The floor of Naertral’s temple was smooth and uneven. Like the walls, once square stones had been eroded by time submerged in the swamp. Like the walls, the pavers were carved with intricate images of animals in various stages of decay, that parallel water tracing around and between then, neatly separating aquatic from terrestrial.

It was less than an hour since Wirrin, Ayan, and Veyoc had eaten a quick lunch and climbed down into their pit. Ayan was sweating, red, and still shaking.

‘We…’ Ayan didn’t have the energy to finish the thought. He simply knelt on the floor and started tracing the images with his fingers.

Veyoc let out a massive sigh and dropped his spade with a loud clang. ‘Finally.’

Wirrin leaned on her shovel and took deep breaths.

For at least a minute, the three of them stayed there, panting.

Ayan looked around and up the ramp, then pointed to the statue Wirrin still felt in the dirt. ‘It must be that way, surely?’

Wirrin picked up Veyoc’s dropped spade. ‘Might as well see it then, I suppose.’

She jammed the spade into the dirt and dug at the wall until with a rushing, shushing sort of noise, it started to collapse over her. The statue was still several metres of dirt away from them.

Veyoc, with a sigh, grabbed the shovel and started pushing dirt out of the way. Slowly, Ayan stood up and took the other spade. He joined Wirrin in digging through the soft dirt toward the statue.

The two diggers pulled far too much dirt, far too quickly, for Veyoc to keep up with. He was using the spade more like a broom, just trying to get the dirt out of the way before more piled up.

Covered in dirt, surrounded by dirt, it took only a few minutes for Wirrin and Ayan to dig their way to the statue of Naertral.

Unlike Mkaer’s statue, Naertral looked something like Wirrin expected from the carvings all around. Not exactly, but not as unlikely what she had half-expected as Mkaer had.

Naertral’s statue crouched on a plinth, a body of almost human proportions posed like a frog about to leap, with long webbed fingers and toes. Like a mantle over the figures shoulders were scales, like the shoulders of a lizard. The scaled shoulders extended into a long neck like a snake’s body that flared into a cobra’s crest, disintegrating to a snake’s skull for a head.

A stone broke with a crunch just behind Wirrin and she turned to face Ayan as Veyoc tripped between them and just managed to catch himself before he bashed his head into the plinth of the statue.

In one hand, Veyoc held his sword.

‘Are we back to being rude, then?’ she asked, breathing heavy. That headache was coming back after a week of absence.

Veyoc pushed himself up, trying to turn toward Wirrin. The stone that had cracked under him closed around his ankle and he slipped and fell against the statue’s base again with a groan.

‘It’s the only way we’ve found to bring the Fiends back,’ Ayan puffed, trying to help Veyoc pull his foot from the broken stone.

‘And why would you want to do that?’ Wirrin asked. ‘The Fiends are evil and their banishment was for the good of us all.’ She absolutely didn’t sell the feeling in the words.

‘The Church controls everything,’ Veyoc spat through gritted teeth. ‘How is anyone supposed to have any power when they’re everywhere?’

Mkaer was rumbling in the back of Wirrin’s head, but at least it seemed to trust her to handle this herself.

Wirrin drew her knife and stepped into Veyoc, grabbing the wrist that held the sword and pressing the knife into his armpit. ‘Tell me, Ayan,’ she said, looking over Veyoc’s shoulder. ‘Does the Church control shipping, perhaps?’

Ayan’s whole face screwed up. ‘Of course it does, Wirrin,’ he said. ‘But that hardly matters, does it? The Church controls everything. It controls knowledge so tightly you can only learn the Fiends names by tracking down the right people.’

Wirrin looked at Veyoc, this time. ‘Tell me, Veyoc,’ she said. ‘Does the Church control shipping?’

He stared back, teeth gritted. Wirrin pressed the knife into his armpit and his whole body twisted, pulling on his trapped ankle, to try to stay away from the blade. His sturdy, dyed leathers wouldn’t do him any good if he couldn’t stay out of the way.

‘Fine,’ Veyoc shouted, reaching the end of his movement. ‘Heran thinks that if we can awaken a Fiend, he’ll be able to get out of paying the taxes on his shipping.’

Wirrin stabbed him in the side of the neck, pulling her knife around to pour his blood over the plinth of Naertral’s statue. She took the sword from his limp hands.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Ayan turned and ran for the stairs. The walls of the stairs collapsed, blocking his way. ‘If I let you live, Ayan, would you tell Heran about this?’ Wirrin asked.

Ayan scrambled at the dirt, which hardened into solid clay under his grasp.

‘You…’ Ayan stopped and turned. ‘You’ve found Mkaer… in the mountains.’ He stared at Wirrin for several seconds, brows mildly furrowed. ‘You killed my cousin’s children, did you?’

‘They did try to kill me,’ Wirrin said. ‘Much as your cousin just did.’

Ayan nodded. ‘I swear to you I will not breathe a word of this to Heran.’

Wirrin dropped Veyoc’s sword and stepped away from the altar, where Veyoc’s blood was running up the stone into the scales of the cobra. ‘Then touch the statue,’ Wirrin said. ‘Awaken Naertral.’

Just as Ayan was reaching out to touch the statue and Wirrin had started to move, Mkaer finally spoke. ‘This is smart, Wirrin,’ it rumbled. ‘We will need new mages for each Fiend.’

Wirrin stabbed Ayan in the back of the head, pressing his forehead to the plinth of the statue. ‘I wish you’d said something a moment earlier,’ she said aloud.

Then she reached out to touch the arm of the human body. As the blood poured out of Ayan and Veyoc, it seemed to fill the statue. The human body of the statue filled in with tan, blushed skin before the colour bled into the scales. The cobra’s scales filled in with glittering colour.

The only acknowledgement of what a king cobra was supposed to look like were lighter stripes along the length of the statue’s coils. Rather than the brown and cream of any cobra Wirrin had ever seen, the neck filled in with glittering, multicoloured scales, each one subtly different. Like the eyes of Mkaer’s statue, Wirrin couldn’t help the feeling that she’d seen all these colours before somewhere. Somewhere in the skeletal mouth was a bright red tongue.

And then the statue lashed out and bit her.

It didn’t hurt. It didn’t draw blood. But Wirrin could feel something hot and nauseous spreading through her body from the bite near her shoulder. Something unpleasant and sweating. Something dripping and bubbling and slithering.

‘Oh, oh,’ a voice like swishing water, like swimming crocodiles, sounded in Wirrin’s head. ‘Am I awakened? A stranger in my swamp?’

Wirrin kept her hand on the statue, despite the shivering that spread with the sweating nausea. ‘You are awakened, Naertral,’ she said aloud. ‘I am not so much a stranger to your swamp.’

‘You stink of the mountains,’ Naertral swished and dripped in her mind. ‘You are a stranger here. You are… something very unpleasant and strange.’

Wirrin smiled vacantly. ‘No one’s said that since my mother died.’

‘Naertral,’ Mkaer’s voice boomed in Wirrin’s head. ‘We are awoken.’

Naertral’s power dripped and burbled and shushed in Wirrin’s head. ‘How?’

Wirrin took a deep breath through her nose. ‘Mkaer didn’t tell me I needed someone else to wake you,’ she said. ‘So here we all are.’

Naertral rushed and snapped and grumbled. ‘How could you do this? How could you trap me here with… with the filthy Mountain?’

Wirrin chuckled breathily. ‘I think you’ll both find that you’re trapped here with me.’ She took a deep breath and the sweating, shivering nausea contracted toward her stomach. Another deep breath and it pushed up her throat.

Wirrin spat on the flagstones and her spit sizzled.

‘Oh, my, my,’ Naertral burbled. ‘Oh is that so?’

‘She’s the only one,’ Mkaer rumbled. ‘No one else has found my statue. No one else has found yours.’

Naertral’s laugh was like the howling of wind, like the crashing of water down from the mountains. ‘Oh, that’s wonderous. That’s spectacular. I don’t care for being trapped here with you, filthy Mountain, but I’ll gladly be trapped here with someone who can trap us.’

Wirrin rolled her shoulder, where the cobra had bitten her. But there wasn’t even a mark in the leather. It seemed as if nothing at all had happened. Her spit still sizzled on the ground.

‘Answer me something, Fiend of Poison,’ Wirrin said. ‘Do you want to help someone avoid paying taxes on their shipping business?’

‘I care little what my power is used for,’ Naertral hissed. ‘I don’t have such high standards as the filthy Mountain.’

‘Tell me, Poison,’ Maker rumbled. ‘Do you wish to be banished again by the so-called Gods?’

Wirrin almost spit compulsively at the question. Naertral’s hissing, dripping, burbling turned again to howling winds and snapping jaws and crashing water. ‘Of course I wish to stay awake, Mountain.’

‘If this Heran had succeeded in waking you, had succeeded in wielding you in aid of fortune, you would have been banished.’

‘I wonder if the siblings were planning the same thing with you, Mkaer,’ Wirrin said, looking around the excavation. All the dirt was still here, after all.

‘Could you have refused an awakening hand, Mountain?’ Naertral hissed. ‘Could you have stayed asleep for your morals?’

‘I do not think I could have,’ Mkaer rumbled. ‘I doubt I could have resisted being awakened.’

‘And what other options would you have had?’ Wirrin asked, collapsing the wall of the ramp back into stairs. ‘If only this family knew how to reach you.’

‘Unlike you and your revolutionaries?’ Mkaer grumbled.

‘Oh, I like the sound of revolutionaries,’ Naertral burbled.

‘I’ll send more letters,’ Wirrin thought. ‘I doubt anyone will come until after winter.’

‘What hurdle will this Heran face in finding me again?’ Naertral burbled.

Wirrin started pulling all the loose dirt she’d dug in the past week back into the pit she’d opened up. ‘Just have to hide you better, this time,’ she thought. That headache was coming back, but she noticed that the nausea wasn’t nearly so bad.

It took only minutes to completely refill the hole she’d spent a week digging with two other people. It wasn’t hidden by any means, even if the stones that had once been poking out of the surface were gone. It was a big patch of muddy ground.

As Wirrin started to shake and the rumbling started to become deafening in her bones, she pressed down on the whole clearing, forcing the ground under the water. She stopped before the dirt was level with the bottom of the water and took a deep breath.

Naertral’s power felt like standing under a waterfall, like standing in a hailstorm in the middle of winter. Like the rushing water would tear the flesh from her rattling bones.

She pulled at the stagnant and gently flowing waters to push away at the loose dirt, to bring sediment from the rest of the wetland, to blend old with new. Something popped in her head again, blood dripped from her nose into the rushing water.

‘For someone so clever, you’re quite dense.’ Naertral’s voice was calmer this time, the swishing of a breeze and the burbling of a brook.

Wirrin made it to the edge of the water to slump against a tree and slide to the ground, taking deep breaths. Once the pressure in her head had subsisted, she sipped at the remains of her week-old tea and gazed out at her newly created river.