“Five hundred years,” the Divine Beast Vita said, emanating her voice to the room. She as yet had no flesh, no lungs, throat or mouth. Her will was merely made manifest as my pupil collapsed atop her and bled. The snake shifted and stirred, realigning bones and giving life to withered tendons and languished muscles. Like a plant’s roots, she sucked in the decayed blood from the chamber floor. It oozed across her body and shaped it anew.

The Giordanans fell back, eyes wide and mouths agape. Some dropped their weapons. All looked to their leader for guidance. He was the one who had spoken with the spirit, who had received its guidance. So he squashed his fear and presented himself to the snake. “You have returned to the world of flesh?”

“You fed me goats,” Vita said, her words morphing from a rasp to an old woman’s voice. It was weak and stretched, like old rope ready to snap.

Muharib rocked back on his feet and glanced at Sieg’s unmoving body. Already the blood had stopped flowing from him as the boy laid across the snake’s tail. “It was all we could spare. Taking prisoners back here it is… difficult and the men found it distasteful.”

“Goat blood is distasteful,” Vita said, lifting her head higher and inspecting the room.

“But… it did nourish you, yes?”

“Barely. Oh… Ennia, what happened here.” The divine beast dipped her head, slowly moving from one body to the next as black ichor coated her skull. It wasn’t quite flesh, but it would suffice. She coated herself with it as though she were putting on clothes.

Muharib cleared his throat. “Then what fortune! What blessing. It is splendid and wonderful that my vendetta– so quick to be wetted– would be what woke you from your slumber. For years now I could but only listen and now we may speak!”

Vita turned her gaze on the man. She shifted her coils, rocking the bodies beneath her and rising until her head nearly touched the ceiling. “For five hundred years I was at the mercy of humans for sustenance. Tell me, why did my mother abandon me?”

Muharib glanced at his men, but they offered no help. “For many years, generations, this town–”

“Ennia’s Crossing,” the divine beast interjected.

“Ah, is that what it was first called? It had been abandoned. We found scorch marks when we first came here. The central kingdoms diverted the Snake River. It strangled the town and the people abandoned it.”

“It was burned. They were killed. I remember that clearly. The fire, the blood… the men on horses skewering me with lance after lance. They pinned me to the ground after exhausting me and they made me watch as they murdered all of the priestesses. I remember. They dumped the bodies in the river. It was raining then, and one by one like sacks of ink the bodies turned the river red. It was to mock me.”

“This was… knights, yes? From the central kingdoms? The Three Swords Kingdom perhaps?” Muharib offered, hoping the Ferrets of the Grass Sea could be tied in.

Vita shook her head. “That I don’t recall. Yellow. Yellow is the only color I remember of those men.”

Muharib waited for her to say more, but the snake seemed deep in thought. He whispered some orders and sent one of his men running back to spread the news. Then, he asked, “We here are also aggrieved of foreign killers. Men who kill in the night, who want our heads and our land and food and every piece of silver and gold. Today, we lost nearly ten of our number, but… perhaps we have gained an even more powerful ally?”

Vita barely listened. She hung her head and began to breathe. The movements of breath were weak and shallow. They wouldn't have been able to rustle hair on someone’s face even if they were close enough to kiss. “Five hundred years and I must wait even more,” she said, her voice almost in mourning. Then she lunged her head down and sank teeth into her prey: not the fresh corpse of the boy but of the bandit he had slain.

The men gasped, some strangled their own cries of fear and disgust. They instinctively brought their weapons back up. They broadened their stances so that they might either flee or strike. Only Muharib scolded them as they all watched the divine beast lift the body of their friend into the air. She tossed it and chomped it again, swallowing half down her throat then pulling in the rest. The great bulge of ichor-skin wrapped around the mass and inched down the snake’s throat.

The chieftain stepped closer, one hand to his chest. “Please, goddess–”

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“I am not a goddess,” Vita snapped back at him, her voice in part rejuvenated. Some twenty years of age, by human reckoning, were healed as the bandit slid from throat to belly. Blood dripped from the snake’s mouth, getting forced from scaled lips as her gums grew back.

“Dear emissary,” Muharib said, and was not rebuked. “Please, allow us to fetch the bodies of our enemies. Let your loyal servants bury their dead. That boy, the Vassish, if you must eat then eat him.”

And so the divine beast turned her attention to Sieg. The boy who had been run through in the chest and left to bleed out and die. Except, there was no wound upon his chest. The blood matting his shirt to his skin nearly obscured it along with the sigil of his stigmata, but the emissary was not fooled. “I do not eat the living.”

Perhaps Sieg could have stayed listening for longer, but his senses had returned to him. Listening to the speech between man and beast left him agitated. It made his breathing rough and difficult to conceal and the moment their attention was on him, the fear that he couldn't keep a still face swarmed his mind. So he leapt up and dove for the canvas.

Vita watched him go. “What are you–” He slashed the painting open and felt the tip of his blade dig through sodden wood. The handle was exposed, and then it came into his hand. The snake roared. “Bastard!”

He ripped the door open and found what he had hoped for, a staircase up. It was narrow and winding, and the edges of the steps had been grinded off by centuries of rain and presumably the scales of the snake, but enough remained for him to sprint away from the bandits. At the first curve, he was thrust into darkness, his own lantern forgotten in the snake’s lair. The stone struck at him like briars and ambush vipers, catching his feet until he had to scramble with his hands to keep going.

With rage chasing behind him, he found light at the end of the tunnel. Murky, turquoise light filtered through an algae infested water sanctum. The boy failed to surmise the purpose of the strange entrance. In the heat of the moment, it didn’t occur to him that a snake large enough to eat a man whole had curious needs if she intended to remain dignified in appearance. All Sieg saw was a way to drown himself if he wasn’t careful, and drowning was not something he could simply heal.

A screaming bandit made him spin. The hall was narrow, too tight for two men abreast. The confinement gave Sieg the advantage, but pressed into a corner he couldn’t back into was not. With lantern light shoved directly into his eyes, he traded blows with the enraged rogue. Their blades danced, clashing off one another until Sieg was forced to take a step back. His foot plunged into the cool water.

The bandit roared, redoubling his attack to seize the opportunity.

Sieg’s foot held fast on the algae-covered rock though. He parried, locking out the overhead chop before throwing himself back at the bandit. The pommel of his blade smashed the man’s nose with a crack. His eyes crossed, unseeing, and Sieg cleaved through the man’s bare skull with a hammer blow.

Steel lashed out at him.

He had to dive backwards, landing in the open mouth of the reservoir to avoid the spear tip. The cold embraced him and he had no choice but to suck in breath and dive before the spear could stab again. While the hall gave him the advantage over swords, getting past a spear would be near hopeless.

The water nearly blinded him, but he steeled himself with the knowledge that he was in a building, not a cave. There would be no fish, no crittering jittering bugs, and no carnivorous slimes. The only thing his fingers and arms grabbed hold of was algae and sandstone and his feet kicked to propel him through. He had to search near blind through a tunnel he didn’t know had an exit, but he did know it had light from the other end.

The water distorted the sound of bandits shouting and arguing, trying to goad one another into swimming after him, but Sieg’s foreign nature saved him. He was of Vassermark, a maritime kingdom. Unlike the men of the desert, he knew how to swim. A dark pool of water wasn’t merely a place to drown someone.

With only the blurry hint of light to guide him, and his lungs burning for air, the water biting at the remnants of lacerations through his skin, he managed to kick off and throw himself up to the surface. His fingers broke free first, spraying water as he grabbed for the lip and hauled himself upwards. Noon sun beat down on him, flashing on and off as a rough tarp flapped in the wind above his head. Only on the second breath did he catch the fecal stench in the air

A moderately surprised goat that had been drinking from the well bleated at him. It stood, flapping ears to scare off the flies, and stared with almond eyes at him. For the second time that day, he stared into the fat lines of a goat’s pupils. A quick glance around revealed he had emerged into a stables. For a moment, he wondered why such an escape tunnel through the back of the temple was unwatched and unbarred.

The stench alone was answer enough.

With a shake of his head, he tossed the stolen sword out from the water trough and crawled out himself. Despite weary muscles and a burning chest, he resisted the urge to flop onto the ground, lest he come up covered in shit and weeds.

The commotion to hunt him sounded like it was boiling out the front of the temple, and he could hear it echoing through the reclaimed town. Not one voice screamed that he was in the stables. No voice except the annoyed goat that wanted to bully him away from the water.

My crow cawed, circling overhead with eyes fixed upon him.

Sieg nodded. He understood what was expected. The Tolzi brothers would not arrive yet. The bandits were still his problem to conquer. So, he set about cooking up another lie. Rather than deal with the main host of mobilizing men, he ducked his head and ran through the town alleys. The bandits tasked with keeping watch would be armed, but hardly informed. He knew that if there was anyone left to fool, it would be one of them.

And at the worst, it would be a mere two rogues to fight at the same time, rather than a dozen.