Beneath cold, grey lips lies the whispering tongue, the tongue of false promises and half-truths. Blue and dead, it snakes out, parting the lips like limp legs, sliding between them, out, out, out to you. It reaches through the chill, still air, still a few inches away, full of death, friend of decay, and you scream—try to scream, but your throat constricts. Your eyes, frantic and fearful and furious all at once, try to look away.

“Anything, anything but this.”

You plead, but you can’t speak. And the tongue approaches. Grey-blue, undulating towards you, somehow smiling, and you know there’s no escape.

It fills your vision, fills your nose with rot, pungent perfume, sickly sweet and cloying, hands clawing at your eyes but they can't move, tied behind you—and it touches you. Like ice pressed on bare skin, you go numb. First locally, then it spreads. The point of the dead fish tongue, whale tongue, blubber and worm and maggot-infested corpse tongue is on your forehead, just above your nose, where the bridge meets the brow.

And you wish there was a bridge, a gun, a knife, anything with which to kill yourself, to end this sickening, this suffering, and it slides down your forehead, down your nose, and there’s no saliva. It’s dry, dry and cold and sticky-slick like a rubber balloon or a condom, and it’s in your nostril, and your mouth is stuck shut, taped shut, and you can’t breathe, and suddenly you’re dying.

You’re crying, but there are no tears, and your heart is pounding in your chest, thumping against the floorboards from below, demanding to be let out, and it hurts, and the horror sickens you. Thickens you. Your throat fills with mud, and you can’t breathe.

Blood runs from your nose in cold rivers, red rivers, sliding slowly, and the tongue laps it up eagerly, greedily, and smiles wider. A knife smile, an unlife smile, and finally, the nightmare sight of it is gone as your eyes roll into your head. The tongue retracts. It is satiated, satisfied, and your body hits the floor. And you’re dead.

Esserai opened her eyes, blinked against the pale yellow light of the suns. Her head lay on a pillow of matted grasses, and she lifted it. Beneath her, pressed against her abdomen, the familiar shape of the spear gave her comfort. Why did she show me such a hideous dream? Is it punishment? Or a warning? Esserai shook her head at the thoughts, images, and pain that were not her own.

Standing, she slung the spear across her body. She’d napped a dozen yards from the roadside, enjoying the subtle breeze that drifted slowly across the open plain, playing with her hair and making the tall grass kowtow. Mindar didn’t need to sleep, not really. Not in the way humans did, or kide, or dwarves, or the other mortal races. But she enjoyed the sensation of it, the rest. The escape. Her body would survive without sleep, but since she’d lost her Corio, her mind would not. Not easily.

She knows this, and yet she sends me such visions. Esserai lowered her head, her lips drawing down in a frown. I miss your son, Spirit Mother.

The sun-bleached grass parted as she walked towards the road, and she let her hands trail through it, feeling their dry, supple stalks on her fingertips. The world outside of her homeland was vast, but everything felt so small. The grass was several feet tall, but to her, it felt like everything beyond the forest was miniature and insignificant.

The grass receded as she entered the road’s domain, packed dirt that crunched softly under her slippered feet. All these foreign words. Road. Sun. Humans. She soured. They were small too. Small, petulant, ugly creatures. In her head, she saw the men in grey robes, their gleaming bald heads reflecting the orange light of a fire that consumed all she knew and everyone she had ever loved.

A cart approached. It was drawn by two horses, one dappled brown and white and the other a sleek black, its eyes covered by leather blinders. Enslavers. The cart followed deep grooves already cut into the dirt by the passing of several other carriages before it, and the driver bent over the side as he passed her, trying to peer into her face shrouded by hood and hair.

The driver was seated on the cart’s wooden bench more than five feet off the ground, and Esserai was nearly on a level with him. She turned her head, tilted it up at him, and caught his eye. Hers shone violet, and he looked away hurriedly, whipping the reins against the horses’ backs.

The cart sped away, and a cloud of dust rose behind it to engulf her. As the day wore on, the street filled with more passersby until it was crowded, a congested mass of bodies under the afternoon suns. In the distance, the land rose to a pinnacle, a hillock adorned by sturdy stone walls and a heavyset, ironbound gate. Esserai knew not the city's name but had picked up the words “Tyrun” or “Tern,” and figured that it was neither of those but something adjacent to them both.

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The road wasn’t large, not by any measure Esserai could admit to, but it was more prominent than others she’d traveled. It was a main road, she’d heard, snaking west to east along the continent's northern half. This was useful information, and she’d memorized it, but she had no idea how large the continent was or how much the road covered. That was one of the reasons she’d decided to subject herself to the cruelty of visiting a human city. For all their alleged secrecy, she hadn’t been willing to trust the knowledge of her existence to the kide, and thus had to garner information about the world herself. So, a city.

No matter how crowded the street became, a bubble of space existed around her into which no one walked. It was created by an unspoken understanding shared by all who walked the road; this one is not to be approached.

Perhaps it was her height; her seven feet and six inches, though she’d never measured it herself, was intimidating in its own right; maybe it was the spear she carried and the eloquence in her movements that told anyone, even the uneducated, that she knew exactly how to use it; or perhaps it was the sleek, refined alien aura that surrounded her at all times like a transparent sheath. It said: "I carry a spear, but I am the weapon." and in a language, though foreign, that all of them could understand.

Whatever the reason, Esserai was pleased by the space. The further away the humans stayed, as far as she was concerned, the better.

The road was full to bursting now, and she had no idea where the people had come from. Side roads joined the main artery, and here and there, roadside tea shops, food stalls, and small shrines stood erect, with patrons coming and going, resting from a long journey or returning to it. The sheer multitude of them disquieted her. It frightened her, and she struggled not to show it.

They walked in loose columns with no more than two feet in front or behind; carts laden with goods and covered wagons carrying who knew what rolled past in the middle ways, while pedestrians kept to the sides, five or six abreast. They sweated, they stank, and Esserai hated it.

She longed for the great expanses of the Minadariel, the forest that bore her people’s name. She fantasized that she was running with Corio, her six-tailed Eiefendril companion loping beside her. They were hunting Ermis, or Umbra, or Azelhorns, and the Fellbirds were singing their gay songs from the high branches, and her brothers were racing beside them, grinning, teasing her for her black hair. For it was the color of midnight, the color of the Umbra, and their hair was white. Everyone’s hair had been white except hers.

“The soul,” her mother told her, “is split between a Mindar and their Eiefendril sister at birth. The spirit foxes conceive only when a Mindar’s womb is with child, and when they are born, their souls join in union. This is in the oath.”

Esserai had understood, and when her mother carried her, Nususa Skytail had mated, and Esserai and Corio had been born at the same time. They had entered the world together, at the same minute, and their souls had mingled. And yet her hair had remained black.

Corio had been black too, his fur the color of jet, and his eyes the same violet as her own. Esserai still remembered Nususa’s words when she saw her child and Esserai, her spirit daughter, for the first time. Though she had only been in the world for seconds, the words rang clear in her head, telling them all that the oath had taken effect.

“Six tails, each as black as Nuiyama’s claws, and my daughter is beautiful and strong. We are blessed by the great goddess this day. Let us drink of the river and be merry, for six tails is the touch of the goddess.”

And later, her father told her that he’d never since gotten so drunk as he had on the night she was born, for six tails hadn’t been seen on an Eiefendril for eight hundred years, in his grandfather’s time, and she was destined to have a special life.

As she looked over the heads of the crowded road before her towards the city rising in the near distance, she wished it had been less special. She wished for days spent frolicking in the river with her siblings; for lazy afternoons carving statuettes of the goddess with her mother; and for long hours training the spear with her father and brothers. For if their persecutors ever followed them over the great sea, they would be ready. Though tens of thousands of years had passed since their exile, the Mindar remembered their persecution and would not suffer it again.

But their extinction hadn’t come at the hands of those from across the water. No, it had been humans in grey robes, with bald heads and weapons of sick magic and diseased, corrupted purple.

Another three or four hours of walking, and she’d be at the gates. There, she would find her answers. The villages she had passed through on her way were too small, and the people were too scared, too reluctant to spend the time speaking with her to parse out her broken, jumbled command of the language. In the city, Tern, Tyren, or Tyrun—whichever—she would find those who would answer her questions.

Something tugged at her sleeve, and she was yanked out of the throng. The world tumbled and twisted as she spun through the air, yellow and blue and brown all blurring together dizzily. They are strong.

Esserai found the spear’s shaft with her hand. She thrust it out beside her, channeling rei through her fingers and into the smooth wood. It extended to its full length, and the spearpoint found dirt. Her flight halted midair. Esserai’s eyes darted around her. There were three men dressed all in black, every inch of their skin covered. Not even their eyes peeked out, and Esserai wondered how they could see, but a flash of silver in the air paused the thought. She willed the spear to shrink, and fell from the sky. The knife whistled overhead, severing a single strand of hair from her scalp.

Esserai stood, spear held at overhand ready, as her three black-clad assailants spread out in a semicircle before her. She spared a glance at the road and saw that not a single person had stopped to watch. Then her eyes distinguished the shimmering sphere of pale aura hanging in the air around her, and she frowned. If they came upon me so easily, why not kill me outright? These were not the monk’s people. These were something else entirely.