One- Adrift,

He left his best friend on the outer banks blubbering that this was not the way they died but Orion Io Saul did not believe in prophesy. His body was broken. He thrashed his arms to keep his head atop the mire while his legs dangled listlessly. He was too desperate to feel pain or cold. Fatigue did not creep over him but swooped down from above like some murderous bird of prey, plunging his head below the quagmire at intervals. He knew what it was to draw a breath and fill his lungs with mud. He could hardly imagine a worse death than the one that flashed its silver teeth at him just now.



There was barely a current in the marsh but it was enough to carry Orion far from the battlefield and into the heart of Arbormoor. He was transported to deep recesses where the water did not yet run red but that stank prematurely of death. Great cathedrals of loam rose from the creek bed providing ideal outposts for snipers. Even the air here was a poisonous fume that choked the lungs. This was no place for crickets or snakes or drowning boy soldiers.



The wind was peppered with falling ash. It collected in Orion's hair and on the tip of his nose. Enemy barracks burned on the hillside, suffusing the ground with light. As Orion approached the shore without the use of his legs, he realized that he had reached an impasse. He thought wildly that the drowning he had just escaped would have been a mercy compared to what awaited him on land.



He could starve to death on that shore. He could become infected and rot on that shore. He could be taken prisoner on that shore. Orion grabbed a tree root and began hoisting himself onto the solid earth when his progress was stopped with a sickening crack.



The pain shot up his torso and wracked every nerve that he had the ability to feel. He screamed from a place that he barely knew he still possessed. It was a place of raw fear and disbelieving anguish that only children knew. Orion plunged his fist into his mouth to stifle the sound. Amid the rapid, shallow breaths and irrepressible tears, he fought hard to assess the situation. His left leg was caught on something. He had not been able to feel the entanglement initially but when he pulled, he had done further damage. He trailed a hand down the side of his body, hoping not to find confirmation of what he already knew. His pelvis was shattered. And his trousers, sopping with morass, seemed to cling to the shape of an exposed bone.

Shivering and half blind from the pain, he planted his forehead against the shoreline. He would need to move his leg, perhaps even bend his knee if he was ever to emerge from the mud. The pain of it would take everything he had and leave him fit only for the sport of rats. This was the way that he died. Orion knitted his brow, gritted his teeth and slowly dislodged his leg.

Sweat poured down his face, cutting through the grime and seeping into his eyes. He could feel his bones grating against the shards of other bones but to cry out again might have alerted someone to his presence. With his ankle free of the undergrowth, he increased his grip on the tree root and slithered through the mulch.



He barely remembered hitting the rock that cleaved his body in two. There was a glint of white light as an incendiary propelled him through the air upon impact. Soot drew its black curtain over the world and he could not even find the voice to cry out. At length, he tried to sit but below the waist, there was nothing. Crawling backwards on his elbows, he dragged his limp body past faces that he recognized, shoulders he had touched, scenes that were now etched indelibly into his skull. When he reached his friend Annubis who was badly burned and gibbering, he did the only thing that a coward could-- He fled. He inched down into the mud, sinking head first below a creek of sorts and drifting with the gentle current of Arbormoor.



This was a sacred place for his people. Seriah the Great had very strategically forced the battle into this corner of the world knowing that his army would be nearly unstoppable here. This was where the Ka first bled beneath the skin of the Ba, the very cradle of all life. The blessed water still snaked through everything in the swamp. Orion lay on his back expectorating it.



His coughing abated more from a lack of strength to continue than from having fully cleared his respiratory passages. Behind his head, he heard a soft squashing sound that continually grew louder. Someone was approaching. Someone rather light on his feet. With the pain and the paralysis, Orion would not be able to focus his energy to defend himself. He gritted his teeth and kept silent. Maybe his filthy body would blend into the moor and the savages would overlook him entirely.



The footsteps came ever nearer and Orion began to snicker. He saw nothing amusing about the situation but still the laughter twisted his insides and emerged from his mouth in a fit of gurgling. This was not the way that he died. His death would be a long, slow agony. He saw that now.

Fine red silk brushed Orion's cheek and a figure loomed overhead. His laughter heightened in pitch, became more difficult to contain. The girl that stood above him pressed her cool palm to his brow.



By her murky green eyes, waxen skin and jet black hair, he knew that she was not of his people. She was a daughter of the Sheut. Seriah Io Laocoon would see the Fae peoples united under one banner but until that day came, Orion still feared any descendant of the Sheut. He almost wished she'd been some shit-licking savage. Orion tried to sit up but the girl gently pushed him back to the ground.



"Calm yourself." Though she smiled serenely, her tone threatened more than it promised. In the firelight, he caught sight of her canine teeth, which were uncannily pointed and carnivorous. A new terror stopped his heart. He had never considered the means by which he might survive or what cost would be too dear to save his young life. Orion swallowed his refusal, burying it. His fate was upon him, fashioning a tourniquet with a long strip of her sari.

Orion closed his eyes and gave himself over to circumstance, praying that he would soon forget the color and the sound of things.



I was nine and a half years old the autumn we left Veronaville on foot.

My Papa and I had been on the move from the onset of the war, diligently avoiding the vigilante militias that marched through the streets, handing out machetes to any man fit enough to carry one. Our government being what it was back then, boys were conscripted and old men like my Papa were pulled into the war by the scruff of their collars.



My mother died when I was much too young to remember. We had no other family that could care for me in the event that Papa was forced into battle. Our choices were nil.

We left Alderton as stowaways on a mining ship and disembarked at the first place we landed. For months, we laid low, shuffling our feet. It was in those days that I learned to sleep standing up.



Then one sunny afternoon in Lanceshire, we were finally picked up-- And not by the militia. Goodwife Landry was barely sixteen, a fine lady of the leisure class, widowed by a war that her husband had not been able to buy his way out of. She tucked us away in a hidden room beneath her scullery and there we crouched right up until the day that General Seriah Io Laocoon Zumerdrem was crowned king. Shortly after, my father began planning our migration. There were still portions of the continent where the Fae peoples held no reign. And we were meandering right through those portions, headed for the coast.

Goodwife Landry's neighbor was an inventor and alchemist by the name of Nigel Curious. He was a very bright man who hardly ever said much but who managed to speak volumes with no more than a raised eyebrow. I told my Papa that I thought Goodwife Landry was sweet on Mr. Curious but he told me that it was wrong to pry into other people's business. So I kept my mouth shut. In any case, Mr. Curious had his brush with new regime when General Seriah took the capital. Men of Mr. Curious's profession were being driven out or executed if they failed to leave. When I asked my father why, he said that it was because the Faes considered them heretics. Though I could not begin to imagine what that word meant, I did not ask for further explanation.



In Riverblossom, my father and Mr. Curious struck up a quick friendship with a stuttering thatcher called Wilhelm Ottomas. His home was torched at the Battle of Canton and his family had been traveling ever since.



They were joined by a family from Alpinloch that was not running for their lives but for their wallets. The patriarch of the family, Fritz Bjornsson was an innkeeper by trade who had a few unresolved debts to his name. His wife, Gia, was an exotic belle who had been a fine lady's maid. Their son was a creature of a different sort altogether.



Leif Fritzsson frightened me. He was twelve-years-old and had a leonine beauty that made no attempt to mask the predator at his core. I was certain that he was deranged. Mind you, I had no proof of that assertion but just the same, I was sure to never be left alone with the beast.



Mr. Ottomas's daughter was quite opposite. Olga was a jolly sort of girl, always quick with a joke or a quip. I was very fond of her. Of all those present, she became an unlikely paradigm of womanhood for my motherless self.



Her own mother was a very strict woman who always smelt of linseed oil and who could hunt rabbit better than any man. Mrs. Ottomas's father had been one of the wild men of the desert tribes. She herself had never set foot in the desert before now.



Lastly, there was my Papa, Kahlil Muenda. He was a warmhearted, fair and even-tempered man, liked by all, worshipped by his daughter. My universe began and ended with him as his universe did with me. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if we had not accepted Goodwife Landry's kindness and just kept running. But life is too short for what-ifs.