They came back, tired, to fanfare. The crowds had been informed an expedition would be returning, and had ventured out in hopes of seeing foreign wonders, recovered spoils, or really anything more exciting than dusty, dirty, dead-tired travellers. The people dispersed nearly as fast as the expeditioners passed them by. Only a few stragglers followed them to the university halls, peering at the pale hunched forms carried with them, the sole treasure claimed.

These inquisitive eyes held no empathy, not even frail attempts at understanding of the terror these captives felt. Stolen away, chained, and confined for the days, weeks, months it took to return… Hani so fervently wished she’d been killed in the fight now. Only after weeks of travel away from their home had she realized how far the travellers would bring them. How faded the call of their home’s magic would become. But even when the captives had coordinated to escape, they’d been too well guarded; two of their friends had earned their deaths, but Nindu and her had been subdued with caution and bound more carefully.

Now there was hardly any remnant of the seeping feeling of home, and every day she weakened. Already she could hardly eat and her stomach was beginning to distend; she’d seen the like before as folk starved out in the desert.

The wagon creaked to a halt in front of a grand stone building, and she stared up at five stories of cut stone with impossibly intricate glasswork windows. It had marvellously sharp lines and edges, stones shaped with intricate care, but even so the facades were bare of decoration. She’d seen far grander buildings, but none more than half standing, and all with corners rounded by uncountable years of blowing sand. Did these savages have some means of preserving their buildings? Perhaps they built them with thicker walls than they needed, and carved the corners back into shape every few decades? Hani shook her head at the thought. To put that much forethought into the building and yet refuse any artwork felt inconsistent. Yet here it stood.

She was still staring when he started walking back down the convoy of wagons. She tensed, and turned to the nearest raider. The woman gestured for her to climb down, and offered her arm. Even such a short drop was agonizing, raw as she was from the restraints, and Hani staggered as she touched down.

Ahead of her, Nindu and that one opened the front doors, large affairs of glass that shattered and reformed as they moved. Her breath caught simply watching it, the thousands of interlocking pieces sliding past each other, a storm of shards that coalesced into a tawdry open door once it had rotated. She roused herself and continued walking, enduring one step at a time, still leaning heavily on the female traveller.

They walked up the steps. Hani mostly kept her eyes down, but she could feel the appraising looks from the people inside. They wore fine clothes, all in darker tones and muted hues, and around her was forest and hillside and rough-hewn buildings of wood and stone, greys and browns and muted greens. None of the dusky colours of her desert, just air thick with the smell of vegetation and hanging moisture – nauseatingly so.

She walked slowly inside, feeling entirely out of place. Glancing over at Nindu, they locked eyes and together steeled themselves. Then began the speeches, proclamations, and questions rife with implicit tones of judgment. Neither of them understood a bare word.

–

“I think they’re starting to get concerned,” Hani said. Nindu didn’t answer.

“Two days since we got here, and neither of us can hold down a meal. Your ribs showing so gaunt I can see it through your shirt, my stomach acting like it’s been years since I’ve seen food… We seem a mess.” Nindu still didn’t answer.

“How long until they realize there isn’t a cure, do you think? I wonder what they think of it all. I haven’t felt a trace of our magic in the soil here, but can you tell if they have their own?” Nindu didn’t answer.

“No, you’re right, they must. Just the door to this prison, the glasswork… It must be mage-work, there’s no other way they could have made it. Maybe theirs is indirect, then? They can’t harm us with a touch, or tear through armour like we can. Can. Could.” Hani sighed, and leaned back against the stone wall.

Elsewhere in the building, people were shouting. She’d been ignoring it for an eternity, she thought. Maybe a couple hours. She could hear it moving through the floor, towards the main entrance.

Hani stood, though it took her two tries, and peered out the window. She had to turn her head sideways to make out the front walk. It was so, so worth it. She saw him land on his side, hard enough that he must have been thrown. Revelling in the sight, she heard the shouting cut off and saw the dancing lights of the glass door closing, shards reflecting scattered sunlight, and he was left sprawling in the dirt.

“Nindu, come look! The folk here might not be as bad as I thought, they just threw the bastard out!” She turned to Nindu impatiently, but Nindu didn’t answer. He didn’t move. He just lay there, sleeping, dead to the world.

She staggered over to him, shook his shoulder roughly. “Come on Nindu, wake up!”

Nindu didn’t answer.

It dawned on her that he hadn’t moved in hours, that she hadn’t heard him cough or breathe. She couldn’t see his chest rising even now.

Hani knelt beside him, and held her hand over his mouth. Nothing.

“Hello? Someone? Please! Help! HELP!!”

She called out for anyone who might hear, and frantic words kept pouring out of her, nonsense by the time anyone arrived, but that wouldn’t matter to the damn foreigners. They’d never know.

They carted Nindu away, and soon she was alone in her room, still desperate, feeling her world fall away. Feeling the throbbing headache of echoing sounds. Feeling the gnawing pit of her stomach, unquenched for months now. Feeling the pounding of her heart that wouldn’t settle.

Feeling the kick of something living in her body that she wasn’t nearly ready to accept.

–

Hani had learned some of the common words spoken in the stone house. She’d had ample opportunity now that the residents knew how few days she had left, and were cramming endless tests and interviews into them. She’d learned of their odd magics, far more varied but weaker than hers. Or had been at least, before they’d stolen her from the lands it blossomed in.

They didn’t appear to see her as a threat, which irked more than many things about her treatment. She was emaciated, hardly able to eat, and nearly bereft of magic, but the warrior in her still stood proud.

She’d even gotten to see their glassmaking. They poured their magic into some putrid water – vitrium, they’d called it – that shattered into intricate glassworks, but sick as she was she could hardly think through the smell. She’d tried her hand at it, but couldn’t draw enough from the land to work with. At that, more than anything else, the researchers seemed disappointed.

Hani wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think they’d realized she wasn’t cooperating. To avoid their ire she’d hidden it behind a mask of language and misunderstanding, but even now she refused to answer their questions properly. They’d steal no secrets of her people, no mysteries of her desert home. She’d given them some delightful recipes that they’d never complete without some absent spices, though, and that was joyous in itself. These little deceptions were her only hobby left. Hard to do anything but misdirect when you couldn’t stand under your own power, after all.

And it was getting worse. Her head would swim when she tried to sit upright, and she understood why Nindu had seemed so comfortable in his final rest. She hadn’t the energy to move anymore, and even a stone bench could grow comfortable when shifting your weight was like lifting a dune.

It wouldn’t be long now. It was well past half a year since the expeditioner had exercised his depravity, but she knew her body wouldn’t last the full term. With how little food she’d kept down, it was miraculous that Kain hadn’t already claimed the unborn child’s life. She couldn’t decide whether or not to be thankful.

No, it wouldn’t be long. Night was falling, and with it the comfort she’d once found. Pain was mounting, and her stifled cries weren’t quiet enough. One of the foreigner guards had heard her, and had come with water and towels.

It seemed they gave mercy in the end. It would have to do, as a parting gift.

–

She gave him to her captors, her only child, one she’d never planned for or even wanted. Hani felt there should be love in her for it, for him, but that part of her heart had been filled with dread for so long now. She only got a short glimpse of the child when he was nestled against her. The guard had waited for his crying to stop, and the sight and the pain and the slow weakening after a birth her body was barely able to manage… Hani had no thoughts left, only waves of desperate horror and regret for what was certain to be the miserable life of a miserable child.

And then he was gone, gone from her, as if she’d been nothing to him but a point of origin, as if he wouldn’t carry anything of their people along with him. As Hani slipped away, she wondered if this land would kill him so quickly as it had them, or if his curse of a progenitor would pass along enough to spare him the death she could feel herself sinking into.

No matter.

Away from her sight, away went the boy from the pale body he would never see, the face he would never know, nor trace save by his own hand in the mirror when trying to understand what he was.

The guard was not a kind woman, but she’d heard the stories. She’d heard of the expeditioner’s rage at the frail mages he’d caught, and his desperate fear that they’d expire before he could show them off like exotic caged animals, sold to the wealthy bidder with a taste for uncommon livestock and foreign cuisine.

And from the glares, the disrespect and disdain from all those who’d journeyed with him, she’d pieced together his crime. So the guard took that babe, a rightful repossession even by one without a claim. She brought the child to her sister, a woman who’d found herself barren after years of planning for the family she’d one day have, and gave her a gift stained with lust and bloody hatred.

She loved him all the same.