Shae awoke to a dull, throbbing pain that seemed to emanate from every inch of his body. His head hurt, lances spiking his brain like icepicks. He tried to open his eyes, but all he could see was shadowy darkness. Breath came in ragged, sucking gasps. It felt as if his entire body was one open wound, festering, salted and screaming. I’m alive.

He tried reaching for his face, wondering if he was blind, and found that his hands were bound behind his back, a length of something tied tight round his wrists. He felt a binding around his ankles too, biting into flesh, and began to panic. He hadn’t drowned, but that seemed small comfort now.

*

Cïr watched as the man squirmed on the ground, wriggling like a worm in mud. Cïr swallowed the last bite of the Umbra meat, then rose from the stool. She set her plate down beside her, picked up the knife that lay atop it, and made her way over to squat next to him.

Kide rarely ate meat, their tastes leaning more towards berries, nuts, and other plants, but she’d developed a fondness for Umbra early in childhood, and the passing of centuries hadn’t diminished it in the slightest. She had her mother to thank for that. Lightly grasping the knife’s hilt in long, slender fingers, she let the blade fall to rest on his throat. He stilled, feeling the cold, sharp edge.

"You,” she began, making her tone cold, sharper than the knife, “have no brand.”

She traced the knife’s tip down his clavicle. She had examined him earlier, head to toe; he was young, lean, well-muscled and tall, but not a slave. His skin was tan, his hair a sandy yellow: all told, he looked nothing like the Relli peoples she knew to inhabit the surrounding lands beyond the forest. Were there new human tribes abound? Unlikely… but perhaps in their ignorance they’ve forgotten why they don’t intrude here. I’ll find out.

He had small, round scars upon his shoulders, arms, and neck, unlike any she’d seen sustained in battle or devotion — the rest of his body was wrapped in the bandages she’d applied when she had found him lying unconscious on the riverbank.

“Either you’re one of the Mori’s pets, or a Yojimata monk, but your hair,” she leaned forward, knife still pressed against his skin, took a handful of his blonde hair in her hand and lifted his head, “says otherwise.”

Whatever this one is, I’ll be taking him back to the Elders for questioning; they can decide what to do with him; but it wouldn’t hurt to learn what I can before they secret him away.

Stowing the knife and taking the knot of the gag in her hand, she whispered in his ear.

“So maybe you’re something else. Speak, but know this: if I hear the first syllable of an incantation, you’ll meet Akari before the next leaves your lips. Take care to choose your words wisely, human. I have other ways of finding out what you are that won’t be nearly so… pleasant.”

She untied the knot, stood, and returned to her stool where she sat watching him. She retrieved her knife and began to roll it between her fingers, blade over hilt.

Shae gasped for air as the gag fell away; he’d struggled desperately to breathe through his nose while the strange woman spoke, and now sucked down greedy lungfuls of clean air through his mouth. Blood dribbled from his nostrils, down his philtrum, onto his lips— any attempt to breathe through his nose resulted in a useless, painful sucking that led him to conclude that it was broken.

Once he’d regained some semblance of bearing, he considered his predicament and the woman. He didn’t have the slightest inkling what to say. Brand? Mori? Yojimata? Incantation? The foreign words floated around in his head like mushrooms in a stew.

He was aware that he was concussed; it wasn’t his first time, but he was sure he’d heard her correctly. He wanted to ask about what they meant, but she seemed wary of him, and he was sure that’d been a knife he’d felt on his skin.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about with the… brands. Or the rest…” he started, “but my name is Shae— I’m not a threat.”

He hoped she was satisfied, that he had placated her, but it was a thin veneer of hope. He pretended desperately to believe it. Who was she? Why had she called him “human,” and what had happened to the creature that’d chased him? That, he remembered with chilling vividness.

At that moment, Shae thought of his sisters, Jen and Alex, and his mother. He’d put them out of his mind until now, not wanting to distract himself from surviving, but now the thought of what might happen if he didn’t make it back weighed on him like a mountain. Without his income, they’d be in serious trouble.

Wherever he was, he needed to be cautious if he wanted to have any shot at surviving long enough to return home. As much as he wanted his hundreds of pressing questions answered, she didn’t seem like the one to ask. Not right now, anyways.

Cïr weighed him, narrowed her eyes, her perfect brow coming together in a crease. She should have been able to tell if he was lying. Her truthsense wasn’t infallible, she lacked the natural inborn talent that some among their people were blessed with, but against a man in his state, she was confident in her ability.

Shae? she thought. A bold name for one traveling the Western Continent, and not one she’d heard before. To start a name with that accursed letter… and to not know of brands or incantations… What else didn’t he know?

She stared at him. Yes… whatever he’s hiding, the Elders will uncover it— perhaps he’s nothing so simple as a runaway slave after all. The Yojimata haven’t attacked in years, and they wouldn’t send just one scout, and one of the Mori’s hounds wouldn’t be so careless, nor half as incompetent, so who?

She’d found him washed up on the shore naked, an Umbra following on the opposite bank close behind; if he’d made it this deep into the Minadrel, surely he should be able to deal with at least an Umbra, but he’d ran from it like a babe in the woods. He came from that direction, however; he must’ve seen the light. Perhaps he knows of its origin.

“Shae” she said, rolling the oily name over in her mouth as she spoke it, trying to keep the disgust out of her voice. “To which village do you belong, and why did you come here?”

“Village?” he said. I really hope they’re not operating on the scale of villages and towns here— that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their technological capacity for interdimensional transportation.

Shae’s mind reeled, but he couldn’t think of any answers. He could tell now, judging by the feel of his skin upon the stones beneath him, that parts of his body were covered by fabric — that he hadn’t bled out from his innumerable cuts meant they were probably some sort of bandages. She had helped him then, and that was something at least.

“I’m from L.A., but that’s a little bigger than a village. I don’t know where we are, or how I got here. One moment I was in my car, then I woke up in this forest.” He paused for a moment, then continued slowly. “That thing that chased me, did I lose it?”

Cïr’s features pursed in contemplation, her furrowed brow deepening. He really didn’t seem to know the first thing about where he was, and if he’d seen the pillar of light that had drawn her in his direction, he hadn’t mentioned it. What is he? Why is he here? Humans speak in such riddles it's a wonder their infantile race hasn’t died out yet. Perhaps another tactic then.

“Man,” she said, rising once more from the stool, voice imperious, “you find yourself in the Great Forest of…” she hesitated, then gave the common name, “Minadrel. What chased you was an Umbra, a night-beast.” Shae shook his head slowly. He would have smiled incredulity, but the loud pain of his battered body and the fresh taste of fear damped his mood a bit.

“You have no brand, you’re certainly no fighter, nor are you one of the Grey Faith. I’ll ask once more only, what are you?” she said.

Her voice was silky and warm, lilting as she spoke, but the words cut like ice. Her accent was odd: British or Australian, but the intonation of words was peculiar somehow, different— alien. She spoke as if singing, her voice sliding from one word to the next like water in a brook, clear, and pure as snowmelt.

Shae grasped for explanations. It was as if he found himself in a fantasy novel or a video game; he half expected Daenerys to swoop down from the skies atop a great dragon, or Frodo and Samwise to ask for second breakfast.

He wondered if he’d been abducted by LARPers or dosed with psychedelics, but the pain was too real, and he recognized the thoughts for what they were: the last remnants of reason trying to explain the unexplainable.

Somehow, as unlikely as it seemed, this had to be real— there was simply no other way around it. So, he decided to accept it. Once he made a decision, he stuck to it; that’s what he did. You had to do what was helpful to the current situation, and not dwell on what you have no power over. Control the controllables, he thought, and right now all I can control is how I react, what I say, and what I do with the information I have.

He thought of the strange, almost tangible quality of the air, the atmosphere; the potency of it; the giant, bird-like aerial creature he’d first seen upon waking; the Umbra; and the trees that made the great Sequoias of California look like baby saplings in the dwarfdom of infancy. Minadrel sounds more like an allergy medication than a forest.

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“I’m just a regular guy; I’m a Marine, and I want to get back home to my family. Look, thank you for helping me.” He meant it, though he wished she’d take his blindfold off.

“Could you tell me where we are? You mentioned the forest, but… where? Could you tell me a little bit more?”

He held his breath. In for a dime, in for a dollar. He hoped he hadn’t said too much, and in the long silence that followed, he began to second-guess how much he’d revealed. In situations of high friction and uncertainty he was bound to make mistakes, but he should try not to give away so much information, especially when he didn’t know who he was talking to. Should have thought of that sooner.

Shae flinched as cool fingers tickled the back of his neck. He squinted as vision returned, light streaming into his eyes. Still bound, he tried to raise his hands to his face to cover them from the blinding bright that bullied his eyes to the ground, but could not.

Something split the cloth holding his ankles together, then his wrists. He felt around on the ground, blinking. He was on the riverbank, and still naked. Shae looked at his battered body beneath him, felt at the scrapes and gashes peeking out from under large beige bandages that covered his torso and limbs. At least she’s not trying to kill me, I probably would have bled to death if it weren’t for her.

He looked up at the woman standing before him. She was tall and slender, maybe six foot flat, but he was a poor judge of height, especially while lying on the ground. Birch brown hair, long and straight, spilled from a baggy hood and tumbled over the front of her elm cloak.

Her skin was light and perfectly smooth, giving her long face a serene, ageless look, like an airbrushed picture of a supermodel on a magazine cover. Emerald eyes glinted with a penetrating, knowing intelligence, weighing him silently from above high cheekbones. Grasped loosely in one slender hand was a long, intricate knife; Its blade a pearly silver, the hilt crafted from bone and inlaid with swirling gold flourishes.

Shae shivered. Stared back at her, dumbfounded. He couldn’t help but feel intimidated under the weight of her stare. She stood tall and regal, her face an emotionless mask, her manner the picture of elegant composure.

In a blur of movement and color, she returned the knife to an unseen pocket of her cloak. One second the knife was there, the next it was not, her empty hand resting casually by her side. Was it a trick of the light, or had he hit his head harder than he’d thought?

“I am Cïr. It may have been kinder to let the Umbra have you,” she said. Her eyes lingered on the bandages, the limp in his step as he hobbled to his feet. “I am not kind to liars, nor to fools.

She inclined her head in the direction of her stool, and watched him sit.

Shae winced as he gingerly lowered himself onto it, then looked around. They were in a small encampment at the river’s edge; a campfire erected upon the stony shore, a large leg roasting over open flame. The leg, Shae realized, of an umbra.

The rest of its oversized body lay crumpled against the beginnings of a tree root a short distance behind the camp, at the edge of the forest where dirt and grass met stone. He looked from the leg to the woman — Cïr — to the corpse, and then back again at her. The astonishment on his face asked the question before his mouth could formulate the words.

"Yes,” she said, her lips drawing into a thin smile, “that is the umbra that sent you swimming in the river. It followed you as you floated. I came upon it waiting for you below, but I got there first.”

She had killed… that? The umbra’s leg had been severed cleanly, its fur matted along the edges where it was wet with blood. Besides the missing leg, however, the beast looked untouched. Its eyes were closed, but its mouth lay open, pearly fangs exposed to the cool river-side air.

“How did you—” he started, then cut off, reining in his amazement. “Thank you for helping me, but I swear I’m telling the truth. I don’t know where we are, or how I got here. I’ve never seen one of those things,” he said, gesturing at the umbra’s corpse, its lolling tongue slowly sliding down its lower lip. He didn’t know what to say or do to make her believe him, so he quieted, waiting for her to speak.

He looked at Cïr, eyeing him, silently contemplating him, her features alluring and beautiful, and found that he couldn’t look away. As if the elegant lines of her face had generated a magnetic field, he was ensnared by her gaze— entranced.

Drifting, Shae began to lose himself in the deep emerald sea of her eyes; they mesmerized him, and his head began to grow cloudy with the sight, the closeness of her.

He had seen beautiful women before, he’d met some models and actresses even, but they were plain and crude beside her. Her eyes seemed to shine, to beckon him, absorb him; they invited him to give himself over to her, to lose himself forever.

Instinctively, he gripped his leg hard, pressed his thumb into a bandaged gash on his thigh. The pain forced its way into his mind, clearing the cloudy fog that’d passed over him.. What the fuck was that? Focus, Shae, now’s not the time. What came over me? He didn’t think he was such a dope, what was he doing getting that distracted by looks at a time like this?

A frown flashed across her face for the merest instant, gone so fast that he thought he must’ve imagined it. She watched him, and he watched her— but he kept his eyes away from hers for the time being, choosing instead to analyze what she was wearing.

Her brown robes looked straight out of a Lord of The Rings set wardrobe, loose and flowing, they draped over her shoulders, the sleeves stopping at the elbow while the rest of the robe drooped almost to the floor, only the tops of her pale feet and well-sculpted toes visible beneath the material.

Now that he was looking closely at her, he noticed thin brown tendrils on her skin, like veins, or runners, pronounced millimeters above the surface. They snaked out from beneath the cloak’s somewhat low open hem and traveled across her body, just barely visible, tracing her collarbone before disappearing into the shadowy recesses of her hood.

Just as he was puzzling out what they could possibly be, a subtle breeze whispered, gently shifting the hair that covered the side of her face. Beneath the hair was revealed an elegant ear, pierced by an ornate, spiraling golden earring that traveled back and forth through the lobe and helix all the way to the tip. A tip, he realized, that ended in an elongated, distinct point.

Shae lost his balance on the stool, almost falling over before catching himself with an outstretched leg.

“Are you an elf?” The words came out quickly, the pitch too high. “Sorry I—” he began, righting himself on the stool, “I’ve just never— I didn’t know—” Didn’t know that I’d see a fucking elf, what the fuck—

She cut him off.

“I am Cïr,” she said, a smile hinting at her lips. “I am a Kide, a child of the spirited ones. And you,” she said, a tone of flinty danger entering her voice like a splash of black ink shot into clear water, her lips drawing to a hard line, “are something unnatural.”

Cïr flashed towards him, closing the distance in a few swift strides. She bent, grasped his face in her powerful hands. Long fingers ensnared his jaw, clenched painfully around his cheeks, and she pulled his forehead to hers. With an alien tingling unlike anything Shae had ever experienced, Cïr forced her consciousness into his mind. White fire flared to life behind Shae’s eyes, inside his head. A furious inferno of burning light consumed his vision and seared his senses; as if a great dam had broken behind his skull, an unstoppable pressure poured from Cïr’s consciousness into his.

Shae found himself unable to move, unable to open eyes that had been forcefully snapped shut. He was drowning, suffocating, locked in an inward vision, victim to the overwhelming onslaught that pressed against him and pulverized his feeble mind. He was being crushed to oblivion, her alien presence obliterating him.

He watched, stunned and helpless, as memories flashed by like slides of film. Visions of his childhood entered and exited his awareness, speeding by like a bullet train, a raging river of color, sound, smell, and experience: memories and emotions relived in exacting detail, all in an instant.

He couldn’t handle it: it would drive him mad. He tried to scream, but could not; he tried to think, tried to cry, tried to fight, but he could do nothing. Utterly helpless, Shae cringed as every crevice and corner of his mind was examined by white fire, torn apart, and discarded. His grip on reality began slipping away, the pain replacing him, becoming his entire existence.

Shae’s eyes snapped open as Cïr’s presence vanished in an instant. He could no longer feel her touch upon him, the imprint of her mind stamped over his: she was gone. His torso, which had been stiffened like a man carrying a strong electric current, slumped in relief; pain lanced through his skull as his soul recoiled from the ordeal, but it was over. Vision constricted, and the world became fuzzy as he sank into a dazed, semiconscious stupor.

Cïr staggered backwards, mouth agape, the previous serenity of her face banished by a twisted, contorted expression of horror and disgust. This boy… he is tainted…. There isn’t time to bring him back, I must deal with him here and now.

She dropped a hand to her side, three elegant silver-gold knives appearing between her fingers. He must not be allowed to live.

As intently focused on Shae as she was, Cïr didn’t notice the mountain of a man barreling towards her until his helmeted head and armored shoulder collided with her torso, sending her flying.

The man skidded, sent rocks leaping into the air where his boots scraped against the riverbank. He pivoted on the heel of his lead foot, used his momentum to launch his body into a careening spin. In his hands was a massive, five foot long, double-edged sword. It was thick, rusted, and savage-looking, resembling two stretched-out, flattened cleavers welded together.

Holding firm to the hilt, he whirled the immense blade in a wide semicircle, letting its weight carry his body along behind it. When the arc of the spin placed him in line with Cïr, her body still soaring through the air, he released it. The sword flew towards her, revolving like a tornado of sinister black steel and fury. Recovering his balance, the man raised his gauntleted hand towards Cïr. In seconds, the spinning sword came within feet of the soaring Kide.

“Imprison,” he said.

The blade became malleable molten metal, flattening and lengthening, expanding around the kide. Transformed into a mass of rippling steel, the sword coalesced around her in an impenetrable dull sphere of heavy metal. The prison, Cïr caught inside it, fell heavily to the earth. It crashed through bushes and brambles, slid heavily to a halt in the dirt, gouging the ground and spraying clods of mud into the air.

“Compress.”

The ball of metal, now several tens of yards away, shrunk inwards a few inches, jerked, then stopped its contraction. The man grunted in annoyance.

“Sink,” and the ball plummeted into the earth, out of sight, a geyser of dirt spraying up from the hole where it tunneled its descent. “Won’t hold long. Come,” his voice grated from inside a closed helmet of solid plate metal.

The man started moving in the opposite direction of the chaos he’d just unleashed, eager to depart. Shae started, turned vacant eyes on the man’s retreating figure. He swayed on the stool, too unsteady from the ordeal with Cïr’s invasion of his mind to rise to his feet. Seeing that Shae wasn’t getting up on his own, the man grunted something vulgar, returned, and lifted him easily to one shoulder. He loped away from the campsite and began to follow the river’s bank upstream, opposite the way Cïr had landed.