It was not the easiest thing, just sitting there and doing nothing beneath the open sunny daylight.
But Amiela was unyielding. She would not budge a single inch away from the shelter of the brambles, not while there was such clear air beyond the tangled undergrowth.
“I’m not trying to argue with you!” Olive briefly held up his hands in feigned surrender. “Just that I’ve been doing it for a long time now, and nothing bad’s happened-” His voice faltered before he could finish. Olive let his arms slump back to his sides. “At least, um, not with soldiers. They just make you give them money, or stuff like food if they find you alone. And I’ve only ever seen them fighting each other out there, and that was really far away.”
Amiela narrowed her eyes at that. “Probably because you’re just some tiny little kid who looks halfway emaciated.” She breathed a lower scoff to herself. Once she was finally done cleaning the dried mud away from one of her packs, she leaned back to rest against one of the nearby boulders. “With my suit on, I could be mistaken for an enemy combatant. Or worse.”
Olive wondered what could really be worse. “What should we do, then?”
“Sleep.” Amiela eyed the half-hidden skyline to the south, watching the clouds that passed far over the edge of the thicket. “We’re going to need it once we start moving again. Or once your self-preservation instincts finally kick in and you run off and get yourself away from here.”
Olive pouted a little at that, but Amiela ignored him. She only moved to unzip her suit down to the ankles, just enough to let fresh air inside. And how strange it was to see her like that, Olive realized, in normal clothes for once, yet also the way it made her entire body look smaller once she’d pushed some of the bulky insulated fabric away.
A more tired, calmer sort of look flickered past the sternness of Amiela’s features. “Or, if you can’t sleep, at least try to rest and conserve your energy for now.”
She was wearing a faded graphic t-shirt and grayish-beige cargo jeans. The shirt had an animal design on it, Olive noticed, beneath jagged pastel letters in odd foreign shapes.
Olive scooted over the dusty earth to sit a bit closer to her. “What does your shirt say?”
“It’s a band.” Amiela’s tone was beginning to sound just as equally weary and strained. “It says Vilkos. He’s the dog on the logo.”
But it looked much more like some shaggy feral beast to Olive, with such angular features and wildly blazing eyes. The heraldic creature seemed to be leaping forward to dart between faint beams of pastel light, even while his austere gaze faced the viewer with a crazed, wide-eyed look to the rest of his expression.
Olive soon decided it would be wiser to leave Amiela alone for a while, despite the deluge of new questions burning away inside his mind. What sorts of bands were there wherever she was from? What kinds of instruments did they play? What songs did they sing about?
He’d occasionally glimpsed photographs of concert halls packed with far more people gathered into one place than Olive had ever actually seen in person, even on the busiest days of the harbor market. How long had it been, he began to wonder, since he’d last heard even the faintest tune of music?
Olive flopped himself down on the ground once more and stared off into the distance. After such a nice breakfast, his stomach wasn’t growling aloud anymore for the first time in recent memory. But it made him feel so much heavier somehow, almost ungainly.
The positives, Olive recalled. Better to be full and tired than achingly sore and hungry.
He began to sway his feet back and forth, rocking his heels over the exposed roots of the dead tree, coated with sandy grit. Olive tried to remember the last time he’d heard a single melody that wasn’t from a fellow wanderer whistling to themselves, before they’d each inevitably wave him away or tell him to leave. With varying degrees of politeness, of course, he thought to himself with a weakly bitter twinge.
Olive tried not to think of the way the sounds almost began to feel like a rhythm, the tones of chiding laughter and airborne stones and blood striking the sand tuned to the creak of a crossbow, the pitchy melody of cheering when metal nearly struck flesh and sinew.
He tried not to think of the noise that particular voice hummed before barking with laughter when the noise of his footsteps scuttled from beneath the thumping crack of a steel bolt lodged in the rotten wood of an upturned farm wagon. How fast the sour music of those cackling mouths twisted and scowled once he finally scampered deep into a concrete drainage pipe beyond the empty dunes instead, when the sound of their laughter broke and rose higher into ravenous shouting, but even that had soon grown dim.
Olive shivered hard. He fought back an involuntary shudder, pressing one of his hands to his mouth and lightly biting it.
Maybe it was not so bad to be so small. Most people could not fit into such scant places, really, not after they’d grown broad and tall. Olive stared down at himself, at the raw little scar hidden beneath the dried bandage on his forearm, ever scrawny, the mark that still twinged sometimes whenever he just started to forget.
He slowly peered over at where Amiela rested. Even braced against the boulder she’d chosen, eyelids not so much relaxed as deliberately held shut for resting, her tense hands did not so much as twitch for the handle of the knife at her belt, much less any rocks on the ground, sharp enough to break skin or otherwise.
In a more gradual way, Olive felt his own posture soften. His mind did begin to recall, so much longer before anything else in that country, how his mother’s soft voice used to sing with the radio every single day, humming along with the words while the two of them did their afternoon chores. Her tone always was a bit off-key, he had to admit, but her tuneless voice merely became background noise in each corner of the house over time.
The long shadow on the ground suddenly twitched. Olive’s eyes fluttered wide. He had almost just forgotten it.
Only a few paces off, Amiela was already dozing where she laid. But she’d stirred herself away slightly from the shade of her umbrella, just enough that both shadows beneath her drowsy form became fully distinct and visible.
Amiela’s true shadow remained almost motionless, only ever moving whenever she shivered or breathed. But that second shadow, the thing that stood looming in such an unnaturally poised way across the sandy dirt, had stretched itself out far to encircle the space beneath the tangled nest of brambles.
It waited there, angled directly between Amiela’s body and where Olive was sprawled over the clearing.
The shadow twitched again, moving with the sinuous coiling motion of some unfathomable animate consciousness. It was the very first time Olive ever felt a full tremble of fear just by looking at it. Even back in the darkness of the barn, he’d somehow felt too awed by the mere sight to truly think of how deadly the thing might have been.
Amiela was a witch, Olive believed that much for certain. No one else could make such incredible glowing light dance over their hands the way she did, he felt sure of.
But if witches were merely humans who could make magical things happen by their will, then that did not mean they were inherently sinister, did it? But Amiela had called that thing a demon, hadn’t she? Her umbrella’s shadow could only hide so much.
Maybe it was foolish of him to try, but Olive finally decided to slowly, carefully reach out towards it. He rested his knuckles down first to let his hand rest there in a soft, open gesture, letting his fingers lay somewhat limp against the sun-warmed dirt. Olive waited. He kept his palm outstretched in the gentlest way he could.
Amiela possessed the generosity to give him food, the kindness to let him follow along after her without even really trying to chase him off. Could whatever else was part of her be the same?
But the shadow only laid there for a long and silent while. It was difficult for Olive to determine, but it did look vaguely humanoid. There were some slight variations to the presence, certain things that seemed impossible for his eyes to really come to grips with, gradually curling there and undulating in dizzying patterns over the ground. Still, it did nothing.
Olive breathed a quiet sigh. He did not think the amorphous creature would do anything else if it hadn’t done so already. Amiela herself looked fast asleep by then. Olive hoped whatever control she might hold over that most unusual second outline remained intact while she was unconscious.
He did not even feel it when he found himself dozing off as well. It suddenly felt as if late afternoon snuck up and sprang out over the whole world in one enormous leap. Olive only realized he’d fallen asleep after his eyes slipped open to notice how much the warm glow of early dusk was gathering on the horizon.
“Ugh...” Olive moved to sit up again, but he paused when he felt something strange resting against the skin of his palm. “Wha-” He looked down at his hand and felt his breath go very still.
It was the loveliest little seashell he had ever laid eyes on. Peachy-cream-colored, smooth textured and spiraling, the fragile thing must have once been a sea snail of some kind, long before the shell was vacated.
A glistening, dreamlike mineral band curled inward to disappear below the surface of the shell, curving further than Olive’s eyes could see. The inner wash of purple-blue color was so rich and vibrant, he swore it looked just like a tranquil sunset over a tiny world of ocean waves. But wherever that particular whelk once originated from, it was not a species familiar to him.
“How... How is this here?” Olive hushed his voice to a whisper. He could already see the way Amiela was still fully asleep, so he turned to stare at the bizarre shadow instead. “Did you do something?”
Even beneath the deep evening light, that unusual outline remained visible. It flickered and rippled just as steadily as a peal of wind gusting over water.
“Okay.” Olive closed his fingertips in a careful way over the delicate little shell. The odd shadow did not seem to mind him taking it. Olive slowly reached up to stash the seashell away into his shirt pocket. “I think I just need some air...”
The sky looked dusky enough by then that Amiela probably wouldn’t scold him much for venturing out. Olive pulled his socks and boots back over his feet. Even if there was any trouble beyond the thicket, he told himself he would not lead it back towards her, no matter what. Olive ignored the way his forearm twinged. Maybe being such a helpless-looking child truly wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
The expanse of high ground spanned a fair ways off into the distance, further than Olive’s eyes could see. He decided it would be better to scout southward rather than to try and backtrack anywhere near the sinking dunes. His little trip might even prove useful if he could inform Amiela of whatever might be waiting up ahead.
With his course determined, Olive tried his best to smile to himself. His gaze edged back to glance at that strange shadow, where he swore it rested just a slight bit closer than before. He shivered and started out on his walk without delay.
The evening air looked clear in the wake of the sandstorm, so much that Olive did not think he really needed to put his respirator back on. Only a few stray whirls of dust spun across the sparse landscape.
The prickly undergrowth felt drier than a tangle of bones, but the enmeshed brambles still stood dense and stubborn. Olive tried to avoid the worst of it, especially the spiky wall of vines choking the path ahead. He only stopped briefly to answer the call of nature once he was lucky enough to find privacy in a much less thorn-coated bush.
The wind swirled gently yet ceaselessly through the rocky fields of dust. Clouds drifted high above, hazy and gray and tinged by a pale sapphire hue around the setting sun.
A russet hawk flapped high above. The soaring bird circled far over the dry scrubland, gliding aloft with a keen set of eyes and far keener talons.
For a moment, Olive stood completely mesmerized by it, lingering in mid-step at the top of a low craggy hill. He dearly wished he still had the little pair of tin binoculars his uncle once gave him for his seventh birthday. They would have certainly helped him examine the finer details of such a magnificent bird.
Olive glanced down at the respirator mask, peering where he’d clipped it beside the satchel on his belt. But the device did not even have eye protection at all, much less any sort of visual enhancement.
“I hope you find lots of mice.” Olive whispered his words to the distant feathered raptor. “I wish you could tell us the way out of here. Or at least the safest way to go.”
The sprawling earth led off to an uneven patch of boulders and dead trees. Olive hastened his way towards the more open parts of upturned ground. Some of the dusty foliage beyond that point actually looked just a little bit twinged with green.
Between the shadows of ragged stones and dry branches, swift lizards scattered from Olive’s approach, avoiding his soft footsteps. He moved to clamber his way atop a huge leaning stone.
The boulder was nice and dry, not at all damp or clammy like the cliffs the evening earlier. It was easier to find handholds there, so much that it even began to feel fun to climb.
The sloping rock reached higher into the air, so far aloft that the strong desert winds gusted forth to flap soundly beneath Olive’s shirt, whispering a swift cadence over his body. He wondered if that was anything like what the hawk might have felt, coasting so high up in the sky.
Olive began to feel certain it must have been. The balmy touch of the evening breeze felt just as soothing as medicine over his skin. When he finally reached the boulder’s peak, his ragged shirt billowed with an audible flutter.
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“Oh, is that..?” Olive moved to perch with his chest and chin pressed snug against the very top of the rock. “Is that really water?!” He tried to keep his voice to a hushing whisper. “Is it clean?”
The terrain before him sloped down and away, winding off into a narrow sort of switchback canyon. The lowest crease of ground stretched so far off into the distance that it disappeared over the horizon. And there, in the very bottommost reach of that rough little canyon, it looked like a clear little stream was flowing there, meandering wherever the sunset light glinted over the water.
“Um... Right. ‘If it’s moving, it probably won’t make you sick.’” Olive recited his mother’s wisdom to himself. “‘But you should still boil it for bugs.’” He squinted at the sight of such a lovely flowing brook. “But Amiela probably won’t want to make a campfire. Then we’d be even easier for people to see.”
Olive reached for the little whelk shell from his shirt pocket. The purple-blue surface looked even brighter and more beautiful beneath the open sunset. He smiled at it and stored it away again.
“I’ll go and look, then go right back!” Olive turned around to slide on his back all the way down the massive rock. His boots hit the ground with a satisfying thud. “Then we can both go get a drink.”
A little thrill flashed through his belly. The water looked so cool and nice. Maybe he could even splash a bit of it over his hair and skin as a makeshift sort of bath.
The last time he’d found safe-enough water to easily drink his fill, much less clean himself and his clothes, was at least a few weeks ago, the day when he’d stumbled across a rusted-out, toppled grain silo. The ruddy metal had eroded to the point where the rainwater pooled within was accessible, yet not entirely dried away by the harsh desert sun. Even then, it was hardly quite as pleasant as any natural stream would be.
The dusty slopes looked deceptively easygoing. Olive stepped down towards them with great caution, careful not to slip his way over the loose grit or dense grass. A fall there would mean a long, harsh tumble down, more than enough to carry him away into those jagged rocks and questionably clean river water.
When Olive jumped towards the next ledge, he spotted a much lower, flatter shelf of rock not far away. The small canyon path stood flanked on either side by natural barriers of windsmoothed stone. Those steady walls meant the far side of the ledge would help stop him from falling on the way down, like a lofty guardrail. Without another thought, Olive leapt for it.
But he could not see how uneven the low rocky gully truly was until he landed there. He also did not realize how much he would have to climb and clamber his way up just to reach the next portion of the path.
Olive winced when he landed awkwardly. His voice gasped a sharp note when he scuffled down in a short stumbling fall over the ground. His hand stung, welling up with a little patch of blood from where he’d braced to catch his fall. In a slight daze, he came to realize his ankles were unhurt, at least, only a bit sore.
Like a flash, a rumbling hiss ripped straight through the silence and shot out at him like a bolt of lightning.
Olive yelped and flailed himself back.
It was a writhing, slender viper. With its diamond-shaped head, dripping fangs outstretched, the fierce little beast rose up high and backed Olive off into the narrowest corner of the smooth rock wall, flaring itself with a deep and menacing hiss.
“Sorry-!” Olive’s eyes flew open wide. Fear glazed over his pupils. Terror thundered down his spine and limbs. “I’m sorry! I’m leaving!”
But the snake coiled back and lashed through the air again. Muscles rippled, glistening beneath a coat of scales that flowed like the surface of the stream. It bunched itself up tighter in the tangle of grass, trying to fend off that wayward little boy, steering him away from its chosen refuge.
Olive tried to scramble backwards to find the next ledge, but his hands were shaking too much to even grasp at it. His entire body shivered like a leaf.
The furious viper rocketed into the space between them again, lashing so close that a swift gust brushed over Olive’s arm, air tickling his skin where those deadly fangs almost touched him.
A wet crunch echoed without warning. Olive blinked at the sudden silence. He felt tiny, warm droplets scatter in a fine mist over his cheeks and eyelashes.
The serpent thrashed once, then fell still. The limp animal dropped to the dust with only a dull, quiet thud.
“Wait, what..?!” Olive tried to scamper backwards, but the solid ledge of rock still gave him no escape. “What?!”
Because there, just above the dead serpentine creature, the air itself seemed to undulate, shimmering like the sunset glow over the ripple of canyon water.
“What happened?!” Olive did not even care how high his voice echoed around the rocky walls. “What..!” His gaze snapped back towards that peculiar blur suspended in midair, where the patch of stone just beyond the shimmer did not look right, not at all, eerily hazy and unclear.
“Ooh, you’re a bit sharper than most humans.” That warm rumble of a voice rang out so close to him, so very deep inside his ears, as if it had already stretched itself out and coiled all throughout the bounds of his mind. “You can almost just start to really see me, here.”
Olive fought the urge to reel back his legs and kick out in utter terror. “Who’s there?!”
“Well. Do you actually mean ‘who,’ or do you mean what?”
As if right out of the clear blue sunset, the stranger was somehow both shifting light and shadows; a sudden, luminous coil of smoke and swift water in the evening air. The sound of her was just as melodic as a river unfurling forth, deep and utterly sonorous.
Her long, sharp teeth dripped with scarlet beads of serpent blood. “Because that’s what most people are actually asking. The difference is important, really. Or do you want my name..?” The cadence of her voice shifted from a low timbre to brighter humming. “Well! My real name isn’t something I can give out to just anyone, you know.”
Olive swore he was about to faint. He just knew it. Surely the shock of such a nightmare would wake him up in only an instant, jolted right back to before he’d ever found that strange little seashell or gotten the foolish idea to wander away from Amiela in the safety of the thicket.
Brightened eyes broke the air around her, twin sparks of luminosity cracking out past evening fire. The rest of the creature’s bizarre span of body poured itself into existence as well, a sinuously swift, glimmering thing of liquid indigo and brightest gold.
“And what I am is actually a similar problem.” She laughed aloud into the faint chill of dusk. “We don’t even really have a name for ourselves, my species. We just are.”
Whatever the bizarre being truly was, teeth and tongue and whiskers rising faster than the grass pushed by the wind, she was still vague and mercurial. The texture of her flesh kept fluctuating without rest between sleek lucent skin and scales or rich pointed feathers, sometimes lightly bristled fur.
“Okay-” Olive forced himself to close his mouth before he next spoke, breathing out a whisper of total shock. He wondered in that small moment if he’d actually just been bitten by the viper, merely hallucinating the sight that danced before him from a dose of toxic venom coursing through his blood. “Okay. Um, you... You’re what Amiela was talking about before, I think..?”
“Well, sure.” Those oddly brightened eyes slid away to peer back towards the northern expanse of wasteland. “But she doesn’t usually call me a demon. Says it sounds like an offensive term. I think she’s being too polite, but whatever.”
That strange visage melded from indefinable swirls of glittering shadow into something that became so much more solid: the smooth, softened face of a massive forest cat. She eased a rather long, lazy yawn towards Olive, rumbling out the deeper tones of her voice to rest just above a purring hum.
“She was probably just trying to scare you off by saying all of that before, you know. But I don’t get it.” Her pointy ears flicked back in puzzlement. The inner curves of them practically leaked with it, that golden light, swirling and meandering over her fuzzy ear fluff to cast unchallenged brightness against the evening glow. “She calls herself a witch all the time. Isn’t that almost the same kind of thing?”
Olive frowned. “Well, um, I think... Witches are probably just humans with magic, right?” He made a cautiously vague wave at the demonic presence drifting closer to float before him. “So unless you’re human-”
“Oh, I can look human.” She laughed far more fully for him then, revealing each and every one of her pointed feline teeth. Her tongue rolled with the motion, only for a moment, just as bright and golden as the light of her inner ears. “But it’s harder to do that sort of thing, like this, when I’m so far away from her.” Those molten eyes of hers, sharpest amber, abruptly welled up with shimmering droplets of dewy mist. “Poor sweetheart must be feeling it even more than I can, being so apart.”
“Wait. What do you mean?” Olive’s gaze darted back to look in the direction he’d wandered from. “Does it... Hurt?”
“In a sense, yeah. Sort of. Maybe?” She wrinkled her nose in thought. “Or maybe not quite in the way you’re thinking of.” The strange feline hummed.
Without even the slightest warning, her face changed into a narrowly pointed beak and razor-keen eyes instead, a long-necked heron with deep midnight feathers.
She lifted her head with a graceful flourish of sleek muscle and plumage. Her beak clacked quietly when she next spoke. “It’s more like... A pulled muscle? Sort of sore, but if you quit messing with it, it goes back to normal eventually.” She slowly tilted her angular head aside. Her tall, elegant neck did not move entirely unlike a rippling serpent. “We’ve been practically joined at the hip for ages, now. So it’s not so easy for us to separate.”
“Are you... Part of Amiela’s magic? Is that what a demon is?” Olive dearly hoped the creature was telling him the truth about the term ‘demon’ being inoffensive.
“No, no.” She shook her head back and forth with a soft ruffle of feathers. The long pinions below her neck prickled up high. “That’s not it at all. No, she’s just chock full of the stuff, that energy you humans always call magic... And I am a lot like what that is. But we’re not like the same person, or siblings, or anything. Or even related.”
Olive blinked at how confusing it all seemed.
She began to sound equal parts aghast and amused by the mere suggestion. “I’m not her. And she’s not me. She wasn’t born with me.” When the creature’s voice finally began to fall less haughty, the color of her eyes slowly whirled away from deeper, more indecipherable colors to a swirl of bright fiery gold. Her beak and feathers shortened into a slightly broader, whiskery snout with sharp canine teeth. “Poor thing only has so much family left, though. She really could stand to keep more company around.”
“Okay.” Olive’s skin prickled with a cold sense of dread. He’d witnessed far too many starving hounds pacing out in the distance of the wastes to feel entirely at ease with that particular face, magical features or otherwise. “So, uh... Not that I’m not, um, grateful for your help or anything, but... Why are you here?”
“That’s exactly it, though!” She called out in a way that made Olive feel like she wasn’t quite listening to the words he’d actually asked her. “She’ll only feel all the more terrible if you end up... Well.” The creature paused on a grimacing smile. “Let’s say... ‘Less than alive,’ out here.” She still kept the same doglike face, yet her features gradually softened into the faint warmth of an almost fond, toothy sort of glow. “Do you know how long it’s been, since I’ve last heard her laugh that way..?”
Olive blinked a few more times at the infinitely less flippant tone she chose. Something about the creature’s voice felt far more raw in that small moment, so much more tangibly real.
Even the way she gazed so much deeper at the sight of him, yet never truly meeting his eyes, past the very surface of his image, peering entire worlds further beneath his outer form; it all felt as if she was somehow staring directly into what might have awaited just beyond, what he might become someday, whatever his bodily presence could possibly be. It somehow made Olive feel like she could, in some sense, already tell exactly what he might say to her.
“How many years, if you had to guess? Mm. It’s been some time.” She winked at him almost faster than Olive could catch. “Well. You really should be more careful. This place is a lot more alive than it looks.”
Olive tried to stare deeper into those vastly luminous eyes. “You... You were protecting me for her sake, weren’t you?”
“Well, sure. But I’m not coldblooded.” For good measure, she shifted into an all too familiar visage. It felt thoroughly chilling to see the demonic creature laugh aloud with the same scaled face as the serpent lying dead on the ground between the two of them, only many magnitudes larger. “So stoic, just like her! Not in the mood for humor?”
“Sorry.” Olive briefly considered nudging the eviscerated viper away with the toe of his boot. “Just trying to wrap my head around all this, I guess.”
“I understand.” She returned to her more feline image, mostly the same as her first solid form. But instead of a vaguely glistening pelt, a set of somewhat more definable shifting stripes stretched out far and bloomed across her body in a spiral of royal lilac and amber, while a long, tufted tail unfurled itself from the base of her spine. The sinewy limb swished back and forth in the air behind her. “We’re a well-kept secret among most humans, you know. More of an open secret around witch-humans.”
Olive nodded. “Okay. Um, if you won’t tell me your name, then what can I call you?”
“Well... Oh, I know!” Her ears perked high with a flutter of light. “I’ll tell you exactly what I told little Ami back when she first asked me that very same question!” The demon smiled wide and began to look rather thoughtful, as if conjuring up something from a distant memory. “That girl, she went and found both of us a big book full of human words, one with so many interesting things, and it had names in it! Different names, from all different places across this world.” Her expression melded into a keener glint. Something about the tug of her lips began to look more wry. “And as charming as Ami’s local culture might be, the names from there never really quite felt like they suited me.”
Olive wondered where in the world that could have ever been. Both Amiela and the demon spoke the common tongue with mostly indefinable central accents. Although the demon’s tone of speech was a bit more liltingly strong and unusual, Olive could not make any certain guesses.
“Not my style, you could say.” The creature laughed. She smiled yet again and let her eyes slip shut. “Mm. But, there were more than enough names in that book for me to choose from. And the one I picked isn’t even all that different from my real name. At least to human senses, maybe.”
The demon breathed in deep and shifted her guise to a narrowly fox-faced bat. She still kept her eyes fully closed, even when she floated higher aloft to drape her entire shadowy body in the air above Olive, drifting upside-down.
She wiggled a set of huge pointy ears at him. Magic glittered with the flicker of each motion. “You can call me Ranya.”
“Oh. That’s a pretty name.” Olive craned his neck high to try and look up at her there. He’d actually heard that particular moniker before, unlike Amiela’s much more unusual name. He remembered hearing it spoken a scarce number of times from travelers passing through the harbor markets of his hometown, usually from the far southeast. “It’s a good one to pick.”
“Be proud of the name you have.” Ranya opened her glossy dark eyes, glittering there like rain in the night. Her arms unfurled, stretching languidly to shadow Olive beneath a veil of starlit wing membrane. Her inner skin and fur glistened with deep tones of clear blue and gold, washing Olive’s entire figure in a quiet glow. When Ranya inhaled the ashen scents on the wind, her pointy bat nose twitched. “It’s more important than you might think, you know.”
It felt like a story, somehow, the shapes that passed over his vision and danced across the conjured wash of starlit darkness in the stretch of her wings, more colors than he could ever try to name. Olive turned in place, boots brushing over the dry, parched span of earth, gazing up into the lights and motion that swelled up slowly and curled deeper in the sleek flesh of that mysterious creature, the wild demon waiting quietly before him with each soft swirl of billowing air.
“I just mean, mine would be a whole lot better for a girl.” Olive gave Ranya a helpless little shrug. “Not that girls’ names are bad. That’s not what I mean. People just...” He tried not to frown. “They always give me weird looks whenever I tell them.”
“Ami didn’t.” Ranya smiled at him knowingly. The corners of her mouth crinkled with the motion, revealing the small yet razor-hooked edges of her pointy, foxlike teeth. “And it might very well be that you won’t meet another friendly soul in this dusty crapsack of a ruin for a very long time. So she’s the one that matters most, right?”
Olive tilted his head even more when Ranya drifted the highest angle she could reach above his face. “Are you not a friendly soul?”
She laughed for him yet again. She returned with a gust of motion to become merely a swirl of lustrous smoke in the air. Her words still rang out loud and true, even when voiced from deep within a formless, echoing shape of mist. “What I am is not what you know; what I want is not what Ami wants...” Her eyes still flashed through the sweeping darkness. “But I’ll do whatever’s necessary to keep her away from harm.”
Olive watched the shadows whirl and churn.
Ranya’s voice fell away to become much quieter, almost a distant murmur. “And I don’t care if it’s from a snake or otherwise, the blood I might have to spill... Remember that, and our happy little adventure will go along just fine.” Her watchful eyes, every single one of them, winked out of sight with the rest of her.
Olive blinked up at the empty span of sunset air. His mind raced with a million thoughts a minute, pressed so unbearably minuscule beneath an even greater burden of questions roiling mercilessly at the forefront.
If Ranya could change her own visible appearance so greatly, manipulate the fabric of reality with such incredible ease, then the various multitude of forms Olive just witnessed of her there, was that even what Ranya truly was?
He knelt forward to examine the dead serpent. The jagged tooth marks certainly looked real. He reached out as carefully as he could to brush his fingertips beside the bloody wounds. They felt real enough, too.
So, Olive began to reason, unless Ranya could manipulate his tactile senses in some way, she had indeed appeared out of nowhere and bitten directly through the scaly creature with a true set of physical teeth, then turned herself into several different animals like it was nothing. Olive glanced up again and wondered if she was still there, only invisible, or if Ranya had already returned all the way back to where Amiela rested.
He realized he really ought to go back soon as well. Who in the world could have known how many more dangerous serpents might just be lurking there, nestled between the dry rocks and shrubs?
Olive wondered if he should bring the dead snake along with him. Maybe Amiela could at least try to help him salvage the meat from it with that knife of hers. But Olive wasn’t quite sure if it was even safe to eat such a highly venomous animal like that, much less carry it around with his bare hands, with the scrape on his hand especially.
He definitely did not want to touch it any further, given the way Ranya’s teeth had ripped directly through the venom sacs hidden deep in the snake’s head, bursting them each right open to let the deadly elixir drip all over the dead, fallen creature.
With a full-bodied grimace, Olive wiped the droplets of snake blood away from his face with a handful of dry grass. Even further, he thought, while he tried his best to clean himself up and examine the shallow wound on his palm, how else might Amiela react to him bringing such a dangerous animal back to her, especially with a set of even more dangerous-looking tooth marks torn all over it?
Better to leave it there, Olive decided, for others to scavenge.
Even still, a twinge of sharpened guilt panged deep in his chest. The serpent had just been protecting its home, after all. It probably thought a human like Olive would surely want to grab it right out from there and eat it.
“Sorry.” Olive carefully stood up. He peered back towards the northward trail he’d traveled from, just minutes before. “If I hadn’t been here, you wouldn’t be dead.”
Before he chose to leave that place, Olive knelt down and dug a shallow ditch in the earth, moving the dry soil away with his hands. He stood back up to push at the poor little viper, just enough to nudge it inside with the toe of one of his boots.
“I really am sorry.” Olive hated the way it was all curled up there, so limp and utterly lifeless. “I hope you have better luck in the next life.” He knelt again to push the dusty soil back over the dead animal. Olive closed his eyes for a moment of time.
A cold wind brushed over his skin. Olive clenched his teeth hard and shivered. His arms prickled with goosebumps. The serpent was not the first thing to die out there in those lawless, barren wildlands, and he knew it would certainly not be the last.