Nefida’s heels left the ground as she stretched for a glass jar perched on the very top shelf of the storage room in her shop. The small space was lined with shelves on every wall like, which made for a cramped closet. Many of the shelves held dozens of containers packed with divisions of scavenged lavender, yew leaves, and clay. Others bowed under the weight of iron and silver ores, which waited to be refined and granulated. While each division was homed with an appropriate label on the shelving, the sprawling maximization of the storage erased any hint of organized intent to the outside eye.

The glass containers quivered and chimed as Nefida used the shelves for support, extending a powder-coated arm to its fullest reach. She grazed the edge of the glass jar with her fingertips, inching it toward the shelf’s edge until finally, she was able to grasp it just before it toppled. Nefida settled her feet fully on the floor again with a heavy exhalation and moved about in a slight stretch to work out the discomfort of her overextension.

“I ought to build a step-stair,” she grumbled and massaged her neck with her free hand, leaving a small trace of the light powder contrasted against her skin.

She left the storeroom, shutting its folding door behind herself, and made her way to her workbench. The table was covered in fine powder swirled in shining metallic hues, and to either side of the table were large esoteric apparatuses covered in the same shining dust. Situated over the workbench was a compartmentalized hutch overflowing with small stoppered bottles, jars, rolls of parchment, and more, smaller pieces of ore.

Nefida placed the jar she retrieved from the storage room on the workbench and began pulling more divisions from the storage compartments. The length of the top surface of the hutch was covered in a line of small square tins with hinged lids lain open and overlapping one another. Nefida selected the topmost tin and set it open on the workbench. She removed the cork stopper from one of the bottles and removed a strange funnel with a tapered square base that was hanging from a wall hook. The base slid precisely into one of the nine divided compartments of the tin, and Nefida began to pour a stream of granules from the unstoppered bottle into the funnel until the contents rose to a line drawn on the tool’s interior.

When the powdery substance breached the threshold, Nefida removed the funnel with care and used a knife to level the small heap with the tin’s wall. She repeated this process with the other divisions that she extracted from their compartments, the excess of each adding layers to the swirling canvas beneath.

After she was finished filling the left and rightmost edges, Nefida began to work on the last third. To prepare the divisions that she poured into the tin’s middle column, she fixed a loupe over one eye and painstakingly emptied each jar until the contents in the tin reached the funnel’s interior line.

With the loupe, Nefida could see another thinner line above the first. She continued to pour out the powder until it reached this second line. Then she drew a small tamp from the hutch and compacted the contents back down to the first.

To fill the heart of the tin, Nefida reached for the container that she brought back from storage. Holding the glass bottle level to her eyes, she considered the contents for a minute — dark gray dust in a thin layer over the bottom.

“Not much left of you, eh?” Nefida asked it, moving the sparse contents around the jar in a circular motion. She removed the stopper and began to pour the dark dust into the funnel, eyeing the lines within its stem, but as she upended the bottle, the powder fell short of the first line. Nefida huffed.

She set the bottle back down on the workbench and leaned on her arms. “Everything begins somewhere,” she told herself. “I suppose I had to collect a few on my own eventually.” She stared at the empty glass container, “Though, I thought Doyen would have left more.”

Stoppering the empty bottle, she deposited it in a small sink near the workbench with a few other neglected dishes. The light from the setting sun faded and the hanging sign on the shop door read: “open” from the interior, displaying the shop’s current closed status to the public of Meshuyot outside.

Nefida whistled two long notes as she walked the hall to the back of the shop, which snuffed gray flames burning in a few sconces at the front of the shop.

She drew open the folding doors of the storage room once again, but she did not reach for another bottle or remove a hefty piece of iron ore. Instead, she knelt near the back of the closet and moved a small box stuffed with papers aside on the floor. In doing so, she revealed a trapdoor in the wooden flooring that was no larger than both her hands together.

Looping her index finger into a small indention in the wood, Nefida lifted the small door on its concealed hinges, and inside the cache was a dark, glossy sphere resting on a bed of straw.

She removed the sphere from its nest, and as she held it in her hands, Nefida felt a surge of scattered and incoherent information assault her senses. Unconscious solutions bubbled around her every repressed thought. Her mind flooded with overlapping words and phrases — some in her own tongue, others in a strange language she did not understand. She waded through the rush in her mind’s eye as if trudging up a rushing stream until finally, she plucked a whisper from the noise:

“Nalgra...”

She followed the word as it led her away from the stream. Allowing herself to follow it farther, Nefida began to understand more about the creature. She saw its hide lined with thick cascading scales — a cluster of a hundred eggs floating below murky water — the dead, reptilian eyes of the animal. She suddenly knew about the beast’s primal instincts, its omnivorous diet, and life of seclusion. Above all, however, she learned that one lived in a den only a day’s journey from her shop in a location vaguely known to her.

When Nefida found the information she sought, her consciousness waded in the calming stream back to her waiting body. Awake in the storage closet again, a smile crossed her face. Then, she got up, prepared a few supplies for light travel in a bulky leather backpack, locked up the shop, and began down the empty street and out of the city, carrying the dark orb with her all the while.

The cobblestone street that Nefida walked stopped at the gate of Meshuyot, splitting into two distinct and parallel paths worn from the wheels of merchants’ wagons. She was familiar with a swath of the Ottreve, having traveled much of its length to the north and south of the city in her own covered wagon. However, such transportation would only have encumbered her that night, as she followed the trade route about a kilometer before consulting a folded map of the region and diverting from the road completely to enter the dense greenery of the Mobusede.

On the edge of the great forest, Nefida slipped a coil of rope out of her bag and onto her arm before scaling the branches of a nearby tree. When she neared the bough, she slung the rope around a few sturdy branches. Then, with a few twists and knots of the rope, she fashioned a webbed cradle suspended in the tree and climbed in. High above the forest floor, Nefida pulled her traveling cloak around herself before drawing out the sphere from a pocket and allowing it to take her back to the shores of that stream of knowledge. Standing on that cusp of rapturous understanding, she tried to search for the whisper that would lead her back to the nalgra. Instead, a cacophonous din of voices overtook her, all in different beckoning timbres. In this reverie, every path she followed seemed only to take her farther from the shore and deeper into the waves of the unwanted council. Soon, she found herself drowning in it — choking on the disorienting and unintelligible language.

Just when Nefida felt that she could no longer hold on to her consciousness in the suffocating depths, her body convulsed and she dropped the sphere from the treetops. In a great shifting, the Mobusede was suddenly surrounded her once again, and she recoiled from the bright rays of the morning sun where there once was night. She had done it again — gotten so lost that she may not have been able to return.

Once she reclaimed herself, Nefida unwrapped the rope around the branches, recoiled it, and climbed back down the tall tree. The forest floor was much cooler than she had been under the breaking light in the boughs.

She retrieved the sphere from where it had fallen into a small patch of brush and came out with leaves stuck to her traveling cloak.

Once she fetched it, she stared down in the abyss of the sphere’s dark glow, only to be greeted with her warped reflection. After some consideration, Nefida returned the sphere to her pocket and continued deeper into the forest in the direction of the nalgra’s den.

When she had seen its location from scrying in her shop, Nefida pinned it on the map in her mind, noting the den to be near Seshide Morass. The swampy wetland that surrounded the area prevented her from traveling too near in the past, but without ground nalgra scales, her compacts would be incomplete, and no one could conduct works with that, no matter their skill.

As Nefida trekked through the trees, she spotted a bush where wild berries were growing. She swiped a handful of the berries as she passed.

“Ott provides,” she said as she drew the handful to her mouth, but just before she ate them, her nose wrinkled and she cast the handful to the ground.

“Mockfruit,” she spat, wiping her hand on her cloak. “…never where you need it to be…” she went on as she unshouldered her backpack and drew a small bottle in which she collected a few mockfruit, carefully picking the stems so as not to touch the actual skin of the berries again.

She was replacing the bottle’s stopper when she heard the sound of muffled voices, the direction stifled by the surrounding trees. Momentary panic overtook her as the suppressed sounds transported her back to that shore by the infinite source within the sphere. Nefida pulled herself out of the dream, quickly stowed the bottle in her bag, and scrambled up another tree as she had the night before.

Up in the branches, Nefida perched listening — waiting for another sign of those who approached. Though the Monitor’s beat kept the Ottreve free from many misdeeds along the trade road’s length, safety’s certainty is surely farther deep in the Mobusede.

“Here’s just as well,” she heard a grizzled voice approach from behind her. Nefida shifted her body in the branches with slow movements, careful not to draw attention upward.

She saw four men walking toward her. One was leading the other three, who were in turn wrangling ropes on the reigns of two animals they had in tow.

The beaked quadrupeds swung their necks despite their captors, which led one of the three men to brandish a whip from his side and crack it at the frantic creatures, who became more restless.

“Take the beaks and pearls; leave the rest for the scavengers.” the man in the front commanded. “Do it quick. Just these two aren’t going to fetch much, so we’ll have to go back in for more. I’ll circle to keep watch while you take care of these two. It would be in your best interest to have them harvested before I get back.”

The creatures struggled against their reigns as the gruff man drew a short sword from a scabbard hanging from his waist and walked off. When they thought the man was out of earshot, one of them said in a low voice, “Alright, when he gets back, you know what to do. We’ll make these cuts and then gut the old fool before he knows what’s happening. With his share split between us, we won’t have to go back into that stinking nest.” The others grunted their approval as they continued to wrestle with the feathered beasts.

Nefida recognized the ketku. She watched as their downy prehensile tails swished back and forth in agitation. Nestled within the down feathers, which were often mistaken for fur, was a line of shining pearls that ran the length of each tail. Nefida’s eyes caught the glints of the pearls refracting the light between the trees. Cutthroats like these had been after the pearls and marbled beaks of the ketku for centuries. In old stories, the creatures would roam through the forests, guiding lost travelers. Now, it was a turn of luck just to find an occupied nest.

The man with the whip began to sharpen a knife on a nearby stone, and the creatures’ fright shone in their eyes with a wild, primitive understanding.

The other two men were tying heavy knots as they fastened the ketku’s reigns to a sturdy tree trunk; the animals’ instinctive pulling tightened their snares all the more.

“Now then, which one’a you’s first, hm?” The man sharpening the knife asked with one last ragged scrape of his blade across the stone. The ketku bayed and released quick clicks from their throats — rare sounds of distress from the animals. As the man approached them, the creatures began to throw their bodies against the tree, jerking and writhing against their bonds in a last attempt for freedom.

Nefida suspected these men were of the new faith — for they carried weapons of steel. On this suspicion, Nefida silently withdrew the near-finished compact from her leather bag and leaped from the branches to the forest floor. By the time the men could react, her fingers were coated with fine dust from the compact, and she was poised in the stance that was traditional in Fieldwork defense.

The two mutinous myrmidons stood still in the shock of Nefida’s sudden appearance — cowering for fear of her wicked craft. A whip cracked, and the supposed leader commanded the others:

“Get her!”

Moved by their low rank, the men both drew stilettos with shining tips pointed toward Nefida, though she remained as silent and unmoved as stone.

Eying one another, the men shared an unspoken plan of attack and lunged in tandem at her; however, Nefida’s swift elusion saw that the steel points never found their mark and only tired their wielders with each unsuccessful jab. Nefida danced like she was guiding the wind, so often twirling around the blades that narrowly missed her sides, and yet, never struck with her prepared components.

The tired fools huffed, hunched over as the woman resumed her first footing with ease and even breaths.

“Why won’t you fight?” one of the men asked through clenched teeth as he swung the slender knife with diminished technique. Nefida sidestepped every useless slash, thinking she could let the poachers tire themselves out, but one lucky slice nicked the arm that carried her compact and sent the small tin into the air in a cloud of its powdery contents before tumbling to the ground. This unexpected disarming made a crooked grin crawl across the men’s faces.

“I see,” said the other man. “She’s got the supplies, but she ain’t got the skill.“ He pointed his knife at her. “That’s no fieldworker. A real one would have attacked as soon as we presented a threat.”

“Why,” Nefida laughed, “would I ever think you were a threat?”

She moved like water into a new, aggressive posture before springing toward the accuser. The man had no time to defend himself before he was disarmed and pierced through his side with the long knife. The howling ketku reared as he collapsed to the ground.

The man’s partner sliced the rope restraining one of the struggling creatures as he attempted a desperate escape. The freed ketku dashed away. Though the animal’s body momentarily obscured her view, Nefida’s stolen stiletto narrowly cleared it before landing in the fleeing poacher’s back.

She was standing over him only seconds after he hit the earth, retrieving a crimson blade from its sheath in his deltoid. He let out an agonized howl as the knife-edge raked his skin again on exit. The man swung weakly from his frail attempt to right himself, but Nefida was already gone.

A whip cracked a foot away from Nefida’s head. Her ears rang from the sound as it rippled through the trees. There was another deafening snap somewhere, and the whip returned to the man’s side.

“Sabe ngotuye,” the man said with disgust. Spitting in Nefida’s direction. She was surprised to hear the ancient language from the vandal, and though she couldn’t say with certainty their precise meaning, she knew she didn’t like the words.

“What kind of orators carry steel?” Nefida asked, holding up the dirty blade she had taken from his cohort. Her sneer was met with a quick rebuttal.

“What sort of yegeku doesn’t?”

Nefida’s face grew hot and she tried to restrain herself, keeping a growing urge inside her at bay. She merely quelled the atavistic call for a brief moment, for when she thought it had gone, a hunger rose stronger within her, and finally released itself. She felt the pull of Ott as a root sprang from the ground beneath the man’s foot, wrapping his ankle in its grasp, and made him collapse as the root pulled his leg from beneath him. With her intention set into motion, more roots grew over the man, stifling his movements while he grappled them in vain. The earth overtook him as Nefida turned back toward the tree where the remaining ketku was tied, calmer now as if waiting for her.

She approached the animal, stroking its face with her hand. It had since stopped its cacophonous clicks, and breathed easily, if heavily at Nefida’s touch. She sawed through its fetter with the stubborn edge of a knife meant for thrusting, but still the cut rope twisted at the knife’s point of contact, fraying and unbraiding itself at its end. The last threads finally gave way with a helpful, determined pull from the creature. With that, the ketku lowered its front half to the earth before running toward denser greenery. Nefida watched it go, but as it approached the edge of the brush, it slowed its step, turned back toward her, and sat, awaiting her again.

Nefida gave the creature a shooing motion to go back to its nest as she retrieved her satchel and slung it over her shoulder, but the ketku sat with insistence, twin tails swishing.

“You’re free; go home,” she said waving her hands in its direction, but even as she approached, she knew her efforts were pointless. When she was nearer, the ketku stood and circled her, rubbing its body gently against her. Nefida reveled in the soft lingering of its downy tails and knew she had found a guide.

Then, the animal let out a youthful chirp, and darted into the forest. Nefida followed as quickly as she could, but the ketku’s clip outmatched hers. Yet, each time she thought she had lost sight of the animal, it slowed its gallop, dropping its speed only enough for Nefida to catch a glimpse before diving back into the thick foliage.

The young woman had forgotten the feeling of the forest floor underfoot after so many long days in the city. Though Meshuyot could seem like a forest teeming with life, the cobblestone perimeter wall did well in its purpose to keep nature out. The snap of twigs beneath her as she ran elicited memories of Doyen Pangzi.

Nefida’s teacher had disappeared nearly a year prior without warning. This was the first time Nefida had returned to the great forest since her Doyen’s sudden departure. In the time before her disappearance, she would often bring Nefida into the Mobusede to teach her critical survival techniques. She couldn’t help but wonder where her doyen might be. It was so unlike her to leave with no notice.

Nefida remembered the sphere nestled in her pouch. She could always try using it to search for her teacher, but the pull of that current had grown stronger the last time she used the power. Worry crossed her face was she dew her eyebrows down in contemplation. If she relied on the sphere to find Doyen Pangzi, she might well suffer in its wake.

A chirp from the ketku drew Nefida from her thoughts. Her task loomed as they approached marsh land. Before she could even start to wonder where the nalgra might be, she saw it. The beast was standing there on the edge of the murky water doing nothing in particular. Even from a hundred paces, Nefida could watch the nalgra’s chest heave — slowly expanding then releasing as it stood still, ankle-deep in the swamp, watching.

The ketku gave a warm, quiet chirrup, and rubbed its downy tails across Nefida once more before sprinting away. Though uncertain of exactly how, Nefida was certain that the animal understood its duty was done and that she had found what she sought.

The nalgra waited, undisturbed by the sounds of the ketku’s paws beating the earth as it ran back into the forest. Nefida observed it closer, and she could see the large overlapping scales of the creature moving with its breath. Occasionally, the scales flared open, releasing thin clouds of gas that made the air around it shimmer.

This was the first time she had ever seen a nalgra — at least outside of the fieldwork textbooks that she had studied as a part of Pangzi’s training. But no ink-filled page in Ott could describe the weight of the nalgra’s presence. Staring at the motionless creature, a moment of realization overtook Nefida. She had never been taught how to harvest a nalgra scale. It may very well kill her before she even got the chance. In fact, the texts that she studied had little information about them beside the fact that their scales contained properties crucial to crafting works. In all the diagrams of their appearance and detailed sketches of their scales, not one text mentioned anything at all about the general habits of the species.

Nefida glanced at the nalgra again, surrounded by thick surface algae. She didn’t think that it had noticed her, and if it had, it didn’t seem to mind her presence. Even so, she slowly retreated back into the trees where she emerged. She wouldn’t let the gap in her knowledge serve as a reason to leave empty handed. She had to know more about the harvesting process.

Covered by the growth, she unshouldered her bag to the ground, reached in, and drew out the sphere. Its dark magnetism attracted her immediately, and without a moment for consideration, she found herself up to her chest in the current of that strange place. Her mind flooded with language like a dam had opened. Where she once could walk along the shore of information, she could now barely stand. She thought she caught a sound that might lead her toward knowledge about the nalgra, but the current swept her away from it before she could orient herself. She tried to fight it and dug her feet in against the rushing flood, but its force was too strong, and she found herself taken by its might.

The loss of control made Nefida cry out in vain as she struggled to regain her footing. Her mind swirled like the fine powders on her workbench in Meshuyot. She grasped at the clearer visions. An immaculate sword atop a mountain, overgrown with vines — a humanoid being carrying a shield, searching through abyssal darkness — a village in flames and a monstrous form dissolving into air — a panicked hand clutching a key on a leather cord.

However clear, these images meant nothing to her. The flood rose around her to her neck and carried her off her feet and away from any hope of reaching the shore.

“Where did it go?” yelled a voice back in the swamp. The gruff voice echoed through the dry gray trees that climbed out of the water, and following the hacking sounds of dull steel on brush, a man carrying a short sword emerged from the trees and into the clearing of wetland. “I saw that feathered payday come through here somewhere,” he said. “Those dead idiots…” he grumbled. “Even if they had managed not to get themselves killed, I still would have had to do everything myself.”

The nalgra hissed quietly at the approaching noise, too low for the intruder to hear over his own grumbling. The disturbed animal lowered its head down into the brackish water, and instantly became undetectable — its shimmering aura appearing as samll movements in the water that might have indicated other life below the surface. In his greedy search for the ketku’s trophies, the man didn’t notice the nalgra’s preemptive defense. Neither did he notice Nefida, or rather, Nefida’s body — still as death, eyes white, gazing into the sphere’s depths — her mind: elsewhere.

Rapid images, speech, and intangible knowledge swarmed around Nefida. A cavernous abyss swallowed her while her mind tumbled down the kaleidoscopic rabbit hole. In the sensory torrent, she desperately struggled to clear a way back to the shore, but the erratic flashing of encyclopedic content made that wish seem impossible.

In a moment of panic, Nefida caught herself holding her breath, for fear of drowning in the all-encompassing collection. Upon the realization that she would indeed not perish in the epicenter of this strange library, or at least upon the realization that she was free to breathe, Nefida’s nerves calmed. With the frenetic wave of anxiety diminishing within her, torn and distorted images appeared to fall into place, correcting themselves where they didn’t seem to fit, and overlapping to gradually form moving scenes that played out before her in asynchronous loops.

These changing scenes were nearly as overwhelming in Nefida’s field of vision as the scattered and ripped pieces, but the sounds that seemed to ring out in an eternal echo chamber before were not silent until a passing scene of a young boy drifted by her. For all his enigmatic existence, Nefida nearly felt as if the boy could see her and in this sense of unreason, she felt the urge to reach out and touch him, and did so.

Of course, the boy could not feel her touch, nor she his skin, but as her hand brushed the airy image of his cheek, the vision came to life before her, and in that long, black, empty hall, she heard a voice. It was her voice, to be sure, though she had not spoken the words. Or, rather, she had spoken the words, but in a time that had long since passed:

“Nay. it’s 100 pieces of iron for the lot,” she heard herself say, and she now noticed that the boy in the vision was crouching beside her peddling cart. Another low voice answered something in response, his voice muffled by the sounds of a market.

“I know,” Nefida’s voice continued from behind the cart, beginning to tinge with agitation. “I’m sorry. I know the Bellelic ducat still stands in the West, but since the city’s conversion to the empire’s new standard, I can’t afford to accept anything but iron pieces.” A recollection of this conversation dredged up in Nefida’s memory. She remembered having to get fairly aggressive when the fieldworker pitched his ducats at her feet and tried to take a handful of her prepared compacts.

The vision of her past self continued on attending to her begrudged customer, Nefida’s present attention was fixed on the boy, who in all the commotion had yet to make a sound. In fact, he appeared to Nefida very intent on not making much noise at all.

The boy peered around the side of the wagon to observe the rising tension of the conversation, and just as Nefida saw a hail of ducats litter the ground from beneath the wagon, the boy blindly reached his thin arm through a slit where the overlapping canvas of the wagon was unfastened and retrieved a compact along with a thin volume of bound pages. His eyes filled with a curious fire as he beheld his bounty, but in a moment, his joyous visage transformed to one which displayed an obvious inner turmoil. With wordless resignation, the boy withdrew a few iron pieces from his pocket and passed them through the slit in the wagon’s covering before scurrying away. It was only moments after the boy left the wispy frame of the scene in front of Nefida, that he reappeared in his crouched position by the wagon, frozen still in time.

“Oi!” Nefida scolded the apparition with a laugh, “you’re not supposed to pay for wares you go through the trouble of nicking, you little urchin.”

Nefida looked around at countless other scenes from the stream that surrounded her. Now frozen into airy, vaporous images much like that of the boy. In her collected state, the sphere’s strange inner core became much more navigable. Instead of wading in shallow morsels of information or drifting with its current from subject to subject, hoping for what she needed, Nefida now could clearly scan and select from certain subsets held captive in those airy frames now before her. However, when she tried to scry for information about scale harvesting, she found she still could not summon a particular subject at will. Her mind fogged again when she tried to bring forth a vaporous frame containing a nalgra.

She looked again around the impossible cavern of stilled visions when suddenly there came a hideous sound which had never before met Nefida’s ears – a voluminous bellow originating from outside of the sphere’s cavern though wild enough to pierce its nebulous walls.

For a moment, Nefida thought her attempt to scry had somehow caused the sound, but once the sound permeated through that strange cavern a second time, she heard it for what it was. She recognized the deep bellow that fieldworkers had described in article upon article within a volume of her doyen’s curated bestiary, now sitting dusty in that empty shop in Meshuyot. Nefida had once thought them to be failing words, but the sound of the angered nalgra made her truly understand. Her amazement waned as she began to realize her situation: her body lingered in the swamp while her consciousness had been spirited away by the sphere.

Amidst the tumult, Nefida felt the drowning sensation upon her suddenly again. The scenes before her liquified and pooled around her, rising ever more. Before it rose to her neck, Nefida reminded herself that navigation here required absolute calm. She closed her eyes and within herself, she found stillness despite the chaos in flux around her. That calm turned to a soft quietness — a static sizzle which rose and fell with a gentle modulation. As she opened her eyes, Nefida found herself back on the shore — or near enough — wading in the vibrant swirl just below her knees. The soft static she had heard was the ebb and flow as some current shifted and moved the curling images. The relief of finding relative safety on the sphere's shore was short lived as another cry from the nalgra invaded the space, dulled by its ethereal walls. At least she would have no trouble returning now from the familiar shore, though in that time, she would have readily admitted she was not eager to see the other side.

⁂

The stench of wet earth met Nefida's senses as she returned. She felt moisture along her back and in her hair. Gradually, she became aware that she was now in a supine position, and with that progressing realization, pain arrived. The ache in her spine was minor, though she nearly gasped for want of air as if her lungs had suddenly been emptied, for they had. Though Nefida did not know it, her unconscious body was caught in the crossfire of the conflict between the poacher and the nalgra. She was entranced and clutched the sphere all the while, even when she was sent reeling after the nalgra's tail caught her.

She tried to prop herself up in the murky water as the creature bellowed again, lunging after the poacher, but she was back in the muck once more when a sharp pain ran through her left elbow and it gave way. The nalgra lunged at the poacher again. The man artfully dodged its offenses, but even in the time Nefida had been conscious and observing, he became slower and evaded with less bravado. As she watched the beginning of the inevitable play out before her, Nefida assessed her injury, and concluded that she could recover with help back in the city. Though she did not excel at healing works herself, she knew a few fieldworkers who could perform more thorough aid with the dregs of a compact than most practicing physicians with all of their instruments and potions.

With her uninjured arm, Nefida propped herself up in the shallow pool of the morass. The sphere had fallen beside her upon her returning, and she swiped it up, shaking off the beads of moisture before returning it to her pack.

The nalgra raged, and it let out a cry that was unlike the deep bellows Nefida heard while within the sphere. Pushing herself to her feet, careful to avoid putting pressure on her left elbow, she saw the nalgra’s chest heaving; it swayed slightly as it moved, and it was now lines with small red estuaries of blood that trickled around its face and down its legs and underbelly where its scaly armor gave no protection. A new, thicker line started to form as blood beaded and then ran from its neck. The tired creature gave another soft cry and turned its attention away from the man to a small mound at its side that just barely breached the water.

That’s when Nefida noticed it: the umbilical that fell from the mother nalgra into the murky water and likely coiled significantly around her territory before ending at that small mound, where her eggs were growing within it.

“Of course,” Nefida breathed as she cursed herself for not realizing the situation sooner. The nalgra was protecting her young, and there was no way to know how long she had been brooding her eggs. Her hostility at the intrusion should have come as no surprise. Yet, even as Nefida saw the rage in the eyes of the nalgra as it leered at her, now aware of her presence as she stood, she was not prepared for its sudden charge.

The hulking mass came at her with all its might, throwing muck and water in its thundering wake. It bellowed again, exchanging the cry of pain once again for a warning, and leapt into the air, casting a great shadow over Nefida.

“Vi deishi meshu!” came a cry from the man, and at his word, the wounds of the creature widened, hemorrhaging its lifeblood. It cried a deep swansong that Nefida could feel within herself as she dove from beneath the giant as it fell. The nalgra dropped down into the water with a great splash, its blood pooling as the ripples settled around it. Nefida recoiled at the sight of the corpse of the animal, shaken by something deeper than just the gore before her, and as she turned her gaze toward the man in disbelief, a smug grin crossed his face. Visibly pleased with his oration, the man said, “No need for thanks, the beast was in my grip all the while.”

He clapped his hands together as if finishing up some menial task and reached for a knife that was sheathed at his side. “I’ve been after one of these for quite some time. This will more than make up for my earlier loss.”

Nefida’s face went hot.

“And what do you intend to do with it, now that you’ve taken its life?” she asked.

“Like you killed my men earlier?”

Their eyes met. He smiled.

“Saw you do it. Never got too far. You can never trust vermin alone with your dinner, if you understand.”

He eyed her.

“Nasty works, you — the way Ott rose up and took Janik… Left the others in the same state you did. As far as I’m concerned, the traitorous bastards got what was coming to them. Loud as the Monitor’s howl, those three. You could hear their conspiracy for miles, I’d wager.”

He was fingering the tip of his knife, chuckling.

“Anyway, I’ll just cut off the scales — “

“— and the noxious poison that releases kills us both along with any other living thing within a hundred paces.” She hadn’t remembered reading that in any of her books, but knew it to be true.

“Surely the meat —“

“— is so acidic, it would burn your little knife clean to the handle before you could even think of eating it.”

“Wholesale, then,” he grunted. “Those tin-toting recluses are always after things like this in Bellel. At least I could put some ducats to good use.” He made way toward the fallen creature, but before he was within reach, the scales on the animal’s hide started to melt like candle wax, running slowly down the side of the nalgra, dripping into the shallow water beneath it.

This, Nefida had read about in her research, but there — as she watched it happen before her — its truth had a different weight. The nalgra’s scales continued dripping from the lifeless corpse, floating in the murk like the fatty tallow of a candlemaker’s wax, until the viscosity of it pulled the animal’s body down with dense gracelessness.

The brigand pulled the necks of his shirts up over his nose with the cloths. “So, there’s noxious poison now?”

“No. Only if the scales are dislodged by the force of a murderous theif.” She gave him an accusatory glare. ”Not when they degrade naturally,” she said, still staring at the majestic heap, standing in its thick, bloody wake.

He lowered his shirts and let the moment become stale as Nefida stood there. Finally, she spoke with restraint, “I’m going to examine her eggs. You’re going to leave. If you go now, I’ll spare you a grave in this swamp.”

Then, she waded in toward that small mound breaching the water’s surface and placed her hand on top of the egg sac and with her other, she reached into the water and retrieved the fleshy tether. It was still pulsating with a semblance of being, though that of its source had faded. This consolation was not enough for Nefida. She let the umbilical cord fall back into the water and began pressing gently on the egg sac, juggling the few soft eggs she could to the top for a close look, grimacing deeper with each pass until she revealed two small glowing signs of life.

In her examination, Nefida didn’t see the man rummaging through her pack, but that momentary lightness was snuffed when she first heard a gasp of disbelief, followed by its utterance:

“It can’t be,” the man said, standing up from her bag with the sphere in his grasp.

“I told you to leave!” Nefida roared, casting her arm toward the man with all the power of Ott behind her.

The water of the swamp rose against its nature and rushed toward the man in a torrent, but he called a swift oration that leveled the stream, and as nature’s force pulled the water to the ground again with a slap, another oration came and caught Nefida unprepared.

The words of the ancient language twisted into paralyzing binds. Yet another saw her removed from the swamp and pinned to the trunk of a great tree on the dry ground.

He approached her and shook the sphere before her.

“Where did you get this?”

“That’s none of your concern.”

“Oh, but it is.”

His lip curled and he began to pace along the water’s edge.

“Tell me where you found this, and I’ll spare you a grave in this swamp.”

He amused himself with his words. Orators always did. She gave no answer to dignify his ego, only struggling to break from her invisible bonds.

“Very well, then,” he said. “If this is what I know it is, perhaps I can find out for myself.”

He rose the dark orb to meet his eyes, and before the warning could escape from Nefida, the vagrant’s eyes whitened and he collapsed into the water of the morass.

Though the man’s mind was now elsewhere, his curse still held. Nefida struggled against it until finally she saw bubbles rising in the water, then ripples, and then finally a short crescendo of waves before there was the stillness of death.

The oration released its hold, and Nefida stumbled as her feet returned to Ott. With no necessary speed, she searched the area where the thief fell until her hand found the sphere, still in his clutch. “I hope you found what you were looking for.”

With the help of her ancestry, she pulled the nalgra’s blood and liquid remains from the water and cast them out into the land. Through Ott’s hand, she beached the remains of the queen, leaving its umbilical trailing into the water. Though she was dead, the mother’s presence might be enough to ward away those that might disturb the still-growing siblings. Nefida saw in their brilliance that the living eggs may well hatch in the coming month, if that were to be their future. She chanted a verse from the old faith that she had tucked away in her mind — only becoming aware of her remembrance as she spoke.

On her trek back to Meshuyot, Nefida counted her losses over, but it was only when her mind quieted and all was momentarily still that her heard the voice of her doyen.

“You wanted to spare him?”

As though the woman were beside her, Nefida responded reflexively, “I’m not sure.”

“So, he deserved his fate? And the fates of the other hunters — were they deserved as well?”

“People far outnumber ketku,” Nefida tried to evade the question.

“You didn’t want him to die. Why?”

“I had already taken one too many.”

“Out of pity, then — for yourself?”

“Out of honor,” Nefida said, turning toward the woman she knew was not really there.

Yet still she heard her voice:

“You do not see the tracks, and so you cannot find the hare. If you cannot find the hare, you will starve.” On the horizon beyond the emptiness where Nefida had nearly expected her teacher, she saw a great smoke billowing to the South near Aenoch. She couldn’t remember the name of the little settlement at the foot of the mountain, but it seemed their Caemnhyr festivities had already begun. Nefida had forgotten all about the holiday until then, but was glad to have an excuse to keep her shop closed and sulk over her misfortunes when she returned home.

Nefida crossed the gates of Meshuyot as the sun peaked over the world. She raised a weary hand to unlock her shop nestled in the busy city readying for their own festivities — the sounds of life too vibrant in the aftermath of her fruitless voyage, dampened only slightly on the other side of her door. She mustered a whistle that only half-lit the sconces in the room and trudged to the storage closet.

On the floor, the small trapdoor and the small bed of hay that it once hid were just as Nefida had left them. She pulled the sphere from her bag and chucked it into its hiding place with little regard and returned the small door and the clutter that covered it to their rightful place.

She left the closet and was whistling again to snuff the lights when she noticed that her workbench had been tidied.

The bottles on the hutch over the workspace, now organized and labeled in the same script as those in the storage closet, had also each been filled from the reserves to a healthy volume — all but one.

It wasn’t the cleanliness, the refreshing of powders, or the appearance of the cataloging system that struck Nefida most. What caught her attention was the single empty, unlabeled bottle in the center of the workspace — dwarfed by a much larger reserve jar, which was unstoppered and filled to the brim with dark gray dust speckled with shimmering gold.

This bottle, too, was unlabeled, but there was a small, folded tag fixed to its neck with twine. Nefida approached with caution, though a wave of other emotion rinsed her of her reservations when she saw the terse lettering:

Don’t starve.

She retrieved parchment, adhesive, a pen, and a well of ink to make labels for both the reserve jar and the small bottle that accompanied it — her blocky print breaking the consistency of her doyen’s flowing script — and through the night, she prepared her inventory for the next day.