Dan had never seen lightning strike the water before, not from that close. At least now he could worry about something else besides drowning or being eaten alive by an unknown monster.

He lay as flat as he could against the carpet, with the goal of not falling off and at the same time preventing as much wool as he could from getting too wet. Since Morìc had entered the heart of the storm instead of following it from afar, everything was soaked. But it was necessary, Morìc had explained, because there was a creature in the water that would attack them if it saw them, and the only way to stay hidden was to fly high inside the storm.

He tried to spot the monster, but after a while all the shadows in the water looked like one, so he closed his eyes.

He had to feed Morìc himself, otherwise he would probably forget, focused as he was on the horizon. When it was his turn to eat, Dan always mixed dried sea snake meat with the rest of the provisions. His skin itched where the scales were surfacing. He didn't have a mirror at hand, but he could feel their roughness on the cheekbones and forehead, as well as admire the ones on the back of his hand. He wondered whether his eyes were changing too.

After one more day, after the storm had lost a bit of strength and it only grumbled without rain, they saw a ship. Dan saw Morìc shudder with relief.

“We're out of danger. Land shouldn't be far.”

Let's just hope it's the right one, Dan thought, but didn't say it out loud. It wasn’t time for doubts anymore.

They steered clear of the ship, since they didn't know what their reaction would be to seeing a flying carpet in the midst of the sea. They couldn't risk being attacked or getting help from people that could deceive them.

“The outside world is not like the mountain,” Morìc had said in his hesitant Arissian. “Don't rely on anyone if you can help it.”

Dan was a bit irritated by his words, as if he had ever truly relied on someone that wasn't his brother, Koidan, or Saia in the last two years. He'd been about to point out that Morìc had been young too when he'd left Aressea and couldn't know how dangerous it actually was, but he didn't want to hurt him in a moment where he needed all the focus and the energy he could muster.

They finally saw a strip of faraway land. The food had ended five hours prior, the carpet was flying lower above the waves.

“I think I recognize that hill,” Morìc said, slowing down for a moment to point. “But it's further than it seems. We don't have enough viss to reach the city, so we’ll land near that village.”

Dan could see it clearly, clearer anyways than the distant spots at the foot of the hill that were supposed to be the buildings of the capital. He looked for the palace of his family, even if he didn't remember it that well, apart from the inside of some rooms.

Morìc flew close to the water, hoping not to be spotted by the village's inhabitants. He didn't fly straight toward the houses, but traced a large curve to enter the thick vegetation surrounding a nearby river. He gently lowered the carpet onto a bed of tall grass and dropped forward with a sigh. Dan let him rest for a bit, dragging the bags in the shadow and mounting guard. He heard voices of people walking nearby: there was probably a road hidden by the trees.

He waited, too worried to fall asleep like Morìc had. Around late evening, he awakened his brother.

“We should look for a place to stay before it becomes night,” he replied to his groans of protest.

In the end, they managed to roll up the carpet, gather their bags, and find the road that led to the village. Dan couldn't help comparing it to Lausune as they approached. The houses were round and a bit taller, like stumps of towers, showing walls of irregular stones or naked clay. The roofs were connected by simple wooden passageways, forming a system of unstable roads. Despite the evening’s approach, there were some people still around, little more than shadows walking on those wooden bridges or even stopping to talk halfway through them, blocking the passage for everybody else.

The terrain between the houses at the center of the village lowered gently to form a bowl shape. There was a fire at the bottom, big enough to illuminate the whole area. From there came a smell of roasted meat, voices of dozens of people gathered together, and the intermittent sound of music.

They approached carefully. Dan had to push Morìc this way or another to avoid the remains of older meals, rags, pieces of broken wood and excrements that covered the ground between the buildings in the areas that weren't illuminated by the firepit.

Dan paused before entering the central area: the shadows projected on the faces of the people around the fire revealed a multitude of different traits that he wasn't able to place. Some of them had long pointy ears, others fur creeping around the outline of their faces. Even the ones that appeared to not have traits had some details out of place, like eyes that shone too brightly when crossed by the fire's light. Multiple faces turned toward Dan and Morìc, so he pushed his brother behind a building.

“What?” he asked.

Dan was about to attempt an answer in Arissian, but he was too scared someone could hear.

“They're all animal people, but not the ones we have at the mountain. I don't know which animals are these.”

“At least you'll blend in,” Morìc commented, pointing at Dan's face. His voice was so bitter Dan had to look away.

“I’ll try talking to them, stay here,” he said, and slipped away before his brother could say anything else.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and approached the firepit in what he hoped was a casual posture. He realized he was too dressed for the climate, and his clothes were too different from the upper garment and trousers almost everybody else was wearing. Since many more people were starting to notice him, he stopped before reaching the bottom of the pit.

“Hi,” he said to no one in particular, hoping they spoke Arissian. “My brother and I just arrived. We need a place to sleep.”

The music had stopped, and as a consequence everyone had heard his words and was now looking at him in silence. He stood there, clenching his hands inside his pockets from the tension.

“Well?” someone said with a gruff voice. “What's your name?”

“And animal,” a woman with long whiskers added. “Some sort of lizard, maybe?”

“Dan,” he answered. “And I eat sea snakes.”

“Ulres,” someone immediately called.

A person looked out from the open window of a nearby house. They asked something that Dan couldn’t catch, then raised their voice to address Dan.

“Come closer, cousin, let me see you. Of course we have a room for you in our house.”

The music and meal reprised while Dan navigated the crowd toward the building. He immediately realized Ulres didn't eat the same type of snake as him, and that his transformation was much more advanced: most of his face was covered in silver scales, to the point the ones on his forehead pushed back his brown hair. The man shared his surprise. He had the same yellow irises of a snake, even if the shape of his eyes was human.

He quickly recovered and smiled at Dan.

“You must be some variant I don't know, cousin. I hope our food isn't too far from what you need.”

Dan smiled back, happy and at the same time suspicious of the man's friendliness.

“We have food, we just don't want to sleep outside.”

The man nodded as if Dan had just said some deep truth.

“Wise choice, this area isn't as safe as it used to be. Go find your brother, then, we’ll wait for you.”

Dan nodded. He returned to the spot where he'd left Morìc. He found him curled up on the sparse grass, asleep, using the rolled-up carpet as a pillow. A big rat with whiskers that seemed to move of their own volition was observing him from too close.

“Go away,” Dan said out loud.

The rat didn't move, but Morìc sat up with an expression of confused alarm.

“Sorry,” Dan said. “I’ve found a place to sleep.”

Morìc nodded and got up without a word. They dragged their bags toward the house, then hesitated on the entrance: the inside was completely dark, except for the distant light of the fire filtering through the windows.

“Lihana’s house is like this too,” Dan said, trying to sound encouraging.

Movement came from the inside. Two golden eyes flashed in the dark, followed by five more pairs. Dan could barely distinguish the people they belonged to despite his enhanced sight; he could only imagine how scared Morìc was.

“I know you said that you already have food,” Ulres said. "But we're about to eat dinner anyway. Do you want to join us?"

He was mostly looking at Morìc. A child with little more scales on their face than Dan pointed at his brother.

“What animal is he?”

“A mule,” Morìc said.

Dan grimaced as the family regarded him for a long time, trying to judge whether he was joking or not. He knew Morìc had aimed for a humorous answer, but the inexpressive delivery and the lack of further elaboration made him look more like an asshole. He hoped he was just reading too much into things and stepped forward to gain back the host's attention.

“We're hungry, so we won’t say no. We have some food to share, but it’s not tasty…”

“Nonsense, you are guests. Come on, enter.”

Ulres stepped aside and ushered his kids forward, toward the door from which the family had emerged. Dan led the way inside. He clutched three scaly hands on his way to the kitchen, belonging respectively to Ulres’s wife, their older son and their middle daughter. The two small children had already started giggling and playing with each other, guests apparently forgotten.

All in all, there wasn't much difference with Ulres’s house. A single candle had been lit in an adjacent room and covered by a sphere of opaque glass to provide the optimal penumbra for sea snake eyes. The dining room was long to accommodate the table. People were already sitting there, clustering at the end further from the door. Veylu, Ulres’s wife, introduced them as her brother and his family.

“We’re not used to having guests this early,” she explained as she directed Dan and Morìc toward their chairs. “We work at night and the children are going to school in an hour. You can have their beds while they’re not here.”

One of the smaller kids started to protest, but his uncle immediately told him to shut up.

“Thank you,” Morìc said. “We’ll only stay here for the night, we don’t want to cause too much trouble.”

Dan observed his brother closely. After an initial hesitation, he seemed to adjust quickly to the darkness and the limited space. He even seemed to relax after the first bite of meat. It tasted very similar to Lausune's traditional dishes. Dan felt a wave of nostalgia, and at the same time a bit of relief: maybe living away from mount Ohat wouldn’t be too scary, if he could find the same food.

"It's delicious," he said.

"Are there many sea snakes in this area?" Morìc asked.

"Yes, but we don't fish them, we buy them from a nearby village with mostly herbivore traits. We cultivate vegetables, they give us what they can hunt from the forest or fish from the sea."

"The people outside are cooking meat too," Morìc said. "So you're... The opposite of whatever herbivore means?"

"Mostly, yes."

"A common joke between our villages," Veylu interjected. "Is that we should all exchange houses with each other. We should give them our fertile land by the river, they should leave behind their hunting tools for us. Then we'd both be independent from each other."

"And bored to death," Ulres smiled, even if it had a tinge of bitterness. "We're in a peculiar situation. Other villages like ours are not divided in this way."

"There are more villages like this one in the area?" Dan asked.

Ulres and his son looked at each other as if in dismay.

"Of course, all around Aressea. There are many of us in the capital too, but food is expensive. It's much better for us to live in communities in the wilderness."

"Where do you come from, if I can ask?" Veylu asked. "You speak Arissian with an accent, I can tell you are foreigners. And yet you don't seem to come from too far. You're difficult to place."

"Also, your scales," the elder daughter said, pointing at Dan, "Do you paint them?"

"Yes," Morìc said before Dan could open his mouth. He'd been about to tell the truth, that he ate another kind of sea snake, but recognized that his brother had had the right idea.

"We come from the mountain," he said, figuring that with all the mountains on the horizon it wouldn't seem a strange answer.

“Which one?”

“We call it 'the mountain’,” Dan said, shrugging. “I don’t know the name in Arissian.”

“You must have made a long voyage. Have you already been to Aressea?” she added, pointing at the carpet that Morìc had left in a corner with their bags.

"Yes," he said, slowly, as if figuring out which was the best answer. "We hoped to return home by flying, but it takes much more viss than anticipated. That's why we landed here. Tomorrow we'll go back to the capital and find a passage on a ship.”

Dan hoped his brother wasn't as transparent to their hosts as he was to him.

Ulres looked surprised.

"I'm impressed they even let you buy one of those and take it out of the city. The guards have been using them more and more recently, and they tend to keep their artefacts secret. You must be friends of the Iraspes, or someone close to them."

Dan glanced at Morìc and found him doing the same.

“No,” he said. “Who are they?”

Their hosts’ disbelief grew.

“The most powerful family of Aressea. The weavers’ family.”

Morìc stood. From the way his face had scrunched up, he looked ready to hit someone. Dan grabbed his arm, desperately trying to find an explanation for his behavior without giving away too much about their past.

He didn’t have the chance, because someone knocked hard at the door. The whole family stiffened as if they already knew who the stranger was without even hearing their voice.

Ulres stood and immediately picked up both of the smaller kids from the table. Veylu went to open, the older children in tow. Morìc slowly sat down, looking straight ahead as if not registering anything of what was happening.

Veylu looked back from the window next to the door.

“It’s Mayvaru,” she whispered, her eyes wide.

She pushed aside her daughter to open the door in her place.

“Good evening, I…”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. A swarm of dark shapes entered the house, screeching and clawing at floor and windows.

Dan stood, then felt them crawling around his feet and jumped on the chair instead. Morìc looked up, a bit more aware, but still didn’t move when the rats surrounded him.

Someone stepped in through the door. By the pointy ears and the fur covering every visible surface, he expected the new arrival to be another animal person. But the closer the creature got, the fewer human traits he could find.

“You have a guest,” the creature said, looking straight at the kitchen.

Ulres reemerged from an adjacent room and stood by the table, eyes fixed on the stranger. The rest of the family backed up until they were near the wall.

“Welcome, lady Mayvaru,” Ulres said, voice surprisingly steady. “We were eating, do you want to join us?”

She marched straight ahead until she was right in front of Morìc. She observed him in the dark, and he held her gaze.

“Morìc Lauhas,” she said. “I recognize your smell. To think we’ve spent the last ten years looking for you, and you came here by yourself.”

Morìc started standing, but she reached out with a hand, grabbing the neckline of his loose shirt. He clutched her hands, trying to pry her fingers open, but she pulled until he was standing. Dan wanted to help him, but Ulres’s older son grabbed his shoulders with both hands, grip strong with fear.

“Where’s Danveru?” the dog woman asked.

Morìc started struggling harder. She punched him in the jaw.

“Stop,” Dan screamed, but a hand immediately covered his mouth.

Mayvaru looked at him, eyes glinting at the distant light of the candle. Dan held his breath, pushing the back of his head against the man’s stomach in an attempt to escape. Mayvaru’s nose was trembling, sniffing so hard he could feel her warm breath.

She turned her head toward Morìc.

“Where’s your sister?” she enunciated.

“At the mountain. I came alone.”

Mayvaru shook him, showing her fangs. She rummaged in a pocket of her dark green trousers and took something out with fingers closed in a fist. Something dropped to the ground and rolled away, reflecting the light of the candle on the walls: a tiny sphere of glass.

“Open your mouth,” Mayvaru growled.

Morìc didn’t. A rat crawled over her shoulder and down her arm, so close that the fear of what it could happen once it reached his face made him close his eyes and obey. Mayvaru pushed the content of her hand inside his mouth. Morìc was startled and closed his jaw. The crunch that followed made everyone wince as he yelled in pain. Still, Mayvaru didn’t relent until he had swallowed the spheres.

Once the operation was over, she turned and dragged him with her. The rats flowed out of the door before she could reach it. She stepped out, dragging Morìc with her. He didn’t try to yell or struggle anymore, eyes fixed on Dan as if he wanted to commit his face to memory.

Then he was gone. The voices and music outside disappeared with him.

Dan looked at the open door until his eyes burned. Then he realized he was still being held in place and struggled against the hold on his mouth.

“I’ll let you go if you promise you won’t scream,” Ulres’s son said.

Dan yelled at him to let go, but the sound came out as a muffled screech. The hand stayed in place as he tried to get free, while the rest of the family looked around the furniture and under the tables, probably to catch any stray rat. Only Veylu was at the doorway, looking out.

"She's gone," she said in the end, locking the door.

Dan was released. He jumped away from the table, glaring at the man who had kept him blocked. He hated them for stopping him, but he knew they just wanted to save him.

In the end, he could only stand in a corner of the room, glaring at everyone.

"Who are you really, cousin?" Ulres asked, his voice kind but demanding of an answer. "Why was lady Mayvaru looking for you?"

Dan could only shake his head.

"I don't know." Then, since he felt like the silence was becoming too heavy and they deserved an answer, he added: "We escaped from Aressea when we were little. I don't remember anything. Morìc does, but he would never have brought me here if he knew we were in danger. So I don't think he knows either."

"You escaped to where?" Ulres interjected.

"Mount Ohat," Dan said, remembering how Morìc had started calling the mountain since the day they had left it.

From the way they looked at each other, he knew they didn't believe him. As if he could lie, when he only knew the names of two places in the world.

"She's going to figure out that you're his brother, sooner or later," Ulres said, pacing a bit. "By protecting you, we put our lives at risk. Are you sure you can't tell us anything more about this?"

Dan shook his head. Ulres and his wife exchanged glances again, then looked at her brother and his family.

"I'm sorry, but we can't keep you here. The longer you stay, the less likely it is that Mayvaru will believe that we didn't know you were involved."

"I'll pack you some things, so you won't starve," Veylu said, and immediately started opening cabinets and taking out food in containers. "Go to Aressea, it's easier to hide in the crowd. Some of our cousins live near the harbor, they'll help you find a job."

Ulres’s son explained to him how to get from the village to the capital, but Dan could barely focus. He had lost his brother, and with him any trace of safety he might have felt.

They finally gave him the bags, someone hugged him tight, then he was ushered out of the house. The door closed softly, as if scared to startle him.

Nobody was sitting around the fire anymore, even if the flames were still raging. The instruments were abandoned on the ground, together with some cloths and wooden toys, as if the people had run into their houses. He sat on an empty stump, alone, draping Morìc's carpet around his shoulders. He stared into the flames until morning.