“Kruvas̆,” S̆ams̆ādūr hissed, as he wiped furiously at the burning sweat that had gotten in his eyes. His hands did little but irritate them further, and he cursed again.

He’d been in Sapīya barely a month but already he’d come to loathe the place. At first, Yas̆peh had seemed almost a paradise. After two months trapped on his yacht, forced to flee down the mighty River from his father’s wrath, simply being able to walk more than a hundred feet without being forced to turn around had felt amazing. He hadn’t exactly been pleased with how negotiations with the king had gone, but simply being able to whore the night away in a local tavern and enjoy a breakfast of fresh fruits and further fleshly enjoyments had been enough to lift his spirits.

Unfortunately, that lasted for all of three days. Three days before the madmen of Mut-Lā’is̆ had caught up with him. This time, S̆ams̆ādūr hadn’t been alone. Enjoying the company of two lovely women, when the assassins had burst into the room, he’d flung himself through the latticed window into the market below.

The streets at night in his father’s capital had rarely been bustling, but Yas̆peh was different. Though the hills the city sat in gave some respite to the blistering heat of the jungle, the humidity from the river was enough to encourage many to do their business at night rather than beneath S̆ams̆a’s relentless gaze. So the market he’d run through had been anything but empty.

The followers of Mut-Lā’is̆ didn’t care about collateral damage. When panicking shoppers got in their way, they cut them down, and they thought nothing of hurling their spells in his direction no matter how many innocents were trapped between them.

But S̆ams̆ādūr was outnumbered seven to one, and he knew that trying to fight them off was a death sentence. Fleeing the market, he took off toward the docks with the hopes of reinforcements. He was only halfway there when they arrived - though the help was not from the avenue he’d expected. City guards converged on his position, supported by a few other guards whose gleaming copper straps confirmed they were from the palace.

The men of Mut-Lā’is̆ had fought to the death, refusing to surrender even after they were surrounded by a full cohort of guards, and before they fell, they took more than a few lives with them into the void. S̆ams̆ādūr’s was not among them, but that was where the good news ended for the escapade had put an end to his brief time of freedom in Yas̆peh. Kabāni had been outraged that the prince had failed to mention that assassins were after him and had used that oversight to blame him for the deaths of the citizens and guards.

The prince felt that was unfair; he wasn’t the one who had killed them after all, but the madmen of Mut-Lā’is̆, but the king was as duty-cursed as he had feared. And, even though there was a little risk of a follow-up attack for several months since the entire squad had been wiped out, Kabāni had confined him back to his boats. S̆ams̆ādūr had wanted to sail off, but the imperial commander had made it clear that they would treat any attempt to leave as a hostile action, so the dwarves had been forced to sit.

They’d sweltered on their ships for two weeks before Kabāni had summoned him once again and offered him a deal - his freedom in exchange for a deed of service. It was a piss poor deal and they both knew it, but by then S̆ams̆ādūr was desperate to get off the boat. The very vessel that had always been his solitary escape from duty back home had become a floating prison.

And that’s how he found himself saddled with accompanying a slow-moving expedition headed deeper into the jungle. It seemed that a bit over a year earlier, one of the king’s cities had been sacked by a malevolent entity some elves had awakened. Less than half of the city’s residents had survived, and a large portion of its buildings had been razed to the ground, but Kabāni could not afford to abandon the city.

Hargish was the only major settlement for hundreds of miles between the western heartland of Sapīya, which hugged the border of Stryn, and the isolated city of Gis̆-Izum, which was the province's primary connection to the heartland of the Empire. Hargish's position along that route was simply too important to leave abandoned, but rebuilding was a task easier said than done. With few other settlements around it, almost everything needed to be brought from the capital, along with a host of both willing and unwilling settlers to repopulate the fallen city.

But S̆ams̆ādūr and his men would split off before ever reaching Hargish. Shortly before they reached the city, the road would split from east to west, and while the settlers would only have a short distance further to the west to reach Hargish, they were headed to Birnah.

The only city Sapīya possessed on the western side of the river, Birnah, had time and again been the focus of Stryn’s aggressions, and the king believed that their constant rival was planning another attack. Ostensibly the prince and his men were being sent to bolster the city’s defenses, but the king had drawn him aside for a private audience.

There S̆ams̆ādūr had learned that Kabāni, like everyone else, wanted to use him for his skill. Even though the lord of Birnah was the king’s own father-in-law, the ruler feared that he might have brokered a deal with Stryn to surrender the city in exchange for the throne of the rest of the province.

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Kabāni did not fear losing the throne; despite the long and uneven history of conflict between Sapīya and its stronger neighbor, Stryn had never succeeded in conquering the interior cities. Though their cavalry was fearsome on the open plains to the west, their troops were ineffective in the rugged mountains and overgrown jungles of Sapīya, and Kabāni did not believe they would be successful now. What Kabāni feared was losing Birnah, their only remaining foothold on the other side of the River. If the city fell, their lands on the far side would likely never be recovered. So, of course, Kabāni had asked him to spy on Lord S̆argānīl. Hypocrite.

“You do need some water, my lord? You’re looking flush.” S̆ams̆ādūr accepted the proffered canteen with a grateful nod and guzzled some down. The cool water was not enough to banish the incessant heat and moisture of the jungle around them, but it brought a moment of relief. The sound of buzzing filled his ears, and he smacked his head, feeling a satisfying crunch beneath his fingers.

“How much longer do we have,” he asked as he tossed the canteen back to the former captain of his ship.

“The sun should not be setting for another four or five hours,” the man replied dutifully.

“Kruvas̆! Forget father’s assassins - the bloody heat is going to do me in,” he groused. “How do these Corsyths stand it?”

“I imagine they’re well adapted to it by now,” the captain replied, “That’s what these qanduppū are like, after all.” He spoke the word, a frequent slur the durgu used to refer to the Corsyths softly, but the prince glared at him.

“Don’t use that word here. One of them might understand it, and we have no troubles already.” The prince could only imagine the diplomatic faux pas if one of the nobles overheard them.

“Sorry, my lord,” the captain quickly apologized. “Perhaps the heat has gotten to me too.”

Choosing to ignore the captain's blunder, S̆ams̆ādur continued to complain. “It wouldn't be too bad if there was just somewhere to cool off."

“Well, my lord, I did overhear some of their men talking about a place they've stopped in the past. Supposedly, a small lake in the midst of the jungle a few miles off the road.”

“And we’re not stopping?” He asked, though he already knew the answer. With the thousands of women and children accompanying them, and the equally large numbers of slow, lumbering carts laden with all manner of building supplies and trade goods, the caravan was lucky to travel ten miles a day. There would be no stopping for a relaxing swim.

“No, but they might be able to tell us where to look.”

The captain had no trouble tracking down the soldiers who, after a brief discussion with their commander, were detached to guide S̆ams̆ādūr to the hidden lake. Their ride took them another hour down the road, another hour trapped beneath the blazing sun in a suit of armor that left the prince feeling like a cooked ham before the soldiers finally turned off onto a small track that led into the jungle.

The road was quickly swallowed up from sight as the thick underbrush and towering trees closed around them. Despite the overwhelming heat, the prince found himself fascinated. Biranāti was a beautiful land, overflowing with golden fields and towering castles, set along the crystal shores of the Affīyan Sea, but it was also a heavily populated land with a rather small territory. There were few spaces of untouched wilderness around his father’s capital, and certainly nothing that could compare to the jungle that surrounded him.

Everywhere he looked was life. Hundreds of birds fluttered overhead, their warbling songs mingled with the chatter of monkeys and other even stranger creatures, and he would have passed by the small herd of deer-like creatures whose green and dark brown fur blended in seamlessly with the mossy dirt of the jungle floor without even noticing them if the soldiers hadn’t pointed them out. But the beauty was only magnified when they reached the lake the soldiers had told them of.

The Corsyths hadn’t done it justice. The encroaching jungle suddenly parted to reveal an almost perfectly circular lake. The water was as clear as glass, allowing S̆ams̆ādūr to see dozens of schools of little fish darting back and forth through the shallows. Near the edge of the lake, the water was as clear as the finest pan of glass but the color quickly deepened into a dark, sapphire blue where the bottom dropped off into an unfathomable depth.

With a glad cry, he slipped off his mount’s back and began to run toward the water, shedding his armor as he ran. The fish scattered as his foot hit the sand, darting out of the way as the durgu let his entire body fall into the cool waters. He ducked his head beneath the pond, feeling the heat and sweat, and the layers of gunk and grime he’d accumulated from days on the road, float away. Perhaps this place isn’t so terrible.

Flipping on his back, he let himself drift along the lake ignoring the sound of splashing as the soldiers and the captain joined him in the water, until the sound of splashing was accompanied by a sudden, high-pitched scream.

Clouds of sand swirled around his feet as he stood up in the water. A soldier who had ventured deeper into the lake than the rest was thrashing wildly back and forth, his voice screaming with a rather unmanly pitch. S̆ams̆ādūr hesitated for a moment, unable to see any cause for the man’s distress, and then his head disappeared beneath the surface.

For a long moment, the men were frozen in silence, their eyes glued to the place where the soldier had vanished. Then his head resurfaced or, perhaps more accurately, half of his head. The top of his skull was entirely missing along with his eyes.

“Muḫḫakāl!” The Corsyths began to scream, fighting each other in a race back to shore. The name meant nothing to the prince, but he didn’t need to see a second victim to know something lurked beneath the surface. He turned and dove in the direction of shore, but not before a second scream filled his ears. He didn’t bother to look back but swam with all his might.

As he pulled himself out onto the sands, he muttered a prayer of thanks to S̆ams̆a for his survival, followed by a quick curse. I was right the first time; this place is hell.