Brawna Baltain
The corpse under Bahn-Nuk was sore.
Her body groaned under the weight of the world on top of her. Her legs were stiff as stone, her arms atrophied thin. She tried to move, but the packed dirt around her was crusted together by age and ash.
The corpse remembered her death. She’d been burned. Living, screaming, her skin peeling from her muscles and her muscles melting from her bones and her bones gnawed to cinders by flame. All inside the curling red stone teeth of the God Jaw, jagged and sharp and closing overhead.
The corpse itched, dry shards of rock scraping rough against her bones.
It was all she was—bits of bone arranged in the pattern of a memory.
She clawed at those memories, bony fingers ripping through dust, until she’d scratched free enough of the tight cast of soil around her to curl in on herself, to shield herself from the blaze that still blackened her bones.
Fire’s teeth shredding her. Its tongues licking away her flesh.
Her blood boiling in her veins and misting out of her.
No matter how she tried to escape, she was trapped inside of the belly of the flame, its acid eroding all she’d ever been.
Skin, flesh, bones, down to her soul bubbling out of her body like spluttering oil.
“Up!” Sour against her senses, something drew her attention.
“Up!” The corpse dug her fingers into the dirt above her skull and pulled herself up. The memories had been buried with her, and she wanted to claw out of them.
She dug endlessly. She cracked her ribcage, bending its hemispheres into each other to fit into the tiny canal she’d dug for herself.
Her bones snapped and broke against the packed soil and the corpse left her shards sticking out of the rocky dirt as she continued her journey up and up.
The long bone in her thigh crackled under the weight of her brittle skeleton.
There was no time in the fire’s stomach. Only precious space carved between her heel and the fire’s fingertips. Perhaps moons and suns awoke and died in the span of each breath higher.
She could still hear the flames scream her name from below. They leapt up to yank her down, but she kept digging. She would not let it have her again.
The corpse came to softer soil. It clung to her bones as she weaseled through it, making her fingers slippery.
Then, she tore up through that soft soil into air.
Feather light and soft on her fingertips.
No rocks, no shards, nothing to scratch through to her marrow.
The fire was so distant a cry here, whispers on her blackened bones.
The sun kissed her cheek like a lover. It’d been so long since she felt a heat that was not made to ruin her.
The corpse clawed out of the ground the way a wolf cub tore from its dead mother’s womb, freed from the belly of rot, finally.
She was still in the God Jaw. She didn’t have eyes to see, but she knew the sun-warped air well.
A dry, suffocating heat so penetrating that the rock sweated around her just to have a drop to drink.
The red stone canyon yawned wide above her, impossibly tall cliffs bending to ponder down at the pile of bones and the tomb she’d scratched free of.
Something acrid came in on the wind, a foreboding deeper than any scent or sound. The corpse could feel it eat at the bits of her she had left. She bent her eyeless, earless head up and it caressed her jaw with frigid hands.
“Brawna, Twin Bear of Bahn-Nuk,” it sang her name. The corpse rose a bit more, as if to lean into the sound. “We have a proposition for you, Favorite.”
Magic poured into the God Jaw, swirling like a whirlpool in the air.
It dragged its black body together from across the world until an oily mouth opened before Brawna’s collapsed corpse.
Its lips were open wide, jaw unnaturally flat and curved fangs dripping black Magic on the ground before her.
Two hands, one old and wrinkled, one small and soft, reached out of Magic’s maw and cradled Brawna’s skull like that of a precious child.
Magic’s hand smoothed down her cheek and left only to grab a fistful of mud to slather over her.
It molded her face back across her skull, reworking her proud, large nose and thin lips, the mud drying on her bones as skin.
It wove her hair from black glass trapped within the God Jaw’s stone and chiseled her body from the rocks and cliffs.
She was hewn from the earth, carved and sculpted out of dirt and mud and obsidian.
When Magic was done with her, Brawna blinked.
Her eyes were so much more open now, seeing farther, deeper.
She could count the cliffs a mile away. Her new body, thickened with muscle like her old one, was stronger than rock.
Blood rushed through her veins like surging rivers, and her heartbeat was a stampede in her chest.
This body would not wither in Asterou fires. Not like the last one.
“You are pleased with your form?” the mouth in front of her asked. Brawna had never seen anything like the storm of swirling and squirming black snakes and the hands reaching out from it.
“Very. Thank you.” Her voice was deeper, too. She ran her fingers across her neck, searching for the scar that used to live there but found nothing.
“What do you wish to do, Favorite?”
Brawna blinked. Her memories finally had a home in this body, and the burning that used to eat her bones gnashed its teeth as searing rage.
“I wish to destroy the Asterou line and retake what is mine and my brother’s.” Brawna’s body buzzed at the very idea of it.
The maw grinned with fangs all black.
“We can assist in one of these things,” Magic said.
The ground roared and cracked open. Whole parts fell through. More hands broke free of the dirt. Brawna sat in wonder as her beloved army, sixty-thousand strong, was reborn.
Magic raised her Reksha riders and their brown-bear steeds, their leather saddles thrown over bone and shredded flesh.
It raised the Yemi warriors, tall as three men, blackened tusks curling across toothless skulls.
It raised her Nuk, her people, her bands of siblings still in their black boots and fur hats and belted tunics, uniforms now sagging over bone whittled sharp and flesh dried to leather.
“You will need allies,” said the mouth, distended wide, its throat a window into a far-off land. In it, an old man slid silver tokens around a map.
A map of Bahn-Nuk, but with a new word scrawled across it: M-i-c-r-e-a.
“He wishes for the same?” Brawna asked, tilting her head at him as a younger man came up to him to argue about something. It was obvious they were father and son. Brawna’s chest ached for her own kepa.
Magic rubbed a hand across her chest as if to ease that pain.
“He is a king who wishes to see a world free of Micrean tyranny. Together, you will see this country burn to nothing. You will watch the entombment of the Asterou royal city from the highest mountains,” it whispered against her ear, its voice an uneven mix of giddy and gentle.
Brawna loosed a deep breath from her new lungs.
The promise brought tears to her eyes, and when they spilled over, they stung her skin.
Magic curled its hands around her body and pulled her to her feet. Its shriveled fingers touched the middle of her chest, and her uniform wrapped around her body, just as bright as it had been almost a century ago.
“Come, Twin Bear of Bahn-Nuk. It is time you win your throne.”
Magic took her hand and led her, and the sixty-thousand rotting corpses of her army, through its mouth to their new home in Waldovia.