"Are you alright?" Sunwhisper was leaning over Janna, who was clutching her broken wrist. He had retrieved his spear.

"I am," she said, but the brush with death had affected her, and she did not immediately rise.

(You gonna eat that?)

The hunger tugged at Sunwhisper, but he pushed it aside. {Take it for yourself.}

When Starscream detached himself from Sunwhisper, as always, there was a sense of loss, of becoming something less. His companion didn’t seem to notice, intent as he was on collecting and consuming the fallen cultivator’s quintessence organ. He was quite precise, having perfected his preferred method of harvest on the sacred beasts of Jigoku. Rather than perform a full dissection, he created an entry point for himself under Hago’s rib cage and squeezed inside in search of his prize.

In most humans, the quintessence organ was located around the area of the solar plexus, though there was some variation, and it occasionally developed closer to the heart. Karasu and Ogumo fed as well, there was mana to be absorbed from every part of a cultivator’s body, but they deferred to Starscream’s primacy when it came to the core.

Janna did not seem to be enjoying the gory display, and Sunwhisper distracted her by fashioning a splint for her arm from a branch of the tree, wrapping it with some left over webbing.

"This will not end here," she said. "You would be better off without me."

"Yes," Sunwhisper agreed, "If we separate, I will be very hard to notice, accompanied only by a giant spider and a six winged raven."

Janna laughed. "Was that a joke? Did you make a joke?"

"Haven’t I always made jokes?"

She paused, considering. "I don’t really know. But still, too many people saw us together, and the Azai are looking for me now. You cannot complete your mission if you are always rescuing me."

"I have considered the problem. Now that I have my stars, I am hesitant to change my disguise, as I don’t have the money to pay for them again. The Azai will have descriptions of us both, and they are unlikely to forgive our transgressions lightly. Still, the world is large, is it not? Where else could we go?"

Janna used her uninjured hand to draw the bare outline of a map in the dirt with a twig. She began with the border, and a mark for Fringe Town, with the jagged edge of the Jigoku mountain range crawling up the western side. Sunwhisper had previously noticed how maps in Hollow mirrored the cartographic conventions of earth, with equivalents of the cardinal directions in their language.

Compasses seemed to work here just as they did on his home world, which was strange, as the magnetic field of the Tree of Heaven had been inconsistent during the journey of his fathers along its bark. Regardless of the mechanics behind it, the border where Hollow ended was the south, and Jigoku delineated the southeast corner.

The Middle Kingdom occupied the center of the map, and Janna marked the area above it simply as the Wet Country, as it was dominated by several small seas. To the west was the Dry Country, a near desert, though she said it was almost as populated as the Middle Kingdom. There were a few blank regions that had never been included in her education as a daughter of Fringe.

The crude map represented thousands of miles of territory, and it wasn’t much use apart from a broad conceptualization.

"The wet and dry regions,” Sunwhisper said, “they are still under the sway of the Middle Kingdom?"

"All that is written," Janna quoted, "is written in the hand of the immortals."

"But not Goth," Sunwhisper said.

"The land of barbarians?" Janna poked the emptiness beyond Jigoku with her stick. "There is nothing there."

Starscream rolled around in the grass to clean himself off before plugging back into Sunwhisper.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

(Hey kid, as long as we’re taking field trips, do you know what those old bastards did with the other mechanoborgs?)

{The bodies of my father’s were placed in a graveyard by the border guardian.}

(So why don’t we go there? That’s leaving a lot of reusable parts on the table.)

{We would be very close to Fringe Village.}

(So take the long way around, we can cross along the mountains. I survived Jigoku on my own just fine. It shouldn’t be a problem.)

Sunwhisper shared this thought with Janna, and she seemed willing to go along with whatever he decided. The border guardian was the only one who had frequented the demon’s graveyard, and it was possible he was yet to be replaced. Visitors from the Tree of Heaven were rare, and the First Elder would handle anything that threatened the town until a suitable successor could be found.

"What would you do with them?" She asked.

"My passenger is better versed in engineering disciplines than I am. He wants to see what is available. Largely speaking, our race has modular components, and if we are not followed, there should be time to test what is still usable. I am concerned about the rate of decay the equipment showed when I went there before, but at the very least, we will have a supply of titanosteel to draw from."

"Like your spear?"

"The same. The more complex components were breaking down, but a material like this, it shows no sign of wear."

They were interrupted by a warning caw from Karasu, who had perched atop the tree after tearing a few choice pieces from Hago’s body to snack on.

"Travelers on the road," the raven said. "A large party."

The land on either side of the Yellow Brick Road was mostly flat and grassy, but there was cover available here and there from stands of trees and a few irregular rock formations. Sunwhisper had a built in sense of direction, and he oriented himself toward Jigoku.

"We should keep to the wilderness for the foreseeable future."

"Then what?" Janna asked, smudging the map with her foot.

"We will find a way."

********

The palanquin came to a stop.

"My lady, there is something by the road that you should see."

Yuyu petted the sacred beast beside her as she addressed the servant. Ise Ebi waved his antenna in languid satisfaction.

"We have stopped, so I suppose I must. What is it?"

"A body, my lady."

"How interesting."

Yuyu slid down from her seat, temporarily relieving the carriers of their burden, and stepped from the perfect regularity of the yellow brick road onto the soft earth beside it. A few servants had spotted a body wrapped in oilcloth beside an old tree that was blooming out of season. Someone had died here.

Two people, as it happened.

The condition of the other corpse, concealed among the roots of the tree on the side that faced away from the road, was unusual enough to earn a reaction from the Lady. She laughed. A short, sharp sound, startled out of her. Genuine delight.

She bent down to examine the second dead man, and it took her only a few seconds to recognize him as Hago, one of the Azai officials from the chapter house in Silk Flower Town. He had one eye, and a hole all the way through his head, but apart from that, it looked like his body had been ravaged by a sacred beast.

If not for the hole in his skull, she would have assumed he had died fighting whatever had ravaged his body. She could not immediately guess what the weapon had been, the wound might have been the result of a technique, but it was certainly not the result of tooth and claw.

Ise Ebi scuttled to her side.

"They took his core."

"Yes, I see that."

"Didn’t the Elder in Fringe say there was a beast in Jigoku that hunted this way?"

Yuyu nodded, then unwrapped the first body. Another familiar face, and the same sort of desecration. Though oddly, the body of her cousin had not been gnawed quite so thoroughly as that of Hago. The removal of the core was surgical. That suggested that the ravaging was the result of scavengers, though why they had left Makoto untouched, she could not say.

What an interesting scene. Two had died by the same hand, but they had been treated differently. Why wrap only one?

"Makoto Shishio." She said it aloud. The name meant more to her than she had revealed in her meeting with the First Elder. "Who are you, really?"

The loss of her cousin meant little to her. He had been weak, sad. This was the way of the Blessed Lands. But the mystery, that was something.

"Ise, can you taste them?"

The sacred beast’s antenna swayed. "I believe I can, mistress. It is quite fresh."

"Good." She turned to the servant that had informed her of the diversion. "Ready yourselves, we are changing course."