Tap. Tap.

Taja rapped his fingernail against one of the sparse chisels rhythmically. His dark eyes – pointed away from the assortment of rune-stridden devices that would bludgeon mortal minds into disarray – were glazed over; directed at nothing at all. He leaned backwards and stared at the stone ceiling of the small cave. Then he rubbed his face.

The teenager had been sitting in his chair by the worktable for over an hour, watching the same piece of bloodtech be created repeatedly. Even the unenthusiasm he’d brought into the room had filtered away by the minutes, leaving him barren of anything but increasingly rapid fidgeting. But the work continued.

Fwah. Fwah.

Taja’s sword – good, solid steel looted from Fort Vane – cut through the air in a series of patterns taught to him by… By Kit. They were intended to be performed slowly in order to correct any deficiencies in form, yet while Taja had begun the exercise properly, his pace gradually grew faster.

Sweat beaded his black skin; he’d already completed the calisthenics routine designed for him months ago once today, and further exertion did his body no favours. A snarl split his face as he hauled the sword through the small alcove as if it were a snake he must wrestle with, marring his stance in favour of wild whirling. The narrow confines eventually caught the steel against stone, and the blade shuddered from his grip with such ferocity it would’ve bit his torso had it not been halted.

He collapsed back onto his chair, trying and failing to close his bared teeth.

Merd… Merd…

Taja’s finger had halted on a single word in the book of folk tales lent to him. His mouth worked, silent but for the barest huff of breath as it tried to catch whatever term was scrawled in front of him. For the first few heartbeats, his tongue slowly ran through the sounds. But after that, it simply stopped. His glare burrowed into the pages, jaw growing tighter and tighter.

He slid the book across the worktable, jarring several pieces of bronze from their perches and turning the chisel away from its target.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

Duh-DUM. Duh-DUM

An inflated bladder padded with cloth was hurled against the wall, where it rebounded once off the wall to be reunited with Taja’s hands. He repeated this motion, but frequently threw the ball too hard, fouling the pattern with the extra force and sending it careening across the room. Where he was forced to walk, hissing to himself, and retrieve it before dumping himself back onto his chair.

The next time he pelted it at the wall, it flew back into his face.

From the opening leading to the dead-end where the workshop had been arranged, there was a blunted snort as Bhan tried to smother his amusement.

Taja turned two burning eyes onto the new arrival. “What is it?”

“Apologies.” The Face cleared his throat. “Eyah Taja. Just checking you.”

“I’m fine,” he stated bluntly. “Anything else?”

“No ‘How Divinity, Bhan?’” the middle-aged man complained. “Just ‘We good, so go.’”

The teenager sighed. “How was the Divinity?”

Bhan rubbed the back of his head. “Not many listen. They all nerves, Taja. Only today, then tomorrow, then…” He opened his hand expansively. “Fight of lifetime.”

“Then the rest of our lives,” Taja muttered.

The Face smiled weakly. “Maybe this is rest of life for warrior, hm?”

The youth nodded to himself, then suddenly smirked.

“What? Share joke.”

“Nothing.”

Bhan groaned. “Worst thing in world, joke untold.”

Taja shook his head.

Before the Face could continue airing his grievances, Erin cleared her throat from behind them. She had arrived at a hurried pace – the muscular woman had spent the entire day flitting through the encampment like an aggrieved bee. There were a lot of things to check.

“How is it?” Erin asked Taja.

“He is fine.”

“Great.” Her eyes darted over the worktable. “How many conversion stones has it made?”

Taja’s mouth opened, then closed.

“You didn’t count.”

“I was not- “

“Do you not know your numbers?” she demanded. “Use your fingers and toes, if needed.”

“Erin,” Bhan snapped. “He not a Seed.”

She whirled on him, finger raised. “Well he should bloody…” Her voice trailed away. “Right. You are… correct.” Erin rubbed the dark rings embedded in the pale skin beneath her eyes. “Sorry, Taja.”

All he gave in response was a jerky nod.

“That is… twenty-eight conversion stones completed.” She eyed Bhan. “They are keyed to Shrikeblood, yes?”

“I not Owlblood.”

Erin released a short breath and reluctantly turned sideways. “They are to…” Her lip twitched downwards at its edge. “They are to specification?”

“They’re for Shrikeblood, yes.”

“Leave the kid alone.”

“Should fully withdraw in a few hours, though the long-term effects of such rapid removal are almost guaranteed to be severe.”

A short scoff emerged from the Shrikeblood. “Did it agree?” she asked the other two.

Both shrugged.

“Excellent,” she hissed. “Absolutely impeccable. We’ll have to spend time testing them. Gods.”

Erin turned. Walked away.

Those remaining looked. Stared.

They conferred. Bhan glanced away to stare from the cavern’s entrance. While he did so, Taja reached into his coat. Piled on the ground. Produced a bottle. Handed it off.

It was some kind of liquor. Tasted like fire, but that was the only kind of slop that could be brewed in such awful conditions.

When Bhan turned back, his face immediately twisted. “You give him drink?” he snapped. “Alcohol?”

The teenager shrugged. “He likes it.”

“Because he did not stop!” Bhan spat. “In Foot: he drink, drink, drink. For months. And now he helpless, and you give him poison?!”

“It’s his choice. It won’t hurt him,” Taja muttered. “Do you think alcohol even effects gods?”

“You not know.”

Taja stood fast enough to knock over his chair. “Do you know what I do know, Bhan?” he erupted. “I know that if we can’t calm this thing down, he will hurt someone. And I know that you want to play dice every time he starts twitching, but do you really think a bottle of cheap liquor is going to change anything?”

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The Face stared, taken aback.

“Anything at all?” Taja reiterated. “For him? For us? He bloody wants it, anyway.”

Bhan’s voice was quiet. “He vulnerable.”

“He is,” Taja said, as if speaking to an idiot, “a god.”

“He a person,” Bhan muttered.

“Do you know what my brother used to say?” Taja bit down a snarl. “Humans are collections of desire. Wants.” He gripped his head, mouth working as it searched for an explanation. Eventually, he produced one. “If a single person is a tapestry, then everything that they are is woven of the same thread; made of the same stuff. So even if they are patchwork, their mind all pulls in the same direction. That’s why we do what we do.”

He gestured sideways. “Can you say the same about him? Is he all the same thread? If not, is it all pulling different directions? And where is he going to go, if it does? What is he going to do?”

Bhan, always ready with a word, said nothing. He was not equal to the question.

“That is what I thought,” the youth spat.

Taja ran from the room, mouth closed once more.

For a time, the teenager stalked through the caverns aimlessly – shuffling past the large Shrikebloods jogging through the capillaries of their hive in pursuit of work that had long been finished under their leader’s exacting eye. He walked through the central shaft, where the felled tree leaned; pacing around the edge of the room where no one walked, kicking at scattered branches or twigs. Bereft of his coat, Taja rubbed his arms under the rain falling from above.

He soon moved to the barracks, with its dim rows of cots separated by thin reed curtains to provide a veneer of privacy. Yet at this hour of the day, it was almost private in truth, for the only people within its dim light were Ronnie – idly staring at the ceiling as they ran a hand over Yowler’s fur – and Blake – rolled over against a wall in an almost flawless imitation of sleep, excepting his shallow breathing. Taja ignored the Strain’s raised hand and glared at his own bed, barren beyond a few half-hearted sculptures and a flax mat to separate his body from the chill stone while exercising.

The fervour of his steps had slowly begun to seep away into the cave’s cold air. Despite his best efforts, his breathing was beginning to slow. If Taja had stopped there, he might have found the fire within himself guttering out.

Instead, he travelled beneath dripping stalactites, over levelled rock and through narrow gaps to the storeroom: a vast space barely filled by clusters of crates. Each were held under the stern eye of a Shrikeblood, who added, subtracted, and tallied numbers on wax tablets that had undergone the same process the previous day.

Most of the crates were daubed with a single yellow splotch. As good as a signature for anyone who found them, but House Baylar were past the point of plausible deniability.

Taja must have known they were there. He’d been in the storeroom before – mastering the grimace tugging his face as he clenched his eyes closed and retrieved the rations. But at this moment, when he saw them, he physically recoiled. Then his limbs began to stiffen; his eyebrows arch; his eyes widen in slow increments.

The teenager held his breath in that absurd pose for a few moments. Then he began wrenching crates to the floor and sinking his leg through the fragile boards forming them. One done, then two, then five were left as a splintery pile of jerky or bolts or superfluous armour. While he did this, he made a sound that was neither battle-cry nor ballad nor peal of terror, but the simple, violent exhalation of air.

When the far older, more muscular, and well-trained Blooded in the room began forging towards him, Taja turned and ran.

His lean form ducked Seeds and stone as he sprinted his way through the tunnels, ignoring greetings from Kit and Maleen who walked past to continue barrelling away. Taja shot past a pair of warriors guarding the encampment’s exit and began clambering upwards on all fours without light, until he slipped on a patch of damp moss and jammed both elbows and knees against the floor.

In almost absolute darkness, he bled for a bit. The teenager kept his face hidden behind both arms. His breathing began to slow.

Eventually, Taja pawed at his face and sat up. His stare drifted across the dark cavern he’d found himself in, mindless of the steep incline he’d nearly ran straight in to. His gaze drifted past the way up and the way down. Two sightless eyes found nothing but shadow.

“Where are you going?”

“You goin’ up?”

“Want me to take you?”

Neither disagreement nor concordance left his mouth; just a heavy sigh.

It wasn’t assent. But it was enough.

He was picked up and carried over the course of several minutes through the circuitous route upwards to be placed on his feet at the exit tunnel, next to the large bloodtech contraption the twins had sat beneath days ago. There were no guards posted around it; an unusual oversight, one Gaia would usually not allow. Perhaps she simply hadn’t had the breath to give the order. The thin grey light penetrated through the opening, caressing the side of Taja’s face like a one-armed mother. After a moment, he stepped into the rain.

Tempest was fading into the brief blink that was Spirit season, yet its clouds still clung onto the sky by their nails, drooling flecks of rainwater as their teeth of lightning gnashed together. A tangible heat clung to the world along with the scent of thunder. The ground outside was a bog smeared with thin hairs of grass. Taja left his boots by the opening to sink his entire foot into it and wiggled his toes.

He glanced sideways. “We used to do this on the plains, when it rained. Though the mud never got so deep” He turned his gaze back to the sea of trees the world swum in. “They would take me out of the yurt. Malee – though he wasn’t called that, back then – would hold one of my hands and Laja the other. I thought… I thought they were so old.”

Taja looked down. “But they weren’t.”

He pulled his feet out of the mud as it tried to suck him back and began to squelch backwards. In the entranceway, he paused and stared at the device – concealed beneath a mottled tarp that would hide it from casual observation. Then he kicked it and immediately knelt to grip and groan when his bare foot proved weaker than its metal.

Voices rang up the cavern. “Kid!” they called. “Where’d you take the damned god?!”

Taja paled as far as his dark skin would allow and began a limping crouch back outside, where he immediately slogged his ways into the trees. Face still twisted from the pain in his foot, he hopped his way over ground firmed by multitudes of roots, yet as the voices grew louder abandoned the hope of finding an excellent hiding spot and simply threw himself into a nearby shrub.

His eyes stared out from the tangle. “Go,” he whispered, making a shooing motion. “Leave. Leave me alone!”

He repeated this mantra for some time. Finally, he gave up and leaned back into the bush. Several minutes later, a familiarly lopsided gait squelched its way through the trees.

“What’re you doin’?” Kit snapped. The scabbarded sword she used as a crutch appeared more like a rod of mud, such was the amount that clung to it. “You an idiot?”

Taja buried his head in his hands.

She angrily attempted to wipe mud off her pants with her one good hand, but only succeeded in smearing more on. “Makin’ me come out here,” the former swordswoman hissed. “Bloody bush-baby. Leavin’ a trail o’ your slimy scat fer th’ rest o’ us to wipe up.”

“Sorry.”

The apology only infuriated her further. “Sorry? Sorry? I don’t want yer sorries; I want you to quit bein’ a godsdamn burden on th’ rest o’ us. Dragged your orphan ass across the Heartlands – unpaid – and you decide a good form o’ repatriation is causin’ us trouble. That sound okay to you?”

Arms still covered Taja’s face. “No.”

Kit levered herself taller on the stump of her missing hand. “What good’re you?” A twisted cousin of a smile began to crawl onto her face. “But I guess where else’re you gonna go? You’re bloody well stuck here,” she laughed viciously, “wastin’ our time, and our godsdamn god.”

A sudden sob wracked the youth.

At the sight of his tears, the scars across her cheeks twisted as Kit’s smile broadened viciously. “Dim-witted illiterate weak-handed numbskull useless bastard o’ a kid, an’ if yer siblings were alive- “

Mid-sentence, the young woman suddenly gagged. She keeled over at the waist and stared at the mud, then retched. When she straightened, Kit looked like she’d ran the length of the continent. Until her feet were bloodied nubs that could not lift any longer.

Looked as if she had seen a wraith.

But she hadn’t. It was just her.

“I’m sorry,” Kit whispered, eyes huge orbs of white. “I didn’t mean it. I’m messed up. I’m rotten.”

Taja did not reveal his face to her.

The woman beat the side of her head with her stump. “Useless idiot,” she muttered to herself. “Stay here. I’ll get someone.”

Kit departed, swearing and hissing between the trees until she was gone. Once she had left, Taja’s muffled sobs grew louder. Rain fattened on leaves to drip onto his face, and he said nothing; no moment of wisdom or insight. Just tears.

Kit reemerged with eyes that looked everywhere but at those beside her: Maleen, Ronnie and – somehow – the twins, with their dog trailing behind. Bhan jogged quickly after them, and Taja interred his face within his hands once more.

Maleen and Ronnie knelt outside the shrub while Bhan carefully levered Taja from within it, whispering assurances all the way. Sash stared while Dash and Kit shuffled awkwardly around the outer edges of the group.

When Bhan managed to fold the teenager into the space between the three of them, Maleen finally spoke. “What’s happening, Taja?”

He said nothing.

Ronnie’s small face wrenched as they held the back of his head. The old runeslate weighed heavily on her arm. The tips of their fingers hinted at signs, but aborted before they coalesced into something comprehensible.

“You ran away from god-duty. You broke several crates. You ran out of the encampment. And you’re out here with no boots. Tell us what’s going on.”

Taja opened his face. “I knew him for maybe three months,” he protested, wet-faced. “And now we are going to look after him every day until we die.” The youth’s eyes turned sideways. “I barely knew you. And now I have to look after you forever.”

Ronnie shook her head, fingers flashing.

“Not forever.”

“It will end.”

“You don’t have to do this. You can leave.”

The Strain’s head jerked around, for the last translation was not her own.

Taja continued, unminding. “Until what? Until the Vulture kills us? Until he scours our corpses and pretends to be us?” Tears trickled down his face.

“I’m sorry,” said Maleen, and the young woman brought him into her chest. “I’m sorry we made you do this.”

Rain fell. The people around looked to the skies while Taja wept – all the privacy they could afford. In the brief pauses between his sobs, he repeated the same phrase over and over again:

“I don’t want to be here.”

----------------------------------------

While the group gathered around the weeping boy, others began crying as well. First Dash, who tried and failed to stop his face twisting into tears. Then Ronnie, who stood and moved to wait nearly out of eyeshot of the others, to give the teenager space. Maleen teared up. Finally, the mute astonishment faded from Sash’s eyes and she buried her face in her twin’s shoulder.

Bhan and Kit simply stared at empty space, eyes hooded by shadow.

While everyone’s eyes were obscured by their grief, Pat turned a weary head towards the forest; fur clinging wetly to his emaciated form. He distanced himself from the twins. Then he dragged his shivering body away. He arduously slumped through the trees, the fire of his life guttering as it had for the past week. Then he settled somewhere far out of sight.

Pat had finally found a place to die.

But though no one else saw, the thing that was me followed after him, limbs stretched; to do something.

Anything.