Chapter Nine #2
A sweeping smile lit her face. “That’s the closest Siapharian word I can think of to describe what they called us.
All the Chthonian beasts who didn’t fit the profile of the standard, bloodthirsty lot.
My parents and I traveled with other demons, fiends, devils, diavoli, succubi .
.. All manner of creatures who are predisposed to aggressive tendencies but choose to fight those urges. ”
“What happened to Osta?” Benjamin asked.
Her smile faded. “An invading devil ripped her from my hands and crushed her underfoot during one of the times they captured us. It’s next to impossible to outrun enemies forever.
They’re everywhere. I wanted to have a funeral for her, but the devils carted us and the other survivors to one of their nearby camps before I could collect all the pieces. ”
Sikras frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that. It’s never easy letting go of something you love.”
“Yeah.” Her shoulders sagged as she slouched forward, hair tumbling to obscure her features, but when she tucked a lock behind her pointed ear, she revealed a small smile. “Gods, I haven’t thought about that in almost twenty years.”
Sikras nodded, both hands on his scythe’s snath, as he leaned into it to combat lingering nausea. “Memories are the fuel that stoke the soul’s fire.”
A shuffling noise rang out as Benjamin tested the tent’s durability by rattling one of the poles. “This seem good to you?”
Sikras barely acknowledged the tent; he didn’t need to. His brother-in-law’s reliable obsession with craftsmanship told him everything he needed to know. “Benjamin, that is the finest-looking tent I’ve ever had the pleasure of laying my eyes on, and I thank you for setting it up.”
In the distance, footsteps neared. The swish of flattening grass.
Sikras looked up in time to see the shavugin approaching, several thick branches clamped between its jaws.
It laid them at his feet and, bound by the obligation of Sikras’s spell, dashed into the forest to fulfill more of its undead duties.
The time was as good as any for a fire. Soon the shavugin would return with the evening meal, and without open flames to cook it over, the party risked contracting any number of food-borne illnesses.
Except Benjamin, the lucky bastard. Sikras slid off the gnarled roots and onto his knees to snap the branches into smaller sizes, while Benjamin gathered rocks for the fire’s barrier.
Helspira shuffled forward on her knees. “I know you said you’re only good for resurrection and shadow blades, but I don’t suppose a spell for conjuring a flame is floating around in that head of yours, is there?”
“Don’t give him any ideas.” Benjamin pointed a cautionary finger. “I’d rather he spare us the threat of his temperamental magic. Flint and steel will work just fine.”
Sikras rolled his eyes. “You melt the flesh off a student’s face one time and suddenly your magic is ‘temperamental.’”
“I heard it took three clerics to heal that man. It’s a miracle he survived with his corneas intact.”
“That man called Vessik a talentless bastard with no annunciation skills,” Sikras muttered.
“He deserved everything he got. In Vessik’s defense, deconstructing the spoken art of wizardry is nothing short of a miracle.
It’s all just a mishmash of suffixes and prefixes and tonal inflections paired with annoyingly specific hand gestures.
One mispronounced syllable or twist of the wrong finger and suddenly you’re melting a man’s face off. ”
Kneeling in the tall olive grass, Benjamin produced flint and steel from his pack.
“Never understood the appeal of magic myself. The lifespan of an energy caster is shorter than a damn soldier’s.
Fools’ egos are always too big in battle.
The number of mages I saw kill themselves with the magical recoil from their own spells could fill a cemetery. ”
Sikras smirked. “Pearls of wisdom from the only dead man in our company.”
The clacking of steel striking the flint mingled with Benjamin’s amused chuckles as Sikras snapped the last stick and set it aside.
Familiar rustling captured his focus, and he squinted to see the shavugin had returned, pale bones like a beacon in the spreading darkness.
A limp and bloodied hare dangled from its jaws.
Sikras pried the hare from the undead beast’s maw. “Well done. I can’t say I’m delighted that you chose the most adorable of the forest creatures to slaughter, but calories are calories.” He passed the rabbit to Benjamin who immediately set to processing it.
A glimpse of the meager firewood pile guaranteed a few hours of heat at most. Sikras studied the soulless shavugin, mindlessly awaiting additional instruction.
It would’ve been easy to deploy it again, but the annoyance of fetching more wood himself paled in comparison to the guilt brought by unnaturally forcing labor from dead animals.
Vessik had always hated exploiting the deceased.
“I don’t enjoy disturbing their eternal rest,” he would say with a grimace.
And Sikras didn’t enjoy disturbing Vessik.
Blood and bone, what he would give to hear another one of Vessik’s lessons on exhibiting empathy.
With a sweep of his hand, he severed concentration on the spell, and the bones clattered lifelessly atop the soil and grass.
Digging a knuckle into a sore spot on his back, Sikras glimpsed Helspira, who was once again enamored with the little wastrus plant poking from between the high grass.
He couldn’t tell which was gentler, her smile or her touch, as she brushed her thumb over the fuzzy leaf. Her expression was as infectious as the plant itself. “I’ve never seen someone grin so broadly when handling wastrus before.”
“How could they not?” Her voice was reflective, admiring. “It’s beautiful.”
“Farmers would beg to differ. It’s an invasive species. Chokes out a lot of crops, and it’s highly toxic if ingested.”
She flashed him a smirk. “Lucky for me, I’m not eating it.”
“You sure? Might pair well with that corpse I resurrected.”
A short laugh rattled her frame before she plucked the small plant and held it out to him. “Touch it.”
Sikras arched a brow, hesitating longer than he wished he would have before he ran a finger over the wastrus’ velvet texture.
Funny, he had grown up around wastrus his entire life and had never touched it before.
The preconceived notion that it was nothing more than a nuisance had been enough to deter such actions.
The plant was universally disliked. In fact, he couldn’t recall a single soul who had spoken well of it.
Yet the wastrus’ texture matched that of the soft part of a horse’s nose, and Sikras couldn’t call to mind a single instance where anyone had anything bad to say about soft horse noses.
Just like that, it suddenly seemed strange that everyone hated wastrus.
The enormous, emerging moon overhead cast a glow, and Helspira’s red iris caught the light. “Isn’t it soft?”
“Very,” Sikras replied.
Seemingly satisfied with his answer, Helspira sat back, rubbing the leaf between her fingers like a soothing ritual. “You’d never find anything this soft in Chthonia. Do you want to touch it, Ben?”
Benjamin ran the skinned rabbit through with his sword and held it over the open flame. “I appreciate the thought, but physical sensations elude me these days.”
“Oh, right, sorry.” Helspira tucked the plant away. “Do you ever miss the little luxuries of living?”
“Uh ...” Benjamin’s skull twisted toward Sikras before he watched the rabbit rotating on his blade like a spit. “Wow. What a question.”
Sikras’s stomach sank faster than a capsized ship in a turbulent sea.
The chastising words that Death had uttered unto him at Saelihn’s castle pierced his mind like daggers, and a flurry of nervous laughter sputtered from him.
“What a question, indeed. Just goes to show we don’t know one another very well at all, do we?
We should remedy that. Right now? Okay. I’ll go first. Helspira”—he blurted the first thing that came to his mind in a desperate attempt to shift the conversation off Benjamin’s thoughts on mortality—“the pink hair. Bold choice. How did, why did, what’s up with that, hmm? ”
She blinked once, twice, her brows furrowed at the sight of Sikras’s frazzled body language. “Well, it’s not a choice, really. Warm tones are common in Chthonia—pinks, oranges, yellows. Helps demons blend in with the landscape. Easier to stalk prey. What’s with the gray hair?”
“Genetics.”
Helspira frowned. “You’re lying.”
“Get used to that,” Benjamin muttered. “Sikras is a compulsive liar.”
“Old habits die hard.” Impressed, Sikras sent a quick smirk Helspira’s way. “The gray is just a harmless side effect of keeping Benjamin, well ... Benjamin.”
Shit. They had circled back to that subject. And why did all of Siaphara’s crickets suddenly start chirping in the background? What god or goddess did Sikras aggrieve so greatly that it was necessary to amplify the ever-growing, awkward silence?
Oh, wait. All of them.
The three sat in quiet with only the crackling fire—and the damnable cacophony of crickets—for company. In the thick of discomfort, Benjamin’s disembodied voice broke the stillness. “Hey. Want to know the best part about being an undead musician?”
Chest tight, heart pounding, Sikras lifted his gaze to meet the empty sockets where Benjamin’s eyes used to be.
Sun-bleached fingers wiggled as Benjamin lifted his hands. “No calluses.”
Relief crashed over him like a warm, sudden wave. Sweet, blissful exoneration. Sikras closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, one side of his lips tugging into a half-smile. “Mark me, my friend, one day you will perform for kings and queens.”
“I’d settle for performing in front of any crowd that wouldn’t immediately scream and run in the opposite direction.”