Chapter 9

  Rosma: fifteen months BK

  Just a little farther (step). Almost home (step). So close (step). So close (step). She could smell it on the wind; she could sense it in the movements of the clouds. Home waited.

  So close.

  Rosma trudged through an arid wasteland, among lichenous boulders, beneath a burning sky. Her scaly skin glittered under the sun, but it had dried too much; painful cracks split the layer of crystalline blue scales and dark fluid seeped from the cracks, staining her body and the few scraps of clothing she wore. It didn’t matter. Home lay just over the horizon, and she traveled toward it step by painful step while leaning on her spear.

  She sang softly as she went, not with her voice but with her arda. It shimmered blue and chimed a song of lament, of desire, of conviction. She would return home. Step by step, she would cross any desert to make it to the sea.

  An auroral sweep washed through the desert in the afternoon. It was weak and dim, a flickering ghost of lights pouring across the shimmering rocks. The sweep saved Rosma’s life, for her arda drank in its energy; it poured like cool water across her skin. And so she pressed on when her body should have died, driven on by the renewed energy of her blue arda.

  Step by step, in the brutal sun.

  She spotted an encampment as evening fell, a cluster of trucks and tents around a green oasis of stunted pines. Fresh water, not salt, but any hydration would do for now.

  She approached without fear, but saw as she neared that this camp belonged to the enemy, those she had fought and killed these past two years. The war had ended. They said it didn’t matter anymore. Everyone said that. As if the end of the world made the wrongs of the past meaningless.

  When she came closer, she saw with a shock that members of her own army, those she had fought alongside, encamped there as well, sharing the same shade, the same water. They called out for her to join them when they saw her approaching. Laughter and song carried on the dry wind, along with the scents of roasting meats, and mead, and clean, cool water. But Rosma would not partake of the food of traitors, and certainly not of their songs.

  She began to kill them the moment she entered the encampment. They cried out as they fell that the war was over, that there was no reason to fight, but she did not stop. They were wrong. Weak. Had they fought only because they had been told to? She fought because she stood in the right; nothing had changed. They cried for mercy; for forgiveness. But the sea did not forgive. Why should she?

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  How many? She didn’t count; it didn’t matter. The death coursing through her veins was killing her, eating her insides, but it made her swift. They could scarcely touch her, and when they did, the pain was nothing. When she had finished, she stood panting, drenched in blood of half a dozen colors. The pale monster-tooth at the end of her spear resembled the resplendent robes of a color-priest; blood mingled like hot paint and dripped to the sandy ground.

  There was water here, but she moved on. It was traitors’ water. Home waited for her, and not far away. She could smell it. She could almost hear it.

  She walked all through the cold starry night but did not feel the cold, nor see the stars. She paused only when she crumpled to the dusty earth, brought down by crawling agony from within. Her curse. Home would help. It would not cure, but it would aid.

  She crested a long, low rise at mid-morning and saw home, the shining expanse of the sea stretching to the far horizon. Long waves rolled in overtop each other along a shore of white sand. Farther out, they broke over submerged reefs.

  The smell of the salt and the crash of the water made her heart beat faster. Home.

  She stumbled into the foamy surf until waist-deep. The rainbow blood of many daimon drained off her scales, mingling to black and dripping into the crashing waves. She dove into an incoming wave and darted like a fish into the deeper waters among the rocks and reefs. Blood trailed away behind her until all had rolled off her scales, left behind at shore as she dove deeper.

  The pain of the salty water on her wounds and on her cracked, dry skin shocked Rosma, but not for long. She was well familiar with pain. Soon the cool waters felt refreshing instead, and it felt so good to breathe with the gills at her neck.

  She went in among the reefs, trailing streams of bubbles as she swam to the secret bright places that she loved. She drifted to rest on a clearing of glittering white sand. Ripples of sunlight played over the sandy floor, the shells, the bright coral, the crystal blue skin of Rosma herself. Layers of water muted the crash of the waves against the reefs overhead to a distant, comforting pulse.

  She laid her spear at her side and took up the one other item she carried with her, a pink and green conch shell carved for sounding. She put it to her lips and, with a great effort, produced the sound. It rang, scarcely perceptible except as a low vibration, through the warm sunlit waters.

  Her seahorses came to her, drawn to the sound, and vibrant fish that darted like shooting stars and changed colors in the shifting light. Jellyfish drifted like awakened clouds, and nautili displayed the fascinating patterns on their nacreous spiral shells. They came to her, and she touched them and called several by name, and some of them drank the dark, dark blood which leaked from her recent wounds.

  At this secret place, shells and fragments of shells rained down from above, drifting like iridescent flower petals. The waves dislodged them with the falling of the tide from the nests that builder fish made in the upper reaches of the coral. These shells fell like jewels around Rosma, glinting in the sunlight. In the warm weightlessness of the water, nudged by the distant pitch of the waves and surrounded by life and color, Rosma at last felt at home, and the darkness of the War began to slip from her mind, and her arda sang out in the vast sea.

  But she spasmed, clutched her stomach in agony. She retched and spewed out foul blackness which was blood and bile, evidence of the disease which ate her away. She sobbed in pain. Her fish fled the dark cloud that bloomed around her. It seemed to cling to her, to stain her, to make her the only darkness here in this bright, calm place.

  It faded in slow increments, and it left her panting on the pale sands as shell-shards rained down. She gripped her spear, swam trembling up from the seafloor, and turned to the darker, colder waters where lay the city of Ys. The War might be over, but she still had a job to do. She had to be there to ring the bells when the world ended.