Of Truth and Beasts

Do you follow the sage? Does she still lead you?

“I starve for my efforts!”

Then find life, as small as it might be. Consume it in the hunt for a greater feast ... so you may serve.

This was no answer, and frustration frayed Sau’ilahk’s wits even more.

“There is no life substantial enough for my need that I can reach here and now.”

His patron’s hiss sharpened like spit-upon coals—or the grind of massive scales upon sand.

A droplet of moisture from a corpse can be lifted from the desert, though it be barely enough for a burrowing carrion beetle.

“Wynn Hygeorht is beyond my reach,” Sau’ilahk argued. “I cannot sense even the forest’s own life. Even if I could, how am I to find her singular spark in such a place?”

Where life is ... death follows. Find the latter to find the former.

Sau’ilahk paused. In a land teeming with life that shut him out as unliving, perhaps “death” had walked into those trees if Chane had somehow followed Wynn in there. Beloved’s cryptic retort seemed to confirm this, but Sau’ilahk had so rarely been able to sense Chane’s presence. Perhaps that strange ring had also allowed the vampire to enter where no other undead could.

His interest in Chane’s little brass ring grew.

“I still ... cannot,” he pleaded. “Please, my Beloved ... I starve.”

Unearth your need, like a droplet in sand ... and then another ... until you find means to serve. Dig and borrow for it, if you must, but do not pray to me to salve the wounds of your failure.

Sau’ilahk sank deeper into dormancy under Beloved’s rebuke. The only source of life he could think of was the caravan. He did not have the strength to search for it, let alone any memory that would let him awaken at its constantly changing location. He remained lost in the black silence, not knowing for how long.

All that was left to him were the painful past memories of his god that made him seethe in silence. The Children had never been treated this way. Though he had earned Beloved’s displeasure through disobedience, he had done all he could to regain a state of grace in his god’s awareness. When trapped between faithful service and desperate need, he was treated like ... an insect in the dirt, just short of a whim to step upon it.

And the world reappeared.

Sau’ilahk spotted the barest gray in the eastern sky, and panic set in. Had he remained dormant for too long? He could not bear a whole day in darkness amid such hunger, and he sagged like a limp scarecrow draped in black sackcloth.

All that filled his awareness was the road.

Not the sands of the great desert from long ago, but packed earth with stones exposed by decades of weathering and use. Drops of water were not what he needed, though they were more plentiful here than in the dunes. The sting of Beloved’s rebuke ran through him like a wasp’s poison in the veins of living flesh.

Where there was water, or just moisture, even in another’s remains, it could sustain a tiny life. He had once been such sustenance at the end of his living days.

That old, old memory still haunted and sickened him.

All had been mysteriously lost at the war’s end. Or, rather, the war had simply ended for no reason he had understood. Years had passed since the night that he received the “blessing” of eternal life. Then one night, the Children simply vanished.

Sau’ilahk went to the mouth into Beloved’s mountain, and it was gone. Not as if blocked by a collapse or filled in with stone and earth. The opening simply was not there anymore ... as if it had never been there.

Gone were the guardian locatha, those hulkish abominations like the offspring of a man and some monstrous reptile. The tribes and others of the horde began to disperse, but not before they turned on each other. Northerners and other defectors in the war turned against the desert tribes. Tribes turned on each other, no longer needing the excuses of old blood feuds. Packs and herds of the Ygjila—what would one day be known as goblins—tore into any but their own kind.