The barrier of rats made Saia’s domain fizzle out. It didn’t matter, because a spike of viserite the size of an antelope was already flying straight toward Mayvaru, too fast for her to move out of the way.

She didn’t need to: the ears of wheat grew until they reached the projectile and bent to grab at it. They were too thin to stop it altogether, but it was enough to modify the trajectory. The spike fell down too soon, bumping and rolling on the strip of bare soil between two fields.

Mayvaru was still grinning, her fangs bare. The beavers were unnaturally still, their paws and tails touching the plants around them. Saia was sure Caydras’s notes had talked about them bending trees, not plants in general. She wondered what else they failed to mention, besides the information they already lacked.

At least the viserite hadn’t shattered, which would have revealed the wheat it contained. Mayvaru already suspected her involvement with the resistance and the local population, Saia didn’t want to give her proof that she was helping them.

She hadn’t even completed the thought when a swarm of red creatures with protruding teeth jumped onto the spike. Raccoons, Saia remembered. They started chewing on the stone as if it was bread. She tried to stop them, but the rats were still advancing. She took a handful of viserite pebbles from her bag and split them into tiny needle-like shards. She waited for the rats to get closer, then threw her shards up in the air and aimed with her winds. By the time they left her domain, they had reached enough speed to hit their targets without her support. She managed to kill most of the approaching rats, and Mayvaru made the rest retreat a bit. The raccoons consumed the spike completely, revealing the cavity.

“Stolen wheat,” Mayvaru commented, her voice a low growl. “I could spin it in so many ways. What do you think the families will believe, that you work for the local population against Aressea or that you’re trying to sabotage their fields?”

Saia didn’t answer, setting out to prepare more shards. The ones she’d used had mostly broken on impact, so she didn’t bother getting them back and piecing them together. She took a new handful of viserite from her bag instead.

“It was all my initiative,” she said, knowing it was useless.

“Whatever, I’ll decide what to say once I’m back at Aressea with your body. I bet the sculptors will love to study it.”

Saia realized she had seen her change shape into an Arissian sheepdog. She returned to her original form and tied the fur around her neck as a cape, ready to use it again if Mayvaru started retreating. With the usual shape and weight of her body she felt much more grounded, quicker to respond without fear that a wrong movement of her viss would change or break the statue. She threw another handful of viserite in the air to kill the next wave of rats, but before she could aim the shards, something collided with her body and sent her flying. She had barely a warning, just a vague distortion of the air an instant before being hit.

She rolled on the soil, trying to get her bearings. It didn’t hurt, even if it had been such a violent blow that it felt wrong to be able to just stand and mend the cracks in her statue as if nothing had happened. She had been separated from her animals, all of them frozen or fallen to the side. Rats were already swarming them, so Saia took out more viserite and set out to kill them as she ran back toward the statues. She looked all around herself in the meantime, trying to find the animal that had trampled her. Not only it was invisible, but its viss had been so faint she hadn’t noticed it until it was too close. It had been enough for her to glimpse the shape of an enormous body.

She didn’t have time to reflect on that, because the rats were advancing again. She cleaned up the area with more shards of viserite until she could expand her domain enough to include most of her statues. She made the birds fly in a circle over her head and positioned the dogs and antelopes around herself, in order to slow down the next attack from the invisible beast. Mayvaru’s animals lurked just behind the first line of rats, safe from her reach and ready to lunge at the first mistake.

Saia looked at the statues she’d left on the other side of the fence: she couldn’t win without all of her fake animals at her disposal. She was already spread thin as it was, since she had to make some statues smaller or lighter than the corresponding animals due to the limited viserite the sculptors had granted her.

She freed a corridor with her winds and shards, leaving dead rats in her wake, and bolted with all the statues she could carry with her. She left a couple of dogs and the small animals behind to bring with her two antelopes full of wheat and the flock of birds. The rats moved to block her way, so she jumped past them. The area in which she landed was free of animals, and she realized too late it was probably a trap.

She perceived a faint trace of viss again in the air inside her domain. She’d been expecting the return of the beast, so she moved her animals out of the way and readied the pattern for slashing. Before she could kill it, the earth under her feet started to move. Tiny hills appeared, set aside by monstrously big paws with the longest claws she’d ever seen. Caydras had mentioned the moles, but she hadn’t expected them to be so big compared to regular ones, nor so fast at digging. Rats started pouring out from the tunnels. Saia threw a handful of viserite in the air, but before she could send the shards to kill the animals around her, the invisible creature collided with her.

She heard something crack in her side, saw pieces of viserite fly all around her as she tumbled away. It was a bull, she realized, her mind evoking the image of the gray-furred beasts that had accompanied Mayvaru the day she’d met her.

It was already out of her domain, vanished somewhere. Moles dug all around her while rats streamed out of the earth in even bigger quantities. Her birds had moved with her, but were now falling from the sky. She expanded her domain, letting the rats eat her viss at ground level in order to reach up at them and make them fly over her head. Actual birds started to attack them, but they only obtained to make Saia waste more viss to stabilize their flight.

The rats had reached her feet. She tried to jump away, but discovered that she couldn’t perceive her legs anymore. Her statue swayed, tipping over to the point it was dangerously close to falling down. She realized that once she was on the ground, the rats could easily reach her sphere and devour her mind, while the raccoons would take care of her statue.

She let one part of herself panic while the rest focused on the birds. She had prepared them for a situation where most of her domain was unavailable, except for the top. She attached them to each other, smoothing over the viserite until it formed a circle with a hole at the center, then raised it with her winds up to the limits of her domain and pushed it toward the ground.

The disk of viserite fell straight down at her. The hole at the center wasn’t big enough to preserve her from the impact: it shattered half of her head, something she only barely registered. The viss started to flow normally through her body again, so she used it to jump away. The disk of viserite had squashed the rats and moles that had been closer to her, while the rest had dispersed a bit and wasn’t currently trying to suck her viss away. She didn’t realize the golden glow in their eyes had disappeared until it returned, reorienting the rats in her direction. Somehow, what she’d done had forced Mayvaru to relent control over them for a few instants.

She grabbed the disk of viserite and ran away with her statues. She reflected on what had happened while she used the rest of another year of viss to make herself and her creations jump over the fence. Whatever the reason was for Mayvaru’s temporary loss of control, simply killing her animals wasn’t enough: Saia had observed her the whole time, and she hadn’t wavered when the shards had pierced the rats. Then again, it was difficult to decipher her expression.

That small pause gave Saia time to reach the rest of her statues. She set them into motion while Mayvaru’s army of rats slithered between the boards of the fence. The raccoons and beavers climbed up behind them, using the animals below as a prop. Saia heard a loud sound halfway through a crack and a boom, as if a bolt of lightning had broken a tree in half. There was an instant of silence, then screams coming from the outpost, and another loud boom as the main door exploded out of its hinges. Nothing visible stepped out of the gaping entrance.

Saia didn’t wait for Mayvaru’s army to approach: she reduced the antelopes to round containers of wheat, getting back all of the excess viserite that had gone into the head, horns and legs. She used it to patch her own head, then put it together with the dogs, the mixed creatures and one of the crocodiles to form a semi-circular barrier in front of her that would force the animals to split up and circle around to reach her. She covered the ground with a thin layer of viserite to slow down the moles. The bull could be strong enough to make all of her protections crumble, and its viss was almost invisible among the swarm of animals, so she took a handful of viserite from the scarce reserve left in her bag, pulverized it and coated the air around her shelter with it, so that the creature would stain itself if it came too close.

She climbed over the barrier and set down the disk of viserite, planning to use it as a reserve of projectiles to kill more rats once they got too close. The little shelter finally gave her a bit of time to stop and reflect.

She didn’t have many statues left: a crocodile, a couple of cats and some squirrels. She could maybe form the birds again, even if they were expensive to move and it was unlikely Mayvaru would have fallen for the same trick twice. The notes had talked about the bull being crossed with another creature, and she remembered the animal she’d glimpsed at Iriméze’s zoological garden, turning invisible when the tourists scared it. She remembered still being able to perceive its viss clearly, so the beastforgers had done more than simply transferring its abilities to a new species.

She remembered Serit mentioning that it was a change in the creature’s patterns to trigger those powers. She could maybe imitate them to achieve the same effect, but she first needed to capture the animal and make it stand still enough for her to analyze how its viss moved. She didn’t think she would have the time, and letting her focus slip in that situation could mean death.

The sea of creatures was advancing slowly, never stepping too close to her wall. Saia didn’t see Mayvaru anywhere, so she prepared to retreat from that place and throw on the fur again to scare another outpost; it was better not to give her any time to prepare further, finding or creating even more powerful animals.

Then, Mayvaru emerged from the demolished entrance of the tower. Still too far, with too many rats and critters in between them. Saia couldn’t extend her domain without it being immediately devoured. At the same time, she was ready to kill any animal that dared approach.

“Congratulations, I didn’t think you’d have survived this long,” Mayvaru said.

Trying to stall and manipulate, as usual, because her power came from staying behind the lines and moving the strings. At least fighting directly was something she wasn’t familiar with, which still wasn’t enough to give Saia the advantage, since every instant of waiting could have meant the arrival of stronger enemies. She wondered how far Beramas was: with all the birds Mayvaru controlled, undoubtedly she had already alerted him and whoever was in charge of Aressea. The military carriages were pretty quick, she had experienced them first-hand. Then again, maybe Mayvaru still thought she could deal with her alone and hadn’t asked for help yet.

She surveyed the scene again, looking for something to use as a distraction. She had weakened some buildings at Darasa, in order to make them collapse on the animals once they had gathered in one place. She had also covered all the possible hiding spots with traps in case Mayvaru tried to make her creatures lurk in the shadows. But there was no use in thinking about that now. The only thing that could help her was finding out what had made Mayvaru relent control over her animals when she had squashed the rats. If she could recreate the same conditions in a crucial moment, she could get access to her and put her to sleep.

She detached a piece of viserite from the disk and formed some shards. She aimed two of them at two separate animals, a rat and an Arissian sheepdog. She observed them closely as the shards approached them at a high speed, even if they were imperceptibly slowing down to give her the time to observe the situation. Once it was clear what the targets were, the two animals and a few of the ones surrounding them lost the golden glow in their eyes. She dropped the shard aimed at the dog and turned the other one at a different rat with glowing eyes, killing it. Meanwhile, she observed Mayvaru’s reaction with her domain half-expanded, pushing against the rats that were eating it without much success. It was still enough to see her ears lower a fraction, her upper lip twitch as if she wanted to release a growl.

Saia shrunk her domain. Neither she nor Serit had guessed it, but it was obvious in hindsight: she could perceive the world through her animals, so she also felt their death as if it was happening to her. That was why she relented control every time her animals were about to get killed, especially when they were close to each other and she didn’t know exactly which one would die, which explained what had happened with the disk of viserite. If Saia wanted to hurt her, she needed to hurt her animals in an unpredictable way.

As if Mayvaru had heard her thoughts, the rats lunged at the wall, scurrying to the side to circle around the barrier and piling up on top of each other to climb toward Saia. She killed the closest ones easily, using the shards multiple times to needle through them. Her high position only exposed her to the attack of birds, but they couldn’t do anything more than hurt themselves by smashing against her body of stone.

As expected, the bull charged against the wall. She saw its arrival in the particles of dust she’d left suspended around herself. It took focus to see the viss moving through its body, but it was enough of a warning for Saia to throw down her disk of viserite and assimilate it into the wall, making the point of impact stronger.

It still rocked her so violently that she lost her balance and tipped over the border. She managed to grab it and not immediately fall to her certain death in the sea of rats below. They were climbing fast, faster now that she had almost fallen, and the wall was so short that Saia had to keep her legs bent to the side in a position she’d have never been able to maintain for long as a simple human.

The bull became visible, probably because Mayvaru had relented control before the impact in order not to feel it herself. Saia couldn’t expand her domain without it being gobbled up by rats, but she could manipulate the viserite through contact with her body. She pushed viss forward to make one part of the wall extend toward the bull. It managed to inglobate the horns, then wrapped itself around the neck, not too tight to kill but enough to immobilize. The viserite was still spread thin, so the violent shakes of the animal’s head risked breaking it, but for the moment it was holding.

Saia pushed herself up and out of the way of the rats, killing another wave of them with the viserite taken from the top of the wall. The raccoons were pushing through the swarm, their slightly open mouths showing the rows of mismatched and protruding teeth. She couldn’t let them reach the wall nor the few statues she had left, so her priority shifted to killing them, which gave time to the rats to advance.

She furiously started memorizing the patterns in the bull’s body while she thought of a solution. She needed a moment of relief, and then to figure out how to use the bull’s power to get her statues to Mayvaru.

She kicked away her shoes and prepared more shards, making the wall smaller in the process. She raised them in the air above herself as much as she could without expanding her domain further, and aimed them at the shapeless swarm of creatures, keeping them suspended in the wind. She could swear the animals had faltered for a moment, as Mayvaru braced herself to let go of the ones that were more likely to be killed.

But Saia pushed her viss down through her feet at the wall below, making spikes grow. The rats that had been piled up at the bottom died, while the ones at the top fell and were stepped on by the dogs that had arrived in the meantime. Saia heard a short scream as Mayvaru tried to hold herself together against so many deaths, then she used the shards to kill another wave of rats and saw her shudder, even if this time she managed not to emit a sound.

The animals stopped for an instant, the golden glow gone from their eyes, and Saia killed them with targeted slashes, creating a carpet of corpses in a circle around the wall. Mayvaru regained control before she could reach further than that, neutralizing her domain again. Still, Saia had gained more than enough time to act.

She hadn’t killed the bull. Mayvaru had left it visible while she was still controlling it, since it couldn’t move and Saia already knew where it was. When her mental grip disappeared, fear coursed through its body. It turned invisible on instinct, just like the strange black and white animal from which it descended. Saia took advantage of the instant of confusion to memorize its patterns, how they moved and how they changed. It was an approximate job, since she was focused on slashing at the other animals in the meantime, but she did detect a shift of sorts when the animal disappeared. Its viss became faint and difficult to see even for her senses, but it was there. She needed Mayvaru to forget about the bull’s existence for a bit. It was her turn to gain time by talking.

“I do know that kid,” she said. “The one you’re looking for.”

She could almost feel Serit yelling at her not to give away that information, but it seemed to capture Mayvaru’s attention: the animals slowed down their advance through the corpses and the bull kept trying to run away, invisible and silent as if it could avoid detection.

“So Beramas was right,” Mayvaru said. “He thought he’d heard you call Morìc’s name, and you seemed oddly invested in his fate.”

“You won’t find Dan,” Saia said.

“What tells you we didn't already?”

“You're lying,” Saia said, wanting to believe her own words.

“We’ll see. I’ve wondered why you would attack me, but now I think I have an answer. And if it turns out I’m wrong, we’ll torture Morìc until he tells us.”

“You haven’t had much success with that, have you?”

Mayvaru didn’t answer, but her pointy muzzle rose a bit, as if she’d caught a new smell. Saia smiled openly. She had memorized the bull’s patterns, filling in the details with what she already knew about antelopes and deer. Mayvaru’s army was decimated for the moment, but it became bigger by the second, with creatures coming from the fields. Saia risked finding herself once again surrounded and heavily overpowered. It was time to act.

She tried to apply the pattern that made the bull invisible to the only big statue she had left, the crocodile. It didn’t work, and the surface of the statue threatened to change into some unpredictable form, so she stopped. She had to transform the crocodile into a bull, first. Someone wouldn’t have liked that.

She set out to work, leaving the cavity inside the animal as much intact as she could. She added pieces of wall to the rest, since soon she wouldn’t have needed it anymore, for better or worse. She kept the statue’s back thin enough it could be broken by a simple scalpel. Once the bull was complete, she kept the viss running through it, then changed one specific pattern.

The viserite bull disappeared. For the first time since the fight had started, Saia dared to feel hope.

She expanded her domain as much as she could, up to the boundary of Mayvaru’s army, then turned the wall into a thousand tiny shards, dropping to the ground and killing the living bull in the process. She started running in a straight line toward Mayvaru. She had gained her control back, so the birds started flying down from the sky en masse, impaling themselves on the shards that were advancing with Saia in order to weigh them down and reduce the amount she could use. The rats started eating wildly, reducing her range a bit. It didn’t matter, because her winds made the shards shoot forward, and even if they couldn’t carry long enough to reach Mayvaru, they showered the nearest animals. She didn’t follow a specific pattern, but most of the kills happened on the left side, and they were mostly rats. She hoped Mayvaru wouldn’t notice. She raised the shards that had been stuck in the bodies, heavy with blood, and attacked again.

Mayvaru was stepping back now, toward the carriage she’d used to reach the outpost. There were still rats following her, close enough to make her untouchable, but at least she had put more distance between herself and the rest of her army. Saia cleaned the left side again, forming a path between the ruins of the wall and Mayvaru. She couldn’t reach her, but she didn’t need to. She only had to get close enough, or better, to get the statue of the bull close enough.

“Now,” she made her voice boom inside the cavity of the fake animal.

A crack followed her words, then a figure emerged as if from thin air, mere steps away from Mayvaru’s position. She froze as Serit pointed their makeshift weapon at her, a portable ballista that they had called ‘crossbow’.

“Yield or die,” they said. They sounded scared to death, but also somewhat proud of their words.

Saia didn’t slow down, taking advantage of Mayvaru’s shock to get closer, in case she had an animal nearby that could hurt Serit.

Apparently, she didn’t. She growled, and her animals stopped acting like one giant creature. The rats scuttled away, the dogs sniffed around with their tails held low, the beavers slapped their tails on the ground in alarm. Saia expanded her domain and put Mayvaru to sleep. She dropped down, but Serit kept aiming their weapon at her.

“Is she gone?”

“She’s asleep,” Saia said.

They sighed with their entire body and lowered the crossbow. Saia let the bull statue become visible so that they could get down safely. They grumbled the whole time.

“Are you insane, leaving the crocodile behind like that? Our whole plan hinged on me coming out at the right moment, and you almost squandered it.”

“Our plan was based on her coming to Darasa, not attacking here.”

“Right. I wonder if someone did something to provoke her, instead of just spreading rumors like we had agreed.”

Saia didn’t feel tired, nor hurt. It seemed wrong, after all that running around and killing animals.

“We won. Can’t you be happy about it instead of tormenting me?”

“Yes, we won. But I’m not doing it again for Beramas,” Serit said, wiping away the viserite dust from their tunic and the sweat from their face. “We’ll have to find a new plan.”

“Don’t worry, we’re not doing this again,” Saia said, letting bitterness fill her words. “I don’t have enough viss.”

Serit looked at her in alarm.

“How much do you have left?”

Saia saw guards looking out of the doorway.

“Later,” she said. “I bet they already alerted Aressea.”

She bent down to pick up Mayvaru’s unconscious shape and draped it over one shoulder. She approached the bull statue, wondering how much viserite she could bring with her. There was no way she could gather the whole block, since it had mostly been shattered into too many shards, in turn buried into too many little bodies. She didn’t have viss nor time to waste.

Her bag was empty now that the fur hung from her neck, so she detached the bull’s head and shaped it into a block that could fit inside it.

“Help me with the containers,” she said, walking over to the ovoid pieces of viserite full of wheat that had once been the statues of two antelopes.

Serit barely managed to raise one. Saia effortlessly picked up the other with her free arm.

“Where are we carrying it?” Serit asked.

“To the village, as soon as we’re out of sight.”

She hoped the resistance could take care of feeding the population, now that Mayvaru wasn’t a problem anymore. She couldn’t do more for them.

“Then what?” Serit asked. “Back at the ruins?”

“For now, yes. Then…”

She thought of the monks. Of Beramas, who could already be on his way there.

“Then we’ll see what to do,” she concluded.