The wagon must have rolled over a ditch, because the entire floor dipped on one side and righted itself. Again. Kara concluded the rocking was never going to stop, and would never cease making her nausea worse. She tried to sit up in her makeshift cot, but that action was only met by another bout of nausea rolling like a wave over head and stomach. A cool cloth had been placed on her forehead.

Someone was in here with me not long ago. Lo’ffen?

She removed the cloth, folded it up and set it beside her cot.

We’re on the move… Tarwall. I remember.

Tarwall was a small walled city on the southern coast of Aren. Tarwall meant the ocean, and the sea breeze always made Kara feel better.

As the nausea faded and her senses returned, Kara could hear her friend’s voice outside the wagon, raised and antagonised.

“You can’t keep sending her into those places. These episodes keep happening, and they’re getting worse. Everyone can see it.”

“She will keep going into those places, because we, her family, need her to.”

That was Turner’s voice, for sure. That word – family – had always made Kara feel unease, and doubly so when Turner used it like he did.

“She’s sick, Turner. The risk is too great. What if we can’t pull her out next time? What then?”

The third voice was Bull’s. She could picture him easily; hardly taller than her but easily twice as wide in the shoulders and four times as wide around the middle. He always looked like a giant to her when she was younger. He had a lot more hair on his head back then. And less fat around the middle. But he hadn’t lost an ounce of his strength in that time.

“We don’t have to think about that, Bull, because that is never going to happen.”

Those two. They always put up a fuss, every time. It’s my own fault, I shouldn’t have gotten caught.

She thought back to the night previous. How she had very nearly been seen, and how it resulted in her having another episode.

I should have been quicker with the lockpick. Stupid, stupid.

She took a deep breath and rose uneasily from the cot. Slowly she got to her feet, and poked her head out the rear of the wagon. Turner, Lo’ffen and Bull were all riding horses just behind her wagon.

“I’m fine, really. It’s nothing.”

“You see?” said Turner, brusquely, “She’s fine. She said so herself.”

Lo’ffen’s face turned a shade darker.

“Kara, this is not nothing. You’re sick. Turner, at the very least take some of the money she’s stealing for you and take her to a healer.”

She wasn’t sick. At least, she didn’t think she was. She was something else. Lo’ffen knew about that, of course, but she didn’t know the full story.

Neither do I, I suppose.

“No healers. We have a medic. No outside help. That’s not how we do things.”

“A medic? You mean Tarry?” Lo’ffen spat, “We found him in a brothel! If he’s a healer then I’m a gnome.”

“We look after our own. That’s the rule.”

Turner’s voice was raising and his face was reddening. Kara knew what was coming, but Lo’ffen spoke again before she could move to placate.

“That’s your rule. Yours. I remember the troupe doing quite fine before you or your rules.”

“You insolent…”

Turner spurred his horse violently toward Lo’ffen’s, wound his arm and struck her with the back of his hand so hard across the lip she fell from her saddle. Kara screamed, the wagon behind ground to a halt and onlookers gathered as the rest of the convoy found themselves abruptly stopping. Turner, his face nearly maroon, darted his eyes between the growing crowd.

“What are you looking at? Ingrates! Get these wagons moving. Now!”

His voice was turning hoarse from screaming and veins were visible around his neck. Bull helped Lo’ffen back onto her horse, mummers and jugglers and musicians looked the other way and Kara buried her head in her cot and cried.

One category of half-human hybrid I find particularly intriguing are the Warith; the fascinating results of Human and Genie coupling. I’ll start with what we know. We know all Genie are male, or at least appear to us as such. All of the available accounts involve a human woman meeting - under some unlikely circumstance - with a Genie and consorting with him. (Whether this has occurred with other races, whether there are half-Elf-half Genie beings roaming the world I cannot say). We also know that these couples do not always result in Warith offspring. There are cases in which a Genie-Human coupling has resulted in a human offspring. Will a Warith mating with a human produce Human or Warith offspring? Could two Warith mate to give birth to a Genie? Is the chance of the offspring of a Human-Genie couple being born human or Warith calculable or is it random? Unfortunately, these are all things we do not know. There have been no studies or experiments put forward, and as far as I am aware none have attempted to mate humans with Genies in laboratory conditions for reasons I believe are self-explanatory.

Genealogy of the Hybrids of Humans – Pietyr Rollford

Kara rode in the back of the wagon, undisturbed for the rest of the day. She sobbed, she dried her tears, she fretted about Lo’ffen. Eventually she began to reminisce. Still in her cot, rocking unpleasantly in the back of a wagon, she thought back to the time she had first confessed her true nature to Lo’ffen and Bull. She remembered the conversation she had with the two of them that had spurred it on.

“So are you going to tell us, or are we going to have to keep pretending like everything here is normal” Bull had asked her.

She remembered feeling frightened.

“I’ve been lifting and throwing performers for years, girl. Years. Never more than four feet in the air, on a good day. And then you come along, weighing as much as a sack of feathers, and suddenly I can throw you, and only you, ten feet up. Isn’t it curious?”

“I’ve been an acrobat for longer than you’ve been breathing, little one,” Lo’ffen had added, “I know how good I am, and I know that no human girl with nil training could best me after three months. What are you?”

Looking back, it seemed almost embarrassing that she could be so afraid of Bull or Lo’ffen.

“Your grandfather was a what?” Bull had laughed. He laughed. She was so scared and he laughed all of her concerns into dust.

That evening, years ago, she had explained her compromising heritage; that her grandmother had travelled to the faraway land of Ramal and returned pregnant. A child, Kara’s mother, sired by a powerful air spirit - a Djinn. The child, however, possessed none of the traits expected from the daughter of a Genie. She was human through and through. A generation later Kara was born; a baby as light as a mouse to hold, with almost perfect-white hair and grey eyes. Her mother knew exactly the twist of fate which had occurred. When Kara explained all of this to Lo’ffen and Bull, they absorbed everything in silence. Once the story had been told, the truth laid bare, none of Kara’s fears were realised. First of all, they believed her. That alone was more than Kara had hoped for. Furthermore they seemed genuinely excited to have an abnormality such as her in their midst. When Lo’ffen confessed to hours spent searching for where this human teenager was keeping white hair-dye, she and Kara had laughed until their eyes were misty.

They knew about her parents’ deaths too. She had told them as such, and she could remember Lo’ffen’s reaction to that piece of information very clearly.

“So what? You think you’re the first orphan to run away and join a troupe? If everyone had parents to run back to, the stage would be empty most of the time. You’re not that different from anyone else here.”

She was, but she chose not to share everything. The truth behind her episodes; the source of her invisibility on the day prior. The cause of her parents’ deaths. That detail she would take to her grave.

We do know that there are four different kinds of Genies; Wharad - the earth spirits, Marid -the water spirits, Ifreeti - the fire spirits and Djinn - the air spirits. We also know that, from the day a Warith is born they take on attributes from their Genie parent, and that these attributes depend on the kind of Genie they are descended from. For instance; the offspring of a Marid parent might be a very gifted swimmer, the son or daughter of an Ifrit might have red hair and be somewhat impervious to fire, a Djinn’s offspring could be uncommonly light.

What we do not know, is how many generations down these traits will still arise in new-borns. We do not know if they fade gradually from generation to generation or if they remain constant and then at some stage disappear completely. We do not even know whether or not they disappear at all. Truly this is a field in which much further research is required.

Genealogy of the Hybrids of Humans – Pietyr Rollford