Chapter 4 Beware of Gods Charming Serpents
Beware of Gods Charming Serpents
Amonth later, Sheba pushed through a pair of scarred metal doors and stepped into a bar that gave up on respectability decades ago.
The establishment, if one could call it that, squatted on the edge of Lattaya Village.
Above it, two and a half moons hung heavy in a star-drenched sky.
They cast pale bands of light across the packed-dirt street outside and through the open slats overhead.
The lunar orbs were visible through the establishment’s tin roof dotted with holes.
Its walls were stained with smoke and grease.
Old, dried candle drippings from sconces that had been replaced so many times that the wax had created its own art on the partitions.
‘Talk about eclectic,’ Sheba murmured to Linh, her boss and friend, who, along with a few of their colleagues, accompanied her.
‘The brews, however, are out of this world, allow me to treat you to their in-house specialty,’ Linh said with a grin.
Their boots crunched on the peanut shell-strewn floor, shoulders brushing strangers as they ordered their drinks at the ramshackle rattan counter.
Kegs in hand, they claimed a rough-hewn table and let the noise wash over them.
Sheba glanced around her, conceding the venue had a charm of its own.
Her eyes flicked from the seashells and old nets decorating the ceiling to the wild art and masks from the residents on the waxed walls.
‘This place is savage,’ Sheba muttered as she sipped on the delicious lemon-flavored light beer in her hand.
Sliding alongside the bench, seated beside her was Dr. Imani Kweku.
The surgical practitioner was tall and composed, her hair bound in a tight crown of twists, dark eyes piercing and alert.
‘It sure is,’ she quipped with a wink. ‘The locals let loose with local entertainment and folk music from a band. Then, if you hang around after midnight, they bring out a feast of spicy Tansinian pork roasted over hot coals. You won’t be able to resist it, it’s so freakin’ delicious.’
On the other side of Sheba sat Jasper Rowe. He was a pulmonary systems specialist from New Savartin, thin, lean, and restless, sleeves already rolled, gaze scanning the room with clinical curiosity.
Across from them was Linh, a generalist medic and the Centre’s head.
Next to her was the bearded, red-headed Dr. Brad Piastri, a medical speleologist whose fascination with subterranean biomes bordered on obsession, adjusting his glasses as he took it all in.
Last but not least, Toma Reyes, a trauma surgeon from Old Manila, broad-shouldered and laconic, who anchored the group with his calm presence.
It had been four weeks since Sheba’s dramatic arrival on Tansinia.
After a week of downtime, settling in and recovery, she got into her new rotations and schedules.
She spent most evenings poring over her cases and managing her admin, leaving her exhausted.
Which was why she had begged off any nights out until now.
Still, she was bonding well with her colleagues; by now, she and the team were on a first-name basis, and she found she liked nearly all of them.
As they talked, Sheba’s attention drifted to the crowd.
Tansinians were strikingly diverse.
A majority were descendants of Asians, Australians, and Africans who fled Oceania during the Great Apocalypse.
Intermarrying with the locals, they interwove their bloodlines with the indigenous tribe’s whose DNA still carried echoes of an ancient other world.
The result was a population marked by broad cheekbones, dark, luminous eyes, and physiques shaped by land and labor.
Their physiology was also extraordinary, and their post-surgery healing and wound-regeneration rates were remarkable.
She turned to her team, who seemed lost in an animated discussion about why Tansinia Minor had been baffling the world of medicine in recent months.
‘Tell me again about how certain regions of the planet suddenly accelerated healing without pharmacological intervention?’ Sheba asked.
‘This place has the hallmarks of a unique ecosystem,’ Jasper said, lifting his glass and staring into it as if his answers might surface there.
‘The locals are infamous for how quickly they use botanical treatments to heal without sophisticated drugs and interventions,’ he went on.
‘However, over the last two years, or even longer, we can’t be sure we’ve seen a sudden increase in tissue repair that accelerates to two to four times baseline.
Bones knit faster. Lung trauma stabilizes without much help,’ Brad added.
‘Which is why we’ve set aside part of the facility for a research center, collecting data with the permission of the villagers, that continues to astound most of us. ’
‘It’s not just an anomaly,’ Imani said. ‘The locals have stories pointing to a sophisticated linkage of healing throughout different environments.’
Linh leaned forward, forearms braced on the table, eyes bright behind her lenses.
‘The eastern cave networks are the key starting point. We’ve tested some of our willing injured patients in our temporary lab out there.
We found that in that region, trees will bind more new CO2, oxygen levels are rising, and the humidity never fluctuates.
In that environment, the pulmonary workload decreases by 30%, and the body starts repairing way faster than any other physiology off-world. ’
Sheba tilted her head and mused. ‘So, it sounds like because the lungs work less, energy gets rerouted from survival to healing quicker.’
‘Correct, and it’s not isolated,’ Toma supplied. ‘The forests are just as compelling. Old-growth moss ecosystems pump beta-pinene and forest ions into the air. Blood pressure drops across the board. Natural killer cells spike. Post-surgical recovery shortens by more than thirty percent.’
He tipped his chin toward Sheba. ‘If we could replicate the same environment during front-line evacuations, we’d halve mortality.’
Jasper exhaled through his nose. ‘Then there’s the Silent Deserts.’
‘The Wadi Tansin,’ Imani said. ‘And the Okama Plateaus.’
‘Places so remote that sound actually collapses because the terrain itself absorbs it,’ Linh continued, ‘leaving you with near-zero acoustic input.’
Reyes nodded along. ‘Your amygdala firing drops in those conditions, which means stress injuries heal three to four times faster after just one night of exposure.’
‘But the access to those areas-,’ Sheba started, her brow furrowed.
‘-is the real problem,’ Jasper finished. ‘You’re dealing with wild cliffs, unstable dunes, and a level of silence that completely messes with your orientation.’
‘Very few people venture that far,’ Imani said, her gaze shifting across the bar. ‘Except, of course, him.’
The group shifted its attention to the centre of the bar, to the small packed-dirt arena where the locals’ entertainment was kicking up.
Sheba glanced over, and she jolted.
It was him.
Her silent rescuer.
‘That’s Idan, your hero, I believe. He’s also a local sheep farmer,’ Linh said to Sheba, with a wink.
Sheba blinked. Sheep farmer, my ass.
Her heart rate went wild as she studied him at the center of the revelry, commanding the chaos with little effort.
A giant dragon cobra reared before him, its hood spread out, scales catching moonlight and torchlight in burnished patterns.
The man’s calloused, sizable hands moved in slow, deliberate arcs, palms weaving through the air, holding the serpent’s attention with absolute focus.
Idan was bare to the waist, skin the color of sun-warmed gold etched with sigils that curved across his chest, arms, and ribs.
He wore thick, rust-colored, durable pants this time and sturdy leather utility boots that anchored him to the floor.
Muscle and sinew shifted with every movement, veins rising along his forearms.
The cobra followed his lead, body swaying, its strike held in check by what appeared to be an obsessive fascination with Idan.
A glass filled to the brim with an amber spirit sat on the ground before the mesmerized creature.
Without breaking the rhythm of his hands, Idan knelt on one knee, leaned forward, and caught the rim of the goblet with his teeth.
He tipped it back, long hair rippling down his spine as he drained the liquor slowly, throat flexing as he swallowed, never once losing the cobra’s attention.
His mouth was full and expressive, eyes glowing bright as he stared deep into the serpent’s, tumbler still snared in his lush lips.
Sheba’s breath hitched.
‘What foolishness,’ she murmured.
Yet her eyes refused to turn away.
His body rippled with waves of potency.
From the heavy fall of his undulating dark hair to the beard framing his jaw, down to the narrow cut of his waist, and the power in his thighs.
He arched his neck as the last of the drink went down, then snapped his head back, locks flying.
Sheba swore he smoked up the room with spectral lightning and fire.
Tossing his glorious mane forward, the glass sailed upward and landed upright before the cobra.
The serpent struck, but his mark was long gone.
Idan leapt back with such speed that Sheba struggled to follow him.
His boots seemed to float over the shells and dirt, landing with a ballerina’s grace at least ten feet away, his balance perfect.
The crowd erupted into wilder laughter, cheers, and roars of appreciation as coins and notes showered the arena.
A young man, the creature’s handler, swept in, guiding the viper into a reed basket and sealing it shut.
More schills rained down.
Idan gathered them with unhurried efficiency, lips curved in a restrained smile, expression unreadable.
‘Is this kinai for real?’ Sheba murmured to no one in particular.
At that moment, he lifted his head and turned as his gaze found her.
His silver-gold, luminous, and freakin’ unusual eyes locked onto hers with devastating intensity.
The sensation speared through her chest, heat and pressure fusing into a single unbearable awareness.
She jolted, breath hitching, while his countenance remained calm, assessing.
He then tore his eyes away, nodding to the handler who slipped away with his precious basket into the night.
Idan crossed the floor and stopped before an older man with braided hair and a weathered face.
‘Who’s that?’ Sheba asked, still entranced.
‘That’s Xian Huey,’ Reyes said. ‘The village alderman.’
Idan counted out half his winnings and placed them into the Chief’s palm without ceremony.
No words passed between them. Just an exchange of nods, twitches to their lips in shared understanding, and a chin lift from the long-haired male anomaly.
Idan turned and traversed the bar with unhurried purpose toward the medical team, slowing his prowl to a stop as he approached the medics.
The sensuous foil of him rolled over Sheba, earth, musk, smoke, and sun-baked stone, drowning out the candle wax and yeasty scents of the bar.
Her entire body almost convulsed.
What the fokk was it, with this man?
He reached into his belt pouch, withdrew the remaining schills, and set them down in a neat stack before the physicians.
The table creaked as he tapped the surface with one lean, ringed finger and gave Brad a chin jerk.
For a moment, no one spoke.
He inclined his head once and, without uttering a word, moved past them again. Vanishing back into the churn of bodies and noise as though he hadn’t just shifted the balance of the room.
‘The hell?’ Sheba breathed.
Toma huffed, lips pursed in respect. ‘He does this every month, entertains the locals, earns some schills, then gives most of it away to the chief and the clinic. He also drops by with regular supplies of wood, wool, and meat for us. He even makes his own charcoal that keeps the our generators burning through winter. He’s the ultimate mountain man who’s taken upon himself to watch over us. ’
‘Where’s he from?’
‘No one is sure, but he lives up on a holding high up on the cliffs in a wild, remote existence with his animals and his farmhand Lago. That’s the young man you saw who dabbled as his snake wrangler.’
Brad leaned back against the dented dura-steel of the bar’s back wall.
‘The mining consortium, Rhixon, has illegal concessions to mine these parts. They first dispatched a collection crew to extort protection credits from the villagers and the medical center. Idan evicted the thugs. He left them with shattered ribs and pride in the dirt. The syndicate returned a week later. With pulse rifles in hand and murder in their eyes. However, those men got snatched away by some invisible force. They vanished into the permafrost of the wadi in winter before they could squeeze a trigger. Two site foremen and a handful of enforcers remain missing to this day. More Rhixon crews harassed the villagers, demanding they move from an identified mining lode. Rumor has it that Idan reached their base camp under the cover of a mountain gale. By dawn, the quarry was destroyed, excavators decimated, and heavy machinery sheds reduced to a smoldering, skeletal pile of blackened steel. Then, about a month and a half ago, the locals reported that Lord Tiberius Si’Rhix’s ship and a battalion of dozens of armed mercs targeted Idan.
They subsequently disappeared from a cliff ridge near his acreage, lost to the sea.
We owe a lot to Idan; however, the man scares the shit out of me. I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.’
Sheba stared at the stack of notes and coins gleaming under the bar’s lights, her pulse racing.
‘Fokk me,’ she whispered, and this time it wasn’t admiration alone that tightened her chest.
It was the unmistakable sense that yet again, she had just witnessed a rare, dangerous, and intentional life force.