Aklesso Kadri rode through the teeming jungle, letting the environment guide him from objective to objective. Hoofprints, trampled plants, and piles of freshly steaming dung. As unruly and bull-headed as Pentayaks could be, they were also terrible at covering their tracks, leaving any number and variety of clues for their human handlers to follow.
Aklesso thought that he’d seen everything these Pentayaks could throw at him. But today’s search was different. With a different kind of clue. Today, the sign that pointed him to his next objective was a trail of blood.
The blood—smeared upon gumtree bark and seeped into mud—led him deep into the jungle, far away from the Trial enclosure and even the known boundaries of the Pentayak sanctuary itself. Aklesso and his jaguar-like Chakram Rosette gradually became caked in mud as they delved farther into uncharted territory. Few places in Stormvast could claim to be truly uncivilized, and the deepest hinterlands north of Seaforth counted among them, owing to their sheer inaccessibility and the dangers that lurked around every crocodile-hiding marsh and mosquito-infested swamp. Despite that, Aklesso pressed on, concerned not for his own safety but for the sanctity and imperative of his task.
Because the most disturbing aspect of this search wasn’t the blood trail, but rather the signs of human activity that accompanied it. Rosette’s weren’t the only Chakram tracks that had recently traversed these parts. At every smear upon gumtree bark and at every stain on the muddy ground, a confusion of interweaving tyre treads painted a picture of violence, fear, and pain. A group of riders had chased and harried an injured Pentayak through the jungle. The meandering nature of the Moshou’s hoofprints and blood trails, often taking wild detours from the paths of least resistance, spoke to its numerous attempts at escape. At every such deviation, the tyre treads followed close, surrounding the beast to force it back into line.
The job of a sanctuary warden dictated that Aklesso maintain calm and clarity of mind at all times. But as much as this particular set of environmental clues led him closer to his objective, it also told a story. A story that made Aklesso’s own blood boil with barely suppressed rage.
The trails ended in a mass of logs, rocks, and cinderblocks: clear signs of human activity and perhaps even habitation, this far out in what was supposedly the middle of nowhere. These objects had been piled against and atop each other to form a kind of mound, then covered with leaves, branches, and dirt. A kind of blockade, along with an attempt at camouflage, though it’d been a rush job at best. Someone or a group of someones had left this place in a hurry, and hadn’t wanted anyone to see what they’d been up to.
Despite its shoddy appearance, the blockade was substantial enough to necessitate an excavator or hours of manual labour to remove it. Luckily for Aklesso, his Chakram’s loadout was specialized toward navigating inhospitable terrain, and it came with a couple of tricks that could be co-opted for this exact scenario.
First, Pelagic Drive. A column of water geysered beneath Rosette, pushing it up into the air to easily clear the height of the mound. The water followed the path of the flight and reshaped itself around the Chakram’s wheels, thereby slowing its descent and cushioning its landing. Next, Earthdelver. The organic portions of the blockade disintegrated and caved, allowing the remaining cinderblocks to give way and fall apart. Underneath the blockade was a sheer drop onto more jungle bits and construction materials. The warden swiftly activated Gustveil, then angled his Chakram to let the rotating Aegis bounce against the scrap heap and prop him upright.
Aklesso found himself at the dead end of a dark corridor, now lit only by the daylight that spilled in from the hole he’d just created. What was this place? An underground bunker? He couldn’t see the full extent of the structure he’d stumbled into, but something told him he’d best proceed on foot from this point forward.
He stepped off Rosette, turned on its headlight, then wheeled it down the corridor. The first thing that hit him—before his vision could adjust to the suboptimal lighting—was the smell. More accurately, a cocktail of multiple and separately identifiable smells. All of them familiar, yet uniquely sickening in their combination. The rancid pungency of days-decomposed meat. The chemical undertones of antiseptics and medical equipment. And the earthy stench of Pentayak dung…
The corridor opened into a spacious room that was in utter disarray. Metallic tables and what looked to be surgical equipment lay strewn about the place. Together with scattered pieces of paper that littered the grimy floor, the room had the appearance of an abandoned lab or clinic.
As Aklesso turned Rosette’s headlight this way and that, he saw that one whole side of the room was lined with metal cages—three of them to be exact. They were large: tall enough to fill the space from floor to ceiling and just as wide. There weren’t too many animals on Earth that these cages couldn’t comfortably house. For a certain bovine Moshou, however, even these would’ve been a tight squeeze. The first two cages Aklesso saw were (thankfully) empty. But the third…
Aklesso took a deep breath to compose himself before setting Rosette in place, keeping its headlight pointed directly into the third cage. Then he approached the cage, slowly so as not to miss a single detail.
The Pentayak was long dead, which was just as well, given the extent and nature of its injuries. Its once hue-cycling fur had settled into a dull gray and was matted with the blood and fluids that had leaked from numerous lacerations, abrasions, and burn wounds. Both of its horns had been snapped clean off, nearly at the base, giving its already vacant face a grotesquely bald and naked appearance. Strange wired instruments protruded from its back, seeming to trace the path of its vertebrae.
But the most striking—most horrific—site of mutilation was its throat: split open with surgical precision down the centre, with its layers of skin, muscle, and fat spread wide open and sutured onto the sides of its neck. Aklesso knew enough Pentayak anatomy to see that the windpipe had also been pushed to one side, thus allowing access to the Anamnic pouch, which, on a Pentayak, adhered to its gullet. This pouch had also been cut open, revealing its emptied interior cavity.
In Aklesso Kadri’s work as a warden of the Pentayak sanctuary, a part of his duties was to protect the Moshous from would-be poachers. Poachers who’d harvest Conduits rather than inherit them from sanctioned Trials.
Harvesting Conduits immediately rendered them ‘defective’, limiting them to a mere fraction of the magic legally inherited Conduits would otherwise generate. However, that didn’t stop their circulation in black markets where they were sold and collected for their novelty rather than practical value. In that regard, Aklesso had failed in his duty—had failed this Pentayak and any others that might’ve passed through this abominable ‘laboratory’.
Yet, he also sensed that wasn’t the full story. For in order to harvest a Conduit, a poacher needed only to kill or immobilize a Moshou long enough to access and retrieve the contents of its Anamnic pouch. But what had happened inside this cage wasn’t simple butchery nor even surgery.
It was torture.
Aklesso took another deep breath to quell his seething rage. He drank in—unhesitatingly—the miasma of death, decay, and waste that permeated the cage and the room at large. He wished not to cower, nor to turn away from the force of the Pentayak’s suffering. Its pain. If he’d failed to save it, he wished at least to taste and feel the abject horror of its lonely miserable death.
And he wished, fervently and with rage that brooked no quelling, to find and punish those responsible.
Eventually, Aklesso tore his eyes away from the fallen beast and faced the rest of the room, the better to search it for any clues that might lead him to the poachers. In his experience, humans tended to be considerably more careful than Moshous when it came to covering their tracks, but that didn’t entirely appear to be the case with whomever had set up then abandoned this laboratory.
The first thing he checked, of course, were the papers on the floor. Even if they contained mostly jargon, he might be able to piece together just enough information to point him to his next objective. To his dismay, the writings were all in foreign script, causing him to rue the years he’d spent in university skipping the lectures for an elective language course. To his growing bewilderment, however, not only were the scripts foreign, they were also unrecognizable, matching none of the other languages that existed beyond Stormvast’s borders. A rare language he’d never heard of? A completely made-up alphabet for encryption purposes? Or could it be—
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“You’d think you’ve seen everything, but there really is no bottom to the depravity mortals are willing to sink to, is there?”
Aklesso was well within his rights to scream. At the very least, he should’ve jumped, tensed, or reached for one of the surgical instruments to defend himself. He did none of that. Instead, he looked up calmly from the paper he’d failed to read, and trained a neutral if mildly curious gaze upon the intruding figure, as though it’d been in the room with him this whole time.
The newcomer—an older man who looked to be in his late sixties or early seventies—stood all but directly in front of Rosette’s headlight, causing much of his figure to be obscured in shadows. That didn’t stop Aklesso from taking ample note of an attire that could only be described as odd. Wide-brimmed hat, circular shaded glasses, a flowery changshan top that was mismatched with its trousers, and a scarf-like contrivance that draped over the shoulders like a cape. Aklesso himself could never be accused of being a fashionista, but even he knew that no one in Stormvast dressed like the man before him. No one sane, anyway.
And yet… despite the man’s odd appearance, despite his even odder remark, and despite the fact that he’d just materialized out of thin air in the deepest and most uncharted of the Seaforth hinterlands, Aklesso Kadri faced this stranger with all the nonchalance of greeting a co-worker on a Tuesday morning.
“What happened here?” he found himself asking. Not who are you and how did you get here. Just… what happened here, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to assume that this oddly attired stranger would have the answer.
“Harvests,” the man did answer, and matter-of-factly at that. “But clearly with extra steps. Perhaps in the hopes of extra rewards. Perhaps the kind of harvest that involved some… creative engineering.”
Aklesso almost pressed for more, then found that he didn’t need to. Whether as an extension of the same magic that imbued this meeting with undue calm, or simply because he himself had bigger fish to fry, Aklesso found that he wasn’t curious about the why. He just wanted to know who and where.
“Do you know them?”
“Know whom?”
“The criminals who did this.”
“No.” The man shuddered and made a face. “These aren’t the types of characters I normally associate with.” Then he nodded toward the paper in Aklesso’s hands. “Find anything useful on there?”
The warden, by way of answer, turned the paper toward the older man, showing off its unintelligible contents. At this, the stranger smiled wryly.
“I think it’s possible that there’s a world where that in itself might be a clue. But as far as you or I are concerned, we need something… a little more in our wheelhouse, wouldn’t you say?”
The man stepped closer to Aklesso, causing the latter to momentarily tense. But only for a moment, for he soon regained his mysterious sense of calm. In any case, the stranger reached, not for Aklesso, but for an object on the table beside him.
The man held the object up to Rosette’s light. It was a bone, stripped clean of all soft tissue: a pale, irregularly shaped plate, about the size of a large cutting board, which contained prominent grooves on either side that once would’ve housed powerful muscles. Aklesso knew enough Pentayak anatomy to identify it as—
“A shoulder blade,” he spoke softly, then swallowed the bile that rose as he imagined the specimen’s provenance.
“Precisely,” the stranger agreed. “And do you know what folks in the olden times used to do with a shoulder blade, when they needed some direction in life?”
Aklesso frowned, but in concentration rather than confoundment. For the stranger’s quiz had touched upon material from his university days he’d actually paid attention to.
“Scapulomancy?” he ventured. “Back in the Ardor Dynasty, fortunetellers would carve questions onto an ox’s shoulder blade, then heat it until the bone cracked. The direction of the crack would then indicate the answers.”
The stranger chuckled, which only deepened Aklesso’s frown.
“What is so funny?”
“Don’t mind me, lad. I’m just appreciative. I’ve chatted to many a wayward soul on my travels, but it’s not often I get to speak to one who’s as quick on the uptake as you.”
The warden considered this statement—its implications—and once again, deemed it not worth pursuing. Instead, he asked with more than passing skepticism, “You really think an ancient fortunetelling ritual will help us?”
“Well… we’re here now. And this is what we have. I reckon we won’t know unless we try. I also reckon there’s no harm in trying. Although… I suppose one of my sisters would be more of an expert on this matter. It’s a real shame she’s so difficult to reach these days.”
Aklesso frowned with the calm bemusement of a student about to doze off during a lecture. Seeing this, the older man stepped forward again and repositioned the Pentayak’s shoulder blade such that one of its surfaces shone clearly in the light.
“Just take a look, lad. What do you see?”
Aklesso obeyed as though in a trance. And to his surprise, as he stared at the contours upon the shoulder blade, a clear picture did form in his mind.
“It’s a map,” he breathed, “a map of Stormvast.”
And so it was. That snaking ridge represented the Firmament Mountains to the west. A pair of shallow, barely visible indentations traced the two arms of the Provenance River, which meant the notch next to one of the arms must be the capital, Morrowtide. There was even a bump in one corner that matched Seaforth—and the hinterlands upon which this oddest of conversations took place.
Even in his studious calmness, Aklesso couldn’t help but let out a soft snicker. “If I understand you correctly, sir, you mean to heat this piece of bone until it cracks. And wherever the crack points to is where I will find the criminals that tortured my Pentayaks?”
“Like I said,” the man said with an odd twinkle in his bespectacled eyes, “we won’t know unless we try.”
Suddenly, the room brightened a touch. Radiant warmth filled the air in front of Aklesso’s face. He saw that a new light—and heat—source had appeared, though from where he stood, it was masked behind the thick plate of the Pentayak’s shoulder blade. He hadn’t seen the stranger pull out a lighter. And yet… something told him that he wouldn’t find a lighter in the man’s hand, even if the shoulder blade hadn’t blocked his view.
After some time, the bone did crack. A thin line first appeared at the centre of the map before it travelled a short way in a roughly northeasterly direction… then stopped. Where the crack ended fell almost exactly upon the prominent notch next to one of the arms of the Provenance River.
Morrowtide.
Aklesso was so focused on visualizing the map—on envisaging his next objective—that it took him a second to notice that the man had already put away the shoulder blade, along with the not-a-lighter in his hand. The man now smiled at him, with eyes that twinkled behind shaded glasses.
The warden suddenly came to himself, snapping out of a trance. He saw the darkened room and felt its oppressive miasma of death, decay, and waste. He looked into the inscrutable eyes of a complete stranger that had appeared out of nowhere. Finally, he reflected upon the ludicrous notions the two of them had just exchanged.
“I cannot,” Aklesso said hoarsely. To himself as much as to the stranger. “I have a duty to these Pentayaks here. I cannot just leave them and pursue this… this fantasy.”
The man nodded, as though he’d expected no other response from his counterpart. “I suppose, lad, that’s a choice only you can make.”
Aklesso averted his gaze. Turned away from the glare of Rosette’s headlight. From the stranger’s inscrutable smile.
And this moment of hesitation—of shying away from the here and now—proved sufficient to break the magic entirely. His senses came back to him in full, and with them, so did all the ways he ought to have reacted to the stranger’s arrival in the first place: alarm, suspicion, authority. Who are you and what are you doing in an restricted area? At a crime scene, no less?
He turned back to voice as much… and found himself alone in the room. The man was gone without a trace. Had appeared out of thin air and now disappeared in the same manner.
Cursing under his breath, Aklesso sprinted out of the room and back up the dark corridor. He clambered up the rubble that had formed at the entrance to the bunker, and jumped out into the open. All around, only the jungle stretched in its ever-writhing density. There was no sign of the caped stranger anywhere—not even so much as a footprint.
But Aklesso did hear something. The roar of a Chakram’s engine. Fading into the unseen distance.