Aj and Da

regarded the shell

of the only verse

humans called by a number.

1/8.

This pleased them.

Da inquired

as to the meaning

of the word

that followed

the number

It took Aj

far too long

to layer the knowledge

needed to understand

'Shithole'

to one whose domains

contained no creatures

larger than few cells.

The ruins of the Neck looked even worse from down below. Though they'd seemed huge from the top while using them as a bridge, walking among the tumbled vertebrae on the ground skewed her sense of scale about again. "Goddamn that's a big turtle. As nasty as the little bastard versions of this thing are, I can't imagine what this one was like when it was alive. Swallow a small herd whole."

A terror, Ghillie signed.

"Terrorizing turtle. Terrtle," Aida said, giggling. Then they reached the bodies, or what was left of them, and humor died.

Whatever Ryk might assure her that these people had come to kill her, they were still people she'd killed however indirectly and unintentionally. That thought triggered a startled shock. How many people had she killed with her own hand or voice now? How many had her Ferals and followers killed? She stopped her mind from venturing on to the flu as she'd walked a ways down that road before and nothing good could ever come of it.

"How many bodies so far?" she asked the Wretches who, of course, were the ones picking mangled body parts from the wreckage. The Professor squatted next to the corpses, engaged in the grotesque puzzle of matching bits and pieces together to assemble what they could of whole people. Aida had never been squeamish, but she didn't think she could ever do what he was so casually handling.

He looked up as she came and smiled warmly. Before he could throw himself at her feet or do something equally embarrassing, she squatted beside him. "How many dead so far? Estimate."

"Five, six, seven maybe?" he said in his sonorous voice. A nod indicated a bloody bit of burlap sitting beside a half-crushed skull. "Unfortunately including your Valeer, it would seem."

"Ryk said they snuck her out and shoved a rotter into her clothes. Well, if you can call her sack-gown thing clothing. Would put her in something better if she was potty trained."

"Ah," the Professor said, taking the implicit Paragon and prophecy in stride. He smiled. "A clever woman to perform such a swap, our Mother of Exiles."

"Clever enough to keep you busy hauling bodies to the Crowmen," she said, turning away from the gory mess he so amiably sorted through. "Not clever enough to keep my people alive and comfortable and healthy and fed."

The Professor trotted around in front of her and wiped his hands carefully on a leafy plant somehow un-mangled by the crushing bone. She couldn't handle standing over him so she dropped to a squat again to look in his eyes. "How do you handle it? Leading a people for so long who have nothing? For whom deprivation is the norm instead of the exception?"

The Professor looked upon the other Wretches scrambling around the pile, his expression radiating love. "I just remember that it's all about people and the things that bring us together. It's about what you do and how, not what you don't have and why. It's about what we may accomplish in the future, not the hardships that have befallen us in the past or that we struggle against in the present. About a better world we might wake up to, not the uncaring, hard place we fall asleep in every evening."

When he looked back at her, that love remained. As it fell on her, the same feeling rose inside her, though tainted by layers of guilt that she hadn't done enough to deserve it. "Thank you, Professor. I'll see if I can't find some way to try to be more like you from now on."

"Strange," he said, grinning. "I try to do the same thing, but becoming more like you."

They laughed for a moment; a spark of joy flashing amid a jumble of chaos and misery.

One of his people called to him from the main heap of the wreckage. His four-limbed lope across the bit of clear ground turned to a rough scramble as he climbed over tumbled bones. Aida followed, realizing that while they were crawling across the rubble, no one would be able to tell who was the Wretch.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"Even when I try to build things up, I end up destroying everything," Aida said as she scaled the heap behind him, her mood darkening again.

They found a couple Wretches examining a bizarre scene near the crushed remains of the Valeer's pen. A few of the giant vertebrae nearby lay cut into clean chunks, the exposed inner bone smooth as a marble tabletop where whatever material or force had sliced through it. Aida marveled as she ran her hand along its surface. "What the hell did this?"

"Arcer," Ryk said from right behind her, making her jump half out of her skin.

She stood and punched at his shoulder, but he annoyingly sidestepped without even looking at her.

He walked around one of the chunks and nodded down. Aida stepped around beside him.

Jutting from a crush of bones, a leather-armored arm skewed towards the sky. Between the middle and ring fingers, the hand split down almost to the wrist . A gnarled melding of bone and scarred flesh crusted around the divide between halves of hand. Aida knelt beside it, touching the silver bracelet at the wrist chained to a blue jade bead pressed into the tough flesh at the point where the hand divided.

Ryk touched the dead fingertips. "Arcers rank among the more potent of mancer varieties, in combat at least."

"He did this somehow?" Aida said, rising and tapping on the nearest sheared bone.

"She did," Ryk said, tapping his finger an the gap between hand halves and drawing a line straight upwards. "Project infinitely-sharp blades of currence as potent as an Aze blade. Seem to be able to cut nearly anything apart, no matter how tough or solid."

"Didn't help much against a few tons of dead turtle though. Terrtle even." Aida glanced at Ghillie, quirking a smile. Ghillie's eyes crinkled in her own Feral sort of smile.

A flash of memory back to her time in Ocyl's estate with Eth and Rusty hit her. She turned to Ryk. "You only know the future that you will see."

He quirked an eyebrow. "When did I ever say that?"

"You didn't. I figured it out on my own back when..." She suddenly realized if she told him how she knew, he could tell Eth and then Eth would know that she would figure it out. Past Eth would know the trick and could find some way around it so Aida would never know. Pressing her fingers against her eyes or rubbing them through her hair did little to help the way her head suddenly hurt as she tried to figure it all out.

"Back when...?"

"Never mind. I just keep forgetting and thinking you're psychic, but you just know what will happen around you, not to everyone everywhere. With hundreds or thousands of you scattered about The Book bossing Dynasts around, it must have seemed like you were omniscient since you could always get together and... ahah! That's why all those Imminent are meeting with Eth! They're telling her what happen... ed...es. Happensed. Whatever."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Ryk said, biting his fingernails. She'd never seen him do that.

"They all meet with Eth, tell her everything they know before they die. Then sometime ten years ago or whenever, she sends messengers to all of them letting them know what all the others said so they all know. An oral history of the future or something." Her mind reeled as she struggled with the implications so she shoved it back for another time and focused on here and now.

"You told me there would be seven bodies because you came here after and counted them. But how can you be sure there are seven?" She stepped over scattered bone fragments to pull his hand down. To make him look her in the eye. "What if there were ten and some escaped? Maybe out there watching us now, waiting. Or the bodies the Wretches are doing CSI Shithole on are actually bits from a dozen different people all dressed the same."

Ryk raised his hand and placed it on her lips to silence her. Anyone else and she would have broken it. Off. Instead, she took a deep breath and made herself listen. "Whatever I said before and however we know what we know doesn't really matter. You think you're figuring it out, but you still have no idea. This is the way it always had to be done."

"So out of all the infinite choices I could have made, I had to break the terrtle and crush these seven or ten or however many people to death?" Aida said, pulling his hand away and struggling against a surge of anger swelling in her chest and heating her face. She wasn't even sure why. Something to do with their arrogance that they were right and everyone else was in the dark. Just pawns to be pushed around to make things go the way they wanted. But if they knew the future, weren't they right in some respects? Just made her brain hurt worse.

"Out of the infinite choice you could have made, we know where this one leads. We follow the path we do because we know what lies at the end. It doesn't matter how torturous the path, if we stray even a little we may never find our way again. And who knows if anyone or anything survives at the end of the other roads? Better futures may lie closed behind the doors of a thousand other choice we could make, but we can't risk a reality where something survives on the hope that we find one where more does."

"So you are a Fatalist."

Ryk ran his finger across her cheekbone and brushed hair back behind her ear. "Just because the night is dark doesn't mean there's no light to be found. Whatever happens wherever we're going, there's still time to take joy in things today. Now."

"Like love?" she said, resting her head against his shoulder.

"Like love."

They stood there for an endless moment just feeling each other's breaths and heartbeats. Aida wished they could stay there forever. Instead, she pulled away, looked up at him, and opened her damn mouth. "Back in the villa, you said you die for love. Does that mean you die for me?"

Emotions flickered across his face and were quickly contained. "I knew you would ask that, but the knowing sometimes makes things harder, not easier."

"You're avoiding the question."

"Yes, I die for you."

"Snuggled in bed a hundred years from now, I hope." She literally clung to him and that clinging made her realize how hard she clung to their relationship. After decades as a single old maid in the nursing home, she'd never dared to dream she'd find love again. Now that she had, no matter what strange form it came packaged in, she was terrified of losing it again.

He wrapped his arms about her. "I'm no Dynast. Knowing what comes doesn't help avoid the natural end of my time."

"So you die naturally."

An sharp intake of breath, gradually released. "No."

"Don't then." She said, shaking her head. "We'll open different doors. Just little ones. Whatever you die fighting or whatever heroics I'm sure you consider a glorious, worthy death, we'll slip by them somehow. We'll just-"

With great effort he pulled himself away enough that he could face her and plant his lips on hers. She resisted at first, then pressed herself hungrily against him. For a while, the past and future melted away in the heat of the moment.

Aliasara must have reached them for she cleared her throat somewhere nearby. Repeatedly. When that didn't work, she spoke. "Aida. The Thorn."

"Whoever it is, give them gist and get them settled in like everyone else," Aida said, looking into Ryk's perfectly-blue eyes. Anything in her power to give, she'd have granted to stay in that perfect moment to hold onto it a bit longer and keep the rest of the world at bay.

"I would, but they're..." Aliasara trailed off. "I'll tell them, yes."

Aida wrenched her gaze from Ryk's and called out to her friend. "They're what?"

Aliasara turned back, her mouth opening and closings several times. "You could use time with Ryk, away from all this. It can wait. They can wait."

"I got time with Ryk already," Aida said, reluctantly pulling away from him and threading her way through the clearest patches of ground towards her friend. "Not enough since there's never enough, but if you think it's important than tell me."

"Dynasts, Aida. Here."

Aida misstepped, rolled her foot on a bone, and crashed into a heap of mangled plants. Aliasara was at her side in an instant, helping pull her to her feet.

Ignoring the new rips and stains on her clothes, Aida put her hands on Aliasara's shoulders to stop the woman from fussing over her. "Dyansts. Dynasts plural? Here?"

Aliasara nodded.

"Fuck me," Aida said.

"Later," Ryk said, grinning, resting his spear over his shoulder, and winding his way back in the direction of his training grounds.

"I'll hold you to that," Aida shot back.

"You'd better."

Aida turned and glanced towards the skull, but it was backlit by several suns and impossible to look at. "And they didn't bring a Legion?"

Aliasara paused again. "I don't think so."

Realizing that she could and would have to go find out for herself anyway, Aida gave up on interrogating her friend and set to scaling the bony heaps towards the skull. Aliasara climbed close behind her.

"Is your family okay?" Aida said as they cleared the worst of it and reached clear ground. She winced at the question. She'd lost count of the funeral processions Aliasara attended or led and that's what she asked?

A long pause, then a surprising hint of smile. "I think all the Dynast's Plague might claim it has. The worst must be behind us."

A forced smile and a long hug was the best Aida could come up with. As they held one another, her smiled fell apart, Ryk's words repeating in her head. "It doesn't matter how torturous the path..."

Whatever Aliasara's optimism and how bad things may be in the One-Eighth, Aida had the feeling that the worst still lay ahead, not behind.