Sadrahan landed and hooked the talons of his toes into the ground, bringing him to a dead stop beside his target, a goat.

It barely had a moment to look up before his free arm came down and his hand pierced its skull and brain. It fell, spasming to the ground, dead before it knew there was danger. ‘A mother’s milk would be best, but this will do.’ He told himself while his daughter cried out for what he couldn’t give her. And since he couldn’t give her what she wanted most, Sadrahan gave her what he could. The goat still twitched on the ground, and while its body passed through its death throws he opened up the vein of its neck and cupped the blood into his palm, which he then brought to his daughter’s lips.

She drank greedily and ceased her cries except for the seconds in between each filling of his palm. Not far away, other goats which witnessed the death of their comrade scattered in all directions, their hooves hopping from stone to stone and rising higher, up to narrow ridges. Sadrahan watched as they stood in places that seemed to have no ledge, and yet they didn’t fall. They had thick white coats which increased the evident size of their bodies, and short horns that were almost demonlike in the way they curved out of the small heads.

“I need to name you…” Sadrahan said after she stopped drinking, stopped crying, and began to cuddle into his chest to fall asleep. The choice was obvious. “Lamashi. Yes, close to your mother’s name.” He said and blinked back bloody tears, driving them back by focusing on what lay in front of him, a dead goat.

He crouched down and ran his hands over the fur. It was soft, ‘Unbelievably soft, this is a far cry from the sheep’s wool we use. And these goats are much bigger.’ He pressed his hand against it, gauging the thickness, then checked the horns. ‘Good furs, good solid horns, I should be able to get milk if I can capture and keep a few of them.’ It was only then that his stomach rumbled and the first pangs of hunger hit.

In a single smooth motion he hefted the goat under one arm and folded his wings inside his back again. ‘Where to go…’ He began to wonder but immediately found his answer. A goat found his way into a cave by hopping up from a cliff so small that Sadrahan wasn’t sure how the goat could stand on it at all. ‘I’ll probably need these a lot.’ Sadrahan realized as he expanded his wings again and launched himself toward the cave.

Broad daylight died when he stepped within the stone, the gentle tapping of goat feet came from somewhere deep within, and the floor beneath his feet had a slight slope over which a trickle of water ran, adding to the peacefulness of the surrounding rock. Though the daylight was dead, something else was born, along the walls was a visual cacophony of colors, faint glowing moss over which small insects skittered. Some of which were familiar, centipedes and spiders, but all of which had their own ‘otherness’ to them. With bodies of pure white they moved across the glowing moss like winking stars in the night sky, but they were stars which clashed in battle with one another.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Scorpion claws ripped a centipede in half after the darting stinger did its deadly work. The moss itself grew in reds, greens, ghostly blues, and even a white shade over which no insect seemed to crawl, and the glow of the carpeted inner walls led deep into the dark where the vanished goat seemed to fearlessly tread.

Sadrahan clutched his daughter just a hair tighter against his body and stepped with trepidation into the distant mystery, his feet fell slow and quiet, his free hand open with claws bared, though he folded in his wings again.

The cavernous opening echoed and briefly amplified every noise, even seemingly his very breath. Sadrahan looked behind him, the entrance was fading to a white dot as he went deeper, following the receding noise of the goat. ‘Could there be monsters in here?’ He wondered, but he set aside the notion, following the winding path and trickle of water by his feet.

All he could think was, ‘The farther I am from the wider world, the safer she will be. Nobody can find us here, nobody will harm her here.’ The thoughts ran like the wheels of Midas the Elder’s cart, round and round without end until he ventured around a bend and the walls of the cave opened up to strike him with awe.

He found the goat again, it was standing at the shore of a great wide lake of such a vibrant blue that it put the sky outside the mountain to shame, while up above a carpet of glowing green moss covered the ceiling, save for a gap in the stone through which a shaft of daylight shone to strike a small island of rock that thrust up from the center.

The great cavern was cool without being cold, and there was the sound of endless dripping breaking the surface tension of the otherwise still waters.

The cause of the trickle was evident, the lake overflowed very slightly near where Sadrahan stood, and kept a constant flow of water sliding over the rock to make a tiny creek in its own right.

The goat slurped peacefully as if it didn’t expect to be disturbed at all, and Sadrahan’s still heart jumped to life. “This is it! This will be our home! Our stronghold!” He shouted the pronouncement to the cavern, the goat looked over its shoulder at him, taking in his claim with indifference before it resumed slurping up the water.

“This will be our home!”

“This will be our stronghold!”

The words came back to him from the walls, the echo a thunderous but fading confirmation of the rightness of his decision.

He dropped the dead goat at his feet and lifted his daughter in both his hands, raising her up in front of him so that she hovered above his face. “Do you hear that, Lamashi! You have a home again! And nobody will ever take it from you!” She giggled, seeming to find his claim to be funny.

His words came back to him with a fresh echo that blended to the point of being unintelligible with the fading sound of his previous words, but one part was clear.

‘Nobody will ever take it from you.’