The Wind Thief

by

Jasmine Giacomo

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010 Jasmine Giacomo

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

~~~

The Wind Thief

“I’m sorry, Learned, but I’ll need your status stud as well,” the lanky young guard said, sympathy edging his voice as his eyes fell on the white-centered black stone, rimmed in yellow, that pierced her left ear. He held out the basket that already contained her bracelets and beaded hair net. The short blonde woman gave him a pleasant smile and slid the stud out.

He flushed at her attention. The prisoner he and his mates guarded rarely got visitors, and none had ever been as beautiful as Learned a’Kaira.

“You can go through the anti-magic barrier now,” he told her, nodding shyly and handing her the gate key.

“Thank you.” She slipped through the stone archway between him and his brother guardsman. As the anti-magic shell coalesced around her, humming with a blue glow at her passage, the guard finally got around to wondering what a Learned of the Japalanai University could possibly have in common with the most reviled prisoner in all the realms of Tilyoth.

~~~

Sevris woke from a deep sleep at the humming of the barrier. He looked around with his usual disappointment. Even after eleven years, he still hoped one day to wake and see the sun shining on his face. Or feel the rain. He’d even settle for a mangy cat licking the drool off his hairy cheek.

But no, aside from his ever-growing black beard and hair, his surroundings were decidedly constant. The lowest curve of the stone sphere he was caged in had not gotten any more comfortable over the years. His one blanket, though replaced regularly, had never grown more padded. The waste grate in the very bottom of the sphere never smelled any better. And the windowless view of the inside of a gray ball never changed, unless he looked at the shiny steel gate that taunted him with glimpses of a hallway he’d never set foot in again.

He looked at it now, and blinked in surprise. An attractive woman slipped the key into the lock and opened the gate, then stepped inside. As her clean, dark boots gripped the concave slope of the bottom of the hollow sphere, he sat up and frowned.

She couldn’t have been taller than his shoulder, and her hair was thick and wavy. An odd ripple across the top, near her ears, told him she’d been wearing a hair ornament until recently, and her status stud was missing. He grinned at the paranoia of his captors, that even pretty women he’d never met before might be smuggling him magical items to aid in his escape. Not that they’d do him any good in here.

“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” he rasped, finding his voice dry with disuse.

The woman crouched a pace away and managed not to wrinkle her nose at the pungency of the waste grate’s contents. “Sevris Nashata? I envisioned you as…”

“Cleaner?” he supplied.

She smiled. “No, older. You don’t even have any gray in that curly mop of yours,” she added, gesturing to his top-tail of matted black hair. “How old were you when you broke into Grand Magus Lostair’s personal complex?”

“I was only twenty-two.” Sevris couldn’t keep the pride from his voice. “Surely, you didn’t need to come all the way down here to ask me that. You could have looked that up at the university, Learned…”

“Ganaasa a’Kaira.” She smiled. “You’re good. What gave me away?”

He gave her a crooked smile. “Your undertunic is a lovely shade of periwinkle. I raided the university’s files often enough to recall the shade.”

“Impressive. It seems your mind hasn’t lost its edge, being cooped up in here for the past eleven years.”

“On the contrary, Learned Ganaasa. Only my body’s cooped up. My mind is as free as a skyserpent.” He grinned at the thought of the ethereal creatures that swirled through ancient myths as well as the skies he couldn't see, but she looked at him with a mixture of surprise and suspicion.

“You can’t know why I’m here,” she began.

He gave her a crooked smile. “No active magic is allowed within the barrier. Even if I had my gem collection with me, my diamonds couldn't read your mind. I guess you’ll need to tell me the old fashioned way.”

Ganaasa looked over her shoulder, toward the gate, and Sevris felt a stab of adrenaline. Eztar’s passionstorms, woman—don’t get me killed.

She faced him again. “Your feet look cold,” she said, reaching for the buckle on her left boot. In a moment, she slid off a thick stocking that held odd yellow glimmers in its yarn. She handed it, and then its mate, to him. “I made them myself. Never could figure out how to make the toe seams smooth.” She lowered her voice to a bare whisper. “Meet me outside in a quarter-hour, and I’ll explain everything.”

Sevris’ eyes bugged. “What?” he hissed. “Are you mad? This place is surrounded by the strongest anti-magic barrier Antaran mages can craft! I do anything with your weirdly glowing socks, and I’ll—“

“You don’t, and you’ll sit here and rot,” she interrupted, pinning him with a cool blue-green stare. She rose and strode to the gate. “Your choice, Redtoe.”

As she vanished down the hallway, he felt an odd quivering in his belly at being addressed by his old name. The redtoe was a small brown lizard that lived in the western deserts. Each foot had five bright red toes, and it could climb on walls, even ceilings, with no apparent difficulty. To the Antaran ancestors who discovered it, it seemed to possess an uncanny magic.

Just like everyone believed Sevris had, until he’d been caught and imprisoned here.

He stared at the yellow socks. They smelled of lanolin and new leather, and a longing for a proper bath, a shave and new clothing rippled through him like a physical bout of nausea.

If they were magical, she couldn’t have gotten them through the barrier in the first place. He squinted, fingering their silky weave. No, that’s not right. If their magic was active, she couldn’t have gotten them in here. But dormant magic--hardly anyone knows that exists anymore. Could she really have figured it out? She must have chosen socks because the dormant component needs a simple counterpart. Socks fit in… He looked over at the gate, a blossom of wild hope spreading within him.

Slowly, as if chilled, he pulled on the socks, then ran his fingers across the lumpy seams.

~~~

Ganaasa stood in her small garden and waited, fingering a wilting pink wisteria cluster that dangled from the arbor overhead. The herb-packed mask that she wore over her nose and mouth prevented her from smelling its perfume, but that was just as well; she knew that this wisteria, like all other flowers in Antar, had not smelled nice in many years.

A whuff of air caught her attention, and she looked behind her to where she’d set a pair of boots in the arbor’s shadow. Faint green smoke curled around their tops, where Sevris’ legs emerged. He looked at her with a nod of respect and a wide smile.

“You’re very good, Learned: I thought I was the only one in Antar who’d cracked the latent-magic-pairing conundrum.” Sevris took a deep breath of freedom, then coughed. “Is it me, or has the air of Antar worsened the last decade? It tastes like a grease troll’s armpit out here.”

Ganaasa handed him a mask, and he put it on quickly. “That’s why I’ve rescued you.”

Sevris’ dark eyes blinked in surprise over the top of his mask. “You want me to find you a grease troll’s armpit? I’ll take my chances with the Gray Ball of Eternal Boredom, thanks.” Belatedly, his eyes fell upon her now-present status stud, and the tiny white center in the black gem. "My condolences, Learned. It’s always a tragedy to lose those in the prime of life. Why am I so important to you?"

Her eyes hooded, looking far away. "His absence drives me; I have no children to remember his smile to me. Once the house was cleansed, I couldn't wait any longer."

"For what?"

She lifted her chin. “Come inside with me; I’ll explain on the way, and we can get going as soon as you’ve cleaned up.”

“Going? Where are we going?”

“Somewhere that your stench would give us away.” She turned and strode toward her home, a small whitewashed building inside its own privacy wall. “You know the origin of the winds, Sevris?”

“Legend says they’re the fruit of the skyserpents’ mating, born during wind storms, but I’ve never seen one.”

“Neither have I, but there’s more. Winds are mortal. Once the skyserpent that gives it motion dies, that wind ceases to blow. In essence, they embody the very element of wind.”

“Skyserpents can die?”

“Yes. And they’re doing so in record numbers. I’ve been researching this at the university for three years now.” They descended a curving staircase to a lower level. “All the nations around us—Haartha, Shei Leru, Parth, even Umach in the far south—have reported increasingly failing winds over the last two decades. Crops are suffering because the sky does not bring rain. Air tastes terrible, sometimes for weeks on end. It can be lethal…” She paused. “No one, not even the Grand Magus, is sure what’s going on, or what can be done, or even if we should interfere at all.”

They reached Ganaasa’s bathing room. She could see she’d lost her audience; Sevris’ eyes were locked on the deep stone pool and its cool, inviting water. She dragged a curtain in a sturdy frame over to one edge of the pool and sat down behind it. “Get in and wash. There are scissors and a shaving stone if you like,” she said, sitting down on a wooden chair. Her voice echoed in the stone chamber.

Splashes let her know that the convict had begun to cleanse himself. After several minutes of washing, he took the scissors to his long wet hair, leaving it just long enough to brush his shoulders, as it once had. The shaving stone nearly dropped from his fingers in his excitement, but he managed to grip it and rub its magic-infused, spongy surface across his cheeks and neck, smoothing away eleven years of growth in minutes. As he finished and began to clamber out, he asked over his own echoing splashes what freeing him had to do with the weather.

“The Grand Magus has inadvertently set in motion a plan that will kill us all, unless we can interfere and set things back in their natural path.”

Sevris paused halfway out of the pool, a hand outstretched for a fluffy towel. “That’s why you need me.”

“Yes. You’re the only one who has ever broken into his compound. I need you to do it again, so I can retrieve the Orb of Eztar Everbreath.”

“What? You want to steal the greatest, the most destructive skyserpent in all of Tilyoth’s legends? In Tora’s name, why?”

“To free him, of course.”

“You are mad. The Grand Magus would only be the first in a long line of people ready to murder you if you did that!”

“I don’t think so. When Antar had a decade’s worth of famine thanks to Eztar’s frenetic mating storms, everyone was glad to see him captured by Lostair. But I believe that one act has doomed us all.” She directed his attention to a stack of clean clothing and continued. “The mortal skyserpents are dying off, because there are no more windstorms to replenish them.”

“So, they’ve lost their desire to reproduce?” Sevris’ voice was puzzled.

“No. They’ve lost half their mating set.”

Cloth rustled as Sevris shook out a dark green tunic. “You're all right with me wearing this?"

"No one else is going to use them." Her voice was distant.

There was a pause. He stared at the yellow ring on her stud. “Which illness took him?”

Ganaasa’s lips twisted. “He died of a lung condition. The same condition many others have contracted within the city. If we’re going to save them, we need to free Eztar Everbreath.”

He frowned. “How is he going to help us?"

She looked at him with an expression akin to pity. “Eztar is the first breath Tora breathed forth into the skies. The first skyserpent is as immortal as the great god himself. But the lesser winds, from the mouths of Tora’s laughing daughters as they watched Eztar swirl and twist, they can die. And they are all female, as their progenitors are.”

Sevris frowned in confusion. “How do you know this? If it’s true, why don’t I know this?”

“Much history was lost during our tumultuous past; the wars with Parth and Shei Leru three centuries ago destroyed much of our nations’ accumulated history. It was the worst tragedy of the war, in my opinion.”

“Unless you count the loss of the Little Portals. I’d give my left arm to have just a glimpse of one of those lost treasures. Before that war, all the rulers shared them equally. Greed ruins everything.”

Ganaasa turned to see Sevris hitching up his britches. “Says the most infamous thief in all of Tilyoth’s realms.”

“I don’t do it for greed. I do it for excitement. But keep talking.”

Ganaasa sighed and continued. “Skyserpents are similar to a beehive. The offspring only ever come from one source. Although in their case, it’s not from a queen, but from the seed of a king. And because Eztar has been trapped in Lostair’s little glass bubble for two generations, he hasn’t been able to mate. If we don’t free him soon, there won’t be any winds left for him to storm with. Once the sky dies, we won’t be far behind. This poisoned air will kill us all.”

Sevris came and stood in front of her chair, looking much cleaner and far more presentable. “Tora’s holy breath, woman. You're serious.”

She stood and met his gaze. “Completely. Just help me get the orb, and you’re free to go your way.”

He frowned in thought. “I can’t say I’m opposed to a little payback against Lostair along the way. But you do know the Orb of Eztar is completely impenetrable, right? How are you going to get around that?”

“It’s unbreakable, not impenetrable.” She reached into a pocket and withdrew a small glass funnel.

“All right, I see the theory,” he said. “What makes you think that will actually work?”

“It’s the failsafe for the spell that created the orb in the first place.”

“You got the failsafe?” Sevris’s eyes bugged as he considered how difficult it must have been to procure such a secret object. Few people outside the magic community knew that such things even existed, let alone where they were. “You’re quite impressive. I’m ready if you are.”

She smiled and led the way upstairs.

~~~

Two hours later, the pair stood thigh deep in the sewer system below the city. Ganaasa held a small crystalline torch, which glowed yellow and was shaped like a stylized flame on a stick. Sevris held a prybar, its prongs ready to be wedged into the gap between the water silo that provided Lostair with water and its small effluent gate, held shut by the pressure of tons of water on the other side.

“Ready?” he asked, eyes alight in the glow.

“I don’t see how this will work. Won't all this water wash us all the way to the river?”

“You forget my little side trip on the way here. All that rope I brought had to go somewhere, and Lostair’s surface alarms don’t register inanimate objects.”

Ganaasa grinned. “Let’s pry that door.”

They pulled together on the bar, and clean water flooded the sewer. It foamed with dingy bubbles, tugging at their feet.

After several minutes, the torrent lessened. “Let’s go,” the thief murmured, grasping the wet rope end that had washed out with the water and stepping through the doorway. Ganaasa followed.

In the large, hollow water silo, the only light other than the crystal torch emanated from a tiny grate overhead, where the other end of the rope was attached.

Ganaasa listened to the trickle of water as it began to refill the silo, and smelled the mineral thickness of wet stone. “It was really this easy to get in?” she asked, panting to catch her breath.

“No, there’s more. But this information alone cost me three months’ worth of searching and a dangerous side mission to prove my dedication.” Sevris pointed to a narrow tunnel just big enough to crawl into. It was nearly two stories up from where they stood, and its mouth was lined with razor sharp spikes. “Now we need to get up there.”

“How do we do that?”

He grinned, his teeth bright in the dimness. “We swing, and pray we don’t miss.”

~~~

Ganaasa nursed a long cut along her upper arm as she crawled down the dark, constricted slope after Sevris. He’d gone ahead of her into the tunnel—feet-first—so he could guide her in as safely as possible, but she’d still nearly ripped off a limb. The lower half of his left sleeve was all that held her skin together, and the wound stung like zagfire. “How much farther?” she puffed, silently cursing Lostair’s light-sensing alarm.

Sevris, inching backward in front of her, began to reply that it shouldn’t be more than another few body lengths, when his eyes suddenly went wide and he slipped away from her, clawing at the stone for a handhold.

Ganaasa watched, horrified, as he vanished over a stone lip and sank into nothingness. Not hearing an immediate thud, crash, or monstrous chomp, she pressed forward, bracing herself on the narrow walls for traction. Fearing what she would see in the dimness, she peered over the lip.

Sevris surfaced immediately in front of her, spraying water from his mouth. Soaked and startled, she yelped, and he laughed at the expression on her face.

“What I get for trying things arse-first,” he said with a grin. “We’re here."

Then the surface of the pool began to roil.

~~~

As they slipped along the lower passages of the mansion, Ganaasa nursed several blood hunter bites. "If they didn't vanish in a puff of blue smoke on contact with air," Sevris informed her with a jolly grin, "half of you'd still be in that pool." She shuddered.

Soon, they found the lowest end of the grand staircase. Its steps were of marble, and the polished handrail was made of pearl. The bars that supported it were made of gleaming white pescallium, carved with a scaled motif as if stolen from the sea god’s lair itself. Looking up through the open center, they could see that it made five full turns overhead.

“Copy me exactly,” Sevris warned, holding up a cautionary finger. He stepped onto the outside of the pescallium frame and clasped the pearl railing. Stepping carefully, he kept his feet on the white metal and began to ascend around the outer edge of the staircase.

Ganaasa nervously fingered the glass funnel in her wet pocket, then followed the thief carefully up to the next floor. There, they stepped off onto a large green ring of tiles. Ganaasa began to walk across the parquet floor toward the vault that contained Lostair’s myriad treasures, but Sevris grabbed her by the elbow.

“Wait. This is a puzzle floor. We have to tread carefully.”

Ganaasa caught her breath as her latest adrenaline rush began to fade. “You first, then.”

“Actually, I’m going to need your help. Do you know how to dance the tansa brissa?”

She slowly turned her head to stare at him. “I’m sopping wet and bleeding on the floor, and you want me to do an Umachi wedding dance with you?”

He grinned and waggled his eyebrows at her.

Two minutes of breathless, dizzying swirling and synchronized stepping left them panting at the far end of the room, on a pleasant, safe floor of monochromatic gray. Sevris examined his hand, smeared with blood from one of Ganaasa’s bites, and winced in sympathy.

“Sorry,” he said, surreptitiously wiping it against his pant leg.

“Don’t be,” she replied, as they turned the corner and approached the vault door. “If you hadn’t held me as tight as you did, I’d probably have lost a leg.”

"Or two."

She shuddered. “Well, here’s the vault. Do what you do best.”

He raised his chin and stepped close to the large black wall that blocked the corridor. It had no markings whatsoever, and it seemed to suck the light from the pair of glowing white half-orbs on the ceiling.

“This didn’t do me any good inside the anti-magic barrier,” he said, placing his hand against its center. “But I confess, I’m more than pleased to get to use it again.” He waited for the space of two heartbeats, while Ganaasa stared uncomprehendingly at the nothing that was happening.

Then the black surface split down the middle, top to bottom, right under Sevris’ hand, and a bluish gleam of light shone through. He pushed on the two halves, and they swung open easily, revealing the glories of the Grand Magus’ vault.

Ganaasa exhaled in surprise. “How did you do that?” she asked as she followed him into the brightly-lit room. Various treasures sat upon unlabeled pedestals, or in large niches along the intricately-carved walls.

Sevris glanced around for the orb they sought. “That dangerous side mission I had to complete before I learned the way in here? I had to steal a piece of Lostair. It took me two months to retrieve a single hair he had shed in the Hill King’s palace. Once I had that, my magus contact helped me implant his very being into my right hand. It grows his nails and bleeds his blood. For all intents and purposes, the Grand Magus has three hands. Hopefully, he doesn’t know it.”

“That’s amazing! That’s what it took to break in here last time? Giving up your hand for his?”

“Yes. And there’s your orb.” He pointed, and Ganaasa looked inside one of the many niches, seeing the glimmer of light off the glass sphere she sought.

“Thank Tora,” she breathed, running among the pedestals and plucking the sphere from its rest. She held it between her hands and stared into its depths, but no flicker of motion or streak of color marred the perfect clarity of the orb.

Sevris joined her. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, I can’t open it in here; Eztar would destroy everything within five hundred paces, including us. We need open space.”

“That will prove difficult,” came a new, angry voice from the doorway, “considering that you’re going to die in here.”

The pair whirled. Lostair, the Grand Magus of Antar, stood before them, eyes blazing. Long white-blond hair lay rumpled on his shoulders, surrounding an ageless face that radiated superiority. His pale nightshirt showed through the open front of his heavily-embroidered over-robe, and his feet were bare.

“I seem to have placed my trust too naïvely in the security members who guarded you, Nashata,” the magus growled. “I’ll have to handle you myself this time.”

Sevris glanced at Ganaasa, then past her to another blank black wall tucked in a far corner of the room. “Run!” he hissed, grabbing her arm and dragging her behind him.

“No!” shouted Lostair. The area the two intruders had recently occupied flared red with dozens of small firebursts.

They reached the corner, out of Lostair’s sight, and Sevris slammed his hand against the black wall. Lostair ran through the pedestals toward them, and Ganaasa gritted her teeth and glanced back.

“Hurry,” she urged.

Finally, the door parted, revealing a short, narrow corridor that ended in a full-length mirror. Sevris darted toward it, pulling Ganaasa, who hugged the orb protectively. Zagfire exploded against her back, and she screamed at its pyro-electric touch, dropping the orb and crumpling to the floor. Her hand slipped from Sevris’, and he stumbled several steps without her.

“You’ve nowhere to run now, little man,” hissed the magus, stalking past Ganaasa’s unmoving form, intent on his revenge. More zagfire crackled among his fingers; his pale hair began to stand on end.

Sevris looked past him at Ganaasa; she was coming around, and he was relieved the magus hadn’t killed her. A strange tingling made him lift his hand and examine it: it too had zagfire flickering around it. A disbelieving grin spread across his face, and he gestured imperiously at the magus. A massive bolt of zagfire shot across the short distance between them, and Lostair flung up a hazy red barrier that absorbed the zagfire’s energy.

It vanished a moment later, along with the zagfire that Sevris held. Lostair looked at him shrewdly. “An unexpected side effect of close proximity, it seems.”

“Indeed,” Sevris replied, hoping he sounded like he knew what was going on.

“I’m afraid that leaves me with but one choice,” the magus said, backing away. Hope flared in the thief’s chest as he saw a chance for life open before him, but it was soon crushed.

Lostair swung his hand back toward Ganaasa, who had crawled across the corridor and now lay curled in a ball.

“No, don’t!” Sevris shouted. “I’m the one you want!”

“Yes, don’t,” came Ganaasa’s weak voice. “Zagfire would make my hand spasm, and that would go poorly for all of us.” She lifted her head, and both Lostair and Sevris could see that she held the failsafe funnel dangerously near to the orb’s surface. Her hand trembled.

“Tora’s crap-pot! Where did you get that? Give it to me! You have no idea what will happen if you release that monster!” Lostair stalked toward her, imperious. His hands flickered with a blacker fire.

“Sevris,” Ganaasa called, her lower lip trembling. “Remember what you’d give your left arm for? Turn around and jump.”

“What?” Lostair glanced back at the thief, at the fine mirror behind him.

“What?” Sevris frowned, looking behind him as well.

"Jump!” she shouted, slamming the failsafe funnel against the orb. The identical magic within the two glass objects melded them seamlessly, and with all the fury of decades of confinement, Eztar Everbreath screamed through the funnel’s hole and into the narrow corridor. A split-second later, everyone’s ears popped, and time seemed to slow to a liquid ooze.

Lostair began to spread his black fire over Ganaasa’s form, but a gray-and-blue apparition took form over her, causing him to pause. A massive head, with long, drooping whiskers and flexible ear-spines, mushroomed in size until it cracked the ceiling. A sinuous body formed behind it, covered with long feathered scales. Winds whirled through the corridor, whipping at every available surface. The serpentine creature seemed to cause the winds and be fed by them at the same time, and he showed no sign of slowing his growth.

Sevris, wide-eyed, decided it was prudent to obey Ganaasa: he spun and leaped, arms outstretched, into the Little Portal—the most secret of Grand Magus Lostair’s hoarded treasures. Behind him, he heard a massive, triumphant roar and the groaning creak of splintered wood as the mansion itself began to buckle to the will of the immortal skyserpent.

The screeching wind threatened to burst his eardrums. It shoved him through the mirror with the force of a massive hurricane, and he spun, whirling into a great black void.

~~~

The storms began to return to Antar and its neighboring realms the very next day. Crops and forests were damaged in many places, but rain also fell, scouring the air clean. The scholars at Japalanai University began to try to piece together what had happened, despite the fact that their best weather Learned was missing. A particularly strong windstorm delayed them from gathering in their conference room the next morning, and when they arrived they found a large collection of journals, along with a short note.

Read Ganaasa’s notes. She is not missing. She is a heroine.

--Redtoe

PS: love those undertunics

Later that morning, he climbed the high, rocky outcrop north of the city and stood among the screaming winds. He smiled and closed his eyes, imagining that he could hear individual voices.

Suddenly, he was engulfed in a whirlwind that threatened to tear his hair out by the roots. He hunkered down behind a rock and shouted, “Too close!”

The wind abated, allowing him to stand.

He looked up into the swirling dust that surrounded him. “I delivered the journals like you asked. They’ll figure it out now. I hope I get to see Lostair’s face when everyone realizes this was his fault. Too much to hope that he’d die like you did, I suppose, but at least most of his magic toys broke when you set Eztar free.”

The wind swirled more gently for a moment, and Sevris smiled.

“I'm glad at least one of us is adjusting to the fact that an immortal skyserpent sieved your soul from your dying body." He shook his head in disbelief. "Listen, I need to get away. Seems I had a moment of hubris and signed a note to the Learneds with my old alias. If you two could find a reason to be amorous above the border town of Nelishak tonight, and keep everyone indoors...”

A form coalesced before him, formed of blues and grays, and Ganaasa caressed his cheek with a hand of air. “Thank you,” she murmured, her voice the sweet whistle of a springtime breeze.

“No, thank you. You saved us all. Eztar was wise to make you as immortal as he is. The winds of Tilyoth will never fail again.”

“Travel safely, Sevris Redtoe.” Ganaasa’s human form vanished into the howling wind, which also soon dissipated, leaving the thief alone on the outcrop.

That night, a heavy wind storm halted nearly all traffic on the streets of Nelishak, though it let the starlight shine down brightly. As Sevris leaned into the wind and the darkness, braced against a sturdy walking stick, he thought he heard laughter from among the stars overhead.

~~~

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