Kashur

Air. Just. Get. Air.

The river was relentless, and Kashur’s waterlogged clothing weighed him down like the metal sinkers in his old tacklebox. He was a hook, made to sink, made to drag along the bottom for a hungry fish to find. He was not made for...

Air!

He tried to suck in another lungful, but his cloak was across his face. Infernal thing was going to kill him. He shrugged his good arm free, but the other one. Hateful fates, it hurt! He swirled underwater, working at it, his vision tunneling from the pain. He needed to breathe! But where was the surface?

Water was rushing by him now, not ushering him along. His cloak was caught on some underwater rocks or debris. Aaargh! It was going to rip his arm off. Kashur grabbed the cloth with his good arm to create slack, but he couldn’t do this forever. Magic could save him, but he couldn’t utter a spell underwater. And the minute he released the slack, the pain in his broken arm would make him black out and he would drown.

Where was Yelora? He hoped she was safe. He’d been able to fly them to deeper water, but the spell was meant to hold one person aloft, not three.

His lungs heaved, demanding oxygen. His fingers clutching the cloak were numb. The muscles were weakening, about to give out.

He was going to drown. Kashur, a former fisherman, knew how this worked. It wasn’t breathing the water that killed you—every Imperial had done that before birth. It was not being able to extract the oxygen from the water you breathed that killed you.

Ah well, at least he wouldn’t be in excruciating pain anymore. Although it seemed such a shame. He’d finally found a way to lift his curse. If he could’ve made it a week more—just a week!—he’d’ve been free of it.

His eyelids fluttered shut. Yelora’s face swam behind his eyelids. He saw himself reach out with bare hands, caress her cheek. She blinked slowly at his touch, gaze growing sleepy, then changing into something more... determined. She leaned in, her prim red lips softening as they pressed against his. Stars, he was sure he could even feel it... her kiss.

Kashur’s lungs spasmed and he sucked in an involuntary breath. His lungs, used to thin air, not heavy water, rebelled, seizing and burning like he’d breathed in fire. Now was the part where he would asphyxiate. With no oxygen in his blood, none would get to his brain, and the organ would die.

He sucked in a second breath. And a third. He was still alive. How was that possible? His eyes popped open and he saw a small greenish face with wide black eyes and a tiny bow mouth.

A Pooka! Underwater! The feathery red gills fluttered in its neck. It smiled at him, and suddenly Kashur realized who had kissed him—kissed him and given him the ability to breathe underwater.

He’d always thought that was a myth.

Two more similar beings appeared from over its bare shoulder. The little guys, or gals as it were, were completely naked, like toddlers splashing in the shallows while their mothers did the washing. Careful of his injured arm, they guided him through the current and down, down, down, deep into the gorge at the bottom of the river. While it was dark with night up top, everything down here was lit with a greenish-yellow bioluminescence, from the tickling grasses to the tentacled houses that looked like sea anemones to the bottom-feeding mollusks, their glowing shells rocking side to side as they lumbered across the sandy bottom. The underwater village spread out under the faux river bottom, stretching in both directions protected from the fast-moving water above by an algae-covered ceiling of volcanic rock, like a lava tube.

Kashur’s new friends settled him onto a soft cushion of sand. When they saw him wince as he moved his arm, their brows furrowed. They began to paw at him, like cats, peeling off his tunic to get a better look at his injury. He’d used a spell to close off his arteries to keep from bleeding to death, but the jagged edges of his humerus were protruding through his skin, right below his shoulder. One of them touched the wound, and the pain was so all encompassing that Kashur got tunnel vision. It touched him a second time and he passed out.

When he awoke who knew how many hours later, his pain had settled into a gentle ache. A group of Pookas were smiling at him in their weird way, all mouth and no eyes. But he was grateful for their help and did not want to judge them. He pointed upward with a gloved finger and raised his eyebrows in a questioning look. He needed to get back to the surface. He needed to find Yelora, make sure she’d gotten away from the Imperial and Dwarf forces.

A Pooka signed something at him. He thought it might be, Wait. A second one swam up to him, her childlike face transforming with worry. With a long-fingered hand, she covered his eyes. Immediately, a picture appeared, like scrying. It was the same vision of the little Imperial girl and the Dwarf sitting by the fire. This time the backdrop had changed a bit. There were tents behind them instead of trees. They were working on something together. It looked mechanical, like a part from one of those self-pulling carriages the salesmen were always peddling on market day. The girl’s resemblance to Nyla was uncanny. Why was the river sprite showing him this?

He peeled the cold green fingers off his eyes and tried to sign something that looked like Elf Queen. He traced fake pointed ears and a crown on his head. When that didn’t work, moved his hands in an hourglass figure over his chest—not his proudest moment, but it was communication he was going for, not gentlemanliness.

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If the Pooka understood, she ignored him, instead taking his hand and swimming him upriver to a part of the underwater city that didn’t glow green-yellow like the rest of it. Everything was dead, bleached skeletons of things that were.

Kashur understood. Crystals? He mimed a smooth shaft with his hands.

She pointed nearby, at a stockpile of them. These must have been crystals that ended up in the river when the meteorite crashed.

Kashur immediately swam for them, but she swirled in front to block him, her babyface angry. No, she signed, and it wasn’t hard to understand that one.

Okay, okay. He held his palms out in surrender. So the Pookas were against the use of the crystals. Noted.

Her cold palm pressed to his face again, and this time Kashur saw a montage of similar destruction across Terris: petrified forestlands, poisoned rivers, blighted crops, cows giving black milk, even a pack of mangy, rabid wolf pups.

Bleeding suns, was all this happening on Terris? Had it already happened? Or were the Pooka showing him the future?

And where were the Elementals in all of this? Perhaps these were the people to ask. Kashur pulled her hand off his face again and mimed the shape of an Elemental—a towering, blocky form made of earth. He pulled up a handful of silt and let it trickle through his gloved fingers.

In a flash, the palm returned to his face. The body of the Elemental Yelora had slain crashed into his vision. Then, as if in reverse time lapse, he watched himself cover it up, and then the Elves came in and built their city up and over and around it. In seconds, the dead Elemental was nothing but a grassy knoll. Part of the terrain. Their sin, hidden in plain sight.

The Pooka retracted her palm, her black eyes sad.

Kashur held up a single finger, afraid to ask, afraid to know. Was there only one?

She nodded.

This was terrible news! Awful! Yelora had destroyed the Guardian of Terris and a new enemy was on its way to finish the job. An enemy so terrible that a powerful Sky Engineer would rather die than face it. One that wielded a terrible, destructive magic. One smart enough to send a vanguard of the same magic, a twisted welcome package for the current residents of Terris to fight over like jealous siblings.

I need to go, Kashur tried to sign, peering up to the ceiling of the lava tube for the crack that would give him access to the surface. His arm was moving better in its socket. The pain was there, but it wouldn’t stop him from being able to swim. He floated up from his seat.

But the Pooka pressed him back down, brows knitted, and covered his eyes once again. She showed him the same scene with the Imperial girl and the Dwarf tinkering.

Kashur waved a hand impatiently. You’ve already shown me this! He tried to sign, although it was difficult to find a way to communicate those words other than through frustration.

All at once, cold hands pressed against every inch of his body, stilling him. Locked in an icy, strange embrace, Kashur froze and watched the story the Pookas wanted him to see.

The girl. The Dwarf. The machine in their hands. They were smiling. He couldn’t hear anything in the vision playing out before him, but he saw when the shadows behind them came alive and a torrent of creatures emerged, all greedy eyes and sharp teeth and pointed ears. They poured into the camp like water. The little girl’s mouth stretched into a scream as they overtook her.

No! Bubbles erupted from Kashur’s mouth as he forgot he couldn’t speak underwater. He thrashed, not wanting to watch the rest of this play out, to see a little girl and her Dwarf friend ripped to pieces by the creatures Mol Morin had created with his curse.

Because that was the truth of it. Kashur’s curse had been used to create what Yelora had called Goblins. Those things in the bathtub hadn’t been fish or leeches. They’d been these things, and Kashur’s curse had allowed Mol Morin to breed enough of them to create an army.

The bile rose in his craw and he fought blindly for the surface. The cold hands did not release him, instead pushed him, shoved him, manhandled him as the scene played out in his mind. A Goblin folding itself over the little girl’s curled-up, cowering form. The Dwarf’s terrified face, slashed to ribbons by a claw that rent the night with silent efficiency.

Let me go! Kashur tried to shout. The hands were moving him, pressing against him and pushing him. Taking him somewhere. Meanwhile the carnage played out before his eyes, and he had to watch, unable to look away.

Kashur gave up the struggle just as his head broke the surface, the hands pulling away. He coughed up the water, heaving as it left his burning lungs, fumbling to shallower water. When he finally crawled onto the sandy shore, ten pairs of black eyes in somber green faces stared at him. He stared back.

One Pooka signed at him. He didn’t understand the words, per se, but he understood the meaning.

“Yes, you want me to find the girl and the Dwarf. I get it. I have no idea what I’m supposed to say to them, but you lot don’t seem to think that’s a problem, so why should I?”

He surveyed the shoreline. It was quiet and damp and littered with needles from the pines towering overhead. The sun was high in the sky. How long had he been underwater?

“Where is the Elf Queen?” he asked.

The Pooka’s brows knitted in anger and it signed at him harder.

“Okay, fine! Fine! I’ll find the girl and the Dwarf. Sheesh, it was just a question.”

A second one threw his damp cloak at him. He caught it and checked the pockets. His things were still here—coinpurse, pocketknife, portal. He fingered the compact, his best and easiest means of travel. Except he didn’t have anything of the Dwarf or the little girl’s, so there was no way to aim the portal to their location.

He opened his mouth to explain that to the pushy Pookas, but one of them whipped an arm back. Kashur barely caught the thing it threw at him—a battered headlamp. Then the Pookas disappeared, one by one, like watery prairie dogs.

He rubbed his shoulder—it felt great, hardly a twinge—and bounced the headlamp on his palm. So according to his new friends, he, a Wizard, was supposed to portal into an Imperial and Dwarf war camp to rescue two sworn enemies who didn’t even know him.

That should go well.