more complicated and uncertain, but he swore to whatever Powers might hear—if he lived, he would not think of Athanor or the life he had lost. He would devote himself to keeping men like Brant alive and safe, and perhaps then, his life truly would be worth something.

He lay beneath the rockfall twelve hours, he found out later. The miners worked without rest to dig out the survivors. They pulled Simon unconscious from the rubble, his leg crushed and broken. Of the seven miners, one other survived.

It wasn’t Brant.