The cat creature swerved its head toward Avisynth. The boy stood still, staring at the floor. His shoulders sagged inward and his feet were still rubbing against one another. He didn’t flinch, but you would have thought it was more out of unawareness than courage.
“We’ll leave you alone,” the totem creature said. Its tongue floated in front of Avisynth’s arms. I imagined the creature was considering some form of a handshake, but I couldn’t see how shaking its tongue offered much in the way of confidence. “That was impressive, boy. I didn’t think you could pull it off,” the creature added. It wasn’t mocking him, but neither did it speak in a tone of genuine admiration. Its tone was subtly patronizing, just reluctant enough to show it wasn’t as impressed as it should be, but not so much to suggest it was impartial to what Avisynth had done.
“I told you,” Avisynth said. He lifted his left hand to his ear, palm up and facing the totem creature. “I can call them back. They’re never far, no matter where you are in the world.”
“No need for that.” The creature smiled, pulling its tongue back into its mouth and running it through the gaps in its teeth. It turned to the other half-men. “I doubt they can harm you anyway. They’ve seen enough. Poor things. Poor, poooooor things. You didn’t make their first trip to the nether pleasant. You could have been gentler, you know.” It made a soft humming sound between its words. I thought it might have been trying to purr. “You’ve done a good job in scaring them. Never be the same, I think. They’re as new to the nether as all of you. The daemons in there see no difference between humans and earth-borne daemons like the ones you see here. It’s all the same to them. And the daemons here are more afraid of them than you’ll ever be of us.”
“And you?” Avisynth asked. “You’re not scared, but you are not going to harm us either.”
“Come nowww,” the creature hissed. It threw its head back with an offended look. For a moment, this look changed to an expression of grief. Several grooves under its right eye were indented to show tears. And then, in another moment, it changed back to a wide and spacious grin. “I would never harm a feratu. You’re too rare in this world. You’re too much of a commodity. And you’re farrrr too much fun. I want to see what you’ll be doing with all that blood magic in the future. I daresay it will be a thing to watch for, no? If I wait a few years, what will you become? I wonder. I’ve only seen one other feratu. A girl in the old continent. I want to see what both of you will become.” It waited for a reply, then continued when Avisynth remained silent. “For all the terrible things that I could do with my little legs and all the terrible things I could do with all my faces, it can’t come close to what you’ll do, just by accident.” It took one of its feet and softly patted the ground in front of Avisynth. “Just by… dabbling. Dabbling with the dark and the blood and the fluttering. Dabbling in your dreams and nightmares. Dabble, dabble, dabble.”
The creature took a step back. It turned its face away from Avisynth. “But let me give you a piece of advice. I’m from the nether. Of course, I’m no more over there than a house cat is to a daemon over here. But you hear things there, you understand? You hear things about the dark. You hear other daemons talk. What other daemons see. What they eat. What they fear. You could learn a lot just by listening. And you would be wise in there, just as you are here, to listen to even the faintest of murmurs. Those are always the most important, you know? The voices in the dark that say so much. I know they speak to you. They must, if you know blood magic.”
Avisynth tilted his head, watching the creature with a curious expression, and then gave a single nod. The creature looked pleased. Its grin stretched farther. I could see its smile from the back of its head. It spread all the way to behind its ears, revealing corner molars that looked like tusks. The biggest ones had jewels in them, tiny green stones that were fit into the cavities that dug into the front of the creature’s thickest teeth.
“Good… good that you understand.” It turned around and charged its face toward Avisynth. Spit flew out of its mouth and its tongue whirled wildly around the air. Just before I expected bits of Aivsynth’s body to be shred to pieces, just before I thought my clothes would be splattered all over with his blood and insides, the creature stopped short. Its teeth were so close they grazed Avisynth’s hair and touched the tips of his toes. It moved a few feet back then closed its mouth. It wasn’t grinning anymore. Its mouth curved up in the center, then down, then up again in a weary kind of smile. It waited to see if Avisynth might react, then it continued, “In the nether, in the far places of the nether, beyond its infinite seas and oceans, they say that things are starting to turn a shade more red. There are daemons that say they see red seas and red skies and red smoke and red rain and red islands. Do you know what that means? Your mother must have taught you. Your father must have spoken of it.”
“You’ve seen him?” Avisynth asked, holding his chin up to the creature in intrigue.
The cat creature looked at him without saying a word for a long time, maybe enjoying that he had finally gotten a reaction out of Avisynth and now relishing that it could play the opposite role. It occurred to me, despite how large and ferocious the creature looked, it had the spirit of a poltergeist. It wasn’t evil as much as it was mischievous, and it wasn’t dangerous as much as it was playful. Its many faces, its mannerisms, its voices, it was all theatrical. Every tone was exaggerated. Every word was hissed or echoed or bellowed or whispered. Sure, there was the part where it wanted to eat us, and all of that violence with the half-men, but could that not be excused as just a very unique kind of humor? The Iunt tribe practiced cannibalism in their birthing rituals for their royal family, and they were some of the kindest people you could ever meet.
The creature finally shook his head—jerking it to the right and pausing for a second, then jerking it to the left and pausing again for another second, and so it went back and forth until it thought it had said no in a sufficient enough manner. “I haven’t seen him. Not with my own eyes, but I never see most things with my own eyes. I’m sure no one has seen him with their own eyes. But there are always signs before he comes. Signs in the deepest parts of the nether. Even signs in this world. They’re always there, and they’re always obvious if you know what you’re looking for.” The creature looked up at the moon, then at the forest, then at the floor, each time with careful attention. One eye would squint as it made a show of looking into the distance, then its tongue would flick in every direction like it was tasting the air in front of what it was examining. “They all say the same thing,” the creature drawled. “After three centuries, Lu’hra Jahd rises again. Angel, daemon, god, prince, king. The Dream Weaver.” It stomped its leg after the last name, adding for itself the kind of sensational pause and then booming sound you might expect after a dramatic reveal in a play.
It stepped away from Avisynth again. It turned around and began walking out of the valley, moving horizontally with all of its legs in a straight line to squeeze between the trees. At the end of the open area, it leaped to the top in one go, making all the oaks and branches around us shake. All of us standing fell to the ground. It even pulled the half-men out of their daze. The campfire collapsed on itself and turned into a smoldering pile of burnt leaves and branches. Black swans atop the hills croaked loudly as they made a run for it. One tripped right at the edge, tumbling down halfway before catching itself on a wing and climbing back on its talons with a desperate kind of speed.
“Be careful, boy,” the totem creature shouted from above us. “Even daemons are fleeing the nether now. It’s not a place you want to go when Lu’hra Jahd is awake, you understand? Blood magic lets you float on a piece of ice in an ocean. It does not let you scale its depths, nor navigate through its endless reach.”
And with that, the creature was gone. Its steps faded from loud rumbles to quiet knocks, and soon, you could hear no more of its coming or going. The other half-men stared at us, then each other, just now realizing their master was gone. They followed in the directi
on of the totem creature, climbing the hill in silence and a jumble of awkward motions. The forest was quieter after they left. The totem creature had scared off most of the animals that were near us, and the sound of wood cracking in the campfire was now no more than the stifled flickering of a few last embers. You could still see clearly with the light of the blue moon, but everything was still, letting the valley blend in with the forest and the night with much more obscurity.
CHAPTER 12
There was a long period of silence between the six of us left. Elsa held onto Jahlil. The boy refused to move, and his breath had turned to a faint and raspy whisper. He would scrape in as much air as he could, unconsciously pulling it through his teeth and throat, and then let it all out in a cough or a muffled moan. His skin was growing paler and thin black lines were beginning to develop at the side of his head and his chest. They were only a few inches long, but you could see them deepening in color, developing more frequently along his skin, and starting to cluster around different points of his body. The black of his pupils now stretched beyond his lids, coloring the skin below his brow and the bags under his eyes. His fingers and toes were losing their moisture. They were as soft as snow, and wrinkling like they had been in water for too long. His pulse was barely there, no more than a weak rhythm against his breath.
“He had his eyes open,” Mawlik said, shaking his head. He glanced at Avisynth. “I don’t know if it helps if you know what’s wrong, but he had his eyes open. You told us to keep them closed, but he didn’t listen. He had them open and he was watching the fluttering the whole time. I opened my own eyes for a second and I saw it. I tried to tell him to stop looking but he wouldn’t listen. He couldn’t hear, I think. He couldn’t hear or see anything else. Something took him just like the half-men. His body is still here, but something took him. I know it. He’s still there, in the place with all the rippling.”
“What did you do?!” Nikhil shouted again, getting up to stand in front of Avisynth. He bent his head down to try and get the other boy to look at him.
Avisynth shrugged without raising his eyes. It didn’t look like he was trying to defend himself, but he did draw his left hand closer to his leg. It was raised to no more than an inch above a relaxed position. He dug his other hand into his pocket. One foot stepped back an inch for better balance, but nothing to suggest he was getting ready to fight.
Nikhil took his sword and raised it a quarter of the way up, just next to Avisynth’s leg. “You’re going to bring him back. Whatever you did with your blood magic, you’re going to bring him back. He was like a brother to me.”
Elsa sobbed, holding Jahlil tighter.
“Nikhil, stop,” I said. “He was trying to save us. This was my fault, if anything.”
“It’s not your fault, Dina,” Nikhil replied. “You didn’t bring those things to us. That fluttering and rippling. It was him.” He raised his sword another few inches, just next to Avisynth’s waist. The feratu boy brought his left hand half an inch up and closer to him.
“You’ll want to go,” Avisynth said. “What you call the hairless werewolf—he’s going to be here soon. I can’t control him like I can the rippling.”
“Nikhil, we don’t have time for this,” I said. My voice grew impatient. There were too many things I was letting distract me. I needed to find a clearer way to think. The more distracted I became, the more frustrated I became over being distracted. Digression through regression, Taa would say. I was being careless. “I don’t care if you’re mad. We have to get my sisters and we have to bring Jahlil back to Chaya so he can get help.”
“Do you think it’s something a physiker could fix?” Elsa glanced at me, then Avisynth. “And what do you mean about the hairless werewolf? He follows you?”
Nikhil tightened his grip on the sword. He raised it to Avisynth’s right ear. Even in its withered state, he needed two hands to hold it firm.
“Whatever you did to him, bring him back,” Nikhil demanded. He turned to me. “Dina, I bet he knows where your sisters are. He was here, remember? He was sitting atop the hill when we came. Daemon family, daemon alchemy. How do you know he’s not working with the half-men? They could be his family. They escaped from their bodies and took forms like these. Doing blood magic under the blue moon in the Dwah Forest.”
I saw Avisynth’s teeth bite down from the corner of my eyes. His breath quickened by half a second and his eyes glared at the floor, but I was certain he was watching Nikhil’s hands through his peripheral. He ran his thumb against his fingertips, over the last bits of dry blood he had taken from me.
“He could have just let us die then,” I snapped. “You’re not thinking straight, Nikhil, and it’s making me not think straight. We’re running out of time for Jahlil and—”
“Put the sword down, foolish child,” I heard a familiar voice say. Taa.
She stepped out of the cave with Yephi and Iris. With her wooden staff in hand and green tears streaming out of one eye, Taa could have passed for a forest spirit. Not a poorly disguised one that relied on her wits and a penchant for acting like me, but a real one. A real spirit as old and wise as the oaks, a real creature of ancient magic and mysteries. Her wooden sandals screeched as she strode across the crystals in front of the cavern’s entrance. Taa had a habit of grinding one foot against the floor every four or five steps she took. She said it was a way to make sure she could always feel the earth. Not the actual physical ground, mind you, but the earth deep down, where you could pull on the liquid stone and molten lava for alchemy. I never quite understood why she would ever expect it to not be there, but a lot of what Taa said didn’t make sense until months or years later. It was her way of teaching me about the world but still letting me discover it for myself.
Taa’s body suffered from a great deal of side effects from using magic. Her injuries had grown worse through the years as old wounds took their toll to pass and new wounds brought their own scars. She was well practiced in alchemical arts that most people would never touch, and she was always looking for new things to try. Her body was covered with her shawl, but her face was left bare, and the scars there were enough to tell you she was no ordinary human. The left half of her face was missing almost all of its skin. Raw pieces of her skull showed through. Glowing green veins wrapped around thin scraps of bone like wires tied to frayed ivory, and small pieces of green flesh pulsed with life like portly beetles. Of course, none of this ever bothered Taa. She wore her shawl because she was always cold, not to hide her scars. Taa was proud of those, and she liked that it frightened other people.
I loved Taa’s scars, and I lamented that I couldn’t get some of my own. There were scars from forbidden magic. Scars from riding on the wings of eagles. Scars from acid burns and mythical creatures. Scars from running hard on roads few people had ever seen. Scars from scaling the highest mountains in the new continent and crawling through the deepest caverns of the old continent. You could trace half the world on Taa’s skin. Here is something from the Valley of Unjakao, and there’s something from diving under the Lotus Rivers. Ahhh and this one—this one’s my favorite. Got it running with dire lions on the Obelisk Tundra when I was only seventeen.
“Dina?” Yephi called. She stepped toward me, letting go of Taa’s shawl.
“Dina!” Iris shouted.
My heart leaped. I took a quick, deep breath, and let it out with a heavy sigh. My hands, cold with sweat and tension, felt light again. I ran to my sisters, dashing against the stones and crystals on the floor to hug both of them at the same time. Iris squeezed my arm and Yephi tugged on my hair. We didn’t show much affection in our family, but it was always there, underneath everything we said and did. When things went wrong like today, it tended to all come out at once.
“Dina, you’re in the forest?” Yephi asked, tilting her head to one side. She was shorter than Iris, although she was a year older at nine. Like every girl from the Anasahara heritage, she had dark hair with deep blue strands at the front. No one had e
ver figured out why some of our strands came out blue, though some of the tales about our house said it was because Yuweh touched one of our ancestors there several thousand years ago, during the battle for the ocean against the old gods. To my own great regret, the hair was something that was passed down with more consistency than alchemical gifts. Both Yephi and Iris’s skin were darker than mine from playing in the sun, but their copper brown colors would quickly fade once winter came. Yephi had big ears that she got from Father, a trait she wasn’t particularly proud of. She always tried to hide them, never tying her hair in the braids that Iris and I were so fond of, the ones that Cecily would make for us. Yephi had poor posture that Mother always commented on. Even now, she stepped back and slouched on one leg as she asked her question.
Iris was only eight, but she looked older. She was quieter than Yephi, and had smaller, more inquisitive eyes. Her hair was always braided, a habit she’d picked up from Mother and strictly adhered to. Even at eight, she had the sharp and smooth hands you would find in well-trained alchemists. No matter if she was running with other kids or folding her own clothes, she moved with a delicate kind of grace you wouldn’t often find in children. She wore a silver earing on her left ear, a plain circular shape with an eye carved into the center that hung from her lobe on a pearl pin. Both her and Iris wore the same thing: black trousers that went down to their ankles and midnight blue shirts. It made them look like boys from afar, with their hair tucked under the back of their shirts.
“The two of you… I th-th-thought...” I began, but was unsure of what to say. I didn’t think they were dead, of course, but I expected they were in more trouble. That something had happened—that they were hurt and needed my help.
“We had it under control,” Iris said, speaking matter-of-factly. I was used to it, but an eight-year-old who spoke with her tone would catch any adult off guard. Mother and Father never faltered. They said they had grown accustomed to it with me, and that I was much worse than either of them could ever be. It was a point of pride for me. All three of us were fluent by two. I could speak two languages by four, something that had taken Yephi and Iris three extra years.
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