Crickets had begun their song through the trees.

“I hate this place,” Wurhi groaned, her leg muscles tight and burning. Saplings and twigs crunched beneath her feet. She made sure to step on the saplings. “I hate this place! Everything hurts! I want to make a fire! I want to sleep!” she complained futilely, looking at her companion. “You found a proper place for your little plan yet?”

Kyembe trudged ahead of her, a miserable slump in his shoulders. He sighed. “Nowhere has been wide enough, flat enough or dry enough. By the stars, I have been in rainforests with earth less damp.” Frustration filled his voice, and he looked up. “And it is late too.”

“Of course it is,” she grumbled. “Should we stop?”

“Not yet. If we can find a proper spot for what I have planned, we will be much safer when we rest.”

She looked at him sharply. “What do you have planned, anyway?”

“Trust me,” he said.

She crossed her arms. “I do. I’m mad for doing it, but I do. Tell me anyway.”

He scratched his short cropped, black curly hair. “It is complex.”

“I have time.”

He snorted a short chuckle. “I suppose we do. Come, I will tell you while we search.”

Their feet returned to crunching over saplings. “First of all, I will build a fire and gather some bodi-”

His words died on his lips.

He went stone still mid-step.

Wurhi dropped into a crouch, looking about furtively. “What?! What?!” she hissed, preparing to flee at any moment.

Thunderstruck and wide eyed, he muttered something in a tongue she had no knowledge of.

“What!?” she demanded. “I don’t understand!”

He slowly looked at her as though in mid-dream. “That is impossible…” he murmured in Makkadian. “Impossible. Wurhi, someone is singing ahead…in Gezi.”

It took a few breaths for the full implication of that to dawn on her. “Your mother tongue?” Her beady eyes widened. “How…how far away is Sengezi?”

“Half a year by good sailing ship.” Kyembe looked at her grimly. “And that is if one did not stop.”

She swallowed. “And you’re hearing that right now? In the middle of these woods? Singing?”

He nodded slowly. “Unless I have gone mad.”

She swallowed and grew very frightened. Olubrian sailors often told gruesome tales of strange, alluring songs heard on long voyages. They always ended in shipwrecks, drowned sailors or crews being eaten. Memories of the smell of vitriol and the butchered ogres returned to her. The path ahead seemed to lengthen and the giant trees seemed to loom taller.

What abomination was waiting for them at the end?

“We should investigate.” Kyembe’s crimson eyes squinted.

“You have gone mad! Why!? We should be running the hell away!”

“We must know what it is.”

“Why!?” she demanded.

He looked at her in agitation. “In case it decides to follow us, Wurhi.”

That gave her pause, and she let out a trembling breath. “Yeah…okay that makes sense,” she grudgingly admitted. She drew her stolen short sword, though she had little faith in it being able to do much. “Lead the way.”

Kyembe hesitated for a moment before stalking forward.

The half-dark elf’s ears were very sensitive - often catching whispers at a distance when she would have trouble with some shouts - and it was another full sixty paces before she finally heard it too.

She gasped. “Kyembe…” She murmured. “…I’m hearing Makkadian.”

A woman’s song drifted through gaps in trees, intoned in a deep voice with a mournful tune. The melody was alien to any song Wurhi had heard in Zabyalla, but the language was her mother tongue with all the lilts and pronunciations of a poet.

He looked at her sharply. “Are you sure you hear Makkadian?”

“As sure as anything,” she barely whispered. “What’s happening?”

“It is a woman’s voice?”

Wurhi nodded in confusion.

He thought hard. “Then you must hear the same song as I, except I hear it in my first tongue and you in yours.”

The hair rose on the back of her neck. “Wh-what in all the hells does that mean!?”

“It means…some have ability to speak their own tongue, but can twist it so all who hear it, hear it in their own mother language. Many higher demons and others of that ilk can do this.”

She backed away from the song, mentally cursing every single deity and demon she could think of. “Let’s leave! Now!”

“We have still not confirmed anything. Trust me. We do not want some unknown demon stalking us.” He put his hand on his sword. “We will scout it and then retreat. Alright?”

Wurhi paled. “You want to go toward the terrifying singing?”

His jaw set and he rubbed the ring on his broken arm. “If it is a demon, better to remove its vile presence.” The sword hissed as it left his belt.

She strongly disagreed, but he was already going forward in a half-crouch, his footfalls now silent on the forest floor. Cursing herself, Wurhi reluctantly followed, keeping the Sengezian several paces in front and squarely between her and the song’s source.

As it grew louder, Wurhi grew more skittish. Had she not been oath bound to watch his back and trapped in a hell-forest, she would have been long gone. As the singing grew louder, her mind raced with plans to save herself. Perhaps she could stay back? Or, she could hide behind a tree until he satisfied his mad, suicidal curiosity, couldn’t she? That would be watching his back wouldn’t it? The idea grew more sensible to her until she was about to suggest it.

Unfortunately, that was when Kyembe placed a finger against his pursed lips.

“Shhhh! It is just ahead.”

He stepped into a clearing and she grudgingly followed. A wide hole yawned in the earth: a sprung mastodon trap set by the ogres. Mud slicked its sides and edge. The song was very loud now, and it was clear that - whatever its source - it lay in the hole’s bottom. A caustic tang of vitriol tinged the air, bothering Wurhi’s nostrils.

Steeling themselves, they crouched as low to the ground as they could and crept silently to the edge of the hole.

A figure sat in the pit.

They were upon what strangely looked like a large, upended dugout boat.

Though the voice seemed a woman’s, her broad shoulders spread wide beneath a suit of armour that looked heavier than those of Cult of Steel’s champions. The armour’s surface was a deep blue-black - as though bathed in liquid sapphire - and decorated in relief with golden inlays of warriors and beasts locked in deadly combat.

A heavy helm guarded the figure’s head, framed by three pairs of metal wings that swept backward on the sides, save for the highest pair which curved upward as though in exultation. The side of her head rested on the fist of her gauntlet, her elbow on her knee in a pensive pose. Though the visor was upturned, the woman backed them and her face could not be seen.

Good! At least they weren’t coming to the pit right in the midst of her view, Wurhi thought.

Against the boat leaned a large round shield embossed with the golden head of a mammoth beneath a symbol of an eye that shed fire above and a tear below.

The symbol of Amitiyah, the Weeping God.

What drew Wurhi’s eye most though, was her blade.

It looked almost too big to be called a sword. It dwarfed the bronze khopeshes, samshirs, and short swords she had seen. Or even Kyembe’s thin steel blade. With tip driven into the earth, it was tall as the Sengezian was. A golden hilt - lengthy enough for two hands - rose between a brutal pommel the size of a warhammer’s head and a cross-guard both thick and wide. The blade itself was broader than a handspan and gleamed a vermillion hue. How the ogres met their grisly fate was clear: it was a weapon more suited to hewing elephants than people.

Wurhi balked at the monstrous strength one would need to swing it. Especially in all that armour. And with that great, heavy shield.

She swallowed, looking back to the figure.

Yes, it was time to run the hell away.

“Hrm,” Kyembe whispered. “I feel no vile presence of a demon.”

“Whatever it is, it’s trapped down there,” she whispered back quickly. “Let’s go before it notices us.”

He nodded in agreement.

Wurhi made to move away.

Her foot slipped on the mud.