"What do you think this temptress looks like?" I asked my familiar as soon as I was out of sight of the little town, kneeling down and running my hand under the hem of my robes.
It took more effort than I would have wished but a few moments later, I pulled out my hat and the leather belt that held Gat in his holster. I pulled the constricting hood off my head and ran my fingers through my hair. After several attempts, I managed to place my hat on my head just right and straightened the wide brim between two fingers. Continuing my journey into the desert, I slung the belt around my waste and had to fasten it one hole looser than I was used to due to the sheer amount of fabric around my waist.
Gat had evidently fallen into one of his silent spells because I had nearly reached the gap between the two plateaus I had been instructed to pass through and he still hadn't spoken. That gave me the silence necessary to fall into my thoughts. There was a "God" in a cave that could potentially give me its blessing and set me on the path to my sisters. I had to go through a trial of a religion I didn't believe in that entailed wandering into the desert under the light of the pearl moon and facing down the temptress to earn the right to seek counsel with the "God."
All things considered, it wasn't the strangest situation I had ever found myself in.
As thick as it seemed, I had no concern with dealing with whatever the terrible temptress turned out to be.
Sakes alive, the sight of me had made everyone but the rat eyed Pontificate nearly faint.
Whatever was titillating enough for them to use it as some proof of devotion would probably seem mild and uninteresting to me. So, I walked through the lightless passage between the plateaus trying to beat the chill that I knew would be cold on my feet since the sun had set.
If I had been in a story or in one of the great fables the old crones in Zenithcidel told maidens that were still wet behind the ears, I would have been attacked in that too dark passage.
Fortunately, I wasn't in a story. Even more fortunately, I made it out the other side without any unexpected danger swirling out of the dust.
The little square town far behind me and the pink pearl moon rising full above me, I could see a faint outline breaking out of the desert in the distance. Between the impressions in the dirt that my boots were making and that faint shape, I would have to resist the temptress.
The cold came quicker than I would have wished but I found it much easier to manage with all the additional layers I had on. "Maybe these folks don't have everything backwards and upside down." I said to myself, having to hold my hat on my head with my hand so a particularly harsh gust of wind didn't send it tumbling into the darkness.
From the corner of my eye, I saw something move.
At first, I thought it was just a trick of the strange pink light radiating from the moon.
Then, it called my name.
"Willa?" Came the voice of a woman that I would have recognized anywhere.
"Milly," I called back. “Sakes alive, what are you doing out here, little sister?”
"Willa. Come here." A second voice commanded me. That could only be Sara. Since the moment I had made her a big sister, she had started using that tone with me.
"Sara," I called back, my sisters coming close enough that I could see them fully. "Did y'all get Shifted too?"
I ran towards them. Of course they had, I should have thought of that as soon as the dust had started sticking to my duster. I'd seen them just a week ago, but after all the years I had spent away, all the time wouldn't be enough. The closer I got, the more that dream became a reality.
Sara, tall and stern.
Milly, hair gray despite being younger than me. I'd been close enough to them that they could have heard me holler the whole time. I ran right up to them as fast as I could in the bulky robes.
They moved like Milly and Sara and the way they called my name sounded like Milly and Sara. Once I had gotten close enough to them to extend my arms for an embrace that I desperately needed from the two women that I missed very much, a clear understanding struck me in the heart like a nine pound hammer. My sisters hadn't ventured out from Merrowcrest after the Shift. They hadn't journeyed through the strange desert to find me. They were probably waiting in our little house on the coast, wondering what was taking me so long to get there. My sense had left me as soon as I heard Milly's sweet voice and I should have suspected something wasn't right, but the notion of seeing them had been all together too tempting for me to resist.
The things that I had thought were my sisters had no faces.
The faceless bodies in front of me were illusions, somehow crafted from my own desires.
I whipped Gat out of his holster and drew my aura just as the illusions vanished. Fading into my sight from a curtain of unnatural shadow like a sea beast rising out of dark water, a gaping maw filled with rows of jagged teeth snapped towards me.
I couldn't load Gat fast enough.
I realized that I didn't have enough time a moment too late.
Throwing myself back and away, The jagged teeth closed on the pink cloth over my left shoulder and tore it from my body..
Rolling back up on my feet in a cloud of dust, I darted my eyes around the dark desert. "The temptress, I’d guess, but sakes alive, that's not what comes to mind when I think of something tempting me."
"You are injured." Gat said, evidently deciding his period of silent contemplation was over.
Glancing down, the fabric that had been torn off my robes was ringing with my blood. I ran my right hand over the patch of my exposed flesh. It stung, but I didn't think the wounds were deep enough to cause any permanent damage. "It grazed me. Damn thing would have took my arm off if I had been a half a second slower." I said, further soiling my robes by wiping the blood off my hand in the pink fabric.
"It's coming back, fast." Gat said.
Out in the distance, Moving in a manner I didn't understand, the Temptress swam through the air just a couple hands above the desert ground. It was huge, its mouth of jagged teeth making up most of its size. All the rest was fins and an antennae that hung in front of its face like a fishing pole. Just as I caught sight of it, something happened. The end of its antennae pulsed with light once, twice, three times and the massive terrestrial fish vanished.
I didn't like to be lied to. I didn't think I'd ever met a person that did but it really chapped my ass. It turns out that I hated being lied to by something that was doing the lying to get close enough to make a meal out of me.
"Get ready." I said to Gat, channeling my drawn aura and manifesting it through my palm. I didn't create big shells like I had with the cliff, that would come later. Instead, I spun the cylinder that hung beneath the two bigger barrels and filled all nine bores with my aura. Once my familiar was fully loaded and glowing purple with my will, I snapped the cylinder shut and raised him, aiming with the smaller of the three barrels
"Are you going to shoot it with your sense of smell? It's invisible." Gat questioned.
"Yes, yes it is," I said. "But the dust isn't," I stopped drawing my aura and took my first shot. A flash of violet light seemed to smash into a pocket of particularly hard air. The trail of displaced dust I had been following snapped away from me and the Temptress's invisibility vanished. I had blown the antennae clear of its ugly head. "And I've always been a good shot."
"Are we feeling particularly violent this evening?" Gat asked, his metal body tracking my mark through the night air.
"I left the tip of my workings hollow." I replied, firing my second shot. The light of my will streaked through the dark night and hit the overgrown fish in its flank. Whatever force allowed it to move through the air as if it were water died with the impact and the Temptress crashed into the dry ground. I followed its sliding descent with my third shot. Then, the fourth. Quickly followed by the fifth and all the rest as I emptied the cylinder into the flopping mass of meat. I walked towards it once Gat was empty, drawing my aura once again.
"Is this really necessary?" Gat asked, his voice taking on the warble of someone who was about to be sick.
"Completely." I answered, palming two glowing purple shells into my familiar's big barrels.
It didn’t know it yet, but the temptress was dead.
I thought it was important that I be the one to tell it.
I raised Gat and pulled both triggers.
The small pieces of flesh that barely connected all the holes from my first nine shots vanished in a flash of purple energy, sending a storm of dust and dirt into the air.
I didn't stay and watch. I had turned and continued walking towards the place that I would come face to face with the "God" that had put the monstrosity I had just turned into chum in the desert as some kind of sick trial for those that worshiped him.
"You know I'm not really a religious type," I said to Gat between his dry heaves. "and I've always left people to their own beliefs."
"Hrroargh." My familiar groaned.
"Right," I exclaimed, placing him back in his holster. "But I don't think I can ignore this one. Even if it means it takes me longer to get to Merrowcrest."
Gat heaved again. "Urghh."
"Sakes alive," I smiled. "I love it when you agree with me."
Under normal circumstances, the long walk across the freezing desert would have been enough to cool my head.
Under the circumstances I found myself in however, which were not the strangest I had ever experienced, I could do nothing to stop the quick rhythm my trigger finger continuously tapped against the cold metal of my familiars body. The loss I had taken from rendering the temptress utterly unable to tempt anyone ever again had slowed me down but during the climb up the rough hewn path I gave myself a talking to and decided to worry about the aching in my bones when I got to my sisters.
I thought of Milly and Sara. Not the faceless imposters I had foolishly ran towards, but the real ones. Twenty years they had hounded me to leave the city and The Mothers behind. Always telling me that I had done enough and that they weren’t going to live forever. Eventually, the truth of it all wore me down and I started my preparations for leaving.
They hadn’t taken after our mother like I had. Sara had enough control over her aura to bring a knife to her hand from across the kitchen while she was cooking and Milly could do little glamors and such, but nothing powerful enough to find a place amongst myself and the other Sorceresses. They wouldn't live forever. Neither would I, but even if I never used my aura again, I could live for another two hundred years after they had passed even if I kept drinking.
Milly and Sara had taken after our father. He had been a mortal man who had been known as a Marshall amongst his people, which I understood to be some kind of lawman. The first two years of my life had been spent with him before he died but I had been too young to remember it and none of my requests to enter The Well had been accepted. According to my mother, he'd been hot tempered and completely unable to not get involved in trouble.
Unfortunately for the Pontificate, Neuter, and all of their prudish followers that had left a bad taste in my mouth, I took after him too.
Just as the almost full moon reached the top of its arc, I reached the cave that must be Neuter's resting spot. The pink moonlight did not penetrate the curtain of darkness inside the cave. Instead, it traced a sharp boundary line across the rocky ground that was evident of some kind of magic.
A high pitched scream echoed out from behind the magical darkness.
"That’s a hat." Gat spoke up.
I grabbed a loose rock off the ground and tossed it across the boundary line, just to be sure I wouldn't turn to dust if I crossed it. The vanished as it crossed but I heard it land solidly on the other side. "Sakes alive, I know what I'm doing."
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Out of the desert and into the cave.
As soon as the heel of my back foot crossed the threshold, warm air touched my face and the pink tint of the moon was replaced by warm lanterns that lined the walls. Pink marble ran from the boundary line to a staircase of the same material in front of me. On either side, clear water flowed through inset troughs that ran the length of the hallway. I knelt down and cupped several handfuls of the cool water into my mouth before I started towards the stairs.
I wasn't mad enough to pass up water in a desert. Yet.
The stairs led to a room. I was not the only one seeking an audience with Neuter. The same man who had been carrying a lantern tipped pole and had become my unwilling guide just after the shift looked up at me as I topped the stairs.
When my back foot left the top step, it was I who was wearing the robes. He, on the other hand, was wearing nothing. Like the day he was born, the man was stark naked.
"Did you get hot or are you just happy to see me?" I asked, expecting him to break out in hysterics at the revelation that someone was committing the unforgivable sin of seeing him naked.
"Oh, hello." He said sleepily and turned to face me in full.
I fortunately had the presence of mind to keep my eyes on his. The robes had done him favors, actually. "Sakes alive, you know you aren't wearing anything right?"
"Yes, yes. I know. You will have to get undressed if you wish to enter. It is a testament to its unshakable desirelessness. I have been preparing for years to resist the Temptress and yet you have arrived and accomplished the same feat in a day. Neuter shall be impressed by your devotion." The man spoke as if sleep was slowly coiling around him, making him drag out every word through a never ending yawn.
I remembered shooting the bulb on the antenna of the temptress and how I had removed it from existence with my power. "Right," I said. "Devotion."
The room was made of the same marble and was backed by a cover of ornate curtains. There wasn't so much as a gap I could see through but I assumed what I had come for lay behind them. Thin tendrils of pink smoke seeped into the room above me. As soon as I realized what I was looking at, I tasted the sweetness in the air that could only be from the smoke. I also realized that my anxious fingers had ceased their tapping on Gat's body. Suddenly, it didn't seem like such a bad idea to wait patiently for my audience. I was unsure about stripping down, my tolerance only went so far, after all. The idea of meeting a God wearing nothing but my hat and Gat's belt around my bare waist didn't seem appropriate.
Why did I even need Gat? Why was I even wearing a hat? I was in the Oasis of Neuter. I was safe. There was nothing there I would need to protect myself from. I should remove my unnecessary clothes and accessories and wait patiently to be welcomed into the liberating arms of Neuter.
I had just begun to slip my boots off when another high pitched scream, just like the one I had heard from outside the cave, sounded from behind the curtains. The scream had been harsh enough that it broke my mind from whatever stupor the pink smoke was smothering me into.
I pulled the loose fabric of the robes from around my throat and over my nose and mouth. The naked man beside me had not reached some kind of enlightenment through his trial and devotion. He was being drugged.
Whatever had done it to him was trying to do it to me.
I spoke to Gat, drawing my aura and filling all nine bores and both barrels of his metal body with my manifested power. "Get ready."
Gat sighed. "I had hoped, if only for a moment, that you would walk in here and not get into trouble."
I resettled my hat on my head before breaking through the curtains. "Sakes alive, you don't know me at all do you?"
"I wish I didn't." He replied, worry evident in his voice.
If the difference between what I had imagined and what the temptress had actually been applied to the desireless god, I expected to walk into a horror like I had never seen before.
Striding through the curtains, Gat drawn and held at the ready, I made it a single step before I stopped in my tracks. A large room made of the same pink marble as the one I had left echoed with screams, cries, and groans. Terracing down from where I stood, the room cascaded into several levels and nearly every inch of pink marble was covered in bodies. A thick cloud of the pink smoke hung heavy at the ceiling. Thousands of thin tendrils stretched down from it and wrapped around legs, arms, throats. The bodies were packed so tightly together, it was difficult for me to tell them apart.
They were not still, they were writhing.
I had not walked into a horror.
Sakes alive, I had walked into an damn orgy.
I'd been in brothels before on business, with the purest intentions of course, but even that could not compare to the carnal display I was witnessing. Trying to compare the two would be like trying to relate a jump to full on flight.
Each terrace that my eyes passed over, a seemingly endless amount of people were being with one another and seemed not to care who the "Another" was. At the lowest level of the room, tables that were rife with every kind of food and drink that, like the marble, seemed wholly out of place in the middle of a desert. Surrounding the table were even more people, who must have needed a break, and every time one of them would take a morsel or a cup, it would immediately replace itself.
It would take me ages to untangle each person in the room and question them about where Neuter was. I needed to do something fast before the smoke seeped through the cloth over my face.
I raised Gat above my head and pulled the smaller of his triggers, sending a flash of my purple aura out of his barrel and into the cloud of smoke.
The mass of writhing bodies stopped suddenly and looked up at me as if my shot had broken some kind of spell.
For all I knew, it had.
"Where is the one known as Neuter?" I yelled from my place atop the highest terrace.
A voice that sounded like silk and honey filled the room. "I am here Willa. I am so happy you have come."
The tendrils of smoke pulsed a brighter shade of pink with every word and I looked up into the cloud of smoke, realizing that it was Neuter.
I pointed Gat towards it and drew my aura. “Sakes alive, what is going on here?”
“Nothing of your concern, Willa. You have been brought here by chance and chance alone. Though, I thank you for ridding the desert of the temptress.” Neuter spoke, every smooth word disarming my will to shoot.
How did it know my name and why had it thanked me for what I had done?
“The fish wasn’t yours? God types like you always have some monster running around.” I yelled, confused without breathing any of the pink smoke.
“Those that follow me do much in my name I do not understand,” A flash of bright pink flared within the nebulous cloud and the mass of people returned to their work, unbothered by my presence. “Such an occurrence is drawing near. Resolve it for me and I will return you to your sisters.”
I remembered the pleased look in the pontificate’s eyes when I had agreed to the trial.
“Seems like you know how to spot a rat as well,” Unless all the sense I had built in my long life had suddenly fallen out of my head, I didn’t feel wrong in believing what the cloud said. It could have been because of how much I missed my sisters or damn tired I was, but I saw no other options. “What do I have to do?”
“Return to the village below my mountain. Slay the beast and prevent the loss of innocent life.”
That didn’t strike me as the nefarious request of a false god that was twisting me into its dark design. Kill a monster, save some lives, it sounded fairly similar to the work I had done in the city above. “That’s it? No catch? All I’ve got to do is kill The Beast and you'll send me home?”
“Slay the beast before it kills and I shall send you home,” Neuter purred, sending thick streams of pink smoke swirling down towards me. “I will shorten your journey back to the village.”
Before I could ask what that meant, the pink smoke enveloped me and I felt my feet leave the ground.
I smacked against the dusty ground the next instant. The wind knocked out of my chest, I rolled onto my back gasping for air.
The full moon hung huge in the sky above me, looking like a pink pearl.
The damn cloud had dropped me back in the desert before I had known what was happening. Still unable to catch my breath, I sat up and took as much of the dusty air into my lungs as my spasming chest would let me. My hat lay on the ground beside me and I fitted it back on my head when my breath returned.
Gat’s holster was empty.
“Gat?” I shouted, searching the ground around where I had fallen wildly.
“Help.” Gat’s answer sounded in my mind, leading me several steps behind the impression I had made in the dirt.
“Sakes alive!” I shouted.
A figure smaller than the grip of Gat’s body, drug the pistol towards me with two tiny arms. Like it had been sculpted out of shadow, it had no feature with the exceptions of its limbs and glowing purple dots for eyes. When it heard me approach, it turned its empty little face up to me and I heard Gat speak. “Are you gonna help? This is a lot heavier for me than it is for you.”
The little imp, I didn’t know what else to call it, wasn’t pulling Gat. It was Gat.
I bent down. Gat pulled open the but of the pistol grip with his little hand and squirmed inside the gun head first. “I thought the gun was you! You mean to tell me you've been this little creature the whole damn time?”
“I can’t believe you’ve never noticed.” Gat answered. I picked him up and gave his cylinder a quick spin.
“Sakes alive, you could have told me.” I shouted.
“Look there, the hat.” Gat said and turned to where his voice willed me to look.
The cloud had dropped me just outside the little town. Not far from where I had taken my rest before the trial, a pyre had been built. Thin scraps of wood, packed tight with dry brush and straw, was mounded at the foot of a tall wooden beam. Tied to the beam by thick rope that constricted them against one another, where three pink robed women. Their veils had been thrown from their faces as they struggled and screamed. Crowded in a circle around them, pearl pink robes all, were dozens of people that I had seen no trace of when I had passed through the town before.
None of them were looking up at the women. All of them had turned away from the town and were watching their holy man.
The pontificate held a torch, fire blazing atop it, and was swinging it wildly in front of him. “Back,” He screamed. “Back beast! Leave this place!’
I started walking towards the pontificate, feeling no need to holster Gat.
Crouched in front of the pontificate, crawling around on all fours to avoid the swinging torch, was The Beast.
Only, The Beast wasn’t a beast, it was a boy. Trails of pale blue light streaked from the corner of his eyes when he moved, claws tipped his hands where fingers should have been, and a mouth full of sharp teeth made him look somewhere between man and feline, but he was still a boy. Despite the shouting man threatening him with the fiery torch, the boy didn’t move like he wanted to hurt the pontificate.
“Sakes alive, I think I get why that spirit showed me what it did.” I said to Gat, all the hats I’d been chasing were beginning to stack nice and neat on top of each other.
“That does make sense.” Gat answered.
I whistled, sharp and loud, as I approached. “Hold on there slick.”
The pontificate turned to me and his rat eyes narrowed into furious slits. “First this and now you? Leave this place at once! You will not stain the devotion of my people!”
I nodded towards the screaming women tied atop the pyre. “They don’t look all that devoted.”
“You do this to them! You exposed them to temptation. I must burn it out of them, I shall not let them be corrupted!” He screamed.
While he was ranting, I had drawn my aura and filled both of Gat’s big barrels. I thought about my sisters, my new home, I had to get to them and Neuter had told me how.
I snatched the torch from the pontificates hand.
The Beast let out a savage growl and lunged towards me, claws extended.
I couldn’t blame him, he was only doing what any boy would do. . .
Protecting his father.
Sakes alive I wanted to go home.
I shot The Beast.
My power struck him just before his claws dug through the fabric of my pink robes and he dropped to my feet, the pale blue light of his eyes fading into darkness.
The pontificate erupted. “You’ve slain it! You’ve slain what has plagued me! Thank you stranger! Thank you!”
I swung the torch at the pontificate, the same way he had done to his son. “Back. Beast.”
The man’s ratty eyes went wide at my words.
“Ah. I wasn’t sure you had heard the difference.” Gat said to me.
I bent down and picked the charmed boy off the ground and threw him over my shoulder. He’d be out for awhile, I’d pushed every tired thought I’d had since the shift through Gat’s barrel and the shot had been clean.
Neuter had said the beast, not The Beast. Sakes alive, of course I’d heard it.
I left the pontificate behind me screaming. “What are you doing? Leave this place!”
Close enough to the pyre that I had a clear shot, I drew on my aura and pulled the small trigger.
A bullet of my purple aura tore through the fat knot that restrained the women and they fell to the burn pile below. The crowd parted to let me pass and I left the torch in the care of the women.
I’d done what I had been asked to do.
With The Beast thrown over my shoulder and snoring loudly, I dropped Gat into his holster and went to get my duster. “Come on kid, I’ve got to get home,” I said to the sleeping boy. “Let's go find your mom.”
The next moment, some strange feeling tugged my awareness out of my own head. The desert and all I had witnessed within it vanished in an instant. With nothing but the pit in my stomach to let me know I was moving, I felt myself being pulled through an impenetrable darkness faster than I could understand.
Then, just as fast as I had fallen, I stopped and my awareness slipped away.
I woke up in a strange room.
My body felt like it had been sealed in stone, every muscle requiring me to force it into movement.
A girl I didn’t recognize sat on the floor next to the bed I found myself in. She was writing something, but when she noticed I was looking at her, she dropped her pen and came to my bedside.
“Samsara, she’s awake,'' The girl said excitedly. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “The next time you decide that you are going to sleep for three days, I would appreciate a warning.”
The words she spoke sounded like she was mad, but her face didn't match her tone. She looked like she was happy to see me.
“Where am I? Where's Gat, The kid, is he still asleep,” I demanded, not seeing any sign that I was anywhere I recognized. I moved my heavy hand to my head. "Where is my hat?"
The girl looked confused. "Dani? Are you alright?"
Before I could ask her again, something appeared in the open window of whatever room I was in. It was tiny, small enough to put in your pocket and as blue as the ocean off the coast of Merrowcrest.
"What is your name?" The little kitten said in a low voice that utterly did not match its body.
"Sakes alive, you've got a talking cat."