Eight months and eight days. Little Alice has not once lost track of time since she set off from the academy. She remembers every grain of sand she treads upon, the golden outlines of the dunes remain etched in her mind as she walks forward, dutifully, without thought—today, like every day before it, was not much of a different day.

Today, she draws closer to the city on the edge of the Sharaji Desert. Even through a burning veil of sand, she could make out the circular rings and levels of the great City of Feasts. The top of the Mantis Warlord’s palace was made up of pure white alabaster, colourless and mundane, the brass domes reaching for the sun. It is surrounded by a sea of colourful buildings—the streets lined with white roses, the walls draped with vines and blooming dahlias—but little Alice feels nothing as she nears the heavily guarded city gate.

A guard sees her approaching from a hundred metres away. He draws his saif, dragging his feet back in the sand, and shouts at her to identify herself. At least, that’s what she thinks he’s trying to say—she doesn’t understand a lick of the Sharaji tongue—but she isn’t here to talk with people in the first place. The sands wriggle beneath her. They have been wriggling for a whole two days, incessant, and she has simply been following them on her tiptoes.

Without warning, a giant desert beetle bursts from the ground in front of her and crushes the guard shouting at her. The other dozen or so lightly armoured men devolve into a frenzy, struggling to draw their saifs in a timely manner. Half of them are killed, barely a wayward thought from the beetle, and it bashed its head through the heavy steel gate. The wall is breached. Alarm bells are rung. The beetle rushes into the lower slums of the city; little Alice strides in afterwards, heavy bags under her eyes.

… The scents of spilled spice. The taste of burning rust in the air. There are little fields of green in the slums, but the paved sand pathways, the shops with rickety and hand-wrought iron signs, and the screaming crowd in bright layers to stand out in the otherwise monotonous beige market—this city was bigger and prettier than any she’d been to so far.

She supposes she doesn’t want this city to fall.

She exhales, letting out a cold, ghostly breath, and beetles are known to hear the whispers of the dead after all. It stops its rampage thirty seconds into the slums and turns, a hulking eight metre monstrosity of a beast that knows no fear, it has never seen fear. The orange desert beetle is a strangely solitary insect. It does not make a nest, it does not particularly yearn for a mate. The malice woven into its fate from its moment of birth is all it knows; she cannot deny she finds herself relating to the unfocused anger in its eyes.

“... Blood,” she whispers, “to me.”

Five blood threads fire out her right upper nails, twirling into a shortsword. Five blood threads shoot out her left upper nails, twisting into a greatspear. Ten blood threads sleaze out her left and right lower nails, turning into rigid round shields, and with a weapon in all four hands she takes another step forward.

The beetle’s search for nourishment will turn into its search for death.

Its antennae fly at her, and she glides past with her shortsword, stopping its attack. Her shortsword moves, severing the left antenna while her greatspear pierces through the right. She follows her instincts, jumping to the side as the beetle screeches and stomps the ground, making the street undulate like a roaring ripple. A moment later, it reared itself and ripped an entire chunk of sandstone from the ground, headbutting it into the building she is sticking on the walls of.

She listens, she feels, she tightens her lips; there are people inside the building, so she supposes she cannot move.

The sandstone that would’ve annihilated her building slams against her shields, and she flies through the wall, her wrists snapping at an entirely uncomfortable angle. She holds firm even through the gnawing pain. The people inside the building scream as she barely avoids crushing them to death, but one glare at them and they scatter like flies—now it is just her, and several dozen more people she has the protect, and the beetle tears through the hole in the building looking for her.

She smells herself bleeding, and her blood is not turned into threads.

Irritate.

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Irritate.

Irritate–

Ten minutes pass.

Her bare feet are swollen masses of weeping cuts and bloody nails. Her weapons were dissolving, her dysfunctional wings turning dark shades of black and red. She must’ve endured hit after hit while defending the people of the slums, because she sees her clothes in tatters and the bracelet the kind old lady gave her in the last town over missing from her wrist. The bracelet was a gift for her saving the townsfolk from a rampaging giant bug; could it be that she lost it while going on a rampaging frenzy herself?

She supposes she doesn’t care too much.

The giant beetle is eviscerated, torn apart, ripped to shreds beneath her feet, and now she stands in broad daylight above its head while its foul-smelling guts spill out onto the streets. Flicking a strand of hair out of her face, she manages to form a stick with her bloody threads and pokes the beetle. No reaction. She pokes it again, but harder. No reaction again.

She sits down, cross-legged, satisfied with her work for the day.

Tomorrow, she will find a new giant insect to slaughter.

“... You did a sloppy job cutting it to pieces.”

She lowers her head. She wants to sleep. She’s grown used to sleeping on giant insects while harvester men poke and prod at her prey—sometimes they try to take her as well, but nobody expects getting decapitated by a blood thread—but for some reason the old man standing below her gives off a completely different impression.

A… different impression.

“It’s a waste of a good ingredient,” the old man says, as he starts cutting up the legs of the giant beetle while she peeks at him, eyes narrow. “Don’t brute force your way through something that can be turned into something delicate. The children of the slums love soft-boiled beetle leg rolls, but if you disturb the natural twisting of the legs by cutting them like you would sever a human limb, the rolls won’t look nice on a patterned plate. Remember: cut along the length of the leg, not through it. You’ll preserve its shape better that way.”

“...”

She can kill the old man in a single glance. She is sure of this. He is a weak, feeble croak with one foot in death’s door, and while his kitchen knife is certainly sharp and well-maintained, no plain steel can rival the strength of her blood threads.

But she doesn’t feel as though she can ‘beat’ him.

And when he looks up at her, she is more sure of it than anything else in the world.

“How about it?” he asks. “Want to be an apprentice at my family restaurant?”

“...”

“You have a modicum of skill.” He severs a full leg from the beetle and grunts, hauling it to his cart parked in a small alley off to the side, and she just now notices nobody else is encroaching on her prey. “I don’t offer just anyone a chance to apprentice with me, but I am getting old and looking for a successor. You may not be it—the fire in your eyes is too hot for any of my stoves to handle—but at the very least, you might become proficient at keeping the peace in this part of the city.”

“...”

She looks. She stares.

What the hell is he even saying to her?

Does he think they speak the same tongue?

He finally seems to realise she doesn’t understand a lick of what he is saying, so he sighs, sits, and lights a fire with a few twigs from his cart.

Two minutes later, he returns with rectangular cuts of beetle meat on a skewer.

“Here,” he says. “If you come with me, I’ll feed you. Three meals a day. Breaks on the weekend. I can’t pay you much, but maybe in ten years you’ll be able to go to school.”

She catches the skewer with her lower left arm, and, without thinking or checking for poisons, she tears into the first chunk of meat.

“...”

… Her stomach growls for more.

Her body is never wrong.

Without thinking, she slides off the beetle and shuffles over to the old man as he cooks up another batch of skewers in his portable stove cart.

She doesn’t really know if she can trust him, but she was never taught to ‘trust’, anyways.

- Scene from City of Feasts past